An Old Man's Art

CONFESSIONS OF FELIX KRULL, CONFIDENCE MAN (384 pp.)--Thomas Mann--franslafed by Denver Lindley--Knopf ($4.50).

"I have to learn how to say goodbye," Thomas Mann said to a visitor not long before his death last month. "That is an old man's art." The last novel to leave his pen is a charming show of how well the old man learned that old man's art. It is a gay goodbye--as gay as Mann could ever get. And yet his last words will also provoke serious interpretation. Felix Krull is a picaresque novel, and it stands, looking sometimes a little lump ish, in the raffish succession of The Golden Ass to Don Quixote to A Sentimental Journey to Lafcadio's Adventures to (sob!) L'il Abner itself. The book's first fragment (54 pages) was published more than 30 years ago--inspired by the impassioned morbidities of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. But most of the final 330 pages, written in the last years of the author's life, strike up a more and more Rabelaisian jig.

The Art of Stealing. Felix Krull is the son of a Rhinelander who manufactured unusually bad champagne and committed suicide because nobody would buy it. Felix is a precocious boy. At an early age he has learned to fake fits and migraine symptoms--he can even make his fingernails turn blue--in order to stay home from school. Soon he is able to forge signatures with the technical virtuosity of a three-time loser. He steals, too, but theft is an esthetic experience to him. And when it comes to sex (as it does soon, with the housemaid), he does not mind admitting that "my gifts for the pleasures of love bordered on the miraculous."

It is obvious to this handsome little devil in fact, that he is made of "finer clay," and he sets out to acquire a gleaming finish in the heat of events. As soon as he has choused his draft board with a neatly feigned epileptic fit, he lights out for Paris, where he hires out as elevator operator in a fashionable hotel. At about this time, his fingers stick to a lady's jewel case, and soon they are stroking the lady herself with such skill that she begs him to steal the rest of her valuables too. He obliges. And so it goes, until Felix is off on a world tour with the title of marquis (bogus) and letters of credit (genuine) on banks from Lisbon to Singapore.

The Door to Hell. The work breaks off at the end of Volume I, and perhaps none too soon. Krull is surprisingly funny, but at times the humor is as heavy as Kartoffelklosse--and not helped by a translation that misses much of the hero-villain's comic pomposity. The action falls asleep at one point while Mann delivers himself of a monumental snore : a 20-page lecture on the nature of the universe.

Nevertheless, despite its faults, the book is a compelling kind of success. For Mann's writing has, to a degree that few of his contemporaries could equal, what Felix Krull calls "the ineffable power, which there are no words monstrously sweet enough to describe, that teaches the firefly to glow." There comes a moment on almost every page when the words glow, and the reader, charmed, follows the firefly into the dark.

The dark, that is, of the German soul. In Mann's sensibility, the yawning portal of burgher respectability leads only to hell--that same hell in which Nietzsche, lonely and restless, contracted the syphilis that drove him insane, and in which sentimental devotees of Brahms Lieder ran concentration camps.

The Ode to Life. Thomas Mann's literary world is one of catastrophic oppositions. As Author Mann developed, the problem took many forms--the artist v. the bourgeois, the criminal v. society, Nietzsche v. Goethe, disease v. conformity, Asia v. Europe, music v. reason. On one occasion, Mann was able to wed his antitheses into a higher reality. The moment came in the lyric, mysterious "snow scene" in The Magic Mountain, in which substance and accidents, skies and devils dissolve in the "white darkness" of the snow. It was one of the really astounding moments in modern literature, but it passed, and Mann was caught once again in the tension of opposites.

In Krull, Thomas Mann tried to avoid that tension by laughing--ironically, a little pedantically, but joyously, too--at human folly. For he really liked his confidence man; he saw in him the world's need for illusion, exemplified by a swindler's tricks as much as by a monarch's pomp and an artist's fictions. The last lines he committed to publication are a rollicking apostrophe to life that few other men of 80--or 40--could have written: "A whirlwind of primordial forces seized and bore me into the realm of ecstasy. And high and stormy, under my ardent caresses ... I saw the surging of that queenly bosom."

Potato dumplings.

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