In the sharp piece of self-analysis with which Thomas Mann introduces his Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen, he speaks of his “conscientiousness—a quality which comprises such an essential element of my writings that one might almost say they consist of nothing else: conscientiousness, an ethical-artistic quality, to which I am indebted for whatever effects I may have gotten.” This conscientiousness has a double manifestation. It is first a “morality of production” which ranks the author among the great technicians of literature. This aspect of his writing culminates in his short novel, Death in Venice, where almost every paragraph contains some particular reward of vigilance, some formal invention, the solution of some literary problem.
The other aspect of his “conscientiousness” is the development of an attitude towards life which is, before everything else, patient, or even cautious. The total body of Mann’s work is the formulation of an ethics: not an ethical system, but an ethical proclivity, a highly complex reception of life through the modes of “Romantik, Nationalismus, Burgerlichkeit, Musik, Pessimismus, Humor.” If I understand Paul Elmer More correctly, I should say that Thomas Mann is a skeptic in Mr. More’s sense of the word. Which is, it seems to me, almost the equivalent to saying that he is fully the artist. For it is in the artist that we find formulations of life (symbolizations) which are as complex, as poised, as life itself. And perhaps what More means by skepticism, Mann means by anti-radicalism: a state of suspense before too easy a simplification. (I say easy, aware that a man may expend a whole life, and an heroic energy of discipline, in the pursuit of a doctrine, and yet have taken the “easier” channel of escape. Prior to this plunge into one direction, there is room for an initial skepticism or anti-radicalism which might deprive said man of precisely this life interest on which he will practice his energy of discipline. Over against the discipline of the soldier or the athlete—the early martyr or the modern business man—there is a discipline of evaluations, a discipline of poise rather than a discipline of projection. This is what I understand by skepticism, or anti-radicalism.)
So Mann is above all “conscientious.” And it was precisely this conscientiousness which kept him from being either a bourgeois or a Bohemian, kept him vacillating between his sympathy for the mediocre, the blunt, the unthinking and his deep understanding of hyperaesthesia. From Goethe, through Nietzsche, he accepts “life” as the basis of values; and yet he also associates the development of the aesthetic sense with the hypertrophy of channels which are useless, even positively inimical, to the purposes of this “life.”
With all this we are now familiar. This type of preoccupation is precisely what the nineteenth century left us as one of its most complex and irritating inheritances. While it is in Mann’s works that the mood is recovered in all its vitality and significance; since his are the sort of books that justify the genre.
However, I have been seeing Buddenbrooks too much in retrospect, too much the way Mann himself looks back upon it in his Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen (Mann’s craftsmanship has been rewarded in that he does not have to “renounce” his earlier work—as is the fashion—but deepens it as he proceeds). Before all else, Buddenbrooks is an epic novel (a large canvas with many details and people and single events, all drawn together into one organism).
It includes people who are characters, and others who are characteristic, and others who are types. At times, that is, it focuses upon strict psychological analysis, while at other times it develops caricature with the vivacity of Dickens, although without Dickens’ excesses of sentiment and vulgarities of style. Or again, Mann will centre his faculties on the charting of an event, as for instance the clinical record of a death, which he can carry off with a subtle mixture of emotionalism and technicality. Buddenbrooks (and the English version is an admirably smooth piece of work) is one of the few “epic” novels in which the handling of major proportions has not misled the author into a neglect of line-for-line texture.
Delight and Tears
The Apple of the Eye by Glenway Wescott. Lincoln Mac Veagh. The Dial Press
The Dial, December 1924, 513–515
I shall not forget the feeling of astonishment and—shall I say?—well-being with which, some months past, I read the opening of Glenway Wescott’s Bad Han when it appeared in The Dial.* Within three sentences Mr. Wescott had established his mood, a mixture of ruggedness and lyrism. The abrupt change from these four lines to the name of his heroine served to clinch his effect. Here, in the purest sense, was action. For such movements, it seems to me, are the essence of action in art.
Mr. Wescott’s novel, The Apple of the Eye, is a continuation of the story Bad Han as it appeared in The Dial. The novel has a kind of tripartite arrangement, in each part the focus being placed upon a different character, while the parts are held together by certain parallelings and interactions of plot and emotion. The first part is the story of Bad Han; the second centers about the love-affair between a delicate young girl and a farm-hand whose wanderlust is temporarily quieted by his attachment to this girl. In this second part a young boy, Dan, has been brought into the story; the third part now settles upon this boy, but treats him in the light of the parts preceding. One feels the reward of Mr. Wescott’s method: the story does have a cumulative effect, and the ending is made richer by its strong reliance upon what has preceded.
All of which is very vague, and in no wise conveys the quality of Mr. Wescott’s story. It is a book almost exclusively of emotional propulsion. Indeed, it even becomes a drenching in emotions, those softer, readier emotions which we designate usually as “feminine,” an experience purely of “delight and tears” (to borrow one of his chapter heads) and is thus a kind of revival in letters, an atavism, albeit a revival which is done with such force, such conviction, that one is caught unawares, and before he knows it is deeply involved in these partings (by death or locomotion), this girl like wilted flower left to perish, these stutterings of love, the sleep-walking in the moonlight, the call, or lure, of the city over the hills and plains. The machinery of pathos is well utilized—which, once again, fails to convey the quality of the story, for it is so obvious that the author did not think in terms of the “machinery” of pathos. His book, if it makes few demands upon the intellectual equipment of the reader, is a profoundly appealing piece of emotional writing, or one might better call it an emotional experience, for the reader’s participation in the author’s plot is intense enough to leave him in possession of the story’s overtones much as one is left with the overtones of some dream or some actual event which has occurred in one’s own life.
The principal objection I find to Mr. Westcott’s book is its failure to widen the field of our aesthetic perceptions. And I use the word “aesthetic” very broadly here, to signify simply all perceptions which engage what Goethe calls the organs of art. Such perceptions are of two categories: method, technique, discoveries of procedure within the medium itself; and the far more important discovery of symbols which adequately summarize for us the emotional and ideological complexities in which we are involved. In method, Mr. Wescott’s chief contribution is the bringing of a greater and more sensitive vitality to a type of book in which the typical novelist could feel very much at home. In subject-matter, the author has re-seen for us certain stock figures and situations of the contemporary story, re-seen with a keener eye, but no new angle of vision.
Yet this in itself becomes a kind of virtue. Our latent familiarity with the mold sets us for it so perfectly, that when Mr. Wescott does his act with such vigour we are able to follow him without a wrench. There is a point whereat the average suddenly transcends into the natural, and at times Mr. Wescott seems rewarded by precisely this illumination, so that his book becomes something of a racial experience, adjusting itself with sensitiveness to our desires for