Case History of a Genius

DOCTOR FAUSTUS (510 pp.)--Thomas Mann--Knopf ($3.50).

In a poll of the world's literary critics, Nobel Prizewinner Thomas Mann would probably win the nomination as the greatest living novelist. He would not, however, win any prizes as the most read--or most readable. His ninth and latest novel, Dr. Faustus, is probably his most difficult. A November co-choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club,* Dr. Faustus is a challenge to the club's membership, who will find it a chewy mouthful after some of the literary pap they have been fed recently.

Ostensibly Faustus is the biography-in-progress of a fictitious German composer, Adrian Leverkuehn, who was born in 1885 and died insane in 1940. The biography is being written during World War II by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a professor, a dedicated parlor humanist and a typically humorless academic product of pre-Hitler German Kultur. This combination of dates, musical genius and philosophical reflection gives Mann, as his old readers could easily guess, a chance to air his views on such Mannish concerns as the problem of the artist in society, the free play of mind v. regimented thought, the relationship of disease to creative activity and the "German problem," before, during & after Hitler. Faustus can in fact be read as an intellectual sequel to The Magic Mountain, that massive and brilliant examination of European thought on the eve of World War I.

Mocking Genius. Mann has chosen no conventionally flashy music-hall prodigy for his case history of a genius. Adrian Leverkuehn, as his friend Zeitblom remembers him, was a brilliant, mocking, arrogant schoolboy who, even in his early teens, was constantly throwing off deep remarks. Sample: "Technique and comfort--in that state one talks about culture but one has not got it. Will you prevent me from seeing in the homophone-melodic constitution of our music a condition of musical civilization--in contrast to the old contrapuntal polyphone culture?"

His uncle, with whom he lived as a schoolboy, was a dealer in musical instruments. Before long, Adrian had secretly mastered the keyboard, discovered double counterpoint on his own and become the apple of the local music teacher's eye. Author Mann, who played the violin as a boy, held long conversations with his friends Igor Stravinsky and Bruno Walter as "research" for Faustus, and has packed his book with an impressive and at times annoying display of musical knowledge that will be over the heads of most readers.

Mann's habit of interspersing long, solemn, gratuitous essays on culture, humanism, the German temperament and other intellectual matters throughout his story puts too many distractions between Adrian and the reader. But it is also true that some of the most brilliant writing in Faustus comes in these unexpected asides. The section describing Adrian's deal with the Devil (he sells himself body & soul for 24 years of creative greatness) is a tour de force--translated from archaic German into archaic English--that is a unique reading experience in or out of context. So is the subtle, near-perfect sketch of the fast-talking music impresario Saul Fitelberg.

Neurotic Kultur. So far as his biographer-friend knows, Adrian had but one sexual experience with a woman, a prostitute; but it leaves him with a disease that alternately retards and heightens his work and leaves him a senile wreck at the end. Perhaps the best and most readable section of Faustus describes Adrian's years in a rustic Bavarian retreat near Munich. Mann's description of Munich's cultural and pseudo-intellectual crowd between wars, and their stiff-necked, neurotic Kultur helps explain how an Austrian fanatic got them to eat out of his hand.

Adrian's music was modern and daring, brought him the fame the Devil promised. But as the 24 years come to an end, Adrian's sanity does too. In a terrible nightmarish scene, Mann describes the gathering where Adrian crazily tries to explain his last and greatest composition to his friends. By that time, the Devil had already claimed him.

Faustus will be considered a masterpiece by some, a bore by many. A good deal of it reads like Mann's heaviest formal essays. To those who look for it, however, the book offers a masterful explanation of those sides of the German character that welcomed Hitler. Most readers will see a symbolic parallel between Adrian's bargain with the Devil and Germany's similar sellout.

Mann himself doesn't think that parallel should be pushed too far. Said he in Los Angeles: "Both sold their souls to the Devil, but my hero is much more representative of the tragedy of the times." Mann, now 73, has been carrying the Faustus idea around for two-thirds of his life ("I wrote the first little note for it in 1901"). His preoccupation with illness goes back at least that far. Mann does not believe that illness is a source of artistic activity, "but if genius already exists, it stimulates it. It depends on who is sick. If it is a Nietzsche or a Dostoevsky . . ." Mann's own genius is of a plainer kind, founded on steady discipline. In writing Dr. Faustus, he averaged a little better than one page" of longhand a day, the same pace he has maintained for half a century.

*Catalina (see below) is the other.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.