In the late-nineteenth and very-early-twentieth century, a series of novels was published that explored the relationship between Europe and America, the former characterised as a culture in a state of permanent if gradual decline, the latter characterised as a dynamic society that had not yet acquired much culture of its own. The author of these works was Henry James, born in New England but longtime resident of ye Olde Englande, whose preferred structural device consisted of a wealthy young American woman – an heiress to some vast fortune, made by her father or some other benefactor – who meets a cultivated but impoverished European man – who might be English or Italian, or perhaps an Englishman who lives in Italy – and marries him, with mostly unsatisfactory consequences for her. It turns out that European men with sophisticated taste but meagre financial resources, tended to marry rich American heiresses for their wealth rather than for their intellect and charm. (Had rich British heiresses been available, no doubt they would have been married for similar reasons.)
I enjoy reading James’s novels, and when I reach their final pages I find myself feeling sorry for the spirited young women who have slowly discovered that possession of heaps of money guarantees neither an easy life nor a happy marriage, who find that European men are eager for access to their wealth but reluctant to give up anything much in return. However, James described only a thin slice of English and American society, the sorts of people you find in Jane Austen rather than the wider range – both by geography and class – who appear in George Eliot or Charles Dickens. He was also very much a nineteenth century author – born in 1843, his last major work of fiction was published in 1904 – whose world is no longer our world: his characters travel by steamship and horse-drawn carriage, and live in houses with gas lighting.
Thomas Mann, by comparison, is very much a modern writer, even though he was born in 1875, merely one generation after Henry James. Whereas James’s books have the feel of an enigmatic impressionist painting by James McNeil Whistler, Mann’s work is more reminiscent of the forthright expressionist paintings of Karl Schmitt-Rottluff, self-knowing in their exploration of our inner feelings and moods. I recently read one of Mann’s less well known books – Royal Highness – written in 1909, after Buddenbrooks but before Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain – which struck me as a direct riposte to Henry James. Mann’s story is set in a fictitious, German-speaking principality, located one assumes on the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the local royal dynasty finds itself in a state of terminal decline – along with the local economy – but whose remaining members nonetheless retain faith in their traditions, and place great emphasis on the fulfilment of their duties as the leading family of a small, hierarchical society.
Mann shows little interest in the cultural differences between Europeans and Americans, or the social and legal inequalities between men and women, the two themes that preoccupy Henry James. Instead, his story illuminates a rather different point, namely that the personal isolation experienced by members of the social and financial elites are fundamentally similar. Klaus Heinrich, the younger brother of the ruler, and Imma Spoelmann, the daughter and sole heir of an American multi-millionaire, come to see that what they have in common is of far greater importance than their differences. He has an elevated social status but little real wealth, whereas she has great wealth but no secure social position, for not only is she a clever young woman in a society that does not care much for clever young women, but in addition, since her paternal grandmother was an indigenous Indian from Bolivia, she has mixed heritage in a society that does care greatly for purity in bloodlines.
That those who are materially rich and those with elevated social status might experience the world in the same way, and that this is true irrespective of whether they come from the ‘old’ or the ‘new’ world, is the theme of Mann’s book. He spices his story with some entertaining narrative about the role of the monarchy in this backwater kingdom. Although he is the younger son, Klaus Heinrich is delegated the task of endless public engagements, in part because he seems to have an easy manner with people and in part because his elder brother has neither robust health nor patience for such events. Klaus Heinrich therefore spends his days meeting the leaders of business, trades, institutions and associations, and the representatives of the arts, sports, and local government. He shakes hands, makes short speeches, eats dinners, and then takes his carriage home. It is a lonely and boring job that makes for a dull life, until a spirited, well-educated, and (serendipitously) wealthy young American woman arrives in the capital city, accompanying her sick father on his visit to the local spa, who then decides to settle in this backward town where, it seems, his wealth is more admired than envied.
Mann has some fun at the expense of the social snobbery of the elite in this small kingdom, although his satire is markedly gentler than that of Robert Musil, who had the benefit of knowing how the Austro-Hungarian Empire came to its wretched end. While Klaus Heinrich and Imma find love and contentment in each other’s company, the central message of the book seems to be that vast wealth and high social status is guaranteed to make us lonely and unhappy, and that no amount of servants and no amount of time spent admiring one’s collection of books and antiquities compensates for the absence of real friendship.
Thinking about Mann’s book reminded me of a question that the son of one of my friends asked me a couple of years ago: who is your favourite king or queen of England? For a republican like me, the true answer would be that I have no favourite, none at all, but I realised that this reply would merely invite a second question, namely, well which one do you dislike the least. So, I said Oliver Cromwell, although I noted that he was the Lord Protector rather than the king. My young interlocutor immediately wanted to know why I supported the shutting of theatres, and his father – who has Irish heritage – had another list of challenges for me. Fair enough.
Had I thought a little harder about the question, I would have given a better answer: my favourite English ruler of all time is Richard Cromwell. He is not much talked about nowadays, so I should probably offer some arguments in his favour. Although Oliver Cromwell refused Parliament’s request that he take the title king, he nonetheless acted like a king when he appointed his son as his successor as Lord Protector, a role for which Richard was ill-prepared and temperamentally unsuited. Further, on his father’s death in 1658, Richard was immediately caught in the middle of an argument between Parliament, which wanted civilian government, and the army, which wanted direct military rule to push forward more radical puritan measures. Richard lacked his father’s distinguished military record that might have given him the authority to stand up to the generals, but he chose to take the side of Parliament, until troops were sent to Westminster to shut down the House of Commons. Richard resigned as Lord Protector after only eight months in office, and fled first to Paris and later to Geneva, knowing that his life would be in danger when the monarchy was restored.
My admiration for Richard Cromwell is not simply due to his giving up a leadership role that he probably never wanted, having tried his best to resist the military take-over of the Republic. For, in addition, after twenty years in exile he returned to England and lived under a false name for thirty-two years as a country gentleman in Hertfordshire. No doubt he enjoyed watching the fall of James II and the Stuart dynasty, and the increasing power of parliament following the Revolution of 1688. England, for reasons I find hard to fathom, still has its kings and its queens, but their power has never recovered from the twin revolts of the 1640s and 1680s. Richard died in Cheshunt in 1712, a few months before his eighty-sixth birthday, which means that until very recently he was the longest-lived ruler in English history.
Richard Cromwell seems to me to be a somewhat modern figure, a man who gives up power that he does not want and cannot properly use, first for exile and later for a quiet rural life. He is also someone about whom Thomas Mann would have written rather well. A son who has neither the skill nor the determination to emulate his father’s success, is the central theme from Buddenbrooks, and a young man who endures a lengthy exile in Switzerland before returning home is the central theme from The Magic Mountain. As for the central theme of Death in Venice, well Cheshunt boasts neither canals nor gondoliers, but I’m sure the great novelist could have devised something appropriate to celebrate the final days of England’s greatest ruler.