Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

Reading Heim’s translation, I was struck by a fine but pervasive difference between it and the Death in Venice I remembered. It goes without saying that the basic events are the same. In both versions Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German author who finds himself, as Dante put it, “In the middle of the journey of [his] life…in a dark wood, where the right road had been lost sight of” (from Seamus Heaney’s 1993 translation), goes on a holiday in hope of reviving his fading enthusiasm for life. He travels to Venice, where he becomes first enamored of and then obsessed by a fourteen-year-old Polish boy named Tadzio, who is, in fleshly form, the very ideal of youthful human beauty, with all youth and beauty can imply to the no-longer-young about yearning, mortality, and the extravagant carelessness of a god who gives us life and then, by slow degrees, takes it back again. Aschenbach is increasingly consumed by his passion, until he dies on the beach at the Lido, done up in a grotesque parody of youth, rouged and lipsticked, watching Tadzio from afar. And yet, the tone of Aschenbach’s decline felt different in Heim’s version.

If I say that this Aschenbach put me in mind of Divine in Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, I mean it as a tribute. In the Genet book, Divine, a drag queen of a certain age, is carrying on at a bar when his faux-pearl coronet breaks. The pearls scatter everywhere, and Divine’s rival queens, exquisitely attuned to the faintest hint of blood in the water, proclaim him uncrowned, the Fallen One. Divine simply takes his dentures out and plunks them onto his head, declaring, “Dammit all, ladies, I’ll be queen anyhow.”* The Aschenbach of the Heim translation shares some of Divine’s heedless heroism. All our coronets will break, sooner or later. When that happens it’s probably best to just put our false teeth onto our heads, have a laugh, and continue.

I compared Heim’s version to the one I read in college, which was done by H.T. Lowe-Porter in 1930. There have been a couple of other attempts, made relatively recently, but Lowe-Porter’s translation is the one with which most of us grew up—the definitive Death in Venice for those who can read English but not German. I’m relieved to say that, as far as I can tell, this altered Aschenbach is not merely a figment of my own aging imagination. Heim’s Death in Venice is, generally, a more lyrical, sympathetic book—a slightly more intimate and personal book—than Lowe-Porter’s rather stern, disapproving one.

My Death in Venice, whichever translation I read, is slightly different from anyone else’s. My Mann is, to a certain extent, my own private, personal Mann, as is everyone’s. We agree about his basic qualities and intentions, but spin them according to our own natures. There is, in a sense, no definitive Death in Venice. We must, all of us, decide for ourselves what Mann meant to give us, and what we are willing to receive. That said, a comparison of the two versions suggests that Mann in the original tends toward a Wagnerian state-liness that is generally magisterial and elevating but also, occasionally, rather rigid and chill. There is the sporadic feeling that in writing this particular tale of doomed love, Mann comes off a bit like a giant trying to manage a porcelain tea set.

Overwrought from the difficult and dangerous labors of the late morning hours, labors demanding the utmost caution, prudence, tenacity, and precision of will, the writer had even after the midday meal been unable to halt the momentum of the inner mechanism—the motus animi continuus in which, according to Cicero, eloquence resides—and find the refreshing sleep that the growing wear and tear upon his forces had made a daily necessity. And so, shortly after tea he had sought the outdoors in the hope that open air and exercise might revive him and help him to enjoy a fruitful evening.

His desire sprouted eyes, his imagination, as yet unstilled from its morning labors, conjured forth the earth’s manifold wonders and horrors in his attempt to visualize them: he saw. He saw a landscape, a tropical quagmire beneath a steamy sky—sultry, luxuriant, and monstrous—a kind of primordial wilderness of islands, marshes, and alluvial channels; saw hairy palm shafts thrusting upward, near and far, from rank clusters of bracken, from beds of thick, swollen, and bizarrely burgeoning flora; saw fantastically malformed trees plunge their roots through the air into the soil, into stagnant, shadow-green, looking-glass waters, where, amidst milk-white flowers bobbing like bowls, outlandish stoop-shouldered birds with misshapen beaks stood stock-still in the shallows, peering off to one side; saw the eyes of a crouching tiger gleam out of the knotty canes of a bamboo thicket—and felt his heart pound with terror and an enigmatic craving. Then the vision faded, and with a shake of the head Aschenbach resumed his promenade along the gravestone cutters’ fences.

He thought of his work, of the point at which, yesterday and again today, he had had to abandon it since it had refused to yield to either patient attention or a swift bit of legerdemain. He had examined the passage anew, trying to shatter or diffuse his block, only to renounce the effort with a shudder of revulsion. There was no unwonted difficulty involved; no, he was paralyzed by the scruples arising from his distaste for the project, which made themselves felt in demands impossible to satisfy. Impossible demands had of course impressed the young man as the very essence and innermost nature of talent, and it was for them that he had bridled and cooled his feelings, knowing they are prone to make do with blithe approximations and half-perfections.

He dreaded the summer in the country, all alone in the cottage with the maid who cooked his meals and the man who served them; he dreaded the sight of the familiar mountain peaks and slopes that would once more encompass his torpid discontent. He needed a change of scene, a bit of spontaneity, an idle existence, a foreign atmosphere, and an influx of new blood to make the summer bearable and productive. He would travel, then; good, he was satisfied. Not too far, not all the way to the tigers. A night in a sleeping car and a siesta of three or four weeks at one of the internationally recognized holiday resorts in the friendly south… Such were his reflections as the clang of the electric tram reached him along the Ungererstrasse, and mounting the platform he decided to spend the evening studying maps and timetables.

His forebears had been officers, judges, and civil servants, men who led disciplined, decently austere lives serving king and state. A certain inner spirituality had manifested itself in the person of the only clergyman amongst them, and a strain of more impetuous, sensual blood had found its way into the family in the previous generation through the writer’s mother, the daughter of a Bohemian bandmaster. She was the source of the foreign racial features in his appearance. It was the union of the father’s sober, conscientious nature with the darker, more fiery impulses of the mother that engendered the artist—and this particular artist.

Since boyhood he had been pressed from all sides to achieve—and to achieve the extraordinary—and thus had never known leisure, the carefree idleness of youth. When in about his thirty-fifth year he was taken ill in Vienna, an astute observer said of him in public, “Here is how Aschenbach has always lived”—and he made a tight fist of his left hand—“not like this”—and he let his open hand dangle freely from the arm of his chair. That rang true, and what made Aschenbach all the more heroic and noble was that he was not robust by nature, that he was merely called to constant industry, not born to it.

But his motto was Durchhalten, “Persevere,” and he regarded his Frederick-the-Great novel as nothing short of the apotheosis of this command, which he considered the essence of a cardinal virtue: action in the face of suffering. Then, too, he ardently desired to live to old age, for he had always believed that the only artistic gift that can be called truly great, all-encompassing, and, yes, truly praiseworthy is one that has been vouchsafed productivity at all stages of human existence.

At forty, at fifty, and even when younger, at an age when others dissipate their talents, wax rhapsodic, or blissfully defer their grand projects, he would start his day early by dashing cold water over his chest and back; then, having set a pair of tall wax candles in silver holders at the head of his manuscript, he would spend two or three fervent, conscientious hours offering up to art the strength he had garnered in sleep.

The new type of hero that he favored and that recurred in a variety of forms had been analyzed quite early by a shrewd critic, who said it rested on “an intellectual, adolescent conception of manliness,” one that “stands by calmly, gritting its teeth in proud shame, while swords and spears pierce its flesh.” It was all very beautiful, clever, and precise, though it erred on the side of passivity. Because composure in the face of destiny and equanimity in the face of torture are not mere matters of endurance; they are an active achievement, a positive triumph, and the Sebastian figure is the most beautiful symbol if not of art as a whole then certainly of the art here in question.

Observing all this and much more of a like nature, one might well wonder whether the only possible heroism was the heroism of the weak. Yet what heroism was more at one with the times? Gustav Aschenbach was the writer of all those who labor on the brink of exhaustion, the heavy-laden, the worn-down who yet hold their heads high, the moralists of achievement who, though slight of stature and chary of means, manage to attain, for a time at least, the trappings of greatness by combining rapture of the will with clever management. They are legion; they are the heroes of the age.

Lively, intellectually undemanding formulations are the delight of the bourgeois masses, while passionately unbending youth is excited only by the problematic, and Aschenbach was as problematic and unbending as any youth. He had overindulged the intellect, overcultivated erudition and ground up the seed corn, revealed secrets, defamed talent, betrayed art; yes, even as his works entertained, elevated, and animated the gullible reader, he, the youthful artist, held the twenty-year-olds in thrall to his cynical remarks about the questionable nature of art and artistic genius.

The power of the word by which the outcast was cast out heralded a rejection of all moral doubt, all sympathy with the abyss, a renunciation of the leniency implicit in the homily claiming that to understand is to forgive, and what was under way here, indeed, what had come to pass was the “miraculous rebirth of impartiality,” which surfaced a short time later with a certain mysterious urgency in one of the author’s dialogues.

But does not moral fortitude beyond knowledge—beyond disintegrative and inhibitory erudition—entail a simplification, a moral reduction of the world and the soul and hence a concomitant intensification of the will to evil, the forbidden, the morally reprehensible? And has not form a double face? Is it not moral and immoral at once—moral as the outcome and expression of discipline, yet immoral, even antimoral, insofar as it is by its very nature indifferent to morality, indeed, strives to bend morality beneath its proud and absolute scepter?