So why not recognize that something more elementary than “Greek Love” is at stake? Why not elaborate a “sexual” reading of Death in Venice? Aschenbach is fascinated with Tadzio’s beauty, because he is a closeted homosexual. The writer’s marriage and family life is long in the past, and it was probably always an attempt to conform his sexuality to approved standards. The challenge of the stranger at the cemetery, with his direct stare, can be read as a sexual invitation; the imagery of the vision of the south in Aschenbach’s reverie is explicitly sexual (the overgrown ferns are described as geil, voluptuous perhaps, but more literally lewd) and primarily phallic (thrusting roots and hairy palm trunks are only the start); the elderly fop disturbs Aschenbach because of the serious possibility that this is a version of himself (as eventually it will be). Even the fop’s parting words of “compliments to your little darling” use the suspiciously neutral word Liebchen. Before he arrives at the lido, the attentive reader can see through Aschenbach’s disguise.
His repression, we might assume, has affected his art, turning it toward formalism because only careful choices allow him simultaneously to conform to the bourgeois conventions and engage passionately with his subject matter: perhaps it is no accident that the great prose epic centers on Frederick the Great.44 On the lido, however, his powers of repression are broken, simply overwhelmed by Tadzio’s beauty, and, because the feelings have been held in check so long, they erupt with a force that makes artistic shaping of them impossible. All Aschenbach’s defenses are destroyed, and his passion leads him to violate the conventional standards that have held him in thrall.
So the challenge: Death in Venice may come in elaborate trappings, echoes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, allusions to Greek mythology and play with Socratic dialogues, but it is tempting to suppose that these are disguises Mann considered necessary to mask a more basic story about the social distortion of sexuality and its costs. Freed from the conventional prejudices Mann accurately ascribed to his contemporaries, readers today can recognize the novella for what it is.
The next two sections will attempt a pair of complementary responses to this challenge.
3
From his youth on, Mann had cherished the melancholy poems of August von Platen, recognizing with sympathy Platen’s yearning for love, love typically doomed to remain unexpressed and, when timidly ventured, brusquely rebuffed. Born into the threadbare aristocracy, Platen was sent to the boarding school for cadets in Munich shortly before his tenth birthday. During the next few years, he became aware of his sexual orientation: “I grew accustomed to devote my hopes and dreams to members of my own sex, and sought to achieve in friendship with them the very same goal that lovers seek in marriage.”45 During the years he spent in military training, with an interval of service as a page at court, his feelings were directed at a number of young men—typically his con-temporaries—whom he admired from a distance: sometimes the passion fared before he had exchanged a word with the object of his desires, or at a time when he was only rewarded with monosyllabic responses, but it was important for him to gaze on the beloved, to have the opportunity of being in the other’s presence.46 In his early twenties, Platen fell in love with a young man to whom he was able to declare himself—he guessed, apparently correctly, that his beloved was also primarily attracted toward men—but the relationship was stormy, with only occasional moments of reassurance and relatively chaste fulfillment. The episode ended when the beloved, Edward, returned Platen’s correspondence and the poems he had written, with “a horrible letter” (“une lettre horrible”); the conclusion gives the tone: “Never dare to write even a single line to me again, or, if I should be in your presence, to speak a single word to me. For my own part, I shall avoid you as a pestilential sickness. Otherwise you could place yourself in danger of being treated just as someone deserves, who has completely abandoned human worth.”47 Later, after he had left the army and devoted himself to a nomadic life in Italy and Sicily, Platen appears to have had fleeting sexual liaisons. Reciprocated love seems always to have eluded him.
How many of the details of Platen’s life did Mann know? In the absence of the diaries he kept in his early years (and destroyed in the 1940s), we cannot discover just which parts of Platen’s own copious journals Mann read. A note from 1898 or 1899 records his intention to read Platen’s Tagebücher, which were transcribed and published between 1896 and 1900.48 Assuming he followed through on his intention, virtually any sampling of the 1,900 printed pages would have confirmed the portrait he had already constructed from reading the poetry—and from knowing Heine’s famous gibe about Platen’s “effeminacy.” In the essay on Platen (“Platen-Tristan-Don Quichotte”) Mann wrote in 1930, he refers to Platen’s love “that saturates every poem”—“an unending and unquenchable love, one that flows into death, which is death, because it finds no satisfaction on Earth.”49 Reflecting on that essay almost four years later, Mann exclaims at how Platen’s “spiritualized and overerotic passion fired my blood” when he himself was in love.50
Mann’s admiration and his sense of kinship with the unhappy poet, who had preceded him by three-quarters of a century, would invite a comparison between Aschenbach and Platen, whether or not Mann had carried out his plan of reading the diaries. Perhaps Mann knew already that Platen’s own visit to Venice had liberated him, that he had overstayed his leave, had suffered (mild) punishment for doing so, and that the experience inspired him to quit his military career and take up life in the south. Platen’s most famous poem—“Tristan”—quoted in full in the 1930 essay, points toward Aschenbach’s collapse at the fountain: the one who has “gazed on beauty,” the third stanza tells us,
would like to dry up like a spring,
to suck poison from every breath of the air,
to smell death in every flower.51
Mann might well also have known that Platen’s last years were spent in restless, unfulfilled, wanderings around Italy—Aschenbach’s obsessive pursuits of Tadzio, on a far larger scale—and also, maybe, that these peregrinations ended when, fearing cholera (which had broken out in Sicily), Platen misdiagnosed himself, took the wrong medicines, and died of a violent intestinal infection.52 Most important for present purposes, however, is a connection made clear by Mann’s reference to “spiritualized and overerotic passion”: Platen’s recapitulation of the Platonic tradition.
Whether or not Platen had studied the Symposium or the Phaedrus or Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love,53 his efforts to come to terms with his own emotions work through the same conceptions and construct the same defenses. The early confessions to his diary surround his passions with allusions to religious devotion, some of them explicitly Christian (“So I was able to gaze on him, uninterruptedly, fixedly, as the pious do when they pray to the picture of the Savior, before which they lie in the dust”), some steeped in classical allusions (“O come back, happy days, I beseech you; let me at least taste your Olympian nectar once again!”).54 He rehearses the ancient view that women cannot be objects of the highest forms of love, because of their intellectual (or spiritual?) limitations (“I believed that the cramped spirit [beschränkte Geist] of a woman would not be capable of captivating me long, and that the vast majority of the fair sex are spoiled through affectation”).55 He echoes Diotima’s account of the priority of intellectual/spiritual reproduction (“nobody was so besotted with his children as a poet”).56 He confesses that his homosexual passions developed during a period when he was unaware that any “criminal relationship could exist between two men” and that he only later paid attention to writings on same-sex love, noting that, in his own earlier readings of Plutarch, he had entirely overlooked this theme.57 The most important recapitulation, however, is the struggle to identify homosexual love as the highest form of friendship. In March 1816, when he was nineteen, Platen characterized friendship in a way of which the ancients would have approved:
I feel that this inclination [toward his current love, “William”] is something noble and forms
itself in a noble fashion in me. Its endeavor is to make its object as worthy as possible, and, where possible, to ennoble and improve the errors and weaknesses of that object. It would be my highest triumph to make my William the best of men. It is no blind, no irrational, inclination, for it is grounded on the deepest and best human feelings.58
Later in the same year, a reading of Brandes’s On Women prompted an extended identification with the Greek perspective:
The author defends the practice of homosexual love among the Greeks. He believes (as I have always believed) that such love among the Greek aristocrats never degenerated into vice, even if outer appearances aroused it or contributed to it. He shows what great deeds proceeded from this love, how two men could be everything to one another, and how they alone were able to exchange thoughts and feelings. These considerations did not leave me indifferent. I have come to feel stronger in my sense of the probity of my inclinations, which I have always felt as noble and directed towards goodness. I cannot take it as a reproach to have sought the human ideal always among my own sex, and I consider this inclination all the more pure, the more I recognize how different the love of men for women is and how it eventually degenerates into mere sensual satisfaction. The conflict between love and friendship within my breast is resolved. I feel that they [love and friendship] can be united, even if I shall never find a man to whom I can give both.59
The resolution, however, was only temporary: about a year later, Platen lamented a fall back into the folly of love. “I am of an age that demands love, and cannot be satisfied with mere friendship…. I can dull my feelings by means of serious occupations, but I cannot silence them.”60 Opposing his earlier thought that women are too limited to serve as objects of the deepest love, he envies those whom he has previously loved who have been “saved” by marriage—and hopes wistfully for a future marriage for himself (“Respect and friendship would draw me to my wife, and these would, perhaps, give birth to love”).61
The turn away from the Greek ideals and defenses is accompanied by an increasing awareness of the slide from sense to sensuality, of the power of the sexual drive, and of a sense of human suffering that echoes Schopenhauer. Platen asks if “the best existence is not a constant suffering” and sees the ideal of love as lying in devotion to another, fulfilled in ameliorating the beloved’s fate.62 Pessimism pervades his thinking in the passage, in which he distinguishes between love and friendship. That entry concludes:
There can be no love without a sensual component. But never, in any fashion, did Federigo awake in me a merely sensual impulse. But suppose it should come to that for me in other cases! Then the abyss would swallow me up. I should be lost. I would wretchedly gnaw at myself, I would never achieve my purpose and would even shudder to attain it. I know already how easily a noble love can lead to the edge of corruption and desperation; but I have not yet experienced how dreadfully sensual ardor can destroy the whole person; I have, however, a grim premonition of it. There is so much in the world that makes me wish I had never been born.63
The Greek ideal that section 2 attributed to Aschenbach was present for long periods in Platen’s own efforts to come to terms with himself—and, as with Aschenbach at the fountain, there are moments at which it cannot be sustained, moments at which the abyss threatens.64
Mann’s immersion in his predecessor’s melancholy lyrics enabled him to divine this pattern in Platen’s thoughts and feelings. Poetry in which the author figures as a rejected friend (or possibly rejected as something more than a friend), in which the friend/beloved steals off to a girl while the poet broods over a pile of books,65 hardly conceals the circumstances in which Platen sometimes found himself:
Friend, it was an empty, mad longing
that our spirits would find one another,
that our glances would spark understanding,
that our tears would mingle …66
Particularly important, however, is “Tristan,” from which I quoted above, a three-stanza poem Mann made central to his essay on Platen. Literally (and clumsily) translated, it runs:
Whoever gazes on beauty with his eyes
is already at home with death,
and will be suited to no earthly service,
and yet will tremble before death,
whoever gazes on beauty with his eyes.
For him the pain of love endures forever,
for only a fool can hope on this earth
to satisfy any such impulse:
Whoever has been struck by the arrow of beauty
for him the pain of love endures forever.
Ah, he would like to dry up like a spring,
to suck poison from every breath of the air,
to smell death in every flower:
Whoever gazes on beauty with his eyes,
Ah, he would like to dry up like a spring!67
Mann had already cited this poem in an earlier essay (on “Marriage in Transition”), where he suggested that beauty and form were connected not with life but with a critical attitude toward life, an attitude “most profoundly bound up with death and infertility”: Platen’s poem was viewed as encapsulating the essence of “aestheticism”, and the homo-erotic impulse the core of “erotic aestheticism.”68
There is an important last aspect of Platen’s attempt to construct a sexual identity with which he could rest, to wit the prominence of vision in his yearnings. As I have already noted, his feelings could easily be kindled from a distance: without words, without knowledge of the young men who attracted him, he could blaze into passion, torturing himself with plans for seeing more of the beloved, reproaching himself for wasting chances to come closer to them.69 During his original stay in Venice and throughout the restless wanderings of his final years, sight is paramount: in Venice he scurries from church to church, entranced by the wealth of paintings, but the sounds, tastes, and smells of the city (of Venice!) leave little impression. Later, in Naples, he finds bathing in the sea particularly agreeable, since it brings him into the company of the local youth.70 The apparently clumsy repetition of references to the eyes in the opening line of “Tristan” reflects his openness to visual beauty, and here again Platen recapitulates the ideas of the ancients. In the crucial section of the Phaedrus in which Socrates describes the earthly apprehension of beauty, he is explicit about which sense is involved: “Beauty, as I said, was radiant among the other objects; and now that we have come down here we grasp it sparkling through the clearest of our senses. Vision, of course, is the sharpest of our bodily senses.”71 Platen, I suggest, accepted this Socratic idea so deeply that he made it central to his understanding of homoerotic expression.
The pessimism of 1817 reaches its nadir in the fear that his erotic yearnings will drive him into the “abyss.” Just over a year later, in the grip of the passion for the young man he identifies as “Adrast”—later revealed as Edward—he reassures himself: “His beauty enchants me, but sexual craving has never sullied me.”72 As he comes to know Edward, he suggests that he would be the “happiest of men” if “heaven” would give him “an unchangeable purity of soul,” and he rejoices that “their esteem for each other” increases every day.73 It was not long before their arms found each other’s shoulders and waists, and Platen reports that their “cheeks often touched.”74 Yet, in accord with his wish for purity, he hopes that God will help them to emerge from “this abyss” (“cet abyme”).75 Even after Edward’s declaration of his own feelings, Platen can reassure himself:
We were no more than a single soul, and our bodies were like two trees whose branches are tightly interlaced, intertwined forever. Nonetheless, I can swear without deception that my longing has been enhanced, and that it has also gained in purity what it has gained in ardor, since when true love, reciprocal love, lifts itself up to a high degree, sensuality is diminished.76
In retrospect, after recurrent storms and difficulties—probably caused by Platen’s yearning for a combination of profound spiritual union and restrained physical expre
ssion—he looks back on this particular day (June 24, 1819)—“the day that remains in my memory as the most beautiful and the most tender.”77 The height of their sexual contact seems to have been attained on the day when they separated: “As he started to leave, he embraced me again tenderly and our lips touched in a long kiss. I accompanied him through the streets and before we separated we embraced each other one more time. I no longer feel my ardent love, I only feel the purest and most lasting friendship [amitié].”78 For Platen, apparently, gazing at the beloved was primary and could permissibly lead to ardent conversational exchanges, embraces, and, as apogee, a kiss. Love was to be separated from the lower part of the body.79
At least in the early part of his life, Platen sought to adapt his homo-erotic feelings to conventional ideas about sexual expression, by limiting the forms of contact allowed to those that might “pass” as exuberant expressions of deep but “pure” friendship. There are even hints that, at this stage of his life, he foresees a role for himself as educator, as Erzieher, someone whose writings will assist sensitive young men who come after him, youths who discover that they are attracted to men and not to women. He considers the possibility of composing an extensive discussion of “Friendship between men”80 and, more prophetically, imagines his diaries as helping sensitive youths—“of my own leanings”—who might learn to avoid his own mistakes.81 The poetry, if not the diaries, surely comforted one such youth, the author who attributed Platen’s acute, conflicted, Platonic homoerotic identity to Aschenbach.
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