Buddenbrooks, a masterwork of business and real life. A novel to love and live with.

notes on reading Mann from Austin

I got ill—the sort of ill where you sleep for three hours in the afternoon—so I read Buddenbrooks. In the time when I was awake enough, I sat in the sun and read a few hundred pages a day. Actually, I am still reading it. But having flown to Austin to talk about literary quests (come along if you happen to be local), I have spent my time meeting interesting people locally. Sometimes you want to talk about books, not just get cooped up reading them, and I’ve been tripping around Austin enjoying myself very much. And on the plane, I read Erwin Dekker’s Viennese Students of Civilization, a very stimulating book which I shall write more about later. So the ending of Buddenbrooks is left waiting.

But I do not want it to end. So far I have taken it in in great slices, eating it up like the family at Sunday lunch with their ham and cheese and butter. It is a splendid novel of fabrics and foods and the material pleasures of bourgeois life. This is a fine picture of the way things were, like one of those paintings by Vuillard where you feel you could step into the room and enjoy the comfortable chair by the fire and join the conversation. It is quite astonishing to think that old Mrs. Buddenbrooks was the creation of such a young man. He sees it all: the dressing gowns, the boiled eggs held in napkins, the way old Johann’s hair changes as he ages into worry, and he makes symbols out of the ordinary beauties of life, like pretty young Tony’s increasingly ash-blonde hair. That word ash comes back to haunt the reader, a subtle, subversive refrain.

Yes, Buddenbrooks is a book that stays with you. I wake up from my naps and I think about Antonine and the tragic superciliousness of youth. (And I think about Strawson’s Basic Argument, as I do so often when I read a book like this.) I lie in bed and pull a worried disapproving face as the poor girl walks unknowingly into the rest of her life. On the decking, warming up in the splendid spring sunshine, I gasped twice as Mann delivered dramatic news with a ruthless elegance and efficiency. I wish for more of the Christmas singing in the landscape room, more of the foods, the four-poster beds, the lamps being lit as the master sets off in his carriage. And the terrible pain when Thomas’s son adjusts the family record in the Bible. It is sharp to remember it even now.

There is no reading only one chapter of Buddenbrooks. There is no pausing for meals. I feel like I am seventeen, reading The Way We Live Now on a sun lounger, or carting Anna Karenina around on the bus. Only now I know a lot more about life (as Tony would say, O poor poor Tony, if only she could hear herself!) and I see it all rather differently. In his account of Hayek’s ideas of civilization, Erwin Dekker gives a picture of him as a rather conservative thinker, who believes in submitting to the norms, customs, and traditions of society. No experiments in living for him, not without the discipline of the market and the inherited virtues. This is precisely the decline documented by Mann, as the Buddenbrooks family slowly lose their grip on the disciplines that made them great. It is all done with so deft, so light, so precise a touch you wake up from the book after many chapters and wonder where it all went wrong.

There is so much I wish to say, and so much I cannot tell you without spoiling the book. Oh the great scene at Christmas, with the English plum cake, and the almond pudding, and the sack of presents for the little boy! Oh the grandparents’ house at the other end of town! And oh! oh! how well Mann understands business without being in a rush to condemn it! You remember what Henry James said in The Art of Fiction: “Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not.” Buddenbrooks is immense with the odours of life, full of the fragrance of a whole civilization. It is a novel to love and live with, a novel to dwell and pause with.

So many novelists would get the business side of Buddenbrooks flatly wrong. It is not the natural arena of sympathy for fiction writers to go into the counting house, to see the master of a great firm pacing, sighing in his chair, scratching his pen in the ledger, and to really see him, but Mann understands. He has, in fact, quite a Hayekian sympathy with the position the businessman holds.

“A businessman cannot be a bureaucrat,” he told his former schoolchum Stephen Kistenmaker—of Kistenmaker & Sons—who was still Tom’s friend, though hardly his match intellectually, and listened to his every word in order to pass it on as his own opinion. “It takes personality, and that’s my specialty. I don’t think great things can ever be accomplished from behind a desk—at least none that would give me any pleasure. Calculations from behind a desk don’t lead to success. I need to see how things are going with my own eyes, direct them with a gesture, a spoken word, to control them on the spot by dint of my own will, my talent, my luck or whatever you want to call it. Sad to say, that kind of personal involvement by the businessman is going out of fashion. Time marches on, but she leaves the best behind, it seems to me. Markets are easier and easier to open up, we get our price quotes faster and faster. The risks grow less and less—and so do the profits. Yes, it was different in the old days. My grandfather, for instance, a fine old gentleman in a powdered wig and pumps, rode in a coach-and-four to southern Germany as a contractor for the Prussian army. And he turned his charm on everyone, put all his arts to work, and made an incredible profit, Kistenmaker. Ah, I almost fear that as time goes on the businessman’s life will become more and more banal.”

Those were his sentiments, and for just that reason he loved the kind of business that sometimes came his way when he was out for a walk with his family, for instance, and he would drop by a mill for a casual chat with the miller, who felt quite honored by the visit…

Mann fully grasps the importance of local details. There are not just a means of preserving and portraying a slice of middle-class German life, nor are they mere moral markers for the decline and fall of his characters. Every little detail is an emergent piece of information about people’s preferences and choices—and the consequences of their choices. In every little detail about dressing-gowns and fine wines, Mann shows us how “personal involvement” creates the every-emerging world. This passage is Mann pointing the reader towards a way of reading his novel. In the choices we make, we pull upon the strings of the web of society and commerce, and each little tug becomes information discovered, prices adjusted, fortunes rising, falling, fluctuating. There is no separation of work and life, economy and home, in Buddenbrooks. Mann sees that we are all part of the emergent order of society. We all act, and in our actions civilization is, in some small manner, partially determined.

Teach this book in business schools! Recite this passage to every cynical teenager who knows nothing of the personal involvement of the businessman, nor of the local knowledge all entrepreneurial work requires! Pass out copies at Christmas when you see your relatives who spend their sunless days toiling in law firms and consultancies!

Mann keeps all the minor details of life in full view. When Tony overhears her husband arguing with his creditors, she is wandering about the pensee room with her “little brass sprinkling can, watering the black earth of various plants. She loved her palm trees very much, they added a splendid elegance to the house.” When Thomas becomes head of the firm,

… there was a dignity in his face and in his carriage. But he was pale, and his hands in particular were as white as the cuffs visible at the end of his black sleeves, almost frosty white; and his carefully manicured oval fingernails had the bluish tone they sometimes took on when his hands were cold and dry. On one finger could be seen the bright green gemstone of the large signet ring he had now inherited. Sometimes he would unconsciously cramp his hands a little, and at that moment they expressed something indescribable—a dismissive sensibility, an almost anxious reticence, that was somehow ill-suited to him and quite untypical of the effect broad, solid, Buddenbrook hands had always made, even given their long delicate fingers.

If that isn’t enough to send you to the book yourself, there is nothing else I can say, and in any event, I have to go and read some more. Tony’s getting older, Thomas is still possessed by anxious reticence, and the next generation is coming into view, no less to be worried for. Anyway, enough, Buddenbrooks is calling to me.