By Kohinoor Dasgupta
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (The Early Years) is a novel that connects the Nobel Prize-winning pre-World War I work of Thomas Mann (1875-1955) to the imagination and artistry he was in possession of at the very end of his life.
The "fragment of a novel" which was to become Book One of the longer work was completed in 1911, when Mann was thirty-six years old. In it, retired fraudster "Felix Krull", forty, old and weary, recalled the watershed moments of his childhood and teens. In less than forty pages, without a single chapter break, Felix described vividly, and almost without self-pity, his secret joys and obsessive love of attention and performance, and the way he came of age while the Krull family was hurtling towards ruin.
The eighteen-year-old Krull’s zest for deception outstripped Mann’s invention. Breaking off, he wrote Death in Venice (1913) and started work on The Magic Mountain.
During the years of the First World War Mann found it impossible to write fiction at all. True autobiography occupied him. Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Non-Political Man), was published in 1918.
Perhaps Mann was not sure that he would ever return to the Krull saga. Perhaps he was eager to share the fragment. Perhaps he needed to throw his weight behind a publishing house. Whatever the motivation, in 1921 Mann released the fragment to Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt as Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull.
The English translation by H.T. Lowe-Porter (Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter), appeared in 1936, as one of the Stories of Three Decades, published by Alfred A. Knoff Inc. The anthology was reprinted by The Modern Library, New York.
Read about H.T. Lowe-Porter here:
Jo Salas published her novel, Mrs. Lowe-Porter, in February 2024. Read about it in The New York Times, here:
It was forty years after Mann completed the fragment, and more than twenty years after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, that he got around to working on The Confessions again. Only the beginning of Krull’s career had been dealt with when Mann died on August 12, 1955, at Zurich, Switzerland.
Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull: Der Memoiren erster Teil was published in 1954 by the Frankfurt am Main-based S. Fischer Verlag. This time Denver Lindley (1904-82) translated Mann; Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (The Early Years) was published by Alfred A. Knoff, New York, in 1955, during the last half-year of Mann’s life.
Incidentally, Mann, H.T. Lowe Porter and Denver Lindley each had a Princeton University connection. During Hitler’s power grab in the 1930s, Mann publicly dissociated himself from the Nazis. He moved to Switzerland in 1933. His German citizenship was taken away from him in 1936. Mann was a Visiting Professor at Princeton in 1938. Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter was married to the famous paleographer E. A. Lowe, who accepted a professorship at The Institute of Advanced Study in 1936. Denver Lindley, who was a magazine and book editor as well as a translator, graduated from Princeton in 1926.
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (The Early Years) thus, is the product of an unusual creative feat. When he was closer in age to his narrator, Mann found it difficult to hold on to Felix. He had an artistic goal for the novel, and the note, the voice had to be just so.
The writer had in mind a comedic clash of a traditional style of autobiography and a narrator who is proud of having been a criminal and a chameleon. While the artists who described their struggles, flaws and inspirations in traditional autobiographies had created masterpieces in their fields of work, Felix created himself.
In his Preface to Three Decades of Stories Mann wrote:
“Felix Krull … is in essence the story of an artist; in it the element of the unreal and illusional passes frankly over into the criminal. The idea of the book was suggested to me by the memoirs of a Rumanian adventurer named Manolescu. I was fascinated by the novel stylistic problem of direct autobiographical presentation on the model of my somewhat coarse-grained original; and still more by the grotesque idea of linking such a theme with another, traditional and beloved: Dichtung und Wahrheit, the aristocratic, confessional self-portrait of the artist. The conception has in it the germ of truly great humour; and I wrote the existing fragment of Felix Krull with such zest that I was not surprised to have many excellent judges pronounce it the best and happiest thing I had done. In a sense it may be the most personal; at least it expresses my attitude towards the traditional, which is both sympathetic and detached and which conditions my mission as an artist. Indeed, the inward laws which are the basis of that "Bildungsroman" The Magic Mountain are the same in kind.”
Like Mann, Felix was born "only a few years after the glorious founding of the German Empire”. Unlike Mann, Felix was born in a sunny southern town west of Mainz. His family, Felix says, was upper-class and yet lacked social status among the local bourgeoisie. Their Rhine-facing villa had a terraced garden and a fountain. His father owned the eponymous firm Engelbert Krull, which manufactured a champagne called 'Loreley extra cuvée' which perhaps sold for its bottle coiffeur and not enough to sustain the luxuries, the mistress in Mainz, the house parties, and the family excursions to nearby places such as Taunus Baths and Langenschwalbach.
It was a cozy home and an easy-going household, too easy-going, perhaps. Even at age forty, looking back, Felix took his adulterer father’s side in the trouble between his parents. He judged his mother severely for her uncouth behavior. Nor did he retrieve any fondness for his elder sister, Olympia. As we will see more clearly in the "full-dress" memoirs, so long as sexual transgressions (and fraud and theft, to take into account his own career) go on discreetly, Felix has a high level of tolerance. It is coarseness which appalls him.
Felix was named after his godfather, "the greatly admired artist” Herr Schimmelpreester, who once told him: "The high priest of mould, that’s the real meaning of Schimmelpreester”. Once upon a time, Felix Schimmelpreester moved in the "best” social circles in Cologne, and often stood in as a carnival steward.
In his childhood, Felix often sat for Schimmelpreester. He was flattered to be chosen by the "greatly admired artist”, who was an esteemed friend of the entire family. The painter had a collection of period costumes, which Felix wore at the sittings. While Schimmelpreester worked, he talked to Felix seriously, as if he were an adult. The child listened attentively to the man of the world. He preened in the costumes, and felt depressed when the fantasy ended and it was time to wear his own drab clothes and go home.
When he was "between sixteen and eighteen” years old, Felix posed in the nude for a large painting deriving from Greek mythology. Schimmelpreester got the commission from a wine-dealer in Mainz who wanted to hang it in his dining room. So absorbed was Felix in self-admiration, or so easy in his own skin, that he did not detect the slightest manipulation or exploitation on his godfather’s part: “… and indeed I was a little like a young god, slender, graceful, yet powerful in build, with a golden skin and flawless proportions”.
The house parties at the Krulls were loud, bawdy affairs that began at seven in the evening and continued all night long. There were fireworks in the whimsical garden which was adorned with gnomes, animal sculptures and an aeolian harp. The invitees came from Mainz and Wiesbaden, actors, actresses and young businessmen. Among the regulars were a sickly infantry lieutenant, a Jewish financier and his wife, and a journalist. The fun cost Felix. At school, he was shunned by the in crowd, comprising the sons of winegrowers and government employees. He was not respectable enough. The townspeople gossiped about those parties and about Engelbert’s affair with the governess. They whispered that 'Loreley extra cuvée' was a failing brand. School made Felix feel lonely, anxious and abased. It was worse than prison:
"I am only able to live in conditions that leave my spirit and imagination completely free; and so it is that the memory of my years in prison is actually less hateful to me than the recollection of the slavery and fear to which my sensitive boyish soul was subjected through the ostensibly honourable discipline in the small square white schoolhouse down there in the town. Add to this feeling of isolation, the sources of which I have indicated, and it is not surprising that I soon hit on the idea of escaping from school more often than on Sundays and the holidays.”
The sensitive, caged soul broke out (bending the genre of Dichtung und Wahrheit) by casually launching a career of forgery and stealing. No consideration of right and wrong or fear of getting caught bothered him. It was a question of opportunity and threading the needle.
Book One ended in the spring of the year in which Felix turned eighteen.
Mann was nearly eighty years old when he took up Felix’s story again, after he left California, where he was based in the 1940s, and returned to Switzerland in 1952. Apart from Felix Krull, he also wrote The Black Swan during this time. I would like to mention that in 1949 Mann returned to Germany briefly, after a gap of sixteen years. Perhaps this visit resuscitated the Felix saga.
Book Two begins with a wallop of irony. Felix reveals that he has not written for an entire year because he was assailed by doubt as to whether his "true recollections” would be able to compete with the "inventions” of writers of crowd-pleasing murder mysteries and detective stories! Going over the written pages, however, he feels inspired to write again. The world deserves to know with what finesse and grace he infiltrated the world of the high and mighty. The memoirist hopes that his "fidelity to truth” and chaste (as opposed to coarse) language will recommend his work to the best publishing houses.
The Krulls are bankrupt. Mother and son move to Frankfurt am Main, where Frau Krull gets busy running a boarding house. While Felix has no words to spare for his mother's fortitude, he does let up on the criticism. By now he is aware of his own charisma, skills and strengths. He does not indulge in self pity. He does not grudge others their good fortune. As Felix did not graduate high school, his godfather Schimmelpreester arranges for him to interview for a hotel waiter's position in Paris. Penniless Felix faces this choice with stoicism. The prospect of compulsory military service is another matter.
The Krulls arrive in Frankfurt in winter and Felix helps with the setting up of Pension Loreley. After the modest business is up and running, Felix has time to kill while waiting for his appointment with the military recruiters, the Superior Draft Commission on the Fitness and Recruitment of Youth. Outwardly he is an idler who sleeps till noon and loafs about in the fashionable districts of Frankfurt. In reality, though, not only has he given himself a fighting chance of being rejected by the military recruiters, but he is also busily penciling in a formidable invisible resumé! He observes manners, he lingers at shop windows where the most stylish men’s clothing is displayed. By the end of the novel Felix is a walking advertisement for a collateral benefit coming out of window advertising.
For the rest of the novel, the young man goes to work with his self-taught skills on other people's weaknesses and secret needs. He is able to steer situations exactly to those outcomes which he desires, whether it be getting out of compulsory military service or accumulating wealth and renting a little room in Paris, even as he continues to work as a liftboy and later, waiter, at the Hotel Saint James and Albany. He builds on his skills, he learns and plots and schemes, giving nothing away. Indeed, our truthful memoirist encourages us to glide along with him on a wild, picaresque swing through a decadent society, laughing and applauding his daring and his guile. What sort of confidence man would he be if he cannot persuade us that society is money-obsessed and hypocritical, but he never was?
While other men, young and old, did not escape the barracks in Germany, Felix is in Paris and in no danger of marring his physical perfection. The closest he comes to discharging a menial job is scraping scraps off plates and washing up in the scullery for five weeks. His hands, which he stated taking care of many years ago, remain soft, the nails well shaped. His skin remains the perfect golden-brown to contrast with his blue-grey eyes and soft blond hair. Whether as a liveried liftboy or in the dark blue tail-coat of a waiter, Felix attracts attention, sometimes unwelcome attention, with his good looks.
On his day job, Felix lacks opportunities to use his gift of the gab. He does have the gift, though he professes to prefer a deeper communication:
“…yet verbal communication is not my element; my truest interest does not lie there. It lies rather in the extreme, silent region of human intercourse – that one, first of all, where strangeness and social rootlessness still maintain a free, primordial condition and glances meet and marry irresponsibly in dreamlike wantonness; but then, too, the other in which the greatest possible closeness, intimacy, and commingling establish completely that wordless primordial condition.”
In Book Three, circumstances and choices pan out in such a manner that Felix takes a train out of Paris, headed for Lisbon, Portugal. (According to the Penguin Books edition (1998) of Mann's stories, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (1938-2011), Thomas Mann's mother was "of South American descent, part Portuguese and part Creole".) Travelling with Felix in the first-class compartment of Nord-Sud Express in none other than Professor Kuckkuck, who is the Director of Lisbon’s Museu Sciências Naturaes (Museum of Natural History). The selfsame Felix who could not be bothered to work at school, is all ears when Kuckkuck holds forth on a variety of subjects, including paleontology and the solar system. Need I mention that Felix is not travelling as Felix Krull, ex-waiter? Professor Kuckkuck may not have considered such a young man, however handsome and obliging, deserving of edification or capable of following scientific information. Such a young man would normally not be travelling in the first-class compartment. Thanks to a plot hatched by Louis Marquis de Venosta to deceive his parents, Felix is setting out on a year-long mission posing as the Marquis.
In his dreams, Felix only needs the clothes to play Emperor. Had not Schimmelpreester planted the idea in Felix's mind years ago?
The following passage reveals what Felix was thinking just a few days ago, at the Hotel Saint James and Albany:
"My basic attitude toward the world and society can only be called inconsistent. For all my eagerness to be on affectionate terms with them, I was frequently aware of a considered coolness, a tendency to critical reflection, which astonished me. There was, for example, an idea that occasionally preoccupied me when for a few moments I stood in the lobby or dining hall, clasping a napkin behind my back and watching the hotel guests being waited and fawned upon by blue-liveried minions. It was the idea of interchangeability. With a change of clothes and make-up, the servitors might often just as well have been the masters, and many of those who lounged in the deep wicker chairs, smoking their cigarettes, might have played the waiter. It was pure accident that the reverse was the fact, an accident of wealth; for an aristocracy of money is an accidental and interchangeable aristocracy.
"Therefore, my imaginary transpositions sometimes succeeded very well, but not always. For, in the first place, the habit of wealth does, after all, produce at least superficial refinement, which complicated my game, and, in the second place, among the polished riff raff of hotel society there are always a few persons whose distinction is independent of money, though naturally always accompanied by it."
Felix goes on to point to Louis Venosta (at this time Felix knows him only as a regular diner at the hotel) as a person of distinction. A few pages later, Felix receives the same kind of compliment from Louis. This is how that came about. As Felix would be travelling abroad for a year in the guise of the Marquis, he would use the circular letter of credit for twenty thousand francs given to Louis by his father. This may be cashed only at the principal ports of call, not in France, where Louis intends to remain. Hence, he and his girlfriend would have no financial support. What would they live on? Felix proposes a solution:
"I replied that we had solved that problem as soon as it arose. I possessed a bank account of twelve thousand francs, which would stand at his disposal in return for his letter of credit.
"He was touched to the point of tears. "A gentleman!" he exclaimed. "A nobleman from top to toe! If you do not have the right to send greetings to Minime and Radicule ["Minime" is his mother's Maltese lapdog and Radicule is his father's frail valet], who should have? Our parents will send back the warmest greetings in their name. A last glass to the gentleman who is us!"
Our knowledge of how Felix saved up the money which he generously offers does embalm the compliment in rich irony. Also, Felix no doubt foresees that the scheme would implode the moment the Marquis grew desperate enough to beg, borrow and steal. Even so, the compliment is not entirely undeserved; Felix does fetch up a basic decency on the rare occasion.
Felix is invited to Professor Kuckkuck’s workplace and to Villa Kuckkuck. He feels the familiar perverse pull of the "double-image” when he sees Senhora Maria Pia and Susanna (Zouzou), the eighteen-year-old daughter, together. Not even the presence of Professor Kuckkuck serves as a check on his self-indulgence.
"The starry-eyed man of the house, sitting at the head of the small table, observed this byplay with vague benevolence, a testimony to the stellar distances from which he gazed. The reverence I felt for him was not one jot diminished by the realization that in my courtship of the double image, consideration for him was wholly superfluous."
For his own reasons, Felix extends his stay in Lisbon. He learns to play tennis, moons over the exhibits and dioramas at the Natural History Museum like a wonderstruck child, writes letters to Victoria Marquise de Venosta née de Plettenberg (Louis Venosta's icy mother) in Louis's handwriting, and even has an audience with the monarch, astonishing the Marquise. We become somewhat unmindful about his diligence in breaking down Zouzou’s resistance to casual flirtation. We are shocked back into alertness when we hear his innuendo-laced sophistry at the cloister of Belém.
Zouzou disturbs Felix because she is real and rooted and waspish. Though obviously attracted to the handsome and attentive "Marquis", she is sure that he is just another sweet talker who wants to seduce her. She quotes this couplet, from "a book on scriptural instruction" to Felix:
"However fair and smooth the skin,
Stench and corruption lie within."
Imagine his response. "That's a nasty little verse, Zouzou," I interrupted ..."
Do not ask Felix why he had to work on Zouzou. It was altruism. He had to teach the stubborn, stupid girl the poetry and nobility of love. He had nothing to gain, not from her. She fully deserved to be shown the real Marquis's unskillful nude studies of his unsuitable girlfriend.
An eon back in Felix’s lifetime, when he was fourteen, he went to watch a play at Wiesbaden. The star of the show was Wiesbaden’s star singer, Müller-Rosé, who played “a rogue and lady-killer”. He was incredibly handsome and graceful. Besides, the character he was playing, Felix informs us, "was supposed to be very rich, which in itself lent his figure a magical charm”. He had the audience eating out of his hands. Later Felix and his father went backstage to meet him. Müller-Rosé sat in his dingy, stinking dressing room, stripped to his drawers. Horrible pustules, "red-rimmed, suppurating, some of them even bleeding” covered the artiste’s back, chest, shoulders and upper arms.
After overcoming his disappointment and disgust, Felix had an epiphany.
“This repulsive worm is the reality of the glorious butterfly in whom those deluded spectators believed they were beholding the realization of all their own secret dreams of beauty, grace, and perfection!... the grown-up people in the audience, who on the whole must know about life, and who yet were so frightfully eager to be deceived, must they not have been aware of the deception? … Here quite clearly there is in operation a general human need, implanted by God Himself in human nature, which Müller-Rosé’s abilities are created to satisfy.
“In full knowledge and realization of his frightful pustules (Müller-Rosé) was yet able – with the help of greasepaint, lighting, music, and distance – to move before his audience with such assurance as to make them see in him their heart’s ideal and thereby to enliven and edify them infinitely.
“It was the devotion and drive of his heart toward that yearning crowd that made him skillful in his art; and if he bestows on them the joy of life and they satiate him with their applause for doing so, is not that a mutual fulfilment, a meeting and marriage of his yearning and theirs?”
"Skillful in his art" could be an apt epitaph for Felix himself.
If, at times, in the middle of Felix's self-congratulatory meditations on the equalizing force of imagination, and "the wordless primordial condition" or even his manipulative monologue on love, you think you pulled on a skein of Mann's own sophisticated thinking, you may be right! Mann cannot or will not fully hide away in this novel, finished at the end of his life. Consider, for instance, the interesting pages describing the best acts of the famous Stoudebecker Circus. "What fabulous creatures artists are!" Felix muses. "Are they really human at all?" Recalling the incomparable trapeze artist "Andromache" – who was known as "La Fille de l'aire", Felix confesses: "I still dream of her." There, for a second, Felix took off his mask. And so, I think, did Mann.
*
The jacket design of the Alfred A. Knoff edition was by George Salter.
Here is part of the the Printer's Note:
"The book was composed, printed and bound by The Plimpton Press, Norwood, Massachusetts. The paper was made by S.D. Warren Company, Boston. The typography and binding are based on designs by W.A. Dwiggins."
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