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While reading the newly published second edition of Wilfred Bion's War Memoirs, I found myself in The Magic Mountain (Mann, 1924/1969). I was not surprised by this, as Mann's work ends with his protagonist killed by a shell in World War I and contains jokes about psychoanalysis in the early pages. However, my focus was not so much on the story itself as on an essay, The Making of the Magic Mountain (Mann, 1924/1969). In that essay, Mann covers a lot of ground, and two points stood out in my memory. First, that the novel could not be judged alone and should be considered with his other works. Second, Mann suggests that as with a piece of music, if the volume is enjoyed, that it will be more so if read more than once. These two points are of course interrelated, and I mention them here because they are fitting and equally daunting in regard to approaching Bion's work. Fortunately, there is no single way of reading.
In this age of classroom requests by students for trigger warnings, there exists at least one classroom where the first edition of this book has been read by undergraduates who evidently find comfort in reports of Bion's own challenges to linking (Souter, 2009). Additionally, Meg Harris Williams (2010) writes on the pleasures of personal readings and the dangers of reading dogmatically. Williams (2010) has written her own haunting poetry in response to Bion's writing, and I recommend it in addition to recommending the book under review. Associations to music and poetry are fitting, as Bion's work possesses a literary quality, and to that end may be linked to a significant literature by British poets, who like Bion fought in World War I. Another Wilfred, Wilfred Owen, who met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon at a military hospital before returning to the front where he was killed in 1918, writes in the first stanza of his poem “Insensibility” (in Ward, 1997, p. 20), “Happy are men who yet before they are killed/Can let their veins run cold.”
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