That long sentence shows Mann's influence on Toibin. "Written into their set of tacit agreements was a clause stating that just as Thomas would do nothing to put their domestic happiness in jeopardy," Toibin writes, "Katia would recognize the nature of his desires without any complaint, note with tolerance and good humor the figures on whim his eyes most readily rested, and made clear her willingness, when appropriate, to appreciate him in all his different guises."
He doesn't rescue Mann from the latent embarrassments of his sexual fantasies, which are an apt enough representation of Mann's constitutional, deep-seated shame. The testimony to the modern novelist's craft is his ability to draw characters at least as interesting as Mann himself from the Nobel laureate's family, in particular but by no means exclusively his wife, Katia, Toibin's greatest creation here. What is never in dispute, somehow, is his greatness. Time and again, the historical Mann is a disappointment, not only as a prevaricator about his sexual appetites but as less strong an anti-Hitler than his admirers wanted him to be. What makes Toibin the latter-day magician is his deep feeling for his predecessor. The cover of the new book notwithstanding, there's no more "news" in it than the European tourists got during their sojourn in plague-hit Venice. Only the reader hankering for pornographic detail in Toibin's reimagining of it will be disappointed. The Tadzio tale is first retold a quarter way into Toibin's 500-page novel. Toibin's title is a reference to the moniker bestowed on Mann by his own children in recognition of their father's ability to make sexual secrets disappear. Not only is it not the author's best-kept secret, it's not just winked at but commonly acknowledged. In The Magician (Scribner), Colm Toibin's just-published novelization of the Mann biography, the tale is resurrected, like the Proustian madeleine, in all subsequent examples of Mann's sweet tooth for comely youth.
It's right there in Death in Venice, the 1911 novella that remains Mann's best-known work, a novelization in high-flown prose of the author's obsession with a young Polish boy while on holiday with his family in Italy. One of the lingering mysteries about the German writer Thomas Mann is how there could have been any lingering mystery about his repressed -make that sublimated- sexual desire for beautiful young men.
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