My Last Thomas Mann Post

 Well, my last one until there comes a reason to change my mind.

A mix of old and new that came up in Google News follows, but before that I want to mention Sinclair Lewis. Here, I point out the deficiencies of my mind. Of what little I remember from reading Lewis' Main Street, there is his commenting on the oppressiveness of the sky on a flat land. Mann's Magic Mountain can be interpreted as giving a moral scale to the lower lands, or of giving a perspective to the lowlands.

Curiosity led me to find out if Lewis and Mann had crossed paths.

Lewis mentions Mann in his Nobel Speech:

...I am sure that you know, by now, that the award to me of the Nobel Prize has by no means been altogether popular in America. Doubtless the experience is not new to you. I fancy that when you gave the award even to Thomas Mann, whose Zauberberg seems to me to contain the whole of intellectual Europe, even when you gave it to Kipling, whose social significance is so profound that it has been rather authoritatively said that he created the British Empire, even when you gave it to Bernard Shaw, there were countrymen to those authors who complained because you did not choose another.

I found a reference to Mann criticizing Lewis's Noble Prize without being able to find any specifics.

(I also ran across REVIEW: What are We To Make of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Hemingway? Where I landed in a discussion of Hemingway's For Whom The Bells Toll that I found cheered on my own annoyance with that novel.)

From America: The Jesuit Review is Franklin Freeman's Revisiting the magic and mystery of Thomas Mann (2022) (did I already note this?, if so my apologies):

In these two books, Mann ascends from an over-emotional nationalistic reaction to a changing Europe to a reasoned but no less passionate and principled working-out of the need for progressive democracy and socialism. Although Hans sees holes in both Settembrini’s and Naphta’s arguments, by the end he sides much more with Settembrini than with the self-destructive and voluptuous Naphta.

From The Arts Fuse is Matt Hanson's Book Review: Writer Thomas Mann — Still August After All These Years (2023) (do read the Comments!):

Thomas Mann is an august figure in 20th-century German literature, heavy with gravitas; Bertolt Brecht called him “the starched collar.” He is celebrated for issuing oracular pronouncements like “where I am is German culture” and writing long, allegorical, densely erudite texts such as The Magic Mountain. I once told a professor that one of the thinkers we were reading was fictionalized in the novel — I’m pretty sure it was the cranky Marxist Georgy Lukacs (whose writing paid Mann ample homage) — and he grumbled that that was probably why he liked the damn thing so much. How does Mann’s grandiosity hold up today? A new selection of his short stories, freshly translated into English by veteran translator and fiction writer Damion Searls, suggests an answer, though only partially. The collection contains some gems, but the gathering inexplicably excludes some significant work.

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It doesn’t matter, ultimately, if Aschenbach goes to pieces after gazing in awe at a teenage boy or a girl or a palm tree or a plate of spaghetti. All roads lead the same way — once your mind has turned. Mann gives us a few early clues — in the form of the strange figures Aschenbach encounters — that the stodgy professor is heading toward his own destruction before he even sees the boy. The evocative allure of his fruitless yet unrelenting obsession is lulling — the irony is that it cushions his doom even as it makes it inevitable. Mann the (once) reactionary aesthete saw just how beguilingly humanity’s death wish can be disguised. Given the current intoxications of demagoguery, it is a lesson well worth heeding. 

From The American Scholar, Under a Spell Everlasting by Samantha Rose Hill (2024) reads more like a compare and contrast Mann's stay in Davos with modern Davos, but it is a beguiling exercise.

The New Statesman's Thomas Mann and the European disease of nihilism: The vicious battle of ideas behind the continent's World Wars has migrated East by Tanjil Rashid has, maybe the most interesting perspective on Mann's novel. I should say perspectives, for although the pertains to the philosophical, he also makes points on literary matters.

When I visited Davos, I had gone in search of the enduring relevance of The Magic Mountain. Little did I know that the novel’s centre of gravity had mysteriously migrated. Its dialectical questions are now more alive in Asia than Europe. Today’s Settembrinis, its Naphtas, fight it out there in the manically modernising countries of the east, where the bourgeois nation-state is still making its case against the seductions of theocracy and tribalism. For us children of Asia, it feels absurd now to read of Europe as the continent of “transforming action” and Asia as that of “inertia”. It is Asia that today actively transforms itself – while Europe lies inert. History has, with its mesmeric wand, performed a magic trick on The Magic Mountain; it reversed its poles… But the spark, one hundred years on, is still undiminished.

If I recall correctly, it may be this essay that broke the film separating Lewis and Mann.