A friend said recently that the only two people he knew who had read Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers were David Malouf, who died in April and your columnist. We sometimes forget the High German culture which was brought to America and had such a dazzling effect there. That magnetic critic Susan Sontag was terribly underwhelmed as a teenager when she met Thomas Mann and imagined she was meeting a dull literary eminence. Simon Gray was certainly not that. No wonder he adored the writing of Simon Gray.