Reviews

German novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955), according to this rich, densely textured biographical-critical study, introduced a new sensibility, ``post-bourgeois but not quite bohemian,'' by transforming his personal circumstances‘``the artist... living in comfort, but estranged from his class and origins'' ‘into a modern type. Troubled, self-doubting Mann, in Heilbut's assessment, was ``a great erotic writer'' whose repressed homosexuality colored all his writings: adventurous explorations of desire, the occult, physical illness, language and modern man's and woman's inability to feel. Heilbut (Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals) observes that three of Mann's six children‘sons Klaus and Golo and daughter Erika‘were homosexual, and the closeted, married author watched them living out his desires with mixed emotions. Heilbut reads Mann's career as a tale of profound erotic disappointment and defends him against charges that he was tardy in joining the anti-Nazi fight. Brimming with fresh insights and linkages between the life and the art, this biography is a more sympathetic account than Donald Prater's Thomas Mann: A Life (Forecasts, Nov. 13). Photos. (Feb.)