July 31, 2020

Dear Nikola,

Thank you for your letter. I think of you very often. Perhaps I should share with you the advice which I give to myself each morning and each evening: to be patient. Patience, I think, is an undervalued and often unrecognized virtue. When I was still practicing medicine, I would often try to console my patients by explaining to them that symptoms and diseases not only sometimes get worse, but they often also spontaneously get better.  My mood has been fluctuating. Sometimes sad, but my writing comforts me.  I am often surprised how much satisaction I can derive from my writing, even when there is no objective reason to consider the work-product to be of good quality.

Adrian Leverkühn it turns out, was not in Virginia, but Klemens had taken' the book with him, some months or years ago on a flight to Tennessee, a circumstance which I infer from the fact that between its pages I found a letterhead from the Madison Hotel in Memphis, a piece of paper which is now a bookmark separating pages 28 and 29. I had failed to locate the book on the shelf, because Klemens had enclosed it in a plain brown paper cover, to protect the binding, which is of fabric stamped with Thomas Mann's emblem, a lyre underneath a bow and arrow, with the initial "T" on one side, and "M" on the other.  Hypothetically this exemplar might have value. Not only is it a first edition, I bought it in 1947, but the stamp of the emblem has been accidentally inverted, making it, I believe a genuinely rare book.

I remember the enthusiastic admiration with which I read Dr. Fausrus seventy three years ago, and how offended I was then by the detached indifference with which it was reviewed by one of my teachers, Harry Levin.  Meanwhile I have spent about an hour with a detailed, thoughtful de.wikipedia biography of Mann - The 28 pages of Dr. Faustus that I have just reread impress me with the baroque intricacy of the style, a complexity which must be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible to translate, and which, considered objectively, decorates the novel much like a frame in which a painting is mounted.

The book was written in exile, in the U.S., presumably in California. I noted with interest that it is tinged with English idiom, though not to the extent of the final novel "Der Erwählte" (The Chosen One) whose anglicisms Mann unapologetically justifies (if I remember correctly,) with the assertion, "Über allen Sprachen ist die Sprache." (Above all languages, reigns language.) In Dr. Faustus, I was struck by a reference to Adrians having been "aufgebracht", a literal translation of "brought up", which is far from the colloquial meaning of "aufgebracht", angered, incensed. My sensitivity to this malaprop confusion probably reflects my own lifelong efforts to write free of linguistic mixture ...

Good night now. Be well. Telephone when and if you feel like it. Give my regards to your parents.
EJM