The Magic Mountain (117 page)

THE MAKING OF
The Magic Mountain

SINCE it is certainly not customary for an author to discuss his own work, perhaps a word of apology, or at least of explanation, should occupy first place. For the thought of acting as my own historian I find a little confusing; and, you know, there are few impartial historians anyway. Furthermore, since my work is still in the making and, I venture to hope, still reflects the present and its problems, it would be rather difficult, if not impossible, to criticize it with scholarly detachment—even if the critic were
not
, at the same time, the author.

In selecting my
Magic Mountain
for discussion, I base the choice on the sympathetic interest that this one of all my books received in America. Likewise, when I tell you freely of the book’s genesis and my experiences with it, I am relying on the healthy and sympathetic attitude of the American mind toward the personal, the anecdotal, and the intimately human.

Oddly enough, it is not a difficulty for me, but rather the reverse, that I have to discuss
The Magic Mountain
in English. I am reminded of the hero of my novel, the young engineer Hans Castorp. At the end of the first volume, he makes an extraordinary declaration of love to Madame Chauchat, the Kirghiz-eyed heroine, veiling its strangeness in the garment of a foreign tongue. It eases his embarrassment and helps him to say things he could never have dared say in his own language. “
Parler
français”
he says, “
c’est parler sans parler
,
en quelque manière.”
In short, it helps him over his inhibitions—and an author who feels embarrassed at having to talk about his own works is in the same way relieved at being able to talk about them in another language.

There are authors whose names are associated with a single great work, because they have been able to give themselves complete expression in it. Dante
is
the
Divina
Commedia
, Cervantes
is Don Quixote
. But there are others—and I must count myself among them—whose single works do not possess this complete significance, being only parts of the whole which makes up the author’s lifework. And not only his lifework, but actually his life itself, his personality. He strives, that is, to overcome the laws of time and continuity. He tries to produce himself completely in each thing he writes, but only actually does so in the way
The Magic Mountain
does it; I mean by the use of the leitmotiv, the magic formula that works both ways, and links the past with the future, the future with the past. The leitmotiv is the technique employed to preserve the inward unity and abiding presentness of the whole at each moment. In a broader sense, the whole lifework of the author has its leading motifs, which serve to preserve its unity, to make that unity perceptible to the reader, and to keep the whole picture present in each single work. But just for that reason, it may be unfair to the single work to look at it by itself, disregarding its connection with the others, and not taking into account the frame of reference to which it belongs. For instance, it is almost impossible to discuss
The Magic Mountain
without thinking of the links that connect it with other works; backwards in time to
Buddenbrooks
and to
Death in
Venice;
forwards to the
Joseph
novels. Let me first of all tell you something of the origin and conception of the novel, just as events in my life brought them about. In the year 1912—over a generation ago now—my wife was suffering from a lung complaint, fortunately not a very serious one; yet it was necessary for her to spend six months at a high altitude, in a sanatorium at Davos, Switzerland. I stayed with the children either in Munich or at our country home in Tölz, in the valley of the Isar. But in May and June I visited my wife for some weeks at Davos. There is a chapter in
The
Magic Mountain
, entitled “Arrival,” where Hans Castorp dines with his cousin Joachim in the sanatorium restaurant, and tastes not only the excellent Berghof cuisine but also the atmosphere of the place and the life “
bei uns hier oben.”
If you read that chapter, you will have a fairly accurate picture of our meeting in this sphere and my own strange impressions of it.

The impressions grew stronger and stronger during the three weeks I spent at Davos visiting my wife while she was a patient. They are the same three weeks Hans Castorp originally meant to spend at Davos—though for him they turned into the seven fairytale years of his enchanted stay. I may even say that they threatened to do the same for me. At least
one
of his experiences is a pretty exact transference to my hero of things that happened to me; I mean the examination of the carefree visitor from the “flatland,” and the resulting discovery that he himself is to become a patient too! I had been at the so-called Berghof ten days, sitting out on trie balcony in cold, damp weather, when I got a troublesome bronchial cold. Two specialists were in the house, the head physician and his assistant, so I took the obvious course of consulting them. I accompanied my wife to the office, she having been summoned to one of her regular examinations. The head doctor, who of course looked rather like Hofrat Behrens, thumped me about and straightway discovered a so-called moist spot in my lung.

If I had been Hans Castorp, the discovery might have changed the whole course of my life. The physician assured me that I should be acting wisely to remain there for six months and take the cure. If I had followed his advice, who knows, I might still be there! I wrote
The Magic Mountain
instead. In
it
I made use of the impressions gathered during my three weeks’ stay. They were enough to convince me of the dangers of such a milieu for young people—and tuberculosis is a disease of the young. You will have got from my book an idea of the narrowness of this charmed circle of isolation and invalidism. It is a sort of substitute existence, and it can, in a relatively short time, wholly wean a young person from actual and active life. Everything there, including the conception of time, is thought of on a luxurious scale. The cure is always a matter of several months, often of several years. But after the first six months the young person has not a single idea left save flirtation and the thermometer under his tongue. After the second six months in many cases he has even lost the capacity for any other ideas. He will become completely incapable of life in the flatland.

Such institutions as the Berghof were a typical pre-war phenomenon. They were only possible in a capitalistic economy that was still functioning well and normally. Only under such a system was it possible for patients to remain there year after year at the family’s expense.
The Magic Mountain b
ecame the swan song of that form of existence. Perhaps it is a general rule that epics descriptive of some particular phase of life tend to appear as it nears its end. The treatment of tuberculosis has entered upon a different phase today; and most of the Swiss sanatoria have become sports hotels.

THE idea of making a story out of my Davos impressions and experiences occurred to me very soon. After finishing the novel
Royal Highness
I wrote the long short story
Death in Venice.
This I had nearly finished when I went to Davos; and I now conceived the idea of
The Magic Mountain
(from the very first the tale bore that title). It was meant as a humorous companion-piece to
Death in Venice
and was to be about the same length: a sort of satire on the tragedy just finished. The atmosphere was to be that strange mixture of death and lightheadedness I had found at Davos.
Death in
Venice
portrays the fascination of the death idea, the triumph of drunken disorder over the forces of a life consecrated to rule and discipline. In
The Magic Mountain
the same theme was to be humorously treated. There was to be a simple-minded hero, in conflict between bourgeois decorum and macabre adventure. The end of the story was not decided, but it would come as I wrote. It seemed an easy and amusing thing to do, and would not take much time. When I got back to Tölz and Munich I set to work on the first chapters.

A private intuition soon began to steal over me that this subject matter tended to spread itself out and lose itself in shoreless realms of thought. I could not conceal from myself the fact that the theme afforded a dangerously rich complex of ideas. Perhaps I am not the only author who tends to underestimate the extent of an enterprise he has embarked on. When I conceive a piece of work, it comes to me in such innocent, practicable guise, I feel sure I shall have no great difficulty in carrying it out. My first novel, B
uddenbrooks
, was meant to be a book of some two hundred and fifty pages, after the pattern, of Scandinavian novels of family and merchant life. It became two fat volumes.
Death in Venice
was to be a short story for a magazine. The same thing is true of the
Joseph
novels; they were to be something in the form of a story, about the length of
Death in Venice
.
The Magic Mountain
proved no exception to the rule. Perhaps this self-deception is necessary and fruitful. If a writer had before him from the start all the possibilities and all the drawbacks of a projected work, and knew what the book itself wanted to be, he might never have the courage to begin. It is possible for a work to have its own will and purpose, perhaps a far more ambitious one than the author’s—and it is
good
that this should be so. For the ambition should not be a personal one; it must not come
before
the work itself. The work must bring it forth and compel the task to completion. Thus, I feel, all great works were written, and not out of an ambition to write something great which set itself from the beginning.

In short, I soon saw that this Davos story had its own ideas and that it thought about itself quite otherwise than I thought about it. This was even outwardly true. The humorous and expansive English style, itself a relief from the austerity of
Death in
Venice
, took up space and time. Then the First World War broke out. It did two things: put an immediate stop to my work on the book, and incalculably enriched its content at the same time. I did not work on it again for years.

In those years I wrote T
he Reflections of a Non-Political Man
, a work of painful introspection, in which I sought light upon my own views of European problems and conflicts. Actually, it became a preparation for the work of art itself; a preparation that grew to mammoth proportions and consumed vast amounts of time. Goethe once called his F
aust
“this very serious jest.” Well, my preparation was for a work of art which could only become a jest—a very serious jest—by dint of my unburdening myself of a quantity of material in the polemical and analytical piece of writing. “This very serious jest.” It is a good definition of art, of all art, of
The Magic Mountain
as well. I could not have jested and played without first living through my problem in deadly, human reality. Only then could I rise, as an artist, above it.

In 1924, at last, appeared the two volumes that had grown out of my proposed short story. Including the long interruptions, they had taken me not seven but actually twelve years of my life. Its reception might have been much less friendly than it was, and still would have surpassed my expectations. It is my way, when I have finished a book, to let it drop with a resigned shrug and not the faintest confidence in its chances in the world. The charm it once possessed for me, its sponsor, has long since vanished; that I have finished it at all is a feat due to my convictions regarding the ethics of craftsmanship—due indeed, at bottom, to obstinacy; and, altogether, obstinacy seems to me to have played such a part in these crabbed years-long preoccupations. I regard them so much as a highly dubious private enjoyment that I question the likelihood of anyone caring to follow on the track of my idiosyncrasies. My surprise is the greater when, as has happened to me repeatedly, they are welcomed by an almost turbulent following; and in the case of
The Magic Mountain
my astonishment was particularly profound. Would anyone expect that a harassed public, economically oppressed, would take it on itself to pursue through twelve hundred pages the dreamlike ramifications of this figment of thought? Would, under the circumstances then prevailing, more than a few hundred people be found, willing to spend money and time on such odd entertainment, which had really little or nothing in common with a novel in the usual sense of the word? Certain it is that ten years earlier the book would not have found readers—nor could it even have been written. It needed the experiences that the author had in common with his countrymen; these he had betimes to let ripen within him, and then, at the favorable moment, as once before, to come forward with his bold production. The subject matter of
The Magic
Mountain
was not by its nature suitable for the masses. But with the bulk of the educated classes these were burning questions, and the national crisis had produced in the general public precisely that alchemical “keying up” in which had consisted the actual adventure of young Hans Castorp. Yes, certainly the German reader recognized himself in the simple-minded but shrewd young hero of the novel. He could and would be guided by him.