The prince of Princeton: Thomas Mann’s life in academia
Thomas Mann lived in Princeton from September 1938 to March 1941. W. H. Auden ’ s “ September 1, 1939” described the menacing mood of the Europe Mann had left behind:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
If Mann had not had a Czech passport, he would have been treated as a German alien and been forbidden to live on the East or West coast.
Mann had three conflicting roles in Princeton: world-famous author, university teacher and crusading anti-Nazi propagandist. The exiled writer had lost his German house, possessions, money and readers, but declared, “ I am determined to continue my life and work with maximum persistence, exactly as I have always done, unaltered by events which injure me but cannot humiliate me or turn me from my purposes.” The rewards were both in the actual writing and in the influence he had. Mann loved reading his weekly pages to his appreciative family, who didn ’ t dare criticise his work. But there were tremendous demands and distractions on his precious writing time, and he needed his version of Edmund Wilson ’ s famous denial card that listed every kind of request he could not meet.
Now a new study of his time at Princeton has appeared: Stanley Corngold’s The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton (Princeton UP, 258 pp, £28). Corngold ’ s three-part book includes a biography of Mann in Princeton, a long account of his wartime lectures, and a discussion of the fiction and literary essays he published during these years.
Unfortunately, there is no material in the Princeton archives that casts new light on this period. The brief biography does not include a description of Mann ’ s house and servants; family and children, with the essential help he got from his wife Katia and English-fluent daughter Erika; relations with the Princeton faculty; difficulties with his domineering, irritating, even seductive patron Agnes Meyer, an isolationist Republican, and with her competitor for Mann ’ s favour, Caroline Newton (an analyst, not, as Corngold has it, a medical doctor and psychiatrist); Mann ’ s physical illness that followed the intense strain of his life; and the exhausting annual transcontinental lecture tours, when he was in his sixties, about which he lamented, “ These Americans certainly know how to bleed you dry, not to say grind you down.”
Citing Mann ’ s grandson Frido, who was not in Princeton, Corngold mistakenly and vaguely asserts that Frido “ has it right when he declares that he knows for a fact [!] that his grandfather ’ s contacts with Einstein in Princeton were few and far between.” But Corngold himself quotes Mann ’ s Diaries and the Princeton newspaper that called them “ good friends,” and notes that Einstein visited Mann to discuss Mann ’ s polemic against Hitler. Corngold does not mention that these old friends met frequently for meals at each other ’ s homes, and that Mann and Einstein spoke to theology students in the university chapel.
When Neville Chamberlain capitulated to Hitler in Munich in September 1938, Mann wrote, “ how broken Einstein ’ s voice sounded when he spoke to me over the phone on my arrival in Princeton and said, ‘ I have never in my life been so unhappy.’ ” When Einstein died in April 1955, Mann was deeply shaken and offered an eloquent public tribute to their friendship: “ Through the passing of this man a light has been quenched for me, which has been a comfort for many years in the dark confusion of our times.”
Henry James ’ letter of August 5, 1914, the day after Britain declared war, is strikingly similar to Mann ’ s feelings about the collapse of civilisation as World War II became inevitable in 1938. James ’ disillusioned and prescient letter condemned the German Kaiser and Austrian Emperor for destroying his belief in the idea of progress and the humane values that he loved: “ The plunge of civilisation into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.”
Unlike Henry James, Mann confronted that monstrous scene with intellectual energy and political zeal, and advocated idealistic values in his forceful war propaganda. He used many high-minded terms to contrast the evils of Nazism with the virtues of democracy, which his audience would surely accept: tolerance, decency, goodness, justice, freedom and liberty. Mann ’ s patrician dignity and decorum prevented him from using the harsher language of his letters, which condemned the Nazis ’ “ filthy, carrion-strewn path of lies and baseness.”
Mann ’ s controversial essay on Hitler, “ A Brother” (1938), was a weak and irrelevant attack on the forceful leader who had ruled Germany for five years and defied the major European powers on the run-up to World War II. Ignoring his murderous brutality, Mann called Hitler “ a man ten times a failure, extremely lazy, incapable of steady work . . . who could not sit a horse, or drive a car, or fly a plane” or even beget a child. Yet even in 1941, when Hitler had conquered all of Europe, Mann continued to predict an Allied victory.
Corngold is contradictory about whether Mann ’ s “ German accent garbled the English and made it mostly incomprehensible” or, more probably, if he spoke “ careful, precise English with a pronounced German accent.” In any case, the hard-working author, who had never earned a high school degree, was pleased to accept eight American honorary degrees.
Corngold is a distinguished scholar of Kafka and modern German literature, but this book is disappointing. His ponderous style includes a monstrous 120-word Germanic sentence (on p. ix). His short book is repetitious, very repetitious, and names Mann ’ s specific years in Princeton seven times in the first seventeen pages. He states, “ even in Switzerland, Mann had reason to fear for his life” and seven lines later repeats, “ his life is not safe in Switzerland.” (Contra the dust wrapper, Mann left Switzerland, not Nazi Germany, for Princeton.) Corngold calls the hopelessly middlebrow critic Clifton Fadiman “ excellent ” and the intellectual phony Susan Sontag “ brilliant.”
Mann surely did not get his “ entire political education” from the now-forgotten German writer Erich Kahler, whom he did not meet until 1931, when Mann was 56. In the second part of the book Corngold gives a brief summary of all Mann ’ s political speeches. But they were intended for a popular audience, were also repetitive, and don ’ t need Corngold ’ s tedious explications and hackneyed phrases, “ heartfelt essay” and “ rousing conclusion.”
In the third part Corngold analyses and overrates the fiction Mann wrote in Princeton: the Goethe-novel The Beloved Returns, the Indian myth used in The Transposed Heads and Joseph the Provider, the fourth and final volume of Joseph and His Brothers. (It would be useful to have an abridged edition of the long-winded 1,207-page Joseph tetralogy.) Let ’ s face it: these books are among Mann ’ s dullest works. He wrote Doctor Faustus, his greatest novel while living in America, after he ’ d left Princeton and moved to Los Angeles, where the circle of German é migr é s was more congenial and stimulating than the academics in Princeton.
The critic Morton Dauwen Zabel, quoted by Corngold, made the most perceptive comments on The Beloved Returns. Zabel observed the parallels between Mann and the fictional Goethe: “ Goethe ’ s reverie gives unforgettable expression to Mann ’ s lifelong researches into the meaning of art and the role of the artist as mediator between idealism and resolution.”
Corngold vaguely summarises the Joseph themes as “ love, hate, trickery, sibling rivalry, vengeance and reconciliation.” The parallels he draws between this novel and Mann ’ s life seem unpersuasive: “ As the young Pharaoh is torn in two by his twin functions as a devotee of the sun god Atôn and ruler and pragmatic administrator of the Two Lands, so was Thomas Mann in America torn in two by his twin functions as a devotee of literature and ambassador to America of the nation of exiles.” The parallels between Richard Wagner and Mann are more convincing. Corngold writes, “ Mann is once again present in propria persona in addressing Wagner ’ s exile in Switzerland, where a good part of the Ring was composed. Wagner had been implicated in the Dresden upheaval of 1849 and became overnight a political refugee.”
In “ September 1, 1939” Auden also answers a crucial question in this book: “ Is the Nazi hegemony an aberration or an organic expression of ‘ Germanness? ’ ”
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad.
Luther and Nietzsche are demonic elements in Doctor Faustus, an allegory on the rise and fall of Nazism, in which the composer Adrian Leverkü hn “ takes back” Friedrich Schiller ’ s appeal to Universal Brotherhood in the choral “ Ode to Joy” in Beethoven ’ s Ninth Symphony.
Corngold also discusses Mann’s essays on Freud and The Magic Mountain. In “Freud and the Future” (1936), Mann praised Freud for scientifically validating the philosophical insights of the German Romantics—though there was no scientific basis for psychoanalysis—and dubiously claimed that Freud’s work “shall be the future dwelling of a wiser and free humanity, productive of a riper art than any possible in our neurotic, fear-ridden, hate-ridden world.” But Corngold doesn’t note that neither Freud’s theories nor Mann’s public approval ever explained how the triumph of instinct over reason would regenerate humankind and lead to a better world.
In a stretch, Corngold praises the “ truly funny” parts of Joseph the Provider. But he misses an essential element in The Magic Mountain and asserts that comedy in that novel is only “ occasionally a subject for humour.” In fact, comedy lightens the mood and enables the moribundi to endure their agony in the chamber of horrors. Mann ’ s comic irony pervades the novel in memorable scenes and characters: Hans Castorp ’ s shocked reaction to the pathological atmosphere, the awkward visit of his Uncle James Tienappel, the head nurse selling expensive thermometers, Frau Stö hr ’ s comic malapropisms, Dr. Behrens ’ endless joking about disease, the description of the massive tubercular cough, Anton Frege ’ s ghastly account of his pleura shock, Dr. Krokowski ’ s lectures on sexual repression, the feverish and forbidden sex life of the dying patients, and Hans ’ s own besotted love for Clavdia Chauchat.
Corngold ’ s weak conclusion, “ the Princeton years were a stunningly productive period for Mann as writer and public intellectual,” was well known before he wrote this book.
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, published three chapters on Mann in Disease and the Novel (1985) and Thomas Mann ’ s Artist-Heroes (2014).
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