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

Shifting Scenes

Changes in the scenery

Fall this year has not brought the usual much-desired, restful slow-down we anticipated. My mother’s death, a couple of stressful trips on expressways around Chicago (“back roads” in that part of the country exist no longer), family revelations, the big street fair in Northport, visitors, another friend’s death, and national political hijinks combined to necessitate our staying in high gear, it seems, through September and into October. There has been a lot of good mixed with the more difficult challenges, but all of it has been intense. Even reading Jane Eyre for our little reading circle (see previous post) was no escape for me this season. Disturbing dreams and disturbed sleep give way at last — none too soon, as the days grow shorter — to faint morning light and the coffee that helps me decide I can cope with life for another day.

Riven!

Last night, in the middle of the night, I finished an odd little book, The Adventures of Ferdinand Tomasso. It was not cheery reading. (This particular copy is from the private library of Suttons Bay author James B. Hendryx, which is its main appeal to me as a bookseller.) I don’t even know if it’s fiction or nonfiction or who the real author might have been, but the story unrolls in Mexico, with Europeans arriving, encountering the natives, storming their cities, and forcing what they call “Christianity” on them with cannons. I read descriptions of murder and slaughter of thousands and can’t help thinking of all the individual lives that count as nothing to the warriors on both sides. For anyone to “win,” thousands had to die, and a civilization had to be brought to its knees. Ambition and greed and power lust.

Former library book

Finishing that book and still wide-awake, I needed an antidote, something familiar, some reminder that life can be, for the fortunate, in certain times and places, ordinary and happy. I might have chosen Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat to re-read but instead plucked another volume from the same shelf, Houseboat Girl, by Lois Lenski.

Patsy sat on the front deck with Blackie and looked ahead. It was good to be on the river again. Life in Mayfield Creek had become dull and monotonous. On the river there was always something new to see. The river was full of bends. The houseboat was always turning corners and coming out on a new stretch. Every bend brought a new landscape, and often there were boats and barges to be seen.

I read for a while, then slept again, until finally it was not an unreasonable hour to get up and make coffee.

Without new landscapes, I muse, sometimes old surroundings can appear new again. That is, what has lost its sparkle or been lost to view because the mind has been otherwise occupied can take on again its own dear, familiar wonder. I look around our dining room, what I sometimes refer to as the “middle kingdom” of our old farmhouse, and feel as if I haven’t seen it with a loving eye for a long time. 

An old round oak table my husband found discarded by the side of the road and brought home with the help of our brother-in-law is where we have meals. Back in the 1970s everyone, especially those who had moved “back to the land,” had to have old heavy round oak tables with massive feet. Now that kind of furniture is no longer in style, country homes taking on much more sophisticated looks, but the table suits our old house and the way we live. Sometimes when we sit after dinner, listening to the radio or reading, a fire (gas) in the fireplace, David says, “This is just how it would have been for Joe and Anna,” the old Bohemian couple (Czech, that is, not Beatnik) who farmed the 80 acres here years ago, kept cows and pigs and chickens. Joe and Anna had the house moved down from its original location up on the hill, where it would have had a stunning view over Lake Michigan. Did they think that in giving up the view they would be out of the wind? The wind swoops downhill to the house, as does the snow! But they no longer had to pump water from their well up the hill, so maybe that was the saving grace. We like being behind rather than on top of the hill: views are taxed, but privacy isn’t, and we like our privacy. We can walk up the drive to see the view. 

An old black wood-burning fireplace (it now burns propane) holds a couple of cast-iron frying pans, a gathering of stones (all houses in this part of Michigan have gatherings of stones somewhere—on windowsills, tables, or wherever), a painted, cast-iron horse, and, since the fireplace is not in use this morning, a vase filled with asters from our meadow. It is aster season now. The asters are deep purple, magenta, and a light pink. The vase came from a friend. Nearby on a counter — because our kitchen is so tiny that counters are arranged to extend outward into the dining room — is a bowl of onions, on another counter a cookie jar. On the walls are paintings by my husband, a framed photograph of shoreline at sunset (gift from the photographer), and a couple of Japanese prints. Two Western saddles rest on stands near two of the walls.

The thing about this room that makes it so comfortable in winter is that it has no exterior walls. An enclosed (but not heated) porch on the west, enclosed (not heated) woodshed on the east, and rooms to north and south embrace the space, though windows through porch and woodshed that admit daylight and doorways to kitchen, “cozy room,” living room, and bath and bedroom keep the room from inducing claustrophobia. On cold evenings, with a fire, no room could feel more sheltered.

Here in the morning, by lamplight, with an illustrated children’s book beside me, I feel calmer than I have in many weeks. 

“On the river nobody likes to hurry,” said Daddy, who had just come in. “That’s the good thing about it.”

We’ll get to wherever we’re going to get, politically and personally. Wherever we are today, we won’t be there forever, and that's true of where we may be tomorrow. None of us will be here forever. Life is short. There are days that demand action, but time comes -- for each of us -- to back away from action, if only for a while. 

We’re here now. We’re here now. I think I will let current events flow without giving them my attention today. 

Book Pairings

Immigration and our southern border

[Note: EXCEPTIONAL CLOSING (as the Parisians call it): Dog Ears Books will be closed this Sunday through Wednesday, Sept. 26. After that we will be OPEN for regular 11-5 hours Tuesdays through Saturdays through the Thanksgiving weekend]

“Pairings” — it’s a familiar idea these days in certain social and professional circles. What wine best accompanies an herbed goat cheese, a rib-eye steak, or a rustic apple tart? Which craft beer is a good accompaniment to seafood gumbo or a hearty chili con carne? The aim is to pair the glass to the dish so that their contents bring out the best in each other, the better to delight the palate. 

I was groping toward the notion of book pairings back when I suggested that readers of Hillbilly Elegy would find their reading experience deepened by going from J. D. Vance’s memoir to Nancy Eisenberg’s historical survey, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. The two books represent two different genres and different degrees of complexity, one a close-up, personal view, the other an objectification through history’s long lens, each book’s content helping to shed additional light on the other. I didn’t then have the phrase “book pairings” in mind, but it helps me now to clarify what I had then and have continued to have in mind when I recommend two books together.

Geology and beach stones

An obvious pair jumped out at me this summer, Lake Michigan Rock Picker’s Guide and The Last Ice Age and the Leelanau Peninsula. The latter provides about as much geological background as most people want, while the former helps to identify stones picked up on the beach. Nothing too heavy here. Again, however, the books are complementary. Both are also small and inexpensive, just right for the car glove compartment or bicycle panier.

Sometimes it might be helpful and salutary to effect an unlikely mating. How about the Death and Life of the Great Lakes, followed by Lake Michigan Mermaid? Narrative poetry does not have to thought of as an antidote or challenge to science but can be seen as a helpful adjunct, a reminder and acknowledgement of personal values and emotional attachments. And why should we have to leave beauty or feeling behind to face facts? What a foolish notion!

Facts and stories. Sometimes two books offer both together to enrich a reader’s experience. One example for me of is that of La Frontera (a book of history and many personal stories) paired with Lauren Markham’s The Far Away Brothers (focused on current events and stories of the experiences of two specific immigrant boys). Anyone concerned with questions of border security and/or immigration from Latin America would find these two books together providing an intense course of learning. 

A recent addition to my Books Read 2018 list, Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, left me more than a little exhausted with its historical examples and survey of current disasters-in-the-making. (That is not a criticism. I heartily recommend the book.) In conclusion, Diamond gives a few reasons for cautious optimism and specific prescriptions for action, but I needed more, something inspiring at an emotional, on-the-ground level, and I’m finding it in Wendell Berry’s The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings. Any of Berry’s books — fiction, nonfiction, poetry — is a good introduction to his thinking and writing and living, and these essays are no exception. Berry and Diamond cover much of the same ground but from very different starting places and with very different perspectives. 

The suggested pairings above, I see, have neglected fiction, and fiction pairs well with nonfiction, as I learned in an undergraduate course entitled “History Through Literature.” In fact, in looking back at my own posts I see I recommended If the Creek Don’t Rise, by Leah Weiss, to accompany Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash. Look here to read about the novel and see my reasons for putting it together with the memoir and the history book. 

And now, here is a completely natural, intuitive pairing of two novels. Have you read both? If not, why not?

Anyone else have a suggestion for a pair — or a trio — of books to be read together? Comments and additions welcome!

We need to change our ways!

A Perfect Storm of Reading

We drove toward and right into a low-lying cloud

After three solid days of rain, a day of blue sky and enormous, slowly drifting cumulus clouds arrived. Maybe it was the clearing weather that gave me the impetus to finish, on one morning, three books I’d begun reading over two weeks before, going back and forth among the three for day after day. Our Sunday was primarily a day of rest, with only a short expedition to Willcox and a visit to Twin Ponds to look for sandhill cranes. For the second time this winter, we could hear cranes in the distance but caught only the briefest glimpse of one small group high in the sky. 

They were lighting on the ground too far from us to be seen. Still, the dancing wind, beautiful sky, golden grasses, distant mountains, and the unusual sight of an expanse of water at our feet lifted our spirits. 

Back at the cabin once more, after a late lunch, I picked up a novel I’d happened on by chance in a thrift shop in Safford. I was not familiar with Yonnondio From the Thirties, by Tillie Olsen, but something about the dust jacket caught my eye, and the text on the flyleaf sealed the deal.

I’ve never read a book like this. To begin with, Olsen began the writing of her novel when she was only nineteen years old and worked on it intermittently for four or five years while moving around the country from one city to another. Somewhere along the way, though, it disappeared from her sight, and for years she thought the work was “lost or destroyed.” Subsequently, for twenty years, while raising four children and working a series of non-writing jobs, her creativity was also “lost” — but it was not destroyed. Tell Me a Riddle, a novel published in 1969, gave her a place in American literature, and her subsequent life was that of a minor literary star, with awards and fellowships and all the rest. 

Then one day, looking for another manuscript in what must have been voluminous papers, the author turned up some pages of her youthful beginning. 

A later, more thorough, search turned up additional makings: odd tattered pages, lines in yellowed notebooks, scraps. Other parts, evidently once in existence, seem irrevocably lost. 

From fourteen different versions of fragments, “penciled over scrawls” written 38-41 years earlier, Olsen did what she could to combine and reconstruct the pieces — with, however, “no rewriting, no new writing.” The result is an unfinished masterpiece in American literature, one that deserves being retrieved yet again from obscurity. 

We cannot know what the author at age 19 had in mind for the end of the story of Maizie and her family, and on the last page of this book published by Delacorte Press in 1974 we leave them still in the hell of an urban slum in August. They had moved from a mining town to a tenant farm to “packingtown,” the parents always hoping to make a better life for themselves and their children. But it is not the story line alone, much less the way it came together, in bits, over an interval of decades that makes Yonnondio memorable. Rather, it is the writing itself, writing so immediate and poetic and natural on the page, as it seems to race along with the breathing and heartbeats of the characters, that even to call it “style” seems all wrong. For example, although the family’s happiest times came when they lived on the farm, that life too was one of hardship, especially in winter:

Days were dim and short. Snow lay on the earth continually—blinding white at noon, yellow and old at dusk, ghost white at night. Life ceased beyond the kitchen. In the circle of warmth around the stove, everything moved and revolved. Distance was enormously magnified by the cold. Far and far it seemed to the woodpile; to the henhouse, where the hens gathered in drooping ovals of dejection, their cheeps coming out in little frozen spears; to the stable, where the sweet rotting smell of hay and the great cloud of warmth from the cow stained the air. They scarcely moved from the stove. 

And this is one of the more prosaic passages in the book. Here is an earlier passage, addressed to a young man newly gone down to work in the mine, where his brother has already died:

Breathe and breathe, Andy, turn your eyes to the stars. Their beauty, never known before, pricks like tears. You belong to a starless night now, unimaginably black, without light, like death. Perhaps the sweat glistening on the roof rock seen for an instant will seem like stars. 

And no more can you stand erect. You lose that heritage of man, too. You are brought now to fit earth’s intestines, stoop like a hunchback underneath, crawl like a child, do your man’s work lying on your side, stretched and tense as a corpse. The rats shall be your birds, and the rocks plopping in the water your music….

Often I have heard — and understood — the complaint that literary classics are generally “depressing.” Yonnondio, in common with finished and widely recognized giants in American literature, gives us human beings with ordinary hopes and dreams who must pit themselves against social and historical circumstances of huge, impersonal, and crushing power. The family’s dream of the farm was crushed by the tenant system. The horrors of coal mine and slaughterhouse have been told in other novels, but never from the point of view of a child whose limited understanding confuses reality and nightmare so thoroughly in a perspective that captures reality as no other book has done.

Once again, serendipity guided me to a book I would never have been looking for. The title and the author’s name were on no “wanted” list of mine, mental or written, and I cannot recall seeing them on other people’s must-read lists, either, although my unfamiliarity may have led me to slide over the book’s title without pause. It isn’t bad to look for particular books. I’m not saying that. What I am saying is that it is always good to be open to the book not looked for, the book stumbled on by chance, the unknown book that one day calls out from a shelf, saying, “Pick me up!”

There was no strong connection between Yonnondio and Sky Island or Old Southwest New Southwest, but for me Olsen’s novel bore a definite connection to William H. McNeill’s The Global Condition. Although McNeill’s lectures look at American history in the wider context of world events and processes, leaving aside details to focus on broad, sweeping currents of change, the detailed picture is there between the lines. In the story of the ever-expanding role of improved transportation and the substitution of market pricing for imperial command, McNeill is very much aware that there always continue to be winners and losers and that the big winners are always those on top of the economic power pyramid. In fact, when he pulls back even further to expand this global view, adding in the role of microparasitism and disease in the transformation of human societies, he also throws in macroparasitism, using the term metaphorically but arguing that he is not doing injustice to the term.

Certainly, most peasants who see someone else eat what they have produced or find themselves conscripted to work for another’s benefit find that access to resources required for their own personal well-being has been reduced in proportion to the quantity of goods and services transferred by such transactions. When armed raiders break in upon a village of farmers, resemblance to the macroparasitism of one animal species on another is obvious enough. When it is tax or rent collectors who come to seize their share of the harvest, the resemblance is less obvious, since sudden death is not normally at stake in such situations. Still, if one thinks not of individuals but of biological populations, the dependence of a macroparasite on the survival of the plants or animals whose tissues it eats is similar to the dependence of the tax and rent consumer on the survival of tax and rent payers. Accordingly, customs and institutions that regulate the amount of tax and rent payments so as to allow the survival of the payers are analogous to the balance of nature that keep predators relatively few and their prey comparatively numerous—as, for instance, is true of lions and antelopes in the African game preserves.

In this sense, then, McNeil feels justified in using the term macroparasitism to apply to and describe “exploitative relations among groups and classes of human beings.” 

I want to pause here and look at Tillie Olsen’s characters and their situations through McNeill’s lens. In the first part of the novel, the mine owners and managers, who never went down into the mine themselves, were the obvious predators on site. Others, of course, are so far removed from the scene that they never appear, either in the story or in the imaginations of the mine workers, but whether we look at the mining town itself, the nation as a whole, or owners and investors and workers the world over, we see that the prey are much more numerous. And while “sudden death” is not the given that it is when a lion runs down an antelope, it does occasionally come into play, and only large numbers of new workers available to replace those who die in the mines make continuation of the system possible.

When Olsen’s fictional family moves to the farm, that brief, bucolic, sometimes-idyllic, sometimes-hellish life (its character depending on the season), we see the family’s hard work taken from them in the very way McNeill describes peasants being preyed upon in earlier centuries. 

Coming to the kitchen, she heard her father’s angry voice: “They’re taking all of it, every damn thing. The whole year slaved to nothing. I owe them—some joke if it wasnt so bloody—I owin them after workin like a team of mules for a year. They’re wanting the cow and Nellie . . . takin Fred Benson’s farm and Eldridge’s. Batten on us like hogs. The bastards. A whole year—now I’m owin them.”

In the third phase of the family’s life, the farm left behind, the hell of the mining world is replaced by the hell even worse, if that is possible, of the slaughterhouse and meat-packing life. Here it is not coal dust but an ever-present stench that pervades the air they breathe. But with no land of their own, they are dependent on jobs provided by others, and since those seeking jobs always outnumber the jobs themselves, there is no bargaining for better wages or conditions. Some will not survive, but enough will….

McNeill is not carrying a socialist (or even a union) banner and certainly is not arguing against the free market system. Far from it. He believes in progress and in civilization. At the same time, he recognizes it as a double-edged sword and sees that every advance in civilization, every technological or market advance, comes with a cost — and that the cost is paid by those at the bottom, time and time again. Nor does he think this problem (for those of us who see it as a problem, which not everyone does) or any other will ever be finally solved for all time, because — if you will allow me to put one of McNeill’s themes into my own language — every solution to a previous problem creates new problems. It is not a question, then, of how to eliminate all problems: it is, rather, a question of which set of problems humanity can tolerate and survive.

Humanity, in short, is not likely to run out of problems to confront nor of changes needing to be made in prevailing practices…. Action and reaction within a complex ecological web will not cease, and efforts to understand its functioning fully and to foresee future side effects will continue to elude human beings for some time to come, and perhaps forever.

I used to look at this solution-creating-new-problems truth as a choice, but I am coming more and more to see it as McNeill does. Since in any given case and for any particular problem, we may choose one “solution” over another, but since we cannot see all the future effects of that solution, all the new problems it will create, we are as much in charge of our future as a herd of antelopes, swerving this way and that across the grassy plains. Our individual, group, and national purposes, that is, may well be lost in the swirl of global processes, economic and otherwise, beyond our ken.

That scarf of cloud above became a fog that lasted all the way to town.

I finished reading Olsen’s and McNeill’s books in the course of the same morning, and that afternoon I took from the shelf my big, fat, hardcover copy of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This particular edition includes the “classic” introduction (so the cover announces it) by Ludwig von Mises. Well, far be it from me to put myself on the same level as a “classic” economist, but the brief introduction by von Mises failed to overwhelm me. Perhaps it was in part because I was just coming off the larger, longer view of William McNeill, but it seemed that all von Mises had to say was that Adam Smith was right about everything, that capitalism was responsible for every bit of improvement ever made in human life, and that anyone who disagreed could only be guilty of indulging in a shallow, barbarian smear. (Yes, he used those terms.) He cites no particular arguments of Smith’s opponents, and so he is under no necessity to refute them. Instead, after tossing them into the dustbin, he trots out the praise of various “authorities” for Smith’s work. 

Prepared as I am to find much wisdom and food for thought in Smith’s work — certainly a Western classic for good reason — my philosopher’s soul rebels at an introduction that substitutes informal logical fallacies for serious analysis. Surely von Mises was capable of better? Moving on, I limited my first sitting’s reading of Smith to his own introduction and his first chapter, “Of the Division of Labor,” and what I propose is to read a chapter and set the book aside for a while, taking time to reflect on the chapter read.

Adam Smith’s “division of labor” has little, if anything to do with a household in which the husband goes out to work for pay while the wife remains behind to cook and clean and raise children. No, he is interested in industrial production, the manufacture of goods for sale. He begins with the simplest of manufactured goods, pins and nails, and shows that one person making such an item by himself can never make anywhere near the number produced by a group of workers when the process is broken down into simple steps and each worker performs only one step, over and over. With division of labor, ten persons may make 48,000 pins a day, where one man working by himself would be hard pressed to make twenty.

Irrefutable, no? And yet, in just the short seven pages of this first chapter, I found myself pausing over a couple of claims. 

One was Smith’s argument that with the division of labor workers are more apt to discover “easier and readier methods” to make their work easier. His example is that of a boy adding a string to a valve handle to “save his own labor.” The boy’s job had been to open and close the valve, but now — has he not put himself out of a job? This result Smith does not discuss, let alone pursue. And in McNeill’s perspective, certainly a technological advance has been made, civilization has been nudged forward, and the job of one now-unnecessary worker counts for nothing in the great scheme of things. 

Well, that is the way of technology. I paused much longer over an earlier point, one made just previous to that of the labor-saving invention. Smith claims that in passing from one kind of work to another, say from one aspect of production to a different aspect, both time and focus are lost. Let me quote directly here, because what I have to say about this claim needs the particularity of an example.

…A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another. When he first begins the new work he is seldom very keen and hearty; his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for some time he trifles rather than applies to good purpose. The habit of sauntering and indolent careless application, which is naturally or necessarily acquired by every country workman who is obliged to change his work and his tools every half hour, and to apply his hand in twenty different ways almost every day of his life; renders him almost always slothful and lazy, and incapable of any vigorous application even on the most pressing occasions. Independent, therefore, of his deficiency in the point of dexterity, this cause alone must always reduce considerably the quantity of work which he is capable of performing. 

In Smith’s picture, the country worker (note the urban sophisticate’s denigration of the “country workman”) “saunters” and “trifles.” He is “slothful and lazy,” “incapable of … vigorous application,” and, we are asked to take as a given, deficient of dexterity. The worker's mind, we see, cannot refocus quickly enough on the new task. He is almost necessarily “indolent” and “careless,” simply by the circumstance of moving from one task to another. 

Oh, my, where to begin? Adam Smith was the son of a customs official, not a workman. Smith himself began studying philosophy at Glasgow University at the age of 15. Anything he knew of manual labor, therefore, he did not know first-hand, and his claims about the workman’s mind can only be speculative. 

As for a mind’s focus on one small task, repeated minute after minute, hour after hour, does not Smith assume too much? Perhaps because it is not part of his experience? Does not the very repetition dull a mind’s focus and allow it to wander? Perhaps lead it irresistibly away from the familiar (and therefore contemptible) task? 

Finally, I would argue that in moving from one task to another — let us imagine a farmer, taking feed to his animals, then turning his attention to a fence that needs mending, and moving on to clean and sharpen and oil the tools upon which his livelihood depends — a worker’s mind will be all the more active. Or we might look to the examples of a carpenter or a seamstress, workers more immediately producing goods. Here, also, I would argue, the man or woman who sees the “big picture” also sees the interrelated nature of various tasks, the necessity of each, and ways in which each task as well as their interrelationship might be better and more expeditiously — and even more beautifully —accomplished. 

In short, my speculations on the minds of a single-task workman and a workman moving from one task to another lead me to a conclusion opposite that of Smith’s. I think of work done with what Wendell Berry would call "affection" as work more likely to be done well.

But here is the clincher, the single word that gives Smith the victory over me: quantity. In evaluating the industrial work force, his concern is exclusively on the quantity of goods produced. It is not important that Smith’s factory worker see the “big picture,” and he does not address even the quality of the goods produced. It is only quantity that counts, with resultant cheapness to buyers. In Smith's picture, therefore, it is all to the good if the worker himself becomes almost literally a cog in the machine, because the more machinelike the work process, the more efficient, the greater the mass of goods cranked out, and the greater the mass of goods, the lower the price and therefore the larger the market for the goods. 

Again, in McNeill’s objective global calculation, this makes sense. It is civilization that moves forward, the human species that advances. Any individual is of little account, especially the antelopes put to work as machine parts for the greater good. 

*****

What kind of world do we want? What kind of lives do we want, for ourselves and for our fellow human beings? Is the accumulation of wealth and the continual increase of material production more humanly valuable than individual lives? Is, for example, the financial health of the weapons and armaments industry and the profits it makes so indicative of the progress of civilization that the deaths of a few schoolchildren weigh nothing in the balance?

Such are my own thoughts and questions and pondering after reading Adam Smith’s first seven-page chapter.

Another day, another set of clouds

Postscript 2/25

First, in relation to the novel by Tillie Olsen discussed in this post, I since read this of Helen Levitt’s photography in the 2/22/2018 issue of the New York Review of Books: “Right up until her death in 2009, Levitt was continually revisiting the exposures she had made on the streets sixty or seventy years earlier…. She had every right, of course, to remain engaged with her early negatives, but it is sensible to distinguish between the young artist doing her first street work, the middle-aged one shaping it into book form, and the nonagenarian approaching it with a lifetime’s experience.” 

As to William McNeill’s metaphorical application of the term “macroparasitism” to describe relationships between different human groups, I think it fair to extrapolate from his usage to distinguish not only a simple predator-prey relationship but also to see a “food chain” of parasitism, as it were. Children, unfortunately for the modern liberal perspective that sees human young as deserving of protection, must be seen as the largest, most readily available group of “prey.” Every layer of predators moving up the chain feeds on the layer beneath it, and thus every level of social parasitism, at bottom, is parasitic on the world’s children. They are not yet contributing members of society; moreover, they can easily be replaced. I hope it is crystal-clear that I am not advocating the metaphorical parasitism on children, any more than McNeil was advocating metaphorical parasitism between any two groups of human beings. He was merely describing what he saw. Looking through his lens, then, I see children at the bottom of the pyramid. They are the oceanic plankton of the parasitic human “food chain.” 

There were no comments in response to my questions ending this post as it originally appeared, so I will repeat here the last question in that paragraph. I asked if the deaths of a few schoolchildren were outweighed by profits to a global weapons and armaments industry. What I have come back to say now is that the picture of an industry as predator and children as prey was vastly oversimplified. In truth, there are many layers of parasitism, many layers of predators between the bottom and top of the metaphorical food chain. My question, however, still stands, as does the first in the paragraph, namely, What kind of world do we want? 

A Dutchman Views World History

The text-books of ancient History give the date 476 as the year in which Rome fell, because in that year the last emperor was driven off his throne. But Rome, which was not built in a day, took a long time falling. The process was so slow and so gradual that most Romans did not realize how their old world was coming to an end. They complained about the unrest of the times—they grumbled about the high prices of food and about the low wages of the workmen—they cursed the profiteers who had a monopoly of the grain and the wood and the gold coin. Occasionally they rebelled against an unusually rapacious governor. But the majority of the people during the first four centuries of our era ate and drank (whatever their purse allowed them to buy) and hated or loved (according to their nature) and went to the theatre (whenever there was a free show of fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums of the big cities, utterly ignorant of the fact that their empire had outlived its usefulness and was doomed to perish.

- Hendrik Van Loon, The Story of Mankind (Boni & Liveright, 1921)

Hendrik William Van Loon (1882-1944) wrote The Story of Mankind for young people and illustrated it generously with his own simple drawings and maps. It received, in 1922, the first Newbery prize ever awarded. The copy I’m reading is a first edition (but without the dust jacket, so I am pricing it accordingly), but very inexpensive copies of the book, even small pocket paperbacks (this adult edition omitted the illustrations), are widely available. It was that popular.

It was 1993 before I discovered Van Loon, happening upon a copy of his Geography at a yard sale and being enchanted by the illustrations. Soon afterward I came to know Lives, the wonderfully inventive series of stories written about an imaginary series of dinners, given by two Dutchmen so determined to have interesting guests that they decide not to limit themselves to living persons. Their first guest is Erasmus. Another I remember fondly is Descartes. Sometimes they invite more than one historical personage at a time, and I have always wondered if this book was the inspiration for the old (very old) Steve Allen television show, with its “appearances” of characters from history and literature.

The Arts is another enchanting Van Loon contribution, detailing the history of various arts from the beginning of mankind. It is another look at the “story of mankind” from a different angle, with a more specific focus (and leaving out a lot of field generals and battles).






I should warn that The Story of Mankind is decidedly (and disappointingly) Eurocentric. Native American tribes are shown on a map of the Eastern Seaboard to the Great Lakes but not otherwise mentioned. There is a very brief chapter on Buddha and Confucius but no detailing of Asian civilizations. Van Loon’s picture of world history is very much a story of Europe taking over the world, and he says as much. One wonders what he would say were he alive today.


For all of Europe’s world “victories,” however, the author does not close with “They all lived happily ever after,” and I suspect he may have had somewhat the tragic sense of history possessed by Michigan’s Civil War historian Bruce Catton. Almost at the end of the book, Van Loon mentions “problems” in the world and the need for apprentices for future leadership. He does not say under whom the apprentices would learn.

He then closes with a lengthy quotation from “a very great Frenchman.”

The more I think of the problems of our lives, the more I am persuaded that we ought to choose Irony and Pity for our assessors and judges as the ancient Egyptians called upon the Goddess Isis and the Goddess Nephtys on behalf of their dead.

Irony and Pity are both of good counsel; the first with her smiles makes life agreeable; the other sanctifies it with her tears.

The Irony which I invoke is no cruel Deity. She mocks neither love nor beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed. Her mirth disarms and it is she who teaches us to laugh at rogues and fools, whom but for her we might be so weak as to despise and hate.

Can anyone identify the “great Frenchman” who penned these words? At the end of his book of world history, what do these words tell you about Van Loon’s view of the world?