Two books ...

... one extraordinary, the other not: Thomas Mann's house of exiles.

There is, first and foremost, Thomas Mann, a creature of such superb habit and indurated routine as to have made himself – as though belonging to another species – almost impervious to distraction: a few magniloquent sentences in the morning, soup (teeth trouble) and a cigar at lunchtime (“smoked Personality cigars”); in the afternoon, correspondence and a walk with one of a relay of the dogs of those years (in another Windsor touch, one was driven to him, cross-country, by Sybille Bedford; in addition, “Thomas was always a keen recorder of the dogs he met”); in the evening, gramophone music or reading aloud or a trip to the theatre and then taking down whatever book it was time for (“Thomas read Rimbaud”), in an unlikely and even rather perverse display of nihil humanum. It’s hard to understand just how famous and successful Mann was in the America of the 1940s: the difficult novels all Book of the Month Club bestsellers (The Magic Mountain named “one of the twenty-five most influential books of the first half of the twentieth century”, somewhere, oddly, behind Marx’s Das Kapital – it was all that long ago); the sell-out lecture tours to the back of beyond (“a busy program, full of high-mindedness”, Juers notes) negotiated on a mild regimen of uppers and downers; the regular frisson of being recognized by a waiter or a train conductor; the malingering and the coddling and the catarrh, and, apparently discomfiting or embarrassing – embarrassment was always a big item in Mann’s emotional Haushalt – erotic agitation, an unwelcome rogue sensation, brought on now by sea air, now by beer, now by Princeton; leading an existence that was basically already halfway to Michael Jackson’s: “Stopping en route in Colorado Springs, they were served a meal that was prepared according to Goethe’s lunch with Lotte in Thomas’s novel”.