Life and works

Abstract

That Buddenbrooks is in many respects an autobiographical novel is irrelevant to the reading pleasure it affords. Thomas Buddenbrook is presented in so rounded and human a manner that, even if we did not know Mann's explanation that the figure is both a portrait of his father and a self-portrait, we could not mistake the special position which he occupies in the novel. The vitality and infectious exuberance of Tony Buddenbrook does not increase when we see the figure of Thomas Mann's aunt Elisabeth Haag-Mann as her model, nor is Hanno's viewpoint on the world more compelling for our knowledge that in so many respects it reproduces Mann's own childhood experiences. It requires in any case no profound scholarship to see the limitations to autobiography, since manifestly Thomas Mann did not die of typhus at the age of sixteen. The richness is in the novel, not in a biography behind the novel. All the same, a writer's biography, in the broadest sense, is never irrelevant to an understanding of the literary work. The process by which experience is transformed into fiction shows the particular configuration of a writer's literary imagination, and if we see the writer's life as an expression of concrete historical possibilities and limitations in a given age his work takes on a further dimension as a creative exploration and redefining of those possibilities. Even so, some writers' biography will remain in the background, under stones which only literary historians will turn over, whereas for other writers, such as Thomas Mann, their own life has a foreground position; they find within themselves and the biography chance has decreed for them the material for a lifetime's work.