A Peak Experience

If literary critics are to be believed, understanding literature requires an analytical approach. We all know, however, that our experience of a particular book or author is often bound up with where we happen to be in life. In that sense, reading is as much about self-discovery as discovery of what the author meant. Perhaps the great books are those which can accommodate the widest possible range of reader experiences of whatever time and place. Certainly the circumstances in which I read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) bore little relation to those of its first German readers in the era of the Weimar Republic. Yet connections emerged in the most surprising ways.

In late August 1969 I arrived in St Louis, Missouri, from the UK to embark upon a postgraduate degree in literature. Washington University had a fine pedigree – its founder was T. S. Eliot’s grandfather – and a reputation as the ‘Harvard of the Midwest’. Among recent appointments to the teaching staff was the eminent poet Howard Nemerov. Knowing the name but little else about him, I signed up for a course of ‘independent study’ which meant meeting him once a week to discuss a mutually agreed selection of books. Since my chief interest was American poetry, and Nemerov was among the leading living poets, our syllabus chose itself: we would start with the early twentieth- century greats – Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams – and work down to the present. After a few weeks it became apparent that Nemerov was bored with these poets, and perhaps with me too. I confronted him: ‘You don’t seem very interested in these people. Perhaps we should read something else.’ ‘What do you suggest?’ he asked. I proposed Thomas Mann. I had read some of the shorter works such as Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice and also his late masterpiece Dr Faustus, a work probably better left till later in life but which, despite my dim understanding, had given me an appetite for Mann’s preoccupation with big ideas and in particular the demonic in human experience. ‘How about The Magic Mountain?’ I said. Nemerov’s face lit up in a way it had never done with the poets. Only later did I find out why. Over the next four or five days I read H. T. Lowe-Porter’s translation in what I can only describe as a trance. It remains the most intense and absorbing reading experience I have ever had. I lived inside this book and came out the other side feeling a vivid identification with the world it portrayed. It was a milestone in my experience of life no less than of literature, a kind of coming of age, and indeed The Magic Mountain is in the great German tradition of the Bildungsroman. Precisely how the discussions with Professor Nemerov went I hardly remember, but I must surely have calmed down and done what students of literature are supposed to do, which is to analyse ‘the text’ with some detachment, presumably more or less as follows. The story is simple in outline. A young, recently qualified engineer called Hans Castorp travels from his home in Hamburg to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joachim who has been a patient there for six months. Castorp had planned a three-week visit but stays for seven years as a resident-cum-patient. He surrenders more or less gracefully to his new reality, becoming a citizen of an alternative world, far removed from ‘the flatlands down below’ whence he had come. His native curiosity renders him alert to certain unexpected attractions of the place. The sanatorium houses a collection of remarkable characters whose combined effect is to provide Castorp with an education, not least the quintessential Enlightenment humanist Herr Settembrini, and the dark Jesuitical apostle of irrationality Herr Naphtha. In his discussions with these imposing individuals Castorp is pulled one way and another by arguments over the deepest moral and intellectual questions in Western civilization. And of course Castorp falls in love, though it brings as much frustration as anything else. Along the way, he encounters two peak experiences, first of the Walpurgisnacht (or Night of the Witches), which is in effect a celebration of the death force, and second, an intense, dream-like vision which comes to him as he is lost in a snowstorm. Here the lesson is a positive one of seizing hold of life. In the light of these experiences the ‘lessons’ of Settembrini and Naphtha look inadequate and abstract. Indeed the whole sanatorium experience comes to seem lacking in life, and it is life, in the form of news of impending war down in the ‘flatlands’, which finally prompts Castorp’s decision to leave the sanatorium and rejoin the human stream. He joins it just as the First World War is beginning and we are left at the end with a glimpse of him in the thick of battle surrounded by other young men going, presumably, to their deaths. There are so many layers to this novel that even several readings fail to exhaust them. Yet the spark which lit the whole book for me on first reading was the figure of Hans Castorp, the seeker after light in a world of darkness. This is where we move from the realm of literary criticism to that of self-discovery. Is it so surprising that a somewhat impressionable 21-year-old, seeking answers to the big questions, and suddenly plunged into a different world, should experience an affinity with Hans Castorp? My world bore little relation to the Swiss sanatorium in which Hans Castorp found himself; nor did I linger seven years in the university. Yet I too was engaged in a struggle to come to terms with life. In my case, besides the usual confusions of early adulthood, it took the form of deep dissatisfaction with the studies to which I had apparently committed myself and a related sense that they bore little connection to the ‘real world’. That world was in turmoil over the Vietnam War and the society which had produced it. The classroom where I read the great authors was my sanatorium; of the world outside I knew very little. The gap was unbearable, the solution obvious – I had to leave my ivory tower, get out there and try to understand what was happening. After one semester at Washington University I dropped out. I had to participate. Of course, I cannot say The Magic Mountain led me to abandon academe. Nothing is ever that simple. What it did, I think, was to nudge me in a direction I was going already, but in a way that provided me with an intellectual justification for my decision. Leaving the comfortable walls of the university was a positive way forward, not an abandonment. I didn’t go to war like Hans Castorp but I did engage with a more or less chaotic world in which my future was uncertain. In short, what stuck with me from the novel was Hans Castorp’s decision to take action, which had the liberating effect of breaking the spell that bound him to the lifeless life of the sanatorium. And then, sometime after I had finished studying with Nemerov, I stumbled on an essay by Thomas Mann on the making of The Magic Mountain, published in America in the 1950s and reprinted as an afterword to my edition of the novel. In it Mann refers to a young scholar, Howard Nemerov, who had written a prize-winning undergraduate essay on the theme of ‘The Quester Hero in the Works of Thomas Mann’. ‘Young Nemerov’s is a most able and charming commentary,’Mann wrote, ‘and it considerably refreshed my memoryand my consciousness of myself.’ Nemerov was just 20 when his essay won the prestigious 1940 Bowdoin Prize at Harvard University. Within the year, well before the United States entered the Second World War, Nemerov had joined the Canadian airforce to fight Hitler and then, when America entered the war in December 1941, transferred to the US airforce as a fighter pilot Nemerov did not, like Castorp, disappear into the mists of battle.Nor do I have any way of knowing whether he shared my sense of the significance of Hans Castorp’s decision to act. What is clear is that Nemerov identified strongly with the quest at the heart of The Magic Mountain and also that he went to war, not as a conscript but as a volunteer. The Nemerov I met was approaching 50 but in thinking about his essay written thirty years before, I was suddenly and sharply aware of fellowship with the younger Nemerov as well as with Hans Castorp – youthful seekers all after the grail of truth and understanding. I also now knew why Professor Nemerov’s face had lit up at my suggestion that we should read The Magic Mountain.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Richard Crockatt 2018