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p144 ...So much I was certain of from the start: it was not the letter as a whole that had given occasion to the direction at the end; but only a part of it, the so-called facetie and farce, the experience with the fatal porter. But again, that part was the whole letter, on account of that part it was written; not for my amusement -- no doubt the writer had known that the “jape” would have nothing comic about it for me -- but rather to shake off a painful impression, for which I, the friend of his childhood, was of course the only repository. All the rest was only trimmings, wrappings, pretext, putting off, and afterwards a covering up again with talk, music-critical aperçu, as though nothing had happened. Upon the anecdote -- to use a very objective word -- everything focuses; it stands in the background from the beginning on, announces itself in the first lines and is postponed. Still untold, it plays into the jests about the great city Nineveh and the tolerant skeptical quotation from the Bible. It comes near being told at the place where for the first time here is mention of the porter; then it is dropped again [doesn't all this remind you of what the precocious Adrian wrote to Kretschmar about composing beautiful music before moving to Leipzig?]. The letter is ostensibly finished before it is told -- “Jam satis est” [that's enough] -- and then, as though it had almost gone out of the writer’s head, as though only Schleppfuss’s quoted greeting brought it back, it is told “to finish off with,” including the extraordinary reference back to his father’s lectures on butterflies [I’m afraid I’m missing that reference]. Yet it is not allowed to form the end of the letter, rather some remarks about Schumann, the romantic movement, Chopin, are appended to it, obviously with the intention of detracting from its weight, and so causing it to be forgotten -- or more correctly, probably, to make it, out of pride, look as though that were the idea; for I do not believe the intention existed that I, the reader, should overlook the core of the letter.
p145 Very remarkable to me, even on the second reading, was the fact that the style, the travesty or personal adaptation of Kumpf’s [Martin Luther’s] old-German, prevailed only until the adventure was recounted and then was dropped regardless, so that the closing pages are entirely uncoloured by it and show a perfectly modern style. Is it not as though the archaizing tone had served its purpose as soon as the tale of the false guide is on paper? As though... it was only introduced in order to be able to tell the story in it, which by that means gets its proper atmosphere? And what atmosphere... It is the religious atmosphere. So much was clear to me: on account of its historical affinity with the religious, the language of the Reformation -- or the flavour of it -- had been chosen for a letter which was to bring me this story. Without it, how could the word have been written down that pressed to be written down: “Pray for me!” ... And just before it was another, which even at the first reading went through and through me, and which has just as little to do with humour, bearing as it does an undeniably mystical, thus religious stamp: the word “lust-hell.”
...My fury at the obscene prank of the small-beer Schleppfuss knew no bounds -- yet it was an impersonal fury, no evidence at all of prudishness in myself. I was never prudish, and if the Leipzig procurer had played his trick on me I should have known how to put a good face on it. No, my present feelings had entirely to do with Adrian’s nature and being; and for that, indeed, the word “prudish” would be perfectly silly and unsuitable. Vulgarity itself might here have been inspired with a sense of the need to spare and protect.
...However strange it may seem, considering our long intimacy, we had never touched in any personal or intimate way on the subject of love, of sex, of the flesh. We had never come on it otherwise than through the medium of art and literature, with reference to the manifestations of passion in the intellectual sphere... [On Adrian’s talking about the sensual in art] It was, to express myself strongly, as though one heard an angel holding forth on sin. One could expect no flippancy or vulgarity, no banal bad jokes. And yet one would feel put off; acknowledging his intellectual right to speak, one would be tempted to beg: “Hush, my friend! Your lips are too pure, too stern for such matters.”
p146 In fact, Adrian’s distaste for the coarse or lascivious was forbidding and forthright. I knew exactly the wry mouth, the contemptuous expression with which he recoiled when that sort of thing was even remotely approached... As for myself, I will confess that I had tasted of the apple, and at that time had relations for seven or eight months with a girl of the people, a cooper’s daughter, a connection which was hard enough to keep from Adrian -- though truly I scarcely believed that he noticed it -- and which I severed without ill feeling at the end of that time as the creature’s lack of education bored me and I had never anything to say for myself with her except just the one thing. I had gone into it not so much out of hot blood as impelled by curiosity, vanity, and the desire to [have a beard?] translate into practice that frankness of the ancients about sexual matter which was part of my theoretic convictions.
Is it just me or is Mann only convincing about sex and passion in Death in Venice?
p147 ...I will not speak of Christian inhibitions nor yet apply the shibboleth ‘Kaisersaschern,” with its various implications, partly middle-class and conventional, yet coloured as well with a medievally lively horror of sin. That would do the truth scant justice and not suffice either to call out the loving consideration with which his attitude inspired me, the anger I felt at any injury he might receive. One simply could not and would not picture Adrian in any situation of gallantry; that was due to the armour of purity, chastity, intellectual pride, cool irony, which he wore; it was sacred to me, sacred in a certain painful and secretly mortifying way. For painful and mortifying -- except perhaps to the malicious soul -- is the thought that purity is not given to this life in the flesh; that instinct does not spare the loftiest intellectual pride, nor can arrogance itself refuse its toll to nature. One may only hope that this derogation into the human, and thereby also into the beast, may by God’s will fulfill itself in some form of beauty, forbearance, and spiritual elevation, in feelings veiled and purified by devotion.
This could be Henry Ryecroft talking about Victorian femininity. When Schleppfuss prepared this ground with his talk about innocence as an inducement to sin, I was thinking more of (Goethe’s) Faust’s Gretchen. I guess it does make sense that Mann would translate the genders in his book.
Must I add that precisely in cases like my friend’s there is the least hope of this? The beautifying, veiling, ennobling, I mean, is a work of the soul, in a court of appeal interceding, mediating, itself instinct with poetry; where spirit and desire interpenetrates and appease each other in a way not quite free of illusion; it is a stratum of life peculiarly informed with sentiment, in which, I confess, my own humanity feels at ease, but which is not for stronger tastes. Natures’ like Adrian’s have not much “soul,” It is a fact, in which a profoundly intellectuality stands in the most immediate relation of all to the animal, to naked instinct, is given over most shamelessly to it; hence the anxiety that a person like me must suffer through a nature like Adrian’s -- hence too my conviction that the accursed adventure of which he had written was in its essence frightfully symbolic.
I saw him standing at the door of that room in the house of joy; slowly comprehending, eyeing the waiting daughters of the wilderness. Once -- I had the picture clearly before me -- I had seen him pass through the alien atmosphere of Mutze’s tavern in Halle. [Just now the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” just came on in the cafe where I’m transcribing this. I mention this because this is the particular song I most viscerally associate with my own pre-adolescent transition. I’ll probably come back to this.] So now I saw him move blindly to the piano and strike chords -- what chords he only afterwards knew himself. I saw the snub-nosed girl beside him, Hetaera esmeralda: her powdered bosoms in Spanish bodice -- saw her brush his cheek with her arm. Violently, across space and back in time, I yearned thither. I felt the impulse to push the witch away from him with my knee as he had pushed the music-stool aside to gain his freedom. For days I felt the touch of her flesh on my own cheek and knew with abhorrence and sheer terror that it had burned upon his ever since. Again I beg that it be considered indicative not of me but of him that I was quite unable to take the event on its lighter side. There was no light side there. If I have even remotely succeeded in giving the reader a picture of my friend’s character, he must feel with me the indescribably profaning, the mockingly debasing and dangerous nature of this contact.
Thanks to looking up "Hetaera esmeralda", I now get the butterfly reference that escaped me before. Here is the passage from chapter III that I skipped at the time and didn't pay enough attention to:
p14 Clearwings were there [in an illustrated book] depicted which had no scales on their wings, so that 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...
p148 That up to then he had “touched” no woman was and is to me an unassailable fact. Now the woman had touched him -- and he had fled. Nor is there in this flight any trace of the comic, let me assure the reader, in case he incline to seek such in it. Comic, at most, this avoidance was, in the bitter-tragic sense of futility. In my eyes Adrian had not escaped, and only very briefly, certainly, did he feel that he had. His intellectual pride had suffered the trauma of contact with soulless instinct. Adrian was to return to the place whither the betrayer had led him.
If this is not a reverse image of Gretchen’s first encounter with Faust, in Goethe’s version of the tale, I am much deceived. But I like that Mann has played it this way as it shows the absurdity of Victorian and earlier attitudes to the innocence of females (when they are not acting as Satan’s consorts.) Many years before I felt those pre-adolescent stirrings I associate with a Beatles song, I had a run in with a little temptress on the stairs of a neighbor’s house. Zeitblom’s description above would be an apt one of the effect of this surprise kiss on my innocent conception of the world at that time... but I was probably seven and my temptress maybe a year younger. As I said, I do like the way Mann is playing this, but, COME ON!
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