Donald Prater THOMAS MANN A LIFE 554pp. Oxford University Press. Pounds 20. - 0

19 815861 0. Klaus Harpprecht THOMAS MANN EINE BIOGRAPHIE 2,253pp. Reinbek:

Rowohlt. DM 98. - 3 498 02873 1.

Karl Kraus, Viennese hater of baggy monsters, claimed a congenital inability to read novels. "Though I can work for sixteen hours at a stretch without fatigue," he wrote, "the slightest attempt to read about how Walter, entering the hall, glanced at the clock, sends me into a deep and dreamless sleep." How then would Kraus have reacted to tree-gobbling tomes like these two, published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of Thomas Mann's death? Would he have stayed awake long enough for Donald Prater to tell him that Erika Mann once put her parents on the train for Luebeck, "while she drove back to Zuerich (very nearly being carried off too when, after an alarming struggle to get them aboard, the train pulled out without warning and she barely had time to jump from the running-board)"; or to discover from Klaus Harpprecht that a hotel in Locarno where Mann once stayed failed to provide "a tumbler in the bathroom, so that he had to put water in the soap-dish to take his customary sleeping pill"? Goethe famously remarked that Schiller was great even when cutting his fingernails; but he also observed in a valedictory poem that his friend had left far behind him "the commonplace things that bind the rest of us". Surely all the dead, great or otherwise, should be allowed to do the same?

Still, publishers believe there is a market for such resurrected minutiae, so biographies continue to be as lengthy as the economics of book production allow. Surprising, then, that their authors still feel obliged to apologize for omissions. Prater and Harpprecht profess to have left out the same things.

"This is not a literary biography", says Harpprecht with over 2,000 pages down and 200 still to go. Prater puts essentially the same statement up front, disclaiming in his introduction any ambition to engage with Mann's creative works. Both give the same reason: literary judgments are best left to "specialists"; and in any case, an attempt to "reach the summit of the mountain of secondary literature" (Prater's phrase) would have made their enterprise impossible. This is mistaken. Mann did not write for specialists, so those who count as such should enjoy no monopoly on assessing his achievement; and the high peaks of Mann criticism (including, in English, Erich Heller, T. J. Reed and J. P. Stern) are worth scaling for the sake of the view. In fact, Harpprecht gives a good deal of attention to Mann's creative writings, to the benefit of his book. Prater, unfortunately, means what he says. This is all the stranger because in his earlier, well-received biography of Rilke (1986), he stressed the "significant interconnection" between his subject's life and works; there, too, Prater disclaimed ambitions to interpret the poetry, but he expressly made it his business "to explore how (the works) grew and the part they played in Rilke's life". This time, he is determined to abide by a strict interpretation of his laconic subtitle and provide simply "A life". A questionable project, for two reasons.

First, for all its momentous historical circumstances, this particular life, considered apart from the works, is less than appealing. Prater comments that Mann emerges from his letters, diaries and the testimonies of family and associates (it is doubtful whether he had any real friends) as someone "easier to admire than love". The unlovable aspects are visible enough on every page of both biographies: the trouble is that without close attention to the creative endeavour and achievement, the grounds for admiration remain obscure.

Second, Mann lived through as well as for his work. He not only revealed, but substantially transformed himself through the labour of creation which the works embody and occasionally retrace. In early adulthood, the discipline demanded by the Buddenbrooks material made him into a different kind of writer.

In his prime, The Magic Mountain became the adventurous ratification of a decisive change in his outlook, offered partly in the hope of encouraging similar reorientation in others of like mind. Doktor Faustus, in old age, developed into an intricate displaced autobiography, more penetrating, comprehensive and desolate in its vision of Mann's splendeurs et miseres than any third party could hope to achieve. And these transformations are all as much matters of biography as of literary history.