I last read this powerful novella in 2019, but this reading of Mann’s classic felt quite different.  Perhaps it’s the time of my life and the current state of the world, or perhaps, as indicated by Michael Cunningham’s introduction to this translation, it’s the new translation by Michael Henry Heim in this 2004 edition.

Whatever the reason, this reading felt much more intense and emotionally engaging.  The story is familiar.  Gustav von Aschenbach, an aging writer whose work has garnered major honors in Germany in this pre-WWI era, finds himself restless and somewhat weary with his work.  In the first of several omen-like events, while walking past a cemetery, he spies a man with “something of the overseer, something lordly, bold, even wild in his demeanor….he suddenly perceived that the man was returning his stare and was indeed so belligerently, so directly so blatently determined to challenge him publicly and force him to withdraw that Aschenbach, embarassed, turned away and set off along the fence.”   That random encounter “acted upon his imagination or some other physical or psychological influence” which led Aschenbach to a wanderlust, a passion to travel “now that his life was on the decline and his fear of failing to achieve his artistic goals could no longer be dismissed.”  

And so, after a series of false starts, Aschenbach finds himself in a hotel on the Lido off of Venice where his fateful passion and obsession for the young Polish boy Tadzio blooms.  As Cunningham writes, “Tadzio is, in fleshly form, the very ideal of youthful human beauty with all that youth and beauty can imply to the no-longer-young about yearning, mortality and the extravagant carelessness of a god who gives us life and then by slow degrees, takes it back again“. The final stage in which Aschenbach yields to his passion and obsession by engaging a barber’s ministrations that resulted in a new hair style, shaped eyebrows, rouged cheeks, and painted lips is a tragic preamble to his vivid nightmares and loosed passions, all of which end abruptly with his death on the shore from cholera. This death in Venice could have easily been avoided had Aschenbach chosen to return to Munich when he first happened upon the rumors of cholera, but his passion overruled his reason; he stayed; and he died.

“How We Live is How We Die”??? Not so much in Mann who describes a writer who died in total contrast to how he had lived, abandoning the discipline and expectations of his lifelong craft to yield to his passion, his obsession, his lust, to die alone and abandoned. Cunningham describes Aschenbach as among the modern characters that defined the 20th C—Mrs. Dalloway, Jay Gatsby, Leopold Bloom, and Humbert Humbert–and calls him “the most devastating of the lot. Like any enduring literary figure, he is both of his time and beyond it. He is descended from King Lear, the most glorious of all misguided spirits.”

So what do we take away from “Death in Venice” with regard to our own thoughts about death and dying???  Try not to be afraid as your powers wane.  Do not panic.  Stay true to your lifelong compass.  Die as you’ve lived.  And most of all, don’t get your hair and face done before you die.