The Human Touch

Thomas Mann must be pacing the deck on the S.S. Rotterdam, perhaps no more than a day’s distance from the sight of Europe’s shore, and only six days after he stood up in the presence of 300 come to do him honor on the occasion of his fifty-ninth birthday, and delivered his first address in the English tongue. And it occurs to me, at this brief remove from the occasion, that of all the three hundred, and more, who were present at the Plaza, the one who had the least fun out of it was the guest of honor himself, Thomas Mann.

It seems to me that when a man is shut out from the comprehension of his fellow man’s jokes and wisecracks, he might as well be sealed up in a soundless glass case. There were only two facts which Thomas Mann must have understood, without explanation or interpretation: the presence of the cake with the fifty-nine candles – We accept the number on faith – and the audience’s response to John Erskine’s suggestion that all rise to do a great man honor on his birthday.

It is not my intention to volunteer advice to such adepts in the social graces as Dr. Mann’s American publisher, who arranged the dinner, but if you arrange a dinner in the honor of a man, arrange it also for the pleasure and delight of that man. The chief effort at bridging the gap between the German-scholar and artist and the English-speaking audience was made by the German scholar; it was Mann, who with great and obvious effort, spoke in English, after a brief introductory statement in German.

NONE OTHER SPOKE GERMAN

But no one of the other speakers made an address, to and for him in t he language which it is easiest, for him to comprehend. Nor would Mann have been the only one to understand the language of Goethe. There were, in the dining room, Mr. Warburg and Dr. Rosenach and Dr. Schwartz, who had formerly been German Consul here, and Mr. Knopt and Dean Gauss, and several others.

It is a pity that Thomas Mann should have missed the humor of the repartees indulged in by the various speakers and the topical allusions, and one may only hope that Frau Mann made some of those allusions clear to him the next morning, or perhaps later when the Rotterdam was well out to sea.

Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton had been discussing the rise of nationalism in Europe and America and quoting the reduction addsurdum of fellow scholar who had advocated, in disgust at the whole nationalist business, that America should be given back to the Indians, whom he had never liked anyway, Dr. Henry Seidel Candy, formerly of Yale, after that victor of Fusion, Mayor Fiorella H. LaGuardia, had made his devoirs to belles letters, expressed the hope that New York, at least, would not be returned to that Indian tribe of the Delaware known as Tammany, which raised a laugh, from the understanding of which, I’m sure, Dr. Mann must have felt excluded. I wonder also whether the translation of Dean Gauss’s wise-crack meant anything to Mann, to wit, that a Dean is one who doesn’t know enough to be a Professor and too much to be President.

I do not intend that you shall gather from all this that I have private advices to the effect that Thomas Mann didn’t have a good time; that he wasn’t move and touched and elated, before, during and after the dinner, but it can’t be the height of fun to hear things the full import and shading of which escape you and to see several hundred persons laughing at a witticism which means nothing to you, not only because you do not understand the language in which it is framed, but the body of facts and common knowledge from which is derives its point.

FROM DETROIT TO GORKI

There are a couple of Jews foremen whom the Soviet imported from Detroit some years ago to help make the city of Gorki, formerly known as Nizhni Novgorod, the Detroit of the U.S.S.R. They are represented as being among the happiest of the employees of the Molotov Automotive Works, some of them having achieved the comparative distinction of being named underlies, or industrial shock troopers of the various Five Year Plans which will have to be engaged on to make the Soviet as self-sufficient industrially as she can be agriculturally.

Two hundred of them were brought on from Detroit employees mainly of Fisher and Ford, some time in 1931 and moved into homes on the factory’s outskirts.

It wasn’t pleasant at the start, what with red tape and general industrial incompetence, but most of those who came from Detroit came not for the purpose chiefly of obtaining a better-paid job, but because they felt they were going to contribute to a social ideal, whether or not you care to agree with them.

Take Sam Herman, a Fisher Body Company employee in Detroit, who after three solid years of hardship spurns the notion of ever returning to the States: “Shall I ever go back to the States? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think any of us care to. Isn???t there plenty to do right here? Our aim is to develop the Soviet automotive industry to the level of Detroit within the shortest time. Isn’t that work enough for a specialist’s lifetime?”

Apparently nothing was said to the Moscow News man about this thing called stream-lining. Let them first catch up to mass production and make the most of the conveyor belt.