Veteran biographer Hayman (Tennessee Williams, 1994, etc.)
painstakingly traces the great German novelist's progress from
anatomist of fin-de-siecle decadence to august personification of
his nation's conscience. While maintaining a veneer of bourgeois
propriety, Mann (1875 - 1955) experienced a lifelong, seemingly
unconsummated passion for young men about which he wrote freely in
diaries kept sealed until several decades after his death. Hayman
makes efficient use of these journals to convincingly reinterpret
much of Mann's life and work in light of his sexual secret, arguing
that Death in Venice, for example (in which an aging writer becomes
obsessed with a boy), is fundamentally autobiographical. The
biographer's focus, however, is not on Mann's inner life, which he
leaves nearly as opaque as he finds it, but rather on his
accomplishments as a public figure. Hayman locates the origins of
Mann's formal style in the starched severities of the wealthy
merchant family into which he was born. Once Mann escaped to become
a writer, successes came quickly: first well-regarded stories, then
the massive family saga Buddenbrooks, whose runaway popularity
vaulted him at a young age into the highest circles of literary
celebrity. The author skillfully chronicles the progress of Mann's
masterful narratives from genesis to publication and also lays out
his political evolution, revealing both his early anti-Semitism and
the courage with which he later actively opposed Hitler. Mann's
life with his wife and children and his late years in exile in the
US are meticulously rendered, and ultimately the drama of his
bisexuality seems little more than a footnote to history. But
Mann's compartmentalized consciousness cries out for a more
trenchant examination; striving nobly not to speculate, Hayman
refuses to make the educated guesses biographers can best supply.
An important, accomplished work, containing the outlines of a less
professional, more passionate look at Mann and his family that,
while yet unwritten, might someday provide drama to match the
master's. (Kirkus Reviews)
Thomas Mann, author of "Death in Venice", "The Magic Mountain", and
"Buddenbrooks" was a man with secrets. This biography offers a
portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist, drawing on
Mann's unexpurgated diaries. It uncovers a brilliant writer's mask
to reveal the private man: his bisexuality, his obsession with
preserving appearances and the deep guilt which plagued him for
nearly fifty years. The sanitized self-image Mann strove to
maintain is revealed as a fragile veneer. Drawing on the diaries
that he stipulated should remain under seal for twenty years after
his death, and on interviews with Mann's children, the author
depicts a man subject to nervous trembling, convulsive sobbing and
moments of sexual embarrassment. When his novels are reread from
this perspective, new meanings emerge and interconnections between
the problems of the author and his characters become apparent. As
Mann wrote to a friend, he devised "novelistic forms and masks
which can be displayed in public as a means of relaying my love, my
hatred, my sympathy, my contempt, my pride, my scorn and the
accusations I want to make". Ronald Hayman is the biographer of
Proust, Sartre, Kafka, Nietzche, Brecht and Sylvia Plath.
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