Chapter VII: By the Ocean of Time (Part 7 of 7)
He preserved a depressed and brooding silence. Herr Settembrini had spoken with composure, logically. But his words sounded strange in his mouth. His thoughts were not his own thoughts, the idea of the duel was one he would never have come upon of himself. He had only taken it over from the terroristic little Naphta. And what he said was but an expression of the strength of that prevailing temper, whose tool and underling Herr Settembrini’s fine understanding had become. What? The intellectual, simply because it was so stem, must lead relentlessly to the animal, to the issue of physical combat? Hans Castorp set himself against it — or at least he tried, only to discover, in affright, that even he was powerless to do so. In him too the prevailing temper was strong, he was not the man to win free. There was an area of his brain where memory showed him Wiedemann and Sonnenschein grappled like animals; and with horror he understood that at the end of everything only the physical remained, only the teeth and the nails. Yes, they must fight; only thus could be assured even that small mitigation of the primitive by the rules of chivalry. Hans Castorp offered to act as Herr Settembrini’s second.
The offer was refused. No, it was not fitting, it would not do, he was told: first by Herr Settembrini himself, with that fine, rueful smile; then, after brief consideration, by Ferge and Wehsal, who also, without specified reason, found it would not do for Hans Castorp to assist at the encounter in this capacity. As a neutral party, perhaps — the presence of such an one was a part of the prescribed chivalrous mitigations — he might be present. Even Naphta, through his second, let it be known that this was his view, and Hans Castorp was satisfied. As witness, or as neutral party, in either case he was able to exert his influence upon the details of the procedure now to be discussed and settled — an influence which proved necessary indeed.
For Naphta’s proposals went beyond all bounds. He demanded a distance of five paces, and, if necessary, three exchanges of fire. These insane conditions he sent by Wehsal the very evening of the quarrel; Wehsal had succeeded in fully identifying himself with Naphta’s mad ideas, and partly as representative, but certainly also in accordance with his personal taste, obstinately insisted upon them. Settembrini, of course, found nothing in them to object to. But Ferge, as second, and the neutral Hans Castorp, were beside themselves, and the latter fell heavily upon the wretched Wehsal. Was he not ashamed to bring forward such frantic and inhuman ideas to meet a case where the injury was purely abstract, not sensible at all? As though pistols were not bad enough, that they must add these murderous conditions 1 Where did the chivalrous mitigation come in? He might as well suggest firing across a handkerchief! He, Wehsal, wac not going to be fired at five paces off — it was easy for him to be blood-thirst v! And so forth. Wehsal shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that precisely that extreme case was a contingency; thus reducing to silence Hans Castorp, who was inclined to forget the fact. But he succeeded, during the negotiations of the following day, in fixing the number of shots at one instead of three, and in dealing with the question of distance so as to arrange that the combatants should be placed fifteen paces apart, and have the right to advance five paces before firing. But in exchange for these concessions, he had to promise that no attempt should be made at reconciling the parties. — It was discovered that none of them had any pistols.
Herr Albin had. Besides the shiny little revolver with which he loved to frighten the ladies, he had a pair of officer’s pistols from Belgium in a velvet case: Browning automatics, with brown wooden butts holding the magazine, blued steel mechanism and shining barrels, with crisp little sights atop. Hans Castorp had seen them in Herr Albin’s room, and against his own convictions, out of sheer compulsion from the prevailing temper, offered to borrow them. He made no concealment of the purpose they were to serve, but appealing to the young swaggerer’s honour, readily swore him to secrecy. Herr Albin instructed him how to load the pistols, and they tested both weapons with blank shots in the open.
All this took time: two days and three nights intervened between the quarrel and the meeting. I he place was of Ham Castorp’s choosing: that picturesque blue-blossoming scene of his retreat and stock-taking activities. On this spot the affair should take place, on the third morning, as soon as there should be light enough to see. The evening before, rather late, it occurred to Hans Castorp, by this time thoroughly wrought up, that there ought to be a physician present.
He immediately advised with Ferge, who foresaw great difficulty. Rhadamanthus himself was an old corps-student, but it would be impossible to ask the head of the establishment to act in an illegal affair, and between patients to boot. It was scarcely like y a doctor could be found who would be walling to lend a hand in a pistol duel between two severe cases. As for Krokowski, or a his brain, it was a question whether the technique of wound treatment would be his strong point. 111 j
Wehsal, who was present, announced that Naphta had already expressed himself to the effect that he wanted no doctor, e was not going to the meeting-place to be salved and bandaged, but to lay about him, and that in grim earnest. It sounded a sinister declaration enough; but Hans Castorp tried to interpret it as meaning that Naphta felt there would be no need of a physician. Ferge too bore back a message from Herr Settembrini, that they might dispose of the question, it did not interest him. It was thus not unreasonable to hope that both antagonists had resolved not to let it come to the shedding of blood. Two nights had passed since the quarrel, and there would be yet a third. Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. In the early dawn, standing weapon in hand, neither of the combatants would be the same man as on the evening of the quarrel. They would be going through it, if at all, mechanically, in obedience to the demands of honour, not, as they would have at first, of their own free will, desire, and conviction; and such a denial of their actual selves in favour of their past ones, it must somehow be possible to prevent.
Hans Castorp’s reflections proved in the event not far from justified; but justified in a manner unlike anything he could have dreamed. So far as Herr Settembrini was concerned, he was entirely right. But had he suspected in what direction Leo Naphta would have altered his intentions beforehand, or at the decisive moment, not even the prevailing temper, of which all this was the outcome, could have driven him to let the affair go on.
At seven o’clock next morning, the sun showed no sign of making an appearance above the mountain; yet day was dawning, difficultly, in a reek of mist, as Hans Castorp, after a restless night, left the Berghof to go to the rendezvous. The maidservants cleaning the hall looked after him in wonder. The house door, however, was unbolted; Ferge and Wehsal, alone or in company, had undoubtedly passed that threshold, the one to accompany Settembrini, the other Naphta, to the field of battle. He, Hans, went alone, his capacity of neutral not permitting him to attach himself to either party.
He moved mechanically, under the compulsion of honour, under pressure from the prevailing temper. It was necessary for him to be present at the encounter — that went without saying. Impossible to stop away and await the event in bed, in the first place because — but he did not finish his firstly, but hastened on to secondly, which was that one could not leave the thing to itself. Thus far, thank Heaven, nothing dreadful had happened; and nothing dreadful need happen, it was really highly improbable that anything would. They had had to get up and dress by artificial light. :°3
and breakfastless, in the bitter frost, betake themselves to the appointed spot. But once there, under the influence of his, Hans Castorp’s presence, the whole thing would surely be turned aside, work out for good — in some manner not yet foreseen, and best left unguessed at, since experience showed that even the simplest events always worked out differently from what one would have thought beforehand.
All which notwithstanding, this was the unpleasantest morning within his memory. He felt stale and seedy his teeth tended to chatter; in the depth of his being he was prone to mistrust his own powers of self-control. These were such singular times. The lady from Minsk, who shattered her health on the point of a quarrel with her corsetiere , the raging schoolboy, Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, the Polish ear-boxes — drearily he thought of them. Simply he could not picture two people, before his eyes, in his presence, standing up to shoot at each other, spill each other’s blood. But when he remembered what it had come to, what he had actually seen, in the case of Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, then he misdoubted himself, misdoubted all the world, and shivered in his fur jacket; though at the same time a feeling of the extraordinariness, the abnormality of all this, heightened by the quality of the early morning air, began now surprisingly to elevate and stimulate him.
In the dusk of that slow’-brightening dawn, moved by such mingled and fluctuating hopes and feelings, he mounted the narrow path along the slope, from the village end of the bob-run, arrived at the deeply drifted woods, crossed the little wooden bridge over the course, and followed a way among the tree-trunks trodden by feet in the snow rather than cleared by any shovel. He walked fast, and very soon overtook Settembrini and Ferge, the latter holding the case of pistols with one hand under his cloak. Hans Castorp did not hesitate to join them, and, coming abreast, was aware of Naphta and Wehsal, only a few paces in advance.
“ Cold morning; at least eighteen degrees of frost,” said he, in the purity of his intentions, but started at the frivolity of his own remark, and added: “ Gentlemen, I am convinced — ”
The others were silent. Ferge’s good-natured moustache wagged up and down. After a while Settembrini came to a pause, took Hans Castorp’s hand, laid his own other one upon it, and spoke.
“ My friend, I will not kill. I will not. I will offer myself to his bullet, that is all that honour can demand. But I will not kill, you may trust me.”
He released the young man and walked on. Hans Castorp was 7°4
deeply moved. After a few steps he said: “ That is splendid of you, Herr Settembrini. Now — on the other side — if he, for his part — ”
But Herr Settembrini shook his head. Hans Castorp reflected that if one party did not fire, the other would surely not be able to bring himself to do it either; and his heart perceptibly lightened. Everything was going well, his predictions seemed about to be verified.
They crossed the foot-bridge over the gorge, where the waterfall hung stiff and silent. Naphta and Wehsal were walking up and down before the bench now upholstered with thick white cushions of snow: the bench on which Hans Castorp, lying to await the end of his nose-bleeding, had experienced such lively memories out of the distant past. Naphta was smoking a cigarette, and Hans Castorp questioned himself if he should do the same, but found he had no faintest desire. It seemed to him an affectation in the other. With the pleasure he always felt in these surroundings, he looked about at them in their icy state and found them not less beautiful than in the season of their blue blossom-time. The fir that jutted so boldly into the picture had its trunk and branches laden with snow.
“ Good-morning,” he said cheerily, with the idea of lending the scene a note of the natural, which should help to dissipate its evil bearing — but was out of luck, for nobody answered. The greetings consisted in silent bows, so stiff as to be almost imperceptible. However, he was resolved to convert the energy from his walk, the splendid warmth engendered by brisk motion in the cold air, at once and without delay to good purpose; and so began: “ Gentlemen, I am convinced — ”
“ You will develop your convictions another time,” Naphta cut him off icily. “ The weapons, if you please,” he added, in the same arrogant tone. Hans Castorp, thus slapped on the mouth, had to look on while Ferge brought out the fatal etui from beneath his cloak, and handed one pistol to Wehsal to pass on to Naphta. Settembrini took the other from Ferge’s hand. The latter in a murmur asked them to make a space, and began measuring off the ground. He marked off the outer limits by lines dug with his heel in the snow, the inner by means of two canes, his own and SettembriniV.
Our good-natured sufferer, what sort of work was this for him? Hans Castorp could not trust his eyes. Ferge was long-legged, he took proper strides, the fifteen paces, at least, were a goodly distance — but the cursed canes, alas, were not far apart at all. Certainly, he was acting in all honour; but what a grip the prevailing 7°5
temper had upon him, to enforce him to a procedure so monstrous in its significance!
Naphta had flung his fur cloak on the ground, so that its mink lining showed. Pistol in hand, he moved to one of the outer barriers directly it was established, and while Ferge was still marking off the other. When that was fixed, Settembrini took up his position, his shabby fur coat open in front. Hans Castorp wrenched himself out of a stealing paralysis, and flung himself once more into the breach.
“ Gentlemen,” he said, choking, don’t be hasty. It is my duty, after all — ”
“ Silence! ” cried out Naphta sharply. “ Give the signal.”
But no one gave the signal. It had not been arranged for. Somebody, of course, ought to say: “ Fire! ” but it had not been realized that it was the office of the neutral party to give the dread sign — at least, it had not been mentioned. Hans Castorp remained silent, and nobody spoke in his place.
“ We will begin,” Naphta declared. “ Come forward, sir, and fire,” he called across to his antagonist, and began himself to advance, holding the pistol at arm’s length, directed at Settembrini — an unbelievable sight. Settembrini did the same. At the third step — . the other, without firing, was already at the barrier — the Italian raised the pistol very high, and fired. The shot awaked repeated echoes, the mountains flung back the sound and the rebound, the valley reverberated with the shock, until it seemed to Hans Castorp people must come running. .
“ You fired in the air,” Naphta said collectedly to Settembrini,
letting his own weapon sink. „
Settembrini answered: “ I fired where it pleased me to fire.
“ You will fire again! ” . .
“ I have no such intention. It is your turn.” Herr Settembrini, lifting his face toward the sky, had turned himself somewhat sidewise to his opponent. It was touching to realize that he a ^ lear one should not offer one’s breast full face to an opponent s fire; and that he was acting according to the regulations.
“ Coward! ” Naphta shrieked; and with this human shriek confessing that it takes more courage to fire than be fired upon, raised his pistol in a way that had nothing to do with duelling, and shot himself in the head. , ,
Piteous, unforgettable sight! He staggered or tottered while the mountains played ball with the sound of his sh°t f wstep backward, flinging out his legs jerkily; execute a rig his whole body, and fell with his face in the snow. They all stood a moment rigid. Settembrini, hurling his weapon from him, was first at Naphta’s side.
“ Infelice! ” he cried. “ Che cosa fai y per P amor di Dio ? ”
Hans Castorp helped him turn the body over. They saw the blackened red hole in the temple. They looked into a face that one would do well to cover with the silk handkerchief, one comer of which hung out of Naphta’s breast pocket.
The Thunderbolt
Seven years Hans Castorp remained amongst those up here. Partisans of the decimal system might prefer a round number, though seven is a good handy figure in its way, picturesque, with a savour of the mythical; one might even say that it is more filling to the spirit than a dull academic half-dozen. Our hero had sat at all seven of the tables in the dining-room, at each about a year, the last being the “ bad ” Russian table, and his company there two Armenians, two Finns, a Bokharian, and a Kurd. He sat at the “ bad ” Russian table, wearing a recent little blond beard, vaguish in cut, which we are disposed to regard as a sign of philosophic indifference to his own outer man. Yes, we will even go further, and relate his carelessness of his person to the carelessness of the rest of the world regarding him. The authorities had ceased to devise him distractions. There was the morning inquiry, as to whether he had slept well, itself purely rhetorical and summary; and that aside, the Hofrat did not address him with any particularity; while Adriatica von Mylendonk — she had, at the time of which we write, a stye in a perfect state of maturity — did so seldom, in fact scarcely ever. They let him be. He was like the scholar in the peculiarly happy state of never being “ asked ” any more; of never having a task, of being left to sit, since the fact of his being left behind is established, and no one troubles about him further — an orgiastic kind of freedom, but we ask ourselves whether, indeed, freedom ever is or can be of any other kind. At all events, here was one on whom the authorities no longer needed to keep an eye, being assured that no wild or defiant resolves were ripening in his breast. He was “ settled,” established. Long ago he had ceased to know where else he should go, long ago he had ceased to be capable of a resolve to return to the flat-land. Did not the very fact that he was sitting at the “ bad ” Russian table witness a certain abandon? No slightest adverse comment upon the said table being intended by the remark! Among all the seven, no single one could be said to possess definite tangible advantages 01 disadvantages. We make bold to say that here was a democracy of tables, all honourable alike. The same tremendous meals were served here as at the others; Rhadamanthus himself occasionally folded his huge hands before the doctor’s place at the head; and the nations who ate there were respectable members of the human race, even though they boasted no Latin, and were not exaggeratedly dainty at their feeding.
Time — yet not the time told by the station clock, moving with a jerk five minutes at once, but rathe, the time of a tiny timepiece, the hand of which one cannot see move, or the time the grass keeps when it grows, so unobservably one would say it does not grow at all, until some morning the fact is undeniable — time, a line composed of a succession of dimensionless points (and now we are sure the unhappy deceased Naphta would interrupt us to ask how dimensionless points, no matter how many of them, can constitute a line), time, we say, had gone on, in its furtive, unobservable, competent way, bringing about changes. For example, the boy Teddy was discovered, one dav — not one single day, of course, but only rather indefinitely from which day — to be a boy no longer. No more might ladies take him on their laps, when, on occasion, he left his bed, changed his pyjamas for his knickerbockers, and came downstairs. Imperceptibly that leaf had turned. Now, on such occasions, he took them on his instead, and both sides were as well, or even better pleased. He was become a youth; scarcely could we say he had bloomed into a youth; but he had shot up. Hans Castorp had not noticed it happening, and then, suddenly, he did. The shooting-up, however, did not suit the lad Teddy; the temporal became him not. In his twenty-first year he departed this life, dying of the disease for which he had proved receptive; and they cleansed and fumigated after him. The fact makes little claim upon our emotions, the change being so slight between his one
state and his next. ,
But there were other deaths, and more important; deaths down in the flat-land, which touched, or would once have touched our hero more nearly. We are thinking of the recent decease of old Consul Tienappel, Hans’s great-uncle and foster-father of faded memory. He had carefully avoided unfavourable conditions of atmospheric pressure, and left it to Uncle James to stu ti y urn self; yet an apoplexy carried him off after all; and a telegram, couched in brief but feeling terms — feeling more or t e epar than for the recipient of the wire — was one day roug Hans Castorp where he lay in his excellent chair. e q some black-bordered note-paper, and wrote to his uncle-cousins: he, the doubly, now, so to say, triply orphaned, expressed himself as being the more distressed over the sad news, for that circumstances forbade him interrupting his present sojourn even to pay his great-uncle the last respects.
To speak of sorrow would be disingenuous. Yet in these days Hans Castorp’s eyes did wear an expression more musing than common. This death, which could at no time have moved him greatly, and after the lapse of years could scarcely move him at all, meant the sundering of yet another bond with the life below; gave to what he rightly called his freedom the final seal. In the time of which we speak, all contact between him and the flat-land had ceased. He sent no letters thither, and received none thence. He no longer ordered Maria Mancini, having found a brand up here to his liking, to which he was now as faithful as once to his old-time charmer: a brand that must have carried even a polar explorer through the sorest and severest trials; armed with which, and no other solace, Hans Castorp could lie and bear it out indefinitely, as one does at the sea-shore. It was an especially well cured brand, with the best leaf wrapper, named “ Light of Asia ”; rather more compact than Maria, mouse-grey in colour with a blue band, very tractable and mild, and evenly consuming to a snow-white ash, that held its shape and still showed traces of the veining on the wrapper; so evenly and regularly that it might have served the smoker for an hour-glass, and did so, at need, for he no longer carried a timepiece. His watch had fallen from his night-table; it did not go, and he had neglected to have it regulated, perhaps on the same grounds as had made him long since give up using a calendar, whether to keep track of the day, or to look out an approaching feast: the grounds, namely, of his “ freedom.” Thus he did honour to his abiding-everlasting, his walk by the ocean of time, the hermetic enchantment to which he had proved so extraordinarily susceptible that it had become the fundamental adventure of his life, in which all the alchemistical processes of his simple substance had found full play.
Thus he lay; and thus, in high summer, the year was once more rounding out, the seventh year, though he knew it not, of his sojourn up here.
Then, like a thunder-peal —
But God forbid and modesty withhold us from speaking overmuch of what the thunder-peal bore us on its wave of sound! Here rodomontade is out of place. Rather let us lower our voice to say that then came the peal of thunder we all know so well; that deafening explosion of long-gathering magazines of passion and spleen. That historic thunder-peal, of which we speak with bated breath, made the foundations of the earth to shake; but for us it was the shock that fired the mine beneath the magic mountain, and set our sleeper ungendv outside the gates. Dazed he sits in the long grass and rubs his eyes — a man who, despite many warnings, had neglected to read the papers.
His Mediterranean friend and mentor had ever tried to prompt him; had felt it incumbent upon him to instruct his nursling, the object of his solicitude, in what was going on down below, but his pupil had lent no ear. The young man had indeed, in a stocktaking way, preoccupied himself with this or that among the subjective shadows of things; but the things themselves he had heeded not at all, having a wilful tendency to take the shadow for the substance, and in the substance to see only shadow. For this, however, we must not judge him harshly, since the relation between substance and shadow has never been defined once and
for all.
Long ago it had been Herr Settembrini who brought sudden illumination into the room, sat down beside the horizontal Hans and sought to influence and instruct him upon matters of life and death. But now it was the pupil, who, seated with his hands between his knees, at the bedside of the humanist, or near his couch in the cosy and retired little mansard study, with the carbonaro chairs and the water-bottle, kept him company and listened courteously to his utterances upon the state of Europe – lor in these days Herr Ludovico was seldom on his legs. iSaphta s violent end, the terroristic deed of that desperate antagonist, had dealt his sensitive nature a blow from which it could scarce y rally; weakness and infirmity had since been his portion, e cou no longer work on the Sociological Pathology; the League waited in vain for that lexicon of all the masterpieces of letters having human suffering for their central theme. Herr Ludovico had p force to limit to oral efforts his contribution t0 thc ot
of progress; and even so much he must ave °reg ,
Hans Castorp’s visits given him opportunity to spread I hi , ospeL His voice was weak, but he spoke with conviction. ^ S mnt and beautifully, upon the self-perfecting o P
through social betterment. Softly, as though on the wings ot
rushing p.n.o.s of «gl~ T>»t was the political key, the grandfatherly inheritance that united in him with the humanistic gift of the father, to make up the litterateur — precisely as humanism and politics united in the lofty ideal of civilization, an ideal wherein were blended the mildness of doves and the boldness of eagles. That ideal was only biding its time, until the day dawned, the Day of the People, when the principle of reaction should be laid low, and the Holy Alliance of civic democracies take its place. Yes, here seemed to sound two voices, with differing counsels. For Herr Settembrini was a humanitarian, yet at the same time, half explicitly, he was warlike too. In the duel with the outrageous little Naphta he had borne himself like a man. But in general it still remained rather vague what his position was to be, when humanity in an outburst of enthusiasm united itself with politics in support of a triumphant and dominating world-civilization, and the burgher’s pike was dedicated upon the altar of humanity. There was some doubt whether he would then hold back his hand from the shedding of blood. Yes, it seemed the prevailing temper more and more held sway in the Italian’s mind and view; the boldness of the eagle was gradually outbidding the mildness of the dove.
Not infrequently his attitude toward the existing great political systems was divided, embarrassed, disturbed by scruples. The diplomatic rapprochement between his country and Austria, their co-operation in Albania, had reflected itself in his conversation: a co-operation that raised his spirits in that it was directed against Latinless half-Asia — knout, Schlusselburg, and all — yet tormented them in that it was a misbegotten alliance with the hereditary foe, with the principle of reaction and subjugated nationalities. The autumn previous, the great French loan to Russia, for the purpose of building a network of railways in Poland, had awakened in him similar misgivings. For Herr Settembrini belonged to the Francophile party in his own country, which was not surprising when one recalled that his grandfather had compared the six days of the July Revolution to the six days of the creation, and seen that they were as good. But the understanding between the enlightened republic and Byzantine Scythia was too much for him, it oppressed his breast, and at the same time made him breathe quicker for hope and joy at the thought of the strategic meaning of that network of railways. Then came the Serajevo murder, for everyone excepting German Seven-Sleepers a storm-signal; decisive for the informed ones, among whom we may reckon Herr Settembrini. Hans Castorp saw him shudder as a private citizen at the frightful deed, while in the same moment his breast heaved 7 ”
with the knowledge that this was a deed of popular liberation directed against the citadel of his loathing. On the other hand’ was it not also the fruit of Muscovite activity, and as such jrivmg rise to great heart-searchings = Which did hot hinder him,*’ three weeks later, from characterizing the extreme demands of the monarchy upon Servia as a hideous crime and an insult to human dignity, the consequences of which he could foresee well enough, and awaited in breathless excitement.
In short, Herr Settembrini’s feelings were as complex as the fatality he saw fast rolling up, for which he sought by hints and half-words to prepare his pupil, a sort of national courtesy and compunction preventing him from speaking out. In the first days of mobilization, the first declaration of war, he had a wav of putting out both hands to his visitor, taking Hans Castorp’s own and pressing them, that fairly went to our young noodle’s heart, if not precisely to his head. “ My friend,” the Italian would say, “ gunpowder, the printing-press, yes, you have certainly given us all that. But if you think we could march against the Revolution — Caro ! …”
During those days of stifling expectation, when the nerves of Europe were on the rack, Hans Castorp did not see Herr Settembrini. The newspapers with their wild, chaotic contents pressed up out of the depths to his very balconv, they disorganized the house, filled the dining-room with their sulphurous, stifling bre ith, even penetrated the chambers of the dying. These were the moments when the “ Seven-Sleeper,” not knowing what had happened, was slowly stirring himself in the grass, before he sat up, rubbed his eyes — yes, let us carry the figure to the end, in order to do justice to the movement of our hero’s mind: he drew up his legs, stood up, looked about him. He saw himself released, freed from enchantment — not of his own motion, lie was fain to confess, but by the operation of exterior powers, of whose activities his own liberation was a minor incident indeed! Yet though his tiny destiny fainted to nothing in the face of the general, was there not some hint of a personal mercy and grace for him, a manifestation of divine goodness and justice^ Would Life receive again her erring and “ delicate ” child — not by a cheap and easy slipping back to her arms, but sternly, solemnly, penitentially — perhaps not even among the living, but only with three salvoes fired over the grave of him a sinner ^ Thus might he return. He sank on his knees, raising face and hands to a heaven that howsoever dark and sulphurous was no longer the gloomy grotto of his state of sin. And in this attitude Herr Settembrini found him — figuratively and most figuratively spoken, for full well we know our hero’s traditional reserve would render such theatricality impossible. Herr Settembrini, in fact, found him packing his trunk. For since the moment of his sudden awakening, Hans Castorp had been caught up in the hurry and scurry of a “ wild ” departure, brought about by the thunder-peal. “ Home ” — the Berghof — was the picture of an ant-hill in a panic: its little population was flinging itself, heels over head, five thousand feet downwards to the catastrophe-smitten flat-land. They stormed the little trains, they crowded them to the footboard — luggageless, if needs must, and the stacks of luggage piled high the station platform, the seething platform, to the height of which the scorching breath from the flat-land seemed to mount — and Hans Castorp stormed with them. In the heart of the tumult Ludovico embraced him, quite literally enfolded him in his arms and kissed him, like a southerner — but like a Russian too — on both his cheeks; and this, despite his own emotion, took our wild traveller no little aback. But he nearly lost his composure when, at the very last, Herr Settembrini called him “ Giovanni ” and, laying aside the form of address common to the cultured West, spoke to him with the thou!
“ E cost in giii” he said. “Cost vai in giu finaimente — addio , Giovanni mio! Quite otherwise had I thought to see thee go. But be it so, the gods have willed it thus and not otherwise. I hoped to discharge you to go down to your work, and now you go to fight among your kindred. My God, it was given to you and not to your cousin, our Tenente! What tricks life plays! Go, then, it is your blood that calls, go and fight bravely. More than that can no man. But forgive me if I devote the remnant of my powers to incite my country to fight where the Spirit and sacro egoismo point the way. Addiof ”
Hans Castorp thrust out his head among ten others, filling the little open window-frame. He waved. And Herr Settembrini waved back, with his right hand, while with the ring-finger of his left he delicately touched the comer of his eye.
What is it? Where are we? Whither has the dream snatched us? Twilight, rain, filth. Fiery glow of the overcast sky, ceaseless booming of heavy thunder; the moist air rent by a sharp singing whine, a raging, swelling howl as of some hound of hell, that ends its course in a splitting, a splintering and sprinkling, a crackling, a coruscation; by groans and shrieks, by trumpets blowing fit to
burst, by the beat of a drum coming fastrr, faster -There is a wood, discharging drab hordes, that come on, fall, spring up again, come on. Beyond, a line of hill stands out against the fiery sky, whose glow turns now and again to blowing flames. About us is rolling plough-land, all upheaved and trodden into mud; athwart it a bemired high road, disguised with broken branches and from it again a deeply furrowed, boggy field-path leading off in curves toward the distant hills. Nude, branchless trunks of trees meet the eye, a cold rain falls. Ah, a signpost’ Useless, though, to question it, even despite the half-dark, for it is shattered, illegible. East, west 5 It is the flat-land, it is the war. And we are shrinking shadows by the wav-side, shamed by the security of our shadowdom, and noways minded to indulge in any rodomontade; merely led hither by the spirit of our narrative, merely to see again, among those running, stumbling, drummustered grey comrades that swarm out of yonder wood, one we know; merely to look once more in the simple face of our one-time fellow of so many years, the genial sinner hose voice we know so well, before we lose him from our sight.
They have been brought forward, these comrades, for a final thrust in a fight that has already lasted all day long, whose objective is the retaking of the hill position and the burning villages beyond, lost two days since to the enem\ . It is a volunteer regiment, fresh young blood and mostly students, not long in the field. They were roused in the night, brought up in trains to morning, then marched in the rain on wretched roads — on no roads at all, for the roads were blocked, and they went over moor and ploughed land with full kit for seven hours, their coats sodden. It was no pleasure excursion. If one did not care to lose one’s boots, one stooped at every second tep, clutched with one’s fingers into the straps and pulled them out of the quaking mire. It took an hour of such work to cover one meadow. But at last they have reached the appointed spot, exhausted, on edge, yet the reserve strength of their youthful bodies has kept them tense, they crave neither the sleep nor the food they have been denied. Their wet, mud-bespattered faces, framed between strap and grey-covered helmet, are flushed with exertion — perhaps too with the sight of the losses they suffered on their march through that boggy wood. For the enemy, aware of their advance, have concentrated a barrage of shrapnel and large-calibre grenades upon the way they must come; it crashed among them in the wood, and howling, flaming, splashing, lasned the wide ploughed land.
They must get through, these three thousand ardent youths; 7*4
they must reinforce with their bayonets the attack on the burning villages, and the trenches in front of and behind the line of hills; they must help to advance their line to a point indicated in the dispatch their leader has in his pocket. They are three thousand, that they may be two thousand when the hills, the villages are reached; that is the meaning of their number. They are a body of troops calculated as sufficient, even after great losses, to attack and carry a position and greet their triumph with a thousand-voiced huzza — not counting the stragglers that fall out by the way. Many a one has thus fallen out on the forced march, for which he proved too young and weak; paler he grew, staggered, set his teeth, drove himself on — and after all he could do fell out notwithstanding. Awhile he dragged himself in the rear of the marching column, overtaken and passed by company after company; at length he remained on the ground, lying where it was not good to lie. Then came the shattering wood. But there are so many of them, swarming on — they can survive a bloodletting and still come on in hosts. They have already overflowed the level, rain-lashed land; the high road, the field road, the boggy ploughed land; we shadows stand amid and among them. At the edge of the wood they fix their bayonets, with the practised grips; the horns enforce them, the drums roll deepest bass, and forward they stumble, as best they can, with shrill cries; mghtmarishly, for clods of earth cling to their heavy boots and fetter them.
They fling themselves down before the projectiles that come howling on, then they leap up again and hurry forward; they exult, in their young, breaking voices as they run, to discover themselves still unhit. Or they are hit, they fall, fighting the air with their arms, shot through the forehead, the heart, the belly. They lie, their faces in the mire, and are motionless. They lie, their backs elevated by the knapsack, the crowns of their heads pressed into the mud, and clutch and claw in the air. But the wood emits new swarms, who fling themselves down, who spring up, who, shrieking or silent, blunder forward over the fallen.
Ah, this young blood, with its knapsacks and bayonets, its mud-befouled boots and clothing! We look at it, our humanisticaesthetic eye pictures it among scenes far other than these: we see these youths watering horses on a sunny arm of the sea; roving with the beloved one along the strand, the lover’s lips to the ear of the yielding bride; in happiest rivalry bending the bow. Alas, no, here they lie, their noses in fiery filth. They are glad to be here — albeit with boundless anguish, with unspeakable sickness Tr home; and this, of itself, is a noble and a shaming thing — but no good reason for bringing them to such a pass.
There is our friend, there is Hans Castorp! We recognize Lim at a distance, by the little beard he assumed while sitting at the “ bad ” Russian table. Like all the others, he is wet through and glowing. He is running, his feet heavy with mould, the bayonet swinging in his hand. Look! He treads on the hand of a fallen comrade; with f is hobnailed boot he treads the hand deep into the slimy, branch-strewn ground. But it is he. What, singing^ As one sings, unaware, staring stark ahead, yes, thus he spends his hurrying breath, to sing half soundlessly:
“ And loving words I’ve carven Upon its branches fair — ”
He stumbles, No, he has flung himself down, a hell-hound is coming howling, a huge explosive shell, a disgusting sugar-loaf from the infernal regions. He lies with his face in the cool mire, legs sprawled out, feet twisted, heels turned down. The product of a perverted science, laden with death, slopes earthward thirty paces in front of him and buries its nose in the ground; explodes inside there, with hideous expense of power, and raises up a fountain high as a house, of mud, fire, iron, molten metal, scattered fragments of humanity. Where it fell, two youths had lain, friends who in their need flung themselves down together — now the)
are scattered, commingled and gone.
Shame of our shadow-safety! Away! No more! -But our friend ^ Was he hit* He thought so, for the moment. A great clod of earth struck him on the shin, it hurt, but he smiles at it Up he gets, and staggers on, limping on his earth-bound feet, all unconsciously singing:
“ Its waving branches whi — ispered A mess — age in my ear — ”
and thus, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, vanishes out ot
Farewell, honest Hans Castorp, farewell, Life’s ; dehcate MW Your tale is told. We have told it to the end, and it was neithe Z, Z long, but hermetic. We have told it for own stfe
not for yours, for you were simple. But a rer ® ’ thought story it befell you, you must have more in you than we thought we Sill not diLlaim the pedagogic weakness wc concerned for you in the telling; which could even lead us to press a finger delicately to our eyes at the thought that we shall see you no more, hear you no more for ever.
Farewell — and if thou livest or diest! Thy prospects are poor. The desperate dance, in which thy fortunes are caught up, will last yet many a sinful year; we should not care to set a high stake on thy life by the time it ends. We even confess that it is without great concern we leave the question open. Adventures of the flesh and in the spirit, while enhancing thy simplicity, granted thee to know in the spirit what in the flesh thou scarcely couldst have done. Moments there were, when out of death, and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to thee, as thou tookest stock of thyself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount? T/ze litfczg ic ]VIo zt tc/ 2/2 The Magic Mountain
Since it is certainly not customary for an author to discuss his own work, perhaps a word of apology, or at least of explanation, should occupy first place. For the thought of acting as my own historian I find a little confusing; and, you know, there are few impartial historians anyway. Furthermore, since my work is still in the making and, I venture to hope, still reflects the present and its problems, it would be rather difficult, if not impossible, to criticize it with scholarly detachment — even if the critic were not , at the same time, the author.
In selecting my Magic Mountain for discussion, I base the choice on the sympathetic interest that this one of all my books received in America. Likewise, when I tell you freely of the book’s genesis and my experiences with it, I am reiving on the healthy and sympathetic attitude of the American nnnd toward the personal, the anecdotal, and the intimately human.
Oddly enough, it is not a difficulty for me, but rather the reverse, that I have to discuss The Magic Mountain in English. I am reminded of the hero of my novel, the young engineer lfn K Castorp. At the end of the first volume, he makes an extraordinary declaration of love to Madame Chauchat, the Kirghiz-eyed heroine, veiling its strangeness in the garment of a foreign tongue. It eases his embarrassment and helps him to say things he could never have dared say in his own language. “ Parler franpais he says, “ e’est parler satis parler , en quelque mamere .” In short, it helps him over his inhibitions — and an author who feels embarrassed at having to talk about his own works is in the same way relieved at being able to talk about them in another language.
There are authors whose names are associated wfith a single great work, because they have been able to give themselves complete expression in it. Dante is the Divina Commedia , Cervantes is Don Quixote. But there are others — and I must count myself among them — whose single works do not possess this complete significance, being only parts of the whole which makes up the author’s lifework. And not only his lifework, but actually his life itself, his personality. He strives, that is, to overcome the laws of time and continuity. He tries to produce himself completely in each thing he writes, but only actually does so in the way The Magic Mountain does it; I mean by the use of the leitmotiv, the magic formula that works both ways, and links the past with the future, the future with the past. The leitmotiv is the technique employed to preserve the inward unity and abiding presentness of the whole at each moment.
In a broader sense, the whole lifework of the author has its leading motifs, which serve to preserve its unity, to make that unity perceptible to the reader, and to keep the whole picture present in each single work. But just for that reason, it may be unfair to the single work to look at it by itself, disregarding its connection with the others, and not taking into account the frame of reference to which it belongs. For instance, it is almost impossible to discuss The Magic Mountain without thinking of the links that connect it with other works; backwards in time to Buddenbrooks and to Death in Venice; forwards to the Joseph novels. Let me first of all tell you something of the origin and conception of the novel, just as events in my life brought them about.
In the year 1912 — over a generation ago now — my wife was suffering from a lung complaint, fortunately not a very serious one; yet it was necessary for her to spend six months at a high altitude, in a sanatorium at Davos, Switzerland, I stayed with the children either in Munich or at our country home in Tolz, in the valley of the Isar. But in May and June I visited my wife for some weeks at Davos. There is a chapter in The Magic Mountain , entitled “ Arrival,” where Hans Castorp dines with his cousin Joachim in the sanatorium restaurant, and tastes not only the excellent Berghof cuisine but also the atmosphere of the place and the life “ bei uns hier obenT If you read that chapter, you will have a fairly accurate picture of our meeting in this sphere and my own strange impressions of it.
The impressions grew stronger and stronger during the three weeks I spent at Davos visiting my wife while she was a patient. They are the same three weeks Hans Castorp originally meant to spend at Davos — though for him they turned into the seven fairytale years of his enchanted stay. I may even say that they threatened to do the same for me. At least one of his experiences is a pretty exact transference to my hero of things that happened to me; I mean the examination of the carefree visitor from the “ flatland,” and the resulting discovery that he himself is to become a patient too!
I had been at the so-called Berghof ten days, sitting out on the balcony in cold, damp weather, when I got a troublesome bronchial cold. Two specialists were in the house, the head physician and his assistant, so I took the obvious course of consulting them. I accompanied my wife to the office, she having been summoned to one of her regular examinations. The head doctor, who of course looked rather like Hofrat Behrens, thumped me about and straightway discovered a so-called moist spot in my lung.
If I had been Hans Castorp, the discovery might have charged the whole course of my life. The physician assured me that I should be acting wisely to remain there for six months and take the cure. If I had followed his advice, who knows, I might still be there! I wrote The Magic Mountain instead. In it I made use of the impressions gathered during my three weeks’ stay. They were enough to convince me of the dangers of such a milieu for young people — and tuberculosis is a disease of the young. You will have got from my book an idea of the narrowness of this charmed circle of isolation and invalidism. It is a sort of substitute existence, and it can, in a relatively short time, wholly wean a young person from actual and active life. Everything there, including the conception of time, is thought of on a luxurious scale. The cure is always a matter of several months, often of several years. But after the first six months the young person has not a single idea left save flirtation and the thermometer under his tongue. After the second six months in many cases he has even lost the capacity for any other ideas. He will become completely incapable of life in the flatland.
Such institutions as the Berghof were a typical pre-war phenomenon. They were only possible in a capitalistic economy that was still functioning well and normally. Only under such a system was it possible for patients to remain there year after year at the family’s expense. The Magic Mountain became the swan song of that form of existence. Perhaps it is a general rule that epics descriptive of some particular phase of life tend to appear as it nears its end. The treatment of tuberculosis has entered upon a different phase today; and most of the Swiss sanatoria have become sports hotels.
The idea of making a story out of my Davos impressions and experiences occurred to me very soon. After finishing the noveJ ?22
Royal Highness I wrote the long short story Death in Venice . This I had nearly finished when I went to Davos; and I now conceived the idea of The Magic Mountain (from the very first the tale bore that title). It was meant as a humorous companion-piece to Death in Venice and was to be about the same length: a sort of satire on the tragedy just finished. The atmosphere was to be that strange mixture of death and lightheadedness I had found at Davos. Death in Venice portrays the fascination of the death idea, the triumph of drunken disorder over the forces of a life consecrated to rule and discipline. In The Magic Mountain the same theme was to be humorously treated. There was to be a simpleminded hero, in conflict between bourgeois decorum and macabre adventure. The end of the story was not decided, but it would come as I wrote. It seemed an easy and amusing thing to do, and would not take much time. When I got back to Tolz and Munich I set to work on the first chapters.
A private intuition soon began to steal over me that this subject matter tended to spread itself out and lose itself in shoreless realms of thought. I could not conceal from myself the fact -that the theme afforded a dangerously rich complex of ideas. Perhaps I am not the only author who tends to underestimate the extent of an enterprise he has embarked on. When I conceive a piece of work, it comes to me in such innocent, practicable guise, I feel sure I shall have no great difficulty in carrying it out. My first novel, Buddenbrooks, was meant to be a book of some two hundred and fifty pages, after the pattern of Scandinavian novels of family and merchant life. It became two fat volumes. Death in V enice was to be a short story for a magazine. The same thing is true of the Joseph novels; they were to be something in the form of a story, about the length of Death in Venice. The Magic Mountain proved no exception to the rule. Perhaps this self-deception is necessary and fruitful. If a writer had before him from the start all the possibilities and all the drawbacks of a projected work, and knew what the book itself wanted to be, he might never have the courage to begin. It is possible for a work to have its own will and purpose, perhaps a far more ambitious one than the author’s — and it is good that this should be so. For the ambition should not be a personal one; it must not come before the work itself. The work must bring it forth and compel the task to completion. Thus, I feel, all great works were written, and not out of an ambition to write something great which set itself from the beginning.
In short, I soon saw that this Davos story had its own ideas and 7^3
that it thought about itself quite otherwise than I thought about it. This was even outwardly true. The humorous and expansive English style, itself a relief from the austerity of Death in Venice , took up space and time. Then the First World War broke out. It did two things: put an immediate stop to my work on the book, and incalculably enriched its content at the same time. I did not work on it again for years.
In those years I wrote The Reflections of a Non-Fohtical Man , a work of painful introspection, in which I sought light upon my own views of European problems and conflicts. Actually, it became a preparation for the work of art itself ; a preparation that grew to mammoth proportions and consumed vast amounts of time. Goethe once called his Faust “ this very serious jest.” Well, my preparation was for a work of art which could only become a jest — a very serious jest — by dint of my unburdening myself of a quantity of material in the polemical and analytical piece of writing. “ This very serious jest.” It is a good definition of art, of all art, of The Magic Mountain as well. I could not have jested and played without first living through my problem in deadly, human reality. Only then could I rise, as an artist, above it.
In 1924, at last, appeared the two volumes that had grown out of my proposed short story. Including the long interruptions, they had taken me not seven but actually twelve years of my life. Its reception might have been much less friendly than it was, and still would have surpassed my expectations. It is my way, when I have finished a book, to let it drop with a resigned shrug and not the faintest confidence in its chances in the world. The charm it once possessed for me, its sponsor, has long since vanished; that I have finished it at all is a feat due to my convictions regarding the ethics of craftsmanship — due indeed, at bottom, to obtmaev and, altogether, obstinacy seems to me to have played such a part in these crabbed years-long preoccupations. I regard them so much as a highly dubious private enjoyment that I question the likelihood of anyone caring to follow on the track of my idiosyn-
crasies. ,
My surprise is the greater when, as has happened to me lep edlyf they are welcomed by an almost turbulent following; and m the case of The Magic Mountain my astonishment was particularly profound. Would anyone expect that a harassed public economically oppressed, would take it on itsel to P^ r ^ e twelve hundred pages the dreamlike ramifications o gni
of thought? Would, under the circumstances then Pjyadmg, more than a few hundred people be found, willing to spend money and time on such odd entertainment, which had really little or nothing in common with a novel in the usual sense of the word ? Certain it is that ten years earlier the book would not have found readers — nor could it even have been written. It needed the experiences that the author had in common with his countrymen; these he had betimes to let ripen within him, and then, at the favorable moment, as once before, to come forward with his bold production. The subject matter of The Magic Mountain was not by its nature suitable for the masses. But with the bulk of the educated classes these were burning questions, and the national crisis had produced in the general public precisely that alchemical “ keying up ” in which had consisted the actual adventure of young Hans Castorp. Yes, certainly the German reader recognized himself in the simple-minded but shrewd young hero of the novel. He could and would be guided by him.
The Magic Mountain is a very German book, and that might be the reason foreign critics very much underestimated its universal appeal. A Swedish critic, member of the Swedish Academy, with a decisive voice in the Nobel Prize awards, told me in public, and very decidedly, that nobody would dare to venture a translation of this book in a foreign language, as it was absolutely unsuited to such a purpose. That was a false prophecy. The Magic Mountain has been translated into all the European languages, and, so far as I can judge, no other of my books has had an equal success — I may say with pride that this is especially the case in America.
Now what is there that I can say about the book itself, and the best way to read it? I shall begin with a very arrogant request that it be read not once but twice. A request not to be heeded, of course, if one has been bored at the first reading. A work of art must not be a task or an effort; it must not be undertaken against one’s will. It is meant to give pleasure, to entertain and enliven. If it does not have this effect on a reader, he must put it down and turn to something else. But if you have read The Magic Mountain once, I recommend that you read it twice. The way in which the book is composed results in the reader’s getting a deeper enjoyment from the second reading. Just as in music one needs to know a piece to enjoy it properly, I intentionally used the word “ composed ” in referring to the writing of a book. I mean it in the sense we more commonly apply to the waiting of music. For music has always had a strong formative influence upon the style of my writing. Writers are very often “ really ” 7 2 5
something else; they are transplanted painters or sculptors or architects or what not. To me the novel was always like a symphony, a work in counterpoint, a thematic fabric; the idea of the musical motif plays a great role in it.
People have pointed out the influence of Wagner’s music on my work. Certainly I do not disclaim this influence. In particular, I followed Wagner in the use of the leitmotiv, which I carried over into the work of language. Not as Tolstoy and Zola use it, or as I used it myself in Buddenbrooks , naturalistically and as a means of characterization — so to speak, mechanically. I sought to employ it in its musical sense. My first attempts were in Tomo Kroger. But the technique I there employed is in The Magic Mountain greatly expanded; it is used in a very much more complicated and all-pervasive way. That is why I make my presumptuous plea to my readers to read the book twice. Only so can one really penetrate and enjoy its musical association of ideas. The first time, the reader learns the thematic material; he is then in a position to read the symbolic and allusive formulas both forwards and backwards.
I return to something I spoke of before: the mystery of the time element, dealt with in various ways in the book. It is in a double sense a time-romance. First in a historical sense, in that it seeks to present the inner significance of an epoch, the pre-war period of European history. And secondly, because time is one of its themes: time, dealt with not only as a part of the hero’s experience, but also in and through itself. The book itself is the substance of that which it relates: it depicts the hermetic enchantment of its young hero within the timeless, and thus seeks to abrogate time itself by means of the technical device that attempts to give complete presentness at any given moment to the entire world of ideas that it comprises. It tries, in other words, to establish a magical nunc stans , to use a formula of the scholastics. It pretends to give perfect consistency to content and form, to the apparent and the essential, its aim is always and consistently to be that of which it speaks.
But its pretensions are even more far-reaching, for the book deals with yet another fundamental theme, that of “ heightening,” enhancement (St ei gerung) . This Steigerung is always referred to as alchemistic. You will remember that my Hans is really a simpleminded hero, the young scion of good Hamburg society, and an indifferent engineer. But in the hermetic, feverish atmosphere of the enchanted mountain, the ordinary stuff of which he is made undergoes a heightening process that makes him capable of adventures in sensual, moral, intellectual spheres he would never have dreamed of in the “ flatland.” His story is the story of a heightening process, but also as a narrative it is the heightening process itself. It employs the methods of the realistic novel, but actually it is not one. It passes beyond realism by means of symbolism, and makes realism a vehicle for intellectual and ideal elements.
All the characters suffer this same process; they appear to the reader as something more than themselves — in effect they are nothing but exponents, representatives, emissaries from worlds, principalities, domains of the spirit. I hope this does not mean that they are mere shadow figures and walking parables. And I have been reassured on this score; for many readers have told me that they have found Joachim, Claudia Chauchat, Peeperkorn, Settembrini, very real people indeed.
The book, then, both spatially and intellectually, outgrew the limits its author had set. The short story became a thumping twovolume novel — a misfortune that would not have happened if The Magic Mountain had remained, as many people even today still see it, a satire on life in a sanatorium for tubercular patients. When it appeared, it made a stir in professional circles, partly of approval, partly of the opposite, and there was a little tempest in the medical journals. But the critique of sanatorium therapeutic methods is only the foreground of the novel. Its actuality lies in the quality of its backgrounds. Settembrini, the rhetorical rationalist and humanist, remains the protagonist of the protest against the moral perils of the Liegekur and the entire unwholesome milieu. He is but one figure among many, however — a sympathetic figure, indeed, with a humorous side; sometimes a mouthpiece for the author, but by no means the author himself. For the author, sickness and death, and all the macabre adventures his hero passes through, are just the pedagogic instrument used to accomplish the enormous heightening and enhancement of the simple hero to a point far beyond his original competence. And precisely as a pedagogic method they are extensively justified; for even Hans Castorp, in the course of his experiences, overcomes his inborn attraction to death and arrives at an understanding of a humanity that does not, indeed, rationalistically ignore death, nor scorn the dark, mysterious side of life, but takes account of it, without letting it get control over his mind.
What he comes to understand is that one must go through the deep experience of sickness and death to arrive at a higher sanity 7 2 7
and health; in just the same way that one must have a knowledge of sin in order to find redemption. “ There are,” Hans Castorp once says, “ two ways to life: one is the regular, direct and good way; the other is bad, it leads through death, and that is the way of genius.” It is this notion of disease and death as a necessary route to knowledge, health, and life that makes The Magic Mountain a novel of initiation.
That description is not original with me. I got it recently from a critic and make use of it in discussing The Magic Mountain because I have been much helped by foreign criticism and I consider it a mistake to think that the author himself is the best judge of his work. He may be that while he is still at work on it and living in it. But once done, it tends to be something he has got rid of, something foreign to him; others, as time goes on, will know more and better about it than he. They can often remind him of things in it he has forgotten or indeed never quite knew. One always needs to be reminded; one is by no means always in possession of one’s whole self. Our consciousness is feeble; only in moments of unusual clarity and vision do we really know about ourselves. As for me, I am glad to be instructed by critics about myself, to learn from them about my past works and go back to them in my mind. My regular formula of thanks for such refreshment of my consciousness is: “I am most grateful to you for having so kindly recalled me to myself.” I am sure I wrote that to Professor Hermann Weigand of Yale University when he sent me his book on The Magic Mountain , the most fundamental and comprehensive critical treatment the work has received.
I read a manuscript by a young scholar of Harvard University, Howard Nemerov, called “ The Quester Hero. Myth as Universal Symbol in the Works of Thomas Mann,” and it considerably refreshed my memory and my consciousness of myself. The author places The Magic Mountain and its simple hero in the line of a great tradition that is not only German but universal. He classifies it as an art that he calls “ The Quester Legend,” which reaches very far back in tradition and folklore. Faust is of course the most famous German representative of the form, but behind Faust, the eternal seeker, is a group of compositions generally known as the Sangraal or Holy Grail romances. Their hero, be it Gawain or Galahad or Perceval, is the seeker, the quester, who ranges heaven and hell, makes terms with them, and strikes a pact with the unknown, with sickness and evil, with death and the other world, with the supernatural, the world that in The Magic Mountain is called “ questionable.” He is forever searching for the Grail that is to say, the Highest: knowledge, wisdom, consecration, the philosophers’ stone, the aurum potabile , the elixir of life.
The writer declares that Hans Castorp is one of these seekers. Perhaps he is right. The Quester of the Grail legend, at the beginning of his wanderings, is often called a fool, a great fool, a guileless fool. That corresponds to the naivete and simplicity of my hero. It is as though a dim awareness of the traditional had made me insist on this quality of his. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister — is he too not a guileless fool? To a great extent he is identified with his creator; but even so, he is always the object of his irony. Here we see Goethe’s great novel, too, falling within the Quester category. And after all, what else is the German Bildungsroman (educational novel) — a classification to which both The Alagic Mountain and Wilhelm Meister belong — than the sublimation and spiritualization of the novel of adventure 2 The seeker of the Grail, before he arrives at the Sacred Castle, has to undergo various frightful and mysterious ordeals in a wayside chapel called the Atre Perilleux. Probably these ordeals were originally rites of initiation, conditions of the permission to approach the esoteric mystery; the idea of knowledge, wisdom, is always bound up with the “ other world,” with night and death.
In The Magic Mountain there is a great deal said of an alchemistic, hermetic pedagogy, of tratisubstantiation. And I, myself a guileless fool, was guided by a mysterious tradition, for it is those very words that are always used in connection with the mysteries of the Grail. Not for nothing do Freemasonry and its rites play a role in The Magic Mountain , for Freemasonry is the direct descendant of initiatory rites. In a word, the magic mountain is a variant of the shrine of the initiatory rites, a place of adventurous investigation into the mystery of life. And my Hans Castorp, the Bildungsreisende , has a very distinguished knightly and mystical ancestry: he is the typical curious neophyte — curious in a high sense of the word — who voluntarily, all too voluntarily, embraces disease and death, because his very first contact with them gives promise of extraordinary enlightenment and adventurous advancement, bound up, of course, with correspondingly great risks.
Young Nemerov’s is a most able and charming commentary. I have used it to help me instruct you — and myself — about my novel, this late, complicated, conscious and yet unconscious link in a great tradition. Hans Castorp is a searcher after the Holy Grail. You would never have thought it when you read his story — if I did myself, it was both more and less than thinking. Perhaps you will read the book again from this point of view. And perhaps 7 2 9
you will find out what the Grail is: the knowledge and the wisdom, the consecration, the highest reward, for which not only the foolish hero but the book itself is seeking. You will find it in the chapter called “ Snow,” where Hans Castorp, lost on the perilous heights, dreams his dream of humanity. If he does not rind the Grail, yet he divines it, in his deathly dream, before he is snatched downwards from his heights into the European catastrophe. It is the idea of the human being, the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death. The Grail is a mystery, but humanity is a mystery too. For man himself is a mystery, and all humanity rests upon reverence before the mystery that is man.
Part 30 of 30