Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (148 page)

‘Carey’ is an Irish surname. There is no mystery as to why so many Irish ended up in colonial Australia. ‘Kelly’ is another Irish surname and one which is immortalised in the annals of national criminal heroism. Ned Kelly’s ‘rebellion’ is the theme of the country’s most distinguished artist’s best-known sequence. Sidney Nolan is also, of course, possessed of an Irish surname. Peter Carey ventured into the same subject matter with
True History of the Kelly Gang
(2000), the novel for which he won his second Booker Prize, in the millennial year 2001. The novel is an exercise in indigenous vernacular, using as its source the one, self-exculpating, letter of Kelly’s which has survived. Carey picks out from that testament Kelly’s lament for the ‘unfairness’ at the heart of the Australia national existence. The Booker Prize release describes it as less a novel than a national anthem in fictional form:
‘True History of the Kelly Gang
is the song of Australia, and it sings its protest in Ned Kelly’s voice … By the time of his hanging in 1880 a whole country would seem to agree that he was “the best bloody man that has ever been in Benalla”. Carey skilfully makes art from his country’s great story and helps us all to understand the measure of that “best bloody man”.’

But was Carey – ‘a man with two passports’, as he described himself – still Australian? He moved to American subject matter with
His Illegal Self
(2008), the story of 1960s domestic terrorists. The novel was perplexing to many reviewers, particularly its second half in which the location changes abruptly, and for obscure narrative reasons, to the site of Carey’s own hippy-commune days of the mid 1970s in up-country Queensland.

No year went by, it seemed, without Carey scooping up prizes and headlines. In 2003 he underwent a publicly acrimonious divorce from Summers and formed a relationship with the publisher, Frances Coady. His 2006 novel,
Theft
, opens with bitter complaint that the hero has been ‘eviscerated by divorce lawyers’, working for his ‘alimony whore’ of a separated wife. Summers took it personally, noting in a combative website, the string of dedications and ‘without whom’ acknowledgements Carey had made her. The novel was, she said, ‘emotional terrorism’. The allegation, Carey retorted, was ‘bullshit’. The newspapers had the kind of field day which fiction rarely supplies. One of Summers’s accusations was that Carey was prepared to sacrifice anyone and anything in his ‘ruthless drive to the top’. If so, he succeeded. He was hugely remunerated for his novels (a $2 million contract with Random House was gossiped about in the book trade). He continued turning out novels, each one as unpredictable as the last had been. No one, in 2010, for example, anticipated an elegant historical novel,
Parrot and Olivier in America
, based on Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1830s tour. What next? is always the question with Carey.

I am a periscope.

Does Sebald qualify for inclusion in this book? Was he a novelist? Was he an English-language novelist? He offers his own enigmatic answers. In the description he filed on his University of East Anglia home-page (‘home’, one notes, is never quite the right word for Sebald), he listed the four masterworks he composed in middle age as ‘prose fiction’, distinguishing them from his earlier works of scholarship. But he listed that ‘fiction’ under its German titles. Why, Sebald was once asked, did he
– having lived in England for thirty years, with a perfect command of English – write in what was, by the 1990s, his second language? Because, he replied, separation from his country meant that the ‘antique’ German he used was clinically pure – uncontaminated by the country’s ‘recent’ (i.e. post-1933) past. And so close was Sebald’s relation with one of his translators, Michael Hulse, that it could, more properly, be called collaboration. Germenglish.

Little of Sebald’s personal history is yet known. The vacuum around him was self-created and a main component of his art. The facts, as stark as the information on an
Ausweis
(it amuses him to reproduce his radically uninformative ID ‘papers’ in his fiction) are as follows. He was born in a small village in southern Bavaria, in the Alps, near the Swiss border, at that strategic historical moment when the war was lost but could no more be stopped from its final destructiveness than an avalanche. His family, long resident in the region, had once been glass-makers. Sebald saw the past, he once said, through ‘a glass mountain’ – an immovable, but transparent, obstacle. In his only extended description of Wertach im Allgäu, he calls it ‘W’ (to signal it is no longer what it was, denuded of its history). It was, when he grew up there, ‘a village of about a thousand inhabitants, in a valley covered in snow for five months of the year’, a place ‘where Jews didn’t exist’.
Judenfrei
by history, not ethnic cleansing.

His full name was Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald. As an author he stringently avoided full first names, using the initials ‘W. G.’ The ‘M’ was suppressed, although to those who knew him, he was ‘Max’. Why this little nominal shuffle? On the literary level, it is
hommage
to ‘K’ (Kafka) and ‘VN’ (Nabokov), but there is a more intimate reason for alphabetisation. Sebald was born when the Nazi Party ordained, by state catalogue, ‘acceptable’ German names. Hence the universality in Sebald’s generation of Teutonic-heroic Helmuts, Siegfrieds and Ulrichs. He chose ‘Max’ because it’s a name associated with Jews as much as Gentiles. When, in 1933 (ominous year), Max Baer did heavyweight battle with Max Schmeling (Aryan versus Hitler’s favourite pugilist) the Jewish American wore a Star of David on his shorts and, ring history records, beat the crap out of the Führer’s Max.

Sebald was brought up Catholic in a Catholic village. He was one of four children – effectively a half-orphan. His father had joined the Wehrmacht in 1929 and rose, by 1945, to the rank of captain in a transport unit. The family, Sebald sardonically recalls, ‘made the grade during the fascist years’. His father was a rare visitor home. After the war he was a POW until 1947 and thereafter worked in a distant town, but he was a good provider and the family ‘rose again’ to middle-class respectability. During the war, as Max discovered from a photo album, his father had served in the ‘Polish Campaign’. One of the photographs he sent home to his
family was of a laughing Polish gypsy mother and child – behind barbed wire, one notices on closer inspection. Can one inherit complicity? As he was growing up, Max’s closest attachment was to his maternal grandfather, with whom he attended church. He died when Max was twelve, a blow from which he ‘never recovered’. The death severed all living connection he had with Germany before 1933.

Sebald sailed through the post-war school system. While still a pupil he saw the Belsen concentration camp films, which the whole German population was made to view, as if to rub their nose in their own filth. He played football afterwards. The films made no immediate impression on him. The effect hit later. As a student at the University of Freiburg, he was nauseated by the ‘deNazified’ professoriate’s ‘conspiracy of silence’. It was universal. ‘I doubt my mother and father,’ he speculated, ‘even among themselves, ever broached any of these subjects.’ Those ‘subjects’ were not merely the Nazi crimes, but the German people’s suffering during the war and post-war periods.

Sebald then emigrated (or went into exile) to England – where there was ‘memory’ – the ‘backbone of literature’, as he called it. He was particularly drawn to provincial England and finally established his career at the ‘new’ University of East Anglia, lecturing in German. He married in 1967 and had a daughter. He loved Norfolk’s flatness (his own style was often described with the same adjective). But rooted as he became there, it was never his home. The last pages of
Vertigo
(1990) describe a journey, often taken, from London to Norwich:

The train rolled slowly out of Liverpool Street station, past the soot-stained brick walls the recesses of which have always seemed to me like parts of a vast system of catacombs that comes to the surface there. In the course of time a multitude of buddleias, which thrive in the most inauspicious conditions, had taken root in the gaps and cracks of the nineteenth-century brickwork. The last time I went past those black walls, on my way to Italy in the summer, the sparse shrubs were just flowering. And I could hardly believe my eyes, as the train was waiting at a signal, to see a yellow brimstone butterfly flitting about from one purple flower to the other.

Sebald, too, had found his cranny at UEA.

Liverpool Street Station, a place which fascinated him, inspired his last novel,
Austerlitz
(2001):

When I was in London this summer, I found myself with some time to spare waiting for a train at Liverpool Street Station. I made a point of going out to the small open space on the south side of the station, known as Hope Square. Here you will find a plaque and a monument to remember the children of the
Kindertransports
.

Some 10,000, mainly Jewish, children found sanctuary in pre-war England. Most came through the grimy station.
Austerlitz
follows the life of one such fictionalised child (compressed, Sebald recalls, from four he knew), who finds himself in a wholly uncongenial Welsh foster home. Spiritual isolation within physical alienation is the human condition in Sebald’s universe.

Sebald’s creative phase of writing began in his mid-forties, with four novels produced in rapid succession:
Vertigo
(1990),
The Emigrants
(1992),
The Rings of Saturn
(1995) and
Austerlitz
(2001). This astonishing creative flow was stopped by his death, aged fifty-seven. Driving in East Anglia, he is thought to have suffered a heart attack. He crashed and died. Had his daughter Anna not been travelling with him – given the pervasive morbidity of Sebald’s mind – one could have suspected suicide. No one thinks it was. He was already being talked of as a Nobel laureate and his reputation had been boosted by laudatory commentary in London and New York’s opinion-forming journals. ‘Where’, asked Susan Sontag, ‘has one heard in English a voice of such confidence and precision, so direct in its expression of feeling, yet so respectfully devoted to “the real”?’ Answers were not invited. Assisted by such golden verdicts, Sebald’s sales were elevated to bestseller levels by his agent, the famously aggressive Andrew Wylie (nicknamed ‘the jackal’). W. G. Sebald at the time of his death was on the verge of becoming a cult.

The most revealing of Sebald’s novels is
The Rings of Saturn
. It is the saturnine planet, the astrological realm of the melancholy. The world, he suggests, can only be known by circling around it. The novel opens:

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.

There was also, the early pages inform us, a recent breakdown requiring hospitalisation. Sebald, in his usual circumambient way, talks about the hospital window, his only link to the outside world, but gives no details about the breakdown. In fact, as we follow it, his wander is not ‘into’ but along the edge of Suffolk – the coastal rim (bleak shingle all the way) from Lowestoft to Felixstowe. What, one asks, makes
The Rings of Saturn
different from, say, Cobbett’s
Rural Rides
or J. B. Priestley’s
English Journey
? The difference is that these other writers look at what is before their eyes, in their ‘pilgrimages’. Sebald’s eye ricochets back into his mind.

By the second page,
The Rings of Saturn
moves from observation to a quirky meditation on the skull of the famous Suffolk doctor (author of
Religio Medici
), Sir Thomas Browne. Browne’s writing (notably
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
, his encyclopaedia of ‘vulgar errors’) is a literary
Wunderkammer
, a hall of curiosities. But Sebald’s
contemplation of the skull recalls, inescapably, the Ignatian exercise of meditation. Like Prospero in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
, his every third thought is of death. Cobbett and Priestley, by contrast, see English life on their travels: he sees human mortality.
The Rings of Saturn
indulges that national German pastime, ‘wandering’. The solitary wanderer’s thoughts ramble in aimless rhythm (there is, incidentally, a dearth of dialogue in Sebald’s fiction: it is virtually soundless). He labelled his narrative technique ‘tangential’, ‘hypotactic’, ‘periscopic’. Thoughts, he said, ‘disintegrate before I can fully grasp them’. Among the many oddities of British public life that fascinated him was the London Tube injunction, ‘Mind the gap!’ Sebald minds little else.

On a stylistic level, the effect is one of unechoing ‘emptiness’. There is little or no antecedent information offered. Why is he always walking alone? In
Vertigo
there is a vaguely indicated ‘personal crisis’ (but what?). The prose, while formal at the level of the sentence (one of which goes on for nine pages), lacks paragraph breaks. One whole novel lacks any white space whatsoever. Sebald’s prose drones, monotonously. But if he is talking to himself (‘mining the salt mines of the soul,’ as he puts it) why shouldn’t his discourse be toneless? The stream is only broken by captionless photographs. Does one think in words, or pictures? If the latter, the pictures need no labels.

In
Vertigo
the first of the novel’s four sections chronicles the post-war life of a Napoleonic soldier ‘Marie Henri Beyle’ – his fraught love affairs, syphilis and wretched end. Nowhere does Sebald trouble to tell the reader that Beyle is the novelist Stendhal. In the last of the novel’s sections, ‘
Il ritorno in patria
’, a similarly nameless Sebald goes back to a similarly nameless home town. He traces its history as a book of the dead: in 1511, the Black Death claims 511; in 1569, a fire destroys 100 houses; 700 die of the plague in 1635. The casualty list goes on through war after war until reaching 125 in the Second World War. It is a catalogue of death, but not quite (even in a village of 1,000 souls) a never-ending holocaust. Such death rates can be lived with. The total destruction of the European Jewish population is, by contrast, the pervasive fact in his fiction. He despised both the shroud of silence in Germany after the war and the exploitative ‘Holocaust Industry’, which he dates as cranking up in the mid-1960s. ‘He claimed no false intimacy with the dead,’ his friend Michael Hamburger said. In Sebald’s view of things, the Holocaust could not be forgotten out of existence, but neither could it be directly confronted, at least not by a writer who had never been directly there – any more than a hairdresser could ‘do’ Medusa’s hair.