The Pursuit of Laughter (43 page)

Jung found another noble savage in Africa, where he made a journey from Uganda to Egypt. He loved Africa. He said that the same conditions prevail in very primitive
countries
as in the collective unconscious. He was disappointed to discover that the tribes were no longer guided by the dreams of their medicine men. This was because the medicine men themselves laboured under the delusion that their dreams were no longer necessary, since the English district commissioner knew everything.

Jung lived for most of his life near the Zürich lake, where he built himself a house. Some distance along the shore he built a tower where he could escape from his family and the demands of his patients, and contemplate the water in peace. He was a very strong personality, loved and revered by his disciples. In this somewhat claustrophobic
atmosphere
, surrounded by adoring women, grateful patients and rich American benefactors, he strove to achieve
Ganzheit
. The English word ‘wholeness’ does not quite convey the
meaning
of this typically German conception. The disciples accepted not only the idea of the collective unconscious (an idea which has thrown light on many things previously not
understood) but also his claim to have explored it, and to have forced the archetypes he met there to disclose to him their secrets. Miss Hannah knew him well for thirty years, but she has perforce relied to a great extent on the only autobiographical writing he left:
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
. There he says he had to try to understand his own fantasies in order to help his patients with theirs, but in her book the whole question hovers on the frontier between medicine and religion, or magic.

One thing is certain: Jung never achieved
Ganzheit
in the Goethean sense. Art
completely
passed him by. His own carvings, hands stretching out to the udder of a mare, for example had little to do with art, whatever his anima may have told him. He kept his
lively
interest in odd phenomena into old age; he was delighted by the flying saucers and
similar
UFOs. He was pleased that people wanted them to be real, and that all over the world they were seeing round objects in the sky. ‘Roundness is the symbol for the self, the
totality
, and this fact in our sceptical, rational modern world is of overwhelming interest in and for itself,’ says Miss Hannah. She often seems to be thinking in German.

I wish she could have told a few facts, such as the percentage of cures among the patients Jung analysed. Perhaps this is not possible, for what is a ‘cure’? Her book is
gossipy
but interesting, and she herself emerges as a clever and agreeably quirky old lady. If Jung is slightly diminished, that is not her fault. Hagiography always diminishes its victim, and Jung was Miss Hannah’s infallible idol.

Jung: His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir
, Hannah, B.
Books and Bookmen
(1977)

Thomas Mann was the best German novelist since Goethe, a very popular writer whose books sold in millions. He must also have been a talented actor: his readings from his works attracted enthusiastic audiences.

Thomas and his brother Heinrich decided not to carry on the old family corn business in Lübeck, and when their father died at 51 the family moved to Munich. Thomas wrote
Buddenbrooks
when he was twenty five, a best seller about himself, his family and Lübeck, thinly disguised. All his life he must have offended people he knew, who found themselves caricatured in his novels.

Heinrich loved Italy, but it meant little to Thomas, child of the Protestant gothic north. He married a Jewess, Katja Pringsheim, his perfect and sympathetic wife for more than fifty years. They had six children. Nothing could have been more bourgeois than this large family living in the hideous house he built in Munich.

Thomas was 39 when the First World War began. He wrote enthusiastically for the Fatherland, saying it was a conflict between the German spirit and the material West, and defending the attack on neutral Belgium by comparing it with Frederick the Great’s on
Saxony. He dreaded being called up, but never was. He denounced democracy, which he was afterwards to extol. There are political quotes for all seasons to be found in Thomas Mann. After the war he felt very German and nationalist until the early 20s, when National Socialism erupted. His hatred of the Nazis governed his life henceforward. In 1933 he left Germany to live in Switzerland and managed to get most of his manuscripts out. But a box was inadvertently left behind, which caused him sleepless nights, because it was full of diaries to which he confessed his secret.

This respectable family man, and much-admired writer, was homo-erotic. Although he remained buttoned up, never indulging in more than a hand clasp or a furtive hug, he dreaded the Nazis finding his confessions and blackening his character. They never did.

Nobody now, reading his story
Death in Venice
, could doubt where the writer’s
sympathies
lay, but when it was published in 1913 the permissive society was undreamt of. Thomas Mann minded deeply what people thought of him.

Was he tortured by impossible, unassuasive desire? Probably not. His wife, his
children
, his enormous success, his fame and fortune and his Nobel Prize were extremely important to him. His diaries are full of complaints about health, teeth, ears, nausea and various ill that flesh is heir to. Sex seems to have been a mild and harmless pleasure, though possibly he regretted never having known passion. Even before the first war he was in and out of clinics. There was nothing he liked better than a rich sanatorium—health was a major preoccupation, and the mise-en-scène of
The Magic Mountain
perfectly
familiar
.

From Switzerland he lectured all over Europe; on Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, Freud and Nietzsche. But as war approached he and Katia began to feel uncomfortably near Germany so they went to America, where they had a powerful benefactress in Agnes Meyer, whose husband owned the
Washington
Post
. She smoothed the way for Thomas, even finding him a sinecure to ensure an adequate income. However, in return she
wanted
to be his muse, his mentor, his possessor. The unfortunate Thomas wrote her
flattering
letters, stayed with her, pretended to welcome her, while all the time confiding in his diary what a pest she was. Ronald Hayman, in his dry way, relates this richly comic episode to perfection.

The Manns lived in California and became American citizens. After the Second World War Thomas Mann, who knew nothing of the gulags, used to say he could happily live under communism. Accustomed to adulation as an anti-Nazi and Nobel Prize winner, he suddenly found the climate changed. Denounced by McCarthyites as soft on communism, his situation was like the 30s all over again. He longed to leave America, which he called ‘an air-conditioned nightmare’.

Eventually the Manns got back to Europe, and settled near Zurich. Thomas was
showered
with prizes and honorary doctorates.

A sort of jealousy shines out of the pages of Mann’s Goethe novel,
Lotte in Weimar
. Probably what he envied in his great predecessor was Goethe’s classic and uninhibited
attitude 
to love, and that he went on falling in love when he was old and didn’t care who knew it, whereas Thomas had to make do with a glance at an attractive waiter, or a glimpse of a boy playing tennis. Whether he truly wished for more is something we shall never know; probably his inhibitions had become an integral part of him.

Ronald Hayman has written an excellent biography of the great storyteller.

Thomas Mann
, Hayman, R.
Evening Standard
(1996)

For a very large part of the world, there is now no ideology with pretensions to
universality
that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy—this is the theme, constantly repeated, of this optimistic book [
The End of History and the Last Man
by Francis Fukuyama]. There are tables showing that more and more countries have succumbed to the charms and opportunities of liberal democracy, all of them rather rich and upwardly mobile. Their citizens enjoy freedom, and are no longer subject to the vague terrors of war.

Soviet Russia has fallen to bits, and revealed its appalling poverty and inefficiency to the delighted gaze of the more fortunate denizens of the West. Spengler should
evidently
have called his book
The Downfall of the East
.

China? Still by way of being communist, it has been obliged to allow a measure of market economy here and there, to keep things going. Perhaps we should not be too
anxious
for it to change. A glance further East than Russia can be rather alarming.

The brilliantly clever Japanese have pointed the way to Taiwan, South Korea and the rest of them. What Chairman Mao called ‘uneasy thoughts’ assail us in the comfortable, smug West. Can we compete? Are they too clever by half? What about their terrifying work ethic, just when we prefer the ethic of idleness? Might it interfere?

When the author speaks of ‘extremely powerful passions—religion and nationalism’, he is too politically correct to mention the dread word ‘race’. Yet race is as powerful as either of the others. Disraeli said ‘all is race’, and certainly this book bears him out.

Riches and prosperity and ease are the goal. The only worry left to those of us with no more history is that some demented little country might blow us up with its nuclear bomb, thus putting an end to history in a manner almost welcomed by Shaw at the end of his life, when he despaired of irrational man.

Democracy is nowhere defined, and it takes many forms. Universal suffrage is only a beginning, and solves none of our problems. Somebody has to make decisions, choice is of the essence. What Asquith called ‘the pervading influence of a commanding mind’ is extremely important in the enterprise of government. But commanding minds are rare. In the teeth of bitter opposition from a large proportion of his countrymen, General de
Gaulle, for example, once in power, was a dictator for ten years. Yet France is ‘a
democracy
’.

Fukuyama dismisses local difficulties such as the Northern Ireland impasse, the hatred between Arab and Jew, the famine in Somalia, wars in the Balkans, and the hideous
poverty
in the very heart of America and the EC, as not particularly important. Some are
soluble
, others perhaps not. But he totally ignores the greatest and most intractable problem of our time: over-population.

He seems to be a clever don in a rich American university, becoming more and more optimistic as the old enemies and the cold war dissolve, while democracy advances with the calm firm tread Spengler once associated with Caesarism. Does he underrate the envy, hatred and malice in the world?

This enjoyable book is not unduly marred by the sort of jargon associated with American academics, though we could do without words like directionality, marketisation and explicated. It is pleasant to think that owing to the powerful scientific civilization
created
by the Europeans, the Americans and the Japanese, we can continue to be liberal
democrats
, and shall not be deprived of our harmless amusements, such as Prime Minister’s Question Time ‘live’ on the wireless. The cries of yes I did, no you didn’t, you’re another, and so forth, are the essence of the democratic process. So, for the matter, are American presidential elections. Small wonder we are the model and the envy of the entire world.

The End of History and the Last Man
, Fukuyama, F.
Evening Standard
(1992)