The 1947 Club: Doctor Faustus / Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend was a book I vowed to myself to read at the start of the year, and when the 1947 Club came along and I spotted the publication date of Mann’s book it seemed a pleasingly neat coincidence. I’ve loved Mann since discovering Death in Venice at 14, a book I’ve read more times than probably any other, and given it’s been five years since I was blown away by Buddenbrooks, it was high time to try another. I read the 1997 translation by John E. Woods, then Michael Beddow’s volume on the book in the Cambridge Landmarks of World Literature series.

The book, ostensibly a fictional biography of the composer Adrian Leverkühn written by his friend Serenus Zeitblom, is Mann’s reimagining of the Faust myth. Leverkühn, perhaps in a hallucination brought on by syphilis, makes a pact with Satan: he will forfeit his soul in exchange for 24 years of success. Success comes, but at great personal cost. Leverkühn’s story is set against the rise of Fascism in Germany. Beddow:

The relationship between Mann’s novel and the history of Germany is in one sense simple to the point of crudity. Adrian Leverkühn is meant as an allegory of modern Germany.

I’ll get the apologies out of the way at the start: because my own understanding of the book is indeed at the crudest of levels, I will restrict myself to a handful of observations that occurred to me as I read it. This is very much a novel of ideas, and though my musical education enabled me to follow the musical elements (which, as you’d expect, are several), I floundered during the lengthy discussions of philosophy, theology and political theory.

Within the first few pages I was put in mind of a favourite book of mine, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, another fictional biography. Nabokov’s narrator, Charles Kinbote, is an egotist who sees himself represented throughout the work of his subject, the poet John Shade. I was pleased to see Beddow draw the same parallel. Did Nabokov, who detested Mann, intend the Kinbote/Shade relationship to be a travesty of Zeitblom/Leverkühn, he wonders. There are many similarities, and most of Mann’s humour (and he’s not a humourless writer, though next to Nabokov he can seem that way) comes from Zeitblom’s pomposity, enhanced by the occasional hint of passive-aggressiveness. On the subject of names:

Our use of familiar pronouns is rooted in those years, and he must have addressed me by my first name back then too – I can no longer hear it, but it is unthinkable that as a six- or eight-year-old he did not call me Serenus, or simply Seren, just as I called him Adri. It must have been during our early years at school, though the exact moment cannot be determined, when he ceased to grant me that intimacy and, if he addressed me at all, began to use my last name – whereas it would have seemed to me impossibly harsh to reply in like fashion. It was so – though far be it from me for it to appear as if I wished to complain. It simply seemed worth mentioning that I called him Adrian, whereas he, when not evading use of a name entirely, called me Zeitblom.

Mann and Nabokov must both have enjoyed the invention of fictional bodies of work for their creations. Mann also does it with Aschenbach in Death in Venice, devoting several pages of the novella to a description of the writer’s output, establishing his credentials as a man of letters. Zeitblom again:

It was my lot in life to spend many years in intimate proximity with a man of genius, the hero of these pages, to know him from childhood on, to witness his growth, and his fate, and to play a modest supporting role in his work. The libretto adapted from Shakespeare’s comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, Leverkühn’s mischievous youthful composition, comes from me; I was also permitted some influence on the preparation of the texts for both the grotesque opera suite Gesta Romanorum and the oratorio The Revelation of St. John the Divine.

Nabokov goes so far as to present Shade’s poem ‘Pale Fire’ in its entirety as a preface to the analysis/biography. Leverkühn is a composer, and so isn’t accorded this luxury, though Mann describes certain works of his in detail. The violin concerto, untypically romantic, sounded bewitching to me in Zeitblom’s description, like the most beautiful piece ever written, and I wondered if any composer had tried to extrapolate any of the music from the book. Proust’s Vinteuil Sonata too: there are various pieces thought to have inspired it, but has anyone set out to compose the piece in real life? A thought that occurred to me in passing.

Theodor Adorno, scourge of music students throughout the world, advised Mann on the book’s musical content. Some readers equate Leverkühn with Arnold Schoenberg because Mann has Leverkühn invent twelve-tone composition. Schoenberg was a bit put out by this, and Mann was obliged to insert a disclaimer at the end of the book setting the record straight. In fact Leverkühn resembles no single real composer, but in some respects Stravinsky is a closer fit than Schoenberg. Around the time of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913), Leverkühn composes a work, Marvels of the Universe, that feels very much its counterpart, and the changeability of his style recalls Stravinsky’s series of chameleon-like self-reinventions.

While Zeitblom’s laughableness is entertaining – the fact that as a student he misses his own lectures to attend Leverkühn’s, so convinced is he that he must observe everything his idol does, already certain that one day he will write this biography; the conviction (like Kinbote’s) that he sees cryptographic messages in the master’s work that no one else does – his political observations make for sober reading, perhaps because his horror of the rise of totalitarianism feels eerily current. There are innumerable passages about art as the antidote to extremism, about the anti-intellectualism of his society, about the ‘anti-humanity’ of the odious iconoclast Chaim Breisacher, misrepresenting Bach and Palestrina as hateful reactionaries who despoiled the glory of monophony, and about the scourge of nationalism, where I felt sharp pangs of recognition as I read. His shame at the moral bankruptcy of his country mirrors what I have sometimes felt about my own in recent months:

Our thick-walled torture chamber, into which Germany was transformed by a vile regime of conspirators sworn to nihilism from the very start, had been burst open, and our ignominy lies naked before the eyes of the world … is it mere hypochondria to tell oneself that all that is German – even German intellect, German thought, the German word – shares in the disgrace of these revelations and is plunged into profoundest doubt? Is it morbid contrition to ask oneself the question: How can “Germany,” whichever of its forms it may be allowed to take in the future, so much as open its mouth again to speak of mankind’s concerns?

In these passages, where (perhaps) we see ourselves reflected, this is a viscerally terrifying book, more so than any horror story I’ve read. Books don’t usually scare me, but I was glad to get to the end of this one. It’s brilliant, but profoundly unsettling. Part of the scariness, as my fellow blogger the Argumentative Old Git has observed elsewhere, is that Germany has such a rich cultural history. If Germany could turn to barbarism, what hope for the rest of us? Let us pray that we heed the lessons of history.

Back to the allegory: the political life of Germany in the first part of the twentieth century seems to correspond to Leverkühn’s own. He sells his soul and ends up killing the things he loves and descending into madness. But although the two mirror each other, their stories don’t seem inextricably linked, and the comparisons are not exact. Take Leverkühn’s music. Serialism – a democracy of tones in which no single note of the twelve is superior to any other – is a logical extreme, a dead end. There is nowhere beyond it to go, which is not to say that much great serialist music has not been written. With political extremism, when things are pulled down we have no option but to carry on, and good generally emerges from the wreckage. (I suppose I mean the NHS.) What came after serialism? Minimalism, blankness, emptiness? I think I’ll keep Schoenberg, thank you. The more I compare political with musical extremism, the more I see it can’t be done. For the reader of Doctor Faustus to feel tempted to equate twelve-tone music with Nazism is, I think, to misread the book. I just can’t say exactly why.

Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire

This is adapted from something I wrote a year or so ago for the Big Readers Forum. Do join us, it’s nice there.

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I’m a bit flabbergasted by Pale Fire, I confess. Despite not being particularly long, it does seem on the face of it somewhat formidable, and so to begin with I was wary of approaching it. I see now that it was silly of me to be wary – who in their right mind is scared of a book? – but I’m now in the more difficult position of knowing what to write about it, or how to write about it. I am aware that when I write reviews of books I tend towards hyperbole, with superlatives coming out of every orifice. Maybe that’s because I’m easily pleased, or just because I’m good at choosing books I like. Anyway, pointing this out is merely a precursor to an apology if I go overboard a bit when writing about Pale Fire.

Anthony Burgess writes, in his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, that “The interest of Pale Fire is perhaps mainly formal”. I think that’s a point open to argument, but its structure is undoubtedly highly inventive. I’ve never read anything remotely like it before. To give as brief a summary of the structure and plot as possible, without spoilers, Pale Fire itself is a 999-line poem written by the celebrated American poet John Shade, his last completed work prior to his murder on 21st July 1959. Nabokov’s book includes the text of the poem along with a foreword, commentary and index by Charles Kinbote, a neighbour and colleague of Shade’s at Wordsmith University (based in New Wye, Appalachia).

The ideal commentary on any given work may be supposed to be one that is scrupulously researched, impartial, and which contains as little of the commentator’s self in its text. Kinbote’s commentary to Pale Fire is none of these things. Kinbote is a native of Zembla, an imaginary country which, as far as I can surmise, may be somewhere near Scandinavia – its language at times resembles an eccentric hybrid of Norwegian and Basque, but I’m getting ahead of myself – and believes himself to be its deposed and exiled King, and even that Shade’s assassin was a buffoon employed by Zemblan rebel forces who killed the wrong man. Furthermore, during the few months of Kinbote’s acquaintance of Shade, he has related to the poet a good deal of Zemblan history, and believes Shade’s final poem to contain a magnitude of veiled references to his homeland, which he communicates in the commentary. Needless to say, these references are visible only to Kinbote, while to the reader the poem appears to chronicle nothing more than a sequence of scenes from Shade’s life.

Cover of the Everyman edition

My overwhelming emotion on reading it was one of joy at Nabokov’s creativity, his audacity, his manipulation of language and his humour. Kinbote is one of the most monstrously believable characters I have ever met on the printed page. He is self-aggrandising, conceited, narcissistic, deluded, deranged and megalomaniacal. Reading between the lines, it is evident that his relationship with Shade, while tolerated by the poet, is far from solicited. Shade’s wife, for whom Kinbote reserves occasional special vitriol, disapproves of his presence, and no wonder! Kinbote stalks Shade and his wife, plans to holiday at the same resort as them, spies on them through windows on all visible sides of their house and engineers ‘accidental’ meetings, altogether the last person one would choose to prepare an edition of one’s final artistic utterance.

The commentary itself is outrageous. Quite apart from the fact that its vast majority touches not on the poem but on the colourful history of Zembla, Kinbote’s ‘friendship’ with Shade and the journey of the assassin, Gradus, to track down his quarry, it suggests that Kinbote may even have changed the text of the poem. He freely admits having italicised passages in the voice of Shade’s daughter, and having been tempted to omit certain passages, which prompts the reader to question – what else has been changed? What can we believe and what can we rule out? Humbert Humbert in Lolita is an oft-cited example of an unreliable narrator, but Kinbote is an even more impressive example, since even his identity is in question. Who is he, and who is the real author of Pale Fire? The word ‘tricksy’ does not begin to describe this book.

Nabokov’s characteristic humour and wordplay are in evidence here at least as much as in Lolita. Examples of Kinbote’s ridiculousness and/or self-importance follow. This passage relates Kinbote’s suspicion that an acquaintance is mocking him for the hallucinations he suffers periodically. In fact, the reader is meant to infer, his bad breath is the point at issue:

Hallucinations! Well did I know that among certain youthful instructors whose advances I had rejected there was at least one evil practical joker; I knew it ever since the time I came home from a very enjoyable and successful meeting of students and teachers (at which I had exuberantly thrown off my coat and shown several willing pupils a few of the amusing holds employed by Zemblan wrestlers) and found in my coat pocket a brutal anonymous note saying: “You have hal . . . . . s real bad, chum,” meaning evidently “hallucinations,” although a malevolent critic might infer from the insufficient number of dashes that little Mr. Anon, despite teaching freshman English, could hardly spell.

Here, Kinbote seems convinced that he almost appeared explicitly in Shade’s poem:

A beautiful variant, with one curious gap, branches off at this point in the draft (dated July 6):

     And minds that died before arriving there:
     Poor old man Swift, poor —, poor Baudelaire

     Strange Other World where all our still-born dwell,
     And pets, revived, and invalids, grown well,

What might that dash stand for? Unless Shade gave prosodic value to the mute e in “Baudelaire,” which I am quite certain he would never have done in English verse (cp. “Rabelais,” line 501), the name required here must scan as a trochee. Among the names of celebrated poets, painters, philosophers, etc., known to have become insane or to have sunk into senile imbecility, we find many suitable ones. Was Shade confronted by too much variety with nothing to help logic choose and so left a blank, relying upon the mysterious organic force that rescues poets to fill it in at its own convenience? Or was there something else–some obscure intuition, some prophetic scruple that prevented him from spelling out the name of an eminent man who happened to be an intimate friend of his? Was he perhaps playing safe because a reader in his household might have objected to that particular name being mentioned? And if it comes to that, why mention it at all in this tragical context? Dark, disturbing thoughts.

He is so gloriously self-obsessed! Other memorable moments include an imagined scene from Shade’s pre-Kinbote existence written as a playscript, knowing references to Lolita and Pnin, Kinbote’s characteristically pompous suggestion that the reader buy two copies of the book so that the text and commentary can be read side by side (and another intrigue of the structure is how differently the book would read if the poem and commentary were read simultaneously rather than one after the other – would we pick up on the Zemblan references that Kinbote sees? I doubt it), and – perhaps my particular favourite – the rendering of the opening of Goethe’s Erlkönig into Zemblan:

Ret woren ok spoz on natt ut vett?
Eto est votchez ut mid ik dett.

The index is a section of the book in itself, not a mere addendum. A choice entry: “Kinbote, Charles, Dr.; his belief that the term “iridule” is S‘s invention, 109”

Something readers occasionally observe on nearing the end of Lolita is that they feel sympathy for Humbert where before there was none, in spite of his horribleness. There is room for sympathy for Kinbote, too, and I found especially poignant the descriptions of his sadness at not being able to consummate the marriage to his arranged bride, Disa, because of his homosexuality. I hardly need say that Nabokov’s prose is gorgeousness itself, particularly, I thought, in his intoxicating descriptions of the Zemblan court and the innocent eroticism of King Charles/Kinbote’s childhood relationship with his friend Oleg.

It’s a book that begs to be read and experienced and savoured and reread. Yes, it’s challenging, but not nearly so much as to be unreadable or unapproachable. I expected something impressive, but never this impressive and never this viscerally exciting. If this isn’t one of my five best books of 2009 come December, I’ll eat my head.

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Postscript: it was, though 2009 was a very strong reading year by usual standards.