Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature

German novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955), according to this rich, densely textured biographical-critical study, introduced a new sensibility, ``post-bourgeois but not quite bohemian,'' by transforming his personal circumstances--``the artist... living in comfort, but estranged from his class and origins'' --into a modern type. Troubled, self-doubting Mann, in Heilbut's assessment, was ``a great erotic writer'' whose repressed homosexuality colored all his writings: adventurous explorations of desire, the occult, physical illness, language and modern man's and woman's inability to feel. Heilbut (Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals) observes that three of Mann's six children--sons Klaus and Golo and daughter Erika--were homosexual, and the closeted, married author watched them living out his desires with mixed emotions. Heilbut reads Mann's career as a tale of profound erotic disappointment and defends him against charges that he was tardy in joining the anti-Nazi fight. Brimming with fresh insights and linkages between the life and the art, this biography is a more sympathetic account than Donald Prater's Thomas Mann: A Life (Forecasts, Nov. 13). Photos. (Feb.)