Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus

Thomas Mann wrote his doorstopper novel Doctor Faustus late in life, long after his more widely read works of fiction, including Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain.

Thomas Mann, 1875–1955

It sometimes happens that a writer, toward the end of a career, attempts a massive opus that takes farther innovations that author started to explore earlier. Mann’s Doctor Faustus is that sort of book. You could also group in that category James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. Often those late-in-life bids for the magnum opus, or great work, end up more as fodder for literary critics than as a good read. Maybe that’s because the writer has gone several steps too far in developing their favorite stylistic devices and topics. 

I have several reservations about Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, about the characters, the content, and the style. But it’s still a remarkable book. I’ll get to the amazing part, but first I have to kvetch a little.

The narrator of Doctor Faustus, Serenus Zeitblom, is a lifelong friend and obsessive chronicler of the novel’s main character, the classical composer Adrian Leverkühn. We have to take for granted Serenus’ description of Adrian as an “extraordinary human being,” and a great artist. But nothing in the novel makes us believe that Adrian is an extraordinary person, since his interactions with other people are puerile and condescending. Nor is the fuddy-duddy narrator Zeitblom very likeable, even if his fussiness and overly apologetic tone are at times funny. A novel where the main character is distasteful and the narrator is pedestrian—that’s a huge pill for a reader to swallow for their own good! 

Mann also spends an enormous amount of time describing nonexistent musical works that Adrian composes. When Mann has Adrian speaking or writing in the archaic language he uses, the book moves along like a cart drawn by an old horse and missing a wheel.  

 

There were times I felt that reading Doctor Faustus was a self-inflicted punishment. Nevertheless, I finished the book, tugged along by truly stunning moments that rewarded my patience, moments that are the most striking I’ve ever read by Thomas Mann.

 

For instance, in turns out Mann was holding out on us before Doctor Faustus. Who knew that Mann had incredible insights into love and passion? He sidestepped those topics in many of his earlier works. I love this quip by Mann in Doctor Faustus about relationships: “There are people with whom it is not easy to live; but to leave, impossible.” (All English quotes are from the Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter translation.)

 

And this penetrating comment about an affair between a married woman and a younger man:

“Passion is too much taken up with itself to be able to conceive that anyone would be seriously against it.” Mann trowels even deeper into that dangerous liaison, adding, “the joy, the love and suffering, did not come into their own if they remained wordless… The more secret they were, the more they required a third party, the intimate friend, the good man, to whom and with whom one could talk… ” The narrator Serenus Zeitblom becomes that confidant for the lovers.

 

Mann also makes some amazing statements in Doctor Faustus about music and language: “Music and speech, he insisted, belonged together, they were at bottom one, language was music, music a language; separate, one always appealed to the other, imitated the other, used the other’s tools, always the one gave itself to be understood as substitute of the other.” No one on Earth has ever said that better!

 

Mann’s descriptions of the natural world and the cosmos in the novel are also breathtaking. For example, he describes Adrian’s father’s love of books on nature and insects: “Clearwings were there depicted which had no scales on their wings, so they seemed delicately glassy and only shot through with a net of dark veins. One such butterfly, in transparent nudity, loving the duskiness of heavy leafage, was called Hetaera esmeralda. Hetaera had on her wings only a dark spot of violet and rose; one could see nothing else of her, and when she flew she was like a petal blown by the wind.”

 

Mann is quite witty on the subject of artists who embrace an outdated style and turn their backs on contemporary art. He says about these artists that they, “persuade themselves and others that the tedious has become interesting, because the interesting has begun to grow tedious.”

 

On a similar note, Mann writes, “For just as little as one understands the new and the young, without being at home in the traditional, just so must love for the old remain ingenuine and sterile if one shuts oneself away from the new, which with historical inevitability grows out of it.” In its own fussbudgety way, Thomas Mann had a revolutionary outlook on the arts.

 

My favorite chapter in Doctor Faustus doesn’t concern the principle characters in the novel, who all lack emotional appeal for me. But I loved Chapter XXXVII, where the impresario Saul Fitelberg tries in vain to persuade composer Adrian Leverkühn to abandon his retreat from the world in rural Bavaria and to move to Paris to become the darling of the salons and concert halls. Fitelberg’s half-German, half-French monologue is a hilarious satire both of the avant-garde and of its critics. 

 

In a way, the real protagonist of Doctor Faustus is not one of the novel’s characters, but the nation of Germany. The book tells the story of that country in the twentieth century, its selling of its soul to the devil, and the terribly tragic inability up till then of German culture to find a political expression of its greatest and most humanistic triumphs.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

How Long Does It Take to Finish a Piece of Writing?

It could take a few minutes to finish a work of literature, and it could take a few decades. It depends in part on your method of composition, and the texture of the text you’re weaving. (Both text and texture come from the Latin verb texere, to weave.) It also depends on how prepared you are to embark on the project you’ve selected.

One method of composition that the writer finishes rapidly is automatic writing, a technique invented by André Breton and the French surrealists.

 

Members of the surrealist group in Paris. André Breton is third from the left.

In automatic writing, the author dreams onto the page, allowing the subconscious to dictate to the hand. The writer deliberately attempts to write faster than s/he can think, letting the deepest parts of the mind create a spontaneous cascade of images:

And as a

Little girl

Caught in a bellows of sparkles

You jump rope

Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of Asia

Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway

I caress everything that was you

In everything that’s yet to be you

André Breton, “I dream I see you endlessly superimposed upon yourself,” from The Air of the Water, in Earthlight, translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow

In this poem, Breton creates a dreamlike collage of his beloved at various moments in her life, layering each sequence on the next. To generate an image such as “You jump rope/Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of Asia/Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway,” no amount of editing or rewriting is of use. Only the first-take, last-take method of writing, where the author doesn’t stanch the mind’s spring of creativity, is effective. Scholars have gone over Breton’s drafts and found that he edited very little. Ben Jonson famously said of the legend that Shakespeare never blotted a line of his scripts, “Would he had blotted a thousand!” Maybe Breton should have edited his writings more. But when the spontaneous method of composition works, it produces a unique and loose weave of language, an amazing texture that a more laborious method usually can’t reproduce. This is the few-minutes version of finishing a poem.

But there are other types of writing that require a much more time-consuming process. James Joyce reportedly took 17 years to write Finnegans Wake, and there is a story that he was still making edits until the publisher’s messenger snatched the overdue manuscript out of his hands. Elizabeth Bishop’s book The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 is all of 287 pages, meaning she only produced an average of one page of poetry every two months. 

Elizabeth Bishop

Certain types of writing just can’t be done quickly, because the texture of language requires a very tight weave that can only be accomplished with many drafts, and much revision:

The big fish tubs are completely lined

with layers of beautiful herring scales

and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

Bishop’s exquisite description of the Favrile surfaces of the wheelbarrows does not seem like a momentary inspiration, but rather a meticulous accumulation of precise details combined with le mot juste, a carefully chosen phrase such as “plastered” or “coats of mail.” That’s the kind of writing that takes many drafts.

Another reason that a work of literature may need a long time to complete is that we often come up with ideas before we have the skill and knowledge to realize them. More than once, I’ve had the experience of rereading a poem I published decades before, and seeing that I had had a genuine impulse behind the poem, but I hadn’t gotten it right. The diction or the imagery or the ending weren’t quite what the original idea was pleading for. With more years of experience, I was able to revise a poem that I thought was complete, but really needed one or two more drafts.

So, how long does it take to finish a piece of writing? That’s a bit like asking how long it takes to fall in love. It might happen with a moment’s encounter, or it might be decades in the making.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry