Thomas Mann's Artist-Heroes

Chapter Ten. The Black Swan

161 CHAPTER TEN The Black Swan In “Artists and Old Age” Gottfried Benn observes that the late period of an author’s work is characterized either by gentleness, serenity, toleration and noble mellowness or by ruthlessness and radical honesty.1 Mann’s novel The Black Swan (in German Die Betrogene, The Deceived One, 1953), completed in his seventy-eighth year, surely belongs to the second category. Its pathological and even disgusting clinical details express his cathartic defense against old age and poor health; they offer proof that Mann, who had recovered from a lung cancer operation in 1946, could face the ugly and terrifying reality of death. The story was inspired by Mann’s wife Katia, who recalls in her memoirs: We had an acquaintance, who—like Frau von Tümmler—was getting on in years but had not reached the menopause. Once when we were talking about her, I said, “That worries me a little. It could be something pathological.” “How do you mean?” “I once knew a woman, Frau So-and-So. She was in love with a younger man. One day she came triumphantly to tell me her secret: ‘Just imagine! I’ve begun menstruating again.’ It turned out to be cancer of the uterus.” My husband was very impressed by this. “You know, it’s fascinating. It’s so striking that I’m going to have to do something with it.”2 The Black Swan, which was roughly treated by American reviewers, has been ignored or neglected by critics of Mann and has received less attention than any of his novels. It has a number of obvious faults: limited plot, wooden characters, artificial dialogue, crude theme. Even Mann was dissatisfied and admitted that it did not reach his own high standards: “The things that have come since [Doctor Faustus] are postludes—let’s not quibble about it. They are as good as ordinary things can be, as is the case with The Black Swan, which I do not esteem very highly, rather disgruntled and spoiled by earlier work as I am.”3 Despite its defects, the cunning and artful novella reveals the hand of a master and has considerable interest . Its complex symbolism, its musical exposition of recurrent themes, its political, philosophical and religious ideas go well beyond morbidity, and are closely related to his lifelong fascination—from Buddenbrooks through Doctor Faustus—with disease, decay and death. Mann’s story of Death in Düsseldorf has been compared to Death in Venice, and the tales have certain superficial similarities. Both concern the perverse love of an older person for a beautiful youth. Both heroes submit to cosmetic improvement and are transported by sinister boatmen. Both loves destroy the harmony of a life that has been ordered by innate moral conviction. Both loves, to a certain extent, are life-enhancing, yet both are punished by disease and swift death.4 But The Black Swan, which lacks the aesthetic richness, intellectual depth and moral greatness of Death in Venice , has much more in common with Mann’s early story “Tristan” (1903). In “Tristan” disease is detached from life, exalted by Spinell as a superior condition, equated with creative genius, and expressed in music and literature. Gabriele’s banal existence in Bremen and discussion of potato pancakes are transfigured by Spinell’s imagination into a spiritual state. Her infatuation with the sinister tempter (who urges her to play the expressly forbidden Liebestod from Wagner) provokes her fatal hemorrhage. Mann confessed that this ironic story was both a parody of his own absorption with fin-de-siècle decadence and a satire on certain aspects of his own character: [It was my] purpose to satirize and condemn in Spinell certain undesirable tendencies in myself, namely aestheticism, that lifeless preciosity which I consider supremely dangerous. . . . I masked this character in the external features of a man 162 chapter ten of letters whom I knew [Arthur Holitscher], a man whose talent was exquisite but alien to life. . . . For the rest I made my author an intellectual and a weakling, a fanatical devotee of beauty and humanly impoverished person. I elevated him into a type, into a walking symbol, and caused him to suffer a miserable defeat in his confrontation with the comically healthy brutality of a Hanseatic businessman—the husband of a lady with whom, in the sanatorium, the author has been conducting a high-minded flirtation. It is important...