The interviews do indeed offer more: his preoccupations, his literary forebears and tastes, his background, and the sources of his grave outlook, that insistence on probing “the traces of decay.” They have the added curiosity of showing how Sebald sounds extemporaneously—quite different from the elaborately webbed constructs in his writing. He is more colloquial than one might expect; he is also incisive and direct, cooperative and adaptable. That is, in almost Zelig-like fashion, he adapts his responses to the tone of the interviewer. Where I anticipated a grim reserve, even taciturnity or grumpiness, he is congenial. Listening to him on tape reveals a low, gravelly voice, serious, occasionally ponderous, but more often witty and at times even verging on the lighthearted.
In interviews of this kind there is bound to be some repetition, and at first I planned to edit this out. Thinking it over, though, I decided that the recurrence of certain themes was useful: it demonstrates to what extent Sebald was possessed, even haunted, by specific motifs from his life and the life of his country. For Germany, which he left so early on, is his country, as he says in Eleanor Wachtel’s interview, whether he likes it or not, and he does not like it. Sooner or later, in most of the interviews, will arise his abhorrence of his parents’ silence about the war and, by extension, of his country’s “collective amnesia.” Inevitably, too, he talks about his frustrating university days, where he sensed something amiss in his professors’ evasion of the past (elsewhere, less discreetly, he calls them “dissembling old Nazis”); about the difficulty of writing, especially the moral ambiguities involved in the kind of writing he did; about the destruction of the natural world and the graceless incursions of technology; about the overriding significance of memory.
Eleanor Wachtel’s and Carole Angier’s interviews took place in 1997, when only The Emigrants had been published, in English. Angier’s appeared in The Jewish Quarterly and concentrates on the Jewish characters in that book—all based on people Sebald knew—and on his relation to them and their stories. Wachtel’s is concerned with the form and sources of the book and examines the background of its real-life models. Arthur Lubow visited Sebald in Norwich in August 2001 in preparation for an essay whose publication was delayed because of the September 11 attacks and finally came out in truncated form three days before Sebald’s death. What appears here is Lubow’s fuller description of their encounter, reinterpreted with unfortunate hindsight. Joseph Cuomo’s wide-ranging conversation with Sebald in March 2001 was preceded by the author’s reading from The Rings of Saturn as part of the Queens College Evening Readings series. From that late vantage point, it covers almost all of his work, its major themes and ramifications. Michael Silverblatt’s radio interview was done in November 2001, a month before Sebald’s death; it focuses on his style and its derivations, and has crucial insights into Sebald’s relation to his subject, particularly the victims of Nazi atrocities.
I chose the four essays with a view to offering cogent accounts of almost all of Sebald’s books. Ruth Franklin’s deals in detail with After Nature and On the Natural History of Destruction; Charles Simic’s discusses the latter book, among others; and Tim Parks’s concentrates on Vertigo. All three view his themes in the broadest possible of contexts and also shed light on the ambiguities and perils implicit in his approach and his subject matter. Franklin’s piece, in particular, points out the risks involved in what she sees as Sebald’s aestheticizing of collective disaster and outlines, with admirable evenhandedness, her discomfort with his handling of the air war against Germany.
On the Natural History of Destruction aroused controversy when it was published on the grounds that Sebald did not place his account of German suffering in the larger context of Germany’s aggression. I believe that Sebald assumed—maybe too naively—that his readers would supply the context, and in fact he says as much in the postscript he added later. The remoteness or coldness critics have noted evinces savage indignation under tight control, especially in his critiques of postwar German writers; the words seem to emerge through gritted teeth. I suspect Sebald is expressing his own view in Austerlitz, when we hear, thirdhand, that the protagonist’s father, killed by the Nazis, “did not in any way believe that the German people had been driven into their misfortune; rather, in his view, they had entirely re-created themselves in this perverse form, engendered by every individual’s wishful thinking . . . and had then brought forth, as symbolic exponents of their innermost desires, so to speak, the Nazi grandees.”
Charles Simic’s piece takes the opposite view of Franklin’s, and I felt it useful to set these two persuasive arguments side by side. Simic also places the destruction of the German cities in a historical context—the ceaseless killing of civilians in warfare, up to the present venture in Iraq.
Finally, I was drawn to these writers because they connect Sebald’s themes to events in their own lives—Simic to his childhood experience of war, Franklin to the loss of family members, and Parks to a piquant personal memory that echoes Sebald’s fascination with coincidence. Parks, incidentally, is the only writer to mention Sebald’s humor, which glimmers slyly through his pessimism and is often overlooked. (Joseph Cuomo’s interview is punctuated by bursts of laughter from the audience at Sebald’s wry remarks and deadpan delivery.)
Michael Hofmann’s provocative essay—the one dissenting voice—is included as a skeptical corrective to what might otherwise be a gush of nearly unqualified enthusiasm. The vulnerabilities in Sebald that he spears so pointedly, as well as the gothic elements, are real and should be taken into account in any assessment of his work.
To help make such an assessment, and to keep us remembering him, it seemed fitting to let Sebald have this final word—or rather, these many final words. He was, after all, an essential guardian of historical memory, dedicated to seeing that the ravages and casualties of history do not evaporate like the fog he was so fond of. This he did, not with any optimistic notion of progress or reform, but for the integrity of the act itself, and for the satisfaction of resurrecting what has been lost in language that would endure.
The Hunter
by Tim Parks
In the closing pages of Cervantes’s masterpiece, at last disabused and disillusioned, a decrepit Don Quixote finds that there is nothing for him beyond folly but death. When giants are only windmills and Dulcinea a stout peasant lass who has no time for a knight errant, life, alas, is unlivable. “Truly he is dying,” says the priest who takes his confession, “and truly he is sane.” Sancho Panza breaks down in tears: “Oh don’t die, dear master! . . . Take my advice and live many years. For the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die just like that, without anybody killing him, but just finished off by his own melancholy.”
Centuries later, observing the loss of all illusion that he felt characterized the modern world, the melancholic Giacomo Leopardi wrote: “Everything is folly but folly itself.” And again a hundred and more years later, the arch pessimist Emil Cioran rephrased the reflection thus: “The true vertigo is the absence of folly.” What makes Don Quixote so much luckier than Leopardi and Cioran, and doubtless Cervantes himself, is that, as the epitaph on his tombstone puts it, “he had the luck . . . to live a fool and yet die wise.” What on earth would have become of such a sentimental idealist had he returned to his senses, as it were, a decade or two earlier?
Originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, June 15, 2000. Reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books. © 2000 NYREV, Inc.
Both in Vertigo and in his later novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald tells the stories of those who reach disillusionment long before the flesh is ready to succumb. The men in his book—they are always men—are engaged in a virtuoso struggle to conjure within themselves the minimum of folly, or we could call it love of life or even engagement, that will prevent them from dying “just like that,” “finished off by [their] own melancholy.”
But perhaps I have got that wrong. For it could also be
said that Sebald’s characters are men who ruthlessly suppress folly the moment it raises its irrepressible head. So wary are they of engagement in life that they are morbidly and masochistically in complicity with melancholy and all too ready to be overwhelmed by it. There is a back and forth in Sebald’s work between the wildest whimsy and the bleakest realism. One extreme calls to the other: the illusions of passion, in the past; a quiet suicide, all too often, in the future. Mediating between the two, images both of his art and of what fragile nostalgic equilibrium may be available to his heroes, are the grainy black-and-white photographs Sebald scatters throughout his books. Undeniably images of something, something real that is, they give documentary evidence of experiences that, as we will discover in the text, sparked off in the narrator or hero a moment of mental excitement, of mystery, or folly, or alarm. They are the wherewithal of an enchantment, at once feared and desired, and above all necessary for staying alive. Not even in the grainiest of these photos, however, will it be possible to mistake a windmill for a giant.
There are four pieces in Vertigo. All of them involve a back and forth across the Alps between northern Europe and Italy. The first is entitled “Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet,” and it is the only one to offer something like the whole trajectory of a life through passion and engagement to disillusionment and depression. By using Stendhal’s baptismal name, Marie-Henri Beyle, Sebald alerts us at once, and far more effectively than if he had used the writer’s pseudonym, to the extent to which identity is invented as well as given and thus involves continuous effort. Beyle created Stendhal, as Señor Quesada dreamed up Don Quixote. Taking on the identity was one with the folly, its most positive achievement perhaps. But that is not to say that Beyle, whoever he was, did not live on, as even Quesada reemerged for extreme unction.
In his opening sentence Sebald likes to give us a strong cocktail of date, place, and purposeful action. Thus the Beyle piece begins: “In mid-May of the year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great St. Bernard pass. . . .” The second piece starts: “In October 1980 I travelled from England . . . to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life.” And the third: “On Saturday the 6th of September, 1913, Dr. K., the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers’ Insurance Company, is on his way to Vienna to attend a congress on rescue services and hygiene.”
It is so concrete, so promising! All too soon, however, and this is one of the most effective elements of comedy in Sebald’s work, the concrete will become elusive; the narrative momentum is dispersed in a delta as impenetrable as it is fertile. Thus Beyle, who at age seventeen was with Napoleon on that “memorable” crossing, finds it impossible, at age fifty-three, to arrive at a satisfactory recollection of events. “At times his view of the past consists of nothing but grey patches, then at others images appear of such extraordinary clarity he feels he can scarce credit them.” He is right not to. His vivid memory of General Marmont beside the mountain track wearing the sky-blue robes of a councillor must surely be wrong, since Marmont was a general at the time and would thus have been wearing his general’s uniform. If crossing the St. Bernard with an army was, as Sebald concludes his opening sentence, “an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible,” remembering that undertaking, even for a man with a mind as formidable as Stendhal’s, turns out to be not only “next to” but truly impossible.
This is hardly news. That the difficulty of every act of memory has a way of drawing our attention to the perversity of the mind and the complicity between its creative and corrosive powers is a commonplace. “And the last remnants memory destroys,” we read beneath the title of one of the pieces in The Emigrants. No, it is Sebald’s sense of the role of this act of fickle memory in the overall trajectory of his characters’ lives that makes the pieces in Vertigo so engaging and convincing.
Beyle/Stendhal’s life as described by Sebald is as follows. Crossing the Alps, the adolescent dragoon is appalled by the dead horses along the wayside but later cannot remember why: “His impressions had been erased by the very violence of their impact.” Arriving in Italy he sees a performance of Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto, falls wildly in love with a plain if not ugly prima donna, overspends on fashionable clothes, and finally “disburdens” himself of his virginity with a prostitute. “Afterwards,” we are told, “he could no longer recall the name or face of the donna cattiva who had assisted him in this task.” The word “task” appears frequently and comically in Vertigo, most often in Thomas Bernhard’s sense of an action that one is simply and irrationally compelled to do, not a social duty or act of gainful employment.
Despite contracting syphilis in the city’s brothels, Beyle cultivates “a passion of a more abstract nature” for the mistress of a fellow soldier. She ignores him, but eleven years later, deploying an “insane loquacity,” he convinces her to yield on the condition that he will then leave Milan at once. Exhilarated by his conquest, Beyle is overcome by melancholy. He sees Il matrimonio segreto again and is entirely unimpressed by a most beautiful prima donna. Visiting the battlefield at Marengo, the discrepancy between his frequent imaginings of the heroic battle and the actual presence of the bleached bones of thousands of corpses produces a frightening vertigo, after which the shabby monument to the fallen can only make a mean impression. Again he embarks on a romantic passion, this time for the wife of a Polish officer. His mad indiscretion leads her to reject him, but he retains a plaster cast of her hand (we see a photograph) that was to mean “as much to him as Métilde herself could ever have done.”
Sebald now concentrates on Beyle’s account of his romantic attachment to one Madame Gherardi, a “mysterious, not to say unearthly figure,” who may in fact have been only (only!) a figment of his imagination. Usually skeptical of his romantic vision of love, one day this “phantom” lady does at last speak “of a divine happiness beyond comparison with anything else in life.” Overcome by “dread” Beyle backs off. The long last paragraph of the piece begins: “Beyle wrote his great novels between 1829 and 1842, plagued constantly by the symptoms of syphilis.”
The trajectory is clear enough. The effort of memory and of writing begins, it seems, where the intensities of romance and military glory end. It is the “task” of the disillusioned, at once a consolation and a penance. In 1829 Beyle turned forty-seven. Sebald turned forty-seven in 1990, the year in which Vertigo, his first “novel,” was published. Coincidences are important in this writer’s work. Why?
The Beyle piece is followed by an account of two journeys Sebald himself made in 1980 and 1987 to Venice, Verona, and Lake Garda (all places visited by Stendhal). The third piece describes a similar journey apparently made by Kafka in the fall of 1913, exactly a hundred years after the French writer reports having visited the lake with the mysterious Madame Gherardi. As Stendhal was referred to only by his baptismal name and not the name he invented, so Kafka, in what is the most fantastical and “poetic” piece in the book, is referred to only as K., the name used for the protagonists of The Trial and The Castle. Or not quite. In fact, Sebald refers to him as “Dr. K., Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers’ Insurance Company,” thus bringing together Kafka’s “professional” existence as an insurance broker and his fictitious creation, begging the question of the “identity” of the man who lies between the two.
Beginning in Verona, the last piece, “Il ritorno in patria,” shows the author interrupting “my various tasks” to undertake a journey that will take him back to the village of his childhood in Alpine Bavaria, where most of the piece is set, and finally on to England, where Sebald has his “professional” existence as a university lecturer. In all three of these pieces the romantic and military adventures of the young Henri Beyle are very much behind our now decidedly melancholic characters, and yet they are ever present too. As if between Scylla and Charybdis, when Dr. K. sits down to eat at the sanitarium on Lake Garda, it is to find an aging general on
one side and an attractive young lady on the other.
Similarly, on returning to the building where he grew up, Sebald remembers his boyhood longing for the company of the pretty waitress in the bar on the ground floor and the fact that he was forbidden to visit the top floor because of the mysterious presence of a “grey chasseur,” presumably a ghost, in the attic. Satisfying his curiosity forty years later, the narrator climbs to the attic to discover a tailor’s dummy dressed in the military uniform of the Austrian chasseurs. It is hard to steer a course across the wild waters generated by these two somehow complicitous follies. Was it not after all a combination of distressed damsels and military grandeur that overwhelmed Don Quixote’s sanity? Vertigo offers a number of images of ships heading for shipwrecks.
But the question of coincidences keeps turning up. In the second piece, entitled “All’estero” (“Abroad”), we are introduced to a character who could not be further from Sebald’s usually melancholic type, Giovanni Casanova. So far we have heard how the writer, in deep depression, travels from England to Vienna, falls into a state of mental paralysis, and is on the brink of becoming down-and-out when in desperation he sets out for Venice, a city so labyrinthine that “you cannot tell what you will see next or indeed who will see you the very next moment.” One of the things he sees of course in Venice is the Doge’s Palace, which causes him to think of Casanova.