Helen Lowe-Porter and Thomas Mann's male preferences

The Times Literary Supplement greeted the publication of "Der Zauberberg" in German with the caustic verdict: "By reason of its length, paucity of action and seriousness of dialogue, [Der Zauberberg] is unlikely to be popular, at least outside Germany."

Thomas Mann himself wrote: "Mit tiefem Mitleid denkt man an den, der sich eventuell der Aufgabe unterzieht, den Zauberberg zu übersetzen." ("One thinks with great sympathy of the person who might possibly subject himself to translating The Magic Mountain.") The "den" in the original, like the "himself" in my translation, are a generic masculine, but in this case they are particularly apt because Thomas Mann never wanted Helen Lowe-Porter, the Pennsylvanian-born, Oxford-based translator of his bestselling first novel, "Buddenbrooks", to work on his "craggy" – as the TLS hailed the publication of the English version in 1927 – masterwork.

The story has been related in various places, not least in Heinz Armbrust's "Frauen und Thomas Mann" (Frankfurt, 2014), David Horton's "Thomas Mann in English: A Study in Literary Translation" (London, 2013) and Kate Briggs's "This Little Art" (London, 2017), but it bears retelling.

Helen Lowe-Porter was the choice of New York publisher, Alfred Knopf, the holder of the world English rights to Thomas Mann's work since 1921. As she had translated Mann's debut novel, he was adamant that she should be his single English voice. However, Mann had received mixed feedback about the quality of her earlier translation and apparently admired the work of an American living in Germany, Herman G. Scheffauer, who had produced what he considered a good translation of his 1919 story "Herr und Hund" ("Bashan and I" in the UK). Scheffauer had also "applied" to translate "Der Zauberberg".

When Thomas Mann was invited to London by PEN in May 1924, he and Katia paid a stiff visit to the Lowe-Porters in Oxford, but the topic of the Zauberberg translation was not tackled. Lowe-Porter wrote several times to Mann that spring without receiving any assurances, and in fact Mann corresponded with Knopf in the first half of 1925 to plead Scheffauer's case.

The most famous letter, though, is one to Lowe-Porter dated 24 April 1925 in which Mann makes the following claim. On account of its subject matter, "[Der Zauberberg] poses challenges that must be better suited to a male constitution"! Lowe-Porter was furious, concerned and determined to prove her mettle, although her handwritten note on the letter (I received a copy of their correspondence from the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale University) suggests that she needed to consider if she really was up to the task.

In any case, Knopf stood squarely behind Lowe-Porter, and she went on to translate all of Thomas Mann's books, with the exceptions of the late novels "The Black Swan" and "Felix Krull".

In a strange and unconnected twist of fate, Scheffauer fell to his death from a window in unexplained circumstances in 1927.

And so began a long and ultimately close relationship between the German author and his American translator. She and her husband returned to the US in 1937 and were in Princeton when the Manns fled there from Europe in 1938. Though he came to consider her indispensable, Mann adopted a somewhat mean-minded modus operandi towards Lowe-Porter's translations: first, he would write to her and praise the translation, sneaking in a few remarks or rectifications, then he would criticise her work to others behind her back. He was, however, vexed when she thought she might not have time to translate the final volume of his Joseph tetralogy, "Joseph the Provider", but was critical of her translation.

When Lowe-Porter was unsure about working on "Doctor Faustus" due to her age, Mann sounded out Agnes Meyer, a well-connected woman in Washington who had used her influence to secure the Princeton position that brought the Manns to the States. But then Lowe-Porter came back on board . . . and Meyer had declined the offer anyway. Mann even paid for half the costs of a secretary to work with Lowe-Porter on "The Holy Sinner".

Mann was of course capable of warm relationships with women: he was married to Katia for 50 years, his daughter Erika Mann became his amanuensis in the States and after the return to Switzerland, and Agnes Meyer was also a constant contact. But his novels, including "The Magic Mountain", reveal what was doubtless true of his social dealings in general, i.e. that his was a homosocial, and at times homoerotic, life and conception of the world.

In his chapter titled "Mann's Man's Life" in "The Cambridge Companion to Mann", ed. Ritchie Robertson (Cambridge 2002), Andrew J. Webber writes: "He is a writer who exhibits a special, acute and ambivalent interest in manhood and rarely puts women and female experience centre stage. [...] When women are indeed focalised, there is often a suspicion that they are acting as foils or substitutes for men." Although Clavdia Chauchat provides Hans Castorp's erotic education, she is a reminder of his schoolboy love, Pribislav Hippe, via the medium of a fetishised pencil.

The German literary critic and biographer Hermann Kurzke noted that "The Magic Mountain" is a novel about male societies of various kinds, and it's true: Hans Castorp's pedagogical relations are with men, Settembrini and Naphta; the medical institution is male, with Behrens as the surgeon and Krokowski as the "soul dissector"; Settembrini is a Freemason, Naphta as Jesuit; even when the young Dane Ellen Brand serves as a medium at their séances, what does she do but create another male society with Holger the spirit and the appearance of Joachim Ziemssen.

Webber suggest that "The Magic Mountain" describes "the collapse of a benevolent homosocial order into the self-destruction of the man's world" in the slaughter of the First World War.

That Thomas Mann sublimated his homosexual tendencies into his art is well documented, and Colm Toibin's recent novel "The Magician" (2021) shows this as a thread running through his life and work. And through his diaries, probably, since he made sure that the volumes between 1921 and 1933 could not fall into the hands of the Nazis by destroying them. One of the roots of Thomas Mann's difficult relationship with his son Klaus was undoubtedly that Klaus lived out his homosexuality.

Dreams and the leitmotiv of the sea are watchwords for these erotic temptations, as Volker Weidermann also highlights in his recent study "Mann vom Meer". It is interesting to note that Thomas Mann called his last novel "Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man" his "homosexual novel" (diary, 25 November 1950) – here the theme of disguise takes centre stage performance is everything, another life is lived.