Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years

by Thomas Mann

  How could Louis possibly have failed to inform me that my mother was a Plettenberg! I seized upon this new fact as something with which to enrich my memory.

  'But with pleasure,' I replied, changing languages at his suggestion. 'Good Lord, as though I hadn't babbled German all through my childhood, not only with Mama but also with our coachman, Klosmann!'

  'And I,' Kuckuck broke in, 'have become almost entirely unaccustomed to my native tongue and am only too happy to seize this opportunity of moving once more within its framework. I am now fifty-seven. It was twenty-five years ago that I came to Portugal. I married a child of the country — née da Cruz, since we are speaking of names and families — of ancient Portuguese stock, and if a foreign language is to be spoken, French is far closer to her than German. And our daughter, for all her affection for me, does not share her Papa's taste in tongues, but prefers, after Portuguese, to chatter very prettily in French. A completely enchanting child. Zouzou, we call her.'

  'Not Zaza?'

  'No, Zouzou. It comes from Susanna. What does Zaza come from?'

  'I really can't say. I have encountered it occasionally — in artistic circles.'

  'You move in artistic circles?'

  'Among others. I'm a bit of an artist myself, a painter and sketcher. I studied under Professor Estompard, Aristide Estompard of the Académie des Beaux Arts.'

  'Oh, an artist in addition to all the rest. Very gratifying.'

  'And you, professor, were certainly in Paris on museum business?'

  'You have guessed it. The purpose of my trip was to secure from the Paleo-Zoological Institute a few skeletal fragments that are very important to us — the skull, ribs, and shoulder blade of a long-extinct species of tapir, from which through many evolutionary stages our horse has descended.'

  'What's that, our horse descended from the tapir?'

  'And from the rhinoceros. Yes, your riding-horse, marquis, has passed through the most varied forms. At one time, when it was already a horse, it was of Lilliputian size. Oh, we have learned names for all its earlier and earliest stages, names that end in hippos, "horse", beginning with "eohippos" — the original tapir, that is, which lived in the Eocene.'

  'In the Eocene. I assure you, Professor Kuckuck, I will make a note of the name. When do they believe the Eocene was?'

  'Recently. It is, geologically speaking, modern times, a few hundred thousand years ago, when the ungulates first appeared. Moreover, it will interest you as an artist to know that we employ specialists, masters of their craft, to reconstruct these extinct animals in highly presentable and lifelike fashion from their skeletal remains, and the men of former times as well.'

  'The men!'

  'The men as well.'

  'The men of the Eocene?'

  'That is a bit early. We must admit that man's history is to some extent shrouded in darkness. He only emerged late, within the framework of the mammalian order, that much is scientifically well established. As we know him, he is a latecomer here, and the Biblical Book of Genesis is quite right in placing him at the pinnacle of creation. Only it abridges the process rather drastically. Organic life on earth, roughly speaking, has lasted some five hundred and fifty million years. It took some time to get to man.'

  'I am extremely thrilled by what you say, professor.'

  So I was. I was extremely thrilled — even then, and to an increasing degree thenceforth. I listened to this man with such intense, enthralled interest that I almost forgot to eat. Dishes were passed to me, I helped myself and started to eat, but then I would forget to move my jaws as I sat listening to his words, knife and fork idle in my hands, while I stared into his face and into his starlike eyes. I cannot give a name to the thirst with which my soul drank in all he had to say. However, without that concentrated and sustained receptivity, would I, after so many years, be able to repeat that conversation today, at least in its salient points, almost verbatim, indeed, I believe quite literally verbatim? He had spoken of curiosity, of the lust for the new, which makes up a good part of the longing to travel, and as he had done so, I recall, I had found something strangely challenging in what he said, something that impinged sharply upon my emotions. It was just this kind of provocation, this plucking of the inmost strings of one's being, that was to raise his edifying discourse to the height of infinite and intoxicating fascination, although he continued to speak calmly, coolly, in measured tones, at times with a smile on his lips—

  'Whether life has before it,' he went on, 'as long a period as it has behind it, no one can say. Its toughness is, of course, enormous, especially in its lowest forms. Would you believe that the spores of certain bacteria can sustain the uncomfortable temperature of outer space, minus two hundred degrees, for a full six months without perishing?'

  'That's amazing.'

  'And yet the emergence and continuance of life are limited to certain clearly defined conditions which have not always existed and will not exist forever. The time within which a star is habitable is finite. Life has not always existed and will not always exist. Life is an episode, on the scale of the eons a very fleeting one.'

  'That predisposes me in favour of the same,' I said. I used the phrase 'the same' out of pure excitement and a desire to express myself formally and by the book. 'There's a song,' I added, '"Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May".' In it there's a reference to "the glorious lamp of heaven, the sun", and its setting. I heard it when I was very young, and I have always liked it, but what you say now about "a fleedng episode" gives it a much profounder meaning.'

  'And how the organic world hurried,' Kuckuck went on, 'to develop its orders and genera, exactly as though it knew the glorious lamp would not shine forever. That applies especially to the earliest phases. In the Cambrian — that's what we call the lowest level, the deepest formation of the Paleozoic period — plant life is, to be sure, meagre: seaweed, algae, and nothing more. Life emerged from salt water, from the warm primeval sea, you must understand. But all of a sudden the animal kingdom is represented not just by the most primitive animals, but by coelenterates, worms, echinoderms, arthropods — that is, by all the phyla except the vertebrates. It seems that less than fifty of the five hundred and fifty millions of years had passed before the first of the vertebrates came out of the water on to land — some of which had emerged by then. And after that, evolution, the development of genera, went on at such a pace that in barely two hundred and fifty million years the whole Noah's Ark, including the reptiles, was present, only the birds and mammals were still missing. And all this thanks to an idea that Nature seized upon in the earliest times and which she has never tired of exploiting up to and including man -'

  'Please tell me what that is.'

  'Oh, the idea is simple enough, just the cohabitation of cells, just the inspiration not to leave that slimy, glassy bit of primeval life, that elemental organism, by itself, but to construct, at first out of a few and then out of hundreds of millions, living designs of a higher order, multicellular creatures, great individuals — in short to create flesh and blood. What we call "flesh" and what religion deprecates as weak and sinful, as "subject to sin", is nothing but such an assemblage of organically specialized tiny individuals, a multicellular fabric. Nature pursued this precious basic idea of hers with true zeal — sometimes with too much zeal: once or twice she indulged in exaggerations of which she later repented. She was actually busy with the mammals when she permitted an exuberance like the blue whale to occur — as big as twenty elephants, a monster not to be sustained or nourished on earth. She sent it into the deep, where that enormous mass of blubber, with vestigial hind legs, fins, and oily eyes, still carries on a rather harried existence, nursing its young in an uncomfortable position, dodging the whalers, and devouring tiny shell-fish. But much earlier than that, at the beginning of earth's middle ages in the Triassic period, long before a bird flew or a tree spread its leaves, we find true horrors, the dinosaurs, the giant reptiles — fellows that occupied more room than is seemly here below. O
ne of those individuals was as high as a room and as long as a railway train, it weighed forty thousand pounds. Its neck was like a palm tree, and its head, compared to its bulk, was ridiculously small. These creatures of exaggerated bodily size must have been dumb as a post. They were, however, good-natured — as often happens with those who are awkward and helpless.'

  'So they were not especially sinful, despite all that flesh?'

  'Probably not, out of stupidity. What more shall I tell you about the dinosaurs? Perhaps this: they had a tendency to walk upright.'

  And as Kuckuck turned his starry eyes on me, I was overcome with something like embarrassment.

  'Well,' I said with pretended nonchalance, 'these fellows, for all their upright gait, cannot have been much like Hermes.'

  'What makes you think of Hermes?'

  'Excuse me, in the course of my education at the castle a good deal of attention was paid to mythology. It was my tutor's personal speciality.'

  'Oh, Hermes,' he replied. 'An elegant deity. I won't take coffee,' he said to the waiter. 'Bring me another bottle of Vichy. An elegant deity,' he repeated. 'And the golden mean of human stature, neither too large nor too small. I knew an old master builder who used to say that anyone who wanted to build must first recognize the perfection of the human figure, for in it are contained the profoundest secrets of proportion. Those who find a mystic significance in proportions maintain that man — and so the god in human form as well — occupies the exact middle point in respect of size between the very largest objects in the universe and the very smallest. They say that the largest material body, a red giant star, is exactly as much larger than a man as the tiniest element in an atom, something that would have to be magnified a hundred billion times to become visible, is smaller than he.'

  'That shows you how little it helps to walk upright if you don't maintain moderation in size.'

  'Highly ingenious, your Hermes must have been,' my companion went on, 'along with his perfect proportions, according to report. The fabric of cells in his brain, if one may speak of such a thing in connexion with a god, must have assumed especially artful forms. But the point is this: if one pictures him as made of flesh and blood and not of marble or plaster or ambrosia, then a lot of natural history survives in him. It is remarkable how primitive, in contrast to the brain, human arms and legs still are. They retain all the bones you find in the most primitive land animals.'

  'That is thrilling, professor. It's not the first thrilling piece of information you have given me, but it is among the most thrilling. The bones in human arms and legs are like those in the most primitive land animals! I am not shocked at that; I am thrilled. I won't speak of Hermes' famous legs. But think of a shapely feminine arm, an arm that embraces us if we are lucky, what the deuce are we to make of that?'

  'It seems to me, dear marquis, that you make a kind of cult of the extremities. That is perfectly understandable as the expression of a highly evolved creature's rejection of the footless structure of the worm. But as far as the shapely feminine arm is concerned, one should never forget that the limb is simply the hooked wing of the primordial bird and the pectoral fin of the fish.'

  'Good, good, I'll remember that in future. I think I can assure you that I'll remember it without bitterness or disenchantment but rather with affection. But the human being comes from the ape, or at least that's what one always hears?'

  'Dear marquis, let us rather say he comes from Nature and has his roots there. We should not be too much blinded by his anatomical similarity to the higher apes; too much fuss has been made about that. The pig with its little blue eyes, its eyelashes, and its skin, has more human 'qualities than any chimpanzee — think how often naked human beings remind us of swine. Our brain, however, in point of structural development, is closest to that of the rat. Echoes of animal physiognomy are to be found among people wherever you look. You see the fish and the fox, the dog, the seal, the hawk, and the sheep. On the other hand, the whole animal world, once we have begun to take notice, strikes us as humanity disguised and bewitched. .. . Oh, indeed, men and animals are closely related! However, if we want to talk about descent, then we must say that men are descended from animals in just about the same way that the organic is descended from the inorganic. Something was added.'

  'Added? What, if I may ask?'

  'The same sort of thing that was added when Being arose out of Nothingness. Have you ever heard of spontaneous generation?'

  'I'm extremely eager to.'

  He glanced about briefly and then began in a confidential tone — obviously for no other reason than because I was the Marquis de Venosta:

  'There have been not one but three spontaneous generations: the emergence of Being out of Nothingness, the awakening of Life out of Being, and the birth of Man.'

  Kuckuck took a sip of Vichy after this declaration. He held his glass in both hands, since we were careening around a curve. The dining-car was almost empty, and most of the waiters were idle. Having neglected my meal, I now drank cup after cup of coffee, but I do not ascribe to that the ever-increasing excitement that took possession of me. Bending forward, I sat listening to my strange travelling-companion, who spoke to me of Being, of Life, of Man — and of the Nothingness from which all this had been generated and into which it would all return. There was no question, he said, that Life on earth was not only an ephemeral episode, but Being itself was also — an interlude between Nothingness and Nothingness. Being had not always existed and would not always exist. It had had a beginning and would have an end, and with it space and time; for they existed only through Being and through it were bound to each other. Space, he said, was nothing but the order of material things and their relationship to one another. Without things to occupy it, there would be no space and no time either, for time was only the ordering of events made possible by the presence of objects; it was the product of motion, of cause and effect, whose sequence gave time its direction and without which there would be no time. Absence of time and space, however, was the definition of Nothingness. This was extensionless in every sense, a changeless eternity, which had only been temporarily interrupted by spatiotemporal Being. A greater duration, by eons, had been vouchsafed to Being than to Life; but some time of a certainty it would end, and with equal certainty the end implied a beginning. When had time, when had events, begun? When had the first quiver of Being emerged from Nothingness in obedience to the words 'Let it be', words that contained within themselves ineluctably those other words 'Let it pass'? Perhaps the 'when' of Being had not been so very long ago and the 'when' of passing was not so very far ahead — possibly only a few billion years this way and that. ... Meanwhile, Being celebrated its tumultuous festival in the measureless spaces that were its handiwork and in which it created distances congealed in icy emptiness. And he spoke of the gigantic setting of this festival, the universe, this mortal child of eternal Nothingness, filled with countless material bodies, meteors, moons, comets, nebulae, unnumbered millions of stars that swayed one another, were ordered by the effect of their gravitational fields into groups, clouds, galaxies, and super-systems of galaxies, each with enormous numbers of flaming suns, wheeling planets, masses of attenuated gas, and cold rubbish heaps of ice, stone, and cosmic dust—

  I listened in excitement, knowing well that to receive this information was a mark of distinction, a privilege I owed to one fact: that I was the Marquis de Venosta and that the Contessa Centurione in Rome was my aunt.

  Our Milky Way, I learned, was one among billions; almost at its edge, almost like a wallflower, thirty thousand light years from its centre, was our local solar system with its gigantic but relatively insignificant ball of fire called 'the' sun, although it only deserved the indefinite article, and its loyal retainers within its gravitational field, among them the earth, whose joy and labour it was to spin on its axis at the rate of a thousand miles an hour and to circle about the sun at the rate of twenty miles a second, thereby creating its days and years — its, be it observe
d, for there were other quite different ones. The planet Mercury, for example, nearest to the sun, completed its revolution in eighty-eight of our days and in the same period rotated once on its axis, so that for it year and day were the same. There you could see what time amounted to — it had no more general validity than weight. Take, for example, the white companion of Sirius, where matter was in a state of such density that a cubic inch of it would weigh a ton here. Material objects on earth, our mountains or our bodies, were, by comparison, the lightest, fluffiest foam.

  While the earth wheeled around its sun, so I was privileged to hear, the earth and its moon wheeled around each other, and at the same time our whole local solar system moved, and at no mean pace, within the framework of a vaster but still very local star group. This gravitating system in turn wheeled with almost vulgar velocity within the Milky Way; the latter, moreover, our Milky Way, was travelling with unimaginable rapidity in respect to its far-away sisters, and they, the most distant existing complexes, were in addition to all their other velocities, flying away from one another, at a rate that would make an exploding shell seem motionless — flying away in all directions into Nothingness, thereby in their headlong career projecting into it space and time.

  This interdependent whirling and circling, this convolution of gases into heavenly bodies, this burning, flaming, freezing, exploding, pulverizing, this plunging and speeding, bred out of Nothingness and awaking Nothingness — which would perhaps have preferred to remain asleep and was waiting to fall asleep again — all this was Being, known also as Nature, and everywhere in everything it was one. I was not to doubt that all Being, Nature itself, constituted a unitary system from the simplest inorganic element to Life at its liveliest, to the woman with the shapely arm and to the figure of Hermes. Our human brain, our flesh and bones, these were mosaics made up of the same elementary particles as stars and star dust and the dark clouds hanging in the frigid wastes of interstellar space. Life, which had been called forth from Being just as Being had been from Nothingness — Life, this fine flower of Being — consisted of the same raw material as inanimate Nature. It had nothing new to show that belonged to it alone. One could not even say it was unambiguously distinguishable from simple Being. The boundary line between it and the inanimate world was indistinct. Plant cells aided by sunlight possessed the power of transforming the raw material of the mineral kingdom so that it came to life in them. Thus spontaneous generative power of the green leaf provided an example of the emergence of the organic from the inorganic. Nor was the opposite process lacking, as in the formation of stones from silicic acid of animal origin. Future cliffs were composed in the depths of the sea out of the skeletons of tiny creatures. In the crystallization of liquids with the illusory appearance of life, Nature was quite evidently playfully crossing the line from one domain into the other. Always when Nature produced the deceptive appearance of the organic in the inorganic — in sulphur flowers, for instance, or ice ferns — she was trying to teach us that she was one.