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Thomas Mann's Conception of the Creative Writer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
A study of Mann's conception of the man of letters and of the literary artist is necessarily an enquiry into his entire philosophy of life, for to Mann “art is the quintessence of humanity and the artist the most human of men.” Because of Mann's perennial and conscious preoccupation with intellectual and artistic creativity, his views on the writer reflect most of the shifts and oscillations in his career. The present essay does not encompass all of these changes in accentuation and tonality.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 J. G. Brennan, Thomas Mann's World (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942), p. x. Even where Mann's concern with this topic is not apparent, as, e.g., in the Joseph novels, he himself insists that he traced the development of the “artistic ego.” Cf. Mann's essay, “The Joseph Novels,” in Ch. Neider, ed. The Stature of Thomas Mann (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 228.
2 In quoting from Mann, I made ample use of Mrs. Lowe-Porter's translations. Wherever I disagreed with her renderings, I took the liberty to revise them. Note the following abbreviations of Thomas Mann's works: Bern for Bemühungen, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. x (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1925); Bet for Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1922); Ess for Essays of Three Decades, tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947); For for Die Forderung des Tages (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1930); Lei for Leiden und Grösse der Meister (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1936); Ord for Order of the Day (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1942); Red for Rede und Antwort, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. ix (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1925).
3 Since Mann's Spirit and Nature are metaphysical entities, i.e., more than mere concepts though less than gods, I have capitalized these terms.
4 A residue of Mann's characteristic ambivalence became manifest even in the author's campaign against National Socialism. Cf. the essay in which he treats Hitler as another hostile brother, and thus as another alter ego (“A Brother,” Ord, 153-161).
5 “Goethe and Tolstoi,” 1922 (Bem, 9-140; Ess, 93-175).
6 “The Joseph Novels,” p. 228.
7 Cf. E. Zilsel, Die Geniereligion (Wien: Braumüller, 1918).
8 Mann, “Dostoevski—in Moderation,” in The Short Novels of Dostoevski (New York: Dial, 1945), pp. vii f.
9 Loc. cit. Disease, Mann holds, is not of value to everyone. It all depends on who falls sick, whether a Dostoevski, a Nietzsche, or “ein Durchschnittsdummkopf” (Neue Studien, Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1948, p. 90).
10 Aschenbach's love of Tadzio in Der Tod in Venedig is a symbol for the sentiment Mann ascribes to the spiritual genius in his relation to the naive man—though it must be a more sublimated passion than Aschenbach's if it is to receive the explicit approval of the author.
11 For the following, cf. the two Wagner essays in Ess, 307-371; also Lei, 90 f.; Bet, 39 f.; Red, 360-363; For, 273-277, 396-399.
12 Though it has few characteristic details, this woodcut might be taken for an idealized self-portrait of the author. In his physiognomy and in his character, Adrian Leverkühn appears as a direct descendant of this same “metaphysical craftsman” (Bet, 88). Leverkühn is a contemporary projection of the “mittelalterlich-nürnbergisch Gesicht” (Bet, 89).
13 Cf. “Schwere Stunde” (190S) in Königliche Hoheit und Novellen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1928), pp. 721-728.
14 Neue Studien (1948), pp. 82 f.
15 The expression is Hermann Hesse's. Cf. “Tractat vom Steppenwolf,” p. 21, in Der Steppenwolf (Zürich: Manesse, n. d.).
16 George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy, first published in 1916 (New York: Scribner, 1940).
17 Cf., e.g., Herr und Hund, Gesang vom Kindchen, Zwei Idylle (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1919), pp. 141-143.
18 For another similar statement quoted by Mann, cf. Red, 238.
19 Mann, Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events (Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress, 1947), p. 36.
20 “This same process,” Mann continues, “this dissolution of the discipline of life, this return to the orgiastic freedom of individualism I once more portrayed in Death in Venice, in the guise of pederasty” (For, 174). Note how the same connections between death, isolation, individualism, and the homoerotic recur in Faustus (cf. the relationship between Adrian and Schwerdtfeger).
21 T. Mann, Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (Amsterdam: Querido, 1937), now continued in Die Begegnung (Olten: Oltner Bücherfreunde, 1953).
22 For the two aspects of death, cf., e.g., the scene on Jaacob's deathbed and the subsequent funeral in Joseph, der Ernährer (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1943), pp. 602-639.
23 Note the parallel to the egotism of the naive man. Now, in the later twenties, Mann was evidently more severe than he had been in the essay on Goethe and Tolstoi written in 1922.
24 Quoted by F. Strich, Der Dichter und die Zeit (Bern: A. Francke, 1947), p. 380. Mann's apologetic introduction to the Betrachtungen also indicated the role of the poet as a representative sufferer, by way of a quotation from Claudel's Violane, “Why did my body have to labor in the place of Christendom?” (Bet, xv).
25 The paradox of a hostile objectivity is implicit in the basic assumption of an antagonism between Spirit and Nature. For, according to this premise, the so-called neutrality of dispassionate intellectual observation is necessarily charged with the ressentiments of the Spirit.
26 “The Joseph Novels,” p. 229.
27 Cf. also, loc. cit.
28 Santayana, p. 112. However, Santayana's criticism was not directed primarily at Lessing himself but rather at his dictum. “Lessing had said that he preferred the pursuit of truth to the truth itself; but if we take this seriously (as possibly it was not meant) the pursuit of truth at once changes its character” (p. 111).
29 The naturelbische Indifferenz of the naive type, his spirit of doubt and contradiction, and his nihilism are closely related to the intellectual nihilism which endangers the Lessingian writer. In turn, the writer's ambivalent egocentricity is connected with both doubt (i.e., the danger of total nihilistic negation) and artistic playfulness. Concerning the latter, it is well to realize that Mann himself has always played with ideas both in his essays and in his fiction, and that, ultimately, it has always been more important to him to convey vital experiences than to make valid statements.
30 Cf. P. Heller, “Some Functions of the Leitmotiv in Thomas Mann's Joseph Tetralogy,” GR, xxii (1947), 126-141.
31 It seems that Mann himself has gone back to the world of his youth. Faustus is the first step on this way back to German settings, and, beyond the Buddenbrooks, to the German past, to a world of guilt, sacred disease, and holy sins. Die Betrogene (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1953), and the work on the old fragment of Felix Krull also point to the author's earlier spheres of interest.
32 For Mann's equation between the infantile attitude—as a regressive identification with a father-image—and the clinging to conservative, ancestral, or mythical patterns, cf. F. J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1945), p. 220. It should be emphasized that Mann frequently uses the term infantil in a positive or neutral sense without pathological or pejorative implications.
33 Cf. “The Joseph Novels,” and Mann's dictum, “Wo ich bin, ist die deutsche Kultur,” quoted by Heinrich Mann in “Mein Bruder,” Die Neue Rundschau, Sonderausgabe zu Thomas Manns 70. Geburtstag, June 1945 (Stockholm: Bermann Fischer), p. 3. Cf. also Mann's “novel of a novel,” Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (Amsterdam: Bermann-Fischer, 1949).