Colm Toibin – The Magician – Comment

 

Thomas Mann received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 at the early age of 54. The writer’s most notable novels are Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. Most of Mann’s works are essential reading in Modern 20th century literature. Colm Toibin’s, The Magician is a creative, and intriguing biographical novel about Mann and his family, ending after WWII.  

The author focuses, more than many biographies, on Mann’s bisexuality. Reading Death in Venice (1912) is an incredible novella about the artist and his observations of a young man, and his immense beauty. Mann explores this theme in many of his short stories, including affairs of the heart and allusions to incest. It is my belief that the prose is so elegant that the censors at the time simply missed it.  

Mann married Katia, a Jewish child of a wealthy family. In fact, Katia is a twin to her brother Klaus. Both striking in appearance, intelligent and gifted in the arts, have a hidden communication as many twins do, though once Thomas Mann decides to marry her, she becomes totally devoted to the writer.  

Over the years the couple have six children, all different, all gifted and distinct individuals. Their first two children, Klaus, and Erica are particularly interesting, both bisexual and politically outspoken about WWII, standing against fascism. A biography about Erica alone would be an interesting project due to her intelligence and utter force of personality. Klaus is the brooding artistic type, a writer, who, in my belief, could never remove himself from his father’s shadow. He becomes a source of disappointment to the family, ending in tragedy.  

Thomas Mann is the traditional German before WWI: conservative, socially aware though his inner life, living through two world wars, he realizes is a mass of contradictions. The Mann’s flee from Germany to Switzerland in 1933. One of his more controversial views is that Nazism had deep roots in the national psyche. He was torn between his older German readership and the then popular rise of the Nazis. This contradiction is emblematic of Thomas Mann. Where his children and older brother, Hienrich, also a writer, publicly denounced Nazism, it seemed to many that he was on the fence.  

When finally escaping Europe under threat of capture and imprisonment by the Nazis, Mann became an influential figure in elite American circles. To be certain, the force behind the Mann's escape from the Nazis was due to The Washington Post publisher, Katharine Meyer Graham. Through this woman’s influence in the halls of power, the Mann’s were invited to dinner with the Roosevelts. At this time, the US was not involved in WWII, as the isolationists were in power. Europe wanted America to get involved, including Katia Mann; though it was not until Pearl Harbour that the US entered the war.  

We forget what the Jews and many people went through because of Nazi brutality and disregard for human life in Europe. Those prosecuted were political dissidents, journalists, writers, artists, gypsies, the disadvantaged, and the Jews. This was the intentional annihilation of a people. (An act we are seeing in the present time.) 

Biographical novels have never been my cup of tea. Gore Vidal’s Julian is an exception. Toibin’s The Magician is another exception. All great writers can pull the reader into the emotion and inner thoughts of the characters – Toiben's prose is astonishing.  

After completing The Magician, (a name given to him by his children because of his silly magic tricks) I felt a better understanding of the time and the mind of one of the 20th century's greatest writers.