Love and Death in Venice

 

“. . . but there is nothing so distasteful as being restored to oneself when one is beside oneself.”

Reading Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice in the year 2020 is not much of a discovery, even in Michael Henry Heim’s 2004 translation. Though I first read it in college more than 40 years ago in the H. T. Lowe-Porter version, it is much more a re-discovery. After a century of ecstatic praise by readers, followed by the film by Luchino Visconti and the opera by Benjamin Britten, I was prepared to find the allure of the text betrayed by traps set both by the author, Thomas Mann, after disclosures in his journals betrayed what were once called “tendencies,” and by both the gay filmmaker and the gay composer who had no difficulty, apparently, claiming Aschenbach as one of their own. 

Mann is not to blame for the film, made by a Communist Italian nobleman. Visconti didn’t have to alter the story at all. The changes he did make weren’t improvements. Instead of a great writer, inspired by Mann’s encounter with Gustav Mahler, Visconti makes Aschenbach a great composer, replete with superfluous flashbacks that make the resemblance to Mahler more than just coincidental. Not to mention all the Mahler “quotes” on the soundtrack, like the exquisite Adagietto under the opening credits. I was a precocious youth when I first saw it in the 70s, but I wasn’t so impressionable to mistake Visconti’s point in making the film. 

Nor is Mann to blame for Benjamin Britten’s tortuous opera based on the film and the novella, even if there is the consolation of Britten’s music. Britten composed it as a showpiece – the last – for his longtime partner, the great English tenor Peter Pears. 

I found nothing that would lead me to mistake Death in Venice as anything but what it is and has always been: a straightforward account of an artist’s abandon – his last – in a setting so sensual that he fails – or refuses – to protect himself from the ravages of the commonest and deadliest of epidemics. He succumbs to cholera, of all things, which he probably contracted from eating fruit sold on a street in Venice. 

I returned to Death in Venice because I had been reading Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, whose narrator drew comparisons between Coleman Silk, a septuagenarian former college professor engaged in a sexual relationship with a woman half his age:

It was something, I suppose, like watching Aschenbach feverishly watching Tadzio—his sexual longing brought to a boil by the anguishing fact of mortality—except that we weren't in a luxury hotel on the Venice Lido...

life—the intoxication with the last fling, what Mann, writing of Aschenbach, called the "late adventure of the feelings"—to reassert itself and take charge of him.

 The onslaught of freedom at seventy-one, the freedom to leave a lifetime behind—known also as Aschenbachian madness.

   "And before nightfall"—the final words of Death in Venice—"a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease." No, he does not have to live like a tragic character in any course.

Nor die like one. But he does. Like Aschenbach, Coleman Silk finds his quietus at the hands of the object of his desire. In fact, she dies along with him in a car crash. Aschenbach succumbs to cholera sitting on a Lido beach gazing deliriously at a Polish boy playing in the sea. The news of his death would not, of course, have mentioned anything about Tadzio. The existence of the “beautiful boy” was unknown to everyone in the world with the exception of his family and Aschenbach. Whatever has been made of Mann’s story, he was in no way confused about its meaning. His presentation of the nature of Aschenbach’s attraction to Tadzio is straightforward:

There is nothing more curious or delicate than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who encounter and observe each other daily—nay, hourly—yet are constrained by convention or personal caprice to keep up the pretense of being strangers, indifferent, avoiding a nod or word. There is a feeling of malaise and overwrought curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally stifled need for mutual knowledge and communication, and above all a sort of strained esteem. For a man loves and respects his fellow man only insofar as he is unable to assess him, and longing is a product of insufficient knowledge.

Some kind of relationship and acquaintance was bound to develop between Aschenbach and young Tadzio, and the older man was thrilled to discover that his interest and attention did not go wholly unreciprocated. For example, what induced the beautiful boy, when appearing on the beach each morning, to shun the boardwalk behind the cabanas and saunter through the sand in front of them past Aschenbach’s residence—sometimes coming needlessly close to him, all but grazing his table or chair—on the way to the family cabana? Was this the result of the attraction, the fascination of a superior emotion on a tender and thoughtless object? Aschenbach looked forward daily to Tadzio’s entrance and at times pretended to be busy when it occurred and let the boy pass seemingly unnoticed. But at other times he looked up and their eyes would meet. They were both as grave as could be on such occasions. Nothing in the cultivated and dignified mien of the older man betrayed any agitation, yet there was a query, a pensive question in Tadzio’s eyes, a hesitation in his gait, and he looked down, then sweetly up again, and when he had passed, something in his bearing intimated that only good breeding kept him from looking back.

Critics who attacked Visconti for his bald presentation of Aschenbach as a romantic paedophile were merely exposing their own misreading of the story. Aschenbach was attracted by Tadzio’s exceptional beauty – all the more exceptional for his finding it in a boy instead of a girl. Tadzio’s gender, in fact, makes him all the more unattainable, and Aschenbach’s passion for him so much the sadder. But just try to imagine readers’ reaction to Mann’s story if Tadzio had been Tadzia – if Aschenbach had developed a secret passion for a pubescent girl. Death in Venice would’ve been a forerunner of Nabokov’s Lolita. 

But there is something else about the differences that distinctive media impose on the adaptation of such a story. Visconti’s film could, quite naturally, not help but make Aschenbach’s ideal paedophilia more obvious to the viewer. But Visconti short-changed Mann in many ways, not least in his casting choices and his stiflingly chi-chi production design. He was quite deliberately trying to beautify Aschenbach’s sad fall, without realizing that he would have to utilize a style to match Mann’s prose. The man who once made Senso, about the sad consequences of an ill-timed love affair between a man and a woman, was strangely incapable of preventing Aschenbach from looking somewhat ridiculous.

The opera tries to make Mann’s short novel into a summation of a lifelong obsession of the artist. But there is some confusion whether the artist is Aschenbach or Benjamin Britten. When Peter Pears premiered in the role he was nearly 63, and his advanced age was audible as well as visible. It made one wonder if it was cholera that killed him or some  malady of old age. And there is the added disadvantage of Britten’s English sensibility imposed on Mann’s tale. The way the English treat Mediterranean settings, all the way from E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence to Lawrence Durrell, makes everything seem like an invitation to sensuality that the English climate – and the English themselves – have successfully suppressed.

Returning to Thomas Mann’s novella, then, is both a refreshing reminder of its disturbing beauty and a clearing of the decks. The refulgent language of the final chapter, used to capture a dying artist’s glimpse of an unattainable ideal, is ravishing and unforgettable:

But to him it seemed as if the pale and charming psychagogue out there were smiling at him, beckoning to him, as if, releasing his hand from his hip, he were pointing outward, floating onward into the promising immensity of it all. And, as so often, he set out to follow him.