I had run across the first two items earlier this week. Until today, I did not see the connection with the third entry.
Many posts will be found here about Thomas Mann and also about his novel The Magic Mountain. What I have never written before is that before Mann, all I knew of German novelists were the works of Hermann Hesse and Günter Grass' The Tin Drum. The former were pretty much demolished by an essay of Kurt Vonnegut. Having read Mann, Hesse seems small, even humorless (whatever humor there is in German.)
Today, Grass's novel feels more in line with Hesse than I thought when reading The Magic Mountain. Reading Thomas Mann’s Pessimistic Humanism (The Nation) there is, again, the effect history had on Mann. But that history liberates Mann, and he expands on it. My memories of Hesse (who I did go back to read decades after Vonnegut knocked him down for me) is that history shrank Hesse. Is The Tin Drum a sequel to Mann's novel, showing what happened when the history that liberated Mann is distorted and censored? Or is it about history's resentments needing to have their day, their say, and the price paid for allowing resentments to breed and grow?
Yes, I am talkative today, when I should be taking of other business. And I am not done yet.
History has not been all that kind to Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, according to The 1935 Novel That Predicted Trump’s Second Term (The Nation). The criticisms contained in that essay are pertinent for a realist novel, or a work of prophesy. Sinclair Lewis has fallen in my estimate, as he has generally. Yet there is a strange alchemy in his writing, if one goes far enough with him, it becomes difficult to leave. There is something stranger in this novel: it is quite unlike anything he ever wrote (not in style, but of substance); it is stranger than anything written by his contemporaries. I share with the Nation essay one serious criticism - that FDR would lose in 1936 and just disappear. That may be because Lewis was a Republican. A corresponding fault in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America has FDR returning as the country's savior. I am more sympathetic to Roth's overestimation of FDR, but wonder if there would not be others who could have taken his place.
Speaking of The Plot Against America, this seems to be the literary heir to It Can't Happen Here. Roth's novel was marketed as an alternate history. I would have Lewis' novel likewise categorized. I know I exclude much of more traditional alternate history novels such as The Plot Against America and some works of Robert Heinlen. Thinking of it as alternate history is why I found many of the criticisms in The 1935 Novel That Predicted Trump’s Second Term irrelevant. What is relevant in the essay, what is relevant in the novel, is this:
Lewis’s predictions may not have come to pass in the decade after the book’s publication. But the myopic complacency summed up in its title continues to eat away at the country’s political culture more than 80 years later. All that remains to be seen is whether the pusillanimous Democratic leadership caste will come to heed Jessup’s grim warning that Windrip’s rise was the fault “of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”
Sinclair Lewis identified the flaws in our politics, and Philip Roth reminded us of those flaws. Roth is correct, in my opinion, that FDR had the skills and the ideals to keep American fascism at bay. Lewis points to the flaws in our character taking control in the absence of a leader dedicated to democracy.
I did not intend to be so grim this Saturday morning. The sun is shining for the first time in days. So Why is English so weirdly different from other languages? (Aeon Essays) seems to be a fortuitous find in more than one way. It leaves a more amusing exit than considering American political and cultural failings.
There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian: if you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.
We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.
More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk-s – why just that? The present‑tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult? Unless you happen to be from Wales, Ireland or the north of France, probably.
And it is history - the invasions physical and intellectual - that makes English so strange.
That English is not a gendered language struck me in high school when I was taking French and German. Nowadays, it makes me wonder about our disputes over non-binary gender identification. Other languages do recognize a third gender. Do those who wish to pursue this identification in official documents want to change the language? Do those opposing them not see a gaping hole in English?
History has left us with two English genders, and time may change this.
What Americans must reckon with is their aversion to history - ours, the world's; of actions and of ideas.
And there I will end this post as conceived at its start.
sch 11/22
These are items turned up during the writing. Mostly these are answers, regardless of their superficiality, to questions I asked myself while writing this post.
Why I Still Read Hesse (Pensive Journal)
Vonnegut was right (of course!) Hesse was and remains the most profound of writers on homelessness, the bitter and the sweet, and on the necessity of one for the other in the on-going river called home.
I still read Hesse; my on-going lives are not over yet! And neither, I hope, is my companioning on the road of souls, although, thanks to Siddhartha, I do feel I have an idea where I will go, indebted to all Hesse’s works for unvarnished insight into the process of the getting there....
Pensive Journal: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts
Pensive publishes work that deepens the inward life; expresses a range of religious/spiritual/humanist experiences and perspectives; envisions a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world; advances dialogue across difference; and challenges structural oppression in all its forms.
Ennyman's Territory: Imaginary Interviews: Hermann Hesse's Restoration (Out of Crisis Comes Art) is different in that it takes the form of a fictional interview. If I knew the following, I had forgotten the fact. It seems very interesting in light of Mann going to the sanitorium at Davos and producing The Magic Mountain.
Hermann Hesse: Entering the sanatorium in 1916 was an act of surrender, not to defeat, but to the unknown depths of my psyche. Dr. Lang, a disciple of Jung, guided me through the labyrinth of my unconscious, where light and shadow, reason and chaos, wrestled for dominion. Jung’s ideas—the integration of opposites, the journey toward individuation—were like a map to a country I had always inhabited but never understood. I learned to face the contradictions within me: the artist and the father, the rebel and the seeker, the man who craved solitude yet longed for connection.
This process was transformative because it gave form to my chaos. I saw my struggles not as failures but as fragments of a greater whole, each with a voice to be heard. Therapy taught me to listen to my dreams, to honor the darkness as much as the light. It was as if I had been drowning and found a current to carry me forward. This awakening fed my art, giving birth to Demian and a new vision of life as a quest for self-unity, a journey I could share with others.
Never before had I read of any connection between Hesse and Mann; therefore, I assumed none. Today I found The Virtuous Cycle of Gratitude and Mutual Appreciation: The Letters of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann (The Marginalian).
That’s precisely what two of the twentieth century’s greatest authors, Nobel laureates Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, did for each other over the course of five decades — even though they came from opposite corners of Germany and went on to lead starkly different lives, Hesse an exponent of the quiet contemplation and Mann a public intellectual with a vibrant social life. But they also had a great deal in common — both had rebelled against their bourgeois background by dropping out of school and taking working-class jobs — Hesse at a second-hand bookstore and Mann as an insurance agent — before becoming prominent writers; both had mothers who brought into their otherwise ordinary German childhoods an exotic perspective — Mann’s was born in Brazil and Hesse’s in India.
But what brought them together, above all, were their convictions. Bound by a shared commitment to humanism and an unflinching belief in the integrity of the individual, they stood by one another’s work, both privately and publicly, through war and exile, through harsh criticism, even through their own philosophical disagreements. The record of this virtuous cycle of mutual support is preserved in the wonderful out-of-print 1975 volume The Hesse/Mann Letters: The Correspondence of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann 1910–1955 (public library).
So much for assumptions
And a last bit of lightness: OldMapsOnline.
sch 11/22
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