Jeffrey Meyers
Unwritten Works: Woolf, Mann and Hemingway
Many writers, to soothe their egos, inflate their reputations and warn off competitors, claim to be working on a book they are not really writing or have not even begun. But all authors reflect on what they have already done and consider ideas and subjects they might write about in the future. Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann and Ernest Hemingway wrote autobiographical stories about their unwritten books. They offer real insight into what Mann calls ‘the beginnings and origins of things,’ the hidden sources and mysterious powers that inspire creativity.
Virginia Woolf’s story, An Unwritten Novel (1921), portrays her over-confident female narrator observing a fellow-passenger traveling to Eastbourne in a railway compartment. Based on the strange look in the woman’s staring eyes, the narrator imagines her dramatic and tragic life. She names her Miss Minnie Marsh, and as she describes the unwritten story her interpretation of the woman’s life and character becomes increasingly intense: ‘We approached the catastrophe. . . . Her lips pursed as if to spit venom. . . . She committed some crime! . . . Neighbours—the doctor—baby brother—the kettle—scalded—hospital—dead—or only the shock of it, the blame?’ Absorbed in her story of unintentional infanticide, the narrator declares: ‘I was heading her over the waterfall, straight for madness. . . . What a swirl these monsters leave. . . . ‘I can bear it no longer,’ her spirit says. . . . ‘it’s the spirit willing its destiny.’ . . . Ignominies, humiliations.’ But in a surprising anti-climax, this quite conventional passenger is met at the train station by her son.
In Woolf’s amusing self-parody the narrator, carried away by what Samuel Johnson in Rasselas calls ‘the dangerous prevalence of the imagination,’ comments ironically on her own solipsistic and misguided method:
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. . . . Unless I’m much mistaken, the pulse’s quickened, the moment’s coming. . . . Though we keep up pretences, I’ve read you right. . . . I read her message, deciphered her secret, reading it beneath her gaze.
Deceiving herself as her imagination runs riot, the supposedly omniscient narrator is surprised to discover that her Miss Minnie Marsh does not really exist. Though the woman’s real life is not worth writing about, the narrator paradoxically writes the story to show there is no story to write. Her invention is one of ‘the unborn children of the mind,’ and the would-be artist is forced to recognise the limitations of her creative powers. After projecting her own violent feelings onto the woman, she exclaims, ‘my world’s done for! What do I stand on? What do I know?’…..
Gustav von Aschenbach, the hero of Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), was born in the province of Silesia, which Mann in his essay on Frederick the Great calls ‘beautiful and never-to-be-forgotten.’ Like Mann, who had a Brazilian mother, Aschenbach’s parental ‘union of dry, conscientious officialdom and ardent, obscure impulse from the daughter of a Bohemian musical conductor produced an artist.’ Aschenbach has written four major works in three genres, biography, novel and literary essay:
the lucid and vigorous prose epic on the life of Frederick the Great; careful, tireless weaver of the richly patterned tapestry entitled Maia [illusion], a novel that gathers up the threads of many human destines in the warp of a single idea; creator of that powerful narrative The Abject, which taught a whole grateful generation that a man can still be capable of moral resolution even after he has plumbed the depths of knowledge; . . . and that impassioned discourse on the theme of Mind and Art whose ordered force and antithetic eloquence led serious critics to rank it with Schiller’s Simple and Sentimental Poetry (1795).
Mann’s self-reflective portrait of Aschenbach gives his hero books that he himself would later write. Mann’s 80-page essay on ‘Frederick the Great and the Grand Coalition’ (1915) defends the Prussian king’s character and military invasions during the Seven Years War (1756-63) in order to justify by analogy Germany’s aggressive role in World War I. Mann argues that a military coalition had formed ‘for the destruction of Prussia’ and that country, surrounded by powerful enemies, was forced to defend itself.
Mann describes Frederick as ‘self-willed and despotic.’ Wanting battle at all costs, he vastly increased his army, claimed Silesia was German territory, invaded the Hapsburg territory of Saxony, triggered the war and condemned his enemies as ‘Cette race maudite.’ His enemies believe Frederick is ‘so savage, so reckless, so extreme, so inordinate, so violent! The man must be bent on a ruthless offensive and thinking of nothing else. Is it possible for anyone to trust him?’
Mann writes that Frederick would ‘have to prove the strength of his budding greatness before the whole of Europe,’ and become a strong leader so that
the destiny of a great people might be fulfilled [in a unified Germany]. . . . His personality helped magnify him in the popular eye and elevate him to a legendary fame. . . . [He fell] in force upon a neutral country, a good, innocent country which was not at all expecting such a barbarous onset. . . . It was impossible to withstand the masterly entry of the Prussian troops, carried out as it was with the utmost order and discipline. . . . After occupying the country and disbanding the army or incorporating it in his own . . . a hubbub arose in Europe at this unheard-of breach of the peace, this attack on the rights of nation! . . . The civilized states [France and Austria] must root out the Prussian spirit and rid the planet from this poisonous growth. . . . He had won nothing tangible, and his territories were ravaged, depopulated, impoverished, run wild.
Mann’s defense of Frederick concludes with the unresolved conflict of opposites: ‘right and might, thought and action, freedom and destiny, reason and daemon, bourgeois morality and heroic necessity.’…..
Mann’s brilliant but unconvincing essay, with its sympathy for an aggressive conqueror, became embarrassing in the 1930s during the rise of Frederick’s great admirer Adolf Hitler. No wonder, after the English translation in 1929, that Mann never reprinted the essay. In his personal life Hitler, like Frederick, was ascetic and had no relations with women (except for Eva Braun at the very end). But he was deeply attached to his favourite dog Blondi. He too “kept poison always upon him for the last emergency.” Like Mann’s Frederick, Hitler was dictatorial, militaristic, aggressive and racist. He had a charismatic character and a legendary reputation. The Führer felt compelled to prove his power and fulfil the destiny of his nation. He occupied Austria in 1938 and incorporated it into the Reich. He began World War II by invading Poland in 1939, and attacked neutral Belgium, which could not withstand his onslaught, in 1940. He aroused the rage of his European enemies, who were determined to destroy him. Finally, he reduced Germany to ruins.
Aschenbach’s Maia became The Magic Mountain (1924); The Abject evolved into Doctor Faustus (1947); Schiller’s theme of ‘Mind and Art’ appeared in Mann’s stories, A Weary Hour (1905) and Tonio Kröger (1903), and in his essay On Schiller (1955). Mann’s favourite structural device in Death in Venice, the conflicting polarities that can never be resolved, recur in The Magic Mountain: reality-illusion, consciousness-dreams, restraint-passion, order-chaos, health-sickness, body-spirit. The novel portrays the ‘human destinies’ of many characters, the ‘single idea’ is that disease always destroys life, and the deluded patients, following an illusion, mistakenly believe they can recover in the Alpine tuberculosis sanatorium. In Doctor Faustus the hero’s Faustian pact with the devil in return for twenty-four years of musical genius plunges him into the depths of knowledge and reveals that he’s still ‘capable of moral resolution.’
Mann’s early story A Weary Hour (1905) portrays the fatal tuberculosis, creative exhaustion and artistic triumph of the unnamed Friedrich Schiller. In Tonio Kröger (1903) the dark, dreamy Tonio (of mixed north and south parentage) uses Schiller’s play Don Carlos in a hopeless attempt to seal his friendship with the attractive but empty-ended Hans Hansen. On Schiller, Mann’s last work, portrays Schiller’s sweet character (rare among great writers and similar to that of Anton Chekhov, Henry James and Stephen Crane): ‘for all his deep earnestness, his unflagging thoughtfulness, and the keenness of his intellect, who can overlook the childlike element in Schiller’s nature, the noble naiveté?’ Goethe called his great friend, ‘the most intelligent, the most pure-hearted person he had ever met.’ Mann concludes that ‘Freedom remained the fundamental motif of Schiller’s thought and his poetry.’
Mann explains his own creative process by writing that Aschenbach’s works were not ‘a manifestation of great power working under high pressure, that they came forth, as it were, all in one breath. . . . The truth was that they were heaped up to greatness in layer after layer, in long days of work, out of hundreds and hundreds of single inspirations,’ while striving for years with endurance and tenacity at the altar of art. His favourite motto was Frederick’s heroic command, Durchhalten: hold fast with fortitude under suffering. But in Death in Venice Aschenbach releases himself from the ‘closed fist’ of his life and, in the hedonistic Mediterranean atmosphere, finally surrenders to his homosexual love and longing for the beautiful boy Tadzio.
Hemingway, who rarely praised his contemporaries, paid tribute to Mann in his letters. In December 1925 he wrote, ‘Buddenbrooks is a pretty damned good book.’ Five years later he said that Mann winning the Nobel Prize in 1929 ‘made me damned happy.’ His favourite Mann story was Disorder and Early Sorrow about a father who feels rejected when his favourite daughter is attracted to a young man.
In contrast to the dedicated Aschenbach, Hemingway’s writer Harry, dying of gangrene at the foot of the mountain in Kenya, has sold his vitality and destroyed his talent. The recurrent theme of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936) is corruptio optimi pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst. Hemingway writes of Harry, in a subtle mixture of flashbacks and narrative:
He had seen the world change; not just the events. . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would. . . . Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.
Unlike Aschenbach, whose works foreshadow those that Mann would write, Harry reflects sadly on those he hasn’t written. Hemingway describes material he’s already used to supply the five flashbacks, the most brilliant part of the story, and to illustrate the work that Harry says he will never be able to write. They include vivid memories of the war in Turkey and Greece (in in our time), skiing in Austria (with the former enemies who had tried to kill him in the Italian Alps, described in A Farewell to Arms), fishing in Germany (in Dateline: Toronto), boyhood brutality in Michigan and violence in Wyoming, writing in Paris (in A Moveable Feast) and the horribly wounded British officer in World War I (also in in our time).
The best passages describe memories of Hemingway’s great themes: war and love. He recalls leaving Turkey with the Greek refugees after their defeat in October 1922: ‘Now in his mind he saw a railway station at Karagatch and he was standing with his pack and that was the headlight of the Simplon-Orient [train] cutting the dark now and he was leaving Thrace then after the retreat.’ He also longs for the unattainable American nurse (as Aschenbach longs for Tadzio), who had jilted him when he was recovering from his war wound in Milan: ‘he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it. . . . How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he knew he could not cure himself of loving her.’ After whoring in Constantinople and getting into a fist fight over a ‘hot Armenian slut,’ he meekly returns to his devoted wife in Paris, ‘that now he loved again.’
Both Aschenbach and Harry, striving for perfection, die tragically in a foreign country and of repulsive afflictions: cholera and gangrene. There’s a strong contrast between Harry’s idealised past and diseased present. Yet as Friedrich Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power, ‘The sick and weak have had fascination on their side. . . . The great adventurers and criminals are sick at certain periods of their lives: the great emotions, the passions of power, love, revenge, are accompanied by profound disturbances.’
The snows of Kilimanjaro and the snows of the Alps in the first flashback are les neiges d’antan, pure, high and unbelievably white in the sun—but forever unreachable. The ironic theme of Snows is that the dying Harry ‘would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.’ His mental flashbacks contrast his great potential with his tragic failure, yet also reveal that he had an impressive talent and lived more intensely just before his death. He could have fulfilled his promise and achieved artistic salvation if he had only been able to reject his decadent life and record the vivid recollections that show him (again like Aschenbach) at the very height of his powers. Harry does write these stories in his imagination, though it is too late to put them on paper, and his redemptive memories show that his life has not been completely wasted.
All three stories by major writers are self-portraits, warnings about what they could become if they failed. They show how strange and absorbing it is to give in to the artistic life and what they suffer in the process: Woolf, connection to ordinary reality; Mann, isolation and passionate obsession; Hemingway, inability to fulfil his ambitions.
These authors brilliantly turn the theme of artistic impotence into an incisive analysis of the creative process.
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Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Hemingway: A Biography (1985) and Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (2014).
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