On Thomas Mann’s birthday, revisit Susan Sontag on meeting the beloved author of “The Magic Mountain” over cookies and tea in Los Angeles, in 1947.
; and a storefront through whose open door one afternoon I unself-consciously trailed two people who were beautiful in a way I’d never seen, thinking I was entering a gym, which turned out to be the rehearsal quarters of the dance company of Lester Horton and Bella Lewitzky. O golden age! It not only was, I knew it was. Soon I was sipping at a hundred straws.
We loved in tandem. Music first—he’d had years of piano. He introduced me to getting into concerts free by ushering , and I made him a regular at the Monday chamber-music series “Evenings on the Roof,” to which I’d been brought by Elaine and Mel. We were building our nearly identical, ideal record collections , and joined forces often in the cool, dark listening booths of the Highland Record Store. Sometimes he came to my house, even if my parents were there.
Reading and listening to music: the triumphs of being not myself. That nearly everything I admired was produced by people who were dead or from elsewhere, ideally Europe, seemed inevitable to me. The next step was to lend it to a friend, to feel someone else’s pleasure in the book—to love it with someone else, and be able to talk about it. In early December I lent “The Magic Mountain” to Merrill. And Merrill, who would read immediately whatever I pressed on him, loved it, too. Good.Of course I knew he lived here.
He picked up the receiver. I bolted through the house, out the always unlocked front door, across the lawn, beyond the curb to the far side of the Pontiac, parked with the key in the ignition , to stand in the middle of the street and press my hands to my ears, as if from there I could have heard Merrill making the mortifying, unthinkable telephone call.
“No, no, she didn’t sound angry. Maybe she said, ‘Miss Mann speaking.’ I don’t remember, but, honest, she didn’t sound angry. Then she said, ‘What do you want?’ No, wait, it was ‘What is it that you want?’ ”“And then I said . . . you know, that we were two high-school students who had read Thomas Mann’s books and wanted to meet him—”“And she said,” he pushed on stubbornly, “ ‘Just a minute, I will ask my father.’ Maybe it was ‘Just a moment, I will ask my father.’ She wasn’t gone very long . . .
Sunday came. It was Merrill who collected me in the Chevy, at one exactly, in front of my house at the curb , and by two o’clock we were on broad, empty San Remo Drive, with a view of the ocean and Catalina Island in the distance, parked some two hundred feet up from the house at 1550. A very old woman with white hair in a bun opened the door, didn’t seem surprised to see us, invited us in, asked us to wait a minute in the dim entryway—there was a living room off to the right—and went down a long corridor and out of sight.Absolute silence in the house. She was returning now. “Come with me, please. My husband will receive you in his study.”
I said how much I loved “The Magic Mountain.” He said it was a very European book, that it portrayed the conflicts at the heart of European civilization.“I have recently completed a novel which is partly based on the life of Nietzsche,” he said, with huge, disquieting pauses between each word. “My protagonist, however, is not a philosopher. He is a great composer.”
Merrill said we were both very interested in Schoenberg. He made no response to this. Intercepting a perplexed look on Merrill’s face, I widened my eyes encouragingly.“My faithful translator is at work on it now,” he said. “A deep knowledge of German is required, and much ingenuity, for some of my characters converse in dialect. And the Devil—for, yes, the Devil himself is a character in my book—speaks in the German of the sixteenth century,” Thomas Mann said, slowly, slowly. A thin-lipped smile. “I’m afraid this will mean little to my American readers.
At first I had seen only him, awe at his physical presence blinding me to the room’s contents. Now I was starting to see more. For instance, what was on the rather cluttered table: pens, inkstand, books, papers, and a nest of small photographs in silver frames, which I saw from the back. Of the many pictures on the walls, I recognized only a signed photograph of F.D.R. with someone else—I seem to remember a man in uniform—in the picture.
I considered telling him that I loved “The Magic Mountain” so much that I had read it twice, but that seemed silly. I also feared he might ask me about some book of his which I had not read, though so far he hadn’t asked a single question. “ ‘The Magic Mountain’ has meant so much to me,” I finally ventured, feeling that it was now or never.“Oh,” I said.“I would say, and have so replied recently in interviews . . .” He paused. I held my breath. “ ‘The Magic Mountain.’ ” I exhaled.
He asked us about our studies. Our studies? That was a further embarrassment. I was sure he hadn’t the faintest idea what a high school in southern California was like.
He asked us who our favorite authors were, and when I hesitated he went on—and this I remember exactly: “I presume you like Hemingway. He is, such is my impression, the most representative American author.” Strange that I don’t recall how it ended. Did Katia Mann appear and tell us that our time was up? Did Thomas Mann say he must return to his work, receive our thanks for granting this audience, and take us to the study door? I don’t remember the goodbyes—how we were released. Our sitting on the sofa having tea and cakes cross-fades in my memory to the scene in which we are out on San Remo Drive again, getting into the car.
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