Thomas Mann was a famous German author whose heyday was the first half of the twentieth century.\u00a0 He had a Nobel Prize in literature for one of his novels and a reputation for writing psychological stories that were full of melancholy and longing for lost happiness.<\/p>\n
In addition to his novels which were too long for my liking he wrote a handful of novellas that were collected in an English translation under the title \u201cDeath in Venice and Seven Other Stories.\u201d\u00a0 One of these stories is named \u201cTristan\u201d and is the story of a sanitarium up in the Alps that especially treated people suffering from tuberculosis which is never actually named in the story but only hinted at when a patient would cough and then check a handkerchief for blood.\u00a0 But in addition to the actual patients at this sanitarium called Einfried there was one resident who stayed there for the atmosphere; a \u201cnovelist\u201d named Detlev Spinell.\u00a0 And novelist would be an exaggeration.\u00a0 No one has ever read his book and even letter-writing is an enormously slow and painful exercise when performed by him.\u00a0 In the story, this writer is the cause of the death of a woman who is attempting to recover from a mild case of tuberculosis which is several times emphatically stated to be only affecting \u201cthe trachea, and not the lungs, thank God.\u201d\u00a0 He is a malevolent force that insinuates into the young woman\u2019s mind that she is the victim of a crass, plebian existence that sacrificed her health and artistic spirit at the altar of mundane human activities, specifically; marriage and childbirth which was the event that sapped her strength and weakened her body sufficiently to allow the wasting disease to get the upper hand with her.<\/p>\n
And this unhealthy influence by Spinell eventually causes her health to completely break down.\u00a0 And so, the doctors call for her husband to return to the sanitarium before her incipient death.\u00a0 And while this catastrophe is occurring Spinell takes it upon himself to write a letter to this husband who at this point is occupying a room in the same building.\u00a0 He painstakingly writes the letter, mails it, smiles at the husband in the hallways when they meet and gives no thought to what will happen when the letter returns from the post office to the building that they both reside in.\u00a0 The letter is an insulting and disparaging polemic attacking the husband for his \u201cplebian\u201d tastes and lack of artistic feeling.\u00a0 And he announces that he has awakened the wife to her true spiritual stature and thereby causes her to renounce her allegiance to ordinary life (and by that choice, life itself).<\/p>\n
Now all of this is quite bizarre but Mann paints the personalities of husband, wife and Spinell very skillfully.\u00a0 And this allows the personalities and their relationships to each other to make sense.\u00a0 The husband is a very plain and \u201cnormal\u201d individual.\u00a0 A businessman who embraces the life of a husband and father along with his hard charging life as a capitalist.\u00a0 He loves his wife and child but he isn\u2019t above pinching a maid in a hallway when the opportunity arises.\u00a0 The wife loves her husband and child but she has the artistic side to her personality and she can be influenced into believing that the prosaic life of a housewife and mother is a demeaning occupation for someone as sensitive and with such an elevated soul as herself.\u00a0 And then there is Spinell.\u00a0 He is an abnormal spirit of the \u201cartistic\u201d type who sees life through a prism that only values the spiritual and pure emotions and sensibilities of the artist.\u00a0 All ordinary things like the normal male\/female relations are fraught with unacceptable amounts of inartistic reality.\u00a0 Thus, his hatred of the husband in the story and his beatification of the wife.<\/p>\n
The climax of the story, to my mind is the collision when the husband reads the letter and confronts Spinell down the hall from him.\u00a0 He reads parts of the letter to the author and then rains verbal abuse on the head of his frightened and contrite adversary.\u00a0 But just as his screaming abuse reaches its crescendo, from out in the hall, comes news that his wife\u2019s lungs have collapsed under the ravages of her ailment, causing her to cough up an enormous quantity of blood and that she is on the edge of death.\u00a0 The husband shifts his focus onto the bearer of bad news:<\/p>\n
\u2018\u201cIs she dead?\u201d yelled Herr Klaterjahn.\u00a0 As he spoke he clutched the R\u00e4tin by the arm and pulled her to and fro on the sill.\u00a0 \u201cNot quite?\u00a0 Not dead; she can see me, can\u2019t she?\u00a0 Brought up a little blood again, from the lung eh?\u00a0 Yes, I give in, it may be from the lung.\u00a0 Gabriele!<\/strong>\u201d\u00a0 he suddenly cried out, and his eyes filled with tears; you could see what a burst of good, warm, honest human feeling came over him.\u00a0 \u201cYes, I\u2019m coming.\u201d\u00a0 He said and dragged the R\u00e4tin after him\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n Mann shows us the reality of life and compares it to the shadow of life that Spinell hides in.\u00a0 He uses art to hide from life.\u00a0 As for the husband, who really was a crass, plebian individual full of crass plebian faults, he is also a living, breathing human being.\u00a0 Spinell is a wraith.\u00a0 His artistic sensibilities and motives are pathetic and infantile.\u00a0 Now this is coming from Thomas Mann who embraced art as the central motive of his life.\u00a0 What I find interesting is that he so clearly shows us the primacy of life over art.\u00a0 I find that powerful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thomas Mann was a famous German author whose heyday was the first half of the twentieth century.\u00a0 He had a Nobel Prize in literature for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,2510,1263,237],"tags":[4933,96,38,1355,1265,5048],"class_list":["post-35025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-literature","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-reviews","tag-art","tag-literature","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-thomas-mann","tag-tristan"],"yoast_head":"\n