This choice continues a nascent exploration of fictional biographies of authors. Most recently, there has been The Fraud by Zadie Smith, about William Harrison Ainsworth. But before that, there was Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, about Arthur Conan Doyle; and The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng, about Somerset Maugham.

This one (published in 2021) is by Irish novelist Colm Toibin, and it's about Thomas Mann (1875-1955).

Another blast from my undergraduate past... In the log of departed books I started to keep after the Great Book Clear-Out, I note that I'd read The Magic Mountain in English (it obviously predated the point where I was reading German fluently), and found it "exhausting"; Death in Venice, on the other hand, which I did read in German, I rated "unforgettable", and I also enjoyed the novella Tristan and the short stories that came bundled into the same volume. I'd also read and appreciated The Subject by Mann's older brother, Heinrich (1871-1950).

Much later -- as in "40 years later" later -- I read Thomas Mann's first book, Buddenbrooks, and was really enthusiastic.


Mann spent little time in Venice, and Death in Venice is just one little piece of a rich oeuvre, but no publisher can resist the allure of the watery city...

The Magician starts with Mann's early days in Luebeck (where his Brazilian mother stands out sharply from the grey, serious, Protestant community around them, and where his family starts the slide that is reflected in Buddenbrooks). His same-sex inclinations are already in evidence, although he is very discreet (except in his diaries, which at a later date almost fall into hostile political hands, a prospect that causes him great distress until he knows they're safe). When he moves to Munich, and proposes to Katia Pringsheim, it looks like a marriage-of-convenience (and is invoked as such at various points by people who are trying to hurt him). But Katia proves to be his salvation. Her family background ensures him wealth, and introduces him to a much more cosmopolitan world. And she stands by him staunchly, refusing to be shocked by (and even occasionally facilitating) the proclivities that they never acknowledge up front.

We learn a little about the personal genesis of key works (particularly Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus), but this is not the primary focus of the book, and a lot of Mann's oeuvre goes unmentioned (unsurprisingly, given its extent). A recurring theme, on the other hand, is the magpie nature of the novelist, who coopts characters and situations, and then takes them in directions that those who inspired them might not necessarily be happy with. Writing is a ruthless business, it seems.


Munich, 2023. This was the city where Thomas Mann spent almost 40 years

Same-sex attraction is a recurring theme. Perhaps a little too recurring, actually. You start to feel, as the pages go by, that no young man's body is safe from Mann's appraising gaze. And the "young" matters here. Current sensibilities mean that we feel nothing but sympathy for repressed sexuality, and hate the conventions that forced many to live out their lives in denial and/or pretense. But decades of stories of unequal power relations and exploitation have made us a little queasy about a sexual predilection for much younger people. We're happy, in this instance, that not much came of anything.

A second key theme is Mann's political development. He starts out the great patriotic German, sympathizing with a fatherland battered by hostile and jealous powers (in contrast with his elder brother, Heinrich, whose stance during WWI is internationalist). Toibin shows us a protagonist who is conservative by nature, and therefore slow to adapt to the changing realities around him. Nevertheless, in the early days of the German Republic, he appeals to a constituency made up of middle-aged, middle-class Germans who see his work as representing freedom. It is on the back of this kind of acclaim that he wins the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.

But he's not paying enough attention to Hitler and his rise. When the Nazis get 6.5 million votes, and one of his lectures meets with organized dissent, he starts to reconsider. Now he knows that while Hitler is in the ascendant, he will never be able to speak in Germany without risking a repetition of this fiasco.

His two oldest children, Erika and Klaus, have no qualms about speaking out, but their father bides his time. In 1933, when the Reichstag fire is followed by mass arrests, the Manns are in Switzerland. It is Katia who realizes they can't now go back to Germany. But still Mann hesitates to take an avowedly critical stance, fearful not only of affecting sales of his books (which are not included in the book-burning binge), but also of bringing down reprisals on the heads of family members who remain in Germany (especially Katia's parents, who are Jewish).

They move to Sanary-sur-Mer in the south of France, where many prominent emigres have gathered. In 1935, both Mann and Albert Einstein are offered honorary doctorates from Harvard. He returns from the US, still without having made a statement. And when he does so, he's partly driven by commercial interests. If he starts to be ostracized for his pusillanimity in Europe, as Erika warns him he will be, then this will also become known on the other side of the Atlantic. The reading public in the United States, who are starting to see him as "the most significant German writer alive", and know he is in exile because of his opposition to Hitler, will not understand his silence: "Up to now, he had seen himself as exceptional, and that was why he had not wanted to join the dissidents. But more than anything else, he had been afraid." He publishes a fairly mild statement in the Neue Zuercher Zeitung. He lates writes in much stronger terms, but he is aware it's all coming a bit late.

Toibin passes no judgement here. Essentially, we're seeing the world through Thomas's eyes, and opposing views come to us mainly through the pronouncements of other family members. And I, for one, wouldn't pass judgement. I'm pretty sure I'd have followed the same line of reasoning, for better or worse...



He and Katia go to America, where they seek asylum (and their tussles with Immigration are amusingly familiar). But they struggle to settle there, and the authorities expect Mann to be grateful and biddable.

After Germany's defeat, Mann again becomes a punchbag for all sides. The FBI are suspicious of his allegedly leftist leanings (which, given his track record, seems completely bizarre). But it's hard to please his compatriots, too. When, still based in the US, he plans to visit Germany, his Swiss friend/minder says: "What you must realize is that you cannot win... If you remain in California, they will hate you. But if you return, they will hate you for having been in California in the first place. If you only visit cities in the West, they will call you an American stooge. But if you visit the East, they will call you a fellow traveller."

Mann is not encouraged by his visit. He attends a formal banquet: "In his dreams, he had expected a Germany to arise in which a dinner like this would be attended by a new generation nervously ready to re-create democracy. But everyone in the banqueting hall looked to him middle-aged and overfed as well as jolly and at home... Money, he thought, was solid here in this hall... Rather than the Munich of delicate souls and exalted social textures, this was the coarseness of the Bavarian village come into the city... He could talk about Goethe all he pleased, but this was the future." The manager of a historic hotel persuades him to sign a guest book -- which he realizes later still sports the signatures of Hitler and Goering and Goebbels. (And I hadn't realized that close to Weimar, that region that engendered so much art and philosophy and beauty, is Buchenwald...)

Eventually, tired of America's Cold War shenanigans, he and Katia return to Switzerland, which is where he dies.



A third motif is Mann's troubled family. His two sisters end up committing suicide, and he has an awkward, competitive relationship with his brother Heinrich.

He and Katia have six children, who are presented as difficult and demanding (understatement). Remember it's Mann's viewpoint we're following here... But the heady mix of complex sexuality, artistic ambition, and conflicting character certainly means there's always turmoil.

Erika, the oldest, having spent much of her life sniping at her father, eventually reconciles with him, and effectively becomes his manager. Klaus (the second child) dies of an overdose that has generally been interpreted as suicide, but might not have been. His parents don't attend the funeral. The youngest son, Michael, sends his father the bitterest of letters (I'm not sure if this actually existed, but there was plenty of Mann-family correspondence, so Toibin must have had something to base it on). Klaus, says Michael, went unnoticed in his own house: "I remember how brusquely his views were dismissed by you at the table and I remember his hurt at seeing that you did not think his views were important. I am sure the world is grateful to you for the undivided attention you have given to your books, but we, your children, do not feel any gratitude to you, or indeed to our mother, who sat by your side. It is hard to credit that you both stayed in your luxury hotel while my brother was being buried."

And certainly, while the Mann of Toibin's book regards Klaus as something of a lightweight, a dilettante who never settled to anything, a quick glance at other appraisals shows that this was very unfair.

Toibin does this all quite well, I think. You appreciate the problems of dealing with larger-than-life children (there's a lovely bit of dialogue here, about Golo, another of the Mann sons: ""'Golo? Well-balanced?' Erika asked and laughed. 'Oh dear. Is he taking morphine too?' Katia asked. 'Or is it incest?'"). But you appreciate also the problems of dealing with a highly self-obsessed father.



Finally, there's the magic theme.

When the children are small, Mann performs tricks for them at the dining-table, and once wore a wizard costume to a children's party. When he tells Klaus the "spell" that can get rid of his bad dreams, and it appears to work, the boy proclaims him a magician. "'He is The Magician!' Erika repeated." He continues to approach children by performing little tricks and stunts, and making little jokes (always a handy way, of course, of avoiding substantive interaction).

But the element of pretense and make-believe goes much deeper than that. As a young man, he reflects on the people around him: "If they could actually see into his mind..., then they would shake their heads in wonder at how cleverly he had fooled them..., what an imposter and confidence man he was, and how little he could be trusted."

His final novel is The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: "He would dramatize the idea that humans could not ever be trusted, that they could reverse their own story as the wind changed, that their lives were a continuous, enervating and amusing effort to appear plausible. And in that lay, he felt, the pure genius of humanity, and all the pathos." Switzerland, he feels, would be "a perfect place to write a novel about a man who could not be trusted and who, after each escapade, lived to see another day, like Switzerland itself".

Yet there's also a magic that lies beyond artifice: "Thomas understood that while [Buddenbrooks] was based on the Manns in Luebeck, there was some source for it that was outside of himself, beyond his control. It was like something in magic, something that would not come again so easily."

So the title, it turns out, is a highly ambivalent one. Magicians give us a frisson of puzzlement and excitement. And then it's all over. Magicians are the smoke and mirrors; behind them, there's not a lot. And yet real magic -- the kind of magic that Mann genuinely produced with his words -- is hard to withstand. Does the book really dig sufficiently deep into what makes Mann's literary magic work? A magician, after all, makes you see what is not there, and deals in a currency that is different from that of the real world. We'd all be poorer without that magic.



*_*_*

I can't quite make up my mind about this book.

On the one hand, it's an immensely readable piece of biographical fiction, drawing out the contrast between the Thomas Mann of the sober, upright, worthy exterior, and the Thomas Mann of the shadows, with his chaotic family, his suppressed same-sex leanings, and his ruthless self-centredness; the contrast between the creator who longs only to be quiet and think and write, and the public figure who is drawn ineluctably into the nightmares of Nazism, exile, World War II, and then the Cold War.

The trait marking both the inside and the outside versions is hesitancy. We get the impression that Mann never knows quite what to do in life -- apart from retreat to his study and write. And we feel for him. We can see all the ways he has failed, but we can see why. He must have been a spectacularly annoying person to live with -- if this account is correct -- but we can understand where the pressures came from that made him what he is. So, guided by his perspective, we resent the way his children walk over him, and W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood conspire to mock him, and the American authorities patronize and bully him.

On the other hand, as the account covers a long, rich life, it inevitably becomes a little truncated at times. Children and other relatives appear and disappear, in various states of defiance or desperation; partners come and go, attached to various records of tragedy. It's all a bit breathless. I wondered whether fewer scenes, with more detail, would have worked better. Frank Hertweck puts this dilemma quite nicely: "Impostors see through the world, but not themselves. That's why the nagging question -- who am I? -- is the novel's actual question. Its strength lies precisely in not wanting to answer it definitively. Its weakness is that he needs a whole narrated life to do that."

I also couldn't escape the feeling that it was somehow too simple. I felt a little as though I were reading a movie script rather than a novel, cut off from the essence that would breathe life into those longing gazes, those crackling family dining-table conversations, that inexorable metamorphosis of what it means to be German. Again, I think that might be a function of space. To draw all that out, over such a long period of time, would have made for a quite enormous volume.

But sometimes the lack of detail makes it sound a bit glib. Here, for example, we have Mann thinking: "It was... the actual culture that had formed him and people like him, that contained the seeds of its own destruction. The culture had proved defenceless and useless against pressure. And the music, the romantic music, in all the heightened emotion it unleashed, had helped to nourish a raw mindlessness that had now become brutality." So many questions here...

My bottom line, however, is that it was a) very enjoyable; b) a good reminder of an author I've spent too little time with; and c) an encouragement to have a look at some of the other representatives of that huge tribe of Manns.

And Colm Toibin, who grew up in Ireland in an era when concealing your sexuality was de rigueur, and who "divides his time" so enthusiastically that "he no longer knows where he lives"), is clearly worth following up, too.