The Magician by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on September 7, 2021

The line between fiction and nonfiction becomes fuzzy when writers make characters out of real people. In some novels, such as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the character is modeled upon, but does not purport to tell the life of, a real person. Mann based his novel on the composer Arnold Schoenberg but gave the character a different name and attributed his musical creativity to a pact with the devil.

Colm Tóibín writes about Doctor Faustus and Schoenberg’s reaction to that novel in The Magician, Tóibín’s own blend of fiction and biographical fact. Tóibín does not disguise his subject; the story’s protagonist is Thomas Mann and the story hews closely to the details of Mann’s life.

Writers who essentially write a biography in the form of a novel run a couple of risks. First, they are constrained by historical fact, which limits the ability to let imagination take flight, as Mann did when he turned Schoenberg into someone other than Schoenberg. Second, if they choose a subject who is not particularly interesting, the novel is likely to be dull. R.J. Gadney stumbled across the first of those barriers to compelling fiction in Albert Einstein Speaking, turning Einstein’s life into a dry checklist of events without ever bringing Einstein to life. Mann is a literary icon but not an exciting one, creating the risk that a book about his life might be dull. Fortunately, Tóibín recognized and overcame that risk.

Given Mann’s reserved and scholarly nature, it would be difficult to make Mann’s the story of Mann's life lively. Tóibín defeated that problem by surrounding Mann with colorful people (including Mann’s children and their varied marital or sex partners), by giving the reader occasional glimpses of Mann’s attraction to young males, and by focusing on the political issues that played an unwelcome role in Mann’s life. Much of the story’s intrigue derives from Mann’s internal struggle with his early embrace of German nationalism and his later recognition that the nationalism embraced by the Nazi party was antithetical to his belief in freedom, democracy, and humanity. Tóibín suggests that Mann was often caught in the middle, between those (including his children) who criticized him for being insufficiently anti-fascist, and those (including the FBI) who regarded Mann and his children as dangerously liberal in their advocacy of anti-fascism. Mann did eventually speak out against Hitler and did so passionately, but for the most part he just wanted to be left alone so he can read and write.

Tóibín portrays Mann as a person whose nature, shaped by German culture, is circumspect and a bit ponderous, a man who has playful moments but prefers the solitude that allows him to think deeply about the human condition and to reveal his thoughts in novels rather than conversation. Although we learn the background to Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, Tóibín spends little time on the content of Mann’s works, focusing instead on the act of creation, the moments of inspiration, the mulling of artistic choices, and the hours spent committing words to paper.

Mann’s confidence in his art contrasts with (as Tóibín sees it) his insecurity as a public figure. Mann transformed his political thinking after the First World War, viewing German’s defeat as a lesson that the nation needed to internalize. He feared the direction Germany was taking as its population embraced Hitler, and then feared for himself and his family as he moved to other European countries and eventually to America. Yet at what point and to what degree he should speak out against Hitler was a question that troubled him, although not as much as it troubled his brother and children. Mann is Germany’s most celebrated writer during Hitler’s rise, just as Einstein (who makes a brief appearance in the story) is Germany’s most celebrated scientist. Both are men who could speak with intellectual and moral authority. Some in America advised Mann not to advocate for America’s participation in the war, lest he jeopardize his relationship with Roosevelt, while most of his family demanded that he make his opinions known. Tóibín’s depiction of Mann’s internal struggle is one of the novel’s highlights, as are the political machinations of the State Department and FBI in their fevered belief that intellectual freedom and nontraditional sexuality must be suppressed in the name of restraining communism and preserving crabbed American notions of morality. American hospitality turns out to be a fickle thing and Mann winds up in Switzerland after the war is over.

As envisioned by Tóibín, Mann is never quite happy with the person he has become. He “wished he were a different sort of writer, less concerned with the details of the world and more with larger, more eternal questions.” He isn’t certain whether his novels evoked emotion in same way that musical compositions express yearning. His own yearnings were confined to diaries (presumably a primary source that informed Tóibín’s understanding of Mann). For a time, Mann feared that his private writings would fall into the hands of Nazis who would use them to destroy his career. His emotions are so intensely private that they are only expressed in novels. Even his warm regard for his children is never spoken. By the novel’s end, when he decides it would be too painful to attend the funeral of his oldest son, he learns from a letter that the feelings of adulation expressed by the general public are not shared by his surviving children.

Tóibín is a meticulous researcher. I can only assume The Magician is grounded in fact, even if some of those facts are revealed in imagined conversations. Whether or not Tóibín’s interpretation of Mann is accurate, his skill at crafting characters in depth is fully displayed. The bottled-up Mann, who often responds to conflict with silence or a conspiratorial glance at his wife, is presented in credible detail as someone who can’t reconcile his emotional conflicts, who can only give full expression to his feelings by attributing them to characters in his novels. Mann is reticent but comfortable discussing matters of intellect; he is hopeless at discussing matters of the heart or loins. He is capable of revising his opinions — in some ways, he becomes a new person before the war, just as his post-war homeland becomes a new country — but he cannot change his deeply ingrained inability to express himself emotionally. He understands and regrets this flaw, but he seems incapable of addressing it. Instead of trying, he buries himself in his writing, the only task that gives him comfort.

I’ve always preferred the flights of imagination that inspire pure fiction, as opposed to the “based on a true story/actual person” brand of fiction. Writers who want to enhance a biography with fiction are constrained by the factual frame that contains their subject. Tóibín has written some true masterpieces of fiction. The Magician and The Master (a similar novel about Henry James) could be regarded as masterpieces of the subgenre of biographical fiction (or whatever it might be called). For my taste, The Magician doesn’t have the wow factor of Let the Great World Spin, but it is an impressive achievement.

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