Literary CriticismThose old enough to remember the heyday of Penguin books in their unmistakable orange wrappers will surely recall the Penguin edition of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, a satisfyingly fat brick of a book with that wonderful back-cover photograph of the author at his desk, the surface of which is bare save for the single sheet of paper on which the Magician - his children's nickname for him - is inscribing with an elegant fountain pen what was no doubt a line of deathless, High German prose.
He is dressed in a grey three-piece suit - as Virginia Woolf said of T.S. Eliot, if it had been possible he would have worn a four-piece one - and starched collar and tie, and in the fingers of his left hand there is cocked at an interrogative angle a cigar of such strikingly phallic proportions that one could not but suspect an intentional if primly muffled joke. For those of us harbouring literary ambitions here was the very picture of the Great European Author: judicious, measured, unostentatiously prosperous, calm in his uncluttered world, the "dauntless master", in Wallace Stevens's formulation, with the entire human tale at his fingertips.
It was a good, nay, a superlative act. The model, of course, was Goethe, against whom always Thomas Mann measured himself. The lavishly gifted author of Buddenbrooks, that definitive epic of German family life which he published at the age of 26, was born in 1875 in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck into a solidly bürgerlich merchant family. His mother, however, a gifted musician, had a dash of Latin blood in her veins - she was born in Brazil - and throughout his career as an artist her son was held in uneasy suspension between the cold, mercantile North and the hot, artistic South. This state of tension found its clearest expression in the novella, Death in Venice (1913), the story of the final weeks in the life of another dauntless master, the writer Gustav von Aschenbach - names are always significant in Mann's work, and this one is characteristically subtle, suggestive both of aridity and liquid swiftness - who comes to Venice to recover from what seems no more than an attack of writer's block but ends in perdition.
How daring, we thought, that a respectably, one might say an ostentatiously, married man whose sexual orientation seemed put beyond doubt by the evidence of a brood of children, should write a tale about a man who loses himself for the love of a boy. Aschenbach's yearning for the elusive Tadzio causes him first to humiliate himself, even to the extent of having his hair tinted and his lips painted - who can forget, at the end of Visconti's film, the spectacle of poor Dirk Bogarde deliquescing in that deckchair on the beach - and finally leads him out into the depthless waters of death itself. Death in Venice seemed a tremendous feat of imaginative invention. Then, after Mann's death, came the diaries and the letters, and to our astonishment we learned that he had not been inventing at all, that throughout his life he had yearned after young men, half-swooning if in a hotel dining room a handsome waiter should throw his ogling gaze even the hint of an answering glance.
Mann's condition - his malady, one wants to say - was not full-blown homosexuality, for its physical manifestation seems never to have gone further than a stolen kiss or a hasty embrace, even in the case of his earliest and perhaps most passionate attachment with his friend, Paul Ehrenberg. Yet if we heed Mann's oft-repeated disclaimer that in his fiction he "invented nothing", that all of his work was spilt autobiography, we shall be brought up short by the many confessional passages in the stories and novels, such as this one, from the short story, 'Tonio Kröger', the eponymous protagonist of which is one of Mann's earliest alter-egos:
He lived in large cities in the south, for he felt that his art would ripen more lushly in the southern sun; and perhaps it was heredity on his mother's side that drew him there. But because his heart was dead and had no love in it, he fell into carnal adventures, far into voluptuousness and hot guilt, although such experiences cost him intense suffering.
Michael Maar, one of Germany's leading literary critics, who quotes this passage in Bluebeard's Chamber, is struck by the intensity of suffering brought on by these "carnal adventures". Remarking that all Mann's modern biographers accept that "the man who signed himself Tonio Kröger" enjoyed or endured just such adventures in his youthful journeys to Naples and Rome, Maar nevertheless is convinced that "the burning guilt that he speaks of here is something that scholarship has yet to track down".
Maar's interest in the sources of this "burning guilt" was sparked by the curious crisis that occurred in Mann's life in 1933, the year of Hitler's accession to power. Mann was on a lecture tour abroad, and realised that the political situation in Germany would not permit him to return home. He wrote to his son, Golo, in Munich, bidding him to rescue the set of diaries he had left locked in a cupboard at the family home. Golo found the diaries, which on his father's dire instructions he didn't even dare open, and packed them in a suitcase and gave them to the family's chauffeur to take to the station and send on to his master. The chauffeur, however, was a Nazi spy, and although he did bring the suitcase to the train he also reported the matter to the authorities, who held back delivering the suitcase for many weeks. While he waited, Mann grew increasingly agitated; his daughter Erika spoke of his "unprecedented state of . . . desperation", while Golo described his father as being close to despair.
What in the diaries was so revelatory and terrible that led Mann to fear that if the Nazis got hold of them they would have evidence sufficient to ruin him, and which caused him to destroy them immediately the suitcase was delivered? Most commentators, Maar remarks, take it for granted that "the main secret, disclosure of which could have driven the author to suicide, was his 'inversion', his love of boys, the homosexuality concealed behind the bourgeois façade - for which he supposedly felt a sense of guilt". In fact, as Maar attests, Mann had long ago accepted his own ambiguous sexuality, and even took pride in it. Nor were his inclinations kept secret from his family; his wife,Katia, knew "more or less" about his hankering after boys, while in their youth his children would tease him fondly when they caught him eyeing this or that likely lad. He was even complacent in the knowledge of his more-than-paternal admiration for the "radiant adolescent body" of his young son Klaus, and wrote in his journal: "Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my own son."
Maar is convinced that the fearful secret contained in the early diaries, which haunted Mann to the day he died, robbing him of sleep and bringing repeated thoughts of suicide, was not to do with sexual peccadilloes but something far darker. Certainly Mann harboured a lifelong sense of oppression and almost hysterical guilt, so that he could describe himself in an autobiographical sketch as "a charlatan with a taste for excess and offensive in every sense". At times in the surviving diaries and even in some of the letters Mann seems to be crying for help out of the "Bluebeard's chamber" - Katia Mann's phrase in connection with the diaries and their secrets - in which he is both Bluebeard and Bluebeard's victim. Maar, whose little book, a triumph of close, indeed forensic, reading, is exciting but in the end delivers less than it promises, follows what he calls the "trail of blood" in Mann's early work that leads ultimately, Maar believes, to the dionysian South where Aschenbach met his nemesis.
Indeed, it is startling to be reminded how "Southern" are these early stories, all flashing knives and brandished revolvers and capricious killings. In one, 'The Wardrobe', a creepy, hallucinatory tale in which a naked girl appears to a dying man and tells him of a love affair which had "a sad ending: the two holding each other indissolubly embraced, and while their lips rest on each other, one stabbing the other above the waist with a broad knife - and not without good reason". Maar remarks on the absence of an identifiable gender for either of the lovers, the wound evasively located "above the waist", and that peculiarly chilling assumption of "good reason". The imagination of Thomas Mann, Maar implies, was a cavern of horrors.
Is Maar too literal-minded, too deterministic? Fiction is a strange process, a form of alchemy in which the base material of life is transmuted into something that can look more like life than life itself. And fiction writers notoriously seize on and exaggerate their own covert urges and predilections and use them as material for stories. Maar himself admits that the "imaginative power of the writer should not be undervalued, his ability to make a mountain out of a molehill . . ." The same, alas, might be said of the author of Bluebeard's Chamber, which in the end turns out to be hardly more than a gentle rise in a flat landscape. Throughout, the narrative leads inexorably towards what the reader expects will be a Poirot-style revelation, only to trail off at the end into vague speculations about possible dark doings entered into or perhaps only witnessed by Mann on a youthful visit to Naples in November 1896. The source of Mann's "burning guilt . . . that scholarship has yet to track down" remains as much of a mystery as it ever was.
Yet Bluebeard's Chamber is a valuable contribution to our appreciation of the work of this uncanny genius, a quintessentially 19th-century figure whose writings captured so much of the troubled spirit of Europe in the 20th century and who continues to fascinate us in the 21st. Maar quotes a wonderfully revealing anecdote, retailed by Katia Mann, in which the poet and librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, spoke of Mann's "upper-class solidity and discreet elegance" whose "home, too, gave the same appearance: very fine and spacious, with valuable carpets, dark oil paintings, club armchairs, bright sleeping quarters, etc. 'The only thing, though,' the poet continued, looking down at his fingernails - 'in a little side room there was suddenly lying - a dead cat . . .'"
John Banville's most recent book, Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City, was published last year by Bloomsbury
Bluebeard's Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann By Michael Maar, translated by David Fernbach Verso, 150pp. £17