Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

Droll as Beyle and Casanova have been, the apotheosis of Vertigo is “Dr. K. Takes the Waters at Riva.” Sebald’s Kafka cannot be the Kafka, since he cannot exist. Of the multitude of Kafkas, Sebald selects the hunter Gracchus, who is neither alive nor dead, and sails perpetually on his ship, which has no rudder, and is propelled by a wind that comes from the icy region of death.

  Vertigo concludes with a return to Wertach, Bavaria, where Sebald passed his childhood. He beholds another dead hunter, suffers diphtheria, and returns to England and to reading Samuel Pepys on the Great Fire.

  Though it does not have the continuous strength of The Emigrants (1992), let alone of Sebald’s masterpiece, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo fascinates because it inaugurates his highly original mode. As he said, Sebald writes prose and not novels. His voice is uncanny; that is his true strength. I have read more of Thomas Bernhard in German than I have of Sebald, which may account for my tendency to prefer Bernhard, though that might be a matter of sheer temperament. I first read Bernhard at the suggestion of my close friend the novelist Walter Abish, who, like Sebald, shows the influence of Bernhard’s shattering vision. Walter, who is Jewish, was born in Vienna and taken by his family to live in Shanghai (1940–49) to escape Hitler. In 1949, he and his parents went to Israel, where Abish served in the Israeli Defense Force, and began to write fiction. Walter came to the United States in 1957 and has been a citizen since 1960. His novels and stories, rather neglected, are memorable for their Bernhardian humor and for their skill at characterization.

  In an illuminating essay, Leland de la Durantaye wrote of what he called “the facts of fiction” in Sebald’s The Emigrants, which is constituted of four quasi-documentary tales of emigrants from Germany, two of whom commit suicide. The third chooses a series of brutal electric-shock treatments to cancel his memories, while the fourth tells the story of his father and mother in Bavaria awaiting their deportation to the death camps. Strong as the book is, I personally find it frightening and wonder if, after all, it exemplifies Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of the possibilities for aesthetic contemplation after the Shoah.

  By common consent, The Rings of Saturn is Sebald’s masterwork. Though I do not know the plays, that judgment seems accurate. The best preparation for The Rings of Saturn is to read or reread Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768–1800 by François-René de Chateaubriand, now best available in translation by Alex Andriesse (2018).

  Chateaubriand was a Breton nobleman, the last of ten children, and had an unhappy childhood. He began a military career, interrupted by the French Revolution; he initially supported it, but then was horrified by the Terror and went into exile, all the way to the United States. His memoirs are evidently not very reliable, whether as to meeting George Washington or as to living with Native Americans.

  Chateaubriand, after returning to France, joined an army of Royalist exiles and was severely wounded in a battle against revolutionary forces. He was sent to recovery and exile, first in Jersey and then in England, where he suffered poverty. His French wife, imposed upon him by his family, was someone he had never even met, and he left her behind. He describes an idyllic and innocent love with Charlotte Ives, a young Englishwoman, but he had to reveal that he was already married, and that ended his hopes.

  He returned to France under the Consulate, won early favor from Napoleon, then courageously denounced Bonaparte, who threatened him with execution but instead exiled him from Paris. In his solitude, Chateaubriand began to write a series of successful books, including fiction. These established him as the forerunner of French Romanticism and influenced Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, and even Stendhal, who despised Chateaubriand’s politics.

  Here is Sebald in The Rings of Saturn, giving us the most charming interlude in Chateaubriand’s long and amorous life:

  They spent long hours in the afternoon together reading Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and the Vita Nuova, and in all likelihood there were times when the young girl’s throat flushed scarlet and the Vicomte felt the thud of his heartbeat right under his Jacob. Their day always ended with a music lesson. When dusk was settling inside the house, but the light streaming in from the west still lit the garden, Charlotte would play some piece or other from her repertoire, and the Vicomte, appuyé au bout du piano, would listen to her in silence. He was aware that their studies brought them closer every day, and, convinced that he was not fit to pick up her glove, sought to conduct himself with the utmost restraint, but nonetheless remained irresistibly drawn to her. With some dismay, as he later wrote in his Mémoires d’outre-tombe, I could foresee the moment at which I would be obliged to leave. The farewell dinner was a sad occasion during which no one knew what to say, and when it was over, much to the astonishment of the Vicomte, it was not the mother but the father who withdrew with Charlotte to the drawing room. Although he was on the point of departure, the mother—who, the Vicomte noticed, was herself most seductive in the unusual role which she was now playing in the teeth of convention—asked his hand in marriage for her daughter, whose heart, she said, was entirely his. You no longer have a native country, your property has been disposed of, your parents are no longer alive: what could possibly take you back to France? Stay here with us and be our adopted son and heir. The Vicomte, who could scarcely believe the generosity of this offer made to an impoverished emigrant, was thrown into the greatest conceivable inner turmoil by her proposal, which it seemed the Reverend Ives had approved. For while on the one hand, he wrote, he desired nothing so much as to be able to spend the rest of his life unknown to the world in the bosom of this solitary family, on the other hand the melodramatic moment had now come when he would have to disclose the fact that he was married. While the alliance he had entered into in France had been arranged by his sisters almost without consulting him and had remained a mere formality, this did not in the slightest alter the untenable situation in which he now found himself. Mme Ives had put her offer to him with her eyes half downcast, and when he responded with the despairing cry Arrêtez! Je suis marié! she fell into a swoon, and he was left with no other choice than to leave that hospitable house at once with the resolution never to return. Later, setting down his memories of that ill-omened day, he wondered how it would have been if he had undergone the transformation and led the life of a gentleman chasseur in that remote English county. It is probable that I should never have written a single word. In due course I should have even forgotten my own language. How great would France’s loss have been, he asks, if I had vanished into thin air like that? And would it not, in the end, have been a better life? Is it not wrong to squander one’s chance of happiness in order to indulge a talent? Will what I have written survive beyond the grave? Will there be anyone able to comprehend it in a world the very foundations of which are changed?

  Perhaps Sebald delighted in this as I do, because Chateaubriand is so outrageously egoistic. Twenty-seven years after he gave up Charlotte Ives, Chateaubriand, then the French ambassador to London, was visited by Lady Sutton and her two sons. Three years after their forlorn love, Charlotte had married Admiral Sutton, one of Horatio Nelson’s flag captains.

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  The Rings of Saturn begins in August 1992, with Sebald walking the entire county of Suffolk, in the hope of combatting a spell of emptiness. A year later, he has to be taken to a Norwich hospital. When he has recovered, his mind turns to Sir Thomas Browne, long one of Sebald’s preoccupations. A train of associations brings him to a remarkable section devoted to Joseph Conrad and Sir Roger Casement, who knew one another in the Congo, when it was a vast den of horrors suffered by the Africans in order to enhance the private wealth of King Leopold II of the Belgians. It is now believed that as many as ten million blacks died because of torture, mutilation, starvation, and illnesses.

  Conrad created Heart of Darkness out of witnessing some of this. Casement, a heroic humanitarian, exposed the scandal to the Western world, a service he was to repeat i
n South America. Knighted by the British government, Roger Casement was stripped of all honors and hanged by the British on August 3, 1916. The Easter Rising took place in Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland April 24–29, 1916. Casement had been committed to the Irish cause for many years. In the autumn of 1914, Casement went to Germany to propose a German-Irish alliance, in which Germany would provide arms and trained officers to assist the Irish uprising. But Sebald transcends me, and his account contrives to be at once informative and strangely aesthetic:

  The first news of the nature and extent of the crimes committed against the native peoples in the course of opening up the Congo came to public attention in 1903 through Roger Casement, then British consul at Boma. In a memorandum to Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne, Casement—who, so Korzeniowski told a London acquaintance, could tell things that he, Korzeniowski, had long been trying to forget—gave an exact account of the utterly merciless exploitation of the blacks. They were compelled to work unpaid throughout the colony, given a bare minimum to eat, often in chain-gangs, and labouring to a set timetable from dawn to dusk till in the end they literally dropped dead. Anyone who travelled the upper reaches of the Congo and was not blinded by greed for money, wrote Casement, would behold the agony of an entire race in all its heart-rending details, a suffering that eclipsed even the most calamitous tales in the Bible. Casement made it perfectly clear that hundreds of thousands of slave labourers were being worked to death every year by their white overseers, and that mutilation, by severing hands and feet, and execution by revolver, were among the everyday punitive means of maintaining discipline in the Congo. King Leopold invited Casement to Brussels for a personal talk aimed either at defusing the tension created by Casement’s intervention or at assessing the threat his activities posed to the Belgian colonial enterprise. Leopold explained that he considered the work done by the blacks as a perfectly legitimate alternative to the payment of taxes, and if the white supervisory personnel at times went too far, as he did not deny, it was due to the fact that the climate of the Congo triggered a kind of dementia in the brains of some whites, which unfortunately it was not always possible to prevent in time, a fact which was regrettable but could hardly be changed. Since Casement’s views could not be altered with arguments of this kind, Leopold availed himself of his royal privilege in London, as a result of which, with a certain duplicity, Casement was on the one hand praised for his exemplary report and awarded the CMG, while on the other hand nothing was done that might have had an adverse effect on Belgian interests. When Casement was transferred to South America some years later, probably with the ulterior motive of getting his troublesome person out of the way for a while, he exposed conditions in the jungle areas of Peru, Colombia and Brazil that resembled those in the Congo in many respects, with the difference that here the controlling agent was not Belgian trading associations but the Amazon Company, the head office of which was in the city of London. In South America too, whole tribes were being wiped out at that time and entire regions burnt to the ground. Casement’s report, and his unconditional partisanship for the victims and those who had no rights, undoubtedly earned him a certain respect at the Foreign Office, but at the same time many of the top-ranking officials shook their heads at what seemed to them a quixotic zeal incompatible with the professional advancement of otherwise so promising an envoy. They tried to deal with the matter by knighting Casement, in express recognition of his services to the oppressed peoples of the earth. But Casement was not prepared to switch to the side of the powerful; quite the contrary, he was increasingly preoccupied with the nature and origins of that power and the imperialist mentality that resulted from it. It was only to be expected that in due course he should hit upon the Irish question—that is to say, his own. Casement had grown up in County Antrim, the son of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, and by education and upbringing he was predestined to be one of those whose mission in life was the upholding [of] English rule in Ireland. In the years leading up to the First World War, when the Irish question was becoming acute, Casement espoused the cause of “the white Indians of Ireland”. The injustice which had been borne by the Irish for centuries increasingly filled his consciousness. He could not rid his thoughts of the fact that almost half the population of Ireland had been murdered by Cromwell’s soldiers, that thousands of men and women were later sent as white slaves to the West Indies, that in recent times more than a million Irish had died of starvation, and that the majority of the young generation were still forced to emigrate from their native land. The moment of decision for Casement came in 1914 when the Home Rule programme proposed by the Liberal government to solve the Irish problem was defeated by the fanatical resistance of Ulster Protestants with the support, both open and covert, of various English interest groups. We will not shrink from Ulster’s resistance to Home Rule for Ireland, even if the British Commonwealth is convulsed declared Frederick Smith, one of the leading representatives of the Protestant minority whose so-called loyalism consisted in their willingness to defend their privileges against government troops by force of arms if necessary. The hundred-thousand-strong Ulster Volunteers were founded. In the south, too, an army of volunteers was raised. Casement took part in the recruiting drive and helped equip the contingents. He returned his decorations to London, and refused the pension he had been offered. In early 1915 he travelled to Berlin on a secret mission, to urge the government of the German Reich to supply arms to the Irish army of liberation and persuade Irish prisoners of war in Germany to form an Irish brigade. In both endeavours Casement was unsuccessful, and he was returned to Ireland by a German submarine. Deadly tired and chilled to the bone by the icy water, he waded ashore in the bay of Banna Strand near Tralee. He was now fifty-one; his arrest was imminent.

  All he could do was to send the message No German help available through a priest, to stop the Easter rising which was planned for all Ireland and was now condemned to failure. If the idealists, poets, trade unionists and teachers who bore the responsibility in Dublin nonetheless sacrificed themselves and those who obeyed them in seven days of street fighting, that was none of his doing. When the rising was put down, Casement was already in a cell in the Tower of London. He had no legal adviser. Counsel for the prosecution was Frederick Smith, who had risen to become Director of Public Prosecutions, which meant that the outcome of the trial was as good as decided before it began. In order to pre-empt any petitions for pardon that might have been made by persons of influence, excerpts from what was known as the Black Diary, a kind of chronicle of the accused’s homosexual relations found when Casement’s home was searched, were forwarded to the King of England, the President of the United States, and the Pope. The authenticity of this Black Diary, kept until recently under lock and key at the Public Records Office in Kew, was long considered highly debatable, not least because the executive and judicial organs of the state concerned with furnishing the evidence and drawing up the charge against alleged Irish terrorists have repeatedly been guilty, until very recent times, not only of pursuing doubtful suspicions and insinuations but indeed of deliberate falsification of the facts. For the veterans of the Irish freedom movement it was in any case inconceivable that one of their martyrs should have practised the English vice. But since the release to general scrutiny of the diaries in early 1994 there has no longer been any question that they are in Casement’s own hand. We may draw from this the conclusion that it was precisely Casement’s homosexuality that sensitized him to the continuing oppression, exploitation, enslavement and destruction, across the borders of social class and race, of those who were furthest from the centres of power. As expected, Casement was found guilty of high treason at the end of his trial at the Old Bailey. The presiding judge, Lord Reading, formerly Rufus Isaacs, pronounced sentence. You will be taken hence, he told Casement, to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution and will there be hanged by the neck until you be dead. Not until 1965 did the British government permit the exhumation of the
remains of Roger Casement, presumably scarcely identifiable any more, from the lime pit in the courtyard of Pentonville prison into which his body had been thrown.

  The Black Diaries of Roger Casement still provokes disputes as to its authenticity. But Casement’s homoerotic orientation is certain enough. The Anglo-Irish arch-poet William Butler Yeats was of another opinion:

  I say that Roger Casement

  Did what he had to do.

  He died upon the gallows,

  But that is nothing new.

  Afraid they might be beaten

  Before the bench of Time,

  They turned a trick by forgery

  And blackened his good name.

  A perjurer stood ready

  To prove their forgery true;

  They gave it out to all the world,

  And that is something new;

  For Spring Rice had to whisper it,

  Being their Ambassador,

  And then the speakers got it

  And writers by the score.

  Come Tom and Dick, come all the troop

  That cried it far and wide,

  Come from the forger and his desk,

  Desert the perjurer’s side;

  Come speak your bit in public

  That some amends be made

  To this most gallant gentleman

  That is in quicklime laid.

  This is hardly the Yeats of “The Second Coming,” the “Byzantium” poems, “Vacillation,” “Cuchulain Comforted,” and scores of other magnificences, but the angry poet did better in “The Ghost of Roger Casement”: