“Everything that surrounds my meeting with him has the color of shame”: so begins Susan Sontag’s story “Pilgrimage,” which appeared in this magazine in 1987. The meeting is with the exiled German novelist Thomas Mann, at his home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. The year, Sontag says, is 1947; she is fourteen. Her favorite novel is “The Magic Mountain,” Mann’s panorama of Europe at twilight, which mirrors her own life in uncanny ways, notably her experience of being treated for asthma at a sanatorium in Arizona. With her friend Merrill, a fellow-enthusiast of everything modern and profound, Sontag has formed the idea of cold-calling the Nobelist and requesting an interview. They find him in the phone book: 1550 San Remo Drive, SM5-4403. To their amazement, he agrees to see them. An awkward, desultory conversation ensues. Mann has “only sententious formulas to deliver.” Sontag replies with “tongue-tied simplicities.” The sense of anticlimax is crushing. “Years later, when I had become a writer, when I knew many other writers, I would learn to be more tolerant of the gap between the person and the work. Yet even now the encounter still feels illicit, improper. . . . Over the years I have kept it a secret, as if it were something shameful.”

Shame? “I don’t remember anything like that,” Merrill Rodin told me the other day. “I felt more of a sense of awe, almost intimidation.” Sontag’s childhood friend is ninety-five and in fine health, his eyes bright, his lampshade mustache imposing. We were sitting in the study of the Thomas Mann House, which is now owned by the German government and is operated as a residency center. Rodin had last been there on December 28, 1949—the actual date of the visit. (Our vaunted fact-checking department is not to blame; the story ran as fiction, not memoir.) When “Pilgrimage” came out, Rodin was puzzled by various liberties Sontag took—notably, the omission of another friend, Gene Marum, who had come with them. Nonetheless, Rodin found the piece delightful. He is, after all, described as “calm, charming, not stupid at all”—lofty praise in the Sontag lexicon. Rodin’s daughter, Jenny, who had joined him on the return to San Remo Drive, recalled the pride she felt: “I read it and said, ‘That’s my Dad.’ ” She asked her father, “Didn’t she call you an ‘Adonis’ or something like that?” Rodin replied, sheepishly, “A ‘dreamboat.’ ”

Sontag put a surprising amount of effort into coming to terms with her ostensibly trivial meeting with Mann. First, she recounted it in her journal, in an entry that begins, “Merrill, Gene, and I interrogated God this evening at six.” Then, sometime in the early nineteen-fifties, she devised a lightly fictionalized story titled “At Thomas Mann’s.” Both journal and story can be found in the Sontag archive at U.C.L.A. I brought along copies and tried to resolve certain discrepancies with Rodin. For example, all three versions state that the visitors arrived early and sat outside in the car, rehearsing. Did this last fourteen minutes (“At Thomas Mann’s”); twenty-five minutes (journal); or two hours (“Pilgrimage”)? Rodin thought that about half an hour sounded right. With a cautionary smile, he added, “I’m honestly not sure whether I remember certain things just because Susan wrote them down.”

The journal indicates that Niko, Mann’s large, unruly poodle, barked as the intrepid teen-agers approached the front door. Katia Mann, the author’s wife, greeted them and ushered them into the study. Mann’s office no longer looks as it did then—most of its books and furnishings are at the Thomas Mann Archive, in Zurich—but it does contain a hundred-and-forty-six-volume edition of Goethe that had been on display in 1949. “I have the feeling we were sitting there,” Rodin said, pointing to where a flower-patterned sofa had once stood. “He was at the desk, with all the books behind him. We tried to read the spines, but they were too far away.”

Of the three, Rodin was most practiced in dealing with formidable personalities. A former child actor, he had appeared in a number of Hollywood films. He took the lead in eliciting Mann’s opinions. Sontag’s journal transcribes remarks that the author made about “The Magic Mountain” (“Didn’t you feel it was humanely written—that there was optimism in it?”), “Doctor Faustus” (“It has one foot in the sixteenth century”), and Helen Lowe-Porter, his valiant translator (“My publisher, Alfred Knopf, has a pious faith in Mrs. Lowe’s ability to translate me”). Rodin ventured to bring up James Joyce, one of his favorite authors. Mann confessed that his English wasn’t quite good enough to appreciate Joyce. Still, he “believed there is a similarity between Joyce and himself—the place of myth in their works.”

The dialogue that Sontag supplies in “Pilgrimage” overlaps little with what is reported in the journal. Rodin is unsure how she could have remembered all of it. He does, however, confirm that there was talk of Hemingway. Sontag quotes Mann saying, “I presume you like Hemingway. He is, such is my impression, the most representative American author.” The kids, taken aback, mumble that they had never read Hemingway. “Well, Thomas Mann said, what authors do you like?” They mention Joyce, Kafka, Tolstoy, Romain Rolland, and Jack London. There follows the funniest line in the piece: “He said that we must be very serious young people.”

Benjamin Moser interviewed Rodin for “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” his 2019 biography of the writer, and briefly sketched Rodin’s background in the book. But this sweet, deep man deserves a fuller accounting. He was born in Kansas City in 1930. His mother and father were Eastern European Jewish immigrants, from Hungary and Belarus, respectively. For a while, Rodin’s father played violin and sang on the vaudeville circuit in Chicago, and Merrill’s uncle Gil Rodin became a saxophonist in bands led by Ben Pollack and Bob Crosby, Bing’s brother. When young Rodin showed musical and theatrical talent, the family decided to move to L.A. to further his career.

Gil Rodin sent his nephew to the Reinhardt Workshop, a performing-arts school run by the towering Austrian émigré director Max Reinhardt, who had settled in L.A.. Reinhardt had made a bewitching adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which featured the film début of Olivia de Havilland and Mickey Rooney's breakthrough role as Puck, but his subsequent projects had sputtered out, and the workshop was struggling to stay afloat. Still, Rodin prospered under the genial tutelage of Reinhardt and his wife, Helene Thimig. When, in 1941, Rodin performed in an evening of Shakespeare scenes, the émigré newspaper Aufbau raved that his Puck outdid Rooney’s. After Reinhardt’s death, in New York, in 1943, a memorial event was held for him in L.A. The speakers included Mann, de Havilland, Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, and the thirteen-year-old Rodin, who recited a poem in honor of his teacher.

Rodin began winning roles in Hollywood movies. He played a traumatized Dutch refugee boy in the 1942 film “Pied Piper,” which, as it happens, received a positive review in Mann’s diary (“gut”). Rodin also appeared in “The Song of Bernadette,” “Hail the Conquering Hero,” and such anti-Nazi vehicles as “The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler” and “The Master Race.” One of his most memorable outings was in Mervyn LeRoy’s short film “The House I Live In,” a plea for tolerance that was released in 1945 and won an honorary Oscar. It stars Frank Sinatra as himself. After recording “If You Are But a Dream” in a studio, Sinatra goes outside to grab a smoke and discovers a gang of boys beating up a Jewish kid. Rodin plays one of the bullies. The following dialogue ensues:

SINATRA: You must be a bunch of those Nazi werewolves I’ve been reading about.

KID: Mister, are you screwy?

SINATRA: Not me, I’m an American!

RODIN: Well, whaddya think we are?

SINATRA: Nazis!

Sinatra sets the kids straight and serenades them with the title number, by the leftist firebrands Abel Meeropol and Earl Robinson: “The children in the playground / The faces that I see / All races and religions / That’s America to me.” Sinatra sings it well, but Paul Robeson sang it better.

Rodin gave up acting in his late teens, preferring to bury himself in books and music. An aunt who lived across the street from the Sontags, in the Valley, had identified Susan as a suitably bright friend for him. The two had in common not only a fixation on everything modern—they regularly attended the Evenings on the Roof series, where Stravinsky was a regular—but also same-sex attraction. Together, they explored L.A.’s gay scene, lurking at the Flamingo Club, in West Hollywood, and the Tropical Village, in Santa Monica. In the Sontag archive can be found a charming five-page dictionary of gay slang, with definitions for “bi,” “drag,” “butch,” “daisy chain,” “rim,” and “69.” Once, Sontag, Rodin, and Marum, who was straight but adventurous, attempted what they deemed an “orgy,” with embarrassing and unerotic results. This happened around the same time as the visit to Mann. That Mann himself had written stories on gay themes added to the piquancy of the encounter. Sontag’s first story about the visit states, in a charming euphemism, “We were lovers of Thomas Mann, not of each other.”

Rodin and Sontag drifted apart in the early fifties, when they were both students at the University of Chicago. (Sontag had graduated high school at the age of fifteen, and she and Rodin had visited Mann while home from college for the holidays.) One source of strain was Sontag’s abrupt marriage, in 1951, to Philip Rieff, one of her instructors at the University of Chicago. “We were both pretty closeted,” Rodin told me, “and that added to the friction.” The decade was, of course, a nightmarish time to be gay. Rodin himself got married in 1961, to the psychologist Jill Schwab, and raised four children. He went into academia, teaching philosophy and literature at various institutions; he also ran an art-movie house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Later, he moved back to Southern California and became the dean of the Weekend College at Mount St. Mary’s University. For his eightieth birthday, his daughter and sons rented the Silent Movie Theatre, in L.A., and staged a Merrill Rodin festival.

In 1990, three years after “Pilgrimage” was published, Rodin and Sontag met again, in San Francisco. Old differences fell away, and the two got along well. Rodin told her, though, that Marum was angry about having been airbrushed out of the picture. Sontag claimed to have forgotten about him, but his vanishing is better explained on writerly grounds. The conceit of “Pilgrimage” is that two headstrong American kids are daring to broach a sacred refuge of European culture. Rodin is seen placing an “unthinkable” call while Sontag flees the room in terror. In fact, it was Marum who made the call, and for him it wasn’t a shot in the dark. He was German-born, having come to the U.S. with his refugee parents in 1939. Not only that, he had a link to the Mann family: his aunt, the psychologist Olga Marum, had known Katia Mann in Munich. Marum later became an assistant director in Hollywood, working on “The Graduate,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and thirty-two episodes of “The Incredible Hulk.” He died in 2021.

The descendants of the German-speaking émigré community in L.A. in the thirties and forties have filtered throughout the city’s culture. One of them is the keyboardist and music producer Justin Reinhardt, who worked on a number of classic early hip-hop albums, including Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic.” He is Max Reinhardt’s great-grandson, and I invited him to the Mann House to meet Reinhardt’s last living collaborator. Together, they looked at an object that Rodin had received from Helene Thimig eighty-three years earlier: a stopwatch, or more precisely a Gallet Yachting Timer, which the director had used to time scenes. It no longer works, but it is a handsome thing, and it harmonized with the eerie timelessness of Mann’s study.

What, exactly, was the root of Sontag’s “shame” over the encounter with Mann, if her semi-fictional story reflected her real-life attitude? The journal, the first report, gives few hints of such feelings. She seems, instead, a bit giddy about the whole thing, not only recording Mann’s comments but also detailing what he wore (“beige suit, maroon tie, white shoes”) and how he spoke (“slow and precise”). A marginal note in the journal suggests that Mann had apologized for his “unsatisfactory answers,” blaming his “poor knowledge of English.” At the top of one page, though, is a much blunter judgment: “The author’s comments betray his book with their banality.” This is in a different ink from the rest, and has the look of something added later.

The unpublished story, “At Thomas Mann’s,” is also relatively unbothered about Mann’s “sententious formulas.” Indeed, it hardly quotes him at all; it’s entirely about the breathless buildup to the rendezvous. But it makes a telling observation about the dynamics of the scene. Sontag is disturbed to realize, on arriving at the house, that Mann had been expecting them. He was “so attentive, so unrelaxed.” She had assumed that the great man would be put out by the intrusion but would still “grant us a few moments of his time.” He would say, “Yes, yes, children, what is it you would like to know?” Instead, he appeared to be “not without some tension himself.” Katia Mann, too, was nervous. “It was horrible, it was more than horrible.” Mann had failed to act the part of the imperial genius; he was an all too ordinary man.

It’s very plausible that Mann worried about what these brainy teens thought of him. Their mention of Joyce might have activated his fear that he was lagging behind the front lines of literary modernism. Indeed, Sontag’s own estimation of Mann soon went into decline. In June, 1950, she wrote in her journal: “ ‘The Magic Mountain,’ I regret to say, is beginning to show at the seams for me. Perhaps it is not the greatest novel, after all!” In later years, Sontag shrugged Mann away, bestowing higher praise on Proust, Kafka, and Beckett. In “Against Interpretation,” she criticized Mann’s lack of raw force: “Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself—albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony—the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author.” Many readers of Mann’s labyrinthine work will find this formulation puzzling, but perhaps it echoes his demeanor on that day in Pacific Palisades.

Mann’s unease might have had deeper roots. In his own diary for December 28, 1949, the meeting with Sontag et al. is quickly dispatched: “In the afternoon, interview with three Chicago students about the ‘Magic Mountain.’ ” Other matters were gnawing at him. “Yesterday I finished the vehement essay ‘On the Occasion of a Magazine,’ he wrote. “Publishing it requires much thought, since it could bring about my downfall here.” This article, inspired by the Swiss periodical Extempore, was designed as a ringing denunciation of anti-Communist hysteria, in the mode of Zola’s “J’Accuse.” Mann had himself been attacked for harboring Red leanings and “fellow-traveller” tendencies. The vitriol reminded him of Germany in the years before 1933. “On the Occasion of a Magazine,” probably intended for Aufbau, lamented America’s “shocking moral decline,” condemned “fascistic obfuscation” in the media, and decried support for the Shah of Iran. It was never published. In 1952, Mann went into exile again, spending his last years in Switzerland. When the poodle Niko died, his successor was named Alger, after Alger Hiss.

In the very unlikely event that Mann had revealed his private struggles to his visitors, would Sontag have thought better of him? Not necessarily. In “Pilgrimage,” she is condescending toward the author’s political engagement: “Mann had the stature of an oracle in Roosevelt’s bien-pensant America, proclaiming the absolute evil of Hitler’s Germany and the coming victory of the democracies. Emigration had not dampened his taste, or his talent, for being a representative figure.” Sontag, by contrast, was headed toward a kind of eroticized aestheticism. In “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” from 1964, the gay sensibility that she had researched with Merrill Rodin is hailed as “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical.” She later readjusted her positions on political art, but Mann never regained his old lustre in her gallery of greatness.

It is not impossible to imagine what Mann might have said if the dilemma of Sontag’s shame had been presented to him. He had long been brooding over the problem of the charismatic artist, over the hidden dangers of aesthetic cults. The topic floats through Sontag’s then favorite novel, “The Magic Mountain,” and it engulfs “Doctor Faustus,” the tale of a genius and a nation gone mad. Mann might have argued that there is not only a moral but also an artistic virtue in being outwardly boring and banal. It is a hedge against mania. The worship of greatness leads, at best, to disillusionment and, at worst, to the insanity unleashed by the Wagnerian Hitler. Every pilgrimage is suspect: Mann scorned the Wagner shrine in Bayreuth on those grounds. “Only for very young people,” he wrote, “are admiration and adoration the same thing.” ♦