Venive and Thomas Mann A 90th year Appreciation

As a young man I read Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice and later watched the Luchino Visconti screen adaptation. Both the novella and the movie affected me considerably. The story is about an accomplished middle-aged writer named Gustave von Aschenbach who travels to Venice in 1911 as a respite from his work. He stays at the Hotel Des Bains, on the Lido, a strip of island across the Venetian lagoon.

It is on his first night in this hotel that he notices a young Polish lad, named Tadzio, in the company of his sisters and nanny. He is entranced by Tadzio’s beauty, is smitten with love and, for the following weeks, is increasingly obsessed with observing the lad from a distance while philosophically brooding about beauty, desiring it and being extinguished by it.

Tadzio discreetly returns Aschenbach’s gazes and communicates, in very subtle ways, his pleasure at being admired, inducing Aschenbach to further continue his pursuit.

As a student, Aschenbach’s ruminations weren’t important to me. I had identified with Tadzio, having been aware that my own youthful looks, with their ephemeral charm, was desired by older gentlemen. The novella, critically acclaimed in 1912, reprinted numerous times and translated into many languages, was daring for its period in recognizing adolescent sexuality.

It is 30 years later and I am on the Number One Vaporetto, a public ferry, on a summer Sunday morning, leaving Venice and headed for the Lido. I am going to the Hotel Des Bains to retrace Aschenbach’s steps. There are many passengers on the ferry, in beach wear with picnic baskets in hand. I hear the dulcet sound of my Ilonggo dialect and look around to see three small Filipinas in their jeans, reading letters from home and laughing on their day off.

The lagoon breeze is cool and strongest midway to the Lido. Several paces from me, clutching a railing, is a young man, in shorts, a t-shirt and a knapsack with a towel sticking out of it. He has Etruscan features–the curved full lips, the gentle but piercing eyes. He looks divine as the sun shines on his nubile body. I look at him intensely, hoping to catch his eye, but the vistas outside are more appealing than me. I chuckle to myself. I arrive in Venice, not the youthful Tadzio, but the older Aschenbach. And I am now pleasantly punished to gaze at the fleeting beauty of younger men. Aschenbach’s fascination 90 years ago is now my own.

The Hotel Des Bains is an imposing, somewhat stuffy building looking out of place by the beach. It does not have the fanciful, art nouveau or Moorish features of the nearby Hotel Excelsior. I find the salon where Aschenbach first lays his eyes on Tadzio, noticing the lad–"entirely beautiful, gracefully reserved, enchanting mouth–Greek sculpture of the noblest period." I wander down a sunlit hallway, entering the sumptuous main dining room where Tadzio, his mother, three sisters and the governess sat for breakfasts and dinners. At a discreet distance, Aschenbach would sit at a solitary table, in viewing distance of his beloved.

I walk the full length of the front patio recalling the chapter when, one night, a group of bawdy minstrels came after dinner to entertain the lounging guests seated on the porch. Throughout the merriment and the laughter, Tadzio and Aschenbach gazed longingly at each other, unmindful of the din, dispensing all caution to the wind.

Leaving the hotel I cross an avenue to reach the beach flanked by a straight row of cabañas and folding chairs of striped cloth, all neatly laid out. Visconti’s film comes to mind as Aschenbach, each morning, takes a cabaña near the Polish family’s. For several hours, he beholds Tadzio in a swimsuit, playing with his friends, running to the ocean to swim or "lay wet in the sand resting from his bathe, wrapped in his white bathing robe". And even when Aschenbach was not watching him but reading a few pages in his book, he "almost never forgot that the boy was lying there, and that he need only turn his head slightly to the right to have the admired vision again in view."

Aschenbach, troubled by his newfound desire, mirrored Thomas Mann’s own inner turmoil. In personal letters and diaries available recently to the public, the 1929 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature (The Magic Mountain) reveals his homosexuality inspite of having married and fathered six children. It was on a vacation trip in 1911 to Lido with his wife Katia and brother Heinrich that he encountered a young Polish boy, Wladyslaw Baron Moes, in the company of his mother and three sisters. Katia Mann later confirmed in her memoirs that Mann was "fascinated" with the young Moes.

Mann portrayed Aschenbach as the ponderous Teutonic aesthete moralist who believed Beauty in the arts must contain a discipline and a dignity in order for it to thrive and be recognized as beautiful. Any intrusion of Beauty with Passion was degenerate and signaled Beauty’s demise. Homosexual emotion, deemed a passion by Aschenbach, was described, in his last interior monologue in chapter five, as a "horrifying criminal emotion".

Aschenbach grappling with his feelings is beset with fever and exhaustion. Blaming the stagnant sultry air and sirocco, he impulsively decides to leave and immediately has his trunk packed and sent ahead to the train station in Venice. After a morning breakfast, a departing Aschenbach crosses paths with Tadzio.

"Meeting this gray-haired gentleman with the lofty brow, he (Tadzio) modestly lowered his eyes, only to raise them again at once in his enchanting way, in a soft and full glance; and then he passed. Good-bye Tadzio! thought Aschenbach. How short our meeting was. And he added, actually shaping the thought with his lips and uttering it aloud to himself, as he normally never did: ‘May God bless you!’"

I board a vaporetto returning to Venice to follow Aschenbach’s route to the train station. Mann achieves the dramatic melancholy needed to portray Aschenbach’s departure on a "voyage of sorrow, a grievous passage that plumbed all the depths of regret".

Our vaporetto enters the Grand Canal, the plaza of San Marco on the right "revealing itself once more in its princely elegance", the stately sinking palazzos, the "splendid marble arch of the Rialto appearing as the waterway turned". The bobbing gondolas, the little arched bridges on the side canals, the restorative sea breeze and fellow passengers muted by the visual intensity before us exhilarates me tremendously, delirious at the thought of being in Mann’s inspiring city. As for Aschenbach, "The traveler contemplated it all, and his heart was rent with sorrow. The atmosphere of the city, this slightly moldy smell of sea and swamp from which he had been so anxious to escape–he breathed it in now in deep, tenderly painful drafts."

Reaching the train station Aschenbach is told that his luggage had been sent ahead, inadvertently, and to a wrong destination. The Visconti film version of this incident has Dirk Bogarde, as Aschenbach, acting this scene at his theatrical best. Bogarde mercilessly scolds the errant train station official while, in a guarded moment, divulges through his face, the almost uncontainable feeling of relief and excitement at the thought of returning to the hotel.

Back in his hotel room, he sits by a window and he catches sight of Tadzio returning from the beach. At that moment "he is stricken dumb by the truth in his heart and he felt the rapturous kindling of his blood, the joy and the anguish of his soul, and realized that it was because of Tadzio that it had been so hard for him to leave."

Venice is a compact walking city and I spend the next few days trudging everywhere, sometimes aimlessly, sometimes lost and, in a few purposeful instances, to reach a recommended museum, a church, a square, a fabled street. I had arrived a week after the Genoa Conference of 8 Ministers meeting which resulted in major rallies and the death of one demonstrator.

As a result, there were, unfortunately, graffiti scrawled on many walls near the university denouncing the government as assassins and fascists. I am sympathetic to their anger but repelled by the vandalism to centuries old buildings and walls.

It is the height of summer and trying to savor the essential Venice I avoid the tourist traps and instead walk the alleyways and small bridges of my Dorsoduro neighborhood and the nearby mazes of Santa Croce and San Polo.

On many afternoons, it was the Polish family’s ritual to cross the lagoon and proceed on a walking tour of Venice. Our infatuated gentleman followed them, furtively, from a safe distance; at times hiding behind food vendor stalls, fountains and dark corners. The young beloved dutifully accompanied his sisters, but at intervals, strayed behind to look back and be assured his pursuer was in sight. When the family boarded a gondola, the gentleman waited until they were almost out of view so he could board his own and follow them.

As I walked dreamily in alleys suffused with romantic memories, mesmerized by the lapping waters on stone and gondolas and the occasional returning glance of a handsome Venetian, I realized how the city’s charm only intensified our gentleman’s ardor. "Venice," our story’s narrator would describe as "the flattering and suspect beauty in this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism."

In ceaseless pursuit and feelings intensified, Aschenbach dismisses his life-long credo that art and beauty must not be sullied with passion. He dreams one night of a frenzied pagan ritual with sensual flute music, half naked figures, phallic objects and sexual coupling with Tadzio’s name called out repeatedly and Aschenbach succumbing to the debauchery. He begins to conduct imaginary conversations with his beloved’s shadow. One night, he finds himself lingering in front of Tadzio’s bedroom door, ecstatic and immobilized, indifferent to being discovered.

This inarticulate obsession is defined one night when Aschenbach meets Tadzio, unexpectedly, on the front terrace of the hotel. The surprise encounter gives no time for either one to exercise the civility of passing glances. Instead, Aschenbach exhibits an unrestrained joy in seeing his beloved. And in turn, Tadzio smiles back, "speakingly, familiarly, enchantingly and quite unabashed with his lips parting slowly as the smile was formed–a smile that was provocative, curious and imperceptibly troubled, bewitched and bewitching."

Shaken by this most visible sign of affection, Aschenbach flees to the hotel’s rear garden and in the darkness reproaches his loved one: "‘You mustn’t smile like that! One mustn’t, do you hear, mustn’t smile like that at anyone.’ Sinking in a chair, he trembles and shudders, whispering what he has profoundly understood in his heart: ‘I love you.’"

The times and mores militate against this love affair. Aschenbach is painfully conscious of his age and sets out to make himself look younger by having his hair dyed, his face plucked, painted and powdered. The film version exacerbates Aschenbach’s trans-formation by showing him, in front of the barber’s mirror, resembling a buffoon.

Adding to the tragedy, our transformed suitor is struck with cholera, and to signal the novella’s conclusion, Aschenbach sees one morning the trunks of the departing Polish family by the hotel’s front desk. Sickly, he wanders to the beach and slumps into a chair to see his Tadzio playing with friends.

Mann chose Gustave as Aschenbach’s first name in tribute to his friend Gustave Mahler who he admired and who had died around the time Mann went to Italy. Visconti chose Mahler’s Adagietto in Symphony Number Five to be the pervasive musical score throughout dramatic points in the film. Its brooding, recurring, decibel-rising cadence eliminated dialogue in many scenes completely and, in the final scene, the music is indispensable.

To succumb to passion, to homosexual emotio, is, to Aschenbach, succumbing to the abyss. The sickly lover is delirious, and a streak of hair dye slowly trickles down his face. He struggles to fasten his look on his beloved standing on a sandbar on the beach. Tadzio slowly turns in his direction and, with one hand, points towards the ocean, "into an immensity rich with unutterable expectation". Aschenbach, attempting to rise from his chair to follow his beloved, collapses and dies.

It is dusk and I board a vaporetto on my last night in Venice. I manage to sit on a chair at the front of the boat and I rest my arms on the railing. I lay my chin on top of my arms and as the boat wanders from quayside to quayside I feel the cool sea breeze on my face. The boat chugs past a seemingly endless array of flamboyant Gothic villas, Early Renaissance churches and baroque facades all demanding one’s awe and reverence. We pass several palazzos, their facade sheathed in plastic or criss-crossed with scaffolding. Some are slightly tilted, others have crumbling masonry.

But work is being done to prop them up, to restore them, to bring them back to their magnificent state despite the immense expense each one of these buildings require. Since Mann’s fateful visit 90 years ago, the city has sunk over 20 centimeters and there are valiant efforts to save a city precariously borne on pinewood piles driven into the mud many centuries ago.

Manila was once called the "Venice of the East." Our esteros– and they were numerous–were our canals and the Pasig River was our Grand Canal. Our cascos, pushed forward by swarthy men with long poles, were our gondolas.

We had villas, churches, stately buildings–not as old as those of Venice, but were as stately and grand. In the late afternoon, when the church bells lustily pealed throughout Venice, first in unison, then in discordance, I pause from my stroll and I am transported back to my Manila childhood.

The vaporetto leaves the Grand Canal and I see a full moon appear just above San Giorgio Maggiore, the 16th century church by Palladio across the lagoon from San Marco’s. Its sheathed facade indicates the building is undergoing major restoration. After Mann wrote this love story, Europe plummeted into the Great War. Twenty years later, the continent embarked on yet another war, this time with greater physical ferocity. Whole cities would be pulverized, senselessly destroying innocent lives, artworks and artifacts representing millennia of cultural endeavor. Mann and his family fled Germany to settle in the United States, there to be an ardent antifascist and welcoming of a new breed of writers like Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams whose writings on homosexual love were far more unabashed than his circumscribed works.

In this moonlit night, in a swaying vaporetto, tears welled and flowed down my cheeks. This romantic city survived modern barbarism and continues to repair and restore itself despite the costs and the odds. A pristine and proud villa unperturbed by the lapping waters on its front door is equally inspiring as a slightly bent palazzo shrouded in plastic surrounded by construction workers lovingly mending it. Where does the Venetian obsession to love and save their city come from? Can I bottle their fervor and bring it back to my dying Venice of the East?

Blissful tears are mixed in with the sorrow. How fortunate to have seen Venice, unchanged, unceasingly sensual, a city that inspired Mann and many other literary masters and composers. And in rereading Death In Venice, I shed the crusty old cynical armor to revel once more in the initial and mysterious stirring of human attraction, its coquetry and social etiquette, its deepening ecstasy and, finally, its boundless and passionate longing.

Death In Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann, translated by David Luke and published by Bantam Classics, is available in paperback at National Bookstore.