Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  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 what was in fact 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 Senor Quesada dreamed up Don Quixote. 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 re-emerged for extreme unction.

  In his opening sentences Sebald loves to give us a robust 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 St Bernhard Pass …’ And 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 of 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 thrust is dispersed in a delta as impenetrable as it is fertile. Thus Beyle, who at the age of seventeen was with Napoleon on that ‘memorable’ crossing, finds it impossible, aged 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 scarcely credit them.’ He is right not to. His vivid memory of General Marchmont beside the mountain track wearing the sky-blue robes of a councillor must surely be wrong, since Marchmont was a general at the time and would thus have been wearing his general’s uniform. Italo Calvino reports making a similar error when looking back on a battle fought with the partigiomi against the Fascists: ‘I concentrate on the faces I know best: Gino is in the piazza: a thickset boy commanding our brigade, he looks into the square and crouches shooting from a balustrade, black tufts of beard round his tense jaw, small eyes shining under the peak of his Mexican hat. I know that Gino had taken to wearing a different hat at the time but … I keep seeing him with that big straw hat that belongs to a memory of the previous summer.’ If crossing the St Bernhard 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 compelling.

  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 II 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 eattiva who had assisted him in this task.’ The word ‘task’ appears frequently and comically in Vertigo, and 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 the most abstract nature’ for the mistress of a fellow soldier. She ignores him, but eleven years on, 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 II matrimonio sereto again and is entirely unimpressed by a most beautiful and brilliant 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, generates 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 Metilde 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 sceptical 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 last long 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 Franz Kafka in the autumn 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 Kafkas ‘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, ‘II 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 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 Sanatorium on Lake Garda, it is to find an ageing general on one side and an attractive young lady on the other. 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 on, 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 complicit follies. Was it no
t, after all, a combination of distressed damsels and military grandeur that did for Don Quixote? Vertigo offers a number of images of ships heading for shipwrecks.

  But to the question of coincidences. In the second piece, entitled ‘AlPestero, we are introduced to a character who could not be further from Sebalds 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 a 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 in Venice of course is the Doge’s Palace, which causes him to think of Casanova.

  With admirable reticence, Sebald has given us no reason for the cause of his depression, but if only because we have just read the Beyle piece - and there are various tiny hints scattered here and there - we suspect that romance is at least part of the problem, or, as Dr K. will think of it in the following piece: the impossibility of leading ‘the only possible life, to live together with a woman, each one free and independent’. Just to see the name Casanova, then, to think of that great seducer and endlessly resourceful schemer, generates a fierce contrast. Yet even Casanova experienced a period of depression and mental paralysis. When? When, like some hero of Kafka’s, he was imprisoned without explanation in the Doge’s Palace. And how did he escape? With the help of a coincidence.

  In order to decide on what day he would attempt to break out of his cell, Casanova used a complicated random system to consult the Orlando Furioso, thus, incredibly, happening on the words: ‘Between the end of October and the beginning of November’. The escape was successful. Casanova fled to France, where he later invented for himself the identity Chevalier de Seingalt. But just as remarkable as this propitious consultation of the Orlando Furioso is the fact that 31 October turns out to be the very day upon which our author finds himself in Venice. Sebald is amazed, alarmed, fascinated.

  Most evident outcropping of the underlying mysteriousness of our existence, coincidence, or uncanny repetition, seems to possess the power, at once comic and alarming, of galvanising the paralysed melancholic, jerking him out of his inertia. It is as if, disillusioned to the point where certain follies have become unthinkable (and contemporary Europe, as Sebald showed in The Emigrants has good reason for being thus disillusioned), we can only be set in motion by a fascination with life’s mysteries, the which are simply forced upon us in all sorts of ways. Between, or perhaps after, passion and glory lies the uncertain resource of curiosity, the recurring emotions of amazement and alarm. Any act of remembering will offer a feast.

  Towards that midnight between October and November, Sebald rows out on the Venetian lagoon with an acquaintance who points out the city incinerator, the fires of which burn in perpetuity, and explains that he has been thinking a great deal about death and resurrection. ‘He had no answers,’ Sebald writes, ‘but believed the questions were quite sufficient to him.’ It is an echo, conscious or otherwise, of Rilke’s advice to his ‘young poet’ to ‘have patience with everything unresolved and try to love the questions themselves’. Rilke was another German writer who had considerable problems both with military academies and with love.

  But it would be a mistake to imagine that Sebald presents coincidence in a positive light. Extraordinary parallels may, briefly, release the paralysed mind from its cell, get it sorting through old diaries, or tracking down books in libraries, or comically attempting on a bus, as in Sebald’s case, to take photographs of twin boys who resemble exactly the adolescent Kafka, but they do this in the way an alarm or a siren might. There is a destructive side to coincidence. It has a smell of death about it. What was the night ‘between the end of October and the beginning of November’, if not the night before All Saints’ Day, I morti, the Day of the Dead?

  Why is this? To ‘coincide’ is ‘to occupy the same place or time’, says Chambers Dictionary ‘to correspond, to be identical’. The coincidence that Stendhal, Kafka and Sebald all take similar trips at similar times of year, the first two exactly a century apart, may set curiosity in motion. It also removes uniqueness from these events; the recurrence diminishes the original, replaces it, falsifies it, the way Beyle reports finding his memories of landscapes destroyed by their painterly representations, the way even an old photograph may be considered as stealing something of its original. Here we are approaching the core of Sebald’s vision, the spring at once of his pessimism, comedy and lyricism. Engagement in the present inevitably involves devouring the past. Waking up in his Venice hotel on 1 November, remarking on the silence, Sebald contrasts it to the ceaseless surging of traffic he hears in the hotels of other cities, the endless oceanic roar of cars and trucks released wave upon wave from traffic lights. He concludes his description: Tor some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.’ To be set, with Casanova, in motion, is to be returned to the business of destruction. The 'chasseur', or hunter, he who consumes his own sport (and what was Casanova if not a hunter?), is a recurring figure in this book. Occasionally Sebald hears an arrow whistle past an ear.

  It is uncanny, on reading a work that makes so much of coincidences, to find it coinciding in unsettling ways with one’s own life. Enviably adept at bringing together images and anecdotes that will deliver his vision, Sebald now tells us of his experiences in Verona, the town where I have lived for more than twenty years. Eating in a gloomy pizzeria, he is unsettled by the painting of a ship in peril on stormy seas. Trying to distract himself he reads an article in the paper about the so-called “caso Ludwig’. For some years a string of local murders were accompanied by the claims of a group calling itself Ludwig. Some of the victims were prostitutes. There were also various incendiary attacks on discotheques, which the murderers felt to be dens of sin. Again the sexual and the military seem to have combined in the most disturbing fashion. How could Sebald not be appalled by the macabre German connection? And when the waiter brings his bill, he reads in the small print (again we have a reproduction) that the restaurant owner is one ‘Carlo Cadavero’, which is as much as to say, Charles Corpse. This is too much and the author flees on the night train to Innsbruck.

  Aside from the fact that I was able to look up Carlo Cadavero’s name in the Verona phone book, what struck me as uncanny was a comment from later in this piece when, returning to Verona seven years on, Sebald hears how the two adolescents, Wolfgang Abel and Marco Furlan, who created this terrible identity Ludwig, a sort of negative two-man Don Quixote, were tried and imprisoned. He remarks that although the evidence against them was ‘irrefutable’, ‘the investigation produced nothing that might have made it possible to comprehend a series of crimes extending over almost seven years’.

  Irrefutable? It would have been about the same time as Sebald’s second trip that, while carrying out English oral exams at the University of Verona, I found myself looking at the ID of a young woman whose surname was Furlan. Seeing my eyebrows raise, she said, ‘Yes, I am his sister. And he is innocent.’ The exam was a test of conversational skills and Signorina Furlan went on to pass it in exemplary fashion explaining to me with the utmost conviction that the whole thing was absurd and her brother the sweetest most normal person on earth. Despite the irrefutable evidence, she believed this, as no doubt the sisters of those who later commit war crimes believe in all honesty that they are growing up in the most normal of families. They are. Not for nothing is Sebald’s writing frequently set alight with images of terrible conflagrations that inexplicably consume everything, leaving the world to start again from under a veil of ash. Never mentioned, Shiva presides.

  The time has come to say something about this writer’s extraordinary prose, without which his rambling plots and ruminations would be me
rely clever and disturbing. Like the coincidences he speaks of, it is a style that recovers, devours and displaces the past. He has Bernhard’s love of the alarming superlative, the tendency to describe states of the most devastating confusion with great precision and control. But the touch is much lighter than Bernhard’s, the instrument more flexible. Kafka is present here too, perhaps from time to time Walser, and no doubt others as well. But all these predecessors have been completely digested, destroyed and remade in Sebald and above all in the magnificent descriptions which mediate so effectively between casual incident and grand reflection. One suspects too that Michael Hulse’s translation, which possesses a rare internal coherence of register and rhythm, is itself the product of a long process of digestion and recasting, a wonderful, as it were, coincidence. Some of the English is breathtaking. All the same, the most effective moments are often the more modest stylistically. Here is the author in a railway carriage with two beautiful women; knowing what we know of him, any approach to them is impossible, yet how attractive they are in their mystery!

  Outside in the slanting sunlight of late afternoon, the poplars and fields of Lombardy went by. Opposite me sat a Franciscan nun of about thirty or thirty-five and a young girl with a colourful patchwork jacket over her shoulders. The girl had got on at Brescia, while the nun had already been on the train at Desenzano. The nun was reading her breviary, and the girl, no less immersed, was reading a photo story. Both were consummately beautiful, both very much present and yet altogether elsewhere. I admired the profound seriousness with which each of them turned the pages. Now the Franciscan nun would turn a page over, now the girl in the colourful jacket, then the girl again and then the Franciscan nun once more. Thus the time passed without my ever being able to exchange a glance with either the one or the other. I therefore tried to practise a like modesty, and took out Der Beredte Italiener a handbook published in 1878 in Berne, for all who wish to make speedy and assured progress in colloquial Italian.