Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature by Anthony Heilbut (review)

Book Reviews191 ANTHONY HEILBUT. Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. 636 p. rleilbut's book covers Mann's life and works up to the late 1930's; a postscript deals with his years in the United States and his return to Europe. The most striking aspect of this latest entry into the Thomas Mann biography sweepstakes is what happens when attitudes towards homosexuality that are characteristic of the late twentieth century sensibility are brought to bear on the life and works of a half-closeted son of the nineteenth century. Only this discrepancy lends some credence to the claim that Heilbut's book is a "groundbreaking," "important and original" biography which "provides new social and psychological insights into the interplay of Mann's life" with his works, as the dustjacket would have the reader believe. Heilbut's central argument—Mann "dealt with the loss of erotic happiness" through a "highly conscious sublimation" (502)—is neither "groundbreaking" nor "original"; it has already been advanced by Karl Werner Böhm in his Zwischen Selbstzucht und Verlangen. Thomas Mann und das Stigma der Homosexualität (1991). Heilbut, however, takes a step further than Böhm. Not satisfied with arguing (again) that it was Mann's homoerotic longing that provided the "psychological spur" for his artistic production (vi; the quotation is from Mann's 1932 essay "Goethe's Laufbahn als Schriftsteller"), he wants to embrace Mann as one of a band of gay brothers who, in his works, sends out "tribal signal[s]" (240), and claim him as an "avatar of gay liberation," a phrase, Heilbut asserts, that "might have sprung from Mann's critical vocabulary." (503) The case Heilbut is trying to make would find a more sympathetic hearing from this reader if it were not built on factual errors, distortions, misreadings, questionable interpretations, and above all on the highly dubious conflation of the sentiments of a homosexual whose formative years were the last decades of the late nineteenth century and those of the postStonewall generation. The errors are numerous, though some of them are minor, others are more egregious, and cumulatively they do not inspire confidence in the biographer 's reliability. Heinrich Mann's short story Abdication is not set in a boarding school (17); Aschenbach did not write a "treatise on maya" (190) but rather a novel entitled "Maya"; "selige Sehnsucht" is not a "longing for the soul" but rather a "blissful longing"; Clawdia Chauchat's "mähnschen" is not a "little mane of hair" which rhymes with "Hänschen" (413) but renders her Russian pronounciation of "Menschen"; Christian Buddenbrook does not become an "actor" specializing in "character roles" (98); Hanno Buddenbrook does not "draw [ ] a line through his name in the family bible as if to write himself off" (102); Professor Kafka is not a character in the Magic Mountain, he appears only in a first draft; Thomas Mann did not "spy" on his son Klaus (312) because he "sexually" desired him (548), rather he came across him accidentally one evening when Klaus was naked in bed; Mann was not "briefly reconciled" with Klaus Heuser in 1935 (464), they never had a falling out; Ernst Bertram was not "a member of George's inner 192Rocky Mountain Review sanctum (!)" (63), but rather, as Heilbut states two hundred pages later, he "stood at the fringes of the George circle" (271); and the list goes on. As far as the distortions go, the space I have at my disposal allows me to point out only one typical example. In 1919 Mann spent three weeks on the Baltic Sea. Among the guests at the hotel was the Hamburg shipbuilder Kirsten and his family. One of Kirsten's sons, Oswald, with his "Armin Martens-Schädel" (Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1918-1921, 282), made a deep impression on Mann: he represented the " 'Nie veraltende'," the "obligate 'Lenz' " (290). Six diary entries are in part about him. Heilbut's brief account of this episode is characteristic of the way in which he bends and combines the facts to suit his image of Mann. It deserves to be quoted in full: "In July 1919 he [Mann] spends Katia's birthday away from...