Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 28 May 2020

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

As the Covid-19 virus rampages around the world and we’re effectively confined to our houses, peeping out now and then to exercise, pick up shopping or lionize the essential care workers risking their lives on behalf of the rest of us, I’ve lost count of the number of book and reading-related websites telling me which are the best novels about plague and pestilence I should be reading at this time. It seems that copies of Albert Camus’ Le Peste can’t be found for love or money and I had no idea there were so many writers obsessed with a zombie apocalypse of some kind. By and large I’ve decided to ignore most of these and continued to try and find alternative diversions that take me to happier places.

However, I remain haunted by the image of Dirk Bogart playing the role of Gustav Aschenbach in Visconti’s film of Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, fretfully asking ‘Why are they disinfecting the streets?’ as cholera slowly overwhelms Venice. So, I thought, if I’ve got to confront this present virus perhaps it’s Thomas Mann’s novella that I need to read.

It has been some years since I last read any Thomas Mann and probably over thirty years since I last read Death in Venice and I’d forgotten what an extraordinary experience reading Mann can be. The sheer richness of the prose, the relish of minute detail and the flights of almost abstruse philosophical conjecture creates an almost cloying sense of heavy air, by turns perfumed and then rotten with the stench of decay.

Gustav Aschenbach (or Von Aschenbach as he’s risen to use) is a European writer of serious renown and in this pre First World War world he’s gone from being cutting edge to stolidly conservative. He’s essentially a creature of habit and he writes carefully, very carefully and at a glacial pace because the effort of making the right choices exhausts his sensibilities. However, as spring begins to turn to summer he’s unexpectedly prompted to take a holiday when he has an odd epiphany of sorts in a churchyard where he stands and contemplates a remarkably unprepossessing rambler who is clearly on a walking holiday.

He eventually heads for Venice, a destination he’s familiar with, but finds himself on a boat to the Lido with a gang of cavorting young men. He becomes repelled and fascinated by one of their number – a man who is much older than he’s trying to be who has dyed his hair, has dentures and wears make-up. Aschenbach’s disgust at the man is physical and moral – how, he wonders, does this man not see himself for the drunken performing monkey he’s become?

In Venice, at Aschenbach’s hotel, is a Polish family that includes a young boy, Tadzio, a teenager, who the writer sees as the incarnation of beauty and who he slowly, incrementally finds himself becoming obsessed with. What starts as a sort of aesthetic, even fatherly, interest in the boy’s perfect youthfulness slowly morphs into a very different kind of interest – a desire to please and possess. Aschenbach finds it is impossible for him to do anything that doesn’t bring him into contact with the object of his love and desire.

But all is not well in Venice and despite efforts to cover up the malady, news of an outbreak of cholera begins to circulate and people begin to leave the city. Aschenbach initially thinks he too should leave but the fact that the Polish family seem to be staying leads him to make the decision to stay as close to Tadzio as he can for as long as he can. The fact the boy has started to acknowledge him leads the writer to begin thinking about his own appearance and he finds himself paying regular visits to the barber who dyes his hair, gives him a curled quiff and a little make-up on the cheeks. Imperceptibly he’s becoming the figure of fun and degeneracy that so appalled him on the ferry to Venice.

His increasingly reckless pursuit of Tadzio around the city takes its toll and soon Aschenbach is showing symptoms of the sickness and, sitting on the beach watching the young boy, he dies.

Many critics at the time felt Mann’s subject matter was unwholesome. The critic, T.J. Reed noted that:

“Mann’s 1912 novella was also to have a powerful influence on social perceptions of homosexuality. His arch-enemy Alfred Kerr was not far wrong with his sneer that Mann had ‘made pederasty palatable to the middle classes’”

But Reed is also right to point out that this is a crude reading:

“One of the strengths of Death in Venice is the delicate pacing of Aschenbach’s gradual self-discovery, as he passes from admiration of Tadzio’s beauty, to fatherly interest, a declaration of love, obsessive pursuit and orgiastic dream to the infection with cholera and the half-conciliatory coda of his death on the beach.”

I think that it’s also under-selling Mann to see the novella as primarily about individual moral corruption – the treatment of Aschenbach’s own sense of surprise at the realisation of the passions he’s unleashed in himself is sensitive and thoughtful although, for modern day sensibilities, the linking of homosexuality with pederasty or paedophilia will understandably be problematic. But it’s also undeniable that this is not just a moral plague that concerns Mann but a cultural one. This is also the story of Mittel-European decadence and a society that is heading towards decline and destruction, eaten away from the inside and outside while the inhabitants take the sun in those seemingly unending pre-war summers.

Interestingly, as Reed notes in his review of the book published in the LRB in 2014:

“By the late 1930s, Aschenbach had become for Mann a political harbinger. As an artist ‘seeking new beauty, a simplification of the soul, in reaction against the psychologism and relativism of the turn of the century, seeking a new dignity beyond analysis and even knowledge’, he represented ‘tendencies of the time that were in the air long before the word “fascism” existed, and are hardly recognisable in the political form. But they are spiritually connected with it and helped to prepare it. I had them as much as anybody in me.’”

All in all, this is a rich confection that is perfectly paced, elegantly written and treats the reader as an adult. You can get copies in hard and paperback for not very much and there’s not an alternative zombie apocalypse novel to match it.

 

Terry Potter

May 2020