Book review: Klaus and Other Stories

In this short collection of fictions we meet a chorus of Allan Massies. They have in common a straightforward clarity, a feeling of dedication to the task of writing well.

His several voices, though, are distinctive. The tone and diction of the essayist-cum-critic is discernible in the Preface, which places in context his writing of Klaus, the novella-length tale of the writer Klaus Mann, son of the Nobel prize-winning Thomas Mann, of whom further mention is made in two of Massie's eight short stories. The last of these stories, What Are You Doing Down There? brings the book to a shuddering climax, making you search for a phrase less hackneyed than tour de force, but that's what it is, a stream of sorcery; superb.

The familiar voice, which drives the centrepiece-novella, is the voice of the craftsman novelist, one who carries the weight of documentary duty on his shoulders. There are lapses into biographical voiceover, rarely found in Massie's fiction - short flat passages of prose which buck the flow of the often imaginative, vibrant re-creation of Klaus Mann's troubled final years.

No such impediment hampers the range of authorial voices in Massie's short stories, which vary from ponderous to preposterously gifted, from recent tales to a pair, which though decades old, not merely pass the test of time but make it seem like an impertinent irrelevance. In the Preface Massie explains that once he had "managed to finish a novel and have it published, ideas for short stories dried up".

The idea for the Klaus novella seems to have come almost unbidden once Massie purchased and read the two volumes of Klaus Mann's journals, "a detailed record of the pre-Hitler years" and (Mann's) subsequent years in exile "as he flitted from hotel to hotel, always working." He cuts a sad figure, alcoholic, homosexual and depressive, unaware of his "gift for friendship", as Christopher Isherwood later remarked.

Massie begins the tale with a dream from Klaus's childhood, his happiest time, with his sister Erika. The dream device, a simple one for reclaiming Klaus's past, blends and amplifies into the present. The war is over, Hitler is dead, and Klaus's anti-Nazi crusade is at an end. "You can't go home any more …" he muses. His future seems full of impossible longing. He is loveless, with suicidal urges that come like a tide which will one day drown him.

Dreams and memories act as a scourge, but also a refuge. Hitler's Brown Plague, about which Klaus wrote in the novel Mephisto, comes flooding back; the flotsam and jetsam of the ominous late 1920s, and the jack-booted thud of the early 1930s, are captured superbly here by Massie, along with the tenor of German intellectual life before its throttling.

He captures too the fraught menage involving the actor Gustaf Grndgens who, while married to Erika, ran a homosexual relationship with Klaus. Grndgens's unflattering appearance (albeit veiled) in Mephisto led to its postwar non-publication. Another lifeline Klaus was to lose.

In his final days, he carries on writing. "Dead as mutton", he spurns the new book. Some of Klaus's stasis seems to seep into Massie's writing, but overall this tale is a homage that lifts the hard covers off a life well worth revisiting for its lessons in betrayal, loss and loyalty, and its portrait of self-destruction.

Like the novella, the stories that follow frequently feature the lives of writers, some, such as Klaus, whose heyday is done. The passage of time is a common theme, again skilfully handled, and the "murmurs of mortality" felt by the has-been Adam Forbes in Forbes at the Festival lend an ironical, comic distance between the protagonists and their stirrings of (sexual) longing.

Massie's best writing allows the stories to happen in front of you, to feel close. When the writing is distanced by too much meditative recall it feels disengaged, the events second-hand, and all too often the endings falter. Venetian Whispers and Sheila and Ronnie are two examples of ragged conclusions, though Sheila and Ronnie, set partly abroad (a feature repeated in other stories), is tinged by pathos, as is the beautifully economical Bertram's Funeral.

The brief encounter in Train Talk twists the theme of strangers meeting and makes it fresh, setting us up for the final two tales, the best in the book. In the Bare Lands amounts to nothing on the surface (another momentary encounter), but blazes with life and implication, while What Are You Doing Down There? is a masterpiece, evocative of James Kennaway at his dangerous, poignant best, with barbs of Giles Cooper's surreality. Madcap and beautiful. Worth the cover price by itself.