‘Parallel Lives’: a modern Plutarch

Alert readers of my weekly chess columns in TheArticle will have observed my predilection for such writers as Thomas Mann, Kafka, Nietzsche, Conrad, Freud, TS Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dean Swift, Stefan Zweig and John Dryden. Three of the above (Eliot, Nabokov and Zweig) even wrote directly about chess, while Nabokov extended his interest in the game to composing chess problems, one of which he sent to me while I was at Trinity College, Cambridge. 

Imagine my delight, then, on discovering a fellow contributor to TheArticle who shared my enthusiasm. Jeffrey Meyers — not least in his new book Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath (LSU Press, £20.95) — seemed to know, understand and be able to interpret such authors with greater skill than my own. 

Every column by Jeffrey Meyers immediately became required reading and it is a consummation devoutly to be wished that such erudition, as expressed in his TheArticle columns, should be anthologised into one (or more) volumes for easy access. I have done this with my own columns in my books  Fifty Shades of Ray, Chess in the Year of the King  (with researcher Adam Black) and my forthcoming 209th book  Chess Through the Looking Glass  (with artist Barry Martin). 

Parallel Lives  is predicated on the inspired concept of updating Plutarch’s classic, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans . This is the source for Shakespeare’s Roman plays, and it pairs two illustrious figures from each culture. Some parallels spring easily to mind: Romulus and Theseus; Quintus Fabius Maximus and Themistocles; Alcibiades and Coriolanus; Alexander and Caesar. Others were unknown to me (Pelopidas and Aratus).

Parallel Lives   operates on a similar trajectory: Rimbaud juxtaposed with Verlaine; Freud with Thomas Mann; Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov. But Freud and Hitler? Unexpected but brilliant, while the combined evocation of pre-1914 Vienna and the concomitant penury of Hitler’s early years, was a complete revelation to me. 

Speaking of Vienna before the First World War, a combination which I would have loved to see subjected to the Meyers investigation would have been Gustav Mahler with Igor Stravinsky. Next volume perhaps? 

I have written before that, had I witnessed Stravinsky’s  Rite of Spring  at its Paris première, my immediate reaction would have been to take the first steamer to New York. It’s clear that the pre-war creative spirits knew that something terrible was coming, even if they were not completely aware of what rough beast it was going to be. 

Meyers writes: “a delver into the depths…advocate of dark gods…most revolutionary sense…the divinity of earth …the primacy of the unconscious, the pre-mental, the will, the passions…exalted the night side of man.” Mann is writing of Freud — but is illuminating his own work, rather than Freud’s.

I see this evocation in Stravinsky’s  Sacre du Printemps,  I detect it in the first movement of Mahler’s sixth symphony and it’s most certainly present in Mahler’s third, where Nietzsche is quoted: “ O Mensch gib Acht, was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht…”

The above lines are also quoted in the Visconti film of Mann’s  Death in Venice , where the writer Gustav von Aschenbach (played by Dirk Bogarde, made to resemble Mahler) succumbs to unrequited love for beauty (in the form of the youthful Tadzio) and to cholera, in the form of the bacterium  Vibrio cholera .  We have just learnt about the latter from Jeffrey’s latest revelatory column for TheArticle . 

Death in Venice  was, in fact, indirectly responsible for my turning to chess as a professional career, and becoming a Grandmaster. In 1971, I was studying for a PhD at Cambridge, my thesis being on the decline of realism in the German novel from Fontane, via Thomas Mann and Kafka. My supervisor was the eminent Germanist J P Stern of St John’s College. 

A close friend (now the Rev William G Raines), whose father was the press officer for the film, invited me to the media launch of Luchino Visconti’s  Death in Venice  film. Before going, I informed Dr Stern and promised to report back. In return, he handed me the advance proof of his forthcoming column, titled: “Why Thomas Mann will never be popular in England”. In view of the blockbuster film about to be unleashed, this sentiment seemed sensationally ill-timed. 

I adored the film. What a combination! One of my favourite books, brilliant performances by Dirk Bogarde and Björn Andrésen as the alluring Tadzio, and to crown it all, extracts from Mahler’s third, fourth and fifth symphonies (the amazing Adagietto from the last named, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra extract from the third, and a rare piano recording of the fourth, played by the hand of Mahler himself.) Heaven!

So, I returned to the lair of Dr Stern, eager to present him with the film’s brochure and submit my gushingly positive report. Stern was, perhaps predictably, in view of the tenor of his forthcoming article, not pleased. When I gave him the programme, which depicted Aschenbach frolicking with his daughter, Stern launched into a diatribe claiming that Hollywood was perverting the true message of German literature and the legacy of Thomas Mann in particular. “We all know that Von Aschenbach was a ghastly old poofter pursuing a beautiful young boy, and he certainly did not have any daughters,” came the thunderbolt from the academic demigod  who might, or (more probably) might not, endorse my PhD thesis. 

“But Sir”, I innocently exclaimed, “surely Mann is trying to convey the idea that natural beauty eludes the formalistic aesthetic techniques which Aschenbach employs, vainly seeking equal transcendence. It’s a metaphor, “ I bleatingly continued. ”Look, Sir, here on page 18, it says quite clearly: “ Eine Tochter war ihm geblieben.” Aschenbach was, indeed, married with one daughter (as confirmed by Jeffrey Meyers in TheArticle ). 

 Result, I may have been an attentive reader, but I was busy scoring C minus in psychology — i.e. in reading the room. As warning storm clouds gathered over St John’s College, Dr Stern threw me out, told me to rewrite my essay, while my copy of  Der Tod in Venedig,  with page 18 still intact, was hurled after me. 

 I returned to my rooms with one overriding thought: if I have to write and think what I am told to write and think, in contravention of what I see to be the facts, what is the point of academic research? 

Outcome: that night I packed my bags, left Cambridge for good (except for when I was invited back as Cambridge’s and Trinity’s first chess Grandmaster for academic feasts) and I turned to chess as a career. 209 books later, having won the British and Euro championships, become the first British player to gain a Grandmaster norm, given the inestimable opportunity to write what I think and know to be true in the pages of TheArticle , organised three of Kasparov’s world championships, not to mention the very first world championship in any thinking sport between a human and a computer, I do not regret my decision. 

And imagine my reaction, a few years later, when my tormentor’s magnum opus on Nietzsche was excoriated by Hans Keller in the New Statesman . Imagine also my surprise to discover from  Parallel Lives  that Thomas Mann actually harboured homoerotic feelings for his own son Klaus “a precious in-house Tadzio” selon Meyers, and wrote them down in his diary. Following a clumsily mismanaged attempt by another son, Golo, to smuggle the incriminating diaries out of Nazi Germany, they narrowly escaped publication by Hitler’s Gestapo. Perhaps Dr Stern did have a point. 

Literary disputes and feuds form a thread running through  Parallel Lives , replacing the battles of Caesar and Alexander, as recorded by Plutarch. Edmund Wilson vs Nabokov, Edmund Wilson vs Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson vs Allen Tate…clearly a polemicist who made enemies, almost without effort. Indeed, war might also have broken out between Thomas Mann and Freud, but was tactfully avoided by Mann, through the cunning medium of claiming he was praising Freud, while actually writing about himself. 

In the Freudian context, I was delighted to see that  Parallel Lives  quite rightly dismisses some of Freud’s theories as “absolute rubbish.” In contrast, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur  of 1929, ranks up there, in terms of preternatural instinctive prescience, with the Rite of Spring , Mahler’s third and sixth symphonies, most of Kafka, Der Tod in Venedig and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s  Poison Belt. Freud’s prognostication in 1929, of course, was of the Hitlerian devastation rather than of the mechanised horrors of the Great War. 

But read Jeffrey Meyers’ new book, and the idiocies, evasions as well as public and social blunders are there for all to see, alongside contrasting examples of both raw humanity and lofty genius.

Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath , by Jeffrey Meyers, was published on July 24 th by LSU Press, and is available through all good booksellers, including Amazon .

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