The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  In this fashion Thelen himself explains the subtitle of his Island: “From the Applied Recollections of Vigoleis.” He gives us the story of his own life, embellishing the real events and, with Vigoleis, inventing his own double. He toys with the genres “autobiography” and “novel,” continually highlighting their ambivalent relationship. “Life begins to get interesting only when it touches poetry,” we learn in the Island. And in another passage: “Why shouldn’t the world that matters to us be a fictional one?”

  Scholars of German literature believe that a novel must be fictional, and an autobiography authentic, but Thelen violated the borderlines. With his “applied recollections” he created a new variant of autobiographic narrative. Thelen confronts the problematic distinctions that accompany all memoirs, which Goethe exemplified in the title of the presentation of his own life (Poetry and Truth), by manipulating these distinctions and heightening them into a poetological program.

  Our comparison of Thelen with the great figures of literary history, as well as our stress on his baroque narrative style, give rise to another question that occasionally gets asked: What is there about the Island that makes it worth reading even today? It is easy to provide a first superficial answer: Any person who travels to Mallorca can use the book as a potential source of information about certain places on the island, especially in Palma, the Mallorcan capital. In addition, the work provides valuable glimpses of a time when today’s explosion of tourism was still in its infancy.

  Yet such a description does no more justice to The Island of Second Sight than our attempt to summarize the book’s contents. Why should today’s readers reach for Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Melville’s Moby-Dick, or Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum? These works offer their readers perennial themes of human experience, in eternally new variants and at the highest linguistic level. And this is exactly what happens in Thelen’s work. His topics are:

  Freedom and Dependency

  Freedom is our hero Vigoleis’ main concern. One of the final sentences in the book is this: “Our destination: freedom.” Vigoleis was unwilling to submit either to the authority of the Hotel Majorica or to that of the Nazis. His freedom was more valuable to him than his own life.

  Success and Failure

  Vigoleis constantly brags about his own incompetence. His origins aren’t worth writing memoirs about; he has no talent for handling money; he is incapable of acting in his own interest; and he doesn’t shy away from presenting a discussion about whether or not he is a genuine writer. In a brief but very impressive passage, he reports his totally futile attempt at giving a speech at his parents’ silver wedding anniversary. For Vigoleis, whose ambition is to become a storyteller, this episode remains in his memory as a bitter defeat.

  Love and Hatred

  While telling us about Pilar and Zwingli as a couple, Thelen shows us how love can turn into hatred. But there is also Beatrice and Vigoleis, whose love affair, while much less spectacular, is much more firmly rooted. Thelen is also keen to present different kinds of love, like the love that can exist between siblings (Beatrice and Zwingli), and between parents and children (Pilar and Julietta).

  Idealism and Materialism

  This important theme, which Cervantes exhibited in such grandiose fashion in his Don Quixote, is present throughout Thelen’s Island. Again and again he matches up his idealistic hero Vigoleis against materialistic antagonists who, for the most part, get the better of him: Adele Gerstenberg, Silberstern, the beggar Porfirio, and—to a certain extent—Zwingli. In the process, Thelen shows us how closely linked idealism is to humanism.

  What is truly unique, however—and what launched the book’s Lower Rhenish author into the highest ranks of world literature—is the linguistic mastery that Thelen displays throughout the work’s many pages.

  “To loosen the tongue of the German Language”

  Thelen set off an unprecedented display of linguistic fireworks with the aid of a vocabulary that must have been the hugest in all of German literature. The critic Eckart Henscheid, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1994, referred to him as a “full-to-bursting narrator.”

  Thelen the storyteller stepped forth as a force of nature, taking the fullest advantage of the cornucopia that is the German language, and of his own ability to master this language. The years he spent in foreign climes—and his familiarity with six different languages—were of great benefit for him. In response to a questionnaire in the 1960s, he explained that he had never once felt “banished” into a foreign language. “On the contrary,” he continued, “it was when I was on foreign soil, constantly surrounded by the sounds of a foreign tongue, that I began to take full possession of my own language.” He also developed an early interest in archaic and technical language, and he collected dictionaries. The largest compendium of German vocabulary by far, the German Dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, became his constant companion.

  All this, plus his work as a translator, enriched Thelen’s language in impressive fashion. By comparing words, sentences, and idioms; by altering them; and by shaping new combinations, he created a multiplicity of new coinages. In this verbal circus, Thelen was the juggler, clown, and trapeze artist, all at once. As such, he performed a highly important service to German, the language of his birth. To quote Jean Paul, another brilliant German novelist, he “loosened its tongue.”

  The origins of The Island,

  as documented in unpublished letters

  But what was Thelen’s life like before the Island was written—before a plan for the book even existed? The fifteen years that passed between his stay on Mallorca and the writing of the book went by both dramatically and calmly.

  After their escape from the Spanish Falangists and the German National Socialists on Mallorca in 1936, Thelen and his wife passed through France and arrived in Switzerland, Beatrice’s homeland. Following a stay in Auressio (Canton Ticino), they planned a further escape to Portugal. From 1937 to 1947, Teixeira de Pascoaes sheltered them at his vineyard estate near Amarante in northern Portugal, protecting them from the grasp of the Nazis. During this time, Thelen worked on his translation of works by Pascoaes. Using contacts with the Dutch publishing house of Meulenhoff, which published the Dutch translations of Pascoaes, Thelen moved to Amsterdam in 1947. Here he found himself among writers and publishers, and he began to tell his stories about Mallorca.

  One of his fascinated listeners was Geert van Oorschot, the Amsterdam publisher who published the Island in 1953. Thelen scholars originally assumed that van Oorschot was the first to encourage the writing of the book, but a letter written by Thelen on December 1, 1942 reveals that the publisher Meulenhoff had actually urged him to write a book of memoirs a good ten years earlier. What follows is a complete account, unavailable until now, of the correspondence between Thelen and the Düsseldorf publisher Peter Diederichs, and between Thelen and his family, insofar as it bears upon the writing of the Island.

  In December, 1942, Thelen wrote to his mother:

  My Dutch publisher has asked me in his most recent letter to write a book of travel impressions for his publishing house—without fancy notions of a “book”—just chatting on about my odd adventures, especially in Spain, meeting famous people, etc. A German publisher, in fact my own publisher, is likewise eager to produce such a book, so now I’ll have to decide whether to write it in Dutch or in German. Certain things come to me more easily in Dutch, but I can handle other things better using my mother tongue.

  The German-language publisher he mentions was Rascher in Zurich, who published Thelen’s translations of Pascoaes. Almost a decade will now pass before Thelen begins writing his recollections. On May 8, 1951, he writes to his family in mock-officialese that on the previous day he has signed a contract with Geert van Oorschot:

  The undersigned wishes to add that yesterday he concluded a contract with a publisher situated in said municipality of Amsterdam, for the purpose of securing the publishing rights for a book, yet to be written, which i
s to placed on the market in a Dutch version on 15 February, 1952 bearing the title “From the Applied Recollections of Vigoleis,” a novel by a. v. thelen. Now he must get a move on if he intends to produce text with his pen by the contracted deadline.

  Van Oorschot, who was enthusiastic about the Mallorca tales that Thelen delivered in person, had been encouraging him to write down his experiences, and he had finally succeeded. At this time, the author and his publisher assumed that the work would be written in Dutch.

  About two weeks later Thelen wrote to his family:

  My publisher wants to bring out the Vigoleis “novel” in German, too, as a co-production with a German or Swiss company. He holds great promise for my jottings, based solely on a preliminary chapter that he found very impressive. I’m calling all the characters by their real names, “concealing nothing and adding nothing,” and so I plan to preface it all with a notice to that effect… I occasionally pull back from my own self, dropping the first-person narration and reporting on Vigoleis as an invented character. May the Muses look kindly upon me!

  On June 7, 1951, Thelen writes to his brother Ludwig concerning his progress, and for the first time he uses the descriptive term “memoirs” in connection with the Island:

  This in haste. I’ve got much to do. I’ve just finished the chapter in my memoirs where I explain how Vigoleis wants to adopt a child, and how everything works out differently from what he expected.

  Before he takes a trip to Switzerland, Thelen writes to Ludwig from Amsterdam on June 13:

  My tome is making progress. I still don’t have a main title, but I’m considering calling the first volume “The Island of Second Sight.” Being in the role of Vigoleis gives rise to mirror images that I am reluctant to associate with my other self. I hope to get busier in Switzerland than I have been here, where I can’t seem to calm down.

  This hope apparently goes unfulfilled. Having arrived in Switzerland, Thelen writes to his family on June 25 from Locarno:

  At the moment I feel stupid. No progress with my tome. I’ve lost contact with it. It will be some time before I can reconnect.

  At the end of August, Thelen and his wife are back in Amsterdam, but it isn’t until October 4 that he returns to the subject of his book, in a letter to his sister-in-law Martha:

  Before I put a new sheet of paper in the typewriter and get back to fiddling with my Vigoleis’ recollections, I’ll type out a few lines for you.

  And on October 16, 1951, Thelen gets more specific in a letter to Ludwig:

  My memoir publisher is active again. The German manuscript, ready for translation, has to be in his hands by the 31st. One chapter went to the press today, in Dutch. In a few weeks it will appear as a pre-publication in a journal that takes risks like this one, and not just because it has the name “Libertinage.” The translation is in the best hands. No less an expert than Thomas Mann’s translator has taken on the task.

  The translator was named C. J. E. Dinaux, and the chapter entitled “The Single-Chair System” appeared in the November/December issue of the Dutch literary journal. At this time, van Oorschot was planning to have Dinaux translate the entire text.

  “Vigoleis lives in me”

  Thelen continues writing, but the deadline for submission of the manuscript (October 31, 1951) has already passed.

  Speaking with Saint Paul, I no longer live, but Vigoleis lives in me. This guy Vigoleis is pestering me to deliver his recollections as the contract says I should. The manuscript keeps growing, and with it the author’s recklessness” (Postcard to his family, November 6, 1951)

  And in a letter to Ludwig on November 28:

  Yesterday I finished the first part (of three) of the first book. But now I must work hard in order to get the manuscript ready to pass on to the Dutch translator by the end of the year… If I’m not disturbed, I can write up to 10 pages a day, my average being 5. When complete it will be more than 400 pages.

  Both the author and his publisher radically underestimated the final size of the Island. Thelen’s “cactus style” repeatedly caused his stories to engender further stories. Or to put the matter as he himself did in a letter to Ludwig on January 20, 1952, like the “sorcerer’s apprentice,” the spirits that he conjured up produced new spirits:

  My publisher was just here, and told me that he doesn’t intend to produce a first edition of my tome in Dutch. Instead, he wants to take it to market directly in the German original. A Dutch translation would have taken a whole year, and would have lagged behind the original in any case. The book has to come out by the end of November. My manuscript must be finished by June 1. So I’ve got to scribble away faster than ever, seeing as the spirits I call forth always bring new spirits along with them.

  Thus the Dutch translation was never completed. But if van Oorschot intended to bring out a German edition, he would have to locate a publishing partner, as he lacked the necessary distributing connections in German-speaking Europe. Thelen understood this, too. On February 1, 1952, he told his brother Ludwig that he could well imagine having his Island come out simultaneously in a German edition:

  Unfortunately he [Oorschot] wants to produce an expensive book, a half-bible-paper edition involving Europe’s best typographic artist [Helmut Salden] (incidentally, a close friend of mine), the price, I would say, 12 - 15 marks. I would prefer ro-ro-ro [German publisher of inexpensive novels], and maybe Oorschot can be persuaded. He has never printed books in German. I am his first original German-language author.

  Meanwhile Thelen keeps sending chapter after chapter to his brother Ludwig, whose literary judgment he trusts. Ludwig makes corrections and adds commentary, eliciting from Thelen an extremely interesting response:

  I have the overall impression from your marginal notes that I haven’t succeeded in giving you as a reader the impression that the “applied recollections of Vigoleis” is a parody of popular memorial literature. Of course I don’t know whether you are familiar with this type of literature. I often plunge ahead and write some exceedingly banal idea, and when I re-read it, I get the impression that what I’ve done is lay on huge gobs of kitsch.

  Thus Thelen assigns his work to a definite literary category, linking it with Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, which was published in 1954. Mann also characterized his book as a parody of popular memoirs.

  Work on the manuscript continues unabated at the beginning of 1952. In March he tells Ludwig that he has completed the third of five books, and a month later he announces that he has reached seven hundred pages. But the end is far from being in sight. In May, Thelen predicts a finished work of a thousand pages, and hopes to reach completion by the end of the year. Even though this goal is illusory, in October he takes an important step toward finding a German licensee for his work. On October 18, 1952, he writes to Peter Diederichs, with whom he was corresponding concerning a German edition of Pascoaes’ book on Napoleon:

  I would like to speak with you also about the German license for a book of my own. The rights are now owned by the local Dutch publisher G. A. van Oorschot, who intends to publish the book next year in the original German (The Island of Second Sight. From the Applied Recollections of Vigoleis). It deals with my years in Spain.

  At first Diederichs is skeptical concerning the stipulations of a license, but he agrees to examine the manuscript and, if necessary, to offer advice with regard to distribution. In the meantime, the Dutch publisher is urging Thelen to bring his ever-lengthening work to a close. When Thelen finishes it in February, 1953, it is 1,255 pages long. Diederichs has yet to read a single page, and Thelen cites the work’s size as a reason to delay sending it. He believes that a personal meeting would be the proper way to negotiate, and such a meeting actually takes place at the end of February in Amsterdam. Thelen, Diederichs, and van Oorschot have a three-way discussion. They give attention to the work itself, and in particular to the details of a publishing license. They apparently had partial success, for on March 3rd, Thelen finally
sends the first 126 pages to Diederichs, who now begins reading, as does his wife Ursula, who is pleased with the text. A preliminary decision to go ahead with the printing must have been made in Düsseldorf between March 3 and April 13, for on the 13th, Thelen writes to Ludwig:

  Now it surely looks as if my book will get started together with him [Diederichs]. At least my original publisher van Oorschot wants to see it in German bookstores by November 1st… I’m going to cut a few hundred pages, paste over a few flecks of midnight oil, and slip in a few sheets of blotting paper. Geert v. O. and I had much fun discussing all this.

  When Diederichs finishes reading the manuscript at the end of June, 1953, in his own interest he urges the timely setting-up of a licensing contract. Thelen is of the opinion that in the meantime Diederichs has come to regard the book as economically successful. On August 8, 1953, Thelen reports to his friend and literary colleague Kurt Lehmann:

  Diederichs is on board. We drank a toast to our adventure at the Black Hog Inn in Düsseldorf.

  With this gesture, the cooperation of the Dutch and German publishers was a fait accompli. The contract itself was very likely unprecedented, since van Oorschot would be producing in his own country a work in a foreign language. The Island of Second Sight appeared in November, 1953 in an original German-language edition in Amsterdam’s van Oorschot Publishers, and simultaneously as a licensed edition in Düsseldorf/Cologne with Diederichs as the publisher. The scene had been set for a successful marketing campaign. Van Oorschot would distribute the thousand-page book in the Netherlands, and Diederichs in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

  They might have accepted raindrops,

  but there came a downpour.

  The literary climate in Germany during the first half of the 1950s was determined largely by a literary association called Group 47. Beginning in 1947, the group, which was led by Hans Werner Richter, had convened once or twice a year at various locations to debate literature. At these sessions, young writers read aloud from their works in progress, and following the readings, the attending writers and critics would begin debating the quality of the texts they had heard. The writers who passed muster would enjoy considerable career privileges on the German literary scene, especially among publishers and the media. If today we look at the list of writers who read at Group 47 sessions, we find the names of the most significant post-war German authors, including Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, Ingeborg Bachmann, Gabriele Wohmann, Peter Härtling, Peter Handke, and Martin Walser, to name just a few.