When Susan met Tommy (with Merrill - or Harry?)

It was when I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts, 'Past Present Future', presented by David Runcimann, that I first heard that Susan Sontag had met Thomas Mann. What? Runcimann was discussing Sontag's essay 'Against Interpretation' (1963) in the eight episode (1 January 2024) of a twelve-part series about great essays that featured fascinating exposés of essays by Montaigne, Simone Weil, James Baldwin and many others.

As after the Baldwin programme, I immediately went out and bought the book. In the short essay, Sontag argues that 'the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities' and that 'interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality'.

Anyway, quite close to the start of the essay, Sontag writes: 'Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself—albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony—the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.'

'The Magic Mountain' could indeed be considered 'overcooperative' in some of the characters' ventriloquism of ideas, even in the narratorial irony that guides us to question those ideas or at least Hans Castorp's attitude towards them.

Sontag gave an account of meeting Thomas in an article entitled 'Pilgrimage' published in The New Yorker on 14 December 1947. You can read it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/12/21/pilgrimage-susan-sontag

Bookish since an early age yet trapped in an insipid household at a time of burgeoning mass culture, Sontag set off in ferocious pursuit of serious art: 'I accumulated gods. What Stravinsky was for music Thomas Mann became for literature. At my Aladdin’s cave, at the Pickwick, on November 11, 1947—taking the book down from the shelf just now, I find the date written on the flyleaf in the italic script I was then practicing—I bought “The Magic Mountain.”'

She immerses herself in the book and shares her rapture with her friend, Merrill, who then suggests that they actually go and discuss the novel with the author; after all, the author lives close by in California. Merrill rings up, a date for tea is set on 28 December 1949, they drive there and are ushered into Thomas Mann's study by Katia Mann.

'He was wearing a bow tie and a beige suit, as in the frontispiece of “Essays of Three Decades”—and that was the first shock, that he so resembled the formally posed photograph. The resemblance seemed uncanny, a marvel. It wasn’t, I think now, just because this was the first time I’d met someone whose appearance I had already formed a strong idea of through photographs. I’d never met anyone who didn’t affect being relaxed ... He talked without prompting. I remember his gravity, his accent, the slowness of his speech: I had never heard anyone speak so slowly.'

So what did Sontag make of her meeting with Mann? She says in the very first sentence that everything about it bore the 'color of shame':

'Here I was in the very throne room of the world in which I aspired to live, even as the humblest citizen. (The thought of saying that I wanted to be a writer would no more have occurred to me than to tell him I breathed. I was there, if I had to be there, as admirer, not as aspirant to his caste.) The man I met had only sententious formulas to deliver, though he was the man who wrote Thomas Mann’s books. And I uttered nothing but tongue-tied simplicities, though I was full of complex feeling. We neither of us were at our best. ... Years later, when I had become a writer, when I knew many other writers, I would learn to be more tolerant of the gap between the person and the work. Yet even now the encounter still feels illicit, improper. In my experience deep memory is, more often than not, the memory of embarrassment.'

A more recent article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by Kai Sina (12 August 2016) – https://shorturl.at/Xmlrf - points to an earlier unpublished story by Sontag called 'At Thomas Mann's', probably written soon after that 1949 teatime, that confusingly suggests that she went to meet Mann with a friend called Harry, a fellow student at the University of Chicago. No mention of Merrill here.

It's fascinating to see the change in Sontag's perspective in these two different accounts of the same event written almost 40 years apart.

In the first she gives a detailed description of what Mann is wearing, mentions that there was a dog in the room, and notes that she advanced a new interpretation of the Zauberberg, which Mann listened to in silence. It's a highly perfomative piece: she suggests that Harry was not so struck by the novel, and that her high-school 'project' was to make an intellectual of him.

In the 1987 article, on the other hand, she merely notes that he is identical to his portrait and that she is too intimidated to say anything. It is reflective, looking back from the safe distance of the future to register her shame but also her ambition. Her interest in the power of photography, and how it shapes our memories, shines through.

As for Mann, his diary notes that he had a meeting that day with "three students from Chicago" and further: "Lots of mail, books, manuscripts."

By way of a coda, for anyone who hasn't yet come across the spectacular academic and critic, Terry Castle: the "Desperately Seeking Susan" piece (the film-title references just keep coming, don't they?) in her wonderful collection "The Professor and Other Writings" (Tuskar Rock, 2011) is a great read.