{"id":101032,"date":"2016-08-01T14:37:17","date_gmt":"2016-08-01T18:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=101032"},"modified":"2016-08-01T15:27:38","modified_gmt":"2016-08-01T19:27:38","slug":"summer-on-the-stones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/01\/summer-on-the-stones\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer on the Stones"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chekhov, Thomas Mann, and the longueurs of vacationing.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After a proposal from a rich but ridiculous suitor, Tony Buddenbrook, the high-society heroine of Thomas Mann\u2019s first novel<\/a>,\u00a0leaves the German city of L\u00fcbeck for Travem\u00fcnde, a resort town where the Trave River meets the Baltic Sea. \u201cI won\u2019t pay any attention to the social whirl at the spa,\u201d she tells her brother Tom. \u201cI know all that quite well enough already.\u201d Tony stays instead in the modest home of her father\u2019s friend the harbor pilot, whose son, a medical student named Morten Schwarzkopf, is also on vacation. On her first day, he accompanies Tony to the spa, and she invites him to meet the friends she had pledged to avoid. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019d fit in very well,\u201d Morten says. \u201cI\u2019ll just go sit back there on those stones.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the end of the summer, Tony and Morten have fallen in love, and \u201con the stones\u201d is a \u201cfixed phrase\u201d in their relationship, Mann writes, meaning \u201cto be lonely and bored.\u201d I visited Travem\u00fcnde recently and after a few hours felt rather on the stones myself. The Baltic Sea was impotent at raising waves, and an incontinent gray sky drizzled on the city. The riverside homes along the Front Row, where the harbor pilot lived, are now tourist shops and restaurants filled with old German couples not talking to each other. The other nineteenth-century landmarks of Tony and Morten\u2019s romance haven\u2019t aged much better. The Sea Temple, a waterfront gazebo where they sit so close their hands nearly touch, fell into the Baltic in 1872, drowning with it the records of young lovers who scratched their initials on the walls.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I headed to the beach, where I figured Morten\u2019s stones had resisted the fashions of the time and the tantrums of the sea. Candy-striped benches spread out across the sand, like they did in Mann\u2019s day, but the only boulders I could find were stacked along the piers at the beach\u2019s edges. Using the clues I had gathered from the novel, they seemed unlikely to be the same stones where Morten sat. I had become what Janet Malcolm, exploring Yalta, the setting of Anton Chekhov\u2019s short story \u201cThe Lady with the Dog,\u201d called \u201ca character in a new drama<\/a>: the absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to \u2018an original scene,\u2019 which can only fall short of his expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n

I read Malcolm\u2019s essay before I went to Travem\u00fcnde, because Tony and Morten\u2019s romance reminded me of Chekhov\u2019s story. Published two years before Buddenbrooks<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>in 1899, \u201cThe Lady with the Dog,\u201d describes the holiday affair between Dmitri Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna Von Diderits. Mann was emulating Tolstoy when he wrote Buddenbrooks<\/em>, a family saga thick enough to stop a bullet, but the Travem\u00fcnde chapters share more than just a time period and seaside setting with Chekhov\u2019s story. Both century-old works conjure a spirit of summer holiday that any beachgoer would recognize today. They capture the sensation I remember from childhood: a series of slow and boring days that somehow hurtle toward the start of school. And Mann and Chekhov each reveal what makes the time warp of a long vacation so seductive and necessary\u2014the fantasy that the ennui will turn essential, that \u201con the stones\u201d of ordinary life we might discover a truer way of living.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

We tend to think of boredom as barren, but on holiday it becomes fertile. Dmitri and Anna begin their affair with a conversation on this theme. \u201cTime goes fast, and yet it is so dull here!\u201d she tells him. Dmitri is familiar with the complaint. \u201cThat\u2019s only the fashion to say it is dull here,\u201d he chides her, but he is not immune to boredom either. With Anna, he hopes for nothing more than \u201ca swift, fleeting love affair.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Yalta, Malcolm was bored, too. \u201cOn our travels,\u201d she wrote, \u201crarely are we as engaged with life as we are in the course of any ordinary day in our usual surroundings.\u201d It is precisely this disengagement, though, that unlocks the possibility of real change. At the start of summer, Dmitri is a callous womanizer who eats a slice of watermelon while Anna cries over her infidelity to her husband. But over the course of the story, he develops a real love for Anna\u2014the first love he has experienced in his life. By the end, when Anna cries, \u201che felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender.\u201d Dmitri never quite understands his transformation, but Chekhov says it blossomed from his boredom. \u201cComplete idleness,\u201d he writes, \u201cmade a new man of him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Downtime in Travem\u00fcnde works on Tony and Morten similarly. \u201cI came here to get away, to find some peace,\u201d Tony says. What was intended as a diversion\u2014some time \u201con the stones\u201d from social life in L\u00fcbeck\u2014becomes her center. One rainy day, Tony tells Morten, \u201cWe\u2019ll both have to sit on the stones today, either on the porch or in the parlor.\u201d Morten then reveals his own transformation. \u201cYou know, when you\u2019re along, they\u2019re not stones at all,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Morten\u2019s coy flirtation turns inflorescent: to be bored with someone you love is to defeat boredom altogether. The stones have become the foundation of not just a happy life but also a free one. Few would approve of Morten and Tony\u2019s relationship, after all. He is a middle-class medical student in G\u00f6ttingen who speaks passionately of \u201cfreedom,\u201d and she is a wealthy socialite in L\u00fcbeck with little political consciousness whatsoever. But the summer holiday liberates them from the expectations of their social class and families. Sitting side by side in the Sea Temple, \u201cTony suddenly felt herself united with Morten in a great, vague, yearning, intuitive understanding of what \u2018freedom\u2019 meant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morten\u2019s life flips inside out. He tells Tony he dreads \u201cthe future, perhaps, when as Madame Such-and-such you will vanish for good and all into your elegant world and \u2026 it\u2019s off to sit on the stones for the rest of one\u2019s life.\u201d Home is supposed to be where the heart is\u2014\u201cwhere the riches of experience are distributed,\u201d Malcolm wrote\u2014but for Morten going back to his studies in G\u00f6ttingen, it has become a life sentence to loneliness.<\/p>\n

And yet the routines of regular life\u2014work, family, school\u2014demand our return. Dmitri says good-bye to Anna at the train station, where there \u201cwas already a scent of autumn.\u201d He returns to Moscow, expecting that he will soon forget her. But after a month, \u201chis memories glowed more and more vividly.\u201d He contacts her, and she begins to visit him secretly in Moscow. His life has been inverted, too:<\/p>\n

\n

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dmitri knows, at least, to keep his secret. For Tony, a life with Morten is so self-evidently better than a life with her suitor in L\u00fcbeck that she declares her love to her father, expecting his approval. Shortly thereafter, her suitor shows up in Travem\u00fcnde and Morten\u2019s father sends him back to school. \u201cYou\u2019ll forget,\u201d Tom tries to comfort her as he takes her home. \u201cBut I don\u2019t want to forget!\u201d Tony cries out. \u201cForget? Is that any comfort?\u201d She has formed, like Dmitri, a kernel of her life: Her memories of Morten would be \u201ca secret treasure that she could enjoy whenever she liked. In the middle of the street, at home with her family, at the dinner table\u2014she would think of them. Who knew?\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In Travem\u00fcnde, I walked northward off the beach and hit a dirt path along coastal cliffs. The forest trees grew to the very edge, like lemmings on the march, and benches were placed at scenic vistas. I took a seat and watched distant sailboats glide silently across the blue. It was a bench like the one Malcolm found outside of Yalta, where Dmitri and Anna sit and listen to the ocean:<\/p>\n

\n

So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Tom Buddenbrook is soothed similarly by the Baltic Sea. \u201cWhat sort of people prefer the monotony of the sea, do you suppose?\u201d he asks Tony. \u201cIt seems to me it\u2019s those who have gazed too long and too deeply into the complexity at the heart of things and so have no choice but to demand one thing from external reality: simplicity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this simplicity\u2014\u201cthis complete indifference to the life and death of each of us\u201d\u2014we can live freshly and free from convention, if only for a few warm weeks. This is the promise of a summer holiday, and one does not need to fall in love to reap its reward. Buddenbrooks<\/em> returns to Travem\u00fcnde years later, when Tony\u2019s young nephew Hanno visits for a four-week vacation. He spends his vacation like most of us, in \u201cpeace and seclusion,\u201d swimming in the ocean, playing in the sand, and exploring the coast. He finds in these simple activities the promise of \u201ca wonderful lazy and coddled life of ease that passed serenely and without a care.\u201d Hanno does not need a romance to be heartbroken by the end of summer, nor does he need a lover to find a \u201csecret treasure\u201d of his own:<\/p>\n

\n

He had what he had. When it all came raining down on him, he would remember the sea and the hotel gardens, and just the brief thought of the sound that the little waves made in the still of the evening\u2014coming from far away, from some remote distance wrapped in mysterious slumber to splash against the rampart\u2014would comfort him, put him out of reach of all life\u2019s hardships.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After Hanno returns to L\u00fcbeck, Tony is eager to hear about his vacation. She never spoke to Morten after their summer together, and her life has been a hard one. Her first husband, the suitor, was a con man who goes bankrupt; she divorced her second husband after he sexually assaulted their cook. Now middle-aged, Tony \u201cshowed the most ready understanding for Hanno\u2019s yearning for the sea.\u201d She tells her nephew to never forget his four weeks in Travem\u00fcnde. \u201cThe true things in life will always be true,\u201d she says. \u201cUntil they lower me into my grave, I will always have happy memories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben Crair is a writer based in Berlin.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chekhov, Thomas Mann, and the longueurs of vacationing. After a proposal from a rich but ridiculous suitor, Tony Buddenbrook, the high-society heroine of Thomas Mann\u2019s first novel,\u00a0leaves the German city of L\u00fcbeck for Travem\u00fcnde, a resort town where the Trave River meets the Baltic Sea. \u201cI won\u2019t pay any attention to the social whirl at 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