The New Lifetime Reading Plan

"Literature begins with geography," says Frost. The litera­ture he created did indeed begin with the hilly, lonely, past- conserving, Yankee land north of Boston. Yet Frost is no regional poet. He may begin with geography, but he advances into unmappable country. Nor is Frost, though deeply American, merely a representative voice; he is his own man. Nor is he a "poet of the people," as Sandburg may be. He writes often about farmers, hill folk, lonely small souls. But the slope of his temperament is as aristocratic as Yeats's [103], though more sociable, flexible, and humorous. As is often the case with him, he is half serious, half kidding in such a casual remark as "I have given up my democratic prejudices and have willingly set the lower classes free to be completely taken care of by the upper classes." Finally, though he uses simple words and weaves into his verse the actual tones of common speech (so that it "says" itself), his technique and imagination are both extraordinarily complex. In other words, Frost is no Yankee sage, rhyming cracker-barrel philosophy, but a sophisticated mind who scorns the usual lingo of sophistication. His under- statement conceals a rich growth of statement.

Frost is an uncornerable man. He will say "I never take my own side in a quarrel." He will say "Fm never serious except when Fm fooling." About his own art he has ideas no one else ever seems to have thought of: "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting." He absorbed

Thoreau [8o] and Emerson [69] and reflected some of their independence, even their crankiness; but, that said, we have said little. Frost outwits classification, as he outwitted his own time, refusing to bow to it, refusing to be intimidated by it, using it always for his own secret, sly purposes: "I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lovers quarrel with the world."

The poems most of us know—"Mending Wall," "After Apple Picking," "The Road Not Taken," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"—remain beautiful. But to find and wind your way into this cranky, ironic, humorous, elusive mind it is necessary to read the less familiar Frost of the later years. Aging, he grew more difficult, more philosophical, far more daring, satirical, funny, scathing. Absorb him slowly, over a long period.

C.F.

107

THOMAS MANN

1875-1955

The Magic Mountain

Some books (they can be first-rate ones, like Jane Austen's [66]) isolate parts of human experience. Others sum up these parts. Thus the masterpieces of Dante [30] and Homer [2,3], though they do other things as well, sum up their cultures. So does The Magic Mountain. The reader will get more out of it by seeing it as a synthetic, inclusive work. Mae West once remarked, in a somewhat different connection, "I like a man who takes his time." In his Foreword to The Magic Mountain Mann puts it thus: "Only the exhaustive is truly interesting." His great novel is exhaustive, and it is truly interesting.

It is a story about a rather simpleminded young German who comes to visit a sick friend at a Swiss tuberculosis sanitar- ium; finds that he is himself infected; stays on for seven years;

listens, talks, thinks, suffers, loves; and is at last swept up into the holocaust of the First World War. As you read this story you will feel, slowly and almost imperceptibly, that it is more than the usual narrative of the education of a young man. In dialogue, in symbol, in fantasy and dream, in argument, in soliloquy, in philosophical discourse, Mann is trying to sum up the mental life of the West.

Ali of our authors are engaged in a Great Conversation, as it has been well called. A minor proof of this is the number of these authors who have helped to form Thomas Mann and whose ideas are orchestrated in The Magic Mountain. I could name dozens. Here are a few acknowledged by Mann himself: Goethe [62], Nietzsche [97], Turgenev [81], Tolstoy [88], Conrad [100], Whitman [85], Ibsen [89], and Freud [98]. In this sense, too, The Magic Mountain is summatory.

Look at it another way. As you read, try to see the Berghof sanitarium as Europe, the Europe (which means America, too) that in 1914 died violently. Think of its characters as being not only themselves but incarnations of powerful modes of thought and feeling: Settembrini is liberal humanism; Naphta is abso- lutist terror (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, and ali the others still to come); Peeperkorn we have perhaps already met, for his message is not unlike D.H. Lawrence^ [113]. And the patients are drawn from so many countries and social leveis—what are they but the sickness of the West, which Mann understood clearly in 1924 and which in the last years of our century may reach its feverish crisis?