It's an open question who would have wanted to be the child of German novelist Thomas Mann, but six offspring knew the mixed privilege. Looking back, in many ways the second of them, Klaus Heinrich Thomas Mann, seems most obviously a chip off the old block, the price for which is spelled out in frequently chilling detail in Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann (Yale). Frederic Spotts' absorbing new biography leaves little doubt that, although he was not the only other novelist in the family, Klaus was, of the six children, the true writer, a tortured soul of the tragic-Romantic archetype who, when not completely incapacitated by drugs or depression, wrote not only well but compulsively, with focus and speed.
Gay from the get-go, the kind of homosexual who had no need of coming out given the obviousness of his nature, he openly bore the stigma that kept his vastly more famous father in the closet for the whole of his life. At least since Death in Venice, of 1911, there were indications enough that the elder Mann was himself homosexual, and reading Spotts' unsparing biography, you don't have to be a diviner to see that the taint of gayness lay at least near the heart of the endlessly conflicted relationship between father and son. "If he was lucky," Spotts writes, "Klaus, like one of the family dogs, might occasionally get a pat on the head by his master but was regarded as an ill-disciplined nuisance. He could shake his fist in Hitler's face but not in his father's."
As is the case with not a few great artists, an unmistakable childishness colors much of Klaus' behavior throughout his short, tragic life, and despite his breathtaking industry in a range of creative disciplines, he never achieved that critical financial independence from his parents. The most absorbing chapter of Spotts' book, where all the madnesses of Klaus' life and times intersect, is the one about his improbable �" preposterous, really �" two-year, almost accidentally successful career as a soldier in the U.S. Army in the climactic years of World War II.
It was that for which Klaus received Thomas' unstinting admiration. For most readers, the most impressive thing about the son will be his clear-eyed, courageous opposition to the horror of Germany's turn toward fascism, decades before his father's, which for harrowing periods of his life left him stateless and completely vulnerable while his father's family was safely ensconced in Santa Monica.
There was a similar courage in his work for gay equality, and a similar childishness in his sexual and romantic relations, about which Spotts is forthcoming, candid and notably unsensational. Klaus' most fervent loves seldom lasted more than 18 months, though the single most disastrous of them dogged him his entire adult life. The late-night anonymous sex, the tricks and the inevitable bouts of syphilis are reported candidly but with notable compassion.
Like many of his gay literary contemporaries and peers, his fondest relationships were with men of the lower classes; it was his seemingly more equal relationships with those peers that were fraught. He was a visitor to the famous Brooklyn house where Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and, in Isherwood's words, "their kind" were boarders, but he kept his distance. Attempted friendships with Auden and Isherwood ended, at best, in a draw, and despite having written an admiring and admired tract on his near idol, Andre Gide, the Frenchman held Klaus at a distance when not outright condemning him.
What is never in question is his commitment to culture and his tireless participation in it. "His point was that culture was not a pretty ornament decorating life but an essential part of a nation's substance," Spotts writes. The author of, among other works, Bayreuth, an indispensible history of the Wagner festival, Spotts is an ideal elucidator of the web of Klaus' vast cultural network, and the array of his friends, associates and subjects is astonishing. Klaus interviewed Germans who lasted out the war in their homeland, including Richard Strauss and Winifred Wagner, both of whom had prospered in the Third Reich and were, at most, innocent of regret.
One of Klaus' most hard-won realizations was that most Germans under the Nazis were anything but political about it, and that the Americans he fought alongside were not fighting fascism so much as doing their unusually odd jobs. Klaus took himself out of Germany, but there was no taking the Germany out of the boy. Present-day Germany's ongoing struggle to redeem its fascist past has brought new attention to the Mann clan, and this new biography adds to the earlier record while ironically making Klaus Mann's own seminal point: that the problem of the modern world is, at root, nationalism. Spotts is clear-eyed about Klaus' writing and treats all of it with respect and appreciation for its fluency, craft and even soul. Still, on his claims it's difficult to imagine Klaus' literary stock gaining much on the current regard for his most enduring work, the novel Mephisto.
Copious amounts of the heaviest drugs available did not serve his art. Controversially, Spotts posits that Klaus' death, in Cannes, of an overdose, was not, intentionally, suicide. Like his emotionally ungrounded British-American-Canadian counterpart Malcolm Lowry (my analogy, not Spotts'), Klaus may not have meant to kill himself the night one inadvertent dose too many led to death by misadventure.