by Colm Toibin
When the woman expressed surprise at the idea that this was even a possibility, Schoenberg explained why he felt he needed thus to reassure her. It was that book by that Thomas Mann, he said. The woman drove straight to Pacific Palisades and told Katia what the composer had said.
It occurred to Thomas that Alma Mahler might be the person to calm Schoenberg down, let him know that the novel was an intricate creation and reassure him that no reader could ever believe that he himself had syphilis just because the composer was based on him.
Alma agreed with him that Schoenberg had behaved absurdly in the Mart; she said that she would speak to him and perhaps the Manns could come to supper with him and his wife where they could all raise a glass to the publication of a marvelous novel.
What she did not tell Thomas was that she had already called at the Schoenbergs’ several times since the appearance of Doctor Faustus and had given the composer and his wife an alarming account of the book’s contents. All this was relayed to him by a friend of the Schoenbergs.
It was simple, she had told Schoenberg: Thomas Mann’s composer had invented the twelve-tone system, and so had Schoenberg; Mann’s composer had syphilis and was in league with the Devil, thus people might think that he also shared these features with Schoenberg.
Thomas worried that if Schoenberg went to a lawyer, he himself would be forced by the Knopfs to unravel all the strands of the book, outlining what was true and what was made up. He shivered at how hard it would be to show from what strange depths this book had come.
Doctor Faustus, despite its recondite content, was a bestseller in America. Any lawyer that the Schoenbergs approached would take this into account. If the composer were to sue, he would, Thomas believed, demand for himself a share in the royalties, or he could even want both royalties and damages. Because of the dense amount of textual argument that would ensue, the costs of defending a case like this would be ruinous.
In the early mornings, as he lay in bed, Thomas could picture a scene in which he would be ordered to hand over all the income from the book to Arnold Schoenberg.
The row between Thomas and Schoenberg made Alma, when she came to see them, even more excited than usual.
“I don’t think you understand Arnold Schoenberg, do you? His work with atonality is not a trick or just technical. It comes to him as something spiritual.”
She stopped for a moment as Thomas looked puzzled.
“Schoenberg is a deeply religious man. He became a Lutheran in all good faith, as he has returned to his Jewish roots with absolute humility and seriousness. He is not immodest enough to see his music as devotional, but he sees it as a bulwark against materialism. So when he witnesses his technique used as a prop in a novel, adopted by a man, however fictional, who has associations with the Devil and whose creative urge is spurred on by syphilis, then he is not pleased.”
“Yes,” Thomas said, “it is a grubby business writing novels. Composers can think about God and the ineffable. We have to imagine the buttons on a coat.”
“And give venereal diseases to German composers,” Alma added.
* * *
Sometimes at night, when Katia had gone to bed and Erika was not in the house, Thomas played Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night on the phonograph and he regretted that he had hurt the composer with his novel. The piece was tense and restrained, but layers of carefully modulated emotion broke through. He knew it was written before Schoenberg invented his twelve-tone system but he saw that it was pointing towards a style that would, in the future, grow more distilled. He wished he could have spoken to Schoenberg about this and hoped that he might be able to do so if they could be reconciled.
To the composer, he must seem venal. He needed material for his novel as a ship might need ballast. His was not an art that could ever manage to be pure. As he listened to the strings moving faster, and the tone of pleading rising and falling, he wished he were a different sort of writer, less concerned with the details of the world and more with larger, more eternal questions. It was too late now; his work was done, or most of it.
How curious it was that across this American city lived the man who, when he was young, composed this lush music! Schoenberg, Thomas imagined, was still awake in the untransfigured Californian night. Some of those early yearnings must still be with him, and he must feel sorrow that such tender expression was no longer possible. Some of the same emotions that the music evoked had, Thomas hoped, been captured in his novel, but words were not notes and sentences not chords.
* * *
Erika was now his driver as well as his editor, his enforcer. She took the phone calls, banked the checks and replied to invitations. She dealt with the Knopfs in New York, making clear to Blanche Knopf that everything to do with publishing, including the smallest matter, must come through her.
And Erika enjoyed infuriating Agnes Meyer by refusing to let her speak directly to her father.
One afternoon when the phone rang, Thomas had nearly reached it when Erika lifted the receiver.
“No, you cannot,” he heard her say. “My father is in his study. He is deep in his work.”
Thomas whispered, asking who it was, as Erika, putting her hand over the mouthpiece, informed him that it was his friend, the woman from Washington, D.C. When he indicated that he wished to speak to her, Erika shook her head.
“I can give him a message,” she told Mrs. Meyer, “but I cannot interrupt him.”
As he stood close, he could hear Agnes haranguing Erika, who, having said her farewells, soon put the receiver down.
“I am electric light,” she said, “and Agnes Meyer is a bat. I turn on and she flies off.”
When the FBI contacted the house seeking to conduct some further interviews with Erika, she insisted that it was Mrs. Meyer who had encouraged them.
“They have left me alone for two years. Why are they back? That wretched Agnes is waging her own war against peace-loving people.”
“Peace-loving people?” Katia asked. “Would that be you?”
Thomas expected Erika to be in the same sort of fury against the FBI as she was against many others, but instead she shook her head in worry, as though genuinely frightened.
“I have been really stupid about this citizenship business,” she said. “I was too busy in the war to follow through on my application. They can have me deported at any time.”
If she had to leave America, Thomas thought, Erika would have nowhere to go. She had a British passport, but she knew no one in England. There would be no room for her outspokenness in the new Germany, east or west. And Klaus had moved to France, where he was languishing in Cannes. Thomas understood that, while Erika was willing to write to her brother and support him, she did not wish to find herself in the same predicament as he was. She did not want to be alone and stateless, someone who had served her purpose in the struggle against fascism and had no further use.
The FBI came to the house twice; the second interview lasted, Thomas noted, almost a full day, with a break for lunch. That evening, at dinner, Erika explained what had transpired.
“Sex, sex, sex. That is all. I wish I’d had the sex they think I’ve had. And when I said it to them: ‘Have you never had any sex?’ one of them answered: ‘Not outside the state of matrimony, ma’am.’ And he is lucky I did not drag him by his protruding ears out of this house and leave him in a state of matrimony in the street outside!”
The FBI had insisted, once more, that Erika had enjoyed relations with her brother Klaus that were less than healthy, and, more dangerously, they had insinuated that they had indisputable evidence that Erika’s marriage to Auden had taken place only so she could get British citizenship, and the marriage had never been consummated and never would be because of her predilections and his.
Their visitors seemed not to know about his daughter’s long love affair with Bruno Walter, but this was hardly the moment to mention it, Thomas thought.
“They have us all mixed up. They think you wrote Klaus’s bo
oks and they think we are all Communists.”
“I hope they don’t think I am a Communist,” Katia said.
“They don’t even know that you exist!” Erika said.
She made it sound like an accusation.
* * *
Once the row with Schoenberg had begun to die down, Thomas hoped that he and Katia could enjoy their declining years in Pacific Palisades in peace. Many of the émigrés had gone back to Germany, but the Manns had no plans to do so. Thomas was slowly being made aware, however, that his efforts not to become involved with Germany were causing bitterness in his homeland.
“No one objected when I left in 1933,” he said, “but now they think I have a duty to return. And what is strange is that I get abusive letters from people I have never met, but I don’t hear at all from anyone I knew.”
“They need scapegoats,” Erika replied. “And you are an easy target. No column or editorial feels complete unless there is an attack on you.”
“And I think the American press is confusing me with you and your brother. They think I am some sort of left-wing agitator. Apparently, I am on a list.”
The two hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth was to come that summer, and Thomas, in an essay, tried to connect Goethe’s thinking with the needs of the contemporary world. He could, he thought, preach, using Goethe’s example, that in public as much as private the world should recoil from single ways of seeing things, and begin to think in myriad ways. Goethe’s paradigm could be nourishing to a world threatened by a savage clash of ideologies. The writer’s mind was protean, his imagination was open to change. Humor and irony were essential tools for him.
Both Erika and Golo, who read the first draft of the essay, thought that he was being too idealistic, not suspicious enough, that he was making Goethe out to be a spokesman for the United Nations, but Thomas persevered, letting Erika get actively involved only when the essay needed to be radically cut so that it could become a lecture. It would be delivered first in Chicago and then in Washington, D.C. Then he would take his first transatlantic flight to London and deliver the lecture at Oxford. From there, he would go to Stockholm via Göteborg and deliver the lecture once more.
When an invitation came to visit Germany, Erika advised him to turn it down.
“You do not want to travel there now,” she said. “It is too early. It is best to refuse all invitations to Germany.”
“I would like to honor Goethe in his homeland during his bicentenary,” Thomas said. “But it is not simple. I know it is not simple.”
“His homeland is in the mind of his readers,” Erika said. “You can hardly say it is Germany. Is Buchenwald his homeland? You would hardly like to go there in honor of Goethe!”
Thomas and Katia decided, however, after much discussion, that, if they were going to Stockholm, they would go to Germany and Switzerland as well, maybe visit Zürich first and then Frankfurt, where Goethe was born. Thomas had been offered the Goethe Prize from the city of Frankfurt. If he accepted, he could then think of going to other cities, perhaps even Munich. The thought of seeing their ruined house caused Katia to go silent. Thomas did not even want to discuss with his wife or daughter the prospect of traveling into East Germany.
The question was how to let Erika know that they had determined, despite her wishes, to go back to Germany, if just for a short visit.
Erika did not let a day go by without further denouncing Germany. Her attacks grew more even intense than Elisabeth’s when a Munich weekly newspaper called her an agent of Stalin. This was reprinted by other newspapers in West Germany. If it had been twenty years earlier, Erika would have known the editors of these papers personally and would have easily cleared her name. Now she knew no one. What surprised her was that not one newspaper supported her, or wrote that there was no evidence at all to uphold the assertion that she was an agent of Stalin.
When Katia broke the news to her over dinner that they really did intend to include Germany in their visit to Europe, she shrugged.
“You two can go where you like. I will go as far as Switzerland with you. If you lose your suitcase, or your glasses, or forget the name of the hotel, or need to be guided safely past greasy town councillors, I will not be with you.”
It was as well, Thomas thought, that Erika glanced dartingly around the room and did not look at her mother as she said this. Katia, he could see, was on the point of expressing satisfaction at the thought that they might spend time under a protection other than that of their daughter.
“I would be grateful,” he said, directing his gaze at Erika, “if you did not tell Heinrich that we are going to Germany. He is in regular touch with the authorities in the East, some of whom are old friends of his. I do not want an argument with him.”
“But he will find out and he will want to know what you plan to say in Germany,” Erika said.
“About what?”
“What do you think? About the division of your own country!”
“It is not our country now,” Katia said. “Not anymore.”
“Then why are you going back there?” Erika asked.
* * *
Thomas liked the preparations for setting out, explaining to the postman that they would be gone some months, watching the suitcases lining up in the hallway. And once on the train, he enjoyed waiting for night, when the staff would come to make up their beds in the compartment for the stretch of the trip that would take them as far as Chicago.
In Chicago, he remembered not to make any jokes in front of Angelica, and hoped that Borgese would not talk too much about the minutiae of postwar Italian politics.
Katia, clearly, had spoken to Erika and Elisabeth and asked them to be civil to each other. In the sitting room, as they took tea, she monitored progress. Erika spoke of the journey and the beauty of the landscape.
“My mother slept as soon as we set out,” Erika said, “and then she read some book in English.”
“It’s rather trashy,” Katia said. “But your father read it too. It’s called The City and the Pillar and it is about a young man.”
“I enjoyed it,” Thomas said.
“Your Goethe audience will need something more exalted,” Erika said.
“The Magician comes in many guises,” Elisabeth said.
Even though Katia had asked Erika not to mention the possibility of Germany being included on their tour, she saw that her daughter could not resist.
“Germany!” Erika said. “Imagine!”
“Are you going back to Munich?” Elisabeth asked.
“We do not know,” Thomas replied. “Nothing has been decided.”
“If you go there, could you ask them to give us our house back?” Elisabeth asked. “The war has been over for four years. It is the least they can do.”
“I have lived for so long now with the idea that we have lost everything,” Katia said, “that I don’t want to think about getting things back. Most people lost a great deal more than we did.”
“What happened to the manuscripts of my father’s books and all the letters?” Elisabeth asked.
“They are lost,” Katia said. “We gave them to Heins our lawyer for safekeeping. His house was ransacked or it was bombed or they were stolen. They might turn up, but I have given up thinking about them.”
“With Germany quite rightly on its knees,” Erika said, looking pointedly at Elisabeth, “our property is perhaps the last thing we should all be thinking about.”
Chapter 17 Stockholm, 1949
The war was over; Thomas had not experienced it. He did not know what its aftermath meant. He would have to get used to that. He was ready to settle down in the Grand Hôtel in Stockholm, with Katia and Erika in rooms near his, and prepare to be fêted by the Swedes. His Goethe lecture would be given also in Uppsala and then in Copenhagen and Lund. Afterwards they would go to Switzerland and hear the German language spoken in the street for the first time in more than a decade.
On his first day in Stockholm, he agreed to tak
e a tour with Edgar von Uexküll, whom he had known since the 1920s, and who had been arrested for his involvement in the plot against Hitler a year before the war ended. Although they spoke freely, there was a gap between them caused by what they each had done during the war.
Thomas could feel an edge of disquiet coming from his friend, a worried look that appeared most when Thomas voiced a belief that was definite. Uexküll had been opinionated and loquacious and convivial when he knew him, a man who enjoyed argument and spirited conversation. Now he had some banal views that he must have gleaned from the newspapers.
Thomas found it difficult to imagine what it must have been like when that coup against Hitler failed, how afraid Uexküll must have been. Even though his connections deep within the regime had saved him, it must have been close.
Having taken a tour of the city, Thomas parted from Uexküll and went to meet Katia in a café.
“I am too old for this travel,” Katia said. “I woke at three and got dressed and took a walk. The staff must think I am mad.”
As he and Katia entered the hotel, Erika was waiting for them in the lobby. The expression on her face was dark. She did not even greet them but approached them quickly and then walked away from them again, beckoning them to follow. At first, when she spoke, Thomas was not sure he had heard her properly, but when he asked her to repeat what she had said she shook her head.
“I cannot talk about it here. But he is dead. Klaus is dead. He took an overdose.”
They moved slowly, without speaking, from the lobby to Katia’s room.
