Masterpiece

JOSEPH THE PROVIDER--Thomas Mann, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter--Knopf ($3).

Last week Thomas Mann published the final volume of his major work. Few novelists in the history of literature have planned a work of such scope and significance, and made their plans come true.

Joseph the Provider finishes a masterpiece. It is a masterpiece in the way that Tolstoy's novels are, rather than Shakespeare's plays--i.e., it is deliberate, sustained, careful (often tiresomely so), rather than spontaneous and overflowing with its own imaginative energy. The final volume's 606 pages bring the epic of Joseph to its end (Bible version, 21 pages; Mann's version, 2,005 pages). Few readers will want to know all of Mann's retelling of the story, the resuscitation of Egyptian and Hebrew thought and customs with which he surrounds it, the lessons for the modern world he derives from it. But no contemporary reader can afford not to know what is in Thomas Mann's version of the life of Joseph.

The Second Pit. Joseph in Egypt ended when Joseph, Potiphar's powerful steward, was ruined by the false accusation of Potiphar's wife. Potiphar sent him to the island fortress of Zawi-Re in Lower Egypt. When this volume opens, Joseph is a prisoner, brooding on the wreckage of his life and the mystery of Egypt, while a boat hustles him off to jail through the bustle of Egypt's busiest highway, the Nile. Ashamed, defeated, heartsick, and yet never without a mild, detached humor and a powerful conviction of future triumph, Joseph thinks how much this imprisonment is like his first descent into the pit when his brothers stole his coat of many colors.

Mai-Sachme. The fortress of Zawi-Re was a group of gloomy buildings on an island in the Mendesian arm of the Nile. When Joseph first saw the prison he divined that he would be there three years. He was right. Joseph was 27. Joseph's jailer, the warden of Zawi-Re, was Mai-Sachme, a soldier and physician, a short, dark, calm man of 40.* Mai-Sachme made Joseph an overseer. Into the isolated life of genial Jailer Mai-Sachme, who was like an intelligent modern officer serving in a frontier post, Joseph brought a breath of the great world of Memphis and Thebes, the wild outland of Canaan.

For Joseph stood between two cultures--the crumbling, terrifying, brilliant, polytheistic life of the Egyptians, and the simple, severe, shepherd's culture of the monotheistic Jews. His mind was filled with the ceaseless introspective poetry of comparison and analogy, prophecy and symbolism. He thought about the story of the Flood and its symbolic repetition in the tears of men. He compared the eerie legends of Egyptian mythology with the religious teachings of the Hebrews. He pondered upon the comparative meaning of sin. Sin for the Egyptians was not conscious wrongdoing, but more akin to a want of foresight. "It meant folly, it meant clumsy dealing with God, it was something to jeer at. Whereas wisdom meant foresight and care for the future."

The innumerable gods of the Egyptians embodied the people's ceaseless attempts to fill all the chinks and crannies through which the innumerable misfortunes of life might enter. The life of Joseph's mind, supple, varied, quick, humorous, was a constant preoccupation with religious problems so difficult that their very statement is tedious to the plain reader. Thomas Mann makes it plain that Joseph was a great religious poet. For, among many other things, Mann's Joseph is a portrait of the artist as a God-guided egoist.

Like Grazing Sheep. When the first volumes of the Joseph series were published, Novelist Willa Cather brilliantly characterized their "dreamy indefiniteness . . . the story has almost the movement of grazing sheep."

The deliberateness, digression and slow tempo are more marked in Joseph the Provider than in the previous volumes. It is the most difficult reading of all the Joseph books. Much of Joseph the Provider is given over to recapitulations of parts of the earlier books, with Author Mann's discussions of the manifold meanings of the incidents, the legends, and the motives of the characters.

Although this volume tells the climax of the story (Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dream of the seven fat and the seven lean kine, his rise to be "Lord over Egypt" and his reunion with his father, Jacob, and his errant brothers), it is so slow-paced and philosophical that it seems static, despite the rapid development of its action. For it lacks the intense excitement of the scenes in which Joseph was cast into the pit, then sold into slavery (Young Joseph), or the intensity of the amorous scenes with Potiphar's wife (Joseph in Egypt). But while it is written with the deliberately pedantic humor in which Mann casts his cosmic irony, Joseph the Provider is so lucid that the magnificent flow of its prose may well be overlooked.

Story of a Story of a Story. The Joseph books almost require a second reading. Readers will be likely to enjoy this big book only when they have looked back upon the immense pattern of the story, the array of characters--Joseph himself, his father, Jacob, his brothers, the scribes and stewards of Egypt, the courtly eunuch Potiphar, his sexually frustrated wife, the two dwarfs (in whom Mann personifies the principles of ineffectual goodness and potent evil), Pharaoh, the sermons of the bald-pated Egyptian priests, the astronomy, history, architecture, concepts of life & death--and the similarities and differences in the ancient legends of different people that Mann delights in.

Mann was first attracted to the Joseph legend because it seemed a perfect story. It turned out to be so perfect in its infinite human implications that, when Mann finished, he had written the story of a story of a story of a story. Step by step, Joseph the Provider is hard going. But from time to time, on the book's Saharan horizons, loom rich oases of pure storytelling--some as long as a novel.

Accomplishment. Says Thomas Mann (who was 69 on D-day): "I have often been asked what it actually was that made me turn to this remote and out-of-the-way subject. . . ." Two of his own answers: his reading of Goethe, who once thought of writing the Joseph story himself; Mann's lifelong interest in Egypt.*

In the brilliant and profound 54-page preface to Joseph and His Brothers (TIME, June 11, 1934), Mann said: "Very deep is the well of the past." Into this well, recorded history goes only a little way, and not truth, but mystery, lies in its fathomless depths. Yet the myths of man are pious abbreviations reaching far deeper than his factual knowledge of 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 traveler in time. . . . 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 well of the past is deep, but, when they have finished the two great characterizations of Joseph the Provider--Old Jacob, and the brilliant, unstable Pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, better known as Ikhnaton, the great liberalizer of Egyptian religion and art, one of the precursors of Christianity, most readers will feel that Mann has made the past's deep waters, at least for a dizzying way down, crystal clear.

* At twelve, in school in Germany, Mann was asked the name of the sacred bull of the ancient Egyptians. He answered: "Chapi." The teacher scolded him for volunteering a nonsensical answer, said the right asnwer was Apis. But it was little Thomas who was right.

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