Mann on the Mann

Mann on Mann

Most great writers leave the assertion of their place in literature to their disciples; some confidently speak out for themselves. One such was the late, great William Butler Yeats.*Another is literature's most famed contemporary exile. Novelist Thomas Mann. The February number of Atlantic Monthly published a speech by Author Mann, in which he speaks of himself and his work with confidence and authority.

A year ago Thomas Mann was appointed consultant in German literature for the Library of Congress. As a member of the staff. Librarian Archibald MacLeish asked Mann to make a speech before a small group in Washington, suggested that he discuss his great, four-volume, just-finished masterwork Joseph and His Brothers. (The final volume, Joseph the Provider, is slated for publication this fall.) Author Mann was at first "startled and disconcerted." Would it not, he asked, "seem terribly presumptuous, vain and egocentric" to talk of a mere novel in a time of world war? That would depend, he decided, "a little on the novel," and much on the fact that, in a world struggling for unity, "borderlines between the different spheres of human thought become unessential."

To tell the whole story of Joseph and His Brothers, explains Author Mann, means going back 15 years to the day he reread the Bible story of Joseph, and beyond that to Mann's own development as a writer.

"Three times," says Mann, "at different stages of my life, have I lived under the prolonged tension of tasks which had a certain affinity to greatness." First great task was Buddenbrooks, a novel "of the

German bourgeoisie," written when Mann was 25. The second great task came 25 years later in The Magic Mountain, a study of "a friendly alter ego" in the midst of "European intellectual controversies." The third great task came in his middle 50s, when Mann found in the story of Joseph a theme embracing "the typical, the eternally human, eternally recurring, timeless--in short, the mythical."

The Bible story of Joseph was prehistoric, an all-too-brief, telescoped account of ages of prehistory. Soon Mann discovered that "the personal story of Joseph alone would not do, but that the primeval and original story, the history of the world, demanded to be included at least in perspective." For the prehistoric men & women of Genesis did not seem to share the modern idea that individuality is unique and self-centered. They were "human beings who did not quite know who they were, or who knew it in a more pious, deeply exact way than the modern individual--beings whose identity was open in back and included the past with which they identified themselves, in whose steps they trod, and which again became present through them."

In this dawn of history Mann found "the birth of the ego." Out of a dim past appears Jacob (the father of Joseph) "a patriarchal and respectable form of human individualization and emancipation." His "far more bold and daring . . . son" has "not only discovered God, but knows how to 'treat' Him." Youngest of all is the 17-year-old Pharaoh, who has reached the stage of being "an anticipating, a premature Christian--the mythical prototype of those who are on the right way but are not the right ones for that way." Still confined by the mythical framework of the collective past, these figures stretch out beyond the present into the future "in the same way that certain figures of Rodin wrest themselves out of the stone and awaken from it."

Gently indicated in the discussion of this emergence is the suggestion that, in Joseph, Mann sees his own course of development, from the individualistic studies of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain to the all-embracing human theme of Joseph. For to Mann, the ego of the emancipated Joseph is an "artistic ego." And, just as Mann, became exiled and wrote his final volume under "the serene, Egyptian-like sky of California," so did the exiled Joseph at last become "the provider and benefactor of a foreign people."

"An artist's life," concludes Thomas Mann, often "strives to follow the great." Mann himself followed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who, in his youthful days, tried his hand at writing the story of Joseph. It was with "playful boldness which springs from the sense of tradition and succession" that Mann confidently took up the theme, completed massively what his great predecessor had begun "naively" and later abandoned entirely.

*There is not a fool can call me friend, And 1 may dine at journey's end With Landor and with Donne.

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