Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  His captain’s hand trembling slightly, he filled the glasses, with the assistance, offered in respectful bewilderment, of Hans Castorp.

  “Take it,” Peeperkorn repeated. “Link arms with me! And drink now thus. Drink it down!—Agreed, young man. Settled. Here, my hand on it. Are you satisfied, Hans Castorp?”

  “That is, of course, no word for it, Mynheer Peeperkorn,” said Hans Castorp, who had some difficulty downing the whole glass in one draft, and now took out his handkerchief to wipe the wine he had spilled on his knee. “What I mean is, I am terribly happy and still cannot grasp how this has so suddenly been bestowed on me—it is, I must admit, like a dream. It is an overwhelming honor for me—I don’t know how I have earned it, at best in some passive way, certainly not in any other. And one should not be surprised if at first I shall find it rather daring to utter this new form of address and stumble in the attempt—particularly in the presence of Clavdia, who, being but a woman, may not be quite so pleased with this new arrangement.”

  What is it in Peeperkorn that has found Hans Castorp? The link with Clavdia is secondary, since she was just a later form of Pribislaw Hippe. Peeperkorn’s vitalism is ebbing: impotence beckons. Confronted with that inescapable contingency, he has already planned a painless suicide, with a hypodermic needle of his own invention, and a fatal poison from Java carried with him. By embracing Hans Castorp, is he asserting a final allegiance to life?

  The best essay I have ever read on The Magic Mountain is by Oskar Seidlin, born Salo Oskar Koplowitz (1911–84), a Jewish scholar who left Nazi Germany to spend his remaining lifetime teaching and writing in the United States. His essay “Mynheer Peeperkorn and the Lofty Game of Numbers” (1971) was reprinted by me in a volume I edited, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: Modern Critical Interpretations (1986). His game of numbers is Kabbalistic, turning upon Mann’s obsession with the number seven. Peeperkorn is both Dionysos and Christ, and his appeal to Hans Castorp is androgynous, hermetic, calling upon a bisexual vision central both to Oskar Seidlin and to Mann:

  We have not reached the deepest layer yet. With all the noumenal “Mysterium” and incarnation which we tried to elucidate, Peeperkorn is “only” a human being, and thus the task to embody the divine is bound to be unfulfillable. No matter how strong and enthusiastic the spirit, the flesh plays it a nasty trick. It cannot live up to the exuberance and overflow of life which Peeperkorn feels to be his and whose emanation he considers his mission. In short, he is impotent, impotent in the crassest physical sense of the word: the flesh refuses to accept the challenge with which he knows himself entrusted. This explains the terror and anguish that overcome him; this is the deepest abyss of his Passion. He cannot be God, but at best God’s deputy on earth—i.e., not Christ but Peter—and we are not surprised that this is his first name. We now understand, too, why the biblical passage relating to Christ’s desolation in the Garden of Gethsemane is so firmly imbedded in Mynheer Peeperkorn’s mind that he can recite it verbatim. It is his own story: Christ chiding Peter (and it is Peter whom Christ mainly addresses), who is no one else but he himself, the one who in shame and despair must recognize his insufficiency, because the flesh is weak no matter how willing the spirit.

  The anguish of the Garden of Gethsemane has, of course, its pagan counterpart. It is the event that takes place on the last afternoon before Mynheer Peeperkorn’s suicide, and is, in fact, the cause of his suicide: nothing more than an excursion to a waterfall near Davos, in which seven persons participate, driving out in two carriages, three in the one, four in the other. We notice, in passing, that the forest through which the seven travel on their way to their destination is sick: afflicted by a cancerous fungus, which overgrows the branches of the conifers and threatens to choke the trees. Upon Peeperkorn’s insistence, the picnic (with plenty of bread and wine) is being held not only in full view of the waterfall, but actually so close to the roaring cataract that any conversation becomes impossible. After the collation, something strange happens. Peeperkorn rises, faces the thundering waterfall (which bursts down from a height of approximately seven or eight meters), and starts talking to it as if trying to conjure the wild unleashed energy of nature, whose tumultuous uproar blots out every word the old man utters. Clearly, he tries to measure himself against the riotously unchained force of the elemental, tries to transfix it, but in vain. His voice is drowned in the cosmic noise, and his companions can read from the motions of his lips only the two last words of the strange invocation perfekt und erledigt [settled and finished]—erledigt, done with, finished. It is the last word that we hear Peeperkorn utter in the novel. On the way back to the sanatorium, hardly a word is spoken in Peeperkorn’s carriage. Shortly after two o’clock in the morning, the night nurse, at Madame Chauchat’s request, calls Hans Castorp to the Dutchman’s room. He is dead. He has killed himself by injecting into his veins some of the violent, exotic poison, the “spice” that he brought with him from India.

  Convinced that in the work of every great writer even the minutest detail is significant, we are, with the Dutchman’s death, not yet at the end of the Peeperkorn episode. After Hofrat Behrens has diagnosed the suicide, he beckons Hans into a corner of the drawing room and demonstrates to him in a long technical explanation the workings of the instrument with which Peeperkorn ended his life. It is not a simple syringe, but a highly complicated, outlandish mechanism, made up of teeth, honed to pinpoint sharpness, in which are embedded hair-thin cannulae leading to a “rubber-gland” that contains the poison. Upon pressure, the teeth, mounted on tiny springs, squeeze the rubber container, which then squirts the deadly fluid through the tubulae outward. Teeth—gland: we would hardly need Dr. Behrens’s explicit statement that this instrument is an exact mechanical replica of the Beißzeugs der Brillenschlange [mechanism of the cobra’s bite]. What caused Peeperkorn’s death was the work of the snake. In the last analysis, he is not the new Adam, but Adam plain and simple, flesh in its weakness and sinfulness, which is man, because this is what the Hebrew word “Adam” actually means.

  Yet—and this is his greatness and dignity—he wanted to be and walked through the pages of the book as more than Adam. Just as Hans Castorp, immediately after Peeperkorn’s appearance on the Magic Mountain, took a good look at the new guest and assessed his strange individuality, so now, standing at the old man’s deathbed, he speaks the epitaph which compresses into a few words the Dutchman’s substance and serves as a last verification of the argument we have presented: “er betrachtete sich als Gottes Hochzeitsorgan, müssen Sie wissen [For you must know, he regarded himself as the instrument of God’s marriage].” Again the images of Dionysos and Christ appear united. The sexual implication, evoking the phallus, signal of carnal fertility and triumphant ruler over the Dionysian mysteries, is obvious. But equally obvious is Christ’s role as the heavenly bridegroom, through whom man’s soul is wedded to God. There could be no more fitting word than the one Thomas Mann has chosen. It points to the act of consummation, in its physical aspect by the anatomical part of the body, in its spiritual aspect by the organon, the medium through which the union of man and God is achieved. As we have tried to show, this was what Mynheer Peeperkorn wanted to live: the sum of three and four.

  I find this extremely persuasive. Oskar Seidlin penetrates the matrix of what makes the mountain enchanting. And then he goes beyond that:

  But Hans Castorp gives us more than just the pinpointing of the “Eigenart [particularity]” of the eleventh-hour visitor on the magic mountain. He pronounces judgment, and much confusion could have been avoided had the readers of the book taken the trouble to listen to him. This divine mission which Mynheer Peeperkorn considered his and which he could not fulfill because he was only Peter and not Christ, was, so we now hear, “eine königliche Narretei [a piece of majestic tomfoolery].” Foolishness it may have been, but all the detractors of Peeperkorn, inside and outside the book, should take notice that it wa
s a regal foolishness. And Hans Castorp continues, making crystal clear that the word “foolishness” is not to be taken in a deprecatory sense, but as an expression of the deepest emotion and the most solemn respect: “Wenn man ergriffen ist, hat man den Mut zu Ausdrücken, die kraß und pietätlos klingen, aber feierlicher sind als konzessionierte Andachtsworte [when one is moved one can say things that sound crass and irreverent, but are after all more solemn than the conventional religious formulas].” Peeperkorn’s is the rarest and noblest sort of foolishness—perhaps even the wisest—with which man can be afflicted: the self-identification with the living presence of the creatively divine.

  William Blake said that if the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise. Dr. Samuel Johnson, treated by Blake with jocular contempt, nevertheless preceded him by saying that love was the wisdom of fools and the folly of the wise. Hans Castorp ultimately is in love with the mystery of personality. As Seidlin notes, Castorp casts aside both jealousy and passion, so as to enter into a covenant with Clavdia to help preserve the waning Peeperkorn. For Clavdia, sexuality is death. Hans Castorp affirms life, and will not yield to death and its attractions.

  In the perhaps too deliberated chapter “Snow,” Thomas Mann sketches an overwrought affirmation:

  Love stands opposed to death—it alone, and not enough, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts. And form, too, comes only from love and goodness: form and the cultivated manners of man’s fair state, of a reasonable, genial community—out of silent regard for the bloody banquet. Oh, what a clear dream I’ve dreamed, how well I’ve ‘played king’! I will remember it. I will keep faith with death in my heart, but I will clearly remember that if faithfulness to death and to what is past rules our thoughts and deeds, that leads only to wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of humankind. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts. And with that I shall awaken. For with that I have dreamed my dream to its end, to its goal. I’ve long been searching for that truth: in the meadow where Hippe appeared to me, on my balcony, everywhere. The search for it drove me into these snowy mountains. And now I have it. My dream has granted it to me so clearly that I will always remember. Yes, I am overjoyed and filled with its warmth. My heart is beating strong and knows why. It beats not for purely physical reasons, the way fingernails grow on a corpse. It beats for human reasons and because my spirit is truly happy. The truth of my dream has refreshed me—better than port or ale, it courses through my veins like love and life, so that I may tear myself out of my dreaming sleep, which I know only too well can be fatal to my young life. Awake, awake! Open your eyes. Those are your limbs, your legs there in the snow. Pull yourself together and stand up. Look—good weather!

  I regret that aesthetically this just does not work. The best thing in it is the recollection of Hippe, who more than Clavdia was the portent of love and death. The prologue to Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1943) retells the Hermetic myth of a divine Man/God who beholds her/his reflection in the Waters of Night, falls in love with that image, and descends from the Holy Light into the Darkness of our world. That Darkness is named “Love and Death.” It is also called “Sleep.”

  It seems to me that all of Thomas Mann is in that prologue. That includes The Magic Mountain. On the mountain; sleep, death, desire, close around Hans Castorp like a floating flower.

  As Mann ends by saying, “It was a hermetic story.” I myself doubt that irony after irony is consistent with Hermetic myth. The author’s avuncular tone distresses me, particularly at the close of The Magic Mountain. But I am being ungrateful. Thomas Mann is not of the order of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. But who now is? Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, Doctor Faustus, Confessions of Felix Krull: all these are still alive.

  CHAPTER 37

  To the Lighthouse (1927)

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  THE LIFE OF Virginia Woolf was an extended and desperate agon with psychosis. When she was thirteen, her mother died and Virginia Stephen collapsed. At twenty-two, she lost her father, Leslie Stephen, philosopher and historian, and again broke down. Eight years later, she married Leonard Woolf. The union lasted until her suicide and undoubtedly sustained her, but it is unlikely the marriage was ever consummated. Her lesbian relationship with the bad poet but great gardener Vita Sackville-West continued on and off for a decade, but then ended because of Vita’s frequent escapades with both female and male lovers. Another cause of the rift was Vita’s fascist sympathies.

  A third crisis lasted for three years, from age thirty to thirty-three. Finally, under the terrible stress of German air bombardment, Woolf drowned herself at the age of fifty-nine.

  Woolf’s major novels, by common consent, are Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Orlando (1928) remains popular, but is a secondary work. Her later novels are all extraordinary work, and clearly will survive: The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and a final masterpiece, Between the Acts (1941). Formally speaking, Woolf’s finest novel is To the Lighthouse, which is a miraculous concentration of her varied gifts.

  Woolf insists that the creative power of women “differs greatly from the creative power of men.” Iris Murdoch refreshingly disagreed: “I think there’s human experience; and I don’t think a woman’s mind differs essentially from a man’s.” There are major male novelists—Samuel Richardson, Tolstoy, Henry James—who have explored female consciousness perhaps more fully than did Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. One can add Marcel Proust and James Joyce, whose depictions of inwardness are equally strong, whether women or men are being portrayed.

  Except for her aestheticism, the author of To the Lighthouse would be wholly nihilistic, which is true also of Pater, Ruskin, and Proust. Woolf teaches perception, and not politics. Her “androgyny” is not a pragmatic program, but a fusion of perception and sensation with her acceptance of death and meaninglessness, apart from the flow of momentary meanings that art can suggest.

  In May 1940, less than a year before she drowned herself, Virginia Woolf read a paper to the Workers’ Educational Association in Brighton. We know it as the essay entitled “The Leaning Tower,” in which the Shelleyan emblem of the lonely tower takes on more of a social than an imaginative meaning. It is no longer the point of survey from which the poet Athanase gazes down in pity at the dark estate of mankind, and so is not an image of contemplative wisdom isolated from the mundane. Instead, it is “the tower of middle-class birth and expensive education.” It would be accurate to suggest that Woolf preferred Shelley to W. H. Auden, though she knew she herself dwelt in the leaning tower, unlike Yeats, to whom the lonely tower remained an inevitable metaphor for poetic stance.

  It is proper that “The Leaning Tower,” as a speculation upon the decline of a Romantic image into belatedness, should concern itself also with the peculiarities of poetic influence:

  Theories then are dangerous things. All the same we must risk making one this afternoon since we are going to discuss modern tendencies. Directly we speak of tendencies or movements we commit ourselves to the belief that there is some force, influence, outer pressure which is strong enough to stamp itself upon a whole group of different writers so that all their writing has a certain common likeness. We must then have a theory as to what this influence is. But let us always remember—influences are infinitely numerous; writers are infinitely sensitive; each writer has a different sensibility. That is why literature is always changing, like the weather, like clouds in the sky. Read a page of Scott; then of Henry James; try to work out the influences that have transformed the one page into the other. It is beyond our skill. We can only hope therefore to single out the most obvious influences that have formed writers into groups. Yet there are groups. Books descend from books as families descend from families. Some descend from Jane Austen; others from Dickens. They resemb
le their parents, as human children resemble their parents; yet they differ as children differ, and revolt as children revolt. Perhaps it will be easier to understand living writers as we take a quick look at some of their forebears.

  “A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment—and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect.” That is Walter Pater, and also Virginia Woolf. Woolf, like Pater, sets herself “to realize this situation, to define, in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn….” Against this can be set Lily Briscoe’s vision, which concludes the novel:

  Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.