Inner Workings Read online

  In Sebald, 1914 often appears as the year when Europe took the wrong turn. But, looked at more closely, the pre-1914 idyll reveals itself to be without foundation. Did the true wrong turn take place earlier, then, with the triumph of Enlightenment reason and the enthronement of the idea of progress? While there is plenty of historical awareness in Sebald – the cities and landscapes through which his people move are ghost-ridden, layered with signs of the past – and while part of his general gloom is about the destruction of habitat in the name of progress, he is not conservative in the sense of harking back to a golden age when mankind was at home in the world in a good, natural way. On the contrary, he subjects the concepts of home and being at home to continual sceptical scrutiny. One of his literary-critical books is a study of the notion of Heimat (homeland) in Austrian literature. Playing on the ambiguity of the word unheimlich (unhomelike, unfamiliar, hence uncanny), he suggests that for today’s Austrians, citizens of a notional country whose territory and population have altered with each turn in modern European history, there ought to be something ghostly in feeling at home.3

  The Rings of Saturn (1995) comes the closest among Sebald’s books to what we usually think of as nonfiction. It is written to tame the ‘paralyzing horror’ that overtakes its author – that is to say, its ‘I’ figure – in the face of the decline of the eastern region of England and the destruction of its landscape. (Of course the ‘I’ in Sebald’s books is not to be identified with the historical W. G. Sebald. Nevertheless, Sebald as author plays mischievously with similarities between the two, to the point of reproducing snapshots and passport photographs of ‘Sebald’ in his texts.)4

  After a walking tour through the region, Sebald or ‘I’ is hospitalised in a cataleptic state, with symptoms that include a sense of utter alienation linked to hallucinations of being in a high place looking down on the world. To this vertigo he gives a metaphysical rather than a merely psychological interpretation. ‘If we view ourselves from a great height,’ he says, ‘it is frightening to realise how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end.’ A spinning of the mind followed by mental collapse is what happens when we see ourselves from God’s point of view. (p. 92)

  Sebald did not call himself a novelist – prose writer was the term he preferred – but his enterprise nevertheless depends for its success on attaining lift-off from the biographical or the essayistic – the prosaic in the everyday sense of the word – into the realm of the imaginative. The mysterious ease with which he is able to achieve such lift-off is the clearest proof of his genius. But The Rings of Saturn does not always succeed in this respect. Chapters on Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, the poet Edward Fitzgerald, and the last empress of China, all of whom – surprisingly – have links with East Anglia, remain anchored in the prosaic.

  In the earlier books the subject of time is not treated in any depth, perhaps because Sebald is not sure his medium will bear the weight of too much philosophising. When the subject is broached, it tends to be via references to the idealist paradoxes of Jorge Luis Borges, or, in The Rings of Saturn, to one of Borges’s mentors, the neo-Platonist Sir Thomas Browne. But in Austerlitz (2001), Sebald’s most ambitious book, time is confronted full on.5

  Time has no real existence, asserts Jacques Austerlitz, a professor of European art and architecture who lost his past when his Jewish parents packed him off to England as a small child to escape the coming catastrophe. Instead of the continuous medium of time, says Austerlitz, there exist interconnected pockets of space-time whose topology we may never understand, but between which the so-called living and the so-called dead can travel and thus meet one another. A snapshot, he goes on, is a kind of eye or node of linkage between past and present, enabling the living to see the dead and the dead to see the living, the survivors. (This denial of the reality of time provides a retrospective rationale for the photographs that pepper Sebald’s prose texts.)

  One consequence of the denial of time is that the past is reduced to a set of interlocking memories in the minds of the living. Austerlitz is haunted by the knowledge that each day a quantum of the past, including his own past, vanishes as people die and memories are extinguished. Here he echoes the anxiety expressed by Rainer Maria Rilke in his letters about the duty of the artist as bearer of cultural memory. Indeed, behind Sebald’s scholar hero, so out of place in the late twentieth century, loom several dead masters from the last years of Habsburg Austria: Rilke, the Hugo von Hofmannsthal of the ‘Letter to Lord Chandos’, Kafka, Wittgenstein.

  Shortly before his death Sebald published a book of poems with images by the artist Tess Jaray.6 It is a work of no great ambition, suggesting that verse-writing was a mere hobby to him. Yet his first book of poetry, Nach der Natur (1988), translated as After Nature, is a work of considerable scope. Though its imagery is more challenging than anything in Sebald’s prose works, the verse retains the Sebaldian virtues of rhetorical elegance and clarity, and sits well in English translation, as indeed does everything he wrote.7

  After Nature is made up of three long poems. The first is about Mathias Grünewald, the sixteenth-century painter, whose life-story Sebald cobbles together from scanty historical sources and observations on his paintings. Chief among the paintings is the altarpiece Grünewald executed for the Antonine monastery of Isenheim in Alsace, in his time the home of a hospital for plagues of various kinds. In the darkest of the Isenheim paintings – the temptation of Saint Anthony, the crucifixion and deposition of Jesus – Sebald’s Grünewald sees creation as a field of experiment for blind, amoral natural forces, one of nature’s crazier productions being the human mind itself, capable not only of mimicking its creator and inventing ingenious methods of destruction, but of tormenting itself – as in the case of Grünewald – with visions of the insanity of life.

  Equally bleak is Grünewald’s Crucifixion in Basel, where the strange, murky lighting creates an effect of time rushing backward. Behind the painting, Sebald suggests, lie premonitions of apocalypse stemming from an eclipse of the sun in central Europe in 1502, a ‘secret sickening away of the world, / in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk / in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit / poured through the vault of the sky.’ (p. 30)

  The darkness of Grünewald’s vision is not just a matter of an idiosyncratically melancholy temperament. Via connections with the messianic prophet Thomas Münzer, Grünewald knew and responded to the horrors of the Thirty Years War, which included a widespread atrocity any artist would shudder at, the gouging out of eyes; furthermore, through his wife, a convert born in the Frankfurt ghetto, he had intimate experience of the persecution of Europe’s Jews.

  The coda of this first poem consists of a single image: the world overtaken by a new ice age, white and lifeless, which is all that the brain sees when the optic nerve is torn.

  The second of the After Nature poems is again about vastness and blankness and iciness. Its hero, Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709–1746), is a child of the Enlightenment, a young German intellectual who has abandoned theology to study natural science. In pursuit of his ambition of cataloguing the fauna and flora of the frozen north, Steller travels to St Petersburg, a city that looms like a phantom out of ‘the future’s resounding emptiness’, where he joins the expedition led by Vitus Bering to map the sea passage from Russia’s Arctic ports to the Pacific. (p. 48)

  The expedition is successful. Steller even sets foot for a few brief hours on the North American land mass. On the way back to Russia, however, the voyagers suffer shipwreck. The melancholy Bering dies; the survivors make their way home in a makeshift craft, all but Steller, who goes off into the Siberian interior to collect specimens and familiarise himself with the native peoples. There he too dies, leaving behind a list of plants and a manuscript destined to become a guidebook for hunters and trappers.

  The aims of the Grünewald and Steller poems are not biographical or historical in any ordinary sense. Though the scholarship behind them is thorough – Sebald had publication
s on art-historical subjects to his name; he clearly did his homework on the Bering expedition – scholarship takes second place to what he intuits about his subjects and perhaps projects upon them (this may give a clue as to how Sebald constructed characters in his later prose fictions). Instance one: his claim that Grünewald, though married, was secretly homosexual, involved for many years in ‘a male friendship wavering / between horror and loyalty’ with a fellow painter named Matthis Nithart, is, among specialists, highly contentious: ‘Matthis Nithart’ may simply be Grünewald’s own baptismal name. Instance two: the historical Steller appears to have been a vain and supercilious young man, interested mainly in making a name for himself, who met his death when he fell into a drunken stupor in sub-zero temperatures. None of this is in Sebald.

  It is thus best to think of Grünewald and Steller as personae, masks that enable Sebald to project back into the past a character type, ill at ease in the world, indeed in exile from it, that may be his own but that he feels possesses a certain genealogy which his reading and researches can uncover. The Grünewald persona, with his Manichean view of the creation, is more fully worked out than the Steller persona, which is little more than a set of gestures, perhaps because Sebald could find – or create – no believable depths in the latter’s character.

  ‘Dark Night Sallies Forth’, the third of the poems in After Nature, is more overtly autobiographical. Here Sebald, as ‘I’, takes stock of himself as individual but also as inheritor of Germany’s recent history. In images and in fragments of narrative, the poem tells his story from his birth in 1944 under the sign of Saturn, the cold planet, to the 1980s. Some of the images – we are familiar with the practice by now from Sebald’s prose fictions – come from Europe’s cultural treasure chest, in this case two paintings by Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538): of the destruction of Sodom; and of the battle of Arbela, fought between Alexander of Macedon and Darius, king of Persia.

  Seeing the Sodom painting for the first time precipitates a déjà vu experience, which Sebald connects with the bombing of Germany’s cities in World War II and the refusal of his parents to speak about the subject. The general willed amnesia of his parents’ generation, the chief source of his grievance against and alienation from them, forces him to do their remembering for them. (Putting an end to this spell of historical amnesia became a matter of gathering national concern in Germany at the turn of the century. It is the theme of Sebald’s own Luftkrieg und Literatur, 1999, translated as On the Natural History of Destruction.8)

  In the poem the spectacle of the destruction of Sodom leads to a personal crisis (‘I nearly went out of my mind’), which Sebald links to his recurrent episodes of vertigo. With hindsight we can see that it will also lead to the labour of reparation constituted by his four prose works, and particularly by his biographies of Jews, both imaginary (the people in The Emigrants; Austerlitz) and real (his friend and now his translator Michael Hamburger in The Rings of Saturn). (p. 91)

  The most clearly narrative section of After Nature, written with a nod in the direction of ‘The Prelude’, William Wordsworth’s poem about his formative years, tells the story of Sebald’s first sojourn in the Manchester of the 1960s, a city in which early industrial Europe survives into the late twentieth century as a kind of necropolis or kingdom of the dead (‘These images / often plunged me into a quasi / sublunary state of deep / melancholia’). (p. 103)

  The East Anglian landscape where Sebald later finds himself is equally bleak: farms have been replaced with asylums or prisons or homes for the aged or testing ranges for weapons. Nor is modern England unique in its ugliness. Flying over Germany, he has another of his darkly visionary experiences.

  Cities phosphorescent

  on the riverbank, industry’s

  glowing piles waiting

  beneath the smoke trails

  like ocean giants for the siren’s

  blare, the twitching lights

  of rail- and motorways, the murmur

  of the millionfold proliferating molluscs,

  wood lice and leeches, the cold putrefaction,

  the groans and the rocky ribs,

  the mercury shine, the clouds that

  chased through the towers of Frankfurt,

  time stretched out and time speeded up,

  all this raced through my mind

  and was already so near the end

  that every breath of air made my

  face shudder. (p. 118)

  Visions like this led him to think of himself as Icarus, the boy who, sailing high above the earth with the homemade wings, sees what no ordinary mortal is allowed to see. When he falls, as he is doomed to do, will anyone pay attention, or, as in Brueghel’s famous painting, will the world simply go on with its business?

  Vertigo points him backward to childhood problems with keeping his balance, and forward to the second Altdorfer painting, The Battle of Arbela, a panorama of slaughter on a huge scale rendered in detail of hallucinatory, vertigo-inducing minuteness. The painting ought to precipitate another of his melancholic collapses. Instead it leads to the rather unconvincing transcendence with which the poem ends: an opening out of vision beyond horizons of unending warfare, East versus West, to a new future:

  . . . still further in the distance,

  towering up in the dwindling light,

  the mountain ranges,

  snow-covered and ice-bound,

  of the strange, unexplored,

  African continent.

  After Nature has its dead patches and moments of empty portentousness, but in all it is a work of great power and seriousness fully worthy to stand beside the prose works of Sebald’s last decade.

  (2002)

  11 Hugo Claus, poet

  IN ONE OF Hugo Claus’s later poems, a celebrated poet agrees to be interviewed by a younger man, also a poet. A few drinks soon unleash the malice and envy that lie behind the visit. Just between the two of us, asks the younger man, why do you keep the modern world at arm’s length? Why do you pay so much attention to the dead masters? And why are you so obsessed with technique? Don’t be offended, but sometimes I find you much too hermetic. And your rhyme patterns: they are so obvious, so childish. What is your philosophy, your basic idea, in a nutshell?

  The older man’s mind roams back to his childhood, to the dead masters Byron, Ezra Pound, Stevie Smith. ‘Stepping stones,’ he says.

  ‘Pardon?’ says the puzzled interviewer.

  ‘Stepping stones for the poem to tread on.’ He leads the young man to the door, helps him on with his coat. From the doorstep he points up at the moon. Uncomprehending, the young man stares at the pointing finger.1

  In this wry look at himself through the eyes of a dismissive younger generation, Claus manages to summarise the more obvious features of his poetry. He does indeed keep his distance from the modern world (though in a more nuanced way than his rival cares to recognise); he is indeed highly conscious of how his own work relates to literary tradition, national and European; he is indeed a master of verse form, to a point where he can make difficult feats seem childishly easy; he is indeed sometimes hermetic – in fact, sometimes writes within a hermetic tradition; and readers looking for a neat message, some Clausian ‘philosophy’ that will sum up his life’s work, are likely to come away empty-handed.

  Now in his seventies, Claus has a hugely productive artistic career behind him during which he has been showered with honours and awards, not only in his native Belgium and in the Netherlands, but more widely in western Europe. His dramatic oeuvre – original plays, translations, and adaptations – has made him a major theatrical presence. He has conducted notable forays into cinema and into art and art criticism. But the creations by which he will ultimately be remembered are, first, The Sorrow of Belgium (1983), one of the great novels of postwar Europe, and second, a corpus of poetry that in his collected Poems 1948–2004 runs to some 1,400 pages.

  Hugo Claus was born in 1929 in Brugge (Bruges) in Flanders, the son of
a printer with a passion for the theatre. Several of his schoolteachers during the Occupation were right-wing nationalists; he himself was drawn into the fascist Flemish youth movement. After the liberation his father was briefly interned for his wartime political activities. This background is drawn on in The Sorrow of Belgium.

  Claus received a sound Gymnasium-type education with an emphasis on classical and modern languages but did not proceed to university. He began his career in the arts as a book illustrator, then at the age of eighteen published a first book of verse and a year later a first novel. Among his early literary idols were Antonin Artaud and the French surrealists; he soon became active in the COBRA (Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam) art movement.

  During the decade of the 1950s Claus lived in France and Italy as well as his native Belgium. In 1959 he was invited on a tour of the United States by the Ford Foundation, along with a group of up-and-coming European writers including Fernando Arrabal, Günter Grass, and Italo Calvino. ‘A verse from Luke won’t help you here,’ he recorded, faced with the impersonal hugeness of Chicago.2

  Talented in a range of artistic spheres and hugely energetic, Claus continued to write poetry and fiction and to paint while at the same time developing his skills as a playwright, screenplay writer, theatre and cinema director, and art critic. With the publication of his Poems 1948–1963 he signalled the close of the first phase of his poetic career, a phase of which The Sign of the Hamster (1963), a rambling retrospective look at his life on the lines of François Villon’s ‘Great Testament’, emerges as the high point. Along with Remco Campert, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Simon Vinkenoog, and Lucebert, he had by now established himself in the front rank of the new generation of Dutch-language poets, a generation that made its mark in the early 1950s by espousing an anti-traditional, anti-rational, anti-aesthetic, experimental art receptive to New World influences but by the 1960s had split apart, its members going their various individual ways.