Bad Tölz, Bavaria, 1909

Abstract

Bad Tölz, Bavaria, 1909 Richard Howard (bio) The demonic should always be addressed poetically; to confront it by critical essays strikes me as indiscreet. —Thomas Mann "The one impression I received, not just from moment to moment and from place to place (weren't there too many rooms on each floor?) but even after leaving my distinguished host —especially then— was of someone uncommonly well-groomed whose elegance was not so much personal as an attribute of class he had long since assimilated. Easy to forget the great man is my own age, even a year younger. How could Thomas Mann not be my senior? Everything about him seemed so settled: for instance, how resolutely (not permitting a single muscle to yield to a less decisive expression), perhaps even how reverently he had explained 'this is where I work,' closing behind us the oak door to what was no doubt his study where we would spend a proper hour together once he had shown me over the entire house, even the Boys' Room: 'Of course they don't live at home now, but we haven't found a better name for it . . .' No one else seemed to be at home [End Page 273] either, especially my host, who expressed amazement at each deep oriental, each dark oil-painting. His house, like Mann himself, seemed to have achieved perfection already, and no further developments were to be anticipated. The only thing, though . . ." —And here von Hofmannsthal broke off, looking down at his fingernails (his constant gesture of embarrassment ever since he had given in his early teens those public readings of his all-too-private necromantic poems)— ". . . was that in a little side-room Doktor Mann had overlooked, there happened to be lying on the clean matting, right there, a dead cat." Richard Howard Richard Howard is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry and four volumes of criticism. His third book, Untitled Subjects, won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1970. He teaches in Columbia University's School of the Arts. Copyright © 2008 Johns Hopkins University Press and its Authors