Transformed Legend

THE TRANSPOSED HEADS -- Thomas Mann--Knopf ($2).

Thomas Mann's latest book is dedicated to his good friend, Dr. Heinrich Zimmer, ex-Heidelberg Orientalist, with the words "Returned with thanks." Mann owed Zimmer his plot: a Hindu legend which Dr. Zimmer (who now lives in New Rochelle, N.Y.) had outlined in a lecture on Kali, the Mother Goddess of India, in Switzerland in 1938. The legend:

Two sworn friends, one wise, one strong, were suitors of the same woman. The wise man won, and all three went on a journey during which the men were attacked and beheaded. The wife, using magic her husband had taught her, brought both to life, but unfortunately put the wrong heads on the wrong bodies. Problem: Who was the husband now? Verdict: The man with the husband's head. Moral, such as it was: The supremacy of the head over the body.

It was a bloody, innocent little story with an innocent little point. By the time Thomas Mann got through with it, it was about as innocent as a Gorgon's smile.

Mann's two young men differ notably in physique and temperament. Shridaman has a noble head, a secondary body, Nanda a handsome body whose head is like the parsley on a roast. Shridaman is the religious, poetic, neurotic type, Nanda an amiable, simple sensualist. They like each other through their differences. For shy Shridaman, Nanda courts Sita "of the beautiful hips," and whose head is as empty as her body is luscious. The tragicomic troubles of this trio are just nicely begun where the original legend ends.

Nanda, with his second-team head and Shridaman's bench-warming body, retires to the woods for solitude and self-mortification. Shridaman, with Nanda's body, becomes that great rarity, "a husband who, so to speak, consisted of nothing but principal features." For a while he and Sita have a wonderful time.

But there are sadder, bitterer, funnier relationships between head and body, desire and fulfillment, than the original storyteller ever dreamed of; these, and their solution, make up the rest of Mann's book. A fade-out starts Sita's child, who combines many of the features of all three, on his career. His name is Samadhi, which means Collection. (Such symmetries make one shudder to think what Dr. Mann could do with Abie's Irish Rose.) This story is told with a great writer's irony at its most bland, cruel and elegant.

It is an irony which controls and blends extreme psychological slapstick with suggestions of the most sinister and sorrowful mysteries of life.

Under the mishaps of Shridaman and Nanda lie, half disclosed, the whole range of human hope and hopelessness, the folly and significance of the effort to unite opposites, the impossibility of gratifying a desire except at the expense of someone else.

To Dr. Zimmer, Mann owed more than his plot. From his Maya, a translation (into German) of a gigantic compendium of Hindu mythology, Mann took detail, background, much, very likely, of his philo-symbological machinery. It is Dr. Zimmer too who best summed up this novel: "It is as if Hindemith composed a one-act opera, availing himself of the motifs from The Twilight of the Gods."

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