What Was Inside Animal Farm?

My wacky filing system again…and tucked inside Orwell’s tiny book was “Farm to Fable,” a

short review from September 7, 1946. Given I was three then, how to explain the date and

having this review by Edmund Wilson. Ah, yes, I’d saved it from The New Yorker’s September

4 th, 2023 issue. Who was Edmund Wilson? The premier literary critic in America for forty

Years and The New Yorker’s principal book reviewer. He wrote widely on the Soviet Union, so

no surprise he was asked to review Orwell’s fable in 1946. I quote Wilson’s second sentence 

in his review. Who, I ask, is allowed this length today?

“If you are told that the story deals with a group of cows, horses, pigs, sheep, and poultry which decide to expel their master and run his farm for themselves but eventually turn into something almost indistinguishable from human beings, with the pigs as a superior caste exploiting the other animals very much as the farmer did, and if you hear that Stalin figures as a pig named Napoleon and Trotsky as a pig named Snowball, you may not think it sounds particularly promising. But the truth is that it is absolutely first-rate.” The review is only two paragraphs, in which Wilson describes Orwell’s prose as plain and spare (unlike his own) and “admirably roportioned to his purpose.” Wilson then compares Orwell’s fable to Voltaire and Swift’s satire.

Enjoyable and enlightening to reread Animal Farm this week, along with Colm Tóibín’s The

Magician, a novel about the German writer, Thomas Mann. The book is 498 pages and effortless reading. Permissible voyeurism, I call it! A reader begins in 1891 in Lübeck, Germany, and continues with Thomas all the way to 1950 in Los Angeles, California.

I turned down the corner of page 196 in chapter 7, Munich, 1922. Why? Because of its relevance now. Mann agrees to deliver a lecture, “An Appeal to Reason,” at the Beethovensaal

in Berlin. He assumes his audience deplores the turning away from principles of a civilized

society, that they will despise “the gigantic wave of barbarism, the primitive populist fairground barking, and will reject a politics of the grotesque, replete with reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like repetitions of monotonous slogans until everyone foams at the mouth.” Mann describes Nazism as “a colossus with clay feet.” That’s when a man in the audience stands and demands to be heard. He calls Mann a liar and an enemy of the people; and soon dissenters all over the hall shout abuse and catcalls. “It was clear they were organized.” That evening Thomas Mann understands he will never be able to speak in Germany again. There’s something happening, Mr. Mann, and now… you know what it is. Remember Bob Dylan’s song about Mr. Jones, who doesn’t know what “it” is. Can you hear the tune and sing the words?

Both Thomas Mann and Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for Literature. What do you have

to say about that, Mr. and Ms. Jones? To be continued…

Right Hand Dependence

Soren Kierkegaard

This Saturday morning, November the 23rd,  unable to sleep past 3:30 a.m., I sat in a sunlighten sauna in a windowless room downstairs and read a long review. (Note: in the sauna I have a folder of articles removed from magazines and meant to be read later.) Today the review was Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard, by Clare Carlisle, published in May 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I did not intend to be reading today. I had wanted to write about Thomas Mann. But my right hand was asleep, the one that daily holds a pen and five times a week, a tennis racquet.

It has been a long time since I saw an orthopedic about my hand. I was 63 then and not on Medicare; and Ortho Virginia in Richmond would not take Tri-Care without Medicare. I had with me X-rays from our local hospital but was told they were not good enough. I remember looking at the “new” X-rays on a screen and hearing that my right hand needed surgery to clean it up.” I shook my head. Then I heard that if I did not want surgery, a shot of cortisone might give momentary relief.  That’s when I remembered a fine male tennis player, Jim Courier. In an interview he had been asked about his tennis injuries. He said his only injury had been his wrist and a cortisone shot had taken care of the problem. That day I plunked out $285.00 for the x-ray, consult, and shot.

Admittedly my hands are an arthritic mess, and eighteen years later, the overused right one is increasingly numb.  As I held the article with my left hand, I read about one of Kierkegaard’s well-known insights, which resonates with me, 211years after his birth.

 Life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward.

Thomas Mann had not believed this. He spent the pre- WW1 years, glorifying Wagner’s passion and Nietzsche’s manliness, and somehow the global catastrophe of war remained an abstraction. Then Mann wrote Reflections, which led to his abandonment of Wagner and Nietzsche’s German romanticism.

Curiously, in the book review, I read that Kierkegaard had insisted it was the duty of the poet to preserve the memory of the hero. And what had influenced Mann’s thinking? He read a German translation of the poetry of our very own Walt Whitman, whose mystical notion of democracy helped Mann to regard democracy as inseparable from humanism. According to George Parker in his Atlantic article (see last week’s blog), Mann became the preeminent German spokesman in 1938 against Hitler in U.S. lectures.

This is only to say I will begin reading The Magician this week, which is Colm Tobin’s novel about Thomas Mann.  To be continued…

Two Wise Men Named George

First, I give thanks to George Saunders. In last week’s Story-club, he recommended that members watch the documentary, God and Country. 

I watched it last night. Now I can stop trying to understand who voted for Donald Trump.  The documentary shows and tells the saga of Christian Nationalism in our country. 

The other George is a staff writer with The Atlantic, first published in 1857.  I hope that date registers.  If you believe in fine prose and meaningful articles, subscribe to the magazine (if you don’t already.)  An electronic version is available, too.  But I, a paperbound reader, felt joy to find the December 2024 edition at the Wicomico post office on Thursday afternoon. I had stopped for mail after the RCC-RILL book club had its fourth meeting of the year. I’d suggested to members that we consider Colm Tóibín’s The Magician, a work of fiction about the German writer, Thomas Mann, for next year.  Earlier this year we had read Tóibín’s The Master about Henry James, so why not another Colm Tóibín?

Anyone who knows me, recognizes that I live for mysterious circumstances. So what happened when I unlocked the mail box at the post office that late afternoon? I saw The Atlantic, along with the 100th  anniversary issue of Commonweal Magazine. The Atlantic comes in clear plastic and is bent to fit in our mail box. I moved over to the counter with my two magazines and other mail.  I tore off the plastic and opened The Atlantic to flatten the magazine.  What did I see?  This photo, across from the title of an article on Thomas Mann: “The Magic Mountain Saved My Life.”  

George Parker has written many articles this past year related to the 2024 presidential election. But given Trump’s win, in this issue Parker offers his thoughts on a novel he first read in his youth as a Peace Corp volunteer in West Africa. He says, “I recently returned to The Magic Mountain, without the intense identification the first time… but with a larger sense that, a century later (novel first published in 1924), Mann has something important to tell us as a civilization.”

Next week:  To be continued…