City of Nets (55 page)

 

Thomas Mann's decision to build himself a house on San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades was not inspired solely by his love of the southern California climate. According to Janet Flanner, who wrote a
New Yorker
profile of Mann in 1941 under the title of “Goethe in Hollywood,” the novelist had other reasons for settling on the Pacific coast. He had begun toying with “the idea of writing a Hollywood novel as a parallel to ‘The Magic Mountain' and its special theme of sickness.” Miss Flanner offered no details of the prospective plot or characters but reported that Mann “thinks there is a psychological condition peculiar to Hollywood which makes of it an island not unlike his island of Davos, on its Swiss mountaintop.”

Since Mann knew and cared little about movies, and since his command of English was limited, it was perhaps all for the best that he abandoned this idea and concentrated on finishing his biblical tetralogy,
Joseph and His Brothers
(1933–44). This work did surprisingly well, and indeed made Mann rich. The final volume,
Joseph the Provider,
was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice in 1944 and sold about two hundred thousand copies. There was even some talk that it might fulfill another of Mann's California ambitions, a Hollywood sale. After all, if Werfel's
Bernadette
could become a successful movie, why not the famous novels of Thomas Mann?

Joseph
was actually bought some years later by Louis B. Mayer, who planned it as his first independent production after his departure from M-G-M. Mayer assigned the project to a veteran M-G-M screenwriter, John Lee Mahin, and then sent Mahin's script to David O. Selznick to see if Jennifer Jones might play the role of Potiphar's wife. Selznick agreed, provided that the character could be made less “consistently villainous.” He thought that Mahin's script needed “a great deal of work,” but that the possibilities in the story of Joseph were grand. “You have working for you that greatest of all showmanship combinations—sex and religion,” Selznick declared. “You have father love, mother love, brother love; you have lust and sentiment; you have a faithful husband and you have an unfaithful wife; you have complete blueprints for every conceivable production value, including spectacle, exterior scenes of great beauty, interiors of great pomp and circumstance, magnificent costumes, daring and revealing costumes, boudoir scenes, royalty and panoply, family life—indeed, the whole catalog of elements of mass appeal.” Despite all this, the film was never produced.

While Thomas Mann was getting rich, his older brother, Heinrich, was sinking into penury. His hundred-dollar weekly dole as a useless screenwriter at Warner Bros. had stopped at the end of one year, and after that he survived only on Thomas's chilly donations. He remained nonetheless proud. When Alfred Knopf bought his memoirs but wanted to make some editorial changes, he refused to allow it. “He thought he was writer enough to decide
for himself
what
HE
ought to write,” his wife, Nelly, wrote to a friend.

Nelly herself, the ex-barmaid whom Mann had married and brought away with him during the fall of France, was getting increasingly alcoholic and increasingly crazy. Several times, she took overdoses of sleeping pills. “She drank secretly,” according to Salka Viertel, “slipping out into the bathroom or kitchen, coyly refusing the drinks offered at parties; then insisted on driving Heinrich home, to which he heroically consented.” Herbert Marcuse's brother, Ludwig, reported that he was once invited to dinner at Mann's house and was greeted by Nelly standing naked in the doorway. At dinner, she kept saying, “Oh, I've got such an old husband,” until Mann got up and left the table, as did the rest of the embarrassed guests. Yet while Mann labored away on books that nobody published, Nelly had to go out and get a job as a nurse in a hospital. “It overtaxes her and shames me,” said Mann, who was by now unemployable at seventy-three. “What can I do?”

Nelly got arrested for drunken driving. She didn't know what to do either. For the fifth time, she swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. “She had broken a probation for drunken driving,” Salka Viertel observed, “and in her panic about appearing in court, she put an end to her constant tussle with the police, her struggle with a language she could never learn, her fear of aging, and her losing battle with liquor.” Thomas Mann, who had his own order of priorities, recorded Nelly's end somewhat differently. “Adrian's dialogue with the long-awaited visitor . . . was still in its early stages when a telephone call from my brother Heinrich informed us of the death of her who had shared his life for so many years.” Nelly's suicide, in other words, was only a brief interruption in the labor that now obsessed Mann, the writing of
Doctor Faustus.

The idea had haunted him for nearly half a century, and when he looked back through his journals, as he repeatedly did, he found there “the three-line outline of the Dr. Faust of 1901.” As a young man, the novelist had not felt any need to write down the details of what he had in mind, and when the old man tried to evoke his faded vision, he recalled not
Faust
so much as “the Munich days, the never-realized plans for
The Lovers
and
Maya
. . . . Shame and strong sentimentality at remembrance of these youthful sorrows.” But that was mere nostalgia. To any German intellectual,
Faust
embodied much of the national legend, and to attempt a variation on Goethe's masterpiece must have seemed as daunting as to attempt a tenth symphony. “Do I still have strength for new conceptions?” Mann worried in his journal. It was March of 1943. Mann went to downtown Los Angeles to hear Horowitz play the Brahms B-flat Concerto. “Gloomy weather: rainy, cold. With a headache, I drew up outlines and notes.”

Mann's eponymous Faust was to be a composer, of course, and to go mad, of course. Mann read Nietzsche, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Paul Bekker's
Musikgeschichte,
and the letters of Luther, and he listened to radio news reports on the war. “Massive and systematic bombings of Hitler's continent,” he noted. “Advances of the Russians in the Crimea.” He didn't want to write about Faust; he wanted to write something more cheerful, to complete the long-unfinished
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.
“And yet the thorn was in my flesh,” Mann later recorded, “the thorn of curiosity about the new and dangerous task.” What made it dangerous, perhaps, was that it was beyond his capabilities, for what he planned to write, in the middle of a war between his native country and his land of exile, was “nothing less than the novel of my era, disguised as the story of an artist's life, a terribly imperiled and sinful artist.”

One problem in Mann's effort to make his hero a composer was that his own knowledge of music was limited. He had loved and listened to it all his life, but when he tried to write about it, he gasped and gushed (for example, in
Richard Wagner and the Ring:
“What would man be, above all what would an artist be, without admiration, enthusiasm, absorption, devotion to something not himself . . . ?”). To create a composer, Mann needed to learn more about what composers actually did, how they worked, how they thought, and that need kept leading him toward one of his neighbors. “Gathering at the Werfels with the Schönbergs,” he recorded in his journal. “Pumped S. a great deal on music and the life of a composer. To my deep pleasure, he himself insists we must all get together more often.”

Schoenberg was now on the brink of a crisis. He was about to become seventy, and the rules of the California university system required that he retire from his post as a teacher at UCLA. The prospect drove him to desperation. “My career is not one which is ended by age . . .” he wrote in protest to the office of the university controller in Berkeley. “I do not feel I am an old man, because I am still improving my teaching methods.” The university was unmoved. At Schoenberg's seventieth birthday, as his eyesight failed and he learned that he had diabetes, he was inexorably forced into retirement. And since he had only been on the faculty for eight years, his pension was $29.60 per month. He had to live on what he could earn from a dozen or so private pupils. He even applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Guggenheim authorities, presumably interested mainly in bright young talents, rejected him. “Dining with the Schönbergs in Brentwood,” Mann wrote in his journal. “Excellent Viennese coffee. Talking with Sch. at length about music. . . .” And again: “Soirée at the Werfels' with Stravinsky; talked about Schönberg. . . .” Schoenberg sent Mann his textbook on harmony,
Harmonielehre,
which Mann pored over and judged to be “the strangest mingling of piety toward tradition and revolution.”

Mann's real teacher, though, was Theodor Adorno, who was apparently trying to promote his own interests and got swallowed up in the far more powerful interests of Thomas Mann. Born Theodor Wiesengrund, Adorno preferred to use the name of his mother, a singer of Corsican origin, and from boyhood he felt a passionate love of music. He studied composition in Vienna with Alban Berg, and piano with Edward Steuermann (Salka Viertel's brother), but there was something lacking in his artistic gifts, something that turned him from music to the theory of music. At twenty-eight, he became a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and a leading figure in that sociological movement known as the Frankfurt School. Driven westward by the Nazis, he ended in Los Angeles, a brilliantly cantankerous thinker in search of an audience. He met Mann, who was already enmeshed in the creation of
Faustus,
and showed him the manuscript of a study much influenced by Schoenberg, “Zur Philosophie der modernen Musik.” “The whole thing had the strangest affinity to the idea of my book . . .” Mann wrote. “This was my man.”

Like his diabolic hero, Adrian Leverkühn, Mann drained his teacher of knowledge. Adorno came repeatedly to Mann's house and lectured, performed, answered Mann's groping questions. Mann persuaded Adorno to teach him all the intricacies of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method, and even quoted substantially, without credit, from Adorno's own writings on Schoenberg. Adorno loved to be used, though, to be studied, quoted, exploited. Once, when the two of them were discussing parallels between Goethe and Beethoven, Adorno went to the piano and played through Beethoven's last piano sonata, Opus 111. Mann made characteristic use of the piece, devoting several pages of his novel to his fervid imaginings about its inner significance.
*

Day in, day out, from nine in the morning until noon, Mann kept writing. In the background, Leverkühn's Germany slid to its ruin, and every once in a while Mann noted some new landmark in his journals. In June of 1944, on Mann's sixty-ninth birthday, a friend telephoned him the news of D-day, and he regarded it as “one of the harmonies of my life . . . that the longed-for . . . event was taking place on this day, my day.” Bombers raided Berlin; Paris was liberated; Mann kept writing
Doctor Faustus.
“Surviving means victory,” he observed when he heard of Hitler's suicide in the spring of 1945. “By continuing to live I had fought and cast mockery and a curse into the faces of those blasphemers of humanity.”

The survivor's health was failing, however. He suffered fevers as high as 102 every afternoon. He tried the new wonder drug, penicillin, but nothing worked. His wife put him to bed. “I went over much of Nietzsche again,” he wrote, “especially his
Use and Disadvantage of History.
” An X-ray showed a shadow on his lung. He was startled that the disease that had haunted
The Magic Mountain
should strike at him. He was taken to Chicago for more expert diagnosis, and the doctor there decided that it was cancer. Mann seems not to have known this verdict, not to have wanted to know, but he stoically underwent surgery, and survived, and went back to work on
Doctor Faustus.
A bit later, when another illness prevented him from sleeping at night, he wrote in his diary: “Even without sleep I will work.”

Schoenberg was even more harshly stricken that same year of 1946. He had a heart attack of such severity that his heart stopped. He was theoretically dead, but a doctor brought him back to life with an injection directly into the heart. “I have risen from real death and now feel very well,” he wrote to a friend. He decided to translate his experience into music, a trio for strings, and since he could no longer see well enough to compose on ordinary music paper, he had some specially printed, with the lines of the staves far apart.

At dinner at the Manns', Schoenberg told the novelist about his new trio and “the experiences . . . secretly woven into the composition.” It would be difficult for any uninstructed listener to decipher these secret weavings, but Schoenberg described them to Mann in detail. “He had, he said, represented his illness and medical treatment in the music, including even the male nurses and all the other oddities of American hospitals. The work was extremely difficult to play [but] very rewarding because of its extraordinary tonal effects. I worked the association of ‘impossible but rewarding' into the chapter on Leverkühn's chamber music.”

On January 29, 1947, Mann finally announced to his wife that
Doctor Faustus
was finished. No sooner said than he was off on a lecture tour to deliver his thoughts on Nietzsche. The tour took him to Washington and New York and London, but at the prospect of returning to Germany again, he blanched. It is a little difficult now to recall the ferocity with which Goebbels had condemned Mann's works to the bonfire, or the pain that such a condemnation inflicted on so genteel and straitlaced a writer as Mann. His American riches and success had scarcely assuaged his sense of rejection and exile. And now, from the rubble of conquered Germany, there already arose a babble of voices claiming that Mann had deserted his own people. “It was harder to preserve one's personality here than to broadcast messages to the German people from over there,” wrote one of these reemerging accusers. Mann was understandably indignant about any such claims from any such “personality.” All books published in Germany during the Hitler years were “worse than worthless,” he declared. “A stench of blood and disgrace clings to them.”