Walker Percy reads Thomas Mann

Paper by Lewis Lawson

Presented at the 2000 Walker Percy Symposium

In this paper I’ll refer to Dr. Percy simply as Walker for the sake of brevity. Walker frequently stated that he admired Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, so today I want to suggest some aspects of his fiction that seem to be indebted to that novel.

Thomas Mann is not entirely forgotten today in the United States, but he has lost the pre-eminence that he held among world novelists during the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, the period when Walker Percy was a young man wandering library stacks searching for a literary father.

Thomas Mann became famous at the age of twenty-six when in 1901 he published Buddenbrooks, the story of the decline of the family Buddenbrook, merchants in Lübeck, Germany. This novel sold 1,300,000 thousand copies in Germany by 1936 (Richards 55). By 1924, when he published Der Zauberberg (or The Magic Mountain as it is translated in English), it was rumored that he would soon win the Nobel Prize. On the basis of this rumor the New York publishing house of Alfred Knopf published English-language versions of Buddenbrooks, in 1924, and of The Magic Mountain, in 1927.

Walker was introduced to The Magic Mountain after he, his brothers, and his mother went to live with his uncle, William Alexander Percy, in Greenville, Mississippi, in 1930. There the fourteen-year-old Walker immediately met Shelby Foote, his junior by six months. This was the beginning of a very close friendship that endured to Walker’s death. Their published correspondence and the memories of Uncle Will and Walker that Shelby has shared with interviewers offer the best insight into Walker’s literary life that we have.

Shelby remembers that in the summer of his seventeenth year, in 1934, Uncle Will told him that the most important contemporary novels were Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and Mann’s The Magic Mountain. So he read all three "in about one six-week period", feeling, he recalls, "like a colt in clover" (Carter 72, 79, 157). Now those of you who have read Shelby’s letters to Walker will agree that Shelby has always been a great student of the literary tradition and an excellent analyst of the individual text. Shelby was so taken with The Magic Mountain that he persuaded Uncle Will’s aged Aunt Nana to read and translate for him the "Walpurgis-Night" chapter of The Magic Mountain, which was left in the original French in the English translation. According to Walker’s biographer Patrick Samway, her French was better than her English (42).

Walker’s biographer Jay Tolson writes that The Magic Mountain was his "big book" reading for the summer of 1935 (124). Now Walker was not the objective analyst of fictional technique and architectonics that Shelby was--never did he say much about The Magic Mountain except to acknowledge to several interviewers an identification with the protagonist Hans Castorp. It might be assumed that the identification was based on the fact that both as young men discovered in their twenties that they were tubercular. But it just may be that Walker felt a temperamental identification with Hans long before he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, an identification that resulted not from conscious awareness but from unconscious empathy. You may remember that when Hans first looked off his balcony at the Berghof, he sees below him a garden, then focuses on a lady dressed in black walking there. This is Hans’s introduction to death, for the lady grieves over a son recently dead and a son dying, both stricken by tuberculosis. Walker, too, had discovered that death walks in the garden, the park, the golf course, all those supposedly idyllic locales that figure so prominently in his fiction.

The summer after Walker entered medical school at Columbia in 1937, Shelby remembers, Walker was always carrying around a textbook, Body Water: The Exchange of Fluids in Man (Tolson 145, Samway 87), as if to announce his belief that the only goal of the physician is to understand the body as a machine. This book-carrying he might have done in imitation of Hans Castorp, who is described on page 1 of The Magic Mountain with a book, Ocean Steamships, that he had been studying "off and on" during his railway journey to the International Sanatorium Berghof. Ocean Steamships would apparently signify that Hans’s consciousness is dominated by his training as a maritime engineer. But Mann goes on to say that Ocean Steamships now "lay neglected" on the seat next to Hans, "and the breath of the panting [railroad] engine, streaming in, defiled its cover with particles of soot". Now Mann is a consummate narrative technician: he offers here a foreshadowing that Hans, the reader of Ocean Steamships, is going to be defiled like the book by "the breath" of a panting apparatus, his own. But Mann is also notoriously ironic: if you study closely the entire seven-hundred pages of The Magic Mountain, you will see that Hans is drawn to steamships because they have their being in the ocean, the element which he loves because it evokes his fantasy of an early existence before he was separated from his mother, not merely psychologically but physically. The imagery suggests that he dreams of a return to the amniotic enclosure, the original ocean. Hans, in short, dreams of the "oceanic feeling" that Romain Rolland describes so vividly in Jean-Christophe, another long novel that Walker read during adolescence (C 260). Mann even throws out the possibility that Hans’s dormant tuberculosis becomes active in response to his repressed yearning for the love that was denied him in his early development, an ancient belief that even today has its supporters.

Now doesn’t this make you wonder about the book, Body Water, that Walker carried around? He was most ironical, himself, and maybe, just maybe, he knew another ironist when he read one. Especially you’d wonder when you recall that Walker began two of his novels with the protagonist carrying a suggestive book. Will Grey, in the unpublished "Gramercy Winner", arrives to begin his tuberculosis treatment at a sanatorium "with", Tolson notes, "a huge physics book, Subatomic Particles, that he thinks will explain everything" (230). Lance Lamar, in Lancelot, recalls that the first time he met Margot Reilly, he was carrying a briefcase containing a fifth of Wild Turkey and a copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (L 72). Other Percy protagonists are identified by the books they read: the moviegoer Binx Bolling owns a single book, Arabia Deserta, while Will Barrett, in The Last Gentleman, reads English detective stories. Of Walker’s protagonists it may be said: the world they read is the world as they see it.

Also in the summer of 1935, perhaps to celebrate Walker’s completion of a two-year minor in German at Chapel Hill, Shelby gave him a German-language copy of Buddenbrooks that, Tolson reports, Walker read "avidly" (165). There is no critical explanation of Walker’s avidity that I’m aware of, so I’m absolutely free to speculate. Since the theme of Buddenbrooks is the decline of the Buddenbrook family over four generations, Walker probably would have identified the Buddenbrooks with the Percys, beginning with the generation of his great-grandfather William Alexander, followed by the generation of his grandfather Walker and his brothers LeRoy and William Armstrong, followed by the generation of his father LeRoy and his Uncle Will, and concluding with his own generation. But, like Thomas Mann’s interest in the Buddenbrooks, Walker’s interest probably shifted with the third generation from the legendary exploits of the early males to the impact of those exploits on the later males. He must have felt that he understood his own father with greater sympathy as he read of third-generation Thomas Buddenbrook, who struggled all his life to live up to the fabulous achievements of the first two generations, thus to throw off the depression and shame that shadowed his life. And he must have identified with Johann, or "Hanno" as his mother calls him, the fourth-generation son who soon realizes that, like his father, he is alienated from the values and manners of the earlier generations. Soon after his father’s death, Hanno dies of typhoid fever, but Mann asserts that if he had possessed will power he would have defeated the disease. The lack of will to resist becomes a characteristic of Walker’s protagonists, especially those named Will.

There is no evidence that Walker wrote any fiction during his four years of medical school, being "particularly attracted" by the "mechanism of disease" as his professors called it (Signposts 187). Graduating in June, 1941, he took up his internship at Bellevue Hospital in January 1942. Within two months a routine x-ray examination revealed that he had an active case of tuberculosis. Walker always insisted that he was infected by bacilli while performing one hundred twenty-five autopsies during those two months, but it is possible that his psychological and spiritual condition at the time activated a dormant infection (Samway 122). In September of the same year he entered Trudeau Sanatorium, at Saranac Lake, New York, known as "America’s Magic Mountain".

Because Walker was now in a situation similar to that of Hans Castorp, it is a widely held assumption that he then reread Mann’s Magic Mountain. Probably he did, but he never said that he did. The only reference that he made during his time there was in a letter to a Chapel Hill classmate, "Apart from all meditations on the philosophic nature of time (à la Hans Castorp), I can’t help thinking of the fantastic turns both our lives have taken . . ." (qtd in Samway 132). All that he conveyed in many interviews, all of them at least twenty years later, was that he, like Hans Castorp, was tubercular and that he received the same clinical treatment as that given Hans Castorp. Walker almost never discussed a work of art as such, usually instead vaguely implying an emotional state that it mirrored or aroused in him. In the Fall of 1944 Walker was discharged from Trudeau. He returned to New York City, intending to teach pathology at the medical school. But his tuberculosis again became active, so that in April of 1945 he entered Gaylord Farms Sanatorium, in Wallingford, Connecticut. After a stay of 136 days (Samway 135), he was discharged from Gaylord, shortly thereafter returning to Greenville.

On November 6, 1946, Walker married Mary Bernice "Bunt" Townsend. They began their married life in Uncle Will’s summer place in Sewanee and Walker soon began a novel, to be called "The Charterhouse". If you accept the idea that tuberculosis can be activated by an emotional factor, you will not surprised to hear that at the same time Walker got a bad x-ray report. After all, his decisions to marry and to write were grave and daring acts of self-expression that would be opposed by the unconscious forces that had dictated his life in the past. He spent most of the next five years on his bed reading and working on his novel, which eventually reached eleven hundred pages in length (Ciuba 30). It was rejected by "four publishers in a row" before being consigned to Walker’s attic. Walker always told his interviewers that it was written in the manner of Thomas Wolfe, but I suspect that there was also a good deal of Thomas Mann in it. In the opening scene Ben Cleburne is thinking, as he lies on his bed in a mental institution. Walker was likening himself to Hans Castorp lying on his balcony in the sanatorium as he himself lay on his bed, first in Trudeau Clinic and now in Sewanee, trying to understand how his life had come to such a crisis. We’ll never know how much more Mann there was in it, for Walker ultimately burned it rather than include it in the papers that he conveyed to the University of North Carolina Library (Foote "Interesting" 26-27). There is the possibility that Foote’s account of the disposal is wrong. I once wrote Walker to ask if I could come to Covington to read "The Charterhouse", saying that he could lock me in a motel room for security. He replied that it would be over his dead body that I would read it, and given that possibility, he was going right then to throw it in Bogue Falaya. I hope that Shelby Foote is right that he burned it, for unpublished novels are hard for fish, even carp, to digest.

Walker soon began another novel, entitled "The Gramercy Winner". It, too, was not published, but it lies safely unburned in the library at Chapel Hill. Walker seems determined to make this novel the American Magic Mountain. Like Ben Cleborne, William Grey seems to believe that he once lived in paradise; Ben Cleborne fondly remembers the "old Terrebonne" farm across the road from his home in Rockridge Park, Birmingham, while William Grey grows up in Gramercy Park, a wealthy section of New York City. The novel opens with Will Grey determined to lie thinking on his bed for six months. The year is 1942. Will, a twenty-year-old Princeton sophomore, had volunteered for the Marines, but his x-ray at induction revealed a mild case of tuberculosis. So he now waits in a boarding house, until there is an opening at a sanatorium modeled on Trudeau’s.

Walker must have been rereading Mann’s novel as he wrote, for he follows it very closely. His close adherence was not because he read The Magic Mountain as a textbook of narrative technique and of characterization but because he unconsciously recognized that Mann’s theme mirrored his own life as he saw it. You will remember that Hans Castorp is an immature innocent when he goes to the sanatorium to visit his cousin. He loves his creature comforts--food, drink, cigars--but there is no indication that he has yet felt erotic desire. On his first day at the Berghof, as he eats breakfast in the communal hall, his peace is disturbed by an attractive young woman who bursts in through the glass door which slams behind her. She does this at every meal--and they have five meals a day--until Hans bursts into rage by her disregard for propriety. What we have here is what Freud called the "return of the repressed"--when long-buried memories burst out of the unconscious into awareness, thus causing mental and/or physical neurotic symptoms. Because of her haunting appearance and behavior, the outrageous woman, Clavdia Chauchat, becomes his obsession, awakening Hans’s long-repressed longing for his mother. Several hundred pages later, when Clavdia returns from a trip, she brings with her a lover, Mynheer Peeperkorn, who awakens the ambivalent feelings that Hans had had for his father. Critics have examined the Oedipal aspect of Mann’s novel, but nobody, to my knowledge, has fully examined the pre-Oedipal aspect, that is, Hans’s earliest relationship, as an infant with his mother. Yet Walker intuited it, for he provides army Lt. Laverne Sutter, an aviator from Alabama, and his wife Allison, from South Carolina, who become competitive parental figures for Will Grey and thus cause the crisis that activates his mild case of tuberculosis. Gary Ciuba notes that the complexity of the triangular relationship is suggested by the card game that they play each night, Hearts (39), but he is silent on a truly Mannian foreshadowing that Walker includes--in one game Allison passes her now-impotent husband the Queen of Spades, implying that her hostility is involved in her husband’s death. Walker allows the plot to be controlled by Will’s unconscious fantasy: Laverne Sutter dies and Will sleeps with his widow, who, then, as Ciuba notes, "abruptly disappears from the novel" (48). In The Magic Mountain Mynheer Peeperkorn, having become impotent, commits suicide, while Clavdia Chauchat, who had once entertained Hans in her room, makes an abrupt departure from the Berghof. The general assumption is that Clavdia’s seduction of Hans is of the body; but I think it is seduction of the soul, binding him to passivity even unto death.

Having exposed the ancient stress that, if left unresolved, could cause Will’s death, Walker introduces another Mannian aspect, two would-be ideological father figures who contend for Hans’s allegiance. In The Magic Mountain these figures are Settembrini, the democratic humanist, and Naphta, the authoritarian Jewish-communist-Jesuit priest. In "The Gramercy Winner" the figures are two staff physicians, Van Norden and Scanlon. Van Norden looks at humans as if he were viewing them through the famous Norden bombsight; he is interested in the body only as a collection of organs that will inevitably malfunction, causing death. Scanlon accepts the Scandal, the "stumblingblock", as the Apostle Paul pictures Christ in First Corinthians (1, 23). Paul says of the Jews who reject Christ that He becomes a stumbling block to their salvation.

After Will’s involvement with Laverne and Allison, his tubercular condition rapidly worsens. Gary Ciuba is right when he argues that Will, having found no answer to his quest in Allison’s body, has lost the will to live (50), for Will tells Scanlon, "The materialist has a version, the vitalist has a version, Van Norden has a version, you have your version. And the one thing that never occurred to anybody is that there is no version. There is nothing" (qtd in Ciuba 51). Scanlon takes care of the dying Will. One night Will fears that Scanlon is abandoning him. Scanlon asks,

"What’s the matter, Willy?"
"I don’t know, Scanlon. I’m homesick."
"How long have you been homesick?"
"All my life." (Tolson 232)
Realizing that Will is going to die, Scanlon insures that he is going to go home, a heavenly home. He uses a glass of water to baptize Will. In a very happy choice of words Gary Ciuba writes that the night nurse who sees Scanlon sneak in the water to baptize Will is "scandalized" (53).

Van Norden tells Will’s parents "that he died like a gallant soldier with a song on his lips" (Ciuba 53). Walker is making Van Norden the spokesman for Thomas Mann, who at the conclusion of The Magic Mountain pictures Hans Castorp charging across a battlefield to an almost certain death while singing "Der Lindenbaum", a Lied or ballad by Franz Schubert. With his concluding picture of Will receiving life through baptism, Walker must have intended "The Gramercy Winner" to be a Christian refutation of Mann’s conclusion, which celebrates the mystery of death, but denies resurrection. For whatever reason Walker never submitted it to a publisher. He told Martin Luschei that its only virtue was that it was short (14-15). Much later, he told another interviewer, Father Corrado, "It was not a good idea to try to beat The Magic Mountain" (Corrado 3).

After turning to the writing of essays for several years, Walker developed his own voice in The Moviegoer, treating the crisis of his thirtieth year, in which he married, converted to Catholicism, and decided to become a writer. The Moviegoer is free of Mann’s influence, as far as I can tell. Published in 1961 by Alfred Knopf, it won the National Book Award. When Walker went to New York to accept his award, he attended a party traditionally given by Mrs. Knopf, at which she would ask a Knopf’s prize winner to autograph the winning book for her personal library, displayed on shelves behind her. When she didn’t ask Walker, he, afraid that she’d simply forgotten, offered to sign his novel. She said that it wouldn’t be necessary, for she only asked Knopf’s foreign authors to autograph books. Since Thomas Mann was Knopf’s most famous author, Walker must have reflected once again that he had gotten beat by The Magic Mountain.

Once again Walker began a novel, published in 1966 as The Last Gentleman. Drawing upon his childhood and adolescence, he creates a Southern Hans Castorp. This time, instead of being Will Grey from Gramercy Park, the protagonist is Will Barrett, who is introduced lying thinking in Central Park. Walker quickly describes Will as an engineer, thereafter, in imitation of Settembrini’s epithet for Hans Castorp, refers to Will as the engineer, thus linking Will with Hans on virtually ever page. But Walker soon seems to forget that Will Barrett is supposed to be like Hans Castorp. Walker does bring in warring parental figures, Rita and Sutter Vaught; Rita, like Settembrini, is a cold-hearted humanitarian, while Sutter is like Naphta, who even though he is a believer, confesses his ultimate despair by commiting suicide. Walker gives Sutter a "distinguishing complication like a German saber scar" (LG 207) as a memento of his failed suicide attempt. But Walker also loses interest in Rita and Sutter. At the end, though, Walker does remember Thomas Mann, for once again he concludes a novel with the anti-Mann act, a baptism. After which Will Barrett is like Hans Castorp, for Will does not understand the significance of the baptism, any more than Hans would, and he rides off with Sutter, who has vowed to be successful at a second attempt at suicide.

Walker then turned to protagonists who owe nothing to Hans Castorp, Tom More in Love in the Ruins and Lance Lamar in Lancelot. Thus, with a free hand, Walker could shape them to fit the plot, hence write novels that are more technically proficient than The Last Gentleman.

Then, early in 1977, Walker wanted to begin another novel. In a letter to Shelby he discussed possible subjects, but firmly rejected a possibility that Shelby had mentioned: "The only thing I’m sure of is that I can’t do what you suggested, write a novel-type novel, the doings of Will Barrett after he leaves Santa Fe" (Correspondence 223). In November he tore up what he had written, beginning again, discovering after he had written about a hundred pages that his protagonist is Will Barrett, probably in his early fifties. A letter from Shelby in April, 1978, surely affected Walker’s intentions for the novel that he was writing. Shelby reports that he had just finished The Magic Mountain for the third time since 1934, then writes two long paragraphs praising it, saying, incidentally, "What a sneaky trick Mann played on you: wrote your magnum opus just as you were approaching puberty" (Correspondence 239-40). Then Shelby adds a third paragraph:

My thought (I finally get around to it) is that you should pay absolutely no attention to the fact that Mann covered this ground you know so well: far better, indeed, than he did--both as a patient and as a man with a medical background. What you do with it will of course be compared to what he did with it, but what difference will that make?

Shelby concludes by writing, "Anyhow I absolutely guarantee a rereading of The Magic Mountain will light all kinds of fires youve long kept banked. . . . I guarantee it." Quickly, before I overstay my welcome, I will argue that in The Second Coming Walker returned once again to The Magic Mountain, perhaps reread it in the original German and read some Mann criticism. The presence of Mann is announced in the first scene. Will Barrett is playing golf in the North Carolina mountains: "It was at that moment that he paused for several seconds, wood still held in both hands, fingers overlapped, and seemed to listen for something. He gazed up at the round one-eyed mountain, which seemed to gaze back with an ironical expression" (6). The mountain is Thomas Mann; it should "gaze back with an ironical expression". Underscoring the "ironical expression" is the name of this mountain, "Sourwood Mountain", for it echoes the German title of Mann’s novel: Der Zauberberg. Walker is announcing that he intends to challenge the Mann who has haunted him all these years.

You will remember the structure of The Second Coming, alternating chapters representing the consciousness of Will Barrett, a retiree, and Allison Hunnicutt Huger, an escapee. We’ve come across both first names before. Will’s early chapters are concerned with one event in his past, when his father planned to kill him on a hunting trip, then lost his will at the last second, swerving his shotgun. Later his father does kill himself, and Will now knows that his father grew to love death because he felt life was so meaningless. Allison’s early chapters are concerned with creating a future in her greenhouse. Walker doesn’t bear down on the Mann theme in Part One of the novel, using only a few Germanic motifs--Walker drives a Mercedes, keeps a Luger in its glove compartment and has a Schubert tape in its audio compartment, and he remembers that his father took the Luger and a black cap with its Totenkopf insignia from a captured German SS colonel in 1945 (132-33).

In Part One Walker uses the gimmick that he elsewhere calls "meeting cute", the hoary Hollywood strategy for a romantic movie, the accidental encounter between male and female. Two or three times Will wanders off the golf course, drawn to Allison’s greenhouse, lovely scenes of preconscious infatuation.

In Part Two Walker switches to the "love in the ruins" gimmick, in which the infatuatees create a new world to replace the old world flying into flinders around them. Will suffers from the despair that possessed his father and Sutter Vaught, for Mary Howland notes that Allie detects a "shadow like a German sabre scar" (106) on his cheek (Howland 168n7). Thus Will decides to seclude himself in "the bowels of Sourwood Mountain" (213), there to die if God does not intervene. He is saved by a toothache. In Buddenbrooks a naturalistic toothache causes Thomas Buddenbrook to have a stroke that he lacks the will to survive. In The Second Coming a providential toothache causes Will Barrett to struggle for survival. When Will falls out of the cave into the greenhouse newly born, he is nurtured by Allie, newly maternal. Eventually they lie naked together, both under the spell of Schubert’s "Trout Quintet", both hearing the ocean roar, but they turn around "at the Dunes Exxon a mile from the beach" (259). This gimmick is called "oceanus interruptus".

Will leaves the greenhouse, returning to the golf course to climb into his Mercedes. In such a Germanic environment he begins to think of his father and this "Century of the Love of Death" (271). He composes a "peculiar litany" (274), naming the forms of the living death that would induce a person to prefer "true death" (273), ending with a declaration: "Death in none of its guises shall prevail over me, because I know all the names of death". Then he sinks into a dream which amounts to Will’s summary of his life and his anticipation of his death: "Very well, since you’ve insisted on it, here it is, the green-stick Rosebud gold-bug matador, the great distinguished thing" (277). Here Walker employs many of the images from literary and cinematic tradition, domestic and foreign, to picture death as the final mystery.

With this chapter, Walker begins a direct assault on The Magic Mountain. In Mann’s novel there is a chapter entitled "Snow" which, Mann himself says, contains "the knowledge and the wisdom, the consecration, the highest reward, for which not only the foolish hero but the book itself is seeking" ("Making" 729). In the "Snow" chapter Hans strikes out alone to climb a snowy mountain. A blizzard envelopes and exhausts him. Lying by a hut, he falls asleep, dreaming first of a park on an ocean beach populated by blissful children and youths and a mother lovingly nursing her baby (MM 491-92), then dreaming of a horrible scene in which two "grey old women", apparently engaged in a religious ritual, dismember and devour a child. The shock of the latter scene awakens him, forcing him to think of what he truly believes. First, he announces what he does not believe in, the rationalist humanism advocated by Settembrini or the Christianity advocated by Naphta. His extended reflections he calls his "dream poem of humanity" (MM 496). The human being is capable of goodness and must express that goodness as love for humankind, "always in recognition of the blood-sacrifice", that is, death. Thus he states his creed, "For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts". But he specifically rejects the idea that the individual soul survives death--believing only that the great soul that inspires all humankind is immortal.

Walker thinks, of course, that Mann is profoundly wrong in his rejection of the individual soul’s immortality. Mann is like the Jew who encounters the stumblingblock. But, rather than becoming openly didactic at this point, Walker uses subsequent events to distinguish his position from Mann’s. When Will Barrett awakens in his Mercedes, he finds Kitty Huger, Allie’s mother, climbing into the front seat. Kitty, you will remember, was his goddess of the golf course in The Last Gentleman. Now she is a grass widow, desperate to rekindle Will’s earlier infatuation for her. She, in other words, becomes an image of the bad-mother ghost, obstructing Will’s efforts to construct a new life for himself and for Allie. Like Clavdia Chauchat, she represents the "return of the repressed".

Will also finds himself besieged by his daughter Leslie, a born-again Christian, who wishes to park his Mercedes in an old folks home. Since Kitty wants to control him by using the past and Leslie, by dictating his future, Will is hemmed in: he literally wrecks his Mercedes. In a dazed condition, he boards a bus for Thomasville, Georgia, where his father had nearly killed him. There he intends to finish the job. But on the way he thinks of Allie, decides to return to her. Injured when he is ejected from the bus, he regains consciousness in the Duke hospital. There Will is diagnosed as having "petit-mal epilepsy" of a rare form, "Hausmann’s Syndrome", a condition which, Walker told Jerry Kennedy, he concocted (C 236). "Hausmann’s Syndrome" has these symptoms: "depression, fugues, certain delusions, sexual dysfunction alternating between impotence and satyriasis, hypertension, and . . . wahnsinnige Sehnsucht", the latter translated as "inappropriate longing" (SC 302).

I am interested here in only the last symptom, wahnsinnige Sehnsucht. The emotional state of Sehnsucht--call it longing, or yearning, or desire--became, thanks to Romanticism, recognized as one of the most characteristic aspects of modern consciousness. Walker frequently used the word "alienation" as a synonym. Sehnsucht became a major theme in German romantic poetry. Many of those poems were set to music as Lieder by such composers as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, but the "undisputed genius" of this type of ballad was Franz Schubert, who perfected the ballad cycle, the linkage of several songs "united by a similarity of mood or theme" (Ewen 157). Thomas Mann certainly knew those song-cycles, for he was both highly responsive to music in general and a victim of Sehnsucht from childhood, having listened devoutly as his mother sang the Lieder. He was certainly aware that he was dominated by Sehnsucht, for he wrote his fiancee: "Sehnsucht! . . . ‘You don’t know how I love that word. It is my favorite word, my holy word, my magic formula, my key to the mystery of the world’" (Stock 4). Indeed, Mann’s most recent biographer, Anthony Heilbut, believes that it was Mann’s continual experience of Sehnsucht, "the frustration of his desires", that "stimulated a passionate energy for composition" (49). Not surprisingly the word Sehnsucht occurs four times in The Magic Mountain, the last occurrence aptly enough in a description of the emotions that José feels for Carmen in the opera of that name, "den Schmerz, die Sehnsucht, die verlorene Zärtlichkeit, die süsse Verzweiflung" (Der Zaub 901)--"the anguish, the longing, the desperate tenderness, [the] sweet despair" (648).

In The Magic Mountain Hans Castorp never escapes Sehnsucht; indeed Mann thinks that the experience of Sehnsucht is the highest possible level of consciousness. Thus Hans goes to his likely death singing "Der Lindenbaum", "The Linden Tree", from Schubert’s song-cycle Der Winterreise, "The Winter Journey". In The Second Coming Will is told by a Duke doctor that his experience of Sehnsucht can be alleviated by medication. Thus medicated Will goes to live in the old folks home where he is twice beaten up by Bad Mother Kitty, who has learned that Will has been staying in Allie’s greenhouse and who triumphantly yells that she is recommitting her daughter to the mental hospital from which she had escaped. With all the commotion, Will forgets to take his medicine, so that the pangs of Sehnsucht lead him to the greenhouse. There he and Allie declare and consummate their love for each other. Then he hides Allie in the Holiday Inn until he can legally prevent Kitty from recommitting her. When he returns from town, he faces a last temptation to use the Luger, but instead he throws it away. Returning to the room, he gets into bed with Allie. Then they consummate their love. The next day he goes to the old folk’s home, intending to ask some occupants to work with him and to ask Father Weatherbee to marry them, while Allie returns to the greenhouse. Will accomplishes his first intention, but then his need for Allie so overcomes him that he leaves without seeing Father Weatherbee. Allie, who knows "the lieder of Franz Schubert . . . . by heart" (233), selects just the one to sing as he approaches the greenhouse, "Liebesbotschaft, Love’s Message", one of Schubert’s songs in the song-cycle Schwanengesang, "The Swan Song". When Will asks what the song says, Allie replies, "The lover is asking a brook to carry his message of love to a maiden" (354). She had thought of the same song when Will had begun to make love to her the night before (339), so she must be hoping for an encore. She gets her wish. Then Will goes to see Father Weatherbee, revealing by his thoughts while talking to the old priest that he is on the verge of conversion. Experiencing the second coming of the maternal in his mate and anticipating the second coming of Christ, Will is free of Sehnsucht.

In his recent study of Autobiography in Walker Percy, my host Edward Dupuy points out that Walker was an intertextual writer, that is, a writer who writes with another writer in mind. Who is the writer in Walker’s mind? Dupuy convinces me when he states that Walker "writes constantly at himself; he repeats himself" (147). I hope that I have convinced you, that in Walker’s novels I’ve discussed, the "himself" that Walker writes to is the "himself" defined by his awareness of Thomas Mann. When he first read The Magic Mountain, Walker was haunted by the personality of Thomas Mann, for he must have recognized that, like Mann, he was haunted by Sehnsucht. On his first reading of The Magic Mountain, he must have identified with Hans Castorp’s agnosticism, for he himself was then agnostic, as he told Sister Park (1) and Father Corrado (2) in separate interviews. By the time he was driven by Sehnsucht to write, though, he had reread The Magic Mountain through Christian eyes and had come to believe that the cure for Sehnsucht lay in Christian faith. Throughout his career, Walker attempted to craft a novel that would answer The Magic Mountain. His inclination, though, was to be preachy, to treat his art as a handmaiden to edification. Both The Gramercy Winner and The Last Gentleman end with a baptism, but both protagonists are still beset by Sehnsucht or, as Will Grey, calls it, "homesickness". That Will Barrett was left in that condition at the end of The Last Gentleman is proved by his condition at the beginning of The Second Coming. In The Second Coming, though, Walker courageously decided to forgo edification and depend only upon fiction. He brilliantly succeeds in asserting that Sehnsucht can only be defeated by a combined force, faith in a mate’s love consecrated by faith in Christ’s love.

 

WORKS CITED

Carter, William C.,ed. Conversations with Shelby Foote. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1988.

Ciuba, Gary M. Walker Percy: Books of Revelations. Athens, GA: U of George P, 1991.

Corrado, Gary, Fr., C.O. "A Conversation with Walker Percy".The Delta Factor 3:1 (1996): 1-3.

The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. Ed. Jay Tolson. New York: Norton, 1997.

Dupuy, Edward J. Autobiography in Walker Percy. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1991.

Ewen, David. The Home Book of Musical Knowledge. New York: Grolier, 1954.

Foote, Shelby. "An Interesting Trip". The Oxford American. 25 ():26-27.

Heilbut, Anthony. Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Howland, Mary Deems. The Gift of the Other: Gabriel Marcel’s Concept of Intersubjectivity in Walker Percy’s Novels. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 1990.

Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Conversations with Walker Percy. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1985.

Luschei, Martin. The Sovereign Wayfarer: Walker Percy’s Diagnosis of the Malaise. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1972.

Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 1964.

---.The Magic Mountain. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 1960.

---. "The Making of The Magic Mountain". Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. In The Magic Mountain. New York: Knopf, 1960. 719-29.

---. Der Zauberberg, Band III, Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Fischer, 1960. Citations of Sehnsucht occur on pp. 528, 611, 613, 901.

Park, Jeong-Mi, Sr., R.S.C.J. "A Conversation with Walker Percy". The Delta Factor 4:1 (1997): 1-4.

Percy, Walker. Signposts in a Strange Land. Ed. with intro. by Patrick Samway. New York: Farrar, 1991.

Richards, Donald R. The German Bestseller in the 20th Century. Berne, Switzerland: Lang, 1968.

Samway, Patrick H., S.J. Walker Percy: A Life. New York: Farrar, 1997.

Stock, Irvin. Ironic Out of Love: The Novels of Thomas Mann. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994.

Tolson, Jay. Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy. New York: Schuster, 1992.

 

Copyright 2000, Lewis Lawson