Tadzio & Death in Venice

 In the Krakow English-language bookstore Massolit I recently happened on a little book describing the life of the Polish boy who’d inspired the beautiful Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s famous novella Death in Venice. The book’s author, Gilbert Adair, an American from New York, went to great lengths tracking down the fate of this boy. Adair discovered, among other things, that the same boy, at an even earlier age—he was only six—had made a great impression on Henryk Sienkiewicz! It’s long been known that the boy was the model for Mann’s character, that Mann actually encountered an aristocratic Polish family in Venice and succumbed to “Tadzio’s” great charm—he fell in love, although, as his biographers stress, this was, as always for Mann, a cautious, purely platonic fascination; he made no effort to meet the hero of his future book. The boy’s identity first came to light in the 1960s. His name was Wladyslaw, not Tadeusz, but his family called him Adzio, hence the name the German writer gave him. Wladyslaw Moes was a baron, an authentic baron (unlike the Parisian prefect Haussmann, who just liked the title), and spent the first half of his long life in luxury. There was nothing of the artist, the intellectual, about him. He liked horses, races, elegant attire, balls, parties, cards. He was, in short, the ideal incarnation of an aristocrat in the more vulgar version favored by writers of popular fiction—sometimes, as it turns out, they’re right. He apparently had no interest in bona fide “high” literature, he didn’t quest after “metaphysical feelings,” politics likewise held no interest; he lived in another world, the world of careless pleasure. He knew, though; he discovered much later that he’d been the model for the beautiful boy in Death in Venice. More precisely, he didn’t seek it out; rather, the news reached him, since I doubt he actually ever tried to discover anything about himself, about himself in Venice, in the hotel on the Lido, where he must have felt the fixed, watchful gaze of that short, middle-aged gentleman, an elegant member of the German bourgeoisie. He doubtlessly felt flattered once the information finally reached him. He was an ordinary man, what the French call un homme moyen sensuel, who suddenly found that he contained mythic potential. He must have stood long before the mirror, seeking to find traces of that mythic being in his face, without success …

Later, much later, when articles revealing his name began to appear in the European press, when he’d been found out, his true identity had been deciphered, he tried to file a lawsuit defending his privacy—as if his anemic privacy required defending, as if the relative immortality offered by Mann might in any way threaten his fragile dignity. After the war he lost everything he possessed, he scraped by on a humble translator’s earnings; only his knowledge of languages, his French, now betrayed his better days. It was in short a difficult existence, not tragic, but sad—through a distant observer’s eyes, it might seem that the vacation on the Lido had been the high point of his life … and not just because it has been preserved in world literature. Later, in 1971, Visconti shot his film, with its obsessive repetition of the “Adagio” from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and a beautiful Swedish boy playing the role of the young Pole. Photos of the actual boy from the time of his Venetian vacation also began to appear—which must have vexed the aging Wladyslaw Moes if he saw them, and if he still cared about the legend of his early years, since they came accompanied by malicious comments: he hadn’t been so good-looking after all, the young Swedish actor beat him hands down … But did early twentieth-century photographs tell the truth about human faces? (I’m taking up the baron’s defense.) It must have been painful: they wanted to destroy his last remaining treasure, the legend of his beauty, his charm … But something else struck me even more—“Tadzio” had spent the Second World War in a German Oflag, a POW camp for officers. “Tadzio” as a German POW! We have to imagine this man, the former ephebe of Mann’s novella, a rather dissolute aristocrat, in a German prison camp. Yet another encounter with Germans, different this time, plebeians, speaking a debased language in which the word heard most frequently was the monosyllabic Raus. I also imagine the unchanging routines of camp existence: rutabaga soup, mess tins, dingy darned sheets, the rare letter from home, dreary coexistence with the same companions in misfortune, seen, and thus perhaps loathed, daily, frost, snow, heat, the four seasons circling monotonously around the barracks like a flock of vultures, the lack of privacy, not a single moment to step aside, to hide. Horse races, banquets, elegant outfits, smoking jackets—forgotten, unreal. And even earlier, the luminous Lido, games on the beach, a brief moment of happiness we know only by chance, thanks to the gaze and gifts of Thomas Mann.

As we know, Mann spent the war years in California and had of course long ceased to think about “Tadzio”; that episode now belonged to history, to philology. Decades later Tadzio had become a literary character, something along the lines of Tonio Krüger, Clavdia Chauchat, or Little Mr. Friedeman—all of whom existed, however, exclusively on paper, unlike the man who had inspired Tadzio. The famous novelist continued to encounter other handsome boys, to observe them carefully, and to record these meetings, never leading to any kind of intimacy, in his pedantic diary. And “Tadzio”? He survived the war, left the camp for home, but this home had been confiscated by the Communists. Only poverty remained, a gray quotidian, chasing after a job in one of the Western embassies in Warsaw, since they remained islands of another world, tolerated by the odd types from the Central Committee, uneducated people with square skulls who filled the blank spaces in Marx’s utopia (the underdefined spaces, as the Krakow philosopher Roman Ingarden would say). Finally, near the end, illness, stays in sanatoriums, hospitals, packed wards (like the camp barracks), and the last day, death, about which we know nothing, so we can’t say if it suddenly lit up the life with a glow even brighter than the Lido, or if it simply carelessly snuffed the flame of an already dim candle before heading off to the next patient.

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But once more on Tadzio—that is, on someone who borrowed several traits from our acquaintance Wladyslaw Moes, that unfortunate baron—the hero of Death in Venice, a novella that still radically divides its readers into two camps, the ardent admirers and passionate opponents of Thomas Mann. The story’s style may be a bit baroque at times (the rhythm of the hexameter surfaces in the German original, alongside allusions to Plato…). But what it presents, the history of a famous writer who falls deliriously in love with a slender boy, so deeply in love that the refined intellectual abandons his art, his all-engrossing literary and spiritual labors, his lifelong quest for truth and form, only to perish in poverty, to die as a homeless pauper, a nameless beggar, might, to die like a pet cast off by its owners, like a worm—it could happen anytime, anyplace, to anyone (almost anyone). Gustav von Aschenbach, the renowned author, a specialist in the human heart, in European history, who clearly feels most at home in the silence of his study, someone who lovingly caresses his books, who is intoxicated by ideas, his own and others’, who lives by thinking, by writing, writing rocks him, bears him through the decades as the ocean carries a sailing ship, suddenly, from the moment he sees that beautiful boy, he loses his mind completely, and the capacious world of intellectual discipline that had hitherto offered him daily refuge and inspiration loses all its charm. In the space of a few days this seemingly weighty edifice of education and creation, intellect and inspiration, risk and dignity, vanishes, sinks into oblivion; its place is taken by chasing Tadzio, watching him from a safe distance, observing his routines, his walks, his runs along the beach, his games with other boys, the impatient waiting until he appears again, first in the hotel restaurant, surrounded by family, then later on the sands of the Lido, where the famous author sits in his cozy, shaded beach chair, trying to write, all the while keeping an eye out for the boy, for Tadzio, he has to watch him, and gradually losing interest in what he tries to write. Aschenbach meets with great misfortune: he falls in love. He falls hopelessly in love with a young creature, a creature possessing the charm of youth, a boy whose life he cannot share in any respectable fashion, and he thus goes insane and dies shortly thereafter. And what becomes of the countless virtues and pleasures of intellectual labor, the careful, fruitful reading on winter days with the white city drowsing outside the window and logs crackling in the fireplace, jotting down thoughts with a fountain pen on clean sheets of paper, above all, that sweet moment when a new idea appears, when new notions emerge out of nowhere, a new take on a topic you’ve been contemplating for ages, when it suddenly assumes new shape, generates new energy, a moment of rapture expands, extends to several hours, fuses with a rhythm of smooth but enthusiastic work? No one knows where they go, those moments, where they’ve vanished, since they’ve been forgotten, they’re ridiculous in comparison with the sole force now governing the fifty-year-old Aschenbach, the wild passion, the pursuit of the beautiful boy even though this boy embodies no ideas, has read next to nothing, doesn’t know Plato, couldn’t possibly hold his own in a conversation about Greek tragedies or the crisis brought on by scientific progress and the triumph of positivism in the last part of the nineteenth century, or the attempts to surmount this crisis mustered by Bergson and other thinkers and artists driven to despair by the barren world of science. One smile from this ephebe holds more meaning than all of Rembrandt’s paintings, Keats’s poems, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Mozart’s piano concertos, Shakespeare’s plays, Goya’s Caprichos. When he runs along the beach, only this matters, that he runs along the beach, with his slim, sunbathed body bent so as to form a right angle with the earth’s surface, and only this is precious, splendid, both fragile and final, unique. This slim body is more important that libraries and museums, concerts in which pianists labor so mightily to stir the impressionable souls of their listeners. And why must Aschenbach, honored and esteemed not just in his native land, but throughout Europe, laden with so many awards and honors—but where are they now, those honors and awards?—why must he perish, perish like the homeless of great cities, swiftly buried in anonymous graves so as not to disrupt the pleasures of the self-satisfied bourgeois? He, who has over the years made his name a synonym for great intelligence, a symbol of wisdom, sees this name erode gradually, day by day, it contracts, diminishes, and vanishes in the same abyss into which all his awards, his glowing reviews, congratulatory letters, and honorary degrees had already tumbled with a gentle splash. And he knows—or rather senses, since he doesn’t know much anymore—that he must die, there’s no other choice, since nothing ties him to that boy, not the slightest hope, and yet he can’t live without Tadzio, without seeing him. Moreover, the Polish family fears the epidemic that everyone is talking about, they’re leaving, taking the lovely boy with them (he’ll vaguely remember some older gentlemen gazing at him intently), so the great writer has only one way out, if you can call it that, to perish, vanish, die. And thus his great misfortune draws to a close, his disaster evaporates like the shallow puddle left by a brief shower on a sultry day, his pain dissipates; his name will be resurrected briefly to ornament a few European papers, the news of the literary titan’s death will shock readers (shock them, but also, truth be told, rather please them, a diverting story to accompany their morning coffee, they’ll feel a bit better, at least something’s happened, sad, of course, but interesting, too). But then his name will be like a dead butterfly, dried in the sun, a blind moth, like a fly lying supine on a windowsill, its tiny legs folded as if in prayer.

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On the other hand, the story’s author, Mann himself, experienced the same thing—or not precisely the same thing, but close—as Aschenbach and emerged from this crisis unscathed, he kept his head. He suffered, to be sure, but unlike the writer who became the novella’s hero and martyr, he had an extraordinarily strong sense of decorum, he could never have fallen as low as his hero. Moreover, he was staying in that elegant hotel with his wife, not alone, so he could watch his ephebe only surreptitiously, on the sly, he had to act out a comedy, keeping secrets from his wife. But something else really saved him; he was saved by writing, that odd activity that sometimes turns pain into pleasure, a chemical process that takes suffering and transforms it into black marks on a page.

From: Slight Exaggeration

by Adam Zagajewski