Two Years of Mostly About Stories

Mostly About Stories has been going for about two years now. I was tempted to give a little summary or whatever at the end of the year, but on balance doing it now makes sense. At the end of any year, and especially one such as that which has just passed, there’s so much to go over that the development of a little blog really has no claim to anyone’s attention.

But what is exciting is that this blog is no longer just a little blog at all.

I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. The blog has grown, massively, in relation to itself. As far as its relation to other book blogs goes, I have not the faintest idea of whether I’m doing well or badly here. Well, actually, I have the most recent version of the same survey that I mentioned when I posted one year ago. According to this, in some respects I’m doing quite well indeed.

One year ago, last January, I had 1078 views on the blog for that month, which worked out as 35 views a day. This month, still unfinished, sees me already at 2738 and with an average of 111 per day. This would put me in the top quartile by pageviews according to the survey. Last year, with the exception of a dip in February, every month was larger than the last. Things just built up, slowly but surely. As they should.

I shouldn’t worry about views, but I do enjoy thinking that people read my blog. Last year I had one follower – a friend. This year I have almost twenty, and almost all of them are unknown to me. The same is true of comments. I now have a few. Not a huge amount, but enough to be excited about. Engagement is what I’m after, really, with this blog. I want a place where people read and want to have their say.

Identity

But it is difficult, because the identity problems I mentioned last year are still present. What exactly is Mostly About Stories? I have long analyses, such as my pieces on Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” (still the most popular piece by far), short poems such as this one by Baratynsky, pieces focusing on a particular aspect of a novel like my thoughts on character in Nostromo, and more general pieces, like this one on Misotheism. It is perfectly reasonable for a blog to be varied in its contents. Just as Borges declared that Kafka created his own precursors, so too do I create my own readers. But that tension between a blog that’s a mess and a blog that’s held together by a unity – some stance, or perhaps my own character – is one that I’ve not resolved.

Even so, this year has been good for the blog’s “intellectual” development. I wrote some long pieces I had wanted to for a while, such as my thing on late Tolstoy, and some shorter more conversational pieces, like my thoughts on how many books to read. I wrote on books that I enjoyed, and on books that I studied, as usual. I do still struggle with knowing what to write. With a book that I’m studying, there’s always an element of teaching involved. I want my readers to learn something, and since the books can be obscure or not available in English, they perhaps do. But when it’s a book that everyone is familiar with, or a book that is long, I’m left flummoxed. Last year I read both War and Peace and Wuthering Heights and I had absolutely no idea what to say about them. Everything’s been said already.

This possibly reflects bad reading habits on my part. I’m not sure I quite “got” Wuthering Heights, though I did have stuff to say about it. But I think it also reflects an unwillingness to write shorter pieces. One thing that I’ve been somewhat adamant about in the past is that Mostly About Stories is for longer pieces, of around 1500 words or more. Yet sometimes I don’t have that much to say, or I want to focus on something small. I wanted to write about education in Wuthering Heights but didn’t know how to make it into a good enough size.

This is an idiotic stance to have. People’s attention drops off rapidly at about 1500 words anyway. Why force people to read more? Perhaps in the future I should aim for something like 1000-1500, but ensure the content is good and tight. Or perhaps I should just let each piece take its own length. All of these ideas have merit.

Reading

Last year, which I spent mostly in Russia with a little time in Cambridge at the end, was a good year for reading. John Williams’ Augustus and Butcher’s Crossing, Marilynne Robison’s Gilead, Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March and Job, Richard Holmes’ Footsteps – all of these are books that have left their mark on me, by authors who were mostly new to me. Then there was Sally Rooney, who is exciting even as I’m somewhat ambivalent towards her work.

This year promises more discoveries. My degree at Cambridge finishes in the summer, leaving me for the first time in a very long time completely free to read whatever I want. It is a great opportunity, as well as a great burden. I am confident I will find something to read. I already have a lot of things I want to. Much more befogged lies my future beyond this blog. Do I get a job, do I do a master’s degree, do I run away into the mountains and become a full-time writer? All of these are possible, as are some less pleasant variants. Only time will tell which fate has decided for me.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Come again.

Here’s a dreadful poem for your time:

I’d Rather (by Konstantin Balmont)

I wouldn't want to be a storm, 
There's too much thunder brewing there. 
I'd rather be the dew at dawn, 
Whose quiet peace knows no compare. 

I'd rather be a little flower, 
The kind whose bloom you barely see, 
The kind that spurns the thunder's power
To have its happiness, to be.

Thomas Mann: Mario and the Magician, Disorder and Early Sorrow

The dislike I have for Thomas Mann’s writing can be summarised as the sneaking suspicion that he does not have a soul. I do not doubt Mann’s intelligence, for how else could anyone write such long sentences on such fascinating topics, ranging from fascism to the conflicted identities of so many bourgeois artists, running around them so that they are illuminated from every possible angle? Yet every time Mann just leaves me cold. I have a certain dislike for the way that his stories always seem to be about educated rich German men, usually on holiday, musing about the same things over and over again. Only exams, and the sheer richness of his writing, makes me get anything out of him. He is the last writer who I would ever read for pleasure. In short: “how clever he is”, says the head; “how cold he is”, says the heart.

Disorder and Early Sorrow (Unordnung and frühes Leid) and Mario and the Magician (Mario und der Zauberer), as the first paragraph perhaps indicates, have not changed my opinion of Mann much. The first story is the description of a party held during the dark days of the Weimar Republic, while the second describes a middle-class holiday gone badly wrong. Both works, published in 1926 and 1930 respectively, are linked, I think, by a certain trepidation about the future. Mann was in his fifties and he had seen his country destroyed in a World War, and in the peace that followed for Europe he saw only its fragility and the growing resentment of individuals, the sort that led eventually to the rise of Hitler and the Second World War.

Disorder and Early Sorrow

“Disorder and Early Sorrow” takes us into the home of a family of what in German are called Bildungsbürger, or the educated middle class. As opposed to the standard bourgeois these people were well educated, but they were economically weak. The family here consists of a mother, a father – Professor Cornelius, two older children – Ingrid and Bert, and two younger children – Lorchen and Beißer (Ellie and Snapper in one English translation). In addition to these are various servants, of whom Xaver is the most important.

The story is about a party that the two older children are throwing. Over and above the difficult financial situation the family finds itself in, unable to repair their nice house or feed themselves properly – at one point they decide they need “a cake, or something cakish” – the problem facing Cornelius, who is the central figure here, is that of dealing with a changing world. Traditional barriers are falling all around him. Not only is language collapsing – as in the cake anecdote – so too are class barriers. Xaver and Bert look so much the same that Cornelius can’t tell them apart when he looks out of the window. For Cornelius, who is a history professor, it is difficult to keep track, so he retreats into his studies – of the beginnings of national debt in Spain and England. 

For the young ones, this breakdown of barriers is only a good thing. They are politically engaged, and make use of all the newest technology, such as telephones. At one point one of their hobbies is described – they go onto a tram and pretend to be other people, speaking in funny accents as if they have only just arrived in Berlin. Cornelius also acts, once the party gets underway, saying hello to his children’s guests, but his acting is far more awkward and nervous. He belongs to a generation where “good breeding” and “gallantry” are the key virtues. When the guests speak to him, they are terribly polite, but as soon as he turns away they speak naturally again.

Cornelius is gripped with a “Father’s pessimism”. His eldest children have already broken free, but the younger two may yet have their innocence saved. There are a number of touching moments in “Disorder and Early Sorrow”, and all of them are between Cornelius and his two youngest children. They play a game with a pillow, and it is Cornelius’s fatherly love for them that most successfully humanises him: “Tenderness floods Dr Cornelius’ heart as if it were wine”.

But even in this love there is something fragile. Lorchen, the girl and his favourite, suffers the “sorrow” of the title when she is rejected by one of the boys at the party who decides he wants to dance with someone his own age, instead of a toddler. She ends up crying tremendously, so that the boy in question eventually comes to wish her a good night. When she falls asleep afterwards, Cornelius reckons that she will forget everything by the next day. But one day Lorchen – whose name recalls the Lorelei myth that inspired so many German Romantic ballads – will grow up, and Cornelius will have to let her go just as he has his other children.

The story is filled with little details but one thing that stood out was the use of space in it. It’s quite a claustrophobic tale, with almost all the action taking place on one floor of Cornelius’s house. In this it reflects the cramping of his own power in the world as the Weimar economy falls apart and the politics of consensus that educated men such as himself had dominated falls apart with it. I almost enjoyed reading it. Perhaps if I had read it in English I would have. As it stands, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. 

Mario and the Magician

“Mario and the Magician” is another one of those fun little beach-tales that Mann was so fond of – think “Death in Venice”. An unnamed family goes on holiday to Mussolini’s Italy only to find to their horror that the country is filled with fascists! This “tragic travel experience” is written like a chapter in a travel book, which is an interesting approach for Mann to take. The style tries to contain excessive outbursts of emotion, but the topic is inherently emotional, because the family had a dreadful time. In some way, this tension reflects the tension in European life at the time between resentment and apparent peace.

Anyway, the story is rather unsubtle. Mann really didn’t like fascism, which we can certainly forgive him for. The story was written before Hitler was a major force in Germany, and so we can call Mann prescient enough for noticing that fascism is bad. Considering he is an artist, it’s something of an achievement for him not to be drawn into it as so many were at the time, including Rilke, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats. But then again, I’ll just put that down to Mann not having a soul. Fascism manages to find so many supporters because it appears to offer salvation for the soul, and only the intellect can stand against that.

Before we meet the magician of the title, the main event is a trip to the beach. The beach is a rather unnatural place – we are supposed to relax here. Yet the beach instead is “lacking in innocence and aimlessness”. The children aren’t just children, but “patriotic children”, waving flags and being used by their parents as a pretext for nationalist fights with foreign tourists. At one point the narrator lets one of his children run around naked, only to be punished with a fine for it for offending public decency and “national dignity”.

The main event of this story, though, is the trip they take to watch a magician, Cipolla. Cipolla is a fascist demagogue. There is nothing more to it. He stands on stage and manipulates people, and the crowd cheers him for it. His volunteers are made to do embarrassing things, surrendering their will to him in the process. The narrator cannot make sense of it, calling him “the most effective hypnotist I have ever seen”. There is no rational explanation for why people seem to lose their self-control, but it happens anyway. Cipolla, this angry, ugly, monster of a man who is filled with resentment (vaguely related to women) is able to control everyone through the force of his voice and personality. However strange it seems to Mann, the approach worked in much of Europe then, and still works in parts of the world now.

As for Mario, I can’t tell you about his role in the story without spoiling its ending. He is a waiter who serves the children in one of the cafes they visit. But he also takes part in Cipolla’s performance.

“Mario and the Magician” appealed to me less than “Disorder and Early Sorrow”. Its lack of subtlety is not the main problem – after all, the fact that fascism is awful is something that needs to be made clear. I disliked the language of it – I read as much in English as I did in German – but most of all I disliked its message. Not the one that says fascism is bad, but the one that seems to propose a solution. I do not know what the answer is to fascism or radicalization, and perhaps there is nobody who truly does, but the one that Mann seems to put forward here is not one I can support at all. It is, to be frank, politically naïve. But then, perhaps, in 1930 we still had a right to be politically naïve. In a few more years we would lose that right forever.

Conclusion

Mann oh man, I wish I could like Thomas Mann. But I just find him too intellectual. It’s not that intellectuality is a problem per se, but rather that when intellectuality is there without a corresponding warmth of feeling it’s really hard to be excited while you are reading. Dostoevsky’s characters may be in some sense representatives of certain views or systems of thought, but they always feel like passionate people, motivated by ideas, rather than ideas who have been poured into people. Mann liked Dostoevsky – I haven’t read his thoughts on the Russian, but I’d be interested to know what they were.

I am going to read more Mann one day. Like Robert Musil, whose “Three Women” I enjoyed intellectually, there’s definitely something to enjoy in these two stories. But at the end of each you are – or at least I was – always left feeling that there is something missing, and that’s a great shame. Because Mann definitely knew how to write.

“The Wanderer” by N. P. Ogarev (translation)

This year at Cambridge I founded a small Russian poetry translation group. Unlike my German poetry translation group, which never made it beyond a Facebook group chat, I can call the Russian one a success. We have yet to meet in person, but already we have seen each other over Zoom a few times. This poem, by Nikolai Ogarev, was the first poem I translated specifically for the group.

I came across it while flicking through an anthology of Russian religious poetry that I have. Much as with Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I wrote about last week, I enjoy religious poetry because it makes people’s beliefs accessible and stamps them with an individual’s personality. We often come away from religious poetry believing in belief, even if we don’t get any further.

As for why I translated Ogarev’s poem instead of any of the hundred others included, the answer is rather more simple – it is nice and short! “The Wanderer” is the only poem of his included, so there was lots of white space around it, which gave me a place to begin the translation.

Anyway, here’s the poem:

The Wanderer

 Misty lies our dreary vale,
 Clouds conceal the sky.
 Sadly blows each mournful gale,
 Sadly looks each eye.
  
 Though you wander, have no fear,
 Though this life is hard -
 Peace and prayer are always near,
 Safe within your heart!

I enjoyed translating this poem, just as I enjoyed reading the original. One of the advantages of translating a poem (and poet) which is not too well known is that it is far easier than something from a “Great” poet. Both because the poet has inevitably been translated many times already (and certainly better than you could), but also because it’s nice to feel a certain degree of equality to your quarry. It is certainly presumption on my part, but there you go. I don’t feel, from the original, that Ogarev is a fantastic artist, but I felt he was one I was good enough to be able to translate. A similar train of thought is how I explain my success with Theodor Storm’s poetry in German.

I don’t feel the poem itself needs much explanation. It’s the kind of optimistic call for self-reliance that is always necessary for a revolutionary (and most of the rest of us). But I like it. It’s a nice little credo, the sort of thing that perhaps really can be mumbled before bed.

A photo of the page in my anthology of Russian prayers where I translate Ogarev's "The Wanderer".
My surprisingly neat attempts at translating “The Wanderer”. Generally it is much worse – I feel particularly sorry for my copy of Fet’s poems.

Nikolai Ogarev is best known now for his association with Alexander Herzen, a major Russian radical who lived for much of his adult life in exile in London. Together they printed the newspaper “The Bell”, which was smuggled into Russia and provided a far more liberal outlook than could be found in most Russian papers because of tsarist censorship. Today there is a website with the same name, run from America (in English and Russian), which gives an interesting look on Russian affairs. The spirit of criticism lives on, even though there is little else that links the two.

Thanks for reading. For more Russian poetry, look at my translation of Baratynsky.