Work, Save, Pray

By Martha Duffy

LETTERS OF THOMAS MANN. Selected and translated by Richard and Clara Winston. 690 pages. Knopf. $17.50.

In 1911 Thomas Mann put aside work on his novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man to write Death in Venice. When he returned to it 43 years later, he took up work on the very same manuscript page and continued writing without the slightest alteration in tone or intent. The history of writing cannot contain another instance of such awesome single-mindedness and coherence.

One has the feeling that Mann could have done the same thing with most of the 540 letters in this volume, but what is a wonder in fiction has more ambiguous effects in correspondence. Though the first letter was written by a 14-year-old in 1889 and the last by a dying man of 80, the reader gets little impression of shift from youth to age. Mann's correspondence was seldom dull and never perfunctory--he justly credits himself with "bringing linguistic passion to letters"; yet it communicates little that is spontaneous or private. Though he wrote famous anti-Nazi letters, as well as scores to family and intimate friends, what emerges most is a deep commitment to German cultural tradition. He loved his language and those who mastered it, pre-eminently Goethe. He considered music "the paradigm of all art" and needed it as life needs the sun. Wagner he saw as "my strongest and most formative artistic experience." Only a man serenely in harmony with his culture could write a passionate love letter to his future wife extolling her as "a minor miracle of harmonious education, a realized cultural ideal."

The absence of personal tidbits will hardly come as a surprise to Mann's admirers. Like Nabokov, he is a shadow man in modern literature simply because his personal life was a model of probity. The public feels familiar with Faulkner's drunks, Hemingway's yellow streak, Gide's Arab boys. Mann had no such weaknesses. He married once, raised six children and wrote 28 books. Despite wars and exile, he lived the measured life of the cultured German bourgeoisie into which he was born.

WORK, SAVE, PRAY was the motto carved over his grandfather's door and apparently in Mann's heart. He worked every day of his life--in trains, ship cabins, anywhere. Mornings were so rigidly set aside for writing fiction that he said that he worried only in the afternoon. He hoarded experiences for over 40 years before turning them into fictions. His religion was art and his devotion total.

From the beginning to the end of his long letter career, he was at pains to convince the world that he was a humorist, an ironist, a playful, cheerful fellow--anything, in fact, but the strongman of literature who undertook to support the whole of middle-class European culture on his shoulders. But by the time Mann was 26 and had published Buddenbrooks, the world knew him for what he was. A massive, two-volume account of the decline of a great merchant family, Buddenbrooks became Europe's greatest bestseller until All Quiet on the Western Front. The Buddenbrooks family was Mann's own, of course, and their ruinous private quarrels turned out to be a microcosm of the differences that would plunge the continent into war.

The rise of the Third Reich confronted him with national tragedy; it drew from him great repugnance as well as some of his greatest letters. But Mann's political instincts were not always reliable. In 1914 he was prattling in a letter to his brother about "this great, fundamentally decent peoples' war," sentiments he largely retracted a few years later in a tortured essay. But he immediately saw the Nazis for the "second-rate Pizarros" they were. He left Munich and all his possessions in 1933, and by 1936 all his books were banned. "The angina of exile" was the bitterest experience of his life; at the beginning, he suffered the only period "in his life when he could not write anything at all.

He wrote only for Germans; others were "extras." In the U.S. he found a nation of extras who welcomed him with enthusiasm he could scarcely fathom. After he had lost his language and his natural audience and settled near Los Angeles in 1941, his family began to play a larger role in his correspondence. He treated Bruno Walter to the details of grandson Frido's baby talk. In a rare hint of jealousy, he wrote that the 57-year-old professor who married Elisabeth, his youngest and prettiest daughter, "probably no longer expected to win so much youth."

Most of the family letters are written to his two oldest children, Erika and Klaus. A restless, flamboyant pair, they often seemed like characters out of one of their father's more sardonic stories. After 1940, Erika traveled the world as a passionately anti-Nazi war correspondent. Mann sought and took her advice on his novels and exulted whenever she touched down in California.

His relations with Klaus were far more clouded, especially in Mann's later years. Klaus wrote too--novels, criticism, political tracts. They did not amount to much, but the famous father wrote him faithfully after each publication letters that could pass for book reviews. Remote, judicious, complacent, they must have been a heavy burden. In 1949 after starting a novel on suicide, Klaus died of a drug overdose. Suicide ran in the family--both Mann's sisters killed themselves--but the father acknowledged a share of guilt for Klaus. "My very existence cast a shadow on him," he wrote Hermann Hesse. But still he carped; Klaus' novel Vulkan, he continued, was "very good aside from the parts he could have done better."

No one reads Mann much today. Kafka, the German-language writer whose territory was limited to the psychic interior, turned out to be the one who spoke most eloquently to the times. But Mann wrote powerfully and fastidiously about the life of the mind, of conscience and perception. He took on transcendent themes--from the Bible in the Joseph series to the nature of creativity in Dr. Faustus--and a future era will no doubt turn to him again.

Meanwhile, these letters serve as a special kind of passport to German culture: garlands of Bibis and Babueschleins, Piffis and Pfiffis and other Teutonic terms of endearment, passages on Wagner and Beethoven that seem written from the soul, notes on food ("firm North German scrambled eggs and baked potatoes shining with butter"). They also bear witness to a particular man of massive intelligence and the way in which he endured a moment in history when everything he believed in and believed permanent seemed bound for destruction.

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