House of Exile was first published in Australia but has now been taken up by Allen Lane in London, the prestigious hardback arm of Penguin. It’s an account of the lives of a group of German and other writers in the period leading up to, and including, World War II. Its main focus, though, is on Thomas Mann’s novelist brother Heinrich, and his comparatively unliterary wife Nelly.
It’s a strange book from many perspectives. Speculation is set side by side with encyclopedia-like factual entries so that the feeling of amalgamated notes is never far away. The author clearly wants to offer a life of Heinrich, but also to bring in other authors, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who he never met. Diverse topics are also given capsule treatment — how writing-quills were once made, and the theory that consciousness continues for around seven seconds after a beheading.
Authorial opinions occur occasionally — the early translations of Thomas Mann into English, for instance, are “indeed awful.” There’s no index, and the sources are lumped together in one comprehensive appendix. The end result is a book without a consistent authorial voice that incorporates a rag-bag of facts and impressions.
But it’s a very literary rag-bag for all that. We learn that Joyce wanted to write something short and simple after Finnegans Wake, which was neither of these things, and that Virginia Woolf wanted to equal the concision of Gide’s journals (“The plain truth is I can’t”). Brecht, we hear, almost never drank, and Thomas Mann suffered from painful teeth.
Minor figures are introduced in cameo roles. Thomas’ son Klaus thought that undergoing rehabilitation for his drug addiction was being “exiled from artificial paradises.” After Walter Benjamin’s son Stephan was interned in London in 1940, he was sent to Australia, along with 2,541 other Germans, Austrians and Italians, mostly Jewish, but also including some Nazis. They had no idea where they were going, but after the war many opted to stay. The author mentions the captain’s respect for the Nazis under his command, and his distrust of the others, but characteristically makes no comment on it.
Heinrich Mann was a more popular novelist than Thomas, and also more left-wing. He shut himself away in his Los Angeles study for two days after reading about the short-lived German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 (“Communists baffled,” noted Woolf of the same event), but eventually came round to an understanding of Josef Stalin’s calculating nature.
Heinrich never won the Nobel Prize, unlike Thomas (who wrote “hopeless” in his diary about attempts to get his brother nominated). House of Exile’s author, Evelyn Juers, has seen Heinrich’s FBI file and notes that he and Brecht were regularly suspected of meeting American communists. And it was East Germany that, after the war, claimed Heinrich as one of its own, with his body dug up, cremated, and the ashes sent there from Los Angeles in 1961.
Heinrich’s wife Nelly gets a good deal of sympathy, something she couldn’t manage with many of her husband’s friends. The author takes pains to record her rejection of the hostile view of Nelly in a recent publication as “a poor and promiscuous young woman who marries into a higher social class and is pathetically, embarrassingly, out of her depth.” Again, Juers is generally an enthusiast for Heinrich, but even so the most outrageous moment in the book comes when, after Nelly has written an account of her life, her husband flings it on the fire, only to rewrite it under his own name. When Heinrich’s published version becomes a victim of the Nazi’s 1933 book burnings, Juers comments that Nelly probably saw it as the second time her life story had been committed to the flames. No wonder she took to drink.
Thomas Mann naturally features prominently. He comes over as haughty and unfeeling, routinely suffering from insomnia, and in constant need of both sedatives and stimulants. He regrets that Joyce may have beaten him in the greatest-20th-century-writer stakes, but is feted in the US nonetheless and dines with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House; many thought he would lead any post-war German government. But as for Nelly, Thomas can’t even bring himself to write her name in his diaries.
Most of this book is about the experience of exile of the Mann brothers, in the South of France and then the US, though Brecht, Auden, Isherwood and Aldous Huxley make brief appearances. The book begins, with a long account of the Manns’ childhood, but is later organized into chapters, each dedicated to a year, covering 1934 to 1944. Political developments and vignettes from the lives of writers such as the Manns, Woolf, Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil (author of Man Without Qualities) and Alfred Doblin (author of Berlin Alexanderplatz) are simply juxtaposed, without comment and in chronological order.
It would be wrong to think the author is only interested, jackdaw-like, in attractive items plucked out from the documents she’s researched. She knows where seriousness lies too. “Unhappy, foolish nation, that has been won over by this shameful rubbish, this swamp of lies, brutality and crime,” she translates from Thomas’ diary (all the book’s translations from German are her own). She even-handedly includes wartime atrocities committed by both sides, almost as if to say that, important though literature and the lives of writers are, other things are even more important.
This book is reminiscent of the works of W.G. Sebald, and also, as semi-fictionalized biography, of Bruce Duffy’s marvelous life of Wittgenstein, The World As I Found It. I noticed some mistakes — a “disinterested” that should have been “uninterested”, and the UK’s King Edward VIII referred to as “Edward III.” Nonetheless this book is notable for the broadness of its sweep and the originality of its method. For the general reader with literary interests it’s a valuable, indeed a remarkable, piece of work on a too-little-investigated topic.
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