The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  And The Confidence Man?

  Some weeks earlier, on February 8th, Mann, in one of his many public readings, had given a performance of the school sickness chapter from The Confidence Man. He notes: ‘This is perhaps the most remarkable thing I have ever written, but the book as a whole can hardly be kept at such a level.’ Still it was not entirely out of his thoughts. On February 26th, he writes: ‘How at home I always feel in the Goethean sphere; how it gladdens and stimulates me. If I manage to get back to The Confidence Man, I will be able to live and work entirely in that realm.’ And he must have done so in the following months because two years later, on May 31st, 1921 he considers reading what he calls ‘the military examination scene of Part II’, which is where he stopped altogether and laid the work aside for what would be another thirty years.

  Meanwhile, on November 14th, Mann notes in one of his precise Diary entries: ‘Finished the fourth chapter of The Magic Mountain with the examination scene and Castorp’s admission … I admit to myself that I have brought the book to the same point at which The Confidence Man came to a halt, and not by chance. Actually I have emptied my bag. Fiction must now take over. Incipit ingenium.’

  What is interesting here is Mann’s suggestion that the material of The Confidence Man, up to the point where it ‘came to a halt’, was also part of his ‘bag’; had its sources, that is, in his own experience.

  The military examination scene is an extension of the school sickness episode earlier in the book that Mann, when he read it some months before, had felt he could not surpass.

  In that scene, young Felix, having learned as a lover and connoisseur of the body how, as he puts it, to ‘parody nature’ and make that wonderfully responsive organ obey his will, plays sick, and convinces the family physician, Health Councillor Dusing, by producing all the appropriate symptoms – a racing heart, high temperature, flushes – that he has a fever.

  Five years later, called up now for military service, he ramps up his performance by producing the symptoms of an epileptic fit; all the while presenting himself as the very embodiment of patriotism, a youth passionate to do his duty, and insisting, to the consternation of the Surgeon General who is examining him, and despite what is clearly happening, that he is ‘entirely fit for service’. In a piece of pure effrontery – and not only on Krull’s part – Mann’s cheeky hero, who has just cheated the army, and the nation, of his services, offers this very sophistical self-justification:

  For though martial severity, self-discipline and danger had been the characteristics of my strange life, its primary prerequisite and basis has been freedom, a necessity completely irreconcilable with any kind of commitment to a grossly factual situation. Accordingly, if I lived like a soldier it would have been a silly misapprehension to believe that I should live as a soldier; yes, if it is possible to describe and define intellectually an emotional treasure as noble as freedom, then it may be said that to live like but not as a soldier, figuratively not literally, to be allowed to live symbolically, spells true freedom.

  Mann, of course, knows perfectly well the cat-and-mouse game he is playing here, both with the elements of his own story and with motifs that elsewhere are ‘sacred’ to him: the motif of ‘a soldier and brave’ that is associated with Joachim Ziemssen in The Magic Mountain, his own wartime writings on the nobility of military service, the idea of ‘representation’ on which his public self and his role as a national figure is founded. Then there is his own rather doubtful relationship to the ‘grossly factual’.

  Mann, like Krull, had been a failure at school and had stayed on for a final year only to secure the elite status – which Krull lacks – of being a ‘one-year recruit’. He presented himself for military service in 1901. He was twenty-six; with Buddenbrooks behind him but not yet established as a success, and in the midst of an emotional crisis, the last and most powerful of his ‘adolescent’ homosexual attachments, with Paul Ehrenberg. By a mixture of natural disadvantage (weak ankles), malingering, and a good deal of official string-pulling (nothing so dramatic or so virtuosic as Krull’s imitation of a fit) he succeeded in getting himself honourably discharged, a fact that must have been a considerable embarrassment, a decade or more later, to so passionate a supporter of patriotic duty, military virtues and the War.

  Krull’s little performance allows Mann to rewrite all this in the spirit of subversive comedy, but also as a lighter version of the interaction between mind and body in the realm of disease that he was exploring, in all its disguises, and tricks, and misrepresentations, in The Magic Mountain.

  A writer’s body of work, if he is at all serious, has from first to last a coherence that may in the end be a mystery, even to himself. He can have no assurance when he begins that there will ever be such a thing as ‘a body of work’, and no clear notion, even as it emerges under his hand – slowly for the most part, and with many side-steps and interruptions – where it is taking him. First books for this reason have a double charm. First there is their freshness, and what comes to us of a new voice and a new way of seeing; then there is what we catch when we go back with the writer’s whole opus before us, and look again: the pre-echoes, sometimes faint, sometimes already strong, of what is to come, which the writing already had its sights on and was quietly pursuing.

  In this longer view last works too have their special interest, and the more so when the writer sees himself as very deliberately bringing things to a conclusion; making an end. As Tolstoy did when, after three decades of devoting himself to moral tales, and works of educational and social reform, he returned, in Hadji Murat, to mere storytelling – as he puts it, ‘like a greedy schoolboy going back for another slice of pudding’ – and as Thomas Mann did in late 1950, when, after a lapse of almost thirty years, wearied after a near fatal encounter with lung cancer and in the disillusionment of his last months in America – after the long haul of The Magic Mountain, the four Joseph novels, his Goethe novel Lotte in Weimar, two novellas, The Tables of the Law and The Transposed Heads, the huge effort of Dr Faustus – he found himself returning to where, through all his years of exile, he had always been most at home. To ‘the Goethean sphere’ as he called it, the Greco-Goethean realm of open sensuality and intellectual play; of secret confession and unapologetic affection for the egocentric self. To forbidden love. To ‘dressing up’ and ‘fairytale magic’ in the company of an adolescent charmer who, after so many years and so many delays and interruptions, was still waiting, in suspended animation, for his creator to catch up and offer him a second breath: the author’s very own Happy One, Felix, a drôle petit homme who shifts very expertly, as occasion demands, from cringing subservience to inappropriate defiant hauteur, but is also magnanimous when it does him credit and no immediate harm, and for all his sensuality is also fastidiously restrained. A hotel lift-boy and toy-boy, who, half-educated as he is, has already learned the most useful of all lessons: that ‘what we call fate is actually ourselves working through infallible laws’. A Sunday Child, and in his slim youth the latest and last incarnation – after Hans Hansen, Tadzio, Pribislav Hippe and the young Joseph – of what had always been the author’s guiding deity: Hermes, lord of boundaries, god of liars, god of thieves.

  Only with his body of honourable hard work behind him and his dignity as a public figure assured could the great novelist, at just on seventy-five, yield at last to his young seducer and give himself over to uninhibited invention.

  What is extraordinary as we read on in Krull from the medical examination in Chapter 5 to the Paris Hotel chapters, 7 to 9, is the absence, after thirty years, of any perceptible break, either in invention or the comico-serious tone.

  What Mann picks up on immediately is his narrator’s optimistic openness – as at the beginning of a life, rather than its end; Krull’s youthful delight in the sheer variety of what the world offers, in shop windows, a crowded hotel lobby, in human types and their accents, their physical tics and habits, in the clothes, ornaments, disguises they assume. All this, o
rganised by Mann in his role as a latter-day Prospero, is a marionette dance, in which all his favourite motifs make a final, last-minute appearance – as in the liberation of old age, and the permissiveness of a later period – with a nod now to Genet rather than Gide – the great man himself does. In elegant drag as it happens, as a lady novelist of a certain age, Diane Philibert (Mme Houpflé, wife of a Strasbourg manufacturer of bathroom toilets), author of fictions as she puts it ‘qui sont enormement intelligents’, who never stops talking, even in orgasm, and admits to being, like her creator, an intellect that ‘longs for the delights of the non-intelligent’, that which is alive and beautiful ‘dans sa stupidité’.

  Felix Krull lift-boy fits the bill perfectly, and she tells him so, delighted – though at twenty he is a little older than she would prefer – that he ‘knows nothing of the alexandrine’, and though he is himself a perfect Hermes, and even a real-life thief, has never heard of the god of so many shifts and disguises.

  Krull, naturally, is not altogether pleased at being praised for his charming stupidity, but is happy to take what is at hand, including the invitation, after he has satisfied the lady’s sexual needs, to creep about naked in the dark, and under the lady’s direction locate and make off with her jewels.

  Later, Mann makes a second and bolder appearance, as the discreetly homosexual and glumly self-repudiating Nectar, Lord Strathbogie, who falls for Krull (rather as Mann himself a little earlier had fallen for the nineteen-year-old waiter at his Swiss hotel, Franz Westermeier) and offers to recruit him as his body-servant and adoptive heir.

  Felix delivers the dour Scotsman a severe admonition against self-repudiation, then very gently declines the proposal. ‘This,’ as he tells us of the promised ennoblement, ‘would be a suspect lordship … But that was not the main thing. The main thing was that a confident instinct within me rebelled against a form of reality that was simply handed to me and was in addition sloppy – rebelled in favour of free play and dreams, self-created and self-sufficient, dependent, that is, wholly on imagination. When as a child I had woken up determined to be an eighteen-year-old prince named Karl and had maintained this pure and enchanting conceit for as long as I wished – that had been the right thing for me, not what this man with his jutting nose offered me because of his interest.’

  The child who dreamed of being a prince named Karl, as we know from elsewhere, was Mann himself, as he was also the ‘man with the jutting nose’.

  In 1954, on the eve of his seventy-ninth birthday, and with The Confessions of Felix Krull about to be printed, Mann had second thoughts: ‘not looking forward’, he writes, ‘to the publication of Felix Krull; the worst of it is that the whole thing strikes me as undignified nonsense, unlikely to impress the public with respect for an octogenarian’.

  Mann need not have worried. Krull is well within the bounds of his oeuvre, a ‘goat’s play’ to all the rest; a novel in the picaresque tradition of Gil Blas or Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, of large scope and good cheer, that sends us back to Mann’s earlier work with a new ear for the line of subversive comedy that he had always insisted was native to him but was obscured, for some of his readers, by the ‘thoroughness’ with which he develops his themes. (This was just one of the ways in which Mann felt, right to the end, that he was essentially misunderstood.) Krull, however wayward he may be on questions of honesty or truth, is never less than a perfect bourgeois when it comes to refinement and class.

  For a work that really does run the risk of being identified as ‘undignified nonsense’, which is just what it sets out to be, we must go to Patrick White’s Memoirs of Many in One, which stands in much the same relationship to The Aunt’s Story, The Tree of Man and Riders in the Chariot in White’s oeuvre as Krull does to Death in Venice and the Joseph books in Mann’s. It too has its source in an unfinished fragment, or rather in two of them: a novella, ‘Dolly Formosa’s Last Stand’, begun in 1966 and rapidly abandoned, and The Binoculars of Helen Nell, begun in 1964, put off while White wrote The Solid Mandala, taken up again in 1966, and finally laid aside, at 160,000 words, in 1967.

  Slighter but more uninhibited than Krull, the product of a very different personality and a very different culture and time, Memoirs resembles Mann’s comic masterpiece in being a work of travesty, an appendage, part Theatre of Cruelty, part Theatre of the Absurd, to the dozen or more weighty fictions that had won White his Nobel Prize. A whole range of White’s earlier preoccupations, and provocations and types, are released here from their usual associations – anger, disappointment, outright disgust – and allowed to play up or run riot in the spirit of the London revue sketches that White had begun with in the early thirties, and whose influence, for all his ‘grimness’, he had never entirely thrown off. Memoirs, true to its English roots, is less a goat’s play than a version of the jig with which an afternoon in the Elizabethan theatre with Timon or King Lear came to a conclusion in bawdy mayhem and the sprightliness of dance.

  For White, as for Mann, writing was a form of dressing up, of acting out the various roles that haunted his true but hidden self. The desperate comedy of Memoirs of Many in One, if it is to be seen as White intended, has to be read as a burlesque version of all that he had devoted himself to in the five decades before. White describes what he was at in a letter of 1985: ‘It’s about premature senility. No. No. It’s a very funny subject. It will offend a lot of people. Does them good. I enjoy it. It is religious in a sense; they won’t like my approach to religion, the ones who are orthodox religious. And it’s bawdy; the ones who like the bawdiness will be offended by the religion.’

  The book purports to be the memoirs, edited by her friend, Patrick White (a local novelist and, in her eyes, failed artist) of Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, ex-nun, sometime actress, septuagenarian serial runaway, a Sydneysider but born in Alexandria and teetering now on the edge of senility – that is, if the fantasies and delusions she entertains us with are not in reality the last stages of true enlightenment.

  Towards the end of the book Alex finds herself in a straitjacket, in the custody of a Colonel Superintendent and a ‘bull-nosed’ nurse. They decide to trust the old girl with another go at freedom, but not without conditions. ‘Just you try to create, my girl,’ the nurse warns her, ‘and you’ll be back in this before tea’s up.’

  White has always had an ear for the comic-sinister in Australian speech. ‘Creating’, playing up, is the essence of a life lived in the writing of it, as it is for her editor as well, though whether this Patrick White, who also happens to live at Centennial Park and wrestles with ‘a growing stack of foolscap which he hopes will bring him fulfilment’, is our Patrick White, is a matter of question.

  Prissy, over-fastidious, fussily repressed, he bears an odd resemblance to one of White’s least sympathetic but most pitiable characters, Waldo Brown of The Solid Mandala, who, while he is not quite an alter ego of his great creator, is in White’s repertory of selves a clear admission of where, in another life and without the liberating plunge into ‘creating’, the piss-elegant and self-hating side of his divided nature might have taken him. As Alex sees it, ‘Patrick understands the demands of art though he has never actually come good himself.’ There are times in Memoirs where she is the one who bears a closer resemblance to our Patrick White than her dry-stick, uptight editor:

  ‘I was sitting,’ she tells us, ‘in what I am vain enough to call my study, though I have studied practically nothing beyond my own intuition – oh, and by fits and starts, the Bible, the Talmud, the Jewish mystics, the Bhagavad Gita, various Zen masters, and dear old Father Jung who, I am told, I misinterpret.’ And more vehemently later: ‘Words are what matter. Even when they don’t communicate. That’s why I continue writing. Somebody may understand in time. All that I experienced on Nisos – as Cassini – in any of my lives, past and future – as Benedict, Magda, Dolly Formosa …’

  If there is at the start of this narrative a clear line between narrator and editor, Alex and Patrick, it soon
blurs. By the end of the book ‘Patrick White’s’ Editor’s Remarks have been invaded by Alex herself in the first person. She has, as White becomes Gray, entirely taken possession.

  As the last work of a writer with a long and distinguished career, Memoirs of Many in One is not what some commentators would wish such a work to be; the noble culmination of all he can do. It was this sort of expectation that had worried Mann in the case of Felix Krull.

  Memoirs, like Krull, is an escape from all that; a breaking free from the heavy burden that expectation sets on the writer’s freer spirits; a return to what, for the writer himself, a Tolstoy, a Mann, a White, had always been at the core of his writing, a spirit of refreshment, of curiosity and discovery, of self-exploration in pure play.

  For White, who comes to the moment later than the others, at a point of post-modernism that allows for a greater degree of permissiveness and different forms of play than Mann would have permitted himself, this becomes a test of his readers’ capacity to read him, of the extent to which they have understood him, and, for those who meet the test, is meant to be a treat. Everything of White that they have previously encountered and taken in, from The Aunt’s Story, through Voss, Riders in the Chariot and The Solid Mandala to The Twyborn Affair and Flaws in the Glass, makes a reappearance here, but in the form of conscious self-parody; most of all in a spirit of lightness in which the fearful, the terrible, but also the silliest and most foolish, find a place. We need, as readers, if we are to savour this as the treat White means it to be, to let go, as he does, of a good deal of baggage. To take on that lightness and feel the release of it. To kick up our heels and dance. To be capable, as readers, of entering whole-heartedly, as White does, into a jig. After so much suffering and pain, to grasp, as he does, and as he asks us to discover with him, the whole range of living, but also of the invigorating process by which the writing self takes life and makes of it the equally real but unpredictable other life we call Art.