I’ve referenced elsewhere (“When I Write of the Veldts”) of the various postmodern riffs, pastiches, and sheer parody that I’ve shaken out of Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice. I’ve spoofed it from Tadzio’s point of view (in which the boy remains clueless about von Aschenbach’s “grand passion”); I’ve even crossed swords with Lovecraft, revealing that the “plague” is not at all cholera, but a fungoid migration of the Mi-go from Yuggoth (“The Shadow Over Venice”).

But if we actually park it back at the source material…I’m not really all that impressed. Yes, I am aware that Thomas Mann shat marble and that he was a Past Master of the Nobel Prize stripe (eyes rolling at the mention of Nobel Committee). I am aware that Death in Venice is yet celebrated, discussed, parsed, and has been rendered into a classic film and at least one opera (no comic book series yet).

Death in Venice is also communicable: it certainly lies at the heart of Suddenly, Last Summer and Love and Death on Long Island (the author Gilbert Adair also wrote a biography of Mann’s actual crush, Baron Wladyslaw Moes, in The Real Tadzio). Nabokov was all too aware of the classic; when his own tale of pedophile obsession was under threat of blue pencil, he snorted “if I’d written about a man chasing after a boy, it would have been all right.”

Did I just use the p-word? After a full century of artistic obfuscation (not the least being riddled throughout the original work), Death in Venice is, after all, a story about a middle-aged man pantering after a slender reed of a boy. Mann was a little self-conscious; Tadzio is fourteen, but his inspiration, the Baron Moes, was all of eleven. Mann was around thirty-five. The three or four years, in our statistics-conscious culture, serve to make the Grand Passion a little less creepy.

In 1912, the idea of this oblique romance was pretty racy, but was not considered the overripe sickness it would be today. Children had an ambiguous role in the culture—a boy Tadzio’s age could be working long hours in a factory or mining, could be found driving a car. Prosecution for sexual interactions were rare, and when so, the offended party was God, not the child. An earlier Wikipedia article on Death in Venice had a great line: “Today von Aschenbach trailing Tadzio through the streets of Venice would be arrested as a dangerous pedophile.” Well, he certainly wouldn’t be the first artiste to lose his head (and social position) over a young boy, and Michael Jackson won’t be the last.

In 1912 (and thereafter), Death in Venice was quickly abstracted and digested as an allegory of the pursuit of Beauty, or even of Truth (offset by the lies the money interests tell to keep the plague secret from the tourists); of the pursuit of lost youth; as an examination of Art itself. Would that it were. Death in Venice is a flat naturalistic almost dear-diary reportage of an injudicious boner, with more than a bit of classical mookery tossed in as a red herring.

The entire petard is an accountant’s notebook of a ten-year-old boy’s sartorial resources, and whether or not he is barefoot today when on the beach. (“He was barefoot,” Mann inevitably tells us, as if surprised.) Well, all right, Death in Venice is more than merely that. It is also a durable almanac of the weather. Mann does not let a slate-colored sky go by without comment, and he is attentive to each mist and every sirocco. Aschenbach is a weathervane pendulent between boy’s bottom and the too-hot day. More often than not, the weather wins out.

The subject of the novella, as you’ve been told, is the worship of a boy. From this, Tadzio has become a bit of an icon in certain quarters, and he has rather escaped the boundaries of his own book, in which he is not especially interesting.

Some delicious essay I read online a few years ago declared that Tadzio is a triune: there is the real Tadzio, the model, Wladyslaw Moes; the Tadzio of the book; and Bjorn Andresen, the Swedish meatball who stuck to the screen in Visconti’s 1971 movie. (Andresen has become an emblem of boy-desires, from appearing in Japanese cigar ads while a child [!] to much later serving as coverboy for Germaine Greer’s odd ode to female pederasty, The Beautiful Boy.)

Producing a contemporary portrait of Moes, the writer made a smart remark about Mann’s Ideal, something along the lines of the curious opaqueness of people’s tastes. Indeed, Wladyslaw (misheard nickname, Wladzio) was not likely to turn heads, and would have been unlikely to have had a callback from Visconti’s casting director. He looks a little—well, creepy. But we remind ourselves that Mann seems to have a morbid Poe’s taste in young girls transmigrated to young boys—he joyfully describes Tadzio as “not long for this world” more than once, and even takes time to unfavorably reflect on the boy’s dentition. (From Annabel Lee to Berenice, as it were.)

Consider then the Tadzio of the here and now to be a meme, a pop culture-created character, because Mann doesn’t do much for him. He describes Tadzio’s wear down to the cufflink, but he reserves only to the generic for the Perfect Boy. We have an essential initial description of the boy’s features, but he does not much dwell on them (which seems odd for a subject of obsession). Past that it’s all sailor suits, red ties and belted waistcoats. One comes to feel that Aschenbach could have had it off just as well with the empty swimsuit as with the contents. Tadzio, in the novella, allegedly the maelstrom center, is functionally parenthetical.

I’ll credit that the observations of Tadzio are distant, and so it is appropriate that the boy remain an enigma, but sooner or later you are forced to realize the entire narrative occurs, quite dully, in Aschenbach’s own head. He is the only character; he only interacts with himself. In that, Death in Venice is quite tedious.

Tadzio is a “frail unthinking object” (and you thought sexism couldn’t be intragender!)—a Grecian statue. Everyone else is an officious little prick who misdirects either Aschenbach’s luggage or his Sherlockian investigations of the spreading plague. Death in Venice is often merely the tale of a cultured Mittle-European snob’s vacation gone wrong.

Von Aschenbach is drawn so woodenly that he is unbearable. Considering he is his author’s close avatar, he is incredibly static and unrevealing—a simplistic figurine in a threadbare fake-allegory who hits one or two flat notes before sliding under his beach chair.

The blurb from my 1971 Ballantine paperback movie tie-in declares Death in Venice to be a classic of “sensual awakening.” It is nothing of the sort.  Aschenbach never awakes sensually: he is merely sexually confused. Nevermind that the “case evidence” does not suggest that one simply awakens one day to the sexual angles of young boys (although that conceit would be useful in a court defense), but is rather likened to a career. It’s more likely that von Aschenbach would have a lifetime backlog of Tadzios, which makes this entire farrago disingenuous.

I have the feeling in reading criticism of Death in Venice that other critics have gotten ahold of some entirely other edition. One critic describes Aschenbach discovering a passion for Venetian oarsmen, which may be more of an attempt to normalize him as an androphile figure. Another elaborately describes Tadzio, but the description appears nowhere in Death in Venice, actually better describes me at the age of eleven (or any number of slav boys)—and is actually better drawn than Mann’s description. On a minor point, yet another declares that Aschenbach “discovers the true nature of his passion for Tadzio” after a Dionysian Dream. Well, not really. Perhaps Death in Venice is a bit of a Rorschach Blot.

Mann steps too carefully to reveal the true nature of anything. He buries his true story of a sad sack’s inactivist mooning over a little kid into a puffery with Greek Gods (somehow he sorely missed tossing in Thanatos, the most relevant). Rather than analyze what all this means, he chooses a Wagnerian cop-out and winds it all up with a big whoop death scene. Forbidden passion, even if unrequited, leads to death. It’s an old story, but I’ll tell it again—after all, Mann did. Forbidden passion, even if unrequited, leads to death.

This Mann-Boy love story however could have gone only one other way. That is, with the seduction of the object of his affection, leaving the idolized principle sticky broken and confused. This would have blown the blue pencil fuse, would have ended the fancy-dress costume play. Perhaps Mann was afraid that his “great theme” novella would have thence served as mere prologue to a policier. At the very least, Death in Venice would have been subtitled Banned in Canada.

As a tale of “sensual awakening”—pederastic or otherwise— Death in Venice is vegetarian. All these years later it remains a pretentious artifact, a mausoleum to the inability to get up from one’s deck chair, whereas it might have been psychologically penetrative. It is not illuminative; it is a work of art that comes not from artifice, but from deception, a coded message in which the original message is too weak to bother the decoder ring.

In Death in Venice what we have is a book about a man lying to himself written by a man lying to us while lying to himself.

One final note, to end this on a shiver, because fright is what we aim for. About ten years ago, I killed time in the Carolinas with a biography of Thomas Mann. The author solicitously mentioned that Mann’s diary contained a note—when his son Klaus reached the Death in Venice age—that he had “fallen in love” with his boy. Klaus later wrote a story, the author goes on to mention, wherein a daughter has pleasurable incest with her father. The biographer pretty much leaves it there, but that’s a pretty big tiger, eyeing us from across the rug.