Mann's Doctor Faustus and its Story

"...this strategy was a bitter necessity in order to achieve a certain humorous leavening of the somber material..."

from Thomas Mann's The Story of a Novel 

Mann wrote The Story of a Novel shortly after completing his novel Doctor Faustus, in 1949. It was translated into English in 1961 by the Winstons. I thought I'd read them as a pair.

That bit about humor? I think Mann succeeded:  the novel is funny, except, of course, when it isn't. Tom at Wuthering Expectations reminded recently that Mann's Magic Mountain is funny, and this is, too. Magic Mountain is funnier than Doctor Faustus, but then World War I was a barrel of laughs compared to World War II. Still, there's some laughs in this one. The narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, spends the first chapters comically complaining that he doesn't know how to write. In very elaborate prose. When our hero, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is worried about the symptoms of early-stage syphilis, his doctors are comically unavailable: suddenly dead, hauled off to jail, etc. (The devil may have done it.) The names of characters are simply silly. Someone whose German is better than mine should feel free to comment, but I make out the names of the conservative circle of intellectuals around Sextus Kridwiss as Mister Chaos, Mister WoodenShoes, Mister Birdy, and Mister PorridgeMess.

So you probably know this as that crazed, howling cheese of a novel about the musician who slips into syphilitic dementia, full of dry theory about twelve-tone music, a novel unintelligible to mere mortals, and yes, it is all those things. It's an allegory about the collapse of German culture into Hitler-led barbarity.

But, hey, it's funny, too, so that makes it all OK...right?

Anyway, a quick summary: Adrian Leverkühn is born on a German farm around 1890; his friend (and future biographer) Serenus Zeitblom is born in the nearby town, two years earlier. Everyone pretty quickly realizes young Adrian is a musical genius and takes the time to nurture his talent. Adrian first studies theology, but finally comes around to the study of composition. He writes some apprentice works, but then deliberately gives himself syphilis by sleeping with a prostitute known to be infected. This deepens his aloofness and separates him from normal family life; it also liberates his creativity.

Or something does. Adrian writes a confession that Zeitblom reproduces in which Adrian makes a deal with the devil for twenty-four years of musical productivity. Was it just a midnight dream, like Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor? Adrian is discreet and ironic, but he always treats subsequent wonderful events as if some power was assisting him. If there is a devil, one of the concessions the devil extracts is Adrian can have no normal human contacts; well, syphilis makes one type of contact awkward; and Adrian's shy and aloof, given to migraines, so all he can do is work anyway. He produces a number of masterpieces, though they're experimental and not universally loved.

The novel in the last third or so becomes, as Mann notes in The Story of a Novel, more novelistic: there is romance, murder, suicide, the death of Adrian's father. Finally in 1930, the twenty-four years are up, and Adrian submerges into syphilitic dementia. His last two compositions are based on the Apocalypse of John and the death of Faust. Götterdämmerung indeed.

Is this Faust saved? We don't know. Marlowe's Faust isn't, but Goethe's is. Mann suggests, but I haven't read, that the original Faust book is ambiguous, and certainly this is. The novel runs in two time tracks: the events of Adrian's life from 1890 to 1930 or so, with Adrian's death coming in 1940. But there is also the time that Zeitblom is supposedly writing it in: from 1943 to the fall of Berlin in 1945. The Russian advance from the East, the invasion of Sicily and then the fall of Italy, D-Day, the Ardennes offensive leading to the Battle of the Bulge. But Adrian's dead, and salvation for Adrian would mean his music would be performed and understood; that the German culture he is the stand-in for would once again have a place on the world stage. In 1945? Well, a German could only hope. Or then again, maybe hope against is more appropriate? Is German culture irredeemably compromised? Zeitblom articulates both possibilities.

In The Story of the Novel, Mann tells us that when he read the final chapters to Adorno, (who was serving as his adviser on musical theory) Adorno told him that the ending was too optimistic, and Mann decided that was right, and rewrote it to be darker. Certainly Mann did not think Germany redeemed enough to return to live there, though there were calls for him to do so, even to become president of a newly freed Germany, something like Vaclav Havel.

I was thinking about rereading it after I read Broch's The Death of Virgil earlier this year. (Still thinking about The Death of Virgil!) Both novels were written in the US in the closing years of World War II. Mann was living in Los Angeles; Broch in D.C., but according to The Story of a Novel, they met a couple of times during those years. Mann was also deeply involved in war work and traveled to D.C. a few times. When I read The Death of Virgil I thought it was surprising how little political a novel it was, given the time it was written and the nature of the (Austrian exile) author. Doctor Faustus is a very political novel. Though I've now read them relatively closely together, two big Modernist stories about major artists, I'm not sure I have much else to say about that comparison in retrospect...

But I'd already been thinking about rereading Faustus after I read Rolland's Jean-Christophe a bit over a year ago. Here I think the connection is quite clear: both characters are musicians; both represent German musical culture of their era, its relation to the rest of Europe; both protagonists die young. Both authors are closeted homosexuals. (At least likely so. The evidence on Rolland is thin.) Mann was engaged with Rolland, even dreaming about him according to his diary. Rolland, writing just before World War I, is more hopeful. That reflects the times, but as well the temperaments, of the two authors.

One notable difference is that the music theory in Mann is quite difficult and authentic-feeling; Adrian's compositions feel like they really do exist. Rolland is quite general about the works that Jean-Christophe Krafft has written. Most of Adrian's compositions are vocal music and set a text; Jean-Christophe's are purely instrumental. (I think Mann's choice is wiser from a writing point of  view.) This makes for very different novels: the Rolland is a much easier read, with considerably more emphasis on the personal relationships; Mann is more difficult, and much of the first half of the novel feels frankly didactic. (Though the fact that Mann can write about Brentano, Keats, Shakespeare, or the Bible help ground it.) All that makes Mann's more believable. I wondered if Mann was thinking specifically about Rolland in The Story of the Novel when he wrote this:

"There is nothing sillier, in a novel about an artist, than merely to assert the existence of art, to talk about genius, about works, to hail these and rave about their effects upon the souls of the audiences. No, concrete reality, exactitude, were needed--this was utterly clear to me."

But short of including a score or a CD, the reader can only estimate musical works from the description of their effects on others. Doctor Zhivago includes Zhivago's poems and we can judge of them, though less so in my case, since I have no Russian. But a novel about a musician? Music is inherently harder. Is Mann's the right approach? I think a lot of people don't read Mann because of his difficulty, because of all that music theory, but then I think hardly anybody reads Rolland at all. (Which is a shame.)

Also reading The Story of a Novel was interesting from the perspective of a working writer. Of course, in 1943 (when he starts the novel) Mann is famous and celebrated as a novelist in ways that seem almost impossible anymore today. From the outside one might assume he has an almost Goethean level of self-assurance. Turns out it wasn't entirely so. So here's some quotes, mostly about the writing process, I copied out of the book:

How much Faustus contains of the atmosphere of my life! A radical confession, at bottom. From the very beginning that has been the shattering thing about the book.

Has any man who ever bore the incubus of creation on his back, always concerned, obsessed, preoccupied with the the work of days and years--has any such man ever been an enjoyable companion? Dubito. 

Protracted psychological low, intensified by horror at the misguidedness of the novel I began with so zestful a sense of experiment.

Why, yes. Certainly! On with it! We'll cut a page and a half; we'll cut three pages. That will make it more readable, somewhat more readable. 

The fact remains, never before has any work so agitated and moved me! 

But also these, more general:

Switzerland is where the most gloriously un-German things are said in German.

People who feel held back and not given their due, and who at the same time present a distinguished appearance, often seek redress in racist self-assertion.

Life is pain, and we only live as long as we suffer. [Ouch! Tell me it ain't so, Tom!]

There is no doubt in my mind to whom we are indebted for this victory. It is Roosevelt.

Mann was an enthusiastic American citizen at the time and a great partisan of FDR. Still the House Un-American Activities Committee hounded him out of the country a couple of years later.

Anyway, a great--and affecting--and sometimes funny--novel, even if the music theory pretty much still goes over my head. It's impact falls at the conflux of the intellectual-political-emotional, with emotional perhaps being the least, but certainly not null, term.

Humpty's eyes may look a little dazed.

Anyway, this post (and the process of writing this post) has gone on **way** too long. I was also reading the books with the idea of #GermanLitMonth, and in fact finished them a while ago. But I've been a particularly slow blogger of late.

Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday

I have never attached so much importance to my own person that I would have been tempted to tell others the story of my life.

Stefan Zweig was a well-known author when he penned that opening line to his autobiography and he acts on it. It's the least personally revealing autobiography I can think of. His first wife shows up only as an element in the occasional 'we'. If you didn't know she was there, you might think he was being royal. His second wife features in an anecdote about his life as a refugee from Hitler, but she herself is little more present than his first.

We get a little more information about his Jewish parents: his father made money in textiles; he made the transition from shtetl to industrialist. His mother's family was an old banking family. Thus Zweig himself was the second son of a haute bourgeois family. (Though we don't learn anything about that older brother.)

None of that much matters, though; that's not what he's interested in. He's a young man interested in the arts:

"I had not read La Bohéme for nothing, without wishing at twenty, to live a similar life."

I find it interesting he says 'read.' The opera I see dates from 1896 and would have pretty brand new when he was twenty; the book is 1851.

Zweig emphasizes his interest as a collector: he searches out manuscripts of Goethe, Beethoven, and Mozart, and particularly those that show the moment of creation, and that's what interests him in his personal life, too. There are various reasons I was interested in this book, but one of them is Zweig's interest in Romain Rolland; Zweig wrote a biography of Rolland in 1921 which I read last fall. He also wrote biographies of Emile Verhaeren, Paul Verlaine, and Sigmund Freud, among people of his own time, as well as various historical figures. He meets James Joyce and offers to translate Portrait of an Artist into German; André Gide visits him at his flat in Paris, and tells him only a foreigner could find so lovely a spot; Zweig helps save Rilke's library, stranded in Paris during World War I; Richard Strauss uses Zweig as his librettist and has to defend the resulting opera against the Nazis; Zweig visits Freud in London and introduces him to Salvador Dalí. Zweig happily puts himself in the middle of the cultural world.

Zweig is endearingly modest about his role; though he knows he's a success, he's not impressed with that part, and what he wants you to think about, and hope for, and work for, is the cultural unity of Europe.

All peoples feel only that a strange shadow hangs broad and heavy over their lives. But we, who once knew a world of individual freedom, know and can give testimony that Europe once, without a care, enjoyed the kaleidoscopic play of color. And we shudder when we think how overcast, overshadowed, enslaved and enchained our world has become because of our suicidal fury.

Sadly all too relevant today. He quotes, with approval, a letter from Rolland, written during the first world war:

Je ne quitterai jamais mes amis.

and one feels that would be true of Zweig.

But let us hope, especially today, with the chaos of the English vote and the assassination of the Europhile mayor of Danzig, that his nearly final words won't apply:

...my most cherished aim to which I had devoted all the power of my conviction for forty years, the peaceful union of Europe, had been defiled. What I had now feared more than my own death, the war of all against all, now had become unleashed for the second time.

I read it in the seemingly anonymous, first English translation of 1943, reprinted in the 70s with a useful introduction by the translator and scholar Harry Zohn. That's what the Toronto Public Library has, but it has been retranslated by the late, great Anthea Bell, which I assume should be preferred.

The other reason this crossed my radar was that Wes Anderson said it was an influence for The Grand Budapest Hotel; who knows what enables Wes Anderson to do the (amazing, IMHO) things he does, but the connection between the two seems a bit tenuous frankly.

Zweig is the great pan-Europeanist so the book could qualify for a number of different countries, but since he was born in Austria, and came later he says to feel a certain Austrian patriotism, I'll count it for Austria for this year's European Reading Challenge:

And at 454 pages, plus a separately numbered preface, it qualifies, although just, as large enough for my Chunkster Reading Challenge:

Hermann Hesse's If The War Goes On... (#NonficNov)

After reading Romain Rolland recently, I picked this volume of essays off the shelf to see what Hesse had to say because I suspected there would be something. I hadn't realized the book was dedicated to Rolland, and it ends with a remembrance of Rolland (who died in 1944.)

The majority of the essays are from the time of World War I and the immediate aftermath; Hesse's thought changes profoundly at the time, as was true of many. The first essay takes it title from the beginning of the Ode to Joy section of Beethoven's Ninth, "O Freunde, nicht diese Töne." O friends, not these sounds. Beethoven turns to the exhilaration of Schiller's Ode To Joy; Hesse just asks that his fellow intellectuals not spew hatred of their enemy, that if a war must be fought, it can be done without contempt for those whom just six months ago you admired. This essay, which appeared in the Zurich newspaper, and not in Hesse's homeland of Germany, spurred Rolland to write to Hesse. The opening essays of Rolland's Above The Battle try to make the same point.

Well. A difficult proposition. Not the least risk of war is its need to dehumanize the enemy.

The next several essays document Hesse's growing disenchantment with the war. But it's the essays of 1919 I found especially interesting, the key one being "Zarathustra's Return." As you might guess, Nietzsche is the central influence here. But what Hesse gets from Nietzsche is not what you might expect, and certainly not what Nietzsche's sister and her fellow Nazis would have wanted you to get. Rather Hesse draws from Nietzsche's insistence that we not succumb to herd mentality the idea we should be pacifist, that we should withdraw from society; if society wants the individual to follow blindly into mass mobilization, then perhaps a Nietzschean refusal leads to pacifism.

Years ago now when I read those novels of Hesse I did read, I was put off a bit by the implied argument of many of them, that we disengage from the world; the Glass Bead Game was my favorite at the time for what were philosophical reasons, the fact that Knecht leaves the academy to once again engage with the world at the end. Hesse withdrew from the world to live on his Swiss mountain, and his books often argue that philosophy. But reading this made that decision, for me, if not defensible, at least understandable.

The last few essays were less interesting and are mostly around the period of World War II. It also includes his brief Message to the Nobel Prize Banquet of 1946.

A fascinating book, and crucial to understanding Hesse's novels, I think, and to the post World War I mindset.

Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe

"...as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings."

That's the dedication for Romain Rolland's Nobel Prize in Literature of 1915. It was largely a prize for his novel Jean-Christophe, serialized in the French magazine Cahiers de la Quinzaine from February of 1902 to October of 1912, and subsequently issued as ten short-ish novels.

Jean-Christophe Krafft, generally referred to as just Christophe, was a musician born in Rhineland Germany around 1870. He flees to Paris when he's young, wanted for taking part in a riot against soldiers stationed in his home town. Later he flees to Switzerland after taking part in a May Day riot in Paris. He also lives for a while in Italy. He has deep friendships and loves, but mostly he composes music and conducts, eventually achieving success and renown. The novel is Christophe's story, but it is also the story of art and culture in Western Europe from 1870 or so to 1912. The handsome, dynamic, heroic figure on the Pocket Book cover is the image Rolland wants to convey. But at the same time Christophe can be short or haughty with people, has a temper, is complicated.

Imagine Beethoven born in 1870.

Rolland conceived the novel as a scholarship student in Rome in 1889 and began it not long after during a trip in Switzerland. After his scholarship was done, he came back to Paris and taught music history at various schools, ending up at the Sorbonne. He wrote plays that went nowhere, and biographies (of Beethoven and Michelangelo among others) that did little better. It wasn't until Jean-Christophe was in progress that he had any reputation; but then...

I took pages of notes as I was reading this, copied out passages, read a biography by Stefan Zweig from 1921. I don't mean to burden you with all of this; I only mention it to suggest that it is a novel that I thought well worth reading; its current obscurity is undeserved. It was both affecting and thought-provoking.

Romain Rolland

That's not to say that it's perfect. Rolland doesn't write well about women, and the female characters too often rely on clichés. If you imagine a continuum between writing too specifically and too generally, Rolland is way over on the side of generalities. (Put Tom Wolfe--or Gary Shteyngart in his newest, Lake Success--with the endless use of brand names, on the side of too specific.) But still Rolland creates characters you care about, and the ending, with the death of Christophe, is powerful.

The novel also needs to be retranslated. The only translation into English, the one I read, is by Gilbert Cannan, and was done as the novel was coming out in the early 1900s. At every translation to burgess for what was bourgeois in the original I cringed. Even where it's not bad, it's out-of-date.

So I would not want to tell you it's a Drop-Everything, Read-Now novel; it's not Anna Karenina or War and Peace by Rolland's master Tolstoy; it's not the equal of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, though it's hard to imagine Doctor Faustus without Jean-Christophe. I only want to suggest that you leave space for it, don't forget it's there, if you're looking for a long novel with characters you care about and insight into its time's art and culture. Something challenging but engaging. A novel about an artist.

Though I find the cover above cool, that's not the edition I read. I bought that for a dollar yesterday (with a bunch of other books...) at the University of Toronto University College book sale pretty much so I could take a picture of it. (Still going on through Sunday for those of you in the Toronto area!) I read the much more boring-looking edition shown. (No abridgements around here! The full 1600 pages for us!)

I discussed the first parts in two earlier instalments. The first three novels (Dawn, Morning, Youth) are looked at here. The next four (Revolt, The Market Place, Antoinette, and The House) are here. I may write a post on Zweig's biography; I'm also reading Rolland's collection of articles against the militarism of World War I, Above the Battle, which may get posted on as well. Everything Rolland-related at the blog should be available here. I found this at the Nobel Prize site informative.

And that's the third-longest book on my Classics Club list done! Woo-hoo!

Quote

"There is but one heroism on earth--to know life and yet to love it."

This is apparently Romain Rolland from somewhere in his oeuvre, but I have no clue where. I picked it up from Stefan Zweig's biography, Romain Rolland, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul.

Quote: Reading Stefan Zweig's biography of Romain Rolland

'The precondition of every true calling must be, not love for art, but love for mankind. Those only who are filled with such a love can hope that they will ever be able, as artists, to do anything worth doing."

In 1887, the twenty-one year old Romain Rolland has finished his classwork at the Ècole Normale of Paris; he reads Tolstoy's brand new What Is To Be Done, the book in which Tolstoy condemns all art as a pernicious slide into sensuality. But Rolland wants to be an artist, a musician or a writer! (or both: Richard Wagner was recently dead.) It was a crisis! He writes a letter to Tolstoy explaining his predicament and Tolstoy sends back a 38-page response to the at-that-time unknown Rolland that begins "Cher Frère." The above is Zweig's summary of the conclusion (tr. by Eden and Cedar Paul, 1921).

Thirty-eight pages...oh, that Tolstoy...

But I do like the quote. 

Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe [Interim #2]

In our last episode, Jean-Christophe was a teenager who had become the head of the family after the death of his father and grandfather, financially responsible for his mother and younger brothers. He's playing in the town orchestra and teaching piano, but what he really wants to do is compose. He's lonely and awkward in the way of a bright teenage boy.

That post covered the first three novels of the ten-novel series; this will take on the next four. The novels are fairly short, so those seven novels are about 1100 pages in my edition. Five hundred to go!

His awkwardness only increases in volumes 4 (Revolt) and 5 (The Market-place). Jean-Christophe gets involved in public debates about the relative virtues of the music of Brahms and Wagner. He manages to offend parties on both sides. As a young composer aiming to make his way, he's dismissive of the music of his fellow young composers; we're not really left in doubt about his correctness in this, but we're in a lot of doubt about his policy and even his manners. And he offends the prince of this principality, and so loses his job with the town orchestra. He manages to totally destroy his position in polite society. The narrator is sympathetic to his viewpoints, but not very sympathetic to his demeanor, and so are we. Young Jean-Christophe is a little hard to take in these two volumes. Even when an older musician likes his compositions, Jean-Christophe in his diffidence and irritability manages to make the occasion impossible.

There are two events that take place at the end of Revolt with significance for the rest of the series. First Jean-Christophe has tickets for a box at the opera, but has offended and is offended by everyone in town, so he'll have to go by himself. But he meets a young French governess who is used to better things and misses culture. Jean-Christophe offers her a ticket, and though she knows she shouldn't, she takes it and goes. Well, that a governess is seen alone in a box at the opera with a man is shocking enough, but that that man is Jean-Christophe! She is fired immediately. Jean-Christophe is at first unaware of what's happened, but when he discovers it, he immediately feels terrible, but there's nothing he can do: she's already on a train to France.

Jean-Christophe is now even more upset with the censorious Puritanism of his town; when he goes to a country dance, and the soldiers from the local barracks arrive, and start abusing the peasant girls, and Jean-Christophe comes to their defense. A riot ensues, and one of the soldiers is seriously wounded. Jean-Christophe has to flee arrest and is himself on a train to Paris by morning.

The Market-place is set in Paris, where the impoverished Jean-Christophe tries to establish himself. His abrasiveness makes it difficult to find and keep pupils; he has no friends who might form the basis of a claque the one time he has a composition performed, and it's booed; he can't even be nice to the person who keeps him alive by assigning him music-copying jobs.

Rolland uses this novel--and Jean-Christophe's ignorance--to conduct a survey of French culture around the year 1900. Well, I'm ignorant, too, and I'm afraid a lot of this went right past me. My edition has no notes. Music is naturally the most important: Berlioz, Debussy, and Satie, for instance. But there are also authors such as Anatole France and Maurice Barrès, as well as the Dreyfus affair. And that's the stuff I recognized.

In the earlier post I thought the narrative quite linear, but that changes. In retrospect, I suspect it was deliberate on the part of Rolland to match the simpler childhood time of our protagonist. Revolt has clear foreshadowing in the character of the young governess, and The Market-place has sections almost essayistic. At the end of The Market-place, Jean-Christophe becomes great friends with a young and still struggling French writer Olivier. Shades of Otto from the earlier books. The sixth novel Antoinette flashes back and tells the history of Olivier and that governess, who are brother and sister.

And in the last of the books (The House) I've read so far, Jean-Christophe and Olivier take top-floor rooms in a large house. With Olivier pushing for him in the public sphere, Jean-Christophe is beginning to have some success. But this novel also follows the stories of all the inhabitants in the house as well, their interactions with each other, and the influence of Jean-Christophe on their lives. Rolland sees Jean-Christophe as a great-souled figure; I want to say Nietzschean, but that word is so loaded it's dangerous, but let's say, Nietzschean in a good sense. But our hero is still just as disdainful of society now that it's beginning to celebrate him as he was when he was a nobody. Will he still manage to shoot himself in the foot? Quite possibly!

Stefan Zweig wrote a biography of Rolland that came out in 1921. I've got a PDF of the English translation still to look at. And apparently Rolland features in Zweig's The World of Yesterday, which has been on my hold list forever (I'm slowly moving up) because I've been interested in reading it for another reason. I may just have to buy a copy.

The reading chair. It's easier to make progress in an Internet-free zone:

Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe [Interim]

Romain Rolland won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915, and according to the Nobel Prize biography Jean-Christophe is his masterpiece. Nowadays he seems rather forgotten.

Jean-Christophe Krafft is born to a musical family in a small principality on the German side of the Rhine a little after German unification. It's the story of how he became a composer. A Kunstlerroman.

The work came out in French over the years 1904-1912 in ten short volumes; the entire work was translated into English by 1913 by Gilbert Cannan and not, as far as I can tell, since.

This is an interim post because those ten novels add up to 1600 pages in my one volume edition. I've finished the first three novels, about 400 pages, and I thought I'd note what I have so far.

The story begins with our hero in his cradle and goes on from there. It's a very linear novel. Jean-Christophe's grandfather Jean Michel Krafft is the Kapellmeister (head musician for the court) in this unnamed principality; his father Melchior is a talented but dissipated violinist who marries Louisa, a gentle woman but beneath him socially. Their eldest child is Jean-Christophe, though there are two brothers to come. When our hero is in his early teens, his grandfather dies of old age, and his father dies of alcohol, leaving the family nothing but debts. Jean-Christophe becomes the breadwinner, playing in the principality's orchestra and giving music lessons.

The novel is, as I say, very linear; it describes one of Jean-Christophe's relationships after another; it moves forward in time without jumps forward or back; the currently most significant relationship is given its space and then doesn't return. There's his mother, his grandfather, his father. His uncle on his mother's side provides him a sense of spirituality and of music as it relates to the average person. There's Otto, his first real friend: his family's poverty, his need to work, and his own hauteur/shyness combine to make friendship difficult for Jean-Christophe, and his friendship with Otto is intense until it's over. Then his first two girlfriends: with the first nothing happens and then she dies; the carnality of the second relationship is disapproved by all, eventually including Jean-Christophe himself. The first three books take him to the end of his adolescence.

My thoughts so far. 1.) Rolland really is obscure these days. For a Nobel Prize winner, his Wikipedia biography is pretty short. I took a look at the French version and it wasn't much longer. The French have so many Nobel Prize laureates in literature they may feel they can just ignore a couple of them. The Toronto Public Library basically has no circulating Rolland, though a number of his books are available for stack usage at the main reference library.

2.) His relationship with Otto is much more intense and much more individualized than is his relationship with either of the two girls. Though they get somewhat fuller portraits, they can still be boiled down to the ethereal and the earthly, at least in Jean-Christophe's life. His friendship with Otto is more complex and it's destroyed when Jean-Chistophe hears a rumor (started by his younger brother) that the relationship between the two of them is homosexual. It isn't, but the thought that others might think so is enough to make Jean-Christophe so unpleasantly conscious of their friendship it ends soon after. This made me wonder if Rolland himself were homosexual. The Interwebs were inconclusive, but kind of said yes. The evidence may be thin because Rolland felt he had to keep it that way, I don't know.

This made me wonder about 3.) what did Thomas Mann think about Romain Rolland? If indeed Rolland was a somewhat closeted homosexual, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, who wrote a long novel about a young man becoming a composer, it seems to me Mann could hardly escape having an opinion. Comparing Doctor Faustus with this novel would be fruitful I suspect, but that's another post. But conveniently I happen to have Mann's selected diaries in English here at home. (Have I mentioned I may have a problem with book purchases?) It even has an index so I didn't have to reread it. On two occasions Mann mentions dismissively articles comparing Rolland's Jean-Christophe with his own Buddenbrooks. But then in an entry on June 17, 1933, he writes:

Last night I dreamed Rolland had died, and that I was delivering a very earnest eulogy beside his coffin, furious about German crimes.

It was a few years until Mann started Doctor Faustus, so make of that what you will. Rolland was a famous pacifist and pan-Europeanist.

Also without leaving the house I could look up James Gibbons Huneker.  Huneker was once (early 1900s) a well-known American critic with a strong interest in both music and avant-garde European literature of the time. (What can I say? There was a phase. A bunch of his books were in some used bookstore I frequented.) I figured he had to have an opinion on Rolland. And he did, but it was only a passing sideswipe. Rolland's prose was 'mucilaginous.' Ouch. A little unfair, but judging only from translation, which I'm sure Huneker was not, it may not be entirely so...

Anywho. That's a start, but that's all for now.