Colm Tóibín’s accomplishments are uniquely his own, but it is hard to imagine that he could have produced such an exquisite fictional biography of Thomas Mann if he didn’t share certain sensibilities with his subject. At age 66, Tóibín has been candid about his gayness for decades. But he came of age before the rise of gay activism and carries within him the self-consciousness of an earlier era. Cautious in interviews, he has conceded that he never discussed his sexuality with his mother. His father died early, and Tóibín recalls living with relatives while his mother recuperated after her husband’s death. He still recalls the helplessness and resentment he felt while being sent away.
Tóibín’s lingering sadness may be one of the interior sources that compelled him to plunge into the psyche of Thomas Mann who spent his entire life in the closet. They share some key life experiences. Both of them had trouble with intimacy, lost their fathers early, and envied their brothers. Their mothers were distracted in disconcerting ways. They found solace in transferring their traumas to the page. Tóibín believes he draws his creative energy from the silence that permeated his childhood home after his father. He recalls being forced to attend the school where his father taught and how later he visited the classroom thinking, “What is strange is that I have no memory of feeling anything: there was no drama, no obvious grief, just a blankness.” Mann handled the loss of his father in a similar way by channeling his distress into Buddenbrooks, a novel about the disintegration of a prominent family from Lubeck similar to his own, published in 1901 when Mann was 25. The burdens of growing up gay seem to have inspired Tóibín’s conjuring of Thomas Mann’s confined life. We can sense his compassion for him as well as his affinity.
Tóibín bases his complex rendering of Mann on the biographical facts, his writings, and diary revelations that came to light in 1975. He creates a memorable opening scene in which a young Mann attends a party where he meets his future bride, Katia Pringheim, who came from an assimilated wealthy Jewish family. She was standing next to her handsome and adored twin brother. Mann tentatively approaches them, and as they begin to converse, he struggles to keep his eyes on Katia while distracted by her brother’s attractiveness. Katia notices his divided attention and is intrigued by the encounter. They would soon marry and have six children, three of whom were gay, and two who would take their own lives.
The traditional boundaries that restrict family life did not apply to the Mann’s. They were a family of shifting alliances and secret pacts; they competed with one another for their father’s limited attention. Mann wrote in his diary about his physical attraction to two of his sons whom he would watch bathe, recording in his journal that he saw improper in his infatuation. His wife may have been inappropriately close to her eldest son Klaus whom she adored, and there were rumors she had been attached to her brother and perhaps her father as well. Mann’s favorite child was his eldest daughter Erika, who later would forsake her own longings to become her father’s assistant. Mann worked feverishly each day in his study while Katia kept the children quiet. When he would come out and occasionally join the children for lunch, there was teasing and jousting; but little empathy and compassion shown for one another. Tóibín’s depicts the Mann home as strained by their father’s preoccupations and demands
Throughout and after the First World War, Mann maintained his conservatism, breaking with his brother Heinrich who foresaw the savagery that would overtake Germany. Mann listened frequently to Wagner and read the literature of Goethe and Schopenhauer. Even as Hitler took power, he hesitated to speak out, fearing to depress his book sales in Germany. It was only at the last moments, and at his children’s urging, that he finally delivered a clear message against Hitler. But of course, it was too late, and his warning was uttered from the safety of the United States where he had found sanctuary.
While portraying the distorted relationships that ruled the Mann family, Tóibín refrains from spelling out the corrosive effects such behavior would surely have on the children, Katia, and Mann. His lens remains focused on Thomas Mann alone, whom he presents to us most sympathetically, emphasizing the dreadful tyranny Mann endured throughout his life. He emphasizes the sorrow Mann must have felt while unable to act on his homoerotic impulses. When under the spell of one young man, whom he was reticent to approach, he wrote “World fame is trifling enough for me but it has no weight at all in comparison with a smile from him, the gaze of his eyes, the softness of his voice.” Tóibíndepicts what it feels like to live as an impostor, terrified to be revealed and oppressed by self-loathing, guilt, and shame.
Tóibín considers how Mann might have behaved as a boy in his childhood home, speaking in a serious tone with his father about his business, hoping to convince his father to leave the business to him. He knew early on he had no interest in girls. With his mother, Mann softens his voice and mannerisms, often joining his mother in her dressing room where he would watch her get dressed for dinner. Julia da Silvia-Bruhns was of Brazilian descent and married his father when she was only 17. Mann would sometimes sneak into her dressing room when absent and take pleasure in her high-heeled shoes and bottles of perfume. Tóibín describes her theatricality: “She joined the company with an air of reluctance, giving the impression that she had, just now, been alone with herself in a place more interesting than festive Lubeck. Her allure came from the atmosphere of foreignness and fragility that she exuded with such charm.” Tóibín lets us know that Mann was certain he was always her most cherished child. But he also had to contend with the knowing eyes of his brother Heinrich who saw through Thomas’s masquerades and held this secret over him.
In one episode, Tóibín writes about Mann’s attraction to a schoolmate named Arminwho, noticing Thomas’s interest in him, wasn’t surprised. He started to take walks with Thomas, making sure the two of them were alone so they could discuss poetry, music, and their desires. Yet when others discovered them in conversation, Armin could change on cue and banter about girls or make fun of their classmates. Tóibín shows us Mann’s assessment upon seeing his friend’s dexterity: “It was his naturalness, his evenness, his acceptance of the world, his lack of nervousness, self-consciousness, or pretense, that made Thomas want to have him as a special friend.”
Tóibín demonstrates how Mann created his revered works through narratives based on his homoerotic passions. Enmeshing his fantasies into literature shielded him from direct scrutiny by critics who thought he was merely engaged in elaborate literary games. Death in Venice was based on a hypersexual attraction he had for a 13-year-old boy he met while vacationing with his wife in 1911. Tóibín envisions Mann response to the beauty of this boy and his use of this experience to create a novel about the fatal passion of Gustav von Aschenbach, an aging famous writer, and his obsession with a boy called Tadzio. Tóibín reconstructs Mann’s writing process, thinking:
“The emotion his character felt would become more overwrought as the days went by. Aschenbach, his protagonist, saw the boy constantly even in Piazza San Marco, when he crossed the lagoon. Noticing that the family had begun to arrive earlier for breakfast so that it’s members could benefit from more time on the beach, he took his breakfast early and tried to be on the beach before them. Aschenbach, in the story, was alone, a man who married once and been bereaved early in life, a man with one daughter, to whom he was not close. His Aschenbach was humorless in a way that was expected of a writer. His irony he kept for moments in philosophy and history: he did not allow it to be directed inwards. And he had no defenses against the vision of overpowering beauty that appeared before him in a blue-and-white suit every morning under the brilliant Adriatic light. The boy’s very outline against the horizon captivated him. His foreign speech, of which Aschenbach could not understand a word, excited him. What he waited for most were the moments of repose, when for example, the boy would stand erect at the water’s edge, alone, removed from his family, his hands clasped at the back of his neck, day-dreaming into blue space.”
Tóibín wrote a touching story a few years back for the New Yorker called “Sleep” that seems autobiographically tinged. A gay older man wakes up next to his far younger Jewish lover who complains to him that he has been moaning in distress all night. The distraught younger man insists his lover go to therapy. He then packs up and leaves, hinting he may come back when the older man has worked things through. He goes for professional help, and is put under hypnosis, and it is revealed that his anguish may have something to do with his brother’s death from a heart attack a few years back. Tóibín lost a brother in a similar way. He never tells us whether he reunited with his lover or even wanted to. He never tells us about their relationship, except to complain about his partner’s taste in CD’s and books. The story emits a tragic undertone that suggests a pervasive aloneness — one in which Tóibín navigates his mostly single life. It is this awareness that helped him unmask Thomas Mann for us – and we sense it is ripped right from the author’s heart.
[Published by Scribner on September 7, 2021, 512 pages, $28.00 hardcover]