Books

THOMAS MANN has dug deep in the well of Old Testament scholarship and has produced a trilogy, the first volume of which, “Joseph and His Brothers,” has just appeared in translation under the aegis of Alfred A. Knopf. But unless and until you know that “Joseph and His Brothers” is not a complete work in itself, but in reality only one-third of a book, you will read it will a sense of confusion and disappointment, as if there were a relation between title and subject matter hidden from you Understanding.

The fact is that “Joseph and His Brothers” so almost exclusively the story of Jacob, father o the twelve sons, of whom Joseph was next to the youngest. Only when the two succeeding volumes, “The Young Joseph” and “Joseph in Egypt,” have appeared will you have the completed work for which “Joseph and His Brothers” may stand as the Trilogy-embracing title.

But even with all this understood at the beginning, Mann’s method of telling the story, beautifully rewarding as it is in large sections is not entirely clear sailing for the average, and even more than average, reader of fiction. In obedience to some philosophical system of his own, Thomas Mann chooses to tell the story of Jacob without respect to chronology. You will first read of how Jacob, returning from his more than twenty years’ stay with lagan, and now rich with sons and sheep and camels, appeases Esau for having obtained the birthright and blessing under false pretenses, and of the slaughter by Jacob’s sons at Schechem, and it is only later, toward the end of the work, that you will read of the manner in which Jacob obtained the blind Isaac’s blessing from under Esau’s nose and of how he fled into the desert and of how he toiled for Lagan and throve. And with the death of Rachel in giving birth to her second son, Benjamin, this first volume closes, promising rich and strange vistas in the two volumes yet to appear.

NOVELIST’S COMPREHENSION

“Joseph and His Brothers’ is the work of a scholar and a poet. In the hands of Mann, the story of Jacob is grounded in human motivations and in the manners and customs of the times in which he lived. You may accept this book as a glowing Variorum note on a small section of the Bible, a note written with a poet’s license and obeying none of the rules governing the writing of Variorum notes. Biblical scholars may differ, but I must beg to state that Mann has given me a comprehension of the whole lagan-Jacob-Rachel-Leah business in the light of the life of the times. Now I have the life of the man known as Jacob, with some unexplained gaps, but with the major crises and episodes clearly explained. One could only wish that the rest of this book had the opalescent clarity with which the years Jacob spent with Laban and the relation between Jacob and Laban and the latter’s daughters, Leah and Rachel, are rendered.

The work opens with a fifty-six-page philosophical “prelude” which it is perhaps not necessary tor read and which, if read, might be read when the narrative proper has been finished. In this “Prelude” Dr, Mann toys rather heavily with the notion that Time is a bottomless well, and that when we think we have come to the beginning of a legend, a new abyss opens beneath us, to a new source, and so on. he calls the phenomenon “the dissolution of time in mystery,” and takes us into the well of the Old Testament, into the rather negligible depth of 3,000 years.

There is in this prelude one brief autobiographical reference, and an oblique one at that. Referring to Jacob’s constant moving from habitation to habitation. He being a tent-dweller rather than a citydweller-mann writes: “For do I not know the feeling? to me too has not unrest been ordained, have not I too been endowed with a heart which know the not repose?… For the storyteller makes many station, roving and relating, but pauses only tent wise, awaiting further directions, and soon feels his heart beating high… as a sign that he must take the road, towards fresh adventures, which are to be painstakingly lived through, down to their remotest details, according to the restless spirit’s will.”