This may seem a strange lead-in for this week's Bitch Of The Week column, but hear me out.
I have no issues with Thomas Mann or son Klaus, but Klaus' biographer, Frederic Spotts, got my ire up, when my beloved, who is reading this, read a passage to me.
The passage was on page 192, or 193. Apparently, Klaus had written some "Memoirs," and it was expected to be the Publishing Event Of The Year. Except that someone beat him to it--Franz Werfel, with his masterwork, "The Song Of Bernadette."
Spotts has the NERVE to call this book "vomitous." This is what get him named this week's winner of the Raving Queen Bitch Of The Week Award. What is really vomitous is Spott's morbid personality, which causes him to write about all things depressive--the Manns, Hitler, the Holocaust. He and Joan Didion would make a great pair!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Frederic Spotts, you should be forced to read Werfel's book, and then see the 1943 20th Century-Fox screen masterpiece of it, with Jennifer Jones, in her stunning Academy Award Winning Performance!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When it comes to Freds, I prefer Fredericks Of Hollywood, darlings!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm with you on this one, RQ. The Manns were one tedious succession of depressing closet queens: talented, yes, but Klaus' memoirs being more significant in 1941 than "The Song Of Bernadette"? Puh-leeze: Spotts is utterly delusional if he believes that. It was 1941, for pity's sake: what planet did Spotts think we were living on? Even if the publishing world was secretly run by a cabal of discreet queens, does anyone seriously believe they would be promoting the memoirs of a bitter state-less queer haunted by his own father's sexual predation of him? Or that those memoirs would eclipse the dramatic Lourdes saga in the public imagination of the era?
ReplyDeleteCome on. Its 2016, and even I still have no interest in Klaus' memoirs (does anyone, really?) Give it a rest, Miss Spotts: go back to drowning your sorrows in "Mephisto".
ReplyDeleteI read "Death In Venice" by Thomas Mann, and thought the Dirk Bogarde film did it better.
While l love family sagas, I have never read "Buddenbrooks" I have always intended to, but it may not be my desitny. As Lotte Lenya says in "Cabaret", "With time rushing by, what would you do?"