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

From Short Story Writer to Novelist: An Interview with Richard Chiappone

Many fiction writers want to make the transition from writing short stories to novels. One writer who has done this successfully is Richard Chiappone, whose terrific first novel, The Hunger of Crows, was published in 2021. I interviewed Rich to find out how he made that leap in his career.

Richard Chiappone, author of The Hunger of Crows

Zack Rogow: Before you published your novel The Hunger of Crows from Crooked Lane Books, you’d written mostly short stories. When you got the idea for The Hunger of Crows, how did you know that this would be a novel and not a short story?

Richard Chiappone: That makes me smile because I had no idea that a short story titled “Personal Use” in my second story collection, Opening Days, would turn into this novel. I rushed to complete the story in time for that collection, and I always thought it ended abruptly. So, a couple years later, I picked it up again and said, “Why does it feel like something more is about to happen? What’s next?” What happened next was about ten years of trial and error and error and error, hundreds of jettisoned pages, and numerous gray hairs. Plus, a novel!

 

Q. When you started to write the novel, what adjustments did you make to create a plot that you could sustain over many chapters?

 

A. After thirty years of writing character-driven stories, I realized I knew absolutely nothing about plot. I thought writing a novel might be a good way to learn. One problem I had was the tendency to make every chapter a stand-alone story. The first agent I sent a draft to said, “When I started reading this I feared it was actually a story collection.” (Note the word feared. Agents HATE story collections.) I had to learn that a chapter can’t be complete on its own; it has to move the novel forward. Who knew?

Q. Did the number of characters or subplots increase when you saw the work as a novel?

A. Oh, yes. And it was very liberating. I allowed myself to shift points of view among the characters, something I’ve always avoided when writing short stories. And new plot ideas kept weaseling into the story. So I let them. What a luxury. It was like finding out you were allowed to swim—without wearing handcuffs.

 

Q. What kinds of character development did you add in writing a novel that you would not have done in a short story?

 

A. Actually that was one of my worst problems. I set out to write a simple action-driven crime novel. But free to sprawl, I went nuts. I got so interested in each character I wrote dozens of pages of back story that had to be thinned down. Even in the finished novel, most of the characters have a lot of history. I guess that’s why it’s been called a “literary” thriller. You have no idea how much more I tried to cram in. Thank God for editors.

 

Q. Does the setting play a different role in this novel than in your short stories?

 

A. Setting plays a much larger and more active role. Here where I live in south Central Alaska, in June when the story is set, we have about twenty hours of daylight, and almost no real darkness. (There are midnight softball leagues.) That’s not just some colorful factoid in the novel. The main character, a young woman, Carla, has fled from Phoenix, Arizona, to a small town, 200 miles from Anchorage, where she is hiding from a quasi-military corporation out to kill her. She assumed that the remoteness of Alaska would hide her, but the constant daylight feels like a spotlight shining on her. Then there are the unpredictable and treacherous northern ocean currents, tides, and storms that nearly kill Carla before the bad guys even show up. Atmosphere can be an important character in a longer work of fiction.

 

Q. Are there advantages to novel writing that short stories don’t offer?

 

A. Yes. In a short story there can be very little dramatic physical action. Look at “The Dead” by James Joyce, one of the greatest stories. It’s a dinner party; no punches are thrown, no guns drawn, there’s barely a voice raised in anger. After reading that story, your knees quake.

 

In short stories, what characters feel and think is often more important than what they actually do. But ironically, there’s little room in that form for delving into their lives leading up to those powerful moments of epiphany. That’s something you can include in a novel. I had a good time writing beatings, shootings, boats sinking, sex! But still, I fell in love with my characters and I wanted to spend a lot of time with them. I hope my readers will too.

 

Q. Is there any one thing you were able to carry over from years of story writing and use in your novel? Something akin to your “style.”

 

A. I’d say it’s humor. Sometimes crime novels can take themselves pretty freaking seriously. That’s their author’s business, of course. But some that I admire also have moments of great levity. I’m thinking of Walter Mosley’s stories, and of course, the sometimes very funny Elmore Leonard.

 

My wife is horrified and embarrassed that I laugh at my own jokes, but I’ll go out on that limb and say in my own defense, several readers have commented on the humor in The Hunger of Crows. One of the many revisions was taking out excess jokes. Painful!

 

Q. How did you go about finding an agent for your novel?

 

A. In 2018, after working for five years, I thought the novel was complete. I sent it to Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary Management. I knew that Jeff had discovered Alaskan writer Eowyn Ivey’s hugely successful debut novel, The Snow Child, at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference here in Homer in 2008. He was an agent who had been to Homer, the setting of my novel. I was sure he was someone with an ear for Alaskan stories. He is.

 

Q. What process did you go through with the editor in creating a finished version of the manuscript?

 

A. Jeff Kleinman liked it, but said it did not feel complete. He turned it over to his associate, Rachel Eckstrom, and for the next two years I completely rewrote the book three or four times before the wise and patient Rachel decided it was ready to pitch to publishers. When Crooked Lane Books bought it in the spring of 2020, I thought I was done revising, at last. Then their editor sent me eleven single spaced pages of “notes” (meaning things that needed to be worked on, changed, or eliminated). Eleven pages! I thought they were rejecting the book. Then I remembered they’d already paid me for it.

 

The editor’s notes were brilliant, and I rewrote the whole manuscript twice more, making massive structural changes. And then it was finally done, after ten years, uncountable rewrites, and hundreds of excised pages zapped into cyber oblivion with the delete key. Nothing to it.

 

Q. How is the novel being publicized or marketed differently from a short story collection?

 

A. Hah! Using the words marketing and short story collection in the same sentence is hilarious. (See above: agents hate story collections.) Why? Because publishers hate story collections! And for good reason: they do not sell. Seriously, how many story collections are on the NY Times bestselling fiction list right now? I'll look. Okay, I looked. The answer: NONE. Only novels.

So, after three decades of publishing short stories, Crooked Lane’s wonderful marketing of my novel has been deliriously encouraging and very much appreciated.

 

Q. Any advice for short story writers who want to try their hand at a novel?

 

A. Yes. Read lots of novels. Many short story writers mostly read short stories. I know, I’ve been a short story junkie for thirty years (and I don’t want to recover. Ever). I have a whole wall of nothing but story collections or anthologies. You can always sneak-read a couple stories secretly. (Hint: Put a story collection on the bottom of a stack of novels on your nightstand. No one will notice.)

 

Not reading novels made it hard to learn to write a novel. I did not have the rhythm of a long work of fiction etched into my brain the way the shape of stories was. Maybe that’s why some of the greatest short story writers never wrote wildly successful novels: Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, to name a few.

 

Q. Were there any “How to” books about novel writing you found useful?

 

A. I love reading craft books on writing. But because until recently I never intended to write a novel, I’ve never read any that are specifically about novel writing. It should go without saying that it helps to have some general writing skills if you’re going to write 300 pages of anything. There are several fine books that I’ve found helpful for myself and for the numerous students I’ve worked with over the years. Here are some favorites (alphabetically):

 

The Half-Known World, by Robert Boswell   

Writing Fiction, by Janet Burroway, et al.

The Art of Fiction, by John Gardner

On Writing, by George V. Higgins

The Fiction Writer’s Workshop, by Josip Novakovich

How Fiction Works, by James Wood

 

One last word to new novelists.

READ LOTS OF NOVELS!

Did I already say that? 

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies.

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris.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

Is It Important to Visit the Places That Great Writers Have Frequented?

I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s book Just Kids, about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and her start as an artist in New York City in the late 1960s and early 70s. It’s a fantastic memoir, I highly recommend it for its mesmerizing story of how Patti Smith went from being a homeless, teenage arts wannabe to a highly accomplished songwriter, performer, and author.

Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith

One thing that stands out to me about Patti Smith’s recollections of her early days as an artist is how important it was for her to stand in the places other artists had stood:

“My friend Janet Hamill had been hired at Scribner’s Bookstore, and she found a way of giving me a helping hand by sharing her good fortune. She spoke to her superiors, and they offered me a position. It seemed like a dream job, working in the retail store of the prestigious publisher, home to writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and their editor, the great Maxwell Perkins. Where the Rothschilds bought their books, where paintings by Maxfield Parrish hung in the stairwell.”

I share Patti Smith’s love of locales that artists, and writers in particular, have lived in or visited. I’ve made a pilgrimage to Walt Whitman’s house in Camden,New Jersey, where you can still view his signature floppy, gray felt hat. I’ve hiked to Dove Cottage in the Lake District of the United Kingdom to see where Wordsworth and Coleridge had their literary commune. I’ve walked across the bridge in Trieste, Italy, that James Joyce crossed each day on his way to work.

The author with the statue of James Joyce in Trieste, Italy

I’m as much of a literary groupie as anyone. There is something thrilling for me about visiting these places and seeing objects that my writer heroes touched. In the presence of those places I become like a true believer who hopes to experience the healing power of a saint’s metatarsal bone displayed in a gold monstrance. Maybe I’m subconsciously hoping that gazing up at the plaque on the house where Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning lived in Florence will somehow help me to harness the power of their art to energize my own. If only it was that simple!

Part of me remains deeply suspicious of artistic hero worship. After all, almost no one knew who James Joyce was when he crossed the Ponte Rosso in Trieste every day in 1905. He wouldn’t publish his first book of fiction, Dubliners, till nine years later. That bridge became famous because James Joyce did the unbelievably hard and inspired work of writing the great stories that make up Dubliners. The way to make your reputation as a writer is not to imitate James Joyce or to drink a Hugo aperitif near his statue in Trieste, as lovely as that is.

Yes, living la vie bohème and being near artists and their haunts may seem glamorous. But art is like sports: watching other people do it is not the same as taking part. There’s no substitute for the hard work of the artist.


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