Virtual Memories Show 666:
Morten Høi Jensen
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“Part of what The Magic Mountain is about is the sense of having lived through a really major rupture in time, of living through a moment in which an old order is falling apart. And that’s the way in which it most speaks to our time.”
With THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Yale University Press), Morten Høi Jensen brings us a masterful biography of one of the great novels of the 20th century and shows how it and its author speak to our present moment. We talk about Morten’s history with Mann’s novel, his weeks of research in the sanatoria of Davos and his discovery of how much of The Magic Mountain‘s world is intact a century later, and how Mann’s novel changed for him in the process of writing this book. We get into Mann’s political transformation from a nationalist into an antifascist, how art & politics can make for a disastrous mix, Mann’s rivalry with his novelist brother Heinrich, and what it was like to write about a novel about life in a TB clinic while in the middle of a pandemic. We also discuss the weird connection I draw between Mann and Thomas Pynchon, how Morten became a literary biographer via the biography of another novel, spiritualism before and after WWI, how he came around on the chapter of The Magic Mountain that bored him in his earlier readings, why Robert Musil resented Mann, whether it’s okay to write margin notes and never look at them, and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS!
“Mann doesn’t come at politics in a straight and narrow way. Nothing is ever really straightforward for him, but the more I researched his later antifascism, the deeper my admiration for his courage became.”
“Approaching a novelist through their creation feels to me a more fruitful way of approaching questions of biography.”
“In some respects, Mann may not have realized how much this novel is about the years in which it’s written.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Morten Høi Jensen is the author of The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain, and A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, and Commonweal, among other publications. He currently works as the European Liaison for Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Morten by Darren Gerrish. It’s on my instagram.