Death In Venice (5*)

Where to begin?  Why am I critiquing this short story when I read one a week in The New Yorker without comment?  Well, as good as the New Yorker stories can be--Annie Proulx published "Brokeback Mountain" there in 1997--I can't think of many in this league.  Thomas Mann's novella requires an intensity of focus and a tolerance for philosophical discussion about beauty that the i-Phone generation lacks IMHO.  

And why now?  Because reading The Magician by Colm Tóibín rekindled my interest.  I found a decaying paperback from college with my initial underlinings which suggest I must have written a paper on the story's mythological allusions instead of what titillated me the most in the early 70s, at  the very beginning of the gay rights movement: the homosexual subtext.  Although I didn't particularly identify with Tadzio--just a few years younger than me at the time--I dismissed Gustave von Aschenbach as a dirty old man who should have left Venice the first time.  Now I know how callow I once was after reading the novel from the older man's perspective and empathizing with his reasons for staying, particularly after surviving the AIDS crisis which Death In Venice almost eerily seems to foreshadow!

Here's a picture worth a thousand words.  Björn Andrésen, the actor who played Tadzio in Luchino Visconti's lumbering (and unfaithful) film adaptation.  If this is what 66 years--that's how much time elapsed between the two photos--does to your face, imagine how it changes your mind!

And yes, a literature professor probably would accuse me of failing to analyze Mann's themes ("For in almost every artist nature is inborn a wanton and treacherous proneness to side with the beauty that breaks hearts, to single out aristocratic pretensions, and pay them homage.") but hey, I'm still pretty much a lightweight who believes that if he had been permitted to act on his desires, he might not have had the inclination or time to write such a subversive story, or produce a novel like The Magic Mountain, surely the most difficult book I've ever climbed.  Sublimation almost seems like a prerequisite for great art, although Mann has the final word on that, too:

Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering in it a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable – it is sympathy.

Death In Venice is an old man's tale written by an artist who was barely old enough to imagine his future, let alone ours.  Bravo!