SOURCE: Schmidgall, Gary. “Death in Venice, Life in Zurich: Mann's Late ‘Something for the Heart’.” Southwest Review 82 (summer 1997): 293-324.

[In the following essay, Schmidgall asserts that Death in Venice was inspired by Mann's homoerotic attachments to younger men, which continued until the end of his life.]

I

In May 1932, twenty years after writing one of the most widely admired short novels of the century, Thomas Mann was 56, about the same age as his protagonist in Death in Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach, who travels south from Munich under a heavy weight of weltschmerz, falls in love, and a few weeks later succumbs—so the world thinks—to cholera. Venice was again on Mann's mind, for his daughter Erika and son Klaus were paying a visit to the dubious city.

Perhaps because it was exactly the season of his own poignant vacation experiences of 1911 that had produced Death in Venice, Mann wrote warmly and revealingly to the pair from Munich: “I still want to write you a letter because the place is so important to me and I'm pleased to know you're there and I, in spirit, with you, living the life that otherwise can never be found, between the warm sea in the morning and the ambiguous city in the afternoon. Ambiguous is really the most modest adjective that one can give it.” Mann adds in closing, “my heart would still pound, if I were there again.” Why would it pound? The implication seems clear: the thought that he might meet another real-life Tadzio was still enough to quicken his pulse mightily. The haunting city of dreams might again tempt Mann into the homoerotic fantasies of living a life that, as he says, “otherwise can never be found” in his waking existence as a Nobel laureate and one of Germany's pre-eminent writers.

It is easy to conclude that Mann expected his two children to grasp the sexual subtext of his letter. For Erika, 26, was lesbian and Klaus, 25, gay. Their sexuality, and their father's, was by then common knowledge within the Mann family circle, though apparently always treated with smiles-of-a-summer-night discretion. While he had not ceased siring children when he wrote Death in Venice—his wife Katia gave birth to a daughter in 1918 and son in 1919, bringing the total to six—several subsequent private and public boldnesses leave no doubt about the objects of the father's most thrilling sexual interest. In 1920 he could even acknowledge in his diary, with pleasure, attraction to his own 14-year-old Klaus, nicknamed Eissi. “Am enraptured with Eissi, terribly handsome in his swimming trunks,” he wrote. “Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son.” A few months later: “I heard some noise in the boys' room and came upon Eissi totally nude. … Deeply struck by his ravishing adolescent body; overwhelming.”

Also in 1920, on the 4th of July, Mann declared in a long, breast-baring letter to the young writer Carl Maria Weber thanking him for his “defense” of Death in Venice: “Obviously, the law of polarity does not hold unconditionally; the male need not necessarily be attracted by the female.” He defended that class in which “masculinity is so pronounced that even in erotic matters only the masculine has importance or interest,” a class that includes Michelangelo, Frederick the Great, Johann Winckelmann, Count August von Platen, and Stefan George. “In matters of culture,” Mann continued, “homoerotic love is obviously as neutral as the other kind. In both, the individual case is everything; both can generate vulgarity and trash, and both are capable of highest achievement.” The spectrum is spanned, he points out, by the flamboyantly mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria and the austerely dignified George.

In this letter Mann also speaks candidly about himself, insisting on the “bourgeois” side of his nature as a loving “family founder and a father” but also admitting to a side devoted to “eroticism,” “unbourgeois intellectually sensual adventures,” and “covert yearning.” And Mann adds a remark that reflects richly on Aschenbach but even more so on himself: “The mind that loves is not fanatical; it is ingenious, political; it woos, and its wooing is erotic irony.” The writer never lost his penchant for erotic irony in his writing, and doubtless this sly, probing, ingenious—one might even say “cruisy”—style affected his social transactions in real life.

After slipping into his 50s, however, Mann found it more difficult to remain so chastely or ironically aloof. His eyes were always well peeled during sultry seaside weather, and in August 1927 another Tadzio-experience unfolded, but one more provocatively reciprocal and physical. Mann became infatuated with a 17-year-old named Klaus Heuser while vacationing on the North Sea island of Sylt. In a letter to Erika and his own Klaus afterward, shared homosexual attractions are wittily acknowledged as the 52-year-old father warns his son not to poach: “Yesterday I wrote a detailed letter to Kläuschen Heuser who left here eight days ago. This Klaus, as distinguished from Eissi, is a fact probably overestimated. I addressed him with Du, and he consented to my embracing him on my breast. Eissi is herewith asked to voluntarily withdraw and not to invade my circle. I am already old and famous, and why should you be the only ones who constantly sin … ? I have it in writing that these two weeks were the most beautiful of his life.”

Heuser remained a treasured keepsake all Mann's life. In 1954, after giving a lecture in Düsseldorf, the 79-year-old happened to meet Heuser's parents at a reception. “Klaus, darling from long ago, is now a 40-year-old. He returns soon from an 18-year-long stay in China, and I'm told he and his not very agreeable father will visit me. He has remained unmarried. … His mother Mira, at 70, is unchanged—has his eyes.” Mann reports that, when Erika learned Klaus never married, she remarked with her usual sly wit, employing the family nickname for her father, Der Zauberer (German for magician), “Since he couldn't have the Z., he preferred to let marriage go entirely.”

Whether the relationship was consummated or remained a “fact probably overestimated” it is now impossible to know. More certain was the ecstatic consummation Mann experienced at his writing desk. The exultant letter about Heuser ends, “And better still, in a little climax, I read in the theater at the Kleist Festival, in his presence, from my analysis of Amphitryon, on which he, if one may say so, was not without influence. The secret and almost silent adventures in life are the finest.” Shades, here, of that page-and-a-half of “choicest prose, so chaste, so lofty, so poignant with feeling” that Aschenbach writes in Tadzio's presence.

Mann could also be astonishingly bold in insinuating his desires and their objects in his fictions and criticism. In 1930, the year of his silver wedding anniversary, Mann delivered a lecture on the Venice-adoring Platen in which he chided critics, who “out of lack of knowledge, and with a reserve today out of date,” have “spoken with foolish circumlocution about the decisive fact in Platen's life, his exclusively homosexual constitution.” Asserting, daringly for the time, that “the moral libertinage of Eros unites all free and hyperuseless elements in a bond against the mean, ordinary, and anxious ones of life,” Mann put himself firmly in the immoralist—or, rather, anti-moralist—tradition of Whitman, Nietzsche, Wilde, and Gide. Indeed, Mann quotes, in the course of his Platen lecture, the Nietzschean aphorism, from Beyond Good and Evil, that underlies most gay liberation rhetoric: “The degree and kind of a man's sexuality permeates the very loftiest heights of his intellect.”

Mann's growing belief in this view may explain why, in “A Sketch of My Life” (written the same year as the self-referential paean to Platen), he freely acknowledged the self-revelation in Death in Venice. The story derived, we are told, from his own “personal and lyrical experience while traveling.” The strange figure in the Munich cemetery, the intimidating gondolier, Tadzio, the cholera, the misrouted luggage—“all that, and anything else you like, they were all there.” Corroboration from Mann's family was unminced, too. On the occasion of the 1973 premiere of Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice opera, Karl Pringsheim, who married Mann's sister, reported in the London Times: “On the first or second day, Mann saw that fabulous young Tadzio, and the entire story, as it developed, was Thomas Mann's own personal experience. It did not go so far as in the novella. It did, however, go rather far. He was absolutely captivated. It was a great experience, and in a direction in fact alien to him. He was still young—I mean it would have been something else again for a man of 50 or 60, but Mann was 35 years old.”

Nor did Mann take pains to hide his feelings for the boy from his wife, who had been with him throughout the sojourn at the Hôtel des Bains. In her Unwritten Memoirs, published in 1975, twenty years after her husband's death, Katia recalled with tart candor that “on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about thirteen was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband's attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn't pursue him through all of Venice—that he didn't do—but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often.”

Frau Mann preferred, at least for her memoirs, to view the novella's version of their Venetian experience as the product of Art rather than Life: “My husband transferred to Aschenbach the pleasure he actually took in this charming boy, stylizing it into extreme passion.” Katia reports, too, the poignant real-life denouement to the story: “A few years ago Erika received a letter from an elderly Polish aristocrat, a count, who wrote that something funny had happened. Some time ago friends had brought him the Polish translation of a novella in which he and his whole family were described to a T; he found this very amusing and intriguing. But he was not offended. Such was the end of the ‘real story’.” The elderly correspondent's name was Count Wladislaw Moes. “Wladzio” is the childish diminutive of his given name, and that, shouted by his playmates on that long-ago beach, was apparently misheard by Mann as Tadzio.

But was the emotional adventure of 1911 in fact “alien” to Mann, as Pringsheim suggests? Was the extreme passion Aschenbach feels for Tadzio the result, as Katia suggests, of her husband's masterful “stylizing” rather than a revelatory narrative of his own midlife yearnings and angst? And to ask a rather more specific question, was the reappearance, over fifty years later, of the “pale and charming psychagog” who beckons to Aschenbach in his final moments as an aging Polish aristocrat truly the end of the real story?

Richly atmospheric answers to these questions are possible because a real-life rehearsal or “retelling” of the Death in Venice story, far more elaborate and poignant than the nostalgic denouement in Count Moes' letter, took place in 1950, when Mann was 75. The Manns were sojourning in Zurich in the Death in Venice season, early summer, and Katia was confined for most of the time at a clinic for medical treatments, principally a hysterectomy. Thomas was installed at the Grand Hotel Dolder, alone and rather depressed by the calm following worldwide celebrations of his 75th birthday. Eissi's suicide the previous year may also still have weighed on his mind.

Katia was a smart woman, the first in Munich to take the Abitur examination, something even her husband never did. From her hospital bed she must have experienced a powerful sense of déjà vu as the events of her husband's three-week stay at the Dolder unfolded. For he was again luxuriating at a grand hotel and suddenly infatuated by a new Tadzio. The details of these extraordinary weeks were concealed, until recently, in the diary entries Mann made during and after his stay. He kept a full diary throughout his adult life, but destroyed several of its volumes on at least three occasions. Those which survived at his death, he stipulated in his will, could be published, but only twenty years after his death. If he had imagined that Katia would survive into her mid-nineties, he might have specified a longer period out of respect for her feelings.

“Literature always anticipates life,” Oscar Wilde said, and now, with the publication in the early 1990s, in German, of the diary volumes covering the last six years of his life, we have been vouchsafed an almost eerily elaborate instance of literature—Death in Venice—anticipating the life of its author. The pages of the diary recording the Dolder sojourn, in fact, constitute an important commentary on Mann's masterly novella, though remarkably it never once occurred to him to liken himself or his new object of adoration to Aschenbach and Tadzio. These pages—the translations from which are mine—offer an artfully shaped narrative just as colored with superb, deft touches as the best pages in his novels and short stories.

II

Mann's first few days at the Dolder were spent settling in, depositing valuables in the hotel vault, walking in nearby woods, and casting a perhaps not so casual glance at a picture of the hotel staff in the lobby. Just as at the Hôtel des Bains in 1911, Mann's eyes fell almost immediately upon an appealing young male while taking tea on the hotel terrace. The first diary mention is superbly understated: “A waiter from Munich, handsome.”

The august author is pleased by the attentions of the waiter, apparently of Aryan stock, and succeeds in learning a little about him. “The Münchner, a gorgeous Nazi who wants to go to work in South America, asked me for an autograph.” On the last day of June, after a week's stay, Mann jauntily informs friends in Southern California, “There is a waiter here from Munich or the Tegernsee with the nicest eyes in the world, slender of course, but what is really remarkable is how his way of talking and the characteristic timbre of his voice etc. have become so familiar and endearing to me. I pamper him outrageously in order to see his beaming eyes.”

Two days later, after visiting Katia and telling her of his sense of isolation without her, he returns to the hotel, again taking tea served by “the little Munich boy.” Throughout the Dolder entries the weather artfully mirrors Mann's emotions; aptly, it often assumes a “very hot” or “sultry” Venetian quality. On July Ist, in fact, Mann is driven by the heat to purchase a fine Panama hat of the kind Luchino Visconti made so prominent in his profoundly millinery film version of Death in Venice. Just before the infatuation begins seriously to escalate, Mann records a premonitory spell of “vehement thunder and wild storm, which did nothing to lower the extraordinary heat.”

Mann's emotional temperature rises too. A few days later, after some dictation and leafing through a new history of the Vatican, he wanders toward the garden in the late afternoon in search of “the little fellow from the Tegernsee”—a lake south of Munich in the Bavarian Alps. He “always greets me beaming and saying ‘Splendid evening!’ and such things. What beautiful eyes and teeth! What a charming voice! He doesn't know that his body is attractive to me.” There is much of the weary, soul-parched Aschenbach suddenly revitalized by Tadzio in the remark Mann then adds: “Here is something for the heart, something I have not found in many a year.”

The next day Mann learns that Katia will be obliged to remain hospitalized another week. An irksome reminder of his financial situation arrives in the form of a semi-annual royalty check from Knopf for a total of ＄9, leaving Mann morose about his writing in general: “I find emptiness in its play, wit and irony—and my ignorance of ordinary life shameful. … How much fame and yet how much thankful love it might bring me!” Still, important progress is made by mid-day on the amorous side of the ledger. After a week, the attractive waiter's name has been discovered.

“Table-side chat with Franz from the Tegernsee. … I inquired about his name, which is Westermaier or something similar, then after his first name, which is the main thing. What a lovely face and what an appealing voice!” As with Klaus Heuser, Mann's instinct is to achieve at least grammatical intimacy: “It would be very natural to say Du to him.—a pillow for my bed.” Mann later concludes there has been “important improvement” in the relationship.

During the next few days Mann is oppressed by a spell of especially hot, muggy weather (“the climate of Washington,” he notes) and by Franz dropping from sight. On July 6th: “I see little Westermaier too seldom.” The next day, however, he makes up for lost time with a brief conversation in the hotel lobby: “Very lovely voice. … He now would prefer to remain in Switzerland, go to a hotel in Geneva to work in the kitchen and learn French.” Erika is with her father for this tête-à-tête: “Erika tugged at my sleeve because I was staring into his face and scolded me properly.” But Mann is unrepentantly pleased that Westermeier (as his name was in fact spelled) “notices perfectly well that I like him.”

As father and daughter walk away from Franz, the old celebrity assures his surely bemused daughter rather complacently, “the pleasure one gets from a beautiful poodle is not very different. Nor is it any more sexual than that.” But Mann ends his diary entry, one would like to think with a smile of erotic irony, “she did not entirely believe this.”

The next day finds him mulling his poodle remark. “Afterthoughts about my feelings for the little fellow, which really do have much of the love for a pet about them.” But, as with Aschenbach, the struggle to maintain emotional poise becomes more stressful as affectionate yearning escalates. The diary entry circles back to Westermeier: “Feeling for the boy goes quite deep. I think constantly about him and seek to contrive meetings that can be casually initiated. His eyes are much too lovely, his voice much too ingratiating, and, although my desire does not go far, my joy, tenderness, and infatuation are sustained enthusiastically the entire day.”

Exhilarated and in a vaguely stalking mood, Mann wishes he could do something nice for the boy—help him get the position he desires in Geneva. He repeats the conviction that Franz is well aware of his affection, adding, “I wouldn't have thought this trip could bring with it something like this. On previous ones there was nothing for the heart.” Increasingly mad about the boy, Mann in the afternoon seeks in vain for him out on the terrace. Then he retires to banter with his wife and daughter “both about him and my weakness.”

Erika, and especially Katia, might have been less inclined to banter about “der Franzl” if they had known how volatile the emotional state of the paterfamilias was becoming. We learn from the entry for July 9th, exactly two weeks after the portentous first sighting, “My passion cannot be really overwhelming, since I did not immediately shave and prepare myself in order to breakfast with him in the garden.” But later, when no Franzl is on duty for afternoon tea, Mann collapses, like Aschenbach, in doubt and feverish anxiety. “Was agitated because I had expected F. W. on the terrace. He wasn't there. I didn't feel well. … Here it goes again, this love once more, this being possessed by a man, profoundly craving for him.” Almost certainly thinking of the 1927 Klaus Heuser affair, Mann adds, “in twenty-five years there has been nothing like this, and now must it happen again to me.” By evening, Mann pulls himself together. He is agreeably surprised to find the boy assisting at dinner for the first time and displaying “professional deftness, courtesy, and virtuosity in his movements.” He is also pleased to glimpse how “at first he looked at me to see if I noticed his presence.”

Aschenbach futilely attempts to distance himself from Tadzio by taking a connoisseur's critical view of his body. He notices that the Polish boy's “teeth were imperfect, rather jagged and bluish” and that he is “delicate, he is sickly. … He will most likely not live to be old.” At the Dolder, Mann does exactly this, trying to goad himself into detachment by analyzing Franzl's flaws. “Glanced about for his blemishes: his profile is not worthy of song, though full-face he is infinitely winning, and the discreet, polite voice, colored by his Munich accent, goes straight to the heart. The neck too thick. Body powerful. Must be about 25 years old—no boy but a young man. Brown hair, a bit curly. Hands more delicate than I had thought.” In fact, Westermeier was 19—far from the pre-pubertal 13-year-old Wladzio Moes.

After dinner, Mann retires elated. “I was very moved afterward and happy in the calm of my room.” As a further “quietive” he takes a volume of Theodor Adorno's philosophy to bed with him, but he admits that Adorno's cleverness would probably work only “temporarily.”

He was right. After sleeping a short time, Mann successfully masturbates. “Let it be to honor you, fool!” Mann exults over the beaming waiter in his diary the next day. He notes that “a certain pride in my vitality at this age and in the entire experience” is in play here, but then he reverts to the dour poise of Aschenbach-before-Venice and lectures himself sternly: “This banal busyness, aggressiveness, and probing to discover how willing he might be do not belong to my life; attending to the secret is necessary. Besides, there is no occasion or possibility. I recoil in horror from a reality very dubious in its promises of bliss.” By way of further self-admonition, Mann reminds himself of his conversation the day before with an actor named Kalser “about the incredibly widespread homosexuality” in Switzerland and of gossip about the director of the Zurich Theater, who was behaving quite boldly for someone in his position: “Amazing that it hasn't become a scandal.” And yet this day's entry ends with a forlorn reference to the charming psychagog: “The Exciter did not come into view the entire day.”

Sleep is fitful for Mann, perhaps because he now had to begin thinking of leaving Franzl and the Dolder. The Manns had planned to journey to Sils Maria, a spa in the Engadine Alps of southeastern Switzerland, to visit Hermann Hesse and his wife. Reunited with Katia, Mann writes, “Departure for Sils Maria already near. I'm not getting out of this nervous mental state of feeling half-sick.” Still, he manages to pass a busy day, lunching with Katia, writing to Adorno, walking in the forest, receiving visitors, and ending with some Moët-Chandon in honor of Katia's release from the doctors.

Mann must have been a little beschwipst from the champagne when he recorded these mundane events, for in the remainder of the entry he allowed his emotions to overflow, violently and miserably. Decades before, he had written that Aschenbach favored a new type of literary hero, one who demonstrated “forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture”—in short, a Saint Sebastian. (Mann knew very well Sebastian's reputation as the patron saint of homosexuals and said more than once that he was his favorite saint.) As we know, destiny sends Aschenbach a gorgeous boy to ruin his heroic composure. In his July 11th entry, a desperate Mann has also lost his composure in the traumatic presence of beauty. “Feeling besotted and as if everything were overshadowed by sadness at losing the Exciter—pain, love, nervous anticipation, hourly reveries, distraction, and suffering. I saw the face that has charmed me only once today, fleetingly, while going down in the elevator.” Then the shattering confession: “Worldly fame is empty enough to me, but how little weight it carries compared to a smile from him, the glance of his eyes, the softness of his voice!”

Mann consoles himself with noble literary company: “Platen and others, of whom I am not the least, have lived through such shame, pain, and despondency, which has in it a pride of its own.” Once again the vertigo subsides as Mann reasons with himself more candidly and probes his motives for not being more aggressive. “How little energy I had to turn this into something. In the end, opportunities would have arisen to follow up on my feelings singlemindedly and arrange meetings. If I immediately dressed and breakfasted on the terrace in the mornings, it is very likely he would serve me. Aside from shyness in the face of such trauma and pressure to keep the secret, comfortableness also restrains me—I am averse to the fretfulness and activity that come with so much emotion!”

Calm of mind, all passion momentarily spent, Mann ends his entry with a gesture of renunciation. The aging, erstwhile Bluebeard will abduct Franz ceremoniously into his house of memory, his house of high-toned literary repute, where he will join other adolescents once madly loved. “Three days more and I will certainly never see the boy again, forget his face. But I won't forget my heart's adventure. He will be taken up into my private gallery, about which literary history will say nothing—the gallery that reaches back to Klaus H[euser] and those now in the realm of the dead, Paul [Ehrenberg], Willri [Timpe], and Armin [Martens].” Mann then closed his diary and made certain of a calm night with sleeping pills.

Lunch the next day with Katia and his other gay son Golo, served by the Exciter, offered a scene begging for cinematography. “Much smiling among us. I pointed him out to K. ‘He's the one from the Tegernsee.’ Further smiling and flirtation. I called him Franzl … I asked about his prospects in Geneva. ‘No position yet.’ He lit my cigarette. I waited upon the necessary burning of the match in his cupped hand. More smiling. I was again utterly enchanted by his face, his voice. K. found his eyes very coquettish. I told her he has known for a while that I have a fancy for him. Then he disappeared. Was very happy and moved by the friendly and down-to-earth merriment of the relationship.”

The next meeting sends the emotional roller coaster plunging. “Meeting with That One as I led K. from dinner. I greeted him matter-of-factly with ‘Hello,’ at which he only bowed earnestly and distantly. Everything darkened with renewed distress. If only I had more presence of mind.” Mann decides to give Franz a five-frank tip for his “nimble” service, fearing that, amid preparations for departure, “no other chance to make him happy will present itself.” The entry ends with more reverie and a quotation from Goethe: “Fall asleep amid thoughts of the darling, just as I awaken thinking of him. Since we still suffer from Love. One does so even at 75. Once again, once again! How all-enveloping age is, with its bothers and moments of illumination.”

The next afternoon the tip was delivered: “At lunch the Enchanter was now and then in the vicinity. … Indescribable, the charm of his smiling eyes as he said his thank you's.” Mann notes his wife's friendliness toward the boy “for my sake.” This continued at dinner, with a visiting couple, the Oprechts, Katia, Erika, and an out-of-sorts Thomas making a party of five. “For a while the boy served us. His presence made me feel tired, pained, depressed, and nervous.” Mann was vexed by Erika's playful exchanges with Franz and refused to take part. He was relieved when the Oprechts excused themselves and he found himself alone with the boy: “Once he stood very close to me, and I said to him I'd have the tomato soup. He reacted very courteously. Set things down with exquisite care.”

As often in the diaries, a novelist's instinct for the telling detail is at work in this scene. “Suddenly he hurried over and held a match up to my cigarette. I looked up at him tiredly. I saw that, at the same time, he was amusing himself at the expense of a ghostly, well-dressed, gaunt old woman of unclear nationality at a neighboring table. He was staring and laughing.” Aschenbach turns into just such a risible spectacle at the Hôtel des Bains; did Mann fear he was becoming one too?

The next morning's preparations for the drive to Sils Maria were filled with Mann's hallmark blend of heartache and comic irony. Twenty years before, in his lecture on Platen, he had called that conflicted poet a perfect combination of Don Quixote (“an errant soul driven and animated by sublime folly”) and Tristan (“melancholy knight … devoted to death and love”). Mann could have been speaking of his discreetly homosexual self at the Dolder, and the Franzl affair certainly illuminates the serio-comic ambiguity that lies at the heart of his life and his oeuvre. The entry for the last day at the Dolder is thus quintessential Mann.

It begins in a slough of despond. He awakens “with the feeling of affliction. … I wonder whether some kind of auspicious occasion will be found to say good-bye to him, wish him the best.” If it is too late, it's just as well, he adds acidly: “This will make it easier for me to return to work as a substitute for happiness.” But later, at lunch on the rainy Friday afternoon, Franz was again the main waiter, and Mann records a “calm, friendly conversation” about the boy's Geneva hopes. News of their departure is dropped, and the boy charms Mann with his shocked “Oh!” His spirit soars. “The incomparably lovely face. I was very happy (sic venia verbo) and comforted afterward. Consoling feeling of harmony.”

In the evening: “Dinner at eight. Baked sole. He was in the lobby. As I led K. down the stairs to retire, he was standing straight near the elevator, obviously waiting, and wanted to say his farewell. We shook hands for a long time. He: ‘If we should not see each other again.’ I couldn't think of anything more to say than: ‘Franzl, all the best! You will make your way!’ He was not entirely unmoved. The incomparably lovely face. He rushed away to the elevator, saying as he entered it, with his gentle, soft voice, something about meeting again. I couldn't think of anything to reply.” As the old couple returned to their rooms, Mann said, “a golden youth!” Katia replied, one imagines with rue, “You do have rapport with him.”

The day closes on an exultant note. “Joyful, that in the end a certain harmony covers everything. Painfully and thankfully stirred. He has no doubt felt my liking for him—secretly, too, the tenderness of it—and it has made him happy.” (As Mann had written twenty-three years before about Klaus Heuser, “the secret and almost silent adventures in life are the finest.”) He muses that Franz saw the elaborate deference accorded him at the Dolder and hopes “the conquest he has made of me” will not make him too self-confident.

Then Mann offers a final elegiac flourish for his autumnal “something for the heart” worthy of one of those Mahler slow movements on the Visconti soundtrack: “It is good as certain that I will never see him again, or even hear about him again. Farewell eternally, Thou Charmer—belated, aching, stirring dream of love! I will live a while longer, write a bit more, and die. And Thou shalt ripen, make your mysterious way through life, and one day die. O incomprehensible, the life that affirms itself in love.”

III

Life being, as Oscar Wilde also observed, “terribly deficient in form,” there is no fatal summoning by the Charmer as a worn-out Mann reclines on the Dolder's breakfast terrace overlooking Lake Zurich—no sudden death of the famed Nobel laureate to report to a shocked and regretful world and certainly no cholera in Switzerland. By Sunday evening, the 16th of July, the Manns were ensconced at the Waldhaus in Sils Maria, so disagreeably, however, that within two days they had decamped to the Suvretta-Haus in nearby St. Moritz.

For the ending—several endings, really—of Franzl's tale, Mann contrived something more protracted (and amusingly poignant) than Tadzio's story. As Katia shrewdly observed in her memoir, in discussing the writing of Death in Venice, her husband's plans “were always much more modest than their execution.” She points out that he had originally wanted to turn his Venetian experience into a story about the aged Goethe's last love in Marienbad, a very young girl. Instead came something very immodestly about himself, a fiction far more complexly self-referential than he had intended—one that caused him to sweat at his writing desk for nearly a year. Franz's story, too, began to ramify in the days after he left the Dolder, and only a reader immune to pathos, candid and often caustic self-reproach, and occasional camp drollery could accuse Mann's later diary entries of being anticlimactic.

Not all of Mann's discomfort at the Waldhaus was due to a “plumbing calamity” and a lack of hot water. He had slept very badly on the two-day journey, waking at four A.M. “in great turmoil and heartache.” Katia sought to comfort him: “I told her candidly that I had had a fancy for the young man for a long time. Took some more Baldrian and slept some more.” The first Sils entry bears out the confession. It begins, “He had heart, he was conscious of my love and was proud enough of this to requite it to a certain degree and to embrace our farewell as a farewell. At the last, by the elevator, he said: ‘Perhaps we will not see each other again, Herr Mann.’ (I did not like the Herr.) How sad it makes me, though, that I did not have the calm to reply with something from my heart.”

Mann said the parting was “consoling and cheering,” but he could not shake himself so elegantly free as in his “Leb wohl” a few days before. “The view of the lake, the mountains say nothing to me. … The thought that this might be my last love continues to fill me and brings to the surface all the invisible premises of my life.” This leads Mann into recollection of the previous boys in his life and how, by way of emotional therapy, he had transformed them into literature. “The first affair with Armin, who became a drunkard after puberty destroyed his magic. To him my first poems. He lives in ‘T. K.’ [the story ‘Tonio Kröger’], Willri in ‘Zbg’ [The Magic Mountain], Paul in Faustus. All of these passions have achieved a certain immortality. Klaus H., who gave me more than all the others, belongs to the introduction to my Amphitryon essay.”

For Franz a more mundane plan to write is hatched. A postcard will be sent “to the one left behind” asking for news about his Geneva hopes and saying “I have not forgotten you.” For the moment at least, there would be no essay for him to outlast “gilded monuments.” The next day, Mann reports, “Light-hearted, humorous talk at lunch with Erika and K. A question of good taste and naturalness. It remains to be seen.”

After an anxiety attack a few hours later that afternoon, Mann follows through on his plan. “Wrote the following to the one left behind: ‘Herrn Franz Westermayer, employee of the Grand Hotel Dolder, Zurich. Dear Franzl, it would delight me to hear from you whether the letter of your friend to the hotel director in Geneva has been sent yet and whether it has already proved successful. If I can be of help myself with some kind of recommendation, please tell me. I would happily write one. With friendly greetings, T. M.’” His comment on this text: “Will he answer? And how? Writing naturally will be hard for him. And yet, how I long for something to reach me from that hand which so heartily shook mine.” Before leaving the Waldhaus, Mann gives the concierge a hefty ten franks—twice Franzl's tip—for making absolutely certain to forward mail. From this day, excited anticipation of a Dolder letter becomes a leitmotif in the diary.

Mann continues to complain of “unquiet sleep, unsteady nerves, and a heart in commotion.” This was due partly to Franzl and partly to intensifying family debate about selling the Pacific Palisades house and permanently returning to Europe. (Mann's increasing disgust at a rightward shift in American politics and at what he called Senator McCarthy's “reign of terror” encouraged the idea of repatriation.) But then, in the afternoon, a staggeringly perfect coincidence occurred that would be deemed incredible if encountered in a fiction. Mann found in his mail the one book of all books guaranteed to bowl over a man in his labile emotional condition: a copy of a new German translation of the poetry of Michelangelo, with the Italian on the facing page. He leapt between its covers.

Mann in his current mood was ideally receptive—“the tragic agitation and suffering of love deeply moved me”—and he ends this day's entry by inscribing in Italian three lines from an early poem that exactly captured his own situation: “Hour after hour I'm still beguiled / by memory of your eyes and by hope, / through which I am not merely alive, but blissful.” The next entry begins with several passages copied out in Italian and German.

The miniature anthology was highly germane to Mann's predicament and pertained mainly to the love-sick, 60-year-old titan's adoration of 20-year-old Tommaso de' Cavalieri. Among the excerpts was “To what does the power of a fair face spur me? / There's nothing on earth that gives me (such) joy.” And:

Although time compels us and spurs us along
with ever-increasing battle
to give back to the earth
our afflicted, tired, wandering limbs,
yet there is still no end
to him who makes my soul happy and me so happy.

The profound parallels between Tommaso and Franz were not lost on Mann: “Always this talk about the face and the Forza d'un bel viso that enthralls one. How completely my feelings came from looking upon his face, which Nature didn't exactly go to much trouble over. His body did not make me pine that much. It would have been lovely to sleep with him, but I don't have a clear impression of what his body was like and would have made love to him because of his eyes and because of something rather ‘spiritual’ about him.” Another passage from Michelangelo quoted by Mann was, thus, especially apt: “What is this thing, O love, that enters the heart through the eyes?”

Somewhat more cheerful now, Mann is able to enjoy the Engadine, where Nietzsche spent his last ten sane summers: “Amazement over the landscape, the mountains looking like thrones of the gods.” Nor did other scenery escape notice: “My God, how attractive young men are, their faces, arms, and legs, even when they are not at all fetching!”

A week after leaving Zurich, Mann begins to notice an absence of mail and fears the Dolder concierge has failed him. “Entirely independent is the question whether Franzl will answer. … Perhaps he won't know how to begin his letter, and, besides, in his handwriting there will be nothing of his eyes, la forza del suo bel viso.” Michelangelo's poems weren't relaxing their hold either; they “occupy me persistently.” One line in particular, from an important sonnet to Tommaso, was among those Mann had inscribed a few days before: nel vostro fiato son le mie parole. This line, which Mann would in later months repeat like a mantra, occurs at the end of this sonnet passage: “Within your will alone is my desire, / my thoughts are created in your heart, / and within your breath are my own words.” Michelangelo is inspired to his artistic flights on Tommaso's wings.

Mann, we have seen, prided himself on inspiration by the breath of beloved young males. Now it was at work again: “I'd like to write something about the poems. This sensual and more-than-sensual lovesickness, this platonic agitation which always means ruin when the beautiful is loved as a god, this crassness in depicting one's own repulsiveness and one's own miserable life—all these themes hold me powerfully in thrall. Old age not bereft of Eros—the untameable weakness for beautiful eyes.” Literary history would not forget the Tegernsee boy, after all. Mann would return again, as he mercilessly put it, to a life of work as a substitute for happiness. As so often, Swiss weather mirrored his attempt to turn from the disturbingly erotic songs of Bacchus to the elegant belletristic essays of Minerva: “The weather overcast and cool. No warmth of the sun in the room.”

To help himself descend from the thin air of lovesickness, Mann returned to the tome on the Vatican. The delightful Hesses also distracted him. Still, a keen eye was kept out for the postman. “Mail still not coming, in general and (obviously thinking of Franz) in particular. … If the boy in the white jacket only knew how impatient I am to receive a few words from him, he would hurry himself a bit more!” The next day Mann begins his Michelangelo essay, and this further primes him for something from Franz. “Why does he not write me, whom he so honored and delighted? Beloved Dummkopf! And I?—Nel vostro fiato son le mie parole!”

Ten days later, the boy in the white jacket had an exquisite eight-page essay to answer for, an exact equivalent to the essay “On Richard Wagner's Art” that Mann wrote in Venice while palpitating over Wladislaw Moes. “The Erotics of Michelangelo” was published later in 1950 in a magazine called, all too aptly, Du. Mann was finally able, as it were, to say Du to his Charmer.

The essay's first audience was shrewdly chosen. “After tea with Erika I read to her the essay, in which the Franzl experience quite obviously enters in. Its closing words: ‘Within your breath are my own words.’” Erika's response, delivered perhaps with a satirical role of the eyes, was “a lovely piece.” The next day, after Erika had transcribed it, Mann re-read the essay and was disappointed. Copies of his autobiographical lecture, “A Sketch of My Life,” also arrived. “I was more satisfied with it than with the erotic essay, though the latter contained much more of my heart: In tuo fiato son le mie parole.”

Back in writing-desk form, Mann regains equilibrium. On July 24th, Katia's 67th birthday, amid ideal weather in the beauteous Engadine Alps, he ventures to declare himself “relatively happy.” This in spite of the fact that in St. Moritz “there is nothing for the heart, and I still await word from the boy.”

Two weeks after leaving the Dolder, however, Mann still awakens with heartache “over the boy there.” It “stabs” him to learn that an old friend, Siegfried Trebitsch, will be spending a few days in Zurich. Erika, however, is delighted. The “erotic essay” having made clear how deeply Franz had affected her father, she immediately begins plotting a reunion. Trebitsch being in Zurich offers a perfect pretext. Mann records that Erika recommended to Trebitsch a stay at the Dolder, where the Manns would then visit before returning, via London, to America. “She did this with a thought of me and Franzl there. I'm shy about the emotional excitement and fear; if it happens at all, seeing him again might be only half-successful or a complete failure.—Read more later in the history of the popes.”

A return to Zurich is broached again the next day. Mann's instinct is to follow Goethe's famous example and resist the flame: “Intention, not to go along and just greet the boy through Erika. Renunciation. Better not to go through this again.” Westermeier seems to have begun receding harmlessly into the pages on Michelangelo's erotics, though not without difficulty. “Head and nervous disposition not much improved,” Mann writes on August 4th, after a restless night. “The only thing I lack would be to see the boy! The temptation to do so is great.”

The next day, though his head aches, he wanders forth: “cast a glance down on the tennis court in the morning.” Mann, it turns out, was getting on with his life—and with his Jovian, eagle-eyed gazing. Lo, another Ganymede appears on the horizon. His elaborate entry for August 6th, a Sunday blessed with “clear, blue, splendid” weather, reveals yet another Death in Venice event, this one brilliantly compressed into just a few days. “On the tennis court below … a young Argentine, already an excellent player, was working out with a trainer. Dark hair, face rather hard to make out, slim, a body to wonder at, the legs of Hermes.” The “occasional high-spirited dancing” of the volleying youngster rivets Mann. So does the “feather-light restlessness of his body” while sitting on a bench. Nothing escapes his eye. “The changing of his crossed legs, the way he let his arms fall and kicked together his white-shoed feet, his getting up, leaving, returning, gripping the net with his hands. White tennis outfit, short pants, a sweater over the shoulders after practicing. Deep erotic interest.” The famed author now leaves off writing to examine the athlete—and his life—even more closely:

Get up from my work to look. Affliction, desire, anxiety, pointless craving. The knees, the way he caresses his legs—anyone would like to do that to him. Agony over him at the Dolder, the influence of the air here, the splendid scenery, the mixture of rapture and a feeling of ailing in this place—all this has deepened and strengthened a general sadness over my life and my love for him. This deep-rooted enthusiasm, illusory and yet passionately sustained, for the incomparable charm of manly youth, which issurpassed by nothing else in the world, has always been my joy and my misery. This not being able to express myself, being enthusiastic and mute, has offered no promesse de bonheur but only privation, something indefinable, something desired and yet beyond my reach.

Mann then turns to autographing copies of Young Joseph, his novel immortalizing Klaus Heuser, and he re-reads its chapter “On the Beautiful”: “I was jesting there about the depths of my soul. The illusionary, the cloudily inconceivable, ungraspable—though it brims with agony and ecstasy, madness and cursing, it is the basis of the practice of one's art.” And once again Michelangelo's yearning line surfaces: “Within your breath are my own words.”

The last half of this diary entry, covering afternoon and evening, reveals further serio-comic jousting between the Tristan and Don Quixote in Mann. The “beauty from far away” reappears on the tennis court after lunch. “I couldn't get my fill of watching him.” Mann tries to read but is repeatedly drawn to the athlete. “Morbid enthusiasm for the ‘divine youth.’ Profound heartache—for whom?—and for what? I probably wouldn't even recognize the beauty in the dining room. When he settled down for a rest, with his heavenly legs pressed against the railing … I closed the shutters and thought: ‘Dear boy, I must calm myself.’ I almost felt the wish to die because I can no longer bear this yearning for ‘divine youth’ (by which I do not exactly mean this one).” Another moment redolent of Aschenbach, “sunk deep in this belated bliss of his.”

Mann carried these dismal thoughts down to tea-time with Katia. The entry continues with him back in his room, pondering. “The beginning of this trip seems so far off … God knows, I will never forget it. The question now reigns, whether I should take part in the visit for tea at the Dolder in order to see those dear eyes again. It would be smarter, but also more craven, not to.” News comes from Erika of having spotted a young man fitting her father's description of the “tennis god.” Eternal, manly youth, Mann well knows, is driving him on. He comments woefully, “Glow-worm in an open hand. Illusion! Illusion!”

Even as the family sets out for Zurich, a sweet-faced chauffeur catches Mann's eye. “In the company of smiling ladies (surely Erika and Katia) I asked him his name. Toni. Appears 14 but is 16. At least this little rascal won't make me suffer; I enjoy him merely as a hint of what I adore. Am much ashamed now about all I have written—and not written. The god, heated up from playing, takes off his white jacket and throws it casually to the ball boy. I think how happy I'd be to be the one to get it! A humiliating thought, I am quite well aware, and it gives me no pleasure.”

The next day the tennis god is hurled headlong from his great eminence. “At lunch we established certainly the identity of the god in a tall young man in a blue sweater and showing his bare legs. On sitting down he appeared stoop-shouldered and the disillusion was striking.” Though he says his interest in the boy off-court “is zero,” he admits his “wonderment is boundless as soon as he is in excited and featherlight action.” Then, at the next luncheon, the Argentine's face is finally vouchsafed, and cool assessment mixes tantalizingly with erotic interest. “He struck me as part-Jewish. Saw his face mostly in profile or half-face, never entirely from the front. Recognized he was essentially adolescent, as I had thought, almost boyish, 18 to 19 years old. Ears a bit prominent, rather large nose, seemingly intense eyes. His smiling at someone as he left was decidedly pleasant.”

With the packing-up for a return to Zurich comes a more emotionally tidy but morose adieu. “He was absent at dinner. I will certainly never see him again, and now that we're departing I have only to forget what so ravished me in his play on the court. Forget and console myself. The ultimate forgetting and consolation of all is death.—Deeply sad. Worn out by the storms of feeling.———” The next morning the Manns drive to Zurich, and by August 12th they are installed at the Hotel Baur au Lac, where they had honeymooned in 1905. The first entry written there begins, “Departure at 10 from the Suvretta-Haus, before the indecipherable one appeared on the court. Farewell, phantasma, who came so near to me.”

IV

Mann was not comfortable in Zurich. “Thick, heavy air. Heavy heart.” The business of tea at the Dolder preyed on him. “I declared that I wouldn't take part in the Dolder visit,” Mann says on July 13th, noting that the Dolder get-together with Trebitsch has been set for the 15th. July 14th is filled with busyness: inscribing one of his works for “a chambermaid who reads books,” arranging for the Michelangelo essay's appearance in Du, planning the family's flight to London, and attending a large dinner party at which, Mann notes, “Erika conversed with the help of cocktails.” To Dolder or not to Dolder? is the question that never leaves Mann's mind for long.

Valor won out over discretion, though the diary is silent about what caused Mann to change his mind. Fearful that the boy might already have left for Geneva, Mann drives with Katia and Erika to the Dolder in time for lunch. On the pretext of making a phone call, Erika goes to summon the boy. Another exquisite scene for film unfolds: “My eyes had been searching for him the entire time. When he appeared they hesitated to believe it was really he. ‘Yes, that's Franzl there!’ He came over. Shaking of hands, joy. ‘It is really lovely to see you once again!’ The charming, playful and yet sincere movement of his face and head as he repeatedly said to me, ‘I was really very happy to get your letter!’” Franz explains that Geneva has fallen through because the Dolder's manager will not release him from his agreement to work for the entire summer season. Mann records, “I touched his arm sympathetically, though I truly would rather have touched something else.”

Knowing well this might be a last look upon the Exciter, Mann gazes unabashedly. “I looked very precisely at his face, the rather off-kilter brown eyes, the strong teeth, the come-hither expression. Robustness of his head and physique combined with a certain juvenile delicacy of demeanor and his way of talking.” Willingness to write a reference on his behalf is repeated; Franz is urged to keep Mann informed of his fortunes; Mann's mailing address is very clearly explained. Mixed feelings spill into the resulting diary entry: “I couldn't get my fill of looking at him, this fellow who would soon enough become a rather heavy, upper-Bavarian son of an innkeeper. A strong, friendly farewell handshake.—Never more to see him again. He is grateful for my affection.”

Mann ponders intervening to gain Franz's release, but the “difficulty” of doing anything too overt discourages him. The entry for this day ends on a forlorn note. “The pressure of his strong hand, his smiles, his eyes: unforgettable in any case. A love, a pleasure in the extreme, an affection from the bottom of my heart. And yet it may be merely my enchanted senses, nothing from the ‘heart.’ Or not? I believe little in the word ‘heart,’ and yet what we mean by it really exists.”

The next day Mann tries to make something of his disarray and grasp the “heart” of the matter. “The meeting yesterday is having a powerful effect on my spirit. The essence of love is the most curious suspension, through a kind of affection, of the repulsion we normally feel toward our fellow creatures. Then one is no longer averse to touching someone too closely or to desiring another's body, for instance wanting to lie in bed with him. That is the way it starts, very quickly becoming a craving. But such physicality is not necessary for powerful craving and desire, or passion. It can stay within negative bounds, suspended from a physical Ich-Du relationship, and can restrict itself to tenderness, in short, what one calls ‘heart.’” This was mere groping, and Mann ends the passage on a puzzled note. “Uncertain whether this is right. The happiness of a real-life union and embrace is very dubious.” As before, Mann was easing himself into comfortable psychological distance from the object that had so exacerbated his emotions.

Success in this effort was not immediate. Nine days later, on August 25th, the Manns were staying at the Shoreham Hotel in Chicago, breaking a transcontinental train trip back to California. Mann was weary of far more than months of packing and unpacking: “Misery and oppression. Glowing memories of beloved youths I have seen. O Dio! O Dio! O Dio! Sore heart. In vostro fiato son le mie parole. I can't get them out of my mind—the eyes, the legs of Hermes, la forza d'un bel viso. This is the last stop on the long return home, but the goal is still far away, uncertain. The future is darkness.”

A glance out over Lake Michigan and the traffic on the busy street below, then a cri de coeur: “Too much suffering, too much ogling and being swept off my feet. I let myself be led around like a fool in this world. Would it all have been better if it had never happened? But it did—the clasp of his hand, the ‘I was really very happy’ remain to me a treasure that smarts.” The entry closes, touchingly, on the strangeness of the bother, not to say danger, of committing such thoughts to paper. “Why do I write this? In order simply to destroy it all at some appropriate time before I die? Or because I wish the world to know me? I believe the world does know me more than it lets on, at least the cognoscenti do, without needing this much more from me.”

The next day, in humid Chicago weather, he is on a shaded lakeside bench with Katia. Moth, flame, action: “Many people on the shore and grassy areas. Naturally, my eyes fell upon an Adonis in a swimsuit; utterly beautiful, even in the features of his face. The phantasma was gone when later we walked back by.”

The next day, aboard the Super Chief, Mann was reading a “very gripping” book on the Alger Hiss trial and trying to gain a philosophical hold on his adventure of the heart. “I think that, at home in my own kingdom, I will forget the tortures of this trip and find myself again in spite of the eyes of little Franz Westermeier and the one with the legs of Hermes on the tennis court. I will cherish these faces and raptures, while at the same time I convalesce from them and from the loss of myself, which has made me feel so old and weary.”

Mann warns himself sternly that “all reminiscence is intrinsically painful” and quotes a bit of doggerel advice: “Live freshly in new things, / and forget the world's worthless trash!” But he cannot help adding, with ironic emphasis, that unfortunately “among the worthless trash there is to be found much that is precious.” He also admits that searching for precious moments is what makes him leave his much-treasured privacy: “As far as these adventures in love go, one has to admit that one sallies forth on account of them.”

The emotional debriefing continues as the Great Plains roll by. “Doubtless my enthusiasm for young men has stormily intensified recently, perhaps from a feeling of its being closing-time. My eyes are incredibly alert and painfully eager for all such physical beauty, my susceptibility to the emptiness of it dreadfully humiliating to me. It is for me an axiom that the power of ‘godlike’ young men to evoke wonder far surpasses everything womanly and excites a yearning that is comparable to nothing in the world.” As for the somewhat stolid reality of Westermeier, “Intimations of the ideal are enough for someone who is enraptured. Franzl was no divine youth, but simply a dear.”

Another “dear” caught Mann's eye. “In the dining car a young Negro waiter, 26, as he told me when I asked, exceptionally pleasant features, intelligent manners, slim figure. This race has until now had no attraction for me. He immediately fixed his eyes on me, and I was happy when he served us in the evening. Has been a waiter since 18, 3 years a soldier in Europe, notably in Frankfurt. Very cute smile, some coquettishness as with Franzl from the Tegernsee. Gifted eyes too, though hardly producing such a lasting memory.”

The first day back in Pacific Palisades, Mann had mixed feelings about the prospect of returning to his writing routine and exchanging his Tegernsee poodle for the family poodle, named Alger in honor of Hiss. “Back to work as soon as possible,” he announces, echoing Aschenbach's increasingly futile desire to “return to detachment and to form.” And yet: “The chaos of traveling, the sorrows of my senses, of my heart—now old age encompasses me once again, and I don't know whether to be disgusted or delighted.”

Mann says he “delights in the privacy” of San Remo Drive and Alger's presence. He catches up on correspondence and prepares new editions of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. He also takes time to read a psychoanalytical pamphlet from England on homosexuality that asserts such pathology is “the result of incest anxiety in relationship to the mother.” His brief review: “learned ignorance.” And Mann's taste for Platen's dreamy homoerotics has by no means disappeared; the second day back, Mann tells of reading Platen's sonnets and coming upon a “spectral love poem.” He quotes several lines (“To you I am as the body to the soul, the soul to the body. / I am to you as the wife to the husband, the husband to the wife. / Who else could you love, since from your lips / I have driven off death with my constant kissing?”) and accounts them “Wonderful.” There can be little doubt that the lips he was thinking of belonged to a boy named Franz.

A few days later Mann read a German book on Tchaikovsky's homosexuality: “miserably and crazily written.” Overtly gay themes were becoming more interesting. A few weeks later he records his astonishment over a story about a gay pick-up called “The Hitchhiker” published, Mann notes, by “my protégé living in Florence,” Donald Windham. He later chewed the “strange, obscene little story” over with Erika. The next day he lunched with Christopher Isherwood. (When Mann died, Isherwood wrote in his own diary with cheeky affection and perceptiveness, “Thomas Mann died last Friday—tidily, as he did everything. There was a greatness in his dry neatness … he was lovable in a tiny cozy way—he was kind, he was genuinely interested in other people, he kept cheerful, he was gossipy, he was quite brave—he had the virtues of a truly admirable nursery governess.”).

In late November, while correcting proof for the Michelangelo essay, Mann read Gore Vidal's novel The City and the Pillar. On the 24th, he was dropped off by Golo for a haircut in Westwood, where he chatted up a “young shoe-shine Negro whose face was pleasing, name of Esno, already 32, which surprised me. But then, at my age that counts as youth. … Gave him a quarter, and it's certain he noticed my attraction.” Mann then came home and finished Vidal, giving it a fine blurb in his diary that he could never have published: “An interesting, indeed important, humane document of splendid and informative veracity.” (The novel is just now being reprinted with Mann's blurb, “A noble work.”) Still, he adds qualmishly, “the sexuality, all the affairs with diverse men are nevertheless incredible to me. How can one sleep with men.”

One day a photographer came to take Mann's picture for a new California magazine, “a nice young man Erika recognized as homosexual.” That Mann needed to be told this perhaps reflected his growing pessimism about waning energies on all fronts. “Given my yearning for youth these days, my wrinkled face is off-putting. … My appearance is praised, but my tiredness is great … my receptive and productive power to work disappearing.”

And America was fast losing its charm. On September 15th he observed, “I am more and more disgusted with this country.” On November 8th the diary tells of the newspaper being “full of the Republican election victory: Warren, Nixon, Taft etc. Horribly inflated. Shouldn't one leave now?” An attack on Mann in Congress the following summer as “one of the world's foremost apologists for Stalin” doubtless encouraged the Manns to sell the house.

The vow to avoid all thoughts about the past was soon broken, heart-flutteringly, by the arrival at long last of a letter from Westermeier on September 15th. Though it evidently contained nothing worth quoting in the diary, Mann likened the letter to the treasured souvenir of Willri Timpe he had kept for over fifty years, a pencil stub the boy once borrowed from him. “I value it just as much as W. T.'s piece of pencil. Nothing has changed in our relationship.” He interleaved the letter in his diary—“a completely infantile act,” he admitted.

Ten days later: “I have to acknowledge that, all these last weeks, whenever the mail arrives I have hoped to find a letter from the boy at the Dolder Hotel. Persistent folly.” The confession is repeated ten days later: “I will note that up to today I actually look through every batch of mail to see whether there is something written by little Westermeier. I'm completely, or almost completely, crazy. It's been 3 months since I last saw those rather treacherous eyes. I suppose it is certain that he perceived my interest in him as a mere extravagance. That it would have made him happy was too much to expect.” And so Mann turns his thoughts to a pet closer to hand. “Poodle clipped and bathed and looking very beautiful.”

An elegant end, this, to the old novelist's belated “something for the heart”—and a neatly symmetrical one, too. For Mann was relaxing into the pose of Aschenbach when we first meet him in Munich, an author who had “learned to sit at his desk and live up to his growing reputation, to write gracious and pregnant phrases in letters that must needs be brief, for many claims press upon the solid and successful man.” When Mann wrote Death in Venice he was 35. Still betraying the callowness of youth, he appears to have thought a hero more than 50 was superannuated indeed. He could scarcely have imagined that his last encounter with a “pale and charming psychagog” would come at the phenomenal age of 75.

Well-manicured Alger, however, does not offer the only superbly crafted ending to the adventure. Candidly revealing the physical aftershocks of Mann's encounter with Westermeier is the entry for a rainy March day, almost six months after the return to America. “For weeks a complete and unaccustomed failure of sexual potency. The most drastic (and not the saddest? to hell with it!) manifestation of a noticeable thrust into old age since the European trip. As I decline to masturbate without a full erection, the end of my physical sexual life seems to have come.”

Mann had, months before, bid Franzl and his “dream of love” farewell. But now, with perfect timing, the boy reappears in dream-time. For the entry continues, “Half-asleep, I dreamed of Franzl W., the last of my lovers, who, as representative of the entire race of those I have adored, took his leave with a kiss. Afterward, one look into his brown eyes, eyes he knew how to make melt.” As so often, the down-to-earth Sancho Panza in Mann soon punctures Tristan's love-dreaminess: “Still, he had that too massive head of the upper-Bavarian race. Whether in reality I ever could have had sex with him is itself a question.”

The Manns resettled in Switzerland in the summer of 1952. Two years after the half-dream of Franzl's kiss, he revisited his old haunt on a cloudy, foggy, cool August day—Swiss weather continued to serve him as artfully as the Tegernsee boy. “The recent sad years stretch before me. At lunch with Trebitsch and his wife in the Grand Hotel Dolder, the scene of a love affair, the object of which I naturally looked around for in vain. Couldn't eat much, was happy when I had my coffee and cigarette.” Later in the day he listens to a recording of Hugo Wolf's Goethe song, “Anacreon's Grave.” It makes him teary.

Yet another splendid ending—especially in the light of an ancient Greek lyric called “The Combat between Cupid and Anacreon” that captures perfectly Mann's (and Aschenbach's) late affair of the heart:

Into me, with fury hot,
Like a dart himself he shot,
And my cold heart melts; my shield,
Useless, no defense can yield;
For what boots an outward screen
When, alas, the fight's within!

Well might the demise of Anacreon, the long-lived poet-pederast, have left Mann moist-eyed. A commentary on Pindar—himself an aging, inveterate praiser of young males—reports that when Anacreon was asked why he wrote hymns to boys rather than gods, he replied, “Because boys are my gods.” This was also Mann's motto, declared in his diaries, as we have seen, but present between the lines of much of his fiction.

And the combat was not entirely at an end. Anacreon's grave, Goethe's text runs, is beautifully planted because “Spring, summer, and autumn delighted the happy poet.” Like Anacreon, Mann was not enjoying his winter, yet he still had some happy days. With the coming of yet another Death in Venice season of the year, Mann was particularly cheerful on May 13th, 1954. He was ensconced comfortably in a beautiful house he and Katia had newly bought in Kilchberg, a few miles south of Zurich and across the lake from the Dolder, and he was feeling fit enough for a walk in the lovely weather. His diary entry for this day gives us the most bittersweet—perhaps the best—ending of all to the Dolder boy affair.

“Went out in the sunshine. Saw a blooming blond youth on a wagon, naked to the waist, which was most magical to me. Sat down to rest myself in the shade of the garden at the inn nearby.” He did, that is, almost exactly what Aschenbach does in Death in Venice after Tadzio confers on him a soul-shattering smile: “He threw himself on a bench; he breathed in the nocturnal fragrance, beside himself.”

Then, that same evening, Mann made his way to the Grand Hotel Dolder once more to dine with Frau Trebitsch. “Poor service, new waiter. I asked if she remembered the little fellow from Munich, Franzl, whose service was something else again. She remembered him.” Fade out to the wistful harmonies of “Anacreon's Grave”—a very Straussian “last song” in its orchestral version—as the camera pans to the Dolder terrace, where Mann had once looked so hopefully for the blond boy in the white jacket.

A POSTSCRIPT IN TWO PARTS

Just over a year later, on August 12th, 1955, Thomas Mann died—more prosaically than Gustav von Aschenbach—in a cantonal hospital during a morphia-induced sleep from complications of phlebitis and arteriosclerosis in his left leg. But he certainly passed, like his fictional alter ego, into a pantheon. The month before, his lecture on Schiller had been a highlight of the Festival of Holland, and he and Katia had been received by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. And just two days before dying, Mann learned he had been awarded Germany's highest order of honor, Pour le Mérite.

But for the dairies, we would be obliged to read between the lines of his novels, short stories, and feuilletons to speculate that he was also a great and lifelong, if also frustrated, lover. He had destroyed compromising diaries as early as 1895, when Wilde's trial panicked him, and as recently as 1945. Why, in the end, did he decide to allow the publication of these? Death in Venice offers one eloquent answer to this question.

Aschenbach, it will be recalled, is often conscious, during his concealed courtship of Tadzio, of “an ignoble caution” at certain paralyzing moments. This caution makes him avert his eyes from the boy's gaze. It also prevents him from approaching his mother and saying, “Go away. Leave here at once, without delay, with Tadzio and your daughters. Venice is in the grip of a pestilence.” Similarly, Mann chose not to intervene with the Dolder's manager, and this ignoble caution preyed a little on him. He wondered in his diary, “Is all my gazing, all my love only egotistical pleasure?” In real life, too, eros won out over agape; he did not help the boy. “My excuse is that doing such a favor is fraught with difficulty, and besides he certainly doesn't expect anything like this from me.”

The Westermeier affair, however, clearly left Mann less ignobly cautious than he had been for many decades. A penchant for boldness and honesty was crescent in him, as the mundane but emotion-laden decision to see Franz once more at the Dolder suggested. When Erika, in 1951, informed her father that the subtext was homosexual in his novel-in-progress, The Confessions of Felix Krull (in which Franz makes a cameo appearance), his response was simply, Nun, freilich wohl, or “well, so be it.” A potent “so be it” also lay in the daring generosity of giving the diaries to the world. The “egotistical pleasure” of keeping them, deeply erotic, was finally to be superseded by an opening-out, an embrace of the Other in himself, not to mention the several beloved others of his long life.

Death in Venice is finally about an opening out, a coming out. Mann's diaries, he obviously saw, would permit the world to see that he too, as Aschenbach admits in the great Phaedrus monologue, had a nature “prone not to excellence but to excess.” These diaries, he wrote with poignant italics, would finally allow “the world to know me.” Releasing the diaries was thus the act of a man behaving as Aschenbach behaves at the powerful mid-point of Death in Venice, when he returns to the Hôtel des Bains and Tadzio after the aborted flight from traumatic love: “he described a slow motion, palms outward, a lifting and turning movement, as though to indicate a wide embrace. It was a gesture of welcome, a calm and deliberate acceptance of what might come.”

Those open palms remind one of another striking image in the story that suggests why Mann calmly and deliberately saved his last diaries from the fire. Near the beginning, a “canny observer” describes Aschenbach as he was when he was 35 and feeling out of sorts with the world—precisely Mann's predicament at the time of his 1911 Venetian holiday. “‘You see, Aschenbach has always lived like this’—and the speaker closed the fingers of his hand into a fist—‘never like this’—and he let his open hand dangle comfortably from the arm of his chair.” After a lifetime of tending the secret of his emotional life, Mann was comfortable enough to relax his fist. His open palm would hold out to posterity, among other things, his dream of love.

Or, as he said of the tennis god with Hermes' legs, “Glow-worm in an open hand. Illusion! Illusion!”

Aschenbach predicts that Tadzio will die young. If the boy's sickly appearance was another real-life detail Mann took from his strolls on the Lido, then Wladislaw Moes certainly proved him wrong by living to a ripe old age.

And so, too, has the boy in the white jacket. Soon after Mann's stay at the Dolder, Westermeier removed not to Geneva as he had planned but to South America. He worked in São Paulo for two-and-a-half years and then, in 1955, came to New York City. For the next forty years he was a waiter at the St. Regis Hotel. Now retired and residing with his wife in Forest Hills, Queens, he vacationed last fall in Europe and said in a phone conversation that his place of former employment on the Dolderberg is, if anything, nicer than it was “in my days,” with a new wing and a new bar. His memory of Mann is of a reserved and stately figure. He does not recall meeting Katia, but Erika made a particularly agreeable impression by greeting him jauntily “in real Bavarian dialect … she was a very nice lady.” And Mann was not the only celebrity with whom Westermeier came in contact. Churchill, Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth, and Elizabeth Taylor also came to the Dolder.

The fate of Mann's letter and postcard to him frustrates Westermeier. While he was in Brazil, a German-language newspaper reported that the Fischer Verlag was in search of Mann correspondence. Westermeier had left his personal belongings, including his papers and some autographs, with his mother in Germany. By the time he wrote to warn her to safeguard them, however, they had already been misplaced and were never seen again.

Westermeier's memories of Mann remain cordial. Indeed, he made a point, during his recent visit to Zurich, of visiting Mann's grave at Kilchberg—yet another valedictory vignette a cinematographer might find irresistible. It would, of course, have to be accompanied by a reprise of “Anacreon's Grave.”