Books: Pious Abbreviation

JOSEPH IN EGYPT—Thomas Mann—Knopf (2 vols. $5).

Four years ago the first volume of Thomas Mann’s extraordinary Biblical novel, Joseph and His Brothers, made U. S. readers aware of the fuller meaning a great imagination could find in a bare, familiar legend. That subtle book of 428 pages retold the Old Testament story of the patriarch Jacob, his wife Rachel, and his sons, particularly his favorite. Joseph.

Woven into its simple narrative were speculations about the ancient world that gave readers a more immediate sense of what it was like than most volumes of historical inquiry. Why, asked the novelist, did stories like this one of Joseph echo from generation to generation? He answered: “Very deep is the well of the past.” Recorded history, he said, goes only a little way into that well. Deeper lie myths, folk tales, legends—”pious abbreviations” of real happenings. Time wore them down to bare narratives which later generations preserved partly through tradition, partly because men found similar patterns in their own experience. And while both Joseph and His Brothers and its sequel Young Joseph contained the lifelike characterizations that readers of Thomas Mann’s modern novels had come to expect from him, they contained some thing more—a sense of the submerged and forgotten origins of men’s beliefs.

Last week the third volume of this major work was published. Joseph in Egypt is the longest and most complex of the books in the series. Like the other volumes, it departs a little from the bare Biblical record, sometimes in minor details, sometimes by the addition of characters and situations that are not in the Old Testament.

The first third of the book tells of Joseph’s trip into Egypt, the slave of a prudent, toothless old merchant who recognized his talents, purchased him and planned to sell him to a household where his gifts might be valued. For the 17-year-old Joseph, intelligent, intuitive, and up held by a mysterious conviction of his destiny, the trip is a succession of marvels.

He studies the language, tries to under stand the complex religion of “the refined and fortunate and vulnerable land of Egypt,” and makes himself valuable to his master by his ability to write and calculate. From the great fortress of Thel, through the religious centres of On and Per-Bastet, on a nine-day voyage up the crowded Nile past Memphis and the pyramids, he gives himself up to observation, impressed and depressed at the grandeur of a civilization of which, as a child of the desert, he has heard only evil.

When he is sold to Potiphar his rise begins. His aptness wins him the regard of Potiphar’s steward, the stocky, 50-year-old Mont-kaw, and saves him from labor in the fields. His clairvoyance and wit, when the great Potiphar himself speaks to him, start him on his way to becoming first Potiphar’s reader and later his steward upon Mont-kaw’s death. But most of Joseph in Egypt is given over to a study of the mad passion of Potiphar’s wife for Joseph—a passion that, in Mann’s account, transforms her from a cool and indolent lady of fashion to a desperate, pitiable, hagridden monster, willing to consider the murder of her husband and finally abandoning all shame in the terrific scene that is the climax of the Biblical account.

Thomas Mann is one of the most ironical of novelists, and his irony persists even when he deals in luminous prose with moral and religious problems. For three years Joseph resisted the blandishments of Potiphar’s wife. How much of this, Mann asks, was the result of his honorable compact with Potiphar, his virtue, and how much of it was sinful pride in his honor, pride in his ability to withstand temptation? In a similar vein, when Mann reaches the climax of the wife’s abandoned courtship of Joseph, he announces, “I prefer to draw over the scene the veil of delicacy and human feeling,” proceeds to write an essay about the questions of taste involved, in the course of which he artfully says what happened.

Joseph in Egypt ends after Potiphar’s wife has accused Joseph of trying to attack her, and he has been sentenced to prison by the world-weary, sophisticated Potiphar. “So then Joseph went down a second time to the prison and the pit. The story of his rising again . . . may be the subject of future lays.” Still unfinished, with an unknown number of volumes to come, the final pattern of Joseph’s story cannot be made out from Joseph in Egypt. But in its picture of the tormented relationship of the young Joseph and Potiphar’s wife it contains some of the best writing that has been done by a novelist who is generally recognized as one of the greatest of contemporary Europeans. Even more than the earlier volumes, it conveys a sense of the past—as if its matter-of-fact details were a thin coating of ice formed over fathomless depths of antiquity.