A few months later, he returned to the contrast between his relationship with Klaus Heuser and the more “melancholy” romantic experiences of his youth. Thirty years on, he is able to declare that he has “lived and loved,” that he has attained happiness and been able to “enfold within his arms that which he desired,” and that the later passion was “more mature, more considered, happier” than those of his earlier life.109 In 1942, he revisited the episode:
I read extensively in the old diaries from the Klaus Heuser time, when I was a fortunate lover. The most beautiful and touching parting in Munich, when I realized my dreams, and laid his temples against my own. Yes, I have lived and loved. Black eyes that shed tears for me, beloved lips that I kissed—it happened, I too had this, and I shall be able to tell myself that when I die.110
As with the young Platen, the fulfillment of sexual desire comes with a kiss.111
We return to the sensibility of Goethe’s morning musings, to the conception of a purified and acceptable sexuality grounded in the visual apprehension of beauty. So: what if a young man had taken Katia’s place in bed? If Mann had held true to the thoughts he had formulated and the feelings he had reflectively endorsed—very little. Of course, discipline might have broken down: as we shall see, he was all too preoccupied with that possibility. Throughout his life, he wanted to distinguish his own inclinations from what he saw as the “orgiastic release” of a homosexuality much more developed than his own.112 He distinguished his own novella from his son Klaus’s coming-out novel (Der Fromme Tanz). Klaus’s own diary commented on the difference between his own sexual identity and that of his father: “the theme of seduction is so characteristic of ‘Zauberer’ [magician; the family name for Thomas Mann]—in opposition to me. The seduction motif: Romanticism—music—Wagner—Venice—death—‘sympathy with the abyss’—pederasty…. Different for me.”113
FIGURE 2.1. Kinderkarneval, Friedrich August Kaulbach, 1888. The five Pringsheim children. Thomas Mann cut this picture out and kept it.
The entangling of his homoerotic desires with aesthetic fulfillment was central to Mann’s conception of his own sexuality. To the end, he longed to separate love from the lower part of the body. That love flowed in two directions—toward young men, through his enraptured gaze, consummated, perhaps, in a few embraces, a kiss at parting—but also to the woman he married. He saw her first in a picture, posed with her four brothers, all in pierrot costumes. Katia records that, in his youth in Lübeck, “he saw the picture in a magazine. It pleased him so, that he cut it out and fastened it with drawing-pins over his desk. Thus he had it always before his eyes.”114
Five children, all attractive with similar features, four of them boys, wearing costumes that elide sexual differences … that is what is shown in the picture Mann chose. Nevertheless, whatever the grounds of the original attraction, whatever the vicissitudes of his sexual difficulties, despite the often-noted lack of interest in the diaries about what “Katja” wore or said or did (in marked contrast to Mann’s preoccupation with minute details of his daily life), there can be little question of the strong bond with his wife.115 Besides the gratitude expressed for the understanding she showed and the comfort she supplied, their marriage embodied their devotion to a common purpose—his purpose—prefigured in the depiction of Imma and Klaus Heinrich. A diary entry from 1933 uses a different figure from his fiction in her praise. Reading the proofs of the first volume of the Joseph tetralogy, Mann
was again moved to tears by Rachel’s death, as in the writing and as inevitably recurs on each rereading. The origin of this character in my relationship to K. plays a role in this. It isn’t for nothing that she loves the story of Jacob and Rachel so much. She recognizes it as the idealized, mythical, representation of our lifelong companionship.116
For all the intensity of his focus on himself, for all the effusions about the beauty of the young male body, it would be wrong to conclude that the creator of Rachel was incapable of at least some form of heterosexual love.
Aschenbach may be confined by the society to which he belongs, but his complex sexuality is also shaped by it. That sexuality, refracted for the reader through the Platonic tradition, through Platen’s poetry and attempts at self-definition, through Goethe’s musings and Klaus Heinrich’s marriage, and, above all, through Mann’s wrestling with his own inclinations, is molded into a form Aschenbach can accept. We should reject the idea of some “core identity” in Mann or in Aschenbach (or in the young Platen), a biologically fixed drive that continues to yearn for complete homosexual intercourse, something that is opposed and eventually repressed by the pressures of the ambient society. Thought about human behavior and the inclinations and capacities that underlie it is all too easily distorted by hypothesizing some fixed nature that socialization may combat or foster or even liberate.117 The specific form of homosexual desire attributed to Aschenbach and to his creator, desire that is satisfied in gazing on the beloved or that culminates in an embrace or a kiss, expresses their real selves—it is no façade erected to mask urges that cannot be confessed. Given the social worlds in which they have grown to adulthood, these are the people they have come to be. When, in a late diary entry, Mann asks rhetorically “How can one sleep with men?” he is completely self-conscious and sincere.118
Nevertheless, without lapsing into the myth of the preformed self, the idea that the social environment has confined a person retains its sense.119 Imagine Thomas Mann growing up a century later, perhaps in Hamburg rather than in Lübeck, able to express his attraction to other men, experiencing joy in full homosexual intercourse. Comparing this imaginary figure (a happier Klaus?) with the real thing, you may be inclined to envisage possibilities of greater fulfillment, even to judge that the actual Thomas Mann’s life was diminished by the prejudices of the society that shaped him—he could, it seems, have had a richer, deeper set of sexual desires and could have satisfied them. Judgments of this kind rightly identify the depth and intensity of full sexual relations—just as Klaus Mann confided to his diary—but they raise questions that are hard to answer. The actual Thomas Mann (and the Aschenbach he created) forgo particular profound pleasures they might have had, but it does not follow that they are—overall—less fulfilled, that—as a whole—their lives are rendered less worthwhile. Global comparisons of the value of lives across different environments are not easy, even though there may be one respect, even an important respect, in which one regime of socialization precludes a central and rewarding form of human satisfaction. We do not need to make a global comparison, however, to ground a judgment that society has confined a person’s life: it is enough to point to a major part of human experience and to features of the social environment that prevent full and fulfilling exploration of that domain.
To claim, as I have done, that a particular form of sexual identity, attributed to Aschenbach or to his creator, goes “all the way down” allows for the possibility that the expression of that identity, in some episode of attraction or infatuation, might involve self-deception or pretense. Aschenbach’s desire to gaze on Tadzio’s beauty, even to yearn for an embrace, expresses entirely and completely his sexual character. When he thinks, however, of laying a “fatherly” hand on the boy’s shoulder, or when he imagines himself playing Socrates to Tadzio’s Phaedrus or Alcibiades, he is indulging a comfortable illusion: what, after all, would they have to say to each other?120 In these respects, Aschenbach is as deluded as countless other lovers, fictitious and real.
To understand a sexual identity is not necessarily to endorse it. We may well regard Aschenbach and Mann as curtailed in their sexual development, unable to reach out for the intense pleasures that should have been available to them, as importing fantasies into their self-confessions in affairs of the heart, and we may view the limitations and deceptions as effects of intolerant and prejudiced societies—all this is consistent with reconstructing their longings as I have done. That reconstruction is crucial. For the danger of harboring those very par
ticular yearnings is central to one important aspect of the novella. Mann used Aschenbach to dramatize a possibility he feared: to maintain this form of sexuality requires a stringent discipline, one that may border on the superhuman—for it is vulnerable to the very beauty it celebrates.
5
On the “sexual” reading of Aschenbach, he is thoroughly self-deceived, refusing to acknowledge his sexual inclinations until their violence forces him to do so. I propose, instead, that his self-deception is only partial. What he wants from Tadzio is simply more of what he actually gets, a continuous opportunity to look on, to gaze, to smile and be smiled at—or, perhaps beyond that, conversation, openly exchanged looks of mutual understanding, or a gentle touch, a modest embrace, and a chaste kiss. Society may actually frown on these desires or their fulfillment, but it should not do so. Aschenbach’s conception of the ideal citizen includes the possibility of responding to beauty as he sees himself responding to Tadzio, and his conception of the ideal artist-educator favors the project of making beauty manifest so that narrow prejudices are undone. Thus the supposed tension between artist and citizen is resolved: Aschenbach is clear about his own attractions to boys and young men (Tadzio, and any predecessors who featured along the writer’s walks or who attended his public readings), clear about the proper limits of homosexual expression, and clear about the integration of these inclinations with his (now past) life as husband and father.
On this reading, he would recognize, from the beginning, the erotic character of his delight in Tadzio, seeing the content of his underlying desires as directed at being in Tadzio’s presence, exchanging glances with him, and so forth. Indeed, he would be right about that. His error would lie in believing that such disciplined eroticism is safe, that it could not invade other areas of his psychological life and undermine his moral commitments. Seen in this way, he is not deceived about the content of his sexual desires but only about their scope and power.
When Aschenbach confesses his love for the boy, he is prompted by a smile. He characterizes that smile as that of Narcissus, enchanted by his own reflection in the mirror. The mirror in which Tadzio has seen himself is Aschenbach, surprised and overjoyed by the sudden appearance of the Polish family. To view the writer as the mirror of Narcissus is to understand him as the passive recipient of beauty, whose sole activity consists in creating opportunities for the expression of beauty.121 We might even say that his erotic love is not directed primarily at Tadzio but toward the feelings and images that the boy impresses upon him. Tadzio becomes an “image at the seaside”—a Bild am Meer rather than a Bild am Wege. In his notebook for the period in which he was writing Death in Venice, Mann copied out Spinoza’s definition of love: an excitation accompanied by the idea of an external thing.122 Aschenbach cannot leave Venice and must pursue Tadzio not because he wants physically to possess him but because of his insatiable desire for the excitation produced by an external object, the boy whose life does not really touch his own.123
To be a perfect mirror of Narcissus is to be exquisitely sensitive to beauty, and that sensitivity brings danger. In his parody of Socrates, Aschenbach contends that the perception of beauty leads inexorably to intoxication and desire, to actions that flout moral strictures, and so to corruption and “the abyss” (der Abgrund).124 The argument the writer rehearses, to be examined shortly, aims to uncover a deep tension between the roles of citizen and artist, even in the idealized form that aspires to transcend the split. The resolution Aschenbach hoped to have achieved is inadequate not because he has repressed homosexual desires but because the sexual identity he has fashioned and its integration with the quest of the artist-educator, the pursuit of beauty, can only be combined with the conduct of the ideal citizen through a discipline so fierce and severe as to be unsustainable. Aschenbach’s homosexual desires heighten the drama of the undoing of his discipline precisely because that discipline is so central to his life not only as a writer but also in the shaping of his sexual self. Those inclinations have been recognized and channeled toward a proper object—beauty—to be gazed at, captured in words, touched modestly, perhaps at last with a “spiritual kiss on the raspberry lips of the world”: the need for self-control has been thoroughly absorbed. To think that is, however, self-deception. Discipline is undone by the lure of beauty.
Mann was preoccupied by the theme, perhaps because of his sympathy with Schopenhauer’s thesis that the “higher” objectifications of blind will are in intense conflict with those that are more basic: the struggle between spiritual striving and sexuality being particularly acute.125 From his early stories on, he explores the ways in which human self-conceptions, even human lives, may be undone by the lure of beauty and the desires it elicits. Those desires do not have to be homosexual or even socially forbidden, merely at odds with the previously chosen self, and the power of the lure of beauty will be most clearly revealed when the subject is already forewarned—a writer, for example, who has reflectively endorsed limits to the expression of desire and who polices those limits with strict discipline.
Little Friedemann falls victim to the lure of beauty. His youthful experiences convince him that fulfilled romantic love is not part of his lot, and he turns to the arts, achieving what appears to be a disciplined serenity. That is disturbed by the arrival of the beautiful Gerda von Rinnlingen, whose charms Friedemann struggles to resist. Resistance finally breaks down at a performance of Lohengrin, where she is his neighbor in the box: she drops her fan, and they both stoop. “Their heads had been quite close together, and, for a moment, he had had to breathe in the warm scent of her breasts. His face was contorted, his whole body shook, and his heart beat so appallingly heavily and violently that his breathing stopped.”126 The combination of surging romantic music and enforced proximity to female beauty is too much for Friedemann. His disciplined acceptance of quiet joys—the static pleasures recommended by Epicurus—is acutely felt as insufficient. He must strive, against all his good judgment, hopelessly, ludicrously, for more, and when the inevitable rejection comes, he sees no alternative to death. The effects of the lure of beauty are more pronounced in Friedemann’s case than they are in Aschenbach’s—despite the fact that the desires beauty provokes in him are socially permissible, even if absurdly quixotic: Friedemann’s life is curtailed; Aschenbach’s probably is not.127 Both characters deploy the same metaphor to describe the breakdown of their discipline, both refer to the “abyss” (Abgrund).128 With a little exaggeration, we could say that Friedemann ends there.
A second example of the preoccupation with the lure of beauty, far more extensive, many sided, and profound, occurs in the Joseph tetralogy. Mann draws the material for an extensive episode (almost two hundred pages) from fourteen verses of Genesis.129 The source tells merely that the wife of Potiphar, whom Joseph serves, invites him to lie with her; he fees, leaving his “garment” behind. On the return of her husband, she accuses Joseph of trying to seduce her, and Potiphar sends Joseph to prison.
Mann gives Potiphar’s wife a name and an extensive character. She is Mut-em-enet, Potiphar’s “titular wife,”130 known for her purity and chastity, the “nun of the moon” (Mondnonne), whose participation in sublime religious rites is much admired. The appointment of Joseph as Potiphar’s steward brings a beautiful young man daily into her presence and disturbs her unfulfilled marriage. Aware of the passion that arises within her, she struggles to resist it. Over a period of three years, she attempts to have Joseph dismissed, even pleading with her husband to send him away. Potiphar refuses. Irresistible desires grow within her, driving her to grotesque and demeaning rituals.131 Eventually, abandoning both chastity and dignity, she attempts to seduce Joseph. Rejected, she emerges from the palace, bearing his clothing, and calls the Egyptians of the household to hear what the foreign slave has attempted. Joseph is bound and taken away. Mut sits on the ground before the palace and awaits her husband’s justice.
Yet Joseph is partially complicit in these events. He is aware of his own charms,
delights in them, and refuses advice to avoid Mut’s presence. His actions amplify the corrupting effects of his beauty. In this, he further develops aspects of Tadzio that Mann presents only fleetingly—for example, the Narcissus smile that wrings from Aschenbach a confession of his love for the boy. The lure of beauty applies to the bearer of beauty himself, and, because of that corruption, the corruption of others proceeds more easily. Tadzio’s future decay—his corruptible mortality—is touched on only fleetingly, when Aschenbach takes note of his pallor and of his teeth.132 Joseph’s self-corruption by his own beauty receives extensive treatment: we are introduced to him as he lies, in a state of provocative undress, under the moon—thereby eliciting the rebuke of his father.133 His delight in the coat his father has favored him with leads him to carry out the mad plan of parading his beauty and distinction to the world, which prompts his envious brothers to strip him naked and cast him into a pit.134 In the face of Mut’s unbounded passion for him, he decides to carry out his supposed “duty” of inspecting that part of the palace in which she is alone.135 Justice requires that Joseph be punished—that he be thrown into the pit a second time.
Deaths in Venice Page 13
