Icy Lights

THE BELOVED RETURNS--Thomas Mann --Knopf ($2.50).

Continually, in all his life's work, Thomas Mann has interested himself in the study of the artist, the superior man, the genius. Usually his method has been elaborately symbolic; in The Beloved Returns it is direct. On the scale of such colossal fables as Joseph and The Magic Mountain this new novel must be classified as "minor"; and, relative to their all-but-unfathomable subtleties, it might seem almost transparent. But it is by no means minor, by no means so straight-edged as it looks. To the readers whom it will bring to the edge of their chairs it will be no simpler than a serpent's eye: an elegant, cold, quietly appalling, enigmatic investigation of genius in its inmost nature and effects.

In plot it is simple enough: at 63, Charlotte Kestner, nee Buff, who in her youth inspired young Goethe to the writing of Werther, turns up in Weimar, ostensibly to visit relatives, more privately and far more shakily, in the thought of meeting Goethe once more, in the full-blown, chilly grandeur of his age. She is besieged by gawpers, beset by callers who wish to talk to and make some use of her; Goethe stages, in her honor, a formal luncheon; she meets him again, more intimately, in his theatre box; and that is all.

For many another writer this tale might be worth perhaps 50 of the 453 pages devoted to it--a prettily sentimental, rather chokingly over-literary, long short story. But of course it is by no means all. The first six chapters, which are perhaps the most inactive and certainly the talkiest in contemporary literature, set up in great detail, with blank and awful irony, the effects of genius upon certain individuals--a secretary of Goethe, young Arthur Schopenhauer's hysterical bluestocking sister, Goethe's tortured, psychically castrated, piteous son--and its equally unpleasant effects upon a whole household and community. The exquisite, shriveling protocols of the formal luncheon are established with a finality, a bland cruelty, at which Marcel Proust might gasp.

And between those two movements is set the heart and brain of the work, an 80-page interior monologue by Goethe himself, which must stand next to Death in Venice among Mann's more paralyzing tours de force, the more astonishing in that it is, in certain important respects, so crude.

In this great chapter, Mann makes a flat denial of those stream-of-consciousness subtleties whereby James Joyce put to shame all "psychological" fiction before and since Ulysses. Mann's own model, down to the very bumpiness and cantankerousness of the style, is the dramatic monologue as developed by Browning. Many of his gripes, grouchings and mph-mph mannerisms are hardly superior to those of a young "character" actor playing an old man. Between these strict archaic boundaries he constructs a complexity of invention, scholarly research, literary criticism, topical satire, prophecy, pure poetry. In every refraction, like the turnings of light within the depths of an iceberg, is recorded more of the nature, substance, detail of that bitterly remote, contemptuous, inhumanly self-pleased, almost divine prescience which is the essence of genius as Goethe had it--or as Thomas Mann observes and believes in it. Mann has here set down more on his subject than anyone has ever set down before.

In Goethe's mind:

"One can still care only for what one keeps to oneself and for oneself."

"Profundity must smile, glide gently in, and, smiling, yield itself to the initiate alone -- that is the esoteric of our art. For the people, gay pictures; for the cognoscenti the mystery behind."

"Ah, if only one lived in a free, in tellectual society, what powerful extraor dinary things one could write for it! Art's natural ruthlessness is shackled and limited by all sorts of petty considerations."

"Enough craziness left in me too, underneath all the brilliance! If I had not inherited the knack of order, the trick of saving myself, a whole system of protective devices--where should I be? Madness I loathe--abhor from my soul, beyond all power to utter, hate in my bones all crack-brained geniuses and near-geniuses, all emotionalism, eccentric gesturing and posturing, extravagance! Boldness, yes, audacity, boldness is all, the one indispensable thing -- but quiet, decorous, wedded to the proprieties, velvet-shod with irony. That is how I am, that is what I will."

Such statements, highly suggestive to students of Goethe, will appeal still more intricately to readers who are interested in what degree Thomas Mann identifies himself with Goethe and uses him, here, as a mask for talking.

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