A Meaningful Moment on Ball’s Neck, Route 605

How to explain something momentary, triangular, and mysterious? 

This happened on Frightsday. That’s the name the Irish writer, James Joyce, gave to Friday? Two days ago on Friday, I was driving our black Ford truck, not my tiny Miata. The truck has a good radio, and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” had just begun. I cannot hear this sonata without its beauty emotionally swamping me.  Odd choice of words.

Yet at the time on Ball’s Neck, I was close to the algae-layered pond or swamp on my right side. That’s when I saw the black snake, an exceedingly long one, heading across the road to the pond. I stopped and eased beyond the center of the road to give the snake more room. Its slithering motion, forward & backward, fixated me. (I don’t like rattlesnakes, so common in my California past. In Malaysia I feared cobras hidden in pots in the garden. Now in Virginia, I carefully walk our property because of copperheads.)

But venom-less black snakes I wish to protect.

While watching the snake, I suddenly turned and looked forward. Just over the rise on 605, a truck larger than the Ford was barreling downward. I was not in my Miata which never stalls, and I felt a moment of panic in the long and heavy Ford. It did not stall, and the oncoming truck did not strafe us. Yet the male driver’s impolite gesture said what he thought of me on his side of the narrow road.  I can imagine what he might have said later that day. Damn near hit an old lady in a truck on Ball’s Neck. What if an accident had occurred? I try to imagine how I might have explained to an authority figure about Beethoven and the black snake, with my literary mind.

I think it was Shakespeare’s Prospero who spoke of the way home across the wine dark sea.  Mine might have been across an algae-covered pond.  Before the “Moonlight” had begun on Friday, I was thinking about Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

Since USC in 1964, this novella has haunted me. The main character, Aschenbach, is a moral man, someone known for his scrupulosity, a writer whose soul is bent on fame, and whose perennial habit has been to “hold fast.” Yet Aschenbach is undone in Venice.  How?  By Eros, “astonished anew at the god like beauty of the human being.” Aschenbach’s love is for the young Tadzio and  youthful perfection of form. I think Mann leaves a reader with this thought: “Give me beauty in the inward soul. And may the outward and inward person be at one.”

I’ll be back in two weeks with a novel set in Ukraine: The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov.

The Magician Disappeared

How could I have returned home last Thursday from the RCC-RILL book club without the novel we discussed? Namely, Colm Tóibín’s The Magician. Now this early Sunday evening, I sit here without the book I underlined and commented on during three readings of it.  Onward, I tell myself.

Last Thursday one book club member admitted to a change of attitude regarding fiction about real persons. She had not been converted by the earlier Tóibín novel we read: The Master about Henry James. Yet Tóibín’s depiction of Thomas Mann made her a convert. That same day she went home and sent me the link to a You Tube interview with Tóibín from the Edinburgh Festival. It was one I had not seen and heard.   

https://youtu.be/S_aFqZBDarE?si=aMtk63Mom9s0Mgsw

I appreciated this interview because this delightful Irish writer talked about The Magician’s POV ( point of view ).

Although Tóibín did not discuss The Master, I will note that his novel about Henry James covers 1895-1899. Throughout this four-year time frame, Tóibín weaves in the life of James from his youth and earlier adulthood. The novel’s narration in third person reflects the complexity and eloquence of the Henry James style. I admire this novel and gained a greater appreciation of James from reading it. Yet I was not enthralled with The Master the way I was with The Magician, as if hypnotized.

Tóibín’s discussion made me understand why I felt this way. In The Magician he created an intimate third person narration without any intrusion from the author.  The character, Thomas Mann, has no foreknowledge of anything that happens, such as wars. This is to say the backstory that characterized The Master is absent from The Magician. This novel is narrated in chronological order from Lübeck in 1891 to Lübeck in 1955, the year of Mann’s 80^th birthday, when he and wife Katia (and some of the six Mann children) lived in Switzerland.

Last week I used the word “voyeur” to describe how I felt reading about Thomas Mann’s public life and his private one.  Tóibín takes the reader into whatever room or place Thomas is in. We see the world as he does.  And by Tóibín’s own admission, he cut 55,000 words from the novel.  Can that figure be correct? He also cited a famous line from Henry James about the three most important words for writing fiction.  Dramatize, repeated three times.  Which is what Mann has done in The Magician.

I will end today’s blog with four lines from the British-American poet, W.H. Auden.  He was married to Erica Mann in a passport marriage, as it were. These lines reflect Thomas Mann.

The Writer fetches/the images out/that hurt and connect/from life to art.

Next week:  Mann’s remarkable novella, Death in Venice

How could I have read The Magician three times

and yet feel flummoxed about what to write this Sunday afternoon?  This novel by Colm Tóibín reveals the life of Thomas Mann in 498 pages. Multiply this by three and it means I read 1464 pages this past month. But each time …I felt even more engulfed in the story of this famous German writer, who won the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature. Thomas Mann fled Nazi Germany and established a life in the United States with his wife Katia, mother to his six children. All six adults flow in and out of the life of their parents in Princeton and then in Southern California.

Chapter 1 takes place in Lübeck, 1891,

and 18, the final chapter, in 1950, Los Angeles. Yet this is misleading because the novel ends with Mann’s 80^th birthday in Switzerland and an earlier return to Lübeck for a celebration in his honor.  A WSJ critic wrote, “One of the most sublime endings I’ve come across…in a long time.”  Anyone who loves Bach and the composer Buxtehude will agree with this reviewer.

Given I am wordless right now, I read all four plus pages of testimonies for The Magician in my hefty 8 by 5 paperback. One blurb by Jay Parini in the New York Times Book Review interested me. I’d taken a class from Parini years ago at the Bread Loaf in Vermont. He discussed Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” and I appreciated how he approached the story. Parini says, “It takes a writer of Tóibín’s caliber to understand how the seemingly inconsequential details of life can be… turned into art.” Parini also notes the novel’s expansive and subtle rhythms that carry the reader forward and backward in time.  I read this description and thought, oh yes. In each read of The Magician, Tóibín’s prose swept me into and through the novel. I had the feeling of being a voyeur, which I do not feel in biography or historical accounts of famous persons. Tóibín’s prose is in contrast to what Mann’s would have been in German, with its complex grammar and sentences that reflect this complexity. The novel’s surface is simple and yet it offers depth in artful ways.

For weeks I feel as if I’ve been with Thomas and his family. I could have lost myself in the Internet! And I watched DVDs of his famous novels: Buddenbrooks, Magic Mountain, Dr. Faustus. I rewatched Visconti’s Death in Venice, plus heard and watched Bemjamin Britten’s opera of this novella.

This film, available on Amazon, was a captivating visual and musical experience. I listened to a lecture on Golo Mann (the third of six children), as delivered by a German scholar. As I read the subtitles. I took notes. Earlier I listened to a You Tube with Colm Tobin discussing The Magician. I have printed pages of articles and already had a folder of articles I’d collected over the years.  I’m awash in Thomas Mann!  But he seems beyond relevant in our increasingly Fascist times.

 Next week: What the RCC-RILL book club had to say about The Magician and Death in Venice.