I have recently read a translation by David Luke of Tonio Kroger by Thomas Mann (the German author, best known for Death in Venice), which was written in 1903.
The main character of this short story is a writer……………“who sets no store by himself as a living human being, seeks recognition only as a creative artist, and spends the rest of his time in a grey incognito, like an actor with his make-up off, who has no identity when he is not performing.”
I wanted to share some passages taken from this story with you, as they strike a certain chord, capturing and reflecting the thoughts and feelings about the “unobtainable object of one’s love":
Ingeborg Holm, the daughter of Dr Holm who lived in the market square with its tall pointed complicated Gothic fountain - the fair haired Inge it was whom Tonio Kroger loved at the age of sixteen.
How did it come about? He had seen her hundreds of times; but one evening he saw her in a certain light. As she talked to a friend he saw how she had a certain way of tossing her head to one with a saucy laugh, and a certain way of raising her hand – a hand by no means particularly tiny or delicately girlish – to smooth her hair at the back, letting her sleeve of fine white gauze slide away from her elbow. He heard her pronounce some word in a certain way, some quite insignificant word, but with a certain warm timbre in her voice. And his heart was seized by a rapture far more intense than the rapture he had sometimes felt at the sight of Hans Hansen, long ago, when he had still been a silly little boy.
That evening her image remained imprinted on his mind: her thick blond tresses, her rather narrowly cut laughing blue eyes, the delicate hint of freckles across the bridge of her nose. The timbre of her voice haunted him and he could not sleep; he tried softly to imitate the particular way she had pronounced that insignificant word, and a tremor ran through him as he did so. He knew from experience that this was love. And he knew only too well that love would cost him much pain, distress and humiliation; he knew also that it destroys the lover’s peace of mind, flooding his heart with music and leaving him no time to form and shape his experience, to recollect it in tranquillity and forge it into a whole. Nevertheless he accepted this love with joy, abandoning himself to it utterly and nourishing it with all the strength of his spirit; for he knew that it would enrich him and make him more fully alive – and he longed to be enriched and more fully alive, rather than to recollect things in tranquillity and forge them into a whole…………
It was thus that Tonio Kroger had lost his heart to blithe Inge Holm…………
(Later, at a private dancing class in the drawing room of a wealthy family’s house, attended only by the best families and led by the dancing-master, Herr Knaak, who came once a week specially from Hamburg for the purpose, Tonio goes on to observe):
……he could not fail to notice that Inge, blithe Inge Holm, would often watch Herr Knaak’s every movement with rapt and smiling attention; and this was not the only reason why, in the last resort, he could not help feeling a certain grudging admiration for the dancing-master’s impressively controlled physique. How calm and imperturbable was Herr Knaak’s gaze! His eyes did not look deeply into things, they did not penetrate to the point at which life becomes complex and sad; all they knew was that they were beautiful brown eyes. But that was why he had such a proud bearing! Yes, it was necessary to be stupid in order to be able to walk like that; and then one was loved, for then people found one charming. How well he understood why Inge, sweet fair-haired Inge, gazed at Herr Knaak the way she did. But would no girl ever look that way at Tonio?
Oh yes, it did happen. There was the daughter, for instance, of Dr Vermehren the lawyer – Magdalena Vermehren, with her gentle mouth and her big, dark, glossy eyes so full of solemn enthusiasm. She often fell over when she danced. But when it was the ladies’ turn to choose partners she always came to him; for she knew that he wrote poems, she had twice asked him to show them to her and she would often sit with her head drooping and gaze at him from a distance. But what good was that to Tonio? He loved Inge Holm, blithe, fair-haired Inge, who certainly despised him for his poetic scribblings…………He watched her, he watched her narrow blue eyes so full of happiness and mockery; and an envious longing burned in his heart, a bitter insistent pain at the thought that to her he would always be an outsider and a stranger………
