Mann to Mann : Thomas Mann’s ‘furious passion for his own ego’ : THOMAS MANN: A Biography, <i> By Ronald Hayman (Scribner: $35; 672 pp.)</i>

W.B. Yeats once said that an artist had to choose between the perfection of the life or the art. Thomas Mann clearly chose the latter. While his unswerving dedication to his art yielded towering novels such as “Buddenbrooks,” “The Magic Mountain” and “Doctor Faustus,” it also extracted a steep price from those around him. Before his marriage, he confided to a friend that he was “more than a little afraid of ‘happiness.’ ” His doubts about this ability to achieve happiness in marriage partly reflect his unconsummated homosexual urges, which plagued him till the end of his life. As close readers of Mann have long suspected, the crush that Gustave Aschenbach develops for the beautiful youth Tadzio in “Death in Venice” was inspired by biographical experience. Mann’s last such infatuation occurred in 1950, when at the age of 74 he fell for a young Bavarian waiter. “World fame means a great deal to me, but it is nothing in comparison with a smile from him.”

The revelations about Mann’s tormented sexuality contained in his unexpurgated diaries, which have been appearing in Germany in recent years, call for a reinterpretation of his fiction. Mann himself was keenly aware of the connection between his literary creativity and his repressed homosexuality. He even considered a work as seemingly asexual as his early “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man,” in which he vented his conservative, nationalist opinions, to be an expression of his sexual “inversion.”

In this uneven biography, Ronald Hayman, who has written lives of figures ranging from Nietzsche to Sartre, often draws on those voluminous diaries. Unfortunately, his presentation of this new biographical material is somewhat misleading. Instead of disclosing from the outset that Mann’s homoerotic relationships were essentially platonic, he appears to suggest, through the use of words such as lovers, that they were consummated. So it comes as a surprise to overhear Mann exclaim, in response to Gore Vidal’s frankly gay novel, “The City and the Pillar:” “How can one sleep with a man?” There is no reason to think that Mann is being disingenuous here. The active pursuit of such desires was inconceivable to the writer who had carefully constructed a facade of upper-class respectability. There was never anything remotely bohemian about Mann, who even while in political exile in Pacific Palisades kept two butlers and a cook.

Yet for all the surface decorum, the Manns were a deeply troubled family, plagued by psychosomatic illnesses, suicide and drug addiction. Outwardly, Katia Mann was a dutiful mother to the six children as well as a loyal assistant to Thomas Mann, known to family members as the magician. However, despite her willingness to serve as handmaiden to her husband’s genius, she candidly admits in her “Unwritten Memoirs” that “in my life I have never been able to do what I wanted to do.” On hearing that her son Klaus had attempted suicide in Santa Monica, she responded: “If he wanted to kill himself, why couldn’t he do it properly?” Her husband’s response was equally chilling: Too busy to visit Klaus in the hospital, he chided him for wanting to hurt his mother. As Hayman points out, this intervention must have given Klaus the impression that his death wouldn’t disturb his father all that much.

In his memoirs Klaus claimed that the “atavistic taboos and incestuous impulses of previous generations are still alive in us.” There is some evidence in the diaries to suggest that Thomas Mann felt physically attracted to his own son, who became an active homosexual in later life. Once, on seeing him naked, he wrote: “Strong impression of his developing magnificent body. Strong emotion.” However, he did not attend the performance of a play by his precocious 18-year-old son and only displayed perfunctory interest in his literary career. Klaus became a prolific, if uneven, writer, who is best remembered today for “Mephisto,” a Faustian novel set in Nazi Germany. When he finally succeeded in killing himself in Cannes at the age of 43, neither parent attended the funeral.

Mann was one of those artists who stage-manage their own fame. In public, he portrayed himself as a staid burgher. This wasn’t entirely an act. Born in Lubeck into the highly stratified society of imperial Germany, he never lost the starched formality characteristic of his class. Even in California, whenever he got together with his brother--and literary rival--Heinrich, they sat on opposite ends of the sofa, conversing, as Mann’s secretary put it, like two college professors who have just been introduced.

The image of Mann that one gets from the diaries is more human than the stiff persona that he liked to foist on the public. Yet it is by no means engaging. While journals usually are self-centered, Mann’s are inordinately so. This astonishing degree of self-infatuation would not surprise Heinrich Mann, who once wrote of his younger brother’s “furious passion for his own ego” and “inability to fathom the real seriousness of anyone else’s life.” Hence the meticulousness with which Mann records favorable comments about himself. He becomes incensed whenever people fail to accord him the princely treatment that he has come to expect. On the ocean-liner taking him to this country, he lashes out at the intellectual mediocrity of his fellow-passengers. Their real crime is that they don’t know who he is.

Mann is justly admired for his courageous stance against the Nazis. During the war years he lambasted the Nazis in articles and in BBC programs recorded in Los Angeles and broadcast to Germany. Yet it took him a long time to shed the prejudices of his mercantile family, which was described as “somewhat conservative and anti-Semitic” by Katia Mann, who came from an assimilated Jewish family in Munich. Astonishingly enough, he retained these attitudes after the Nazis came to power. In the privacy of his dairy he could still respond to unfavorable reviews by ranting about “Jewish cliques” and decide that it was “no misfortune” that the Nazis had made all Jews resign from the judiciary.

It is important to note these lapses on Mann’s part. However, they have to be weighed against the overall moral rightness of his uncompromising stance against Hitler’s Germany and of the readiness of this “nonpolitical man” to devote so much time and effort to the propaganda effort against the Nazis.

In America, he was adulated as the representative of another, decent Germany. However, with the rise of McCarthyism, he began to feel increasingly unwelcome. It must have come as a shock to him to read in the Los Angeles Times of April 5, 1951, that he had been “listed” by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as “affiliated with various peace organizations or Communist causes.” Invitations began to be withdrawn; the Beverly Wilshire hotel canceled a meeting on the grounds that “a Communist like Dr. Mann” was scheduled to speak. Mann concluded that the Cold War was poisoning America and resolved to move to Switzerland.

Ronald Hayman has a good eye for apt detail, but he often spoils the effect through clutter. His psychological analysis is also uneven. Sometimes the emphasis seems exactly right: “What he wanted most was to be loved, not for his literary skill or his talent as an entertainer but for his human qualities. What he wanted least was to be condemned as cold, detached, unloving, unlovable.” It is irksome, however, to be told that, as a young man, Mann drew his knowledge of psychology mostly from Goethe and Nietzsche; this seems unlikely in the case of such a discerning self-analyst.

Hayman also fails to do justice to the immensely subtl relaionship between Mann’s life and art. He makes the interesting suggestion that Hans Castorp’s love for Claudia Chachat in “The Magic Mountain” is like “Thomas’s for all the beautiful men and boys he could never possess.” Yet there is something reductive about the notion that all references to emotional spontaneity in “Death in Venice” are coded allusions to Mann’s own homosexuality. Revealign though the diaires are, they cannot be treated as a key to the fiction.

Literary biography is an art with a distinguished pedigree. So it is reasonable to expect the style of such a book to be commensurate with its subject. That is unfortunately not the case here. While Mann is one of the greatest stylists in German, Hayman’s English--to say nothing of his choppy translations of Mann’s prose--is serviceable, at best. Occasionally, he seems to be stringing index cards together rather than writing. That’s a pity, because the riveting story buried in this book is of great human interest.

In his own life, Mann displayed the ironic detachment and tolerance for self-contradiction that one would expect of the author of “The Magic Mountain.” His extreme self-absorption and steel-willed perseverance damaged the lives of those close to him. Yet in the end one cannot help but admire his ability to rise above the chauvinism of his caste and become a citizen of the world.