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  • From: RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com>
  • To: "percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc: "percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] Percy and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"
  • Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2026 15:19:05 +0000

Dear Chuck,

I’m in a busy season, so your post languished for a few days. How delighted I was on this Sunday morning to read it slowly and to indulge in your indulgences. Joe sounds like a helluva guy—the sort of scholar who wears that mantel well and lightly. And now I’m wondering if I still have my copy of Stendhal—I haven’t read it since college, but now I’m intrigued. All I remember of it is that I liked it. 

All the best, 

Rhonda 
Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 15, 2026, at 11:32 AM, lowry.charles AT gmail.com wrote:




Dear Michael, Henry, Rhonda et al.,

It is wonderful to see this activity on the list, a noble undertaking to mark the annual dark period between the Saints’ elimination from playoff contention and the arrival of pitchers and catchers to kick off spring training.

Like Henry, I was (and have long been) intrigued by the influence Thomas Mann might have had on Percy.  My first thought in that regard, years ago, was that Percy would have certainly regarded it as a rotation (or maybe a repetition—I have always appreciated the novels more than the philosophy) that he read Magic Mountain while he himself was in a tuberculosis sanitarium.

Like Henry, I sought assistance in a Percy biography, and since Henry looked to Father Samway, I betook myself to Jay Tolson’s Pilgrim in the Ruins.  Tolson speaks about tuberculosis in general, and links it with Mann: “To be sure, very few illnesses remain strictly within the realm of the medical.  They often take on psychological or cultural meaning, and some diseases are routinely pressed into service as metaphors.  Susan Sontag has discussed this tendency in relation to cancer in Illness as Metaphor.  But there is an even richer tradition of associations with tuberculosis, not all of them completely negative…. In Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, for example, the rich array of associations with the disease are brought into play.” (p. 164)  As for a more direct influence, Tolson traces in the same context Percy’s growing cynicism: “Such intimations came mainly from reading the writers to whom he was now addicted—Dostoyevsky, Mann, Tolstoy, and Kafka.” (p. 173)  At a later point (p. 177) Tolson even notes a very close verbal echo between Magic Mountain and the unpublished Percy novel The Gramercy Winner.

I was happy to be reminded by Rhonda in her perspicacious post that one of Percy’s unpublished novels was entitled The Charterhouse.  I carry about the recollection (alas a recollection whose source is lost to me) that the last book Percy read before getting to serious work on The Moviegoer was Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma.  This gave me the opportunity to look afresh at an article appropriately titled “Mann and Stendhal” by R. J. Schork (more on him anon), published in The Germanic Review, Vol. 59 (1984), Issue 2, pp. 63-67.  In this article the author discusses Mann’s “typically ironic allusions” and notes, “These cryptic echoes of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir are anchored in Mann’s original text.”  He goes on to quote Mann himself speaking of compositional technique: “There was probably some connection between this enterprise and my choosing to read Stendhal’s letters.  I was no little impressed by the intelligence, manliness, courage, and sensibility of the author of Le Rouge et le Noir—a novel that makes one feel that no novel ever existed before.”

If you will pardon a personal indulgence, the article I cited was written by the late (1933-2021) Professor Rudolph Joseph Schork.  Joe was a friend of mine, an always knowledgeable, fiercely loyal and occasionally madcap Professor of Greek and Latin.  Although the classical tradition and the classical languages remained Joe’s first love, his vast erudition and quick mind found him making salient and solid contributions to our understanding of the works not only of Stendhal and Mann but of (inter alios) Shakespeare, Wilde and (especially) Joyce.  The last time I saw Joe was maybe two years before he died.  We ate pub food (shepherd’s pie and fish & chips) and drank draught beer at a nondescript gin mill in Jamaica Plain.  It was wonderful.  Iustorum animae in manu Dei sunt.

Chuck Lowry
Brooklyn, New York



On Jan 14, 2026, at 11:02 PM, RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com> wrote:

 Hello Michael, Henry, and all,

If I recollect things correctly, one of Percy’s unpublished novels, The Charterhouse perhaps, is heavily influenced by Mann’s Magic Mountain. You can read that novel—or, at least, you can read what remains of it, at Chapel Hill. Just let the Wilson library staff know what you are looking for. Come in the spring when the dogwoods are blooming!

Rhonda
Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 14, 2026, at 6:21 PM, Henry P. Mills III <wppdirector AT gmail.com> wrote:


Michael, thanks for your shared comments and question to the listserv about Percy and Mann.

I took a quick look at the Samway biography, and yes, during his long convalescence from tuberculosis at Trudeau Sanatorium in the 1940s, Percy's reading list from the library includes Mann's The Magic Mountain.

On the topic, Lewis Simpson has this to say in his Southern Review memorial essay to Percy located on the Project website:

"Walker attributed his choice of vocation to the privilege he had — it was nothing less than a privilege in his estimation — of "taking the cure" at "an old-fashioned sanatorium," which he compared to the sanatorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. The comparison was somewhat hyperbolic. Yet, although it hardly offered an exotic community of patients and doctors — the exotic emblems of a dying European culture — that Hans Castorp encountered on his Swiss mountain in the years immediately preceding the first world war, Trudeau Sanatorium did afford Percy the opportunity, in the context of life in a community of displaced fellow sufferers, to pursue a personal quest into the mystery of existence."

If you've read Magic Mountain, which I haven't yet, do you see any parallels between Mann's themes and any of Percy's you'd like to share? Of course, others in the community are welcome to reply, too. I will say, with a bit of (lost in the) cosmic irony, one is almost tempted to ask: How might Percy, biographically, be a Hans Castorpian figure himself?

Cheers,
Henry Mills


--
From Amazon
In "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann, readers are transported to a Swiss sanatorium, where time seems to stand still, and the boundaries between reality and the surreal blur. The protagonist, Hans Castorp, arrives for a short visit but becomes entangled in the complex world of illness, philosophy, and conflicting ideologies. As the novel unfolds, Mann weaves a mesmerizing narrative that explores the human condition, intellectual pursuits, and the impact of the looming World War I. "The Magic Mountain" is a captivating journey into the recesses of the mind, a place where the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary, and the boundaries between sanity and madness become increasingly elusive.
https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Mountain-Thomas-Mann/dp/B0DYSQ22RN/

__
Henry P. Mills III
Director, The Walker Percy Project


On Fri, Jan 2, 2026 at 12:59 PM Michael Serafin <michael_serafin AT hotmail.com> wrote:
Mr.Mills, thank you so much for posting this wonderful article. I would companion it with an essay called "The Walker Percy Option" published a few years ago.  The First Things article mentions in passing Mann's "The Magic Mountain". Did Percy read this, I wonder?

Happy New Year, Percyites!

Michael Serafin
Chicopee, MA.

From: percy-l-request AT lists.ibiblio.org <percy-l-request AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, January 2, 2026 5:00 PM
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: percy-l Digest Fri, 02 Jan 2026 (1/1)
 
percy-l digest Fri, 02 Jan 2026

Table of contents:

* 1 - [percy-l] Happy New Year to Percy-L -- "Walker Percy’s Pilgrimage
  " (First Things Magazine) - "Henry P. Mills III" <wppdirector AT gmail.com>

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message-ID:
 <CAPHQa6R8tHy-079v8ZDagg+QhF65VTrbmfp8DvoLtQmGmzGo9Q AT mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2026 09:36:42 -0500
From: "Henry P. Mills III" <wppdirector AT gmail.com>
Subject: [percy-l] Happy New Year to Percy-L -- "Walker Percy’s Pilgrimage
 " (First Things Magazine)

A Happy New Year's greeting to all Percy-L members:

Algis Valiunas provides us a well-written, insightful essay appropriate to the
start of a new year on Percy and his literary vision.

Wishing all a successful journey to your own personal authenticity ahead!
Best, Henry Mills

-------
"Walker Percy’s Pilgrimage"
*First Things Magazine*
Algis Valiuna, Nov. 25, 2025

"People can get used to most anything. Even the abyss may be rendered
tolerable—or, for that matter, luxurious—furnished with creature comforts
so that the unbearable truth of one’s condition is overlooked: a pair of
lavishly upholstered armchairs, some choice pictures on the wall, bookcases
laden with the best that has been thought and said, a sound system worthy
of your favorite Beethoven and Brahms recordings, a well-stocked liquor
cabinet, soothing overhead track lighting, and strategically placed table
lamps to make you almost forget the perpetual darkness outside your walls.
The hell with the world outside, anyway: You’re home, the best place there
is, you’re prosperous and well liked, you’re a fine example to your
children, your wife and your mistress are better-­looking than you deserve,
and you can’t imagine a better life than the one you’ve got....“The
specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being
despair”...

https://firstthings.com/walker-percys-pilgrimage/



__
Henry P. Mills III
Director, The Walker Percy Project
walkerpercyproject.org
wppdirector AT gmail.com


------------------------------

*********************************************

End of percy-l Digest Fri, 02 Jan 2026

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