Side Roads

Closeup in the blogosphere

 

Occasionally (not continually or compulsively) I look at the stats for this blog and learn how many people for a given period—24 hours, 30 days, all time—have looked at the blog and also how many looked at specific posts. The latter numbers always interest me, showing me where something I might have written years ago has suddenly found new life for a handful of readers. I always wondered why an old post reappears that way in a particular day’s stats. Why, for example, did three people on Thursday morning look at from my old 2018 post on writer Thomas Mann? I was curious enough to give it another look myself to see what I’d said about that German writer seven years ago.

 

Our “intrepid Ulysses reading circle” had decided to read The Magic Mountain after realizing that we had read classics from France, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Japan, as well as from the U.S. and England, but had read nothing from the German tradition. I even admitted to the group that I had avoided German literature and felt I needed to get over my prejudice. I tried The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse, but thought it would unduly tax the patience of group members (it’s a very strange “story,” if it can even be called a story), and so, somehow, we landed on The Magic Mountain, and I wrote about it for Books in Northport.

 

By early Friday morning, when I looked again (my curiosity now augmented by having begun a post on the subject), I saw that over 30 people had chosen to view a 13-year-old post about art, old books, and ephemera. Why? Was there something in the labels that attracted them? Heaven knows. I don’t.

 

 

Oh-So-Ordinary!

 

My reactivated appreciation for flowering annuals steadily increases. For years, I looked down on them, wanting only perennials (more expensive), but one genus and species at a time the annuals have crept back into my heart. 

Lobelia may have been the first to return. That intense blue! And the way it keeps blooming throughout the season, while perennials come into bloom once and all too soon finish up for the year. Three or four years ago I discovered bacopa and have bought plants every summer since. Like lobelia (and they go together beautifully), it continues from time of purchase until frost, blossoming and fading and blossoming, again and again and again. I like bacopa with begonias, too, tender begonias that make such a splash all summer long. It’s October now, and they are still going strong. 

The really ordinary annuals, of course, are the ones you can easily and successfully plant from seed, such as marigolds or snapdragons. Snaps often volunteer (from the previous year’s seeds?) or—believe it or not, this happened with one clay pot I left on the porch last year—occasionally go dormant and revive in the spring, without benefit of warmth or watering while they chill! I wouldn’t count on it, but it's happened in my life. 

 

And as for marigolds? How could I ever have thought marigolds weren’t special enough to be part of my life? Outdoors and indoors, they continue to brighten into the fall. They also remind me of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” an enchanting movie, and the wonderful, long novel by Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy. Here is a strange thing, though, in that link to the movie. The site omits on its list of “stars” (you can find him by digging deeper) Dev Patel, who was, in my mind, the heart and soul of the film! 

 

 

Does old-fashioned mean outdated?

 

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal was headlined “Young People Are Falling in Love With CDs and Digital Cameras.” The young woman introduced at the beginning of the piece also uses paper maps and “calls the local cab company when she needs a ride.” (I want to cheer for maps and cabs!) A certain segment of teens and twenty-somethings, we are told, has had it with screens and “are resurrecting digital cameras, flip phones and CDs.” Maybe, too, they want to have their own music and photographs safely in their possession and not off in a “cloud,” which, my son informed me long ago, is nothing but “someone else’s much bigger computer” (which also requires ENORMOUS energy inputs and maintenance!).

 

My digital camera's storage card,
compared to size of postage stamps

I shared the article with a bookseller colleague, commenting to him, “They forgot books,” because I have noticed in the past few years that more and more young people, who have grown up with electronic devices and see them as completely ordinary and unexciting, albeit useful, are thrilled to get their hands on a book printed, bound, and published in the 1800s. They hold such a book carefully and turn its pages with something like reverence. Again, and even more so than with keeping digital images in digital files, these objects are something you can take home and possess securely. They aren’t going to disappear, as items from a digital library can do, and when the power goes out, you can read a book by kerosene lamp, as I have done. 

 

My colleague agreed with me about books and added that the WSJ article had also forgotten to mention typewriters. He, Paul Stebleton of Landmark Books in Traverse City, has made a sideline specialty of manual typewriters. While I don’t use one these days (there are one or two in my house), I remember my first one fondly. When a key stuck, I could turn the old black machine upside-down and fix it myself. I could and did change the ribbon myself. Maintaining that typewriter gave me a kind of independence that few of us have when our electronic devices malfunction.

***

 

Blogging, gardening, legacy media (!) – where can I go next? How about specific books? The last one I finished was E.B. White On Dogs, edited by his granddaughter, Martha White. Long a staff writer at the New Yorker, White is probably most widely known for his children’s books, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, and for The Elements of Style, but Here Is New York also remains a classic. On Dogs (how could I resist?) includes some of the author’s short New Yorker pieces, a couple or so longer essays, and quite a few personal letters. Often the letters have only a brief passage about dogs, but I was glad to have the entire letter each time and to read about the author’s homey country life, with pigs and chickens and other animals, in addition to dogs. 

 

Martha White writes in “A Note to the Reader,” following her introduction, 

 

…The letters … are more casual in style, and my Tilbury House editor was surprised to find that the co-author of The Elements of Style did not always get his that and which correct, especially in the early years. Our hands-off policy [not correcting the writer’s grammar] nearly killed her.

 

Which goes to show that all of us have things to learn as we go through life!

 

And there! I have kept things light today, for a change. Feel free to breathe a sigh of relief and thank me, but do not mistake this lightness as a promised change of direction for future posts.

Daisy and Sunny take a break.

Tragedy and Comedy in the Life and Writings of Thomas Mann

I came across something interesting the other day in a biography of Thomas Mann that I picked up to read alongside one of Mann's novels. Well, naturally, there were interesting facts on every page, but a couple of passages in Chapter 25 jumped out at me, perhaps all the more since the ideas addressed there were not elaborated on or discussed at length.

Ten years after the end of the war [WWI], French troops were still occupying the Rhineland, and reparations payments were still outstanding. In August 1928, Stresemann [German chancellor] finally persuaded France to consider early withdrawal and to authorize a new review of reparations. In February 1929 an American banker, Owen Young, headed an international board which in August submitted its assessment to a conference at The Hague. The plan was to give the German economy a chance to expand by allowing reparations to be spread over the next thirty years, and the date settled for the evacuation of the Rhineland was June 30, 1930. [Hayman, p. 391. Italics are my emphases.]

I was always told — and maybe you learned it this way, too — that Germany’s motives in supporting Hitler and launching a Second World War stemmed from the burden of reparations exacted on them from the First World War. And I’m not saying that isn’t part of the story. But what of this plan to ease the burden? Further down on the same page of the Mann biography came another event from the same year that seems to have exacerbated greatly economic conditions in Germany. 

Streseman died early in October 1929, and at the end of the month the Wall Street crash precipitated an international crisis. During the winter, unemployment in Germany reached the point at which the state’s insurance scheme could no longer pay benefits. …Mein Kampf was selling a steady fifty thousand copies a year. With unemployment rising, morale sinking, extremist demagogues and uniformed thugs active in the streets with truncheons and collecting boxes, membership in the Nazi party rose from 120,000 in 1929 to 800,000 in 1931. Members were contributing 300,000 marks a month, which few of them could afford, to a party that was acting less in their interests than in those of the large-scale capitalists, some of whom were helping to finance it. [pp. 381-382]

I draw no general but at least two minor conclusions and questions from this story. First, perhaps it was not necessarily reparations alone that broke Germany’s spirit and drove its people to desire revenge. Had an international financial crisis not been set off by the crash of Wall Street, who is to say that the new terms for payment of reparations would not have been a solution, allowing time, as the international board in The Hague hoped, for the recovery of the postwar (post-WWI, that is) German economy? In addition, note that the National Socialist party, while “socialist” in name, was not a grass-roots workers’ movement but was largely financed by “large-scale capitalists.” The object of their support, of course, was to hold communism at bay.

Long after Thomas Mann and his wife had moved to the U.S. and taken American citizenship, and after World War II finally came to a close, the novelist had this to say about his native country: 

‘There are not two Germanies, a bad one and a good one, but only one, in which the best qualities have been corrupted with diabolical cunning into evil. . . . The evil Germany is the good one in misfortune and guilt, the good Germany perverted and overthrown.’

Hayman, his biographer, notes Mann’s undying resentment over what Germany had allowed itself — and been allowed by others — to become: 

His biggest grudge against humanity was that the civilized countries hadn’t merely failed to scotch the growth of Nazism but had encouraged it. ‘My resentment about this I shall take with me to the grave.’

Our reading circle, initiated back in 20xx to read and study James Joyce’s Ulysses together, is meeting soon to discuss Mann’s The Magic Mountain — hardly a book to be absorbed on first reading or adequately considered in a single evening’s conversation, but 2018 is running out, so we’ll do what we can now and maybe come back to Mann later. He is a fascinating writer, not only for his novels but also for the way he wrote (longhand, about a page and a half a day), the time he spent on a work (The Magic Mountain was begun before World War I and not finished and published until 1924), and the way his beliefs and commitments altered with the passage of time and events in Europe. A “reactionary” in the First War, a man who declared he “hated democracy,” he came around to working for the survival of democracy and freedom and doing all he could to support refugees from the nightmare of Hitler’s Germany. Initially, worried that his novels might be banned in Germany and that he might lose his German citizenship (fears that were, unsurprisingly, eventually realized), he hesitated for a long time to speak out against the Nazis. What to say, when to speak, and how -- these were questions that tormented him. He finally made a public statement against Hitler after six years of living “in exile,” and his biographer comments, “A braver man than Thomas might have come out into the open sooner, but Hesse never came out.” 

The Magic Mountain, however, begun before the First World War, was finished and published in 1926, some time before the rise of Hitler. The Magic Mountain is the first work of Thomas Mann’s that I have ever read, and coming to it with little idea of what I would find, I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud in later chapters, even given some of the book's heavy themes of death, decay, and corruption. When you look at a portrait of Mann, he hardly looks like a humorist (and I don’t mean to suggest that he was some kind of German Mark Twain — hardly!), but he found much in human life and civilization ridiculous. When spiritualism overtakes the residents of the Sanitorium Berghof, for example, or when the charismatic Dutchman Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn (modeled in part, at least physically, on the author’s friend Gerhart Hauptman) holds forth at a picnic by a thundering waterfall, declaiming and gesturing to an audience that can’t hear a word he is saying, a reader feels that Thomas Mann was having a wonderful time poking fun. If you’re a traveler, you may be interested in this New Yorker piece about other travelers making a pilgrimage to find the setting of the novel.

All in all, I’m very glad to have read this novel by Thomas Mann and expect to take his advice and read it a second time. It also occurs to me to mention, in light of current world events, that Mann and his German-Jewish wife were immigrants to the United States. 

The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann: A Biography

by Ronald Hayman

NY: Scribner, 1995