In the introduction to Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, we are told that these stories have never before been included in collections of Mann’s work because they were deemed “tentative and awkward.”   I wholeheartedly agree with the editors of this book that such assessment was “arbitrary and wrong”.  The stories are the opposite of tentative and they are surely technically sound.  Nevertheless, these stories are silly, hyper-romantic, evidencing the worst of the 19th century influences (excess) and none of the best (realism), lacking in subtlety or imagination, and misogynist.

Two of the six stories were written before Mann turned twenty, three in his twenties, and interestingly enough, the last one and the worst one by far, he wrote in his thirties: it was published just five years before the hauntingly beautifulDeath in Venice.  This last story, entitled “Anecdote”, shows none of the quiet and compelling creation of character and place that is so well done in Death in Venice. Instead it is suffocatingly heavy and obvious in both language and plot (a seemingly virtuous woman who turns out to be a monster — or is her husband mad?  As he ends up committed to a mental institution, we will never know the truth) and almost Romance Novel in its depictions of its caricatures of characters.

That said, there were a few good laughs provided in these stories (some intentional and some not), as when Mann describes a young man in love writing letters home to his family, “which surely no one understood.  These letters didn’t actually say anything and yet they were vehemently punctuated, bristling with seemingly random exclamation marks.  But somehow he had to express and disburse all his happiness, and deciding after some deliberations that he could not be completely frank, he opted instead for the ambiguous exclamation points.”

If you are a Mann fan, these stories will keep you in his camp, by making him that much more human: fallible but working hard.  It is interesting to see the seeds of his incredible style just as they started to push through the pages of his writing, and I am grateful he was able to leave the hyperbole, excessive romanticism, and most of the misogyny well behind him in his later works.