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Thomas Mann
Sep. 17th, 2016 07:23 pmAlthough Thomas Mann is a 20th-century writer, he does write as if he is living under the moral restrictiveness of the Charles Dickens era. It is perhaps my main regret about the man. I wouldn’t have minded if he had a little touch of the Henry Miller philosophy when it comes to sex and literature - a touch.
One considers that maybe his homosexuality might have hampered him in this. He wrote early enough in the century that one could not write freely of homosexuality, and so the whole sexual dynamic in all of its rich mechanical details might have been something to shy away from. On the other hand, maybe this helped his art. He dwelt more on longing and desire and the absence of love, which is pretty powerful material, too.
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Pleasure in the salacious for its own sake, though an almost universal fault, has always been incomprehensible to me, and verbal excess of this kind I have always found the most repulsive of all, since they are the cheapest and have not the excuse of passion. People laugh and joke about these matters precisely as though they were dealing with the simplest and most amusing subject in the world, whereas the exact opposite is the truth; and to talk of them in that loose and airy way is to surrender to the whinnyings of the mob the most important and mysterious concern of nature and of life.
-- Thomas Mann, “Felix Krull”
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One considers that maybe his homosexuality might have hampered him in this. He wrote early enough in the century that one could not write freely of homosexuality, and so the whole sexual dynamic in all of its rich mechanical details might have been something to shy away from. On the other hand, maybe this helped his art. He dwelt more on longing and desire and the absence of love, which is pretty powerful material, too.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Pleasure in the salacious for its own sake, though an almost universal fault, has always been incomprehensible to me, and verbal excess of this kind I have always found the most repulsive of all, since they are the cheapest and have not the excuse of passion. People laugh and joke about these matters precisely as though they were dealing with the simplest and most amusing subject in the world, whereas the exact opposite is the truth; and to talk of them in that loose and airy way is to surrender to the whinnyings of the mob the most important and mysterious concern of nature and of life.
-- Thomas Mann, “Felix Krull”
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