Both had elder brothers who were also distinguished authors (William James, Heinrich Mann) with whom they had complex, competitive relationships. Both spent much of their lives away from their homelands. Both men wrote obliquely about homosexual desire without publicly acknowledging it in themselves. In 2004’s The Master he took his readers inside Henry James. This is the second time Tóibín has used fiction to imagine his way into the mind of a past novelist. Flummoxed by the apparent futility of the project, the customs man waved him through. This was an imaginary table plan, an aid to his fabrication of an imaginary conversation, which would, he hoped, tell the reader something real about another writer who had died a century earlier. Among his papers was a sketched plan of a dining room, with scribbled names around the table: just the sort of thing, thought the customs officer, a spy might be carrying. Mann was working on Lotte in Weimar, his novel about Goethe. Tóibín has Mann reflecting that his literary tone identifies him as precisely what the newly ascendant Nazis most detest As they flew low through German airspace, Thomas – persona emphatically non grata in his native land since he had fled six years earlier – was trembling. Last-minute rescue when places were found for them on a plane chartered by the Swedish authorities to evacuate foreign nationals.
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