I’m currently reading Thomas Mann. I should say re-reading Thomas Mann, because Death in Venice was assigned in at least two of my classes at Kenyon and Virginia. My Vintage paperback edition is marked up from start to finish. (It’s always curious to see which sentences and grafs I esteemed years ago; in some instances, as I puzzle over why I would have possibly underscored a particular section, I conclude that I might as well be reading someone else’s copy.)
Though I read Death in Venice at least twice before, I never could have told you quite what it was about. Sure: old man falls in love with young boy during a farewell-to-life sojourn in the titular Italian city. But the textures, the depths, the material that truly courses through the story all escaped me. After thinking about it for a few days, I’ve decided that my receptiveness to the story this third time around results in some large degree from the fact that I was just a student during my first two readings. I hadn’t yet struck it out in the world. I was probably 20 the first time I read it, maybe 22 or 23 the second time. Now I’m 29. Back then, I hadn’t attempted to make my own way on this absurd path of earning a living by means of letters and words. As Pete Dexter once put it, I hadn’t yet learned that writing is always about the “integrity of the sentence”—and that countless struggles ranging from writer’s block to solitary grumpiness and embarrassing credit card debts were only some of the obstacles to achieving the sort of high integrity I desired in the sentences I composed. Consquently, all of the passages in Death in Venice where the narrator describes Aschenbach’s life as an artist were Greek to me.
Something that particularly surprised me, however, was when I finished the novella and turned the page to the next story in the collection, “Tonio Kröger.” I don’t remember ever having read “Tonio Kröger”—but I must have done so once upon a time. The pages are filled with the same underscoring and marginalia of the book’s first 73 pages. But if I could barely remember Death in Venice, I had absolutely no recognition of “Tonio Kröger.”
The challenges and tribulations of artistry are once again a central theme in this story. But if Death in Venice sounds this theme with the pacing of a symphony, “Tonio Kröger” does so with the punch of a great rock song. Consider this passage on forming art with words:
But his love of the word kept growing sweeter and sweeter, and his love of form; for he used to say (and had already said it in writing) that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.
That seems as perfectly concise as any writer’s credo could possibly be.
A few pages later, Kröger also suggests one chilling culprit that has prevented me from finishing a single damn story since I first began trying to write them five or six years ago. I’m not saying this is the single reason—but it struck a deep note of recognition for me:
If you care too much about what you have to say, if your heart is too much in it, you can be pretty sure of making a mess. You get pathetic, you wax sentimental; something dull and doddering, without roots or outlines, with no sense of humour—something tiresome and banal grows under your hand, and you get nothing out of it but apathy in your audience and disappointment and misery in yourself….only the irritations and icy ecstasies of the artist’s corrupted nervous system are artistic. The artist must be unhuman, extra-human; he must stand in a queer aloof relationship to our humanity; only so is he in a position, I ought to say only so would he be tempted, to represent it, to present it, to portray it to good effect. The very gift of style, of form and expression, is nothing else than this cool and fastidious attitude towards humanity; you might say there has to be this impoverishment and devastation as a preliminary condition….[and here Kröger really lets it fly] It is all up with the artist as soon as he becomes a man and begins to feel.
How many pieces of writing have I commenced while in some sort of sentimental or over-sensitive delusion? Too many, without question. I don’t know if the extreme position articulated by Kröger—“this cool and fastidious attitude towards humanity”—is ultimately called for. In fact, this feels like a winning candidate for the story to finally disprove, and to dramatic effect for Herr Kröger, before the last sentence’s full stop. (I have a few pages to go.) Then again, maybe not.
But I do believe that Mann positively nails the professionalism of writing, which is an aspect of the craft that many would-be practitioners overlook. I certainly learned how to be a better professional when I was working full-time as a reporter, triumphing over the daily discomforts of headaches, fatigue, annoyances, creative ennui (if I may be so bold), and physical restlessness in order to keep my ass planted in my chair and pound out the copy. In addition, I had to learn how to hold real people aloof, to write about them critically in fair, sparse sentences; to lend the experiences they had shared with me the most fundamental and even-handed treatment I could provide. Only when I succeeded in that mission did any of my work begin to depart the realm of "poor" and maybe encroach upon the realm of "good."
Much of why I’ve recommenced this blog—and, I hope, with nary a sentimental or “dull and doddering” impulse—ultimately comes back to that desire for professionalism. My current work doesn't call for any writing, though I am still deeply involved in gathering stories. But reading Mann has reminded me of a truth that all writers would do well to tattoo on their brains: few things are more pathetic than a self-identified writer who seldom puts a word on the screen.
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