The Smitten One

THE BLACK SWAN (141 pp.)--Thomas Mann--Knopf ($2.75).

And it came to pass after these things, that his master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said, Lie with me. --Genesis 39:7

Thomas Mann once admitted that he regarded the Biblical account of the temptation of Joseph by Potiphar's wife as too blunt and brief. This theme of a mature woman's passion for a much younger man so excited Mann that in Joseph in Egypt (third volume of his Joseph cycle), he took the dozen or so Bible verses on the subject and blew them up into a 300-page storm. What fascinated Mann as much as the temptation of Joseph was the psychological motivation of the temptress, which he analyzed brilliantly in a chapter called "The Smitten One."

Mann returns to this theme in The Black Swan, but not with the hot-blooded zest he showed in Joseph in Egypt, only with a cold and antiseptic detachment.

A Trick of Nature. The smitten one, this time, is a Duesseldorf widow, Frau Rosalie von Tuemmler, who lives with her club-footed spinster daughter and student son. The time is the early 1920s. Frau Rosalie is just over 50 and just entering the menopause. She has a fine, compact figure and is still something of a beauty. She is much drawn to her daughter Anna, who paints, and together they share a quiet world of dialogue, mostly about art, music and books. But Frau Rosalie cannot conceal how restive and bitter she is at what she regards as Nature's meanest trick on her womanhood. When a handsome young American war veteran named Ken Keaton enters her family's life, Frau Rosalie invents excuses for inviting him to dinner and taking him on picnics. One hot night she invites him to strip down to his T-shirt for comfort, and then devours him with bold and blushing stares.

"Can You Love Me?" To Daughter Anna, Frau Rosalie reveals her abject love for Ken and an even more surprising secret, that Nature has restored her to full womanhood. Finally, in the dank secret passageway of a castle converted into a museum, Frau Rosalie pleads and babbles for the young man's favors: "Do you love me too, a little, only a little, tell me, can you love me . . . ? I will be yours, but not in this mould ... In your room . . . tonight." Ken is casual, cynical and agreeable, but Frau Rosalie never comes to his room. Next morning she is found unconscious in her bed after a hemorrhage. She dies of cancer a few weeks later.

Mann has always made much of the fact that illness often intensifies life and genius, citing as examples Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, who did some of their most vital work while ill. But in the case of poor, smitten Rosalie von Tuemmler, illness means only a pathetic last fling. And on this tired little literary trip to her side, 78-year-old Author Mann has clearly forgotten to pack his genius.

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