The New Yorker:

An eyewitness recalls the fraught encounter between a precocious American college student and a titan of German literature.

By Alex Ross

“Everything that surrounds my meeting with him has the color of shame”: so begins Susan Sontag’s story “Pilgrimage,” which appeared in this magazine in 1987. The meeting is with the exiled German novelist Thomas Mann, at his home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. The year, Sontag says, is 1947; she is fourteen. Her favorite novel is “The Magic Mountain,” Mann’s panorama of Europe at twilight, which mirrors her own life in uncanny ways, notably her experience of being treated for asthma at a sanatorium in Arizona. With her friend Merrill, a fellow-enthusiast of everything modern and profound, Sontag has formed the idea of cold-calling the Nobelist and requesting an interview. They find him in the phone book: 1550 San Remo Drive, SM5-4403. To their amazement, he agrees to see them. An awkward, desultory conversation ensues. Mann has “only sententious formulas to deliver.” Sontag replies with “tongue-tied simplicities.” The sense of anticlimax is crushing. “Years later, when I had become a writer, when I knew many other writers, I would learn to be more tolerant of the gap between the person and the work. Yet even now the encounter still feels illicit, improper. . . . Over the years I have kept it a secret, as if it were something shameful.”

Shame? “I don’t remember anything like that,” Merrill Rodin told me the other day. “I felt more of a sense of awe, almost intimidation.” Sontag’s childhood friend is ninety-five and in fine health, his eyes bright, his lampshade mustache imposing. We were sitting in the study of the Thomas Mann House, which is now owned by the German government and is operated as a residency center. Rodin had last been there on December 28, 1949—the actual date of the visit. (Our vaunted fact-checking department is not to blame; the story ran as fiction, not memoir.) When “Pilgrimage” came out, Rodin was puzzled by various liberties Sontag took—notably, the omission of another friend, Gene Marum, who had come with them. Nonetheless, Rodin found the piece delightful. He is, after all, described as “calm, charming, not stupid at all”—lofty praise in the Sontag lexicon. Rodin’s daughter, Jenny, who had joined him on the return to San Remo Drive, recalled the pride she felt: “I read it and said, ‘That’s my Dad.’ ” She asked her father, “Didn’t she call you an ‘Adonis’ or something like that?” Rodin replied, sheepishly, “A ‘dreamboat.’ ”

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