FOCUSING ON THE EROTIC SIDE OF THOMAS MANN IN 'EROS'.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

Title: "Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature"

Author: Anthony Heilbut 

Data: Illustrated. 636 pages, Alfred A. Knopf; $40

Our rating: Four stars.

For generations, readers were taught that the homoerotic passages in Thomas Mann's fiction were never to be taken literally. Aschenbach's falling in love with Tadzio, the beautiful Polish boy, in "Death in Venice"? Merely symbolic of the fistlike Teutonic artist declining into Mediterranean disease and death.

Hans Castorp's crush on his schoolmate Pribislav Hippe, he of the Kirghiz eyes, in "The Magic Mountain"? A foretaste of his attraction to the careless East, as embodied at the Sanitarium Berghof by the Russian Frau Clavdia Chauchat.

But now along comes Anthony Heilbut in his astonishing extended essay, "Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature," to tell us that "virtually every detail in 'Death in Venice' was based on fact," and that the character of Hippe is based on Willri Timpe, one of an endless series of erotic attractions that Mann experienced throughout his life.

Indeed, Heilbut argues that everywhere in Mann's writing such homoerotic incidents are hidden in plain sight, from Count Kai's kissing the dying Hanno at the end of "Buddenbrooks," to the wooing of Felix Krull by a middle-age Scot, Nectar Lord Strathbogie, who looks and sounds exactly like Mann. "A little like Poe's purloined letter," Heilbut writes, "the evidence of Mann's tendencies was too visible to be spotted."

What else could have blinded all but the most knowing readers to such tendencies? Heilbut cites Mann's ironic style, for one thing, his "suave and facile" prose that enabled him to "reveal a dubious, pathetic character without undermining his narrative authority."

That style extended to Mann's bearing, which was decorous and public even when intimacy was called for. And, of course, Mann disguised himself as a Buergerlich man of letters, complete with town and country domiciles, an upper-class wife and six gifted children.

Then, too, Mann himself often protested, steering his readers toward symbolic interpretations of his work. His critics often went along, as did his translator into English, H.T. Lowe-Porter, who blushingly excised some of the more explicit passages. Finally, we lacked the perspective on Mann's work revealed piecemeal by his 26-year diaries, which began to appear some 25 years after his death in 1955.

Given the diaries and his command of German culture, Heilbut attempts to show how Mann's sexuality governed both his writing and his life. "Mann's career may be read as a tale of profound erotic disappointment, and its diversion into and projection onto the widest range of disparate subjects," Heilbut writes. "But, conversely, it also kept him young, alert to each promesse de bonheur" - promise of happiness - "a term he was still using in his 70s. As he wrote of George Bernard Shaw, 'Having never been young, he remained eternally youthful.' "

Even Mann's political development had an "erotic basis," in Heilbut's view. "During his nationalistic period, he shared the common infatuation with glamorous male warriors," he writes. "By 1920 Mann's social vision had grown specifically homoerotic and right-wing; witness his admiration for Hans Blueher's 'blood and soil' doctrine."

Two years later, his turn to the left and his embrace of the unpopular Weimar Republic "was catalyzed by his reading of Walt Whitman." He sang of "the body electric" in "On the German Republic," and of "Hellenism born anew as the spirit of American democracy."

Such a view of Mann is startling, to say the least, more extreme than those of two other recent biographies, Donald Prater's overdetailed "Thomas Mann: A Life," and Ronald Hayman's psychoanalytically judgmental "Thomas Mann: A Biography." It is also troubling. From Heilbut's portrait one would guess that Mann's life was miserable. Certainly his talented children seem to have paid for his conduct by living more or less unhappy lives.

Yet Heilbut - who also wrote "Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America From the 1930s to the Present" - persuades us that Mann's marriage was secure and happy, even though his wife was aware of his predilections, and even after, as he confessed in his diary, he had failed her sexually. Almost until his death at 80, he continued to relish writing, and to see it, as Heilbut implies, as an act of erotic stimulation.

In Heilbut's portrayal, Mann remains one of this century's literary giants, embodying the best of his culture as few recent figures have done. He was also heroic in challenging the evils of Nazi Germany, willing to speak out when fellow writers like Joyce, Yeats, Gide and Musil chose, for one reason or another, to remain silent.

While his literary stock in America and England may have fallen - because, Heilbut argues, he belongs to no school - his masterpieces remain alive and relevant, particularly "The Magic Mountain," recently reissued in a new translation by John E. Woods. As Heilbut concludes, Mann's diary revelations "enable us to see him more precisely as a great erotic writer, a man whose language was saturated by his sexuality."

And apparently Mann did not remain entirely unfulfilled outside of his imagination. Heilbut suggests that on at least one or two occasions his homoerotic affairs were consummated. Mann, at any rate, pronounced himself satisfied with his life.

In a letter to Bruno Walter in 1943, he wrote of his beloved grandchild Frido, who, he said, has a "clumsy tongue" that speaks the truth: "When he has had enough of anything, or wants to console himself because there is no more of it, he says: 'habt' ('had'). I find that perfect. When I am dying, I, too, shall say, 'habt.' "

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Photo "Thomas Mann Eros and Literature" attempts to show how the writing and the life of author Thomas Mann, pictured in 1947, were governed by his sexuality. The New York Times