Great Mann

(See front cover)

JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS--Thomas Mann--Knopf ($2.50).

Not until a man is dead and buried can he safely be called great. Death and its historical illusion then lend the word some meaning, which it lacks in an age addicted to strong language. Boundaries warp perspectives even more: one land's hero is another's hissing, and there is no universal Emily Post to tell plain men in whose presence to doff their hats. But this week, in the name of half a hemisphere, literary Manhattan was ready to do homage to a foreign writer, to acknowledge him" as safely great though still dangerously alive.

It was Thomas Mann's 59th birthday. No Jew, he had exiled himself from his native Germany with the coming of Hitler. His latest book was being published in the U. S. that day. These events served only to time a tribute to him which was born of years of worthy work in the best field of letters. At a testimonial dinner presided over by Pontifex Minimus Henry Seidel Canty, buttressed by such notables as Nicholas Murray Butler, Thomas W. Lamont, Owen D. Young, Mrs. Ogden Reid, Felix Warburg, William Allen White, such literary sidelights as Willa Gather, Sinclair Lewis; Christopher Morley, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, the praises of Thomas Mann were to be chanted, droned and anecdotalized hour after hour at the Plaza Hotel.

Men-in-the-street. unaware that they were missing a feast, might have pointed out more than one reason for the genteel hullabaloo. Thomas Mann is a Nobel Prizewinner (1929). This was his first visit to the U. S. Hitler's victims, if sufficiently presentable, are popular in Manhattan. Author Mann brings no topsy-turvy social message; even a banker is safe in his company. Though some of his books have been best-sellers in Germany, his finespun writing will never appeal to the U. S. masses. But the man-in-the-street, more than half right about the smokescreen, would have missed the coal of truth. This week's company of tail-coated diners were delighted to honor a prominent professional but they also represented a wider audience of deeper views. That audience, which has waded through the lengthy Buddenbrooks and clambered up the perilous slopes of The Magic Mountain, will not hesitate to plunge into the bottomless well of Joseph and His Brothers. Readers to whom Thomas Mann is only a newspaper name may well take fright at the book s forbidding brink. For Author Mann's latest excursion toward the boundaries of the human spirit is in an uncharted direction, a descent into the past which is no easy tumble into a fanciful Avernus but a painful, foot-by-foot groping for handholds.

Descent into Hell is the subtitle of his Prelude. In 54 close-packed pages Author Mann justifies his caption, presents the prehistorical theory on which his narrative is founded. "Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?" Not truth but mystery lies at the bottom of the well. Recorded history goes down only a little way. "Where then do they lie in time, the beginnings of human civilization? How old is it? . . . We have only to enquire, to conjure up a whole vista of time-coulisses opening out infinitely, as in mockery." But there are records which go back far beyond history's short memory, "pious abbreviations" of real events. "Certainly it becomes clearer and clearer that the dream memory of man, formless but shaping itself ever anew after the manner of sagas, reaches back to catastrophes of vast antiquity, the tradition of which, fed by recurrent but lesser similar events, established itself among various peoples and produced that formation of coulisses which forever lures and leads onwards the traveller in time." Such a group of sagas is contained in the Bible; such a "pious abbreviation" is the Biblical story of Joseph and His Brothers.

These antique legends point back & back to a Garden of Eden, unrecognized by Science, which offers instead a "Lemurian world ... a scene wherein the tortured larva of the human being . . . endured the nightmare of fear and lust which made up his life, in desperate conflict with scaly mountains of flesh in the shape of flying lizards and giant newts." Says Author Mann: Science leads here into a blind alley; this was not the beginning. "We have sounded the well of time to its depths, and not yet reached our goal: the history of man is older than the material world which is the work of his will, older than life, which rests upon his will. . . . The original human soul is the oldest thing . . . for it has always been, before time and before form, just as God has always been and likewise matter."

The Book, By this point readers may begin to see why Author Mann, with all of Europe's complicated culture to embroider on, chose rather to go back to Asia to wake a slumbering legend. Originally attracted by the charm and the tantalizing brevity of this "natural narrative" of Jacob and his sons, Mann soon saw greater & greater depths in the story, an unsuspected universality in its theme. Readers will expect much more than a refurbished narrative of the tale of Joseph and they will not be disappointed. Author Mann has woven the threads of myth, history and fiction into a story of consummate artistry, but from time to time he deliberately breaks the thread, ties it into the deeper pattern of the tale's symbolic background. Joseph, Jacob, Isaac, Esau, Laban, Rachel, Leah take on vivid lifelikeness as characters in their own right, but at the same time their outlines are misty with suggestions of their ancestors and their posterity. Says Author Mann: 'I do not conceal from myself the difficulty of writing about people who do not precisely know who they are," but his irony is directed less at his antique protagonists than at the modern idea that individuality is unique and self-contained. Every character is the reminiscence of an earlier character, each man the faintly clouded mirror of his forbears.

After establishing this sense of the timelessness of beginnings, Author Mann starts his story of Joseph in the middle of things. Yaakow ben Yitzchak (Jacob) and his tribe are encamped near the town of Hebron. Jacob, worried by the absence of his favorite son. Joseph, finds him sitting in the moonlight by the side of a well. Their conversation rouses Jacob's ready memories, which the tale follows back to their beginning: his cheating his elder brother Esau out of their father Isaac's blessing; his flight from Esau's wrath to Laban's far-off farmstead; the long years he spent there serving the closefisted Laban that he might marry his daughter Rachel; how Laban in turn cheated him, substituting his other daughter Leah ; how Jacob ended by marrying them both and taking his family and riches back to his own country; the reconciliation with Esau; the massacre at Shechem; the death of Rachel. This first volume of Joseph and His Brothers is Jacob's story; except for the brief glimpse of Joseph at the beginning he comes into it hardly at all, is not even born until p. 381. His story is to follow in subsequent volumes.*

Reverent before tradition. Author Mann never meddles with the main outline of the Biblical story, but he expands its abbreviated prehistory into an appearance of the present, concentrates its bald chronicle of events into a human reality. No strict-interpretationist of the Scriptures, he does not hesitate to contradict or supplement the original account in matters of minor fact. Thus he says that Jacob's only daughter Dinah was older, not younger, than her brothers Issachar and Zebulun; suggests that Isaac was well aware that he was blessing Jacob instead of Esau; asserts that Jacob demonstrably served 25, not 20 years, with Laban; supplies Rachel's age at her death (41). He puts in Isaac's dying mouth a babbled prophecy that stretches back to Abraham, forward to Christ. Laban, unlucky until Jacob came to live with him, had sought to propitiate the gods by burying alive his infant son in the foundations of his house. When Joseph is born, Jacob prophesies about him as if he were a Messiah, his mother a virgin-goddess.

Joseph and His Brothers is written in a language that is not strictly Biblical but gives, even in translation,/- a Biblical effect. The book ends with the death of Rachel, just after the birth of Benjamin. Her last words: " 'Now all burdens have been taken from me, childbearing, life-bearing, and in it is the night. Jacob, my husband, forgive me that I was unfruitful and brought thee but two sons, but yet two, Jehosiph, the blessed, and the little one, the son of death. And ah, I am sore to go from them. And from thee too, Jacob, I am sore to part, for we were the right ones for each other. And now thou must muse alone and learn without Rachel who God is. Learn, then, and fare well. And forgive too,' she breathed, 'that I stole the teraphim.' [Laban's household gods.] Then Death passed over her countenance and put out its light."

The Visitor. Like his prototype, Jacob, Thomas Mann is a distinguished visitor but has no country he can call his own. If Hitler had not revoked his citizenship last year after Author Mann had taken him self into exile he might never have visited the U. S. Says he: "I am from Hamburg, and traveling." people On from the way Hamburg to are the not U. S. given on to the Volendam, Author Mann, who hates to have nothing to do, puttered away at the lecture he would deliver at Yale. On his ten-day visit he planned to keep in character as a Hamburger, see little of the U. S. After disembarking with no fuss & feathers he was to go to his hotel to rest up. Except for three meals (his birthday dinner, luncheons at Manhattan's Pen Club, Dutch Treat Club) he had made no engagements. From his exile's home in Zurich he brought with him his wife, left behind his favorite daughter Elisa' beth.

The Author, Not Nobel-Prizewinning Thomas Mann but bad Prose Poet Adolf Hitler (My Battle) is the most popular writer in Germany today. Personally, Author Mann has never been popular in his own country. News that he had won the Nobel Prize was received with small enthusiasm in his adopted town of Munich, where he lived 39 years. His message to the young writers of Europe (1927) did him no good with the powers that were to be: "I believe that you have been temporarily too infatuated with the notion, the pathos, of revolution. Some touch of austere estheticism in it has fascinated you. . . . But revolution is no more than a proud boy's play, compared with freedom, the authentic upstanding freedom of the spirit, out of which springs a loftier, an all-commanding revolution. . . . All of us . . . unite in agreeing on one thing that we do not want: namely, to let stupidity make fools of us, and to let life be ... surrendered into the paralyzing clutch of stupidity."

Born in 1875 in Hanseatic Liibeck, near Hamburg, of an old merchant family. Thomas Mann was brought up to be a bourgeois and has always remained one. From his Brazilian mother he inherited the malleable steel that, striking against the flint of his paternal Protestantism, gave him the spark of creative ability. Though he is a mixture of Southern & Northern blood, he calls the North "the homeland of my heart." Thomas Mann was backward at school, and his elder brother Heinrich was considered the most promising literary member of the family. When his father died and the family business soon after, his mother moved with the younger children to Munich. After his schooling Thomas followed, went to work in an insurance office. But he wrote whenever he could, soon won himself a year in Italy. He had already published a book of short stories when in 1901, at the age of 26, his lengthy novel Buddenbrooks, based on the history of his own family, founded his literary reputation. In 1905 he married Katja Pringsheim, only daughter of a household very like his own, settled down with her in Munich to raise his family of three sons, three daughters, write his books in contemplative quiet.

But his quiet life had its troubles. His two sisters both killed themselves. Before he could finish The Magic Mountain, the War burst over Europe. Author Mann was exempted from military service because the first doctor to examine him had read his books; said he: "You shall be left alone."

Though he led a more public life after the War, as befitted Germany's foremost novelist, did his bit for reconstruction by lecturing in Paris, served as president of the Bavarian section of the German Authors Society and signed a cable pleading for executive clemency in the Scottsboro case, he joined no party, stayed away from social and political functions. When the Nazi broom began to sweep Germany clean of non-"Aryans," "Aryan" Thomas Mann picked up his household goods and left. Resigned to permanent exile, he says: "As a German. I can understand what has happened and why it has happened. As a human being I cannot justify it. . . . The German people may have learned what it means to be hated; that should only have taught them that vicious hate has no place in the civilized world. ... If to be more German means to be less human, I can make only one choice."

Tall, lean, with clipped mustache, close-set eyes, Thomas Mann is dry of face and manner; his movements are almost feminine. His few intimate friends he can count on the fingers of one hand. He likes comfort, order, a settled family life. He was so fond of his dog Bashan that he wrote a biography of him (A Man-and His Dog, 1919). A slow worker, it took him two and a half years to write Budden-brooks, twelve years for The Magic Mountain, some ten years for the first part of Jacob and His Brothers. Because he is mildly superstitious, the round numbers that have partitioned his life please his "sense of mathematical clarity." "It was midday when I came into the world; my 50 years lay in the middle of the decades, and in the middle of a decade, halfway through it, I was married. ... I have a feeling that I shall die at the same age as my mother, in 1945."

Though Germany has given Thomas Mann only a grudging preeminence, Europe and the U. S. acknowledge him as one of the greatest living writers. Readers of his masterpiece-in-progress will echo the prayer of Critic Gabriele Reuter: "May the guardian angel of great literature sustain Thomas Mann, that he may complete this work as powerfully and beautifully as he has begun it."

* Last fortnight the second was published in Berlin.

/- By Translator H. T. Lowe-Porter.

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