What an extraordinary book this is. What a novel. The Magic Mountain is so easy to criticise – so fun to, even. It’s a ridiculous book. Even in John Woods’ translation, which is a great improvement on Helen Lowe-Porter’s, the characters sometimes sound as if they are still getting accustomed to human flesh, especially at the beginning. Of particular note is our main character, Hans Castorp, who laughs so much at things that are manifestly not funny that it seems as if he has perhaps swallowed too much laughing gas. Beyond that, we are constantly treated to such sentences as: “there was asparagus soup, followed by stuffed tomatoes, a roast with several vegetables, an especially well done dessert, and a tray of cheese and fruit.” This is incredibly dull stuff, the kind of detail we are pleased to be rid of in our more modern novels.
And yet, and yet. The Magic Mountain deserves the name. Thomas Mann’s novel takes us into another world, a world where I can be interested in the fact that the characters are having pineapple with their five-course dinner, because in this world the rules are different from our own. I have descended from the mountain every bit an evangelist. But another could quite easily descend, fed up and exhausted from the trip. The problem is that we come down and try to explain something that is to those below quite incomprehensible – even if we are criticising it we have to speak a different language, one it itself dictates. The Magic Mountain is its own world, for better or worse. We have to enter into it in order to work out what it is about.
Here is our plot. Early in the 20th century Hans Castorp, a young man who intends to work on a shipyard as an engineer, goes up a mountain to visit his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, at a sanatorium near Davos, where the latter is attempting to fight off his tuberculosis infection. Castorp himself comes down with something and spends seven years at the sanatorium, where he meets various characters – of note the Russian Madame Chauchat, the Dutchman with an imposing personality Peeperkorn, the Italian Settembrini, the Jewish Jesuit Naphta.
This is one of those books that contain multitudes. It is a desperately intellectual book. Virginia Woolf’s comment on Middlemarch, that it is a novel written for grownups, is very much true here. I cannot think how disappointed I would have been, trying to read this when I was younger. There is no action to entertain us. The emotions we and our characters feel are all intellectual, even the love that runs through the pages has something cerebral about it. And yet, the greatest complement we can make of this book is that it makes those intellectual emotions feel every bit as valid and as important as the kind of passions that make us want to abandon our families or murder somewhat innocent people.
The Magic Mountain is a book of learning. One of the most exhilarating chapters is entitled “Research”, and in it we sit through the night with Hans Castorp as he engages deeply with that most important of questions, “what is life?”. It is a question that seems to have less impact on our existence than those more common cursed queries, like “what shall I do?”, or “who is to blame?”. And yet, in ways “lyric, medical, and technical”, Mann throws us into the world of this other question. We hurtle, as if in the presence of a great magician, from the smallest atoms to the greatest of stars, as we and Hans Castorp seek the answers. The world seems to rush past us, brilliant and bright:
“The atom was an energy-laden cosmic system, in which planets rotated frantically around a sunlike centre, while comets raced through its ether at the speed of light, held in their eccentric orbits by the gravity of the core. That was not merely a metaphor – any more than it would be a metaphor to call the body of a multicelled creature a “city of cells”. A city, a state, a social community organised around the division of labour was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it. And in the same way, the innermost recesses of nature were repeated, mirrored on a vast scale, in the macrocosmic world of stars, whose swarms, clusters, groupings, and constellations, pale against the moon, hovered above the valley glistening with frost and above the head of this master of muffled masquerade.”
If this is too much for you, turn away now. In “Research” alone there are pages and pages of long, dense, blocky paragraphs. In other chapters we learn of things like music or botany. The chapter “Snow” has one of the most extraordinary descriptions of snowfall you will ever read, but it does go on and on. You must commit yourself to reading The Magic Mountain, just as Hans Castorp commits himself to treatment at the sanatorium. Any haste, any desire to get on with reading something else or getting to some action, will spoil the book completely. To invert a metaphor, in the same way that a beloved food can lose all of its taste when we are ill, when we do not have the constitution for it The Magic Mountain it will appear a hill of boredom. I know there were definitely chapters I rushed and shouldn’t have.
The Magic Mountain is a bildungsroman – it is about education, yes, but also about cultivation, that other idea of Bildung. It is about Hans Castorp growing from a relatively simple young man who is unable to participate in philosophical debates except as a witness to a man of respectable complexity, well-read, passionate about music, and willing and able to hold his own in any discussion. Just as the novel does not hide its engagement with learning, so too does it not conceal its engagement with teaching. “Pedagogy” is one of its watchwords.
Two characters are above all concerned with this – Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta. These two, who literally live next to each other, are the most obvious teachers for Hans Castorp in the novel. Their debates and discourses go on for pages, often without any kind of interruption or riposte. In any other work of fiction this would be horribly bad form, but again, The Magic Mountain is no normal work of fiction. It dazzles us with its ideas, so why should it be obliged to conceal them from us by chopping them up into manageable little phrases or numbing them with retorts before they have first demonstrated their full power? Put another way, if we are to take the ideas seriously, they must be expressed properly. And since, unlike a Russian novel, the characters here do not act their ideas out (with a few exceptions), we must make do with characters speaking their ideas out.
And what are those ideas? Well, we might say that Settembrini is a humanist. He is buoyed by a beautiful hope for a better world, a cosmopolitan world of peace and fairness. Even stricken by illness, he is a member of all sorts of international committees and organisations that aim to improve the world. To give an example of the sort of work he does, he is engaged with creating a volume for The Sociology of Suffering, a series of books that aims to categorise every sort of suffering in the world that it may then be eliminated through the power of reason. Settembrini is the bright light of the Enlightenment, the heroic intellectual that we never have enough of. “Order and classification are the beginning of mastery, whereas the truly dreadful enemy is the unknown,” he tells us. A hero he is, but also limited. There are only so many international organisations that seem to be doing very little other than convening which we can handle.
Leo Naphta is a Jew who became a Jesuit. It was he whom I was most excited to meet, opening The Magic Mountain for the first time. Described quite often as a proto-fascist, I wanted to make the acquaintance of this man who seemed to smell of forbidden knowledge. Naphta is every bit as incendiary as his name, with its similarity to naphtha, suggests. He is a nihilist, but as always that term is not hugely useful. What I can say is that he is in many ways the antithesis of Settembrini, even down to the ways that they decorate their respective rooms. Where Settembrini envisions are future world of progress, Naphta’s visions are all of blood and violence. The medieval church with its crude punishments dealt “to save souls from eternal damnation”, are far more valid to him than the punishments of the modern nation state, which thinks it is legitimate but is anything but. He is a destructive thinker, who at times reminded me of Nietzsche with his disregard for what we take to be “true”. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is – terror.” This is scary stuff, scary in particular because Mann articulates it so well. And Hans Castorp is taken in by Naphta, with his dark world and his hatred of everything bourgeois. So, at times, are we.
And there are other characters, each of whom, in their own way, has something to say – either by themselves, or through themselves. One of the most memorable is Mynheer Peeperkorn, an extraordinarily funny fellow introduced late in the novel. He is unable to express anything at all, his language comes in stops and starts and terrible bluster, but through his person he commands the attention of everyone – he has that thing every politician wishes they had: presence. In contrast to the two pedagogues his inability to fit together a sentence is all the more pronounced. (“What did he say? Nothing very intelligible, and even less so the more he drank”). But again, he has presence. Against the world of ideas, he seems to offer an alternative – drinking, eating, existing.
A Russian friend who has recently left their country told me recently that The Magic Mountain was their favourite book. Perhaps I should just leave this sentence here, hanging.
This is not a book for lovers of action, but for those who love contemplation. We need to be idle, even – possibly – sick to appreciate it properly. Were I stuck in bed for a month or a year, this is all I would want. It is all I would need. The Magic Mountain is the answer you want to give if you are asked what one book you would take to a desert island when you love Western culture but don’t want to look as basic as those who name the complete works of William Shakespeare. We may find it overly intellectual, but life is full of intellectual engagement for many of us, and if not intellectual then at least populated with ideas. Compared to reading a dry work about the history of ideas, we can read about Settembrini and Naphta who, even if they go on for page and page, at least feel autonomous, real, and serious in their views. They are excited in a way that a writer reporting on the views of the dead-and-buried never can be.
The Magic Mountain is a modern book. Although the “Forward” declares that a vast gulf divides it from the present (1924), it is not so. The arguments here about life and ways of looking at the world only became more relevant after the First World War. What happened, though, was that they were translated into actions – horrific, terrible actions, whose consequences we continue to feel to this day. Perhaps we can say this – The Magic Mountain reflects the last time when a bunch of Europeans could gather together on a frozen hillside to debate the nature of the world, before all of the innocence of such intellectual tomfoolery was lost.
The novel reminds me of one day, years and years ago, when together with two friends, while playing croquet on a well-maintained lawn by a trickling stream, hidden from the world by a stone wall, I debated the consequences of the People’s Budget of 1909. Thinking back on it now, there’s something sickly about the isolation that allows us to go so deeply into intellectual things. But there is something equally sickly about the attitude that never engages with any kind of ideas at all. The novel is a balancing act, well aware of itself and what it says, and the criticisms we might make of it from afar – about its lack of engagement with action and so on – are all answered within its pages. It is an encyclopaedia. It is a world. If we are able to enter it without losing our sense of the world around us, we will be rewarded with one of the most vital, the most intelligent, the most thoughtful books that we will ever read.
I just want to read it over and over again.
