THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, September 21, 1997
by Steven Marcus
In common with the majority of the classic modernist writers of prose -- with Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka, and Hemingway and Faulkner, for example -- Thomas Mann was a master of the shorter forms of fiction. That fact is magisterially demonstrated throughout his great collection in English, “Stories of Three Decades” (1936). It was, as Mann himself told us, the idea of Alfred Knopf, his American publisher, “to present to the English-reading public a single volume containing all the short stories which I have written.” But that volume was not the “autobiography . . . in the guise of fable” that Mann said he took “peculiar pleasure” in contemplating. Six stories from the first 15 years of Mann’s creative career were omitted; they are now available in English, and it isn’t clear, at least to me, why some of them were not included in the 1936 collection. A number of them are certainly as meritorious as other youthful narratives by Mann. All are of some interest, and several are of considerably more than that. The earliest is from 1893, when Mann was 18, and the latest is from 1908. Only two of them were reprinted in Mann’s lifetime, in his first collection, “Little Herr Friedemann” (1898).
What the pieces in “Six Early Stories” reveal, among other things, is that from the very outset Mann began to develop the ironic modes, perspectives and tones that would characterize all his later fiction. This irony played upon virtually everything in Mann’s narratives. It left no character untouched, no narrator who was not undermined, no paragraph of authorial intervention that was without hollow or questionable reverberations. Within its orbit, the themes of the end of the century -- decadence, the esthetic, the afflicted sensibility and the new realism, the intolerable vulgarity and materialism of the contemporary social world, and the distressed extremities of individual response that it called forth -- took on new angles and contours and revealed themselves to be the shapes of modernism. Each of these six stories, we can see in retrospect, has touches of genius, or something very like genius that appears to render them equally memorable.
“Death,” for example, was first published in 1897. It was submitted for a magazine competition that, tongue in cheek, called for a story “in which sexual love plays no role.” (This in itself suggests something about the advanced literary scene at the end of the last century.) Although Mann’s contribution did not win first prize, it was nonetheless printed. It is a virtually negligible effort, except for a single detail or moment. Told in the form of a diary, it is about an unnamed nobleman, perched on the shore of a northern sea, waiting throughout a rainy autumn for death to arrive. He is near his 40th birthday, and he tells us that since the age of 19 or 20 he “knew that at 40 I would have to die.” He imagines death as a personage, someone “grand and beautiful, and of a wild majesty!” But the diarist is in for a surprise when death does make his appearance:
“It is ridiculous, but he behaved like a dentist!
“‘I think it best if we get down to it right away,’ he said.”
The snooty narrator is mortally offended, fends death off and sends him packing. That death should be “so sober, so boring, so bourgeois” is an outrage and an insult. Like one of modern literature’s great noblemen, Henry James, the protagonist expects death to be “the distinguished thing.” But he sorely overestimates himself, and, ironically, like Conrad’s Marlow at almost the same time, he represents the proximity of death merely as something “gray” and contemptible -- a dentist, in the protagonist’s self-absorbed perspective the essence of bourgeois mediocrity.
Other stories are of larger interest. All of them take up matters that were of pressing current concern in the literary culture of the decades before World War I. That these thematic preoccupations were of urgent personal bearing for Mann himself only made his eventual accession to the role of representative writer and figure in culture more appropriate. All of the stories involve sexuality in its problematical aspects -- both straight and otherwise, in particular slightly screened, displaced and symbolic homosexuality. They are concerned as well with the shifting and anxiety-provoking position of women -- with the “New Woman” of the period, in both her recent emancipation and her continuing dependency and secondary, inferior status; with her sometimes uncertain exertions toward personal fulfillment and her equally recurrent cruelty, perversity and castrating, consuming and murderous revenge on men for the injuries that they have inflicted upon her. Such depictions are regularly accompanied by an overt interest in the morally corrupt and the morbid, in decay, disease, degeneration and illness, both physical and spiritual (or psychological), and by considerations of weakness, irrationality and crime. And these are in turn connected with Mann’s lifelong obsessive absorption in exploring the nature and temperament of the artist. For the artist -- in the main, himself -- was the figure in which all these matters, along with others, came into intense, confluent focus.
The artist both embodied the conflicted unity of bourgeois society and was the vanishing point of its contradictions. Ruthlessly critical of the middle-class world, alienated and deviant from it, rebel, renegade and outlaw, the artist was at the same time representative and upholder of some of its notable historical achievements: its elaborated individuality, its belief in work and the dedication of self to a vocation, its sense of the virtues of solidity and integrity, of value given in fair exchange. The young Mann acutely intuited that this bourgeois self was undergoing historic alterations. Its integrity was splintering and coming apart; it had become unstable and was losing its firm center; it now came upon itself as existing in a hall of mirrors, with its identity distributed among an array of split-off and ill-assorted fragments. Mann dealt with such unnerving circumstances in part by beginning to develop a complex narrational voice or series of voices and by experimenting with multiple points of view within intricately layered narrative strata.
Three of these stories particularly exemplify the emerging modernist sensibility. “Avenged: Study for a Novella” (1899) begins with the portrayal of two contemporary types, the young, experimental, bohemian, bourgeois artist and his counterpart in the emancipated single woman. It then goes on to dramatize some of the intellectual pleasures and moral predicaments and misadventures of their relationship. But as it does so, the story also clearly begins to represent the onset of homosexual desire and fantasy, which were there from the beginning and which are in turn further provoked by the course that the story takes. And it succeeds as well in representing something of a woman’s entanglement in male homosexual cravings.
The writer-narrator of “Avenged” recalls an incident that occurred when he was 20. His yearnings were then “boundless; without scruple I devoted myself to satisfying them.” It is in the pursuit of a Dorian Gray/Oscar Wilde-like life of “inquisitive depravity” that he forms what he calls “a completely spiritual” intimacy with a New Woman. She supports herself as a journalist of the arts. Cultivated and intelligent, she is also unequivocally and resolutely ugly -- she has “the physical charm . . . of a broom.” Their uninhibited friendship prospers until one evening the narrator drinks too much, feels himself pushed by some “vile impulse” to confide in his companion that what he finds charming about their relationship is “the close intimacy of our minds . . . in contrast to the distinct aversion which I have for you physically.” Unruffled by this spiteful hostility, his friend calmly responds by telling him in due course that a year ago she had a serious and extremely satisfying sexual affair with a young and very handsome man. The narrator is abruptly overcome with lust: he sees his friend being undressed and embraced by a man. Shameless and impudent in the violence of his craving, he propositions her. “Whatever gave you that idea?” she says, and, when he persists in his baseness, refuses him again in no uncertain terms and prepares to leave:
“‘So I’ve been rejected?’ I said, laughing. ‘Well, I hope this won’t affect our friendship.’
“‘Why shouldn’t it?’ she answered, giving me a comradely handshake, a rather mocking smile playing around her unlovely lips. Then she left.
“I stood in the middle of the room with a vacant look on my face while I let this dearly cherished adventure run once more through my mind. Finally I clapped my hand to my brow and went to bed.”
Along similar lines, “Fallen” (1894), the longest story in this volume, begins as a topical, elaborately framed narrative about an affair between a young man and a young actress, and seems on one side to be about conventional respectable morality and the double standard. But it, too, soon mutates into something less predictable and controllable and reveals beneath those preoccupations conflicts and strivings about male sexual rivalry, female resentment and anger and the worlds of intellect and art. Equally conflagratory material is started and creatively worked over in the third of the better stories, “The Will to Happiness” (1896).
These early stories, ably translated by Peter Constantine and edited by Burton Pike, are well worth reading. They are also a welcome addition to the body of Mann’s work in English. But they are something more. They remind us of what has been lost in the dissolution and passing of modernism. The boldness, daring and risk-taking in both formal, technical matters and in explicit, thematic explorations remain as admirable today as they were a century ago. Perhaps they are even more admirable, since such qualities appear even less easy to come by nowadays than they were then. And the intense seriousness of modernist writings, the seriousness along with the pervasive irony, affiliates them with the high seriousness of 19th-century literary culture, which they were busy repudiating but to which they were at the same time profoundly beholden.
Steven Marcus is the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.
