Mann thomas

1930 · 25258 — New York: Brewer & Warren Inc. Very Good in Good dj. 1930. First American Edition. Hardcover. the book itself is only mildly shelfworn; the jacket presents well at the front panel and spine with just a few nicks along the top and bottom edges and some wrinkling/creasing in the lower right area of the front panel but the rear panel is unfortunately blemished by about a dozen small holes no doubt the legacy of some long-dead insect. The third novel by the eldest son of Thomas Mann and the second of his books to be published in America preceded by "The 5th Child" a translation of "Kindernovelle" published in the U.S. in 1927 was a kind of historical fantasy-cum-personal confession centered around Alexander the Great. For Mann a fairly openly gay writer or about as much so as one could be in those days the central tragedy in Alexander's life and the driving force behind his ambition to conquer the world and bring about the "Utopia" referred to in the book's subtitle was his sublimated homosexuality especially as manifested in his obsessive yet rejected love for an officer in his army named Clitus. Generally referred to by modern historians as Cleitus aka "Cleitus the Black" he is known to have saved his commander's life at the Battle of the Granicus in 334 BC only to be killed later by Alexander in what may have been a drunken quarrel but also seems to have been rooted in an intergenerational power struggle; in Mann's telling the killing was an act of impulsive passion provoked by Clitus's public dissing of Alexander at a banquet in his honor. Klaus Mann was nothing if not precocious: he began writing and publishing short stories in 1924 and produced his first novel an overtly gay-themed book called "Der fromme Tanz" "The Pious Dance" in 1925; he was just 23 years old give or take when "Alexander" was first published in Germany in 1929. Unfortunately he spent his creative life under the shadow of his father who received the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year and remained a towering figure on the literary scene throughout Klaus's life. Often struggling with drug addiction Klaus was known to have expressed a kind of death wish especially in the years immediately leading up to his death by suicide probably in 1949; even at this early stage of his literary career this is manifested here in a scene in which Alexander overcome by remorse after his killing of Clitus begs Hephaestion another of his generals and historically known as his friend advisor and possible lover to kill him with his own sword. Contemporary American reviewers of the novel rather danced around the homoerotic content one calling it "a tragedy of the emotions rather than of the senses" whatever that means another reviewing it under the headline "Alexander a la Freud" and noting that the great hero "might have had a mild 'mother fixation'" and still another remarking on his supposed "misogyny" as accounting for the fact that he "fled from the bridal couch of Roxana the Amazonian queen and other attractive wives." Only recently has much scholarly attention been paid to the homosexual aspects of Mann's Weimar-era fiction . Brewer & Warren Inc. hardcover books