Word: friendly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...cutting from TIME, Oct. 11, has been forwarded to me by an American friend. I am both humiliated and distressed to discover that . . . emphasis has been placed on minor remarks of a jocular nature, to the entire disfavor of Kent School, whereas the serious side of Kent life, which was stressed by me in enthusiastic terms, has been completely ignored...
John Payne, as the novelist, just hasn't got enough screen personality to make Saxon's dominion over him seem worthwhile. The wife, Susan Hayward, registers tender anxiety throughout without much success, and Audrey Totter, as Saxon's girl friend has to cope with the sort of "I-love-him-the-brute" part which was thoroughly explored by Clara Bow a long time...
Ostensibly Faustus is the biography-in-progress of a fictitious German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who was born in 1885 and died insane in 1940. The biography is being written during World War II by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a professor, a dedicated parlor humanist and a typically humorless academic product of pre-Hitler German Kultur. This combination of dates, musical genius and philosophical reflection gives Mann, as his old readers could easily guess, a chance to air his views on such Mannish concerns as the problem of the artist in society, the free play of mind...
Mocking Genius. Mann has chosen no conventionally flashy music-hall prodigy for his case history of a genius. Adrian Leverkühn, as his friend Zeitblom remembers him, was a brilliant, mocking, arrogant schoolboy who, even in his early teens, was constantly throwing off deep remarks. Sample: "Technique and comfort-in that state one talks about culture but one has not got it. Will you prevent me from seeing in the homophone-melodic constitution of our music a condition of musical civilization-in contrast to the old contrapuntal polyphone culture...
Neurotic Kultur. So far as his biographer-friend knows, Adrian had but one sexual experience with a woman, a prostitute; but it leaves him with a disease that alternately retards and heightens his work and leaves him a senile wreck at the end. Perhaps the best and most readable section of Faustus describes Adrian's years in a rustic Bavarian retreat near Munich. Mann's description of Munich's cultural and pseudo-intellectual crowd between wars, and their stiff-necked, neurotic Kultur helps explain how an Austrian fanatic got them to eat out of his hand...