AGNI Fiction

An Essay from AGNI, Web Issue 3

SUSANNA KAYSEN

On Rereading The Magic Mountain

Mann's great novel, known to those who love it and to the many others who have never been able to slog through it in H.T. Lowe-Porter's 1927 translation for Knopf, has been retranslated by John E. Woods and published in a rather funereal black-and-blue edition made more somber by a pair of author photographs: a frontispiece of Mann vigorous, presumably having just finished his masterpiece, and a back-of-jacket eightieth-birthday shot in which the large, stern, dark face has crumpled and faded, and even the eyes have filmed over.
Since the workings of time are the subject of the book, it is fitting that they be precisely documented on the binding. But there is something eerie in this diptych, and I found myself often flipping from the front page to the back cover to compare one image to another as if such comparison would yield insight into genius, writing, life, or some other mystery. It didn't. It just made me think how little time we have to get things done. The impartiality of death: even that black magician Mann, with his creepy, self-satisfied yet remote gaze, is felled in the end.

For thirty years I've been obsessed with this novel. I first read it during my senior year in high school, and I wrote my major English paper about it. I can't find this paper now, nor can I remember much of what I said. I do remember that my teacher wasn't impressed. He gave me a C and noted that my understanding was superficial. I'm sure it was. I've read The Magic Mountain about ten times since then and I still feel I don't understand it.
Looking for that English paper I came across an extremely bad poem I wrote about rereading the book, probably for the third time. I will spare you and myself most of it, but quote the end:

       The focus on death had a particular source. I don't now agree with this assessment of the book's point, but back then I was for a time convinced by Elena Wilson. Mother of my close friend Helen and wife of the critic Edmund, Elena disapproved of Mann. She would remove or in a Belmondo-like manner not remove her Lucky Strike and growl: He was too interested in illness, he thought creativity was a disease, it's all a bit distasteful.
       She'd been to Davos, to the Zauberberg; she'd grown up in the Europe of which Mann wrote. Her comments therefore had a special force, an aura of inside information that seduced me into agreement. It's an unsavory book, she'd say. Elena was old-fashioned enough to believe that books shaped people, and she was warning me against Mann. She once told me that she'd read all of Edith Wharton while she was pregnant with Helen, and "That's why she turned out that way." She never specified what "that way" was, but I got the drift, or thought I did.
       When several years later I added to my Mann obsession an obsession with Holocaust literature, Elena cautioned me not to dwell on it. "It's no good reading too much about that," she said.
       "I have to know," I objected.
       "You do know," she told me. "To read more is to enjoy it in some terrible way, and you must be careful." But like Mann I believed that "only the exhaustive is truly interesting." Or, to quote Woods' translation: "Only thoroughness can be truly entertaining." Interesting or entertaining? Well, that was Elena Wilson's point, how subtly the one could shift to the other.
       I wrote that bad poem in my room in a commune on Wendell Street in Cambridge in 1967. I was shortly to enter my own pale version of the Berghof, McLean Hospital. In my peculiar frame of mind, the book had become a talisman for me the book as an object. If I went away for the weekend, for instance to Wellfleet to see Helen and Elena, I took The Magic Mountain with me.
       I was toting around my parents' two-volume Knopf edition of 1938, which I "liberated" (to use the language of the times) from them when I ran away from home on my eighteenth birthday. The black bindings were frayed at the corners and unraveling on the spines. My mother had glued their bookplate into each volume, which even then I found touchingly thorough. The cloth (not leather, as I'd tritely put it in my poem) was embossed with the title in Gothic script, forbidding and spiky, black on black. Volume One was inscribed to my mother by my father. I realize now, nearly sixty years later, that it was a gift on her twentieth birthday, in May 1939.
       What the book represented to me, at eighteen, was an ideal world. I was suffering from a spiritual and emotional malaise, soon to be diagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder but in fact a kind of world-weariness typical of perfectionistic, lazy, somewhat talented characters. I wanted to get out of having to live my life. I wanted life to stop, actually. The Magic Mountain was a nine-hundred-page depiction of a life outside of life, a life, as Mann kept repeating, without responsibility, inhibition, shape, ambition, or even a sense of time. It sounded perfect to me.
       Maybe I thought the book was contagious, that I could contract TB just from reading it or carrying it around with me. TB seemed like the only way out of the mess I was in.
       Elena was right: The book had corrupted me. It had made abdication from living acceptable, even charming. So when I found myself up on that far smaller hill outside of town in an establishment designed to remove me from reality, well, as I've said elsewhere, it was an opportunity too good to resist. Had I not read The Magic Mountain, I might have hesitated before signing myself into McLean Hospital for what turned out to be not two weeks but, Heaven forbid, two years.

Lowe-Porter's translation is 900 pages long; Woods' is 706. This in itself tells you something. Type size isn't a factor: the type of the earlier edition is a point smaller. Lowe-Porter's Magic Mountain is leisurely, stately, and sometimes pompous; Woods' book is snappy, even slangy, brisk and direct. I don't read German so I can't tell which is more faithful to the original though it's been said that Lowe-Porter translated The Magic Mountain into German, and there's some truth to that. It certainly is not a natural-sounding English. Woods, however, has removed a film of mystery and obscurity that seemed integral to the book and that I miss the way restorers of the Sistine Chapel cleaned off the moody, brooding atmosphere we'd all assumed was a darkness intended by Michelangelo.
To begin at the beginning, with the Forward:

The story of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, not on his own account, for in him the reader will make acquaintance with a simple-minded though pleasing young man, but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us highly worth telling though it must needs be borne in mind, in Hans Castorp's behalf, that it is his story, and not every story happens to everybody this story, we say, belongs to the long ago; is already, so to speak, covered with historic mould. . . .

With that "historic mould" Lowe-Porter probably lost Mann a good portion of his readership before Chapter One.
Now Woods:

his

       Aside from the awkwardness of "which we would here set forth" in contrast to "that we intend to tell here," and the puzzling discrepancy between a "simple-minded young man" and a "perfectly ordinary" one, the main shift in tone is contained in Woods' italicization of the word his: "It should be noted that it is his story, and that not every story happens to everybody . . . ."
       That slight emphasis conjures Mann speaking, conversationally cajoling his readers to see things his way. It also makes Hans a person rather than a structure on which to hang ideas. The Magic Mountain is often called a novel of ideas, but the new Magic Mountain is a novel with ideas in it. It is filled with all the usual business of novels: people, events, emotions, suspense, and most of all, sex.
       I didn't realize how erotic a book this is. In truth, the book I kept rereading wasn't erotic. Partly that was because of my lousy high-school French, which made the Walpurgis Night chapter a blur. I assumed Hans and Clavdia got into the sack, but I never exactly had the evidence for it. I wonder why Lowe-Porter and Alfred Knopf, for that matter thought it necessary and good to translate The Magic Mountain from German to English but neither necessary nor good to translate it from French to English. Perhaps it was a decision: Leave those sexy parts in French so they aren't too accessible. Or a different decision: He wrote it in French so let's leave it in French. Probably, it was just a reflection of an era in which anyone educated enough to read Mann could also read French.
       The sexiness goes beyond that one chapter; it permeates the entire first volume, which in the new translation is a vivid documentation of obsessive love. Love as illness, desire as fever, the body as a hotbed of disease, whether disease is literal or the figurative disease of sexual yearning: all of this was evident in the old book, but denatured somehow, as if Mann were taking notes on the subject rather than writing about it. Lowe-Porter's passive constructions and Germanic syntax (long sentences with many dependent clauses, vast stretches of words between subject and verb) leached the charge from much of what Mann was saying.
       Take, for instance, the biological-erotic vision of Clavdia Chauchat from Research in Lowe-Porter's version:

It [the body] leaned thus, turning to smile, the gleaming elbows akimbo, in the paired symmetry of its limbs and trunk. The acrid, steaming shadows of its arm-pits corresponded in a mystic triangle to the pubic darkness, just as the eyes did to the red, epithelial mouth-opening, and the red blossoms of the breast to the navel lying perpendicularly below. (p. 351)

Now Woods:

There the body stood, leaning charmingly, turning to smile at him, its radiant elbows spread wide in the dual symmetry of its limbs, of its corporeality. The night of its pubic region built a mystic triangle with the steaming pungent darkness of the armpits, just as the red epithelial mouth did with the eyes, or the red buds of the breast with the vertically elongated navel. (p.272)

       Lowe-Porter seems to disapprove of those "acrid, steaming arm-pits;" she doesn't make them sound very alluring. Of course, Mann was more attracted to men than to women, so maybe the tinge of distaste in Lowe-Porter's version is closer to his intent than Woods' "steaming pungent darkness." But I doubt it. Desire does not vary according to its object. Desire is intent and encyclopedic, scholarly in its fascination with every aspect of the beloved.
       In my earlier readings I skimmed, even skipped, huge portions of Research and of Operationes Spirituales. I didn't get it. Why was Mann trotting out everything he knew about biology at such tedious length? Why did I have to live through a near-interminable argument about free will versus order or whatever it was about in which the disputants appeared to forget which side they were on and take as their own points they had been refuting only minutes before?
       Insofar as The Magic Mountain has a reputation as unreadable, these two chapters are to blame. Many people have lost the thread during one of Naphta's fascist rants and not bothered trying to find it again. Many others have given up half a volume earlier, having decided that a summary (though far too long to justify that term) of the origins of life doesn't constitute a proper narrative.
       Even Woods can't make Operationes Spirituales a pleasure to read, but I have finally read every word of it. To understand it, I'd need to know all of history, theology and philosophy and I still feel I don't want to understand it, because it's still boring. Research, though, has been transformed. Formerly almost as dull as Operationes Spirituales, it is now an erotic roller coaster; more important, its purpose has become clear to me in Woods' translation.
       Purpose is an odd word in this context. There are rare moments as a reader when I feel a book become transparent and have the sense of seeing through the page to the writer's mind. The words seem to transmit not only the emotions and ideas they describe but the emotions and ideas the writer had while writing them. Reading Research for the tenth or eleventh time, I felt, suddenly, that I saw Mann seized with the idea of writing a chapter on sexual obsession that was formed the way a sexual obsession comes into being, that toyed with erotic images and then backed away, that circumnavigated the images it yearned for and then replaced them with acceptable substitutes until the desire simply broke through. And then (I could imagine him staring at the wall of his study, delighted) he would shape the narrative in the form of the sexual act, with a long intricate foreplay and an overwhelming climax: Clavdia Chauchat leaning down in her "pungent darkness" to embrace Hans Castorp. But the best part was that the chapter would describe in words the evolution of inert matter into life while describing as a compass describes a circle Hans' evolution from an inert, ordinary young man into a man buzzing and vibrant with desire.
       Mann's purpose was to make the form and the content so perfectly consonant that the one essentially was the other or so it seemed on this rereading. And my seeing Research this way opened the whole book up to me.
       It may have been obvious to everyone else, but I hadn't realized that The Magic Mountain is shaped like a mountain: the slow rise of the narrative for the first two hundred pages, which chronicle Hans' first three weeks and in which one seems to make no progress, to see no change in the landscape as one moves through endless foothills; the roughening of the terrain when Settembrini arrives; the impenetrable brush of Research, which leads to the plateau of Walpurgis Night a false summit, a resting place before the final ascent, through the thinner and thinner air of Naphta and Settembrini arguing, to the peak, Snow. After that, the descent is headlong, barreling through excesses: Peeperkorn's banquets, the mania for parlor games, Hans' fascination with the gramophone, and the terrible seance that conjures Joachim as a soldier of the war that has not yet begun. Everything spins out of control: the incomprehensible quarrels the Polish duel, Naphta and Settembrini's duel conflicts leading, of course, to Hans in the muddy trenches where Mann abandons him, and us.
       If in my many readings of this book I failed to see its structure and failed even to bother with large sections of it, what exactly did I mean when I said it was my favorite book and why did it exert such a powerful influence on me? Perhaps I should ask how it exerted any influence whatsoever on me, since, as my English teacher pointed out, my understanding was superficial.
       Superficial, and yet even lacking understanding, I felt the force of it. I sensed its all-encompassing quality, which I described to myself as being like a garbage pail. After I'd read it, I felt I too could write a novel, because Mann had given me permission to put anything at all into a book. After all, he'd put everything in the world into his book.
       The one aspect I understood from the start was the toying with time. I remember first reading those words, "Heaven forbid it should be seven years!" and the thrill of knowing it would be. All the asides about the passage of time, the differing quality of time under different circumstances, were clear to me as authorial commentary on the very notion of narrative, and I found this thrilling as well. Not only could you put anything in the world into a book, you could talk about the way you were writing the book in the book.
       And though I didn't notice that the book was shaped like a mountain, I did notice that the narrative speed, so to speak, duplicated Hans' experience of time that the first three weeks occupied such a large portion of the whole because that was how those three weeks felt to him. Of course, one would have to be a very dunder-headed reader not to notice this, since Mann more than once crows over having written it that way.
       That crowing charmed me. I realize that some people dislike Mann's work for precisely this quality; what I find charming they find didactic, pompous, and self-congratulatory. But the intrusion of the author's delight into the flow of the story was, in the end, what made me love this book. It overrode my confusion about the particulars and made me feel I knew Thomas Mann.

Probably, I will not read this book again. I stopped rereading it annually many years ago, in my late twenties. Back then, I could still tell myself that at, say, fifty, I would know enough to understand The Magic Mountain. Fifty isn't so far away now, but my education has yet to catch up with this book. I guess I have to admit it never will.
The saddest part of this final reading is the other admission I'm forced to make: I will never write The Magic Mountain. That was what I wanted all along. It sounds ridiculous, and I don't mean it literally. But it was the template for my ideal of both Novel and Writer. My books are anthills compared to this one, and with the resignation of middle age I've stopped even making such hopeless comparisons.
But I do sometimes sit at my desk and stare with delight at the wall, thrilled with some perfection I can, for those moments, imagine. It never gets onto the page. All my study of Mann couldn't teach me to be a great writer. But I learned my pleasure in the effort from him.