Bluebeard's Chamber by Michael Maar

Author:Michael Maar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

This kind of thing one would rather banish, but does not succeed in doing so. The fisherman, for his part, ‘did not succeed badly, so far as the upper layer of his consciousness went’. The lower layer, however, sees to it that he betrays himself as soon as the emissaries from Rome arrive. He claims not to have sent anyone away from his door, whether ‘lord or beggar’,128 but when the key to the legiron turns up in the belly of the pike that he serves up to them, Thomas Mann has him where he wants him: ‘Then the blenched man straightened and made his confession.’129 He is pale as the brothers were at Judah’s revelation, pale as Adrian Leverkühn in his final address, whose admissions were recorded by his friend Zeitblom in Doctor Faustus, his pen already trembling as he sits down to write – a tremble that he shares with his author.

No other book so exhausted Thomas Mann as Doctor Faustus, this ‘radical confession’, this ‘confession of a life’ and ‘transformed autobiography’, which he wrote in a ‘state of profound excitement, deep turbulence and surrender’ and with such a determined ‘investment of reality and a life’s secret’ that the ‘idea of making public this work of life and its secrecy’ remained ‘in the depths of my soul something strange and unfathomable’ – ‘the whole thing is like an open wound’.130 There can be no doubt about it: if there is one work to which Thomas Mann confided, in however coded a form, the secrets whose discovery he feared in April 1933 as a mortal danger, then this work is Doctor Faustus. And vice versa; what else should the secret work deal with if not precisely those secrets of his life that the diary passage mentions?

This however is almost the only sure thing that one can say about this most intricate of his novels, in which allusions are piled one above the other like the mattresses and eiderdowns in the tale of the princess who still feels the pea underneath. And at the deepest point beneath the layers of allusion there is concealed here, too, the hard nub that robbed the author of his sleep and sorely pressed on his soul.

Is this nub the affair with Schwerdtfeger, whom Adrian addresses in the familiar form after they have spent a holiday together – in short, the story of Mann’s youthful passion for Paul Ehrenberg? But something is no longer a secret if it is bruited about at every opportunity. All that was needed was the inquiry of an acquaintance, and Mann burst out:

Ah, those friends of my youth, the Ehrenbergs! Carl, who wrote you the stupid letter, played Tristan with such legato, and ‘that Paul’, who was certainly a painter, like so very many, but an attractive lad and indeed one of my great passions – I cannot put it otherwise.131

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