The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Sebald’s landscapes, whether those he traverses in his solitary walks and travels or the ones that appear in his eschatological dreamscapes, are dotted with treeless heaths and the remains of walls. (There is a good deal of the naturalist in Sebald, which provides for the scattered passages of lyricism about clouds or the phosphorescent glow of herrings that leaven his harsh outlook.) The cities he stops in are peopled with the ghostly presences of exiles (often Jews who have managed to escape the Nazi net) and transplanted, reclusive eccentrics who flit in and out of the deserted railway stations, run-down buildings, and emptied-out towns that are left behind after the drumbeat of progress or the whims of conquerors have moved on. “From the earliest times,” he observes in one of the casually desolate asides that are strewn like black confetti through his writing, “human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.”

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  Sebald’s books are usually referred to as novels or “prose fictions,” in spite of his transparently autobiographical narrators and the fact that Sebald himself never clearly defined his work as belonging to any one genre; they fall into that gaping crevasse between fact and fiction known as hybrid, which is another way of saying that they are committed to but not hindered by the obligation to tell the truth. They are interspersed with blurry, uncaptioned black-and-white photographs—as well as reproductions of newspaper items, handwritten notes, receipts, timetables, and tickets—which may or may not refer to the text. Sebald calmly disposes with such rudiments of reader-friendliness as paragraphs and quotation marks; the sentences within his long monologues sometimes run amok, and his narrative voice often switches without warning from the first person to the paraphrased thoughts of a third-person character. In lieu of the momentum of a plot, he relies on layers of bricolage that derive their force—or lack of it—from a cumulative rush of coincidences or correspondences, the frisson of an unsuspected synchronicity of detail that crosses centuries and continents. (Austerlitz, the last and most accessible of the books to appear before his death, is something of an exception in this regard, with a more conventional creation of character and pacing of incident.) It is an approach that might seem artless but is as deliberate as the story line in a fast-paced mystery. In Vertigo, the third book to appear here, he gives a glimpse of his creative strategy: “August the 2nd was a peaceful day. I sat at a table near the open terrace door, my papers and notes spread out around me, drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order.”

  Sebald’s typical protagonist (if that is not too concrete a term for his disembodied, wafting narrators) is somewhat paranoid (an anonymous waitress in a bar strikes him as suspicious, “as if she were the bearer of secret messages between the several guests and the corpulent landlord”) and seems always to be recovering from or about to enter a period of debilitating malaise. Even the images he exhumes from his childhood are tinged with an irredeemable sadness, like the “sorrow-worn camels and elephants” he once spotted at a performance he saw with his mother. In the present, meanwhile, he contemplates the portents of certain doom, sifting through sadness. Needless to say, the colorless, nomadic universe he inhabits, where the pizzerias are dreary and the hotels unwelcoming, offers few flashes of humor except of the most heavy-handed, ironic variety (the eponymous Jacques Austerlitz recalls ordering an ice cream that turned out to be “a plaster-like substance tasting of potato starch and notable chiefly for the fact that even after more than an hour it did not melt”). The mere mention of an “ice-cold can of Cherry Coke” or “an immense Rolex watch” jumps off the page like a garish piece of flotsam from a different planet.

  The shadow of estrangement follows Sebald everywhere: there is scant mention of women or sex (in The Rings of Saturn, he passingly alludes to the “ardent bewilderment of my senses that I used to feel in an embrace”) and there are few companionable encounters except for those with people in straits similar to his own, who are, more often than not, on their way to suicide. (Three out of the four characters in The Emigrants, his first book to appear here, take their own lives.) The experience of being in an airport, hardly a restful one for most of us, takes on an almost somnambulistic aspect when Sebald undergoes it. The crowds strike him “as if they were under sedation or moving through time stretched and expanded” (which gives one cause to worry whether any of them will make their flights); the airport is “filled with a murmuring whisper,” and the atmosphere itself has a “strangely muted” quality. Even when he does something as prosaic as stopping at a McDonald’s, the transaction assumes a terrifyingly anomic quality: “I felt like a criminal wanted worldwide as I stood at the brightly lit counter.”

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  On the Natural History of Destruction is the second of two posthumous works of Sebald’s to be published. (After Nature, a triptych of biographical prose poems and the first of his nonacademic books to be published in Germany, came out here in the fall of 2002.) It comprises four disparate essays, the latter two having been appended to the book as it appeared in the original German in 1999. One is on the Austrian writer Jean Améry, who survived torture by the Gestapo and Hitler’s concentration camps (he was together with Primo Levi at Auschwitz for a brief time), only to commit suicide in the 1970s; the other is on the German artist and writer Peter Weiss, whose work, in a description Sebald quotes from one of Weiss’s published journals, is a constant struggle with “the art of forgetting”—an attempt “to preserve our equilibrium among the living with all our dead within us.”

  On the Natural History of Destruction also includes a foreword Sebald wrote to accompany the first two essays, “Air War and Literature,” which takes up the silence of German writers in the wake of World War II, and “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” an examination of the compromised principles and quasi-brilliant career of the writer Alfred Andersch. (This is an odd and disconcerting piece, the splenetic tone of which is unlike Sebald’s other work and hints at a more private grievance, as if it had been written to even a score.)

  Although one might reasonably claim that all of Sebald’s work has an air of contingency, this slim volume is patently something of a publishing afterthought. As such, it cannot in fairness be said to represent the writer at his best, but it is precisely this pieced-together quality that enables the reader to consider some of the chinks in Sebald’s literary armor that might have been overlooked before—including his tendentious approach to a fraught national legacy, his practice of a kind of keyhole history, and his uneasy relation to both his personal and his national origins.

  The central essay of the collection, “Air War and Literature,” which was excerpted in The New Yorker and is based on a series of controversial lectures that Sebald gave in Zurich in 1997, comes at the reader from a different tangent than one might have expected, given the denunciations of German culture and character that are peppered throughout Sebald’s work, from The Emigrants on. In that book he assails his countrymen for their willed amnesia about the depredations of the Third Reich and the gruesome efficiency “with which they had cleaned everything up.” Similarly, in Vertigo, he evokes his first visit home in thirty years with undisguised revulsion. The women of his village are described as “almost without exception small, dark, thin-haired and mean”; his philistine father is indicted as a man “who would probably never have taken it into his head to go to the theatre, and less still to read a play”; and his parents’ Teutonic habits are scrutinized with narrow-eyed disdain, from the “cold and loveless” chimes of the living room clock to an étagère in which the plants “led their strictly regulated plant lives.”

  It is all the more surprising, then, that “Air War and Literature” poses the problematics of memory in another light entirely, shifting the onus of inquiry from one kind of moral quiescence (the Germans’ self-preserving complicity with Hitler’s program of genocide and tacit accep
tance of the Master Race theory) to a different kind altogether (the “extraordinary faculty for self-anesthesia” that led to the postwar evasion of the fact of Germany’s own suffering at the hands of the Allied bombing campaigns). Sebald accuses his country’s writers of having failed to come to imaginative terms with the devastation wrought upon their cities by air raids in which 600,000 civilians died, 3.5 million homes were destroyed, and 7.5 million people were left homeless: “It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness, it has been largely obliterated from the retrospective understanding of those affected, and it never played any appreciable part in the discussion of the internal constitution of our country.” Indeed, he blames this peculiarly German ability to cordon off unpleasant memories—to impose order on the unruly workings of the mind—for his own lack of knowledge about both the Nazi past and the retribution “on a scale without historical precedent” meted out by the British and the Americans.

  The terms of the argument have subtly but significantly changed. In keeping with a revisionist and somewhat disreputable line of thinking that has surfaced in German writings on the Holocaust in recent years, Sebald no longer calls for a confrontation with the intergenerational pathology—based on an “almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression”—that allowed people like his parents to close their eyes to (or to outright embrace) the bloodthirsty philosophy that led to the creation of the crematoriums. Instead, the historical burden of citizens of “the Fatherland” (an odd nomenclature for Sebald to avail himself of, given his previous, strenuously asserted disassociation from his German roots) is now deemed to be the necessity of conjuring with their fate as survivors of another kind of crematorium—the “inferno” caused by the “obvious madness” of the Hamburg and Dresden firestorms.

  Although he dutifully acknowledges the immutable reality that led to the Allied attacks (“a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps”), Sebald seems to be suggesting that the precipitating horror of Hitler’s reign has been sufficiently atoned for and that the time has come to acknowledge a “shameful family secret” that leaves aside the tribal particulars of guilt and focuses instead on the ecumenical nature of human suffering. In a sleight of hand so deft that it is easy to miss its implications, Sebald repositions the Germans as unmourned victims of “defenseless cities” rather than as culpable victimizers of a defenseless people.

  His catastrophist’s perspective, in which we briefly inhabit the world in the face of horrors past, passing, and to come, leaves no room for an etiology of disaster—and therefore no room for the sort of psychological triage that would allow us to pool our limited resources of compassion and pity in accordance with some stark hierarchy of justness. Considering that it was Hitler who pioneered the art of sophisticated aerial bombardment and who was the first to target civilians (in Rotterdam), one might find it understandable that German casualties have had less claim on our sympathies up to now than they otherwise might have had. But in the world according to Sebald the end is always more or less in sight, and we are all more or less Jews bound for slaughter.

  On the Natural History of Destruction is a complex apologia of a book, one that attempts to absolve a son of the sins of the father by establishing a larger and more generic ground for incrimination. It is a testament, among other things, to the lingering impact of early familial identifications and to the powerful grip of unresolved conflicts between intellectual and emotional allegiances. Which is to say that even a writer as scrupulous about his own motives—“one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other”—and as removed from private agendas as Sebald seemed to be, may be possessed of an impulse to clear the bad name of the parents he has ostensibly repudiated. (He pitilessly observes the profound fulfillment his mother and father found in “the acquisition of living room furniture befitting their station, which … had to conform in every detail with the tastes of the average couple representative of the emerging classless society.”) He may also be trying to account for his own unfathomable lapses of attention and failures of memory.

  Still, Sebald’s conviction about the discontinuous character of any one time period and the fallibility of conscious recall (as opposed to the Proustian belief in the magically rehabilitative effects of involuntary recall) puts him in a curious bind. Skeptical though he may be of “the much-vaunted historical overview,” based as it is on “a falsification of perspective,” the slippery stratagems of memory are the only material a writer of an archaeological bent such as his has to work with. Sometimes, as appears to have been the case with Austerlitz, Sebald was capable of his own convenient repressions. In one of several flurries of controversy that surrounded him in his lifetime, Susi Bechhöfer, herself a survivor of the Kindertransport, claimed that he had made use of the experiences recounted in her published memoir without acknowledging it. Sebald eventually responded to a letter she wrote to him and admitted that he had in fact read her account and based some of Jacques Austerlitz’s recollections on it.

  I suppose it is possible to read all of Sebald’s work as the through-a-lens-darkly vision of a man suffering from a medicable mood disorder that he mistakes for a universal entropy, “as if the world were under a bell jar.” It might even help to explain the suspect aura of highbrow cultism that attaches to his books, the prick of misgiving as to whether they are profound or just implacably misanthropic. Who else but a gloomy, deskbound intellectual would warm to a narrator who chooses as his “favorite haunt” the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold, which is “almost always deserted but for one or two of the surviving fishermen and seafarers sitting in silence in the armchairs, whiling the hours away”? But to reduce Sebald to a clinical depressive is to ignore the admittedly bleak gift that is the larger part of his greatness, which is his mining of a primal existential despair that goes beyond the merely personal to suggest something endemic about the condition of being human. I think of him as someone who was on good terms with darkness—a solitary watchman who stayed awake while the rest of us dreamed, the better to acquaint himself with the mad dogs that bark in the night.

  PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A FIASCO

  (HENRY ROTH)

  2005

  Henry Roth, whose ruthless assertions of creative will were offset by equally savage powers of self-sabotage, remains one of the more confounding figures in modern American letters. Roth’s jangled and disrupted life, filled with the most noble artistic intentions—including a sustaining belief in the redemptive possibilities of art—along with the most sordid personal impulses, belies the illusion of internal cohesiveness we prefer to set our sights of human behavior by. Even during his long and agonized lifetime—Roth died in 1995, at the age of eighty-nine—his bizarre trajectory as a one-book wonder who had wandered off to an unheated cabin in the Maine woods took on the aura of a cautionary tale. What unseen mutation of character led Roth to trade in his former existence as a literary comer for the persona of a Yankee hick—the laconic, subsistence-level operator of a feather-plucking business called Roth’s Waterfowl? Or, as his sister, Rose, put it in an interview quoted by Steven G. Kellman in Redemption, his absorbing biography of Roth, “How could he give up a God-given talent and fool around with chickens and ducks?”

  Roth had shown early indication of dazzling promise with Call It Sleep, published in 1934 when he was all of twenty-eight. The novel is told from the harrowing perspective of David Schearl, a young boy growing up in the fractious melting pot of New York City. David is the half-adored, half-abused only child of Yiddish-speaking greenhorn parents who emigrated from Eastern Europe to the ironically labeled “Golden Land” of their bare-bones tenement flats in Brownsville and the Lower East Side. The hypersensitive eight-year-old cowers in the face of his brutish, feckless father and looks to his unhappy, radically disoriented mother for love and protection. Without her attentive, reassuring presence
he feels lost: “He would not see his mother again until morning, and morning, with his mother gone, had become remote and tentative.”

  From the opening sentence of the first chapter, the reader crouches down behind David’s eyes, peering out along with him at a universe looming with imminent menace, indifferent to his needs and wishes: “Standing before the kitchen sink and regarding the bright brass faucets that gleamed so far away, each with a bead of water at its nose, slowly swelling, falling, David again became aware that this world had been created without thought of him.”

  A true multicultural novel avant la lettre, Call It Sleep had an epic ambition that was immediately recognized. Roth was praised by one reviewer as “a brilliant disciple of James Joyce”; his book was hailed by another as “the most accurate and profound study of an American slum childhood that has yet appeared.” Still, the novel was published during the depths of the Depression and sold fewer than two thousand copies before disappearing. More cuttingly to the point for Roth, a zealous recruit to the Communist Party, the book was condemned by the Marxist publication the New Masses for being insufficiently political in its use of its working-class background. That particular reviewer felt it was beset by the fatal flaw of bourgeois aestheticism and dismissed it as “introspective and febrile.” (He also found Call It Sleep overly focused on sex, an opinion seconded by the presumably capitalist New York Times critic, who characterized it as “a fine book deliberately and as it were doggedly smeared with verbal filthiness.”)

  As Kellman points out in his introduction, Call It Sleep “offers a case study in the fickle mechanism of literary reputations, in the eclipse of cultural leftism, and in the invention of ethnicity.” The last two factors were particularly important. The novel’s seminal accomplishment would become clear only in 1964 after it was released in a handsomely designed paperback edition and was hailed as a classic articulation of the American immigrant experience. (The New York Times Book Review ran a front-page rave by Irving Howe.) Call It Sleep became a bestseller as well as a fixture in the canon. Meanwhile, as it turned out, neither Roth’s retreat into “silence, exile, and waterfowling” nor the rediscovery of his long-ignored novel (which Roth, in his characteristic snatching-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory fashion, went to great pains in his later years to disassociate himself from) was destined to be the end of the story. Instead, it came with an eleventh-hour plot twist in which the slumbering literary giant surprised everyone by emitting a final scandalous roar that echoed through thousands of pages and brought decades of near-oblivion to an end.