Thomas Mann
The Stature of Thomas Mann. Edited by Charles Neider. (New Directions. $5.)
MR. NEIDER has collected an international body of writing, critical . and hagiographic, which testifies to Thomas Mann's world-wide fame and influence. Fame (" the sum total," Rilke said, " of all mis- understandings circulated about a person ") has done strange things to Thomas Mann. It forced him into his position of literary pro- tagonist of that " other Germany " which refused to compound with the Nazis. With no personal bent for politics, he was still too honest to compromise and too big to be overlooked. He could do nothing but lead. He opposed to the Nazis his eloquence and integrity ; losing, he retired to the United States, majestic, sad, unruffled, taking the centre of gravity of the German literary world with him. M. Gide, whose preface to the French edition of Europe Beware is re- produced here, comments on the process with intelligence and sympathy. It is patent that Mann's denunciations of the conduct of his countrymen did far more good than harm to the reputation of his country. " As for us," wrote M. Gide in 1938, " we have enough love for Germany to recognise her voice rather in the protest of a Thomas Mann than in the letter of the dean of the university of Bonn." Mr. Priestley, who a year earlier wrote a preface to the English edition of An Exchange of Letters, had said much the same thing : " Two Germanies, addressing one -another across a dreadful gulf."
Thomas Mann, his personality, his appearance, his family life, his method of work, are described and revered in this collection: his creative mind, his style, his philosophical system are studied and analysed. He is and remains a German. His work is utterly German —" in its massive intellectuality, its mystical brooding quality and, at times, its faintly morbid melancholy," as Mr. Priestley observes. This is not to belittle its general significance. It has happened that the disintegration of the Western world of which Mann is in certain ways the chronicler has taken extreme forms more swiftly in Germany than in the other great European countries. Thomas Mann is the most profound of its analysts. Profound, and to the English ponderous ; therefore they do not, in general, read him, and his direct influence on English is unlikely ever to be of the same order as his influence on American literature. The day has gone when English- men would claim that the decline of the West was no concern of theirs ; but they will still avoid the Magic Mountain as they would the Slough of Despond ; the primrose path is sweeter.
The influence of a great writer on letters is not always, nor of necessity, good. To read the body of exegesis that is growing up around the works of Thomas Mann reminds one painfully : Here is another trick that fame has played on him. Mann's complexity of style and structure carries its justification—in his own work, not in the work of followers. Mann has much to say and says it resound- ingly ; " level after level of meaning " opens out before the pilgrim, who may feel lost and frightened and lonely in this stately forest, but is rewarded with exaltation. But only from the Master should the pilgrim have to submit to these rigours : disciples should be wary in the demands they make. Hacking through the undergrowth of
jargon in some of the German and American criticism which Mr. Neider--himself a principal offender—has collected, one pilgrim at
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