Summer in Baden-Baden, Part II

The literature of the second half of the twentieth century is a much traversed field and it seems unlikely that there are still masterpieces in major, intently patrolled languages waiting to be discovered.  Yet some ten years ago I came across just such a book, Summer in Baden-Baden, which I would include among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century’s worth of fiction and para-fiction. Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag’s Introduction to Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden tells us that Tsypkin (1926-1982) wrote this remarkable novel while he worked as a scientist at Moscow’s Institute for Poliomyelitis and Viral Encephalitis.  It appears that he started writing in earnest in 1977 after being demoted as punishment for the fact that his son and daughter-in-law had just emigrated to the United States.  Tsypkin conducted archival research on Dostoyevsky and, Sontag tells us, made many photographs of “places associated with Dostoyevsky’s life as well as ones frequented by Dostoyevsky’s characters during the seasons and at the times of day mentioned in the novels.”  Faced with the realization that he would never receive his own exit visa Tsypkin decided in 1981 to ask a friend to smuggle the completed manuscript and some related photographs out of the Soviet Union.  The following year Tsypkin’s novel, illustrated with his photographs, began to appear in the weekly New York-based Russian-émigré periodical Novaya Gazeta.  Tsypkin never lived to see it.

In 1987, Summer in Baden-Baden was finally translated into English and published – without any photographs – in London by Quartet Books, and presumably this is the book that Sontag read.  Its romantic cover design suggests a marketing scheme more appropriate to a title like E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View than a frenetic book about Dostoyevsky’s summer in the gambling halls of Germany.

In 2001, New Directions took a chance on an American edition with a cover that more appropriately represents the intensity of the fiction within.  (It’s is a great example of the power of typography.)  This edition also included the newly-commissioned Introduction by Susan Sontag, but only one of Tsypkin’s photographs, which was placed opposite the title page.

The New Directions volume is the edition that I bought and read when it first came out, and then subsequently shelved for another eight years – until a reader of Vertigo asked me if I’d ever seen the photographically-illustrated version of Summer in Baden-Baden issued in London by Penguin in 2006.  Needless to say, I ordered a used copy immediately.

The Publisher’s Note in the Penguin edition explains “This edition is the first to be published in book form with the author’s original photographs.”  Full captions for each photograph are located at the end of the book.  Unfortunately, the reader is left not knowing if the author had a hand in placing the photographs within the text.  I tend to doubt it.  Tsypkin never traveled outside the Soviet Union and his photographs were restricted to Leningrad (Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg).   A main point of Tsypkin’s book is the suggestion that an authentic bridge can be erected between past and present, that we can temporarily comprehend some other time and become someone else through an act of the imagination.  Tsypkin, like W.G. Sebald, believed that the power of the imagination is strengthened – if not dependent upon – visiting the actual locations where events happened.   “In front of me was the Kuznechny Market, and to the right and behind me the Vladimir Church – I had reached exactly the right spot, and my heart was pounding with joy and some other vaguely sensed feeling…”  And he talks about making sure that the locations for his photographs were accurate: “I was anxious not to mistake the street or the number of the building supposed to appear before my camera lens.”  This does not sound like the kind of author who would shift images from Russia to Germany just for the sake of having photographs more or less equally spaced throughout his book.

Nevertheless, in the Penguin edition a number of photographs of St. Petersburg can be found in the areas of text relating to Baden-Baden.  While these images vaguely add to the atmosphere of Baden-Baden, this ambient use strikes me as inimical to Tsypkin’s methodical research methods.  For example, in the first example shown below, Tsypkin’s photograph of the the dark stairway leading to the location that Dostoyevsky used for Raskolnikov’s apartment is inexplicably dropped in the midst of a gambling scene in Baden-Baden.  On the other hand, the second example – a St. Petersburg street image appearing in the midst of a discussion of the streets of that city – is at least contextualized a little more closely.

“The steps leading up to the room where Raskolnikov lived.  These steps no longer exist as the building has been renovated.”

“Gorokhavaya Street, which frequently features in Dostoyevsky’s novels.”

Even though the Penguin edition has the advantage of being the first English edition to include some of Tsypkin’s photographs, Penguin didn’t seem to have really understood what kind of book it was dealing with.  Their disastrous cover design suggests a fin-de-siècle farce or light romance.  Innocent purchasers were probably more than a little surprised at the powerful – and heavy – work of art behind this loopy image .  Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Summer in Baden-Baden has completely disappeared from Penguin’s website as if it had never been published.  What we need now is a new edition of Summer in Baden-Baden that answers questions about Tsypkin’s photographs and their placement.

My post Summer in Baden-Baden, Part I is here.

Summer in Baden-Baden, Part I

Why was I so strangely attracted and enticed by the life of this man who despised me and my kind…

Written between 1977 and 1980, Leonid Tsypkin’s remarkable novel Summer in Baden-Baden (NY: New Directions, 2001) is a strange and exhilarating reading experience.  Slightly reminiscent of W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, Summer in Baden-Baden is largely about Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  Tsypkin’s unnamed narrator is traveling by train to Leningrad probably during the 1970s, with the intention of walking streets that Dostoevsky walked, visiting the buildings mentioned in some of his books, and spending time in the museum dedicated to the writer.  On the train he reads a book borrowed from his aunt’s library (and which he has no intention of ever returning): the diary of Anna Grigor’yevna Dostoyevskaya, Dostoyevsky’s wife.  As the reader quickly learns, the boundary between the narrator and Dostoyevsky is porous; Tsypkin simply moves without warning between the two men and the century that separates them.  In fact, the narrator’s identification with Dostoyevsky is so complete at times that he seems to struggle to awaken from a deep dream in order to return to his own time and place.

Tsypkin leads us in and out of the fields of consciousness of the three main characters – the narrator, Fyodor and Anna – in long intoxicating, cinematic sentences that drive the reader breathlessly across time and space  using long tracking shots followed by sudden shifts in focus.  The narrator’s train trip and his own memories of post-Second World War Soviet Union frame the story of the recently-wed Dostoyevsky’s own train trip to Germany and their short intense stay in Baden-Baden in 1867, primarily so that Dostoyevsky can indulge in his compulsion for gambling.

The train was speeding along a narrow track twisting capriciously between round-topped hills covered by dark-green forests of beech, elm and other native trees of the plains and the uplands of central Germany – Schwarzwald, Thuringer Wald and all the other mountain areas – a toy train made up of tiny little carriages and a miniature steam-engine with red spokes on its wheels and a tall chimney, the sort you see nowadays on special stamps depicting the history of locomotives – and in one of the carriages of this doll’s train, in a second class compartment, was seated a man no longer young, in a dark suit obviously made in Berlin, with plain Russian face, receding temples and greying brown beard – and next to him was a youngish woman, not unlike a student but with heavy, glowering gaze, wearing a hat and travelling shawl and with a cardboard box on her lap – and sometimes she would begin to doze off leaning her head against her husband’s shoulder while he, squinting his eyes, would carefully and suspiciously inspect her face, as if trying to read something.

Dostoyevsky is paranoid, superstitious, jealous, impulsive, argumentative, constantly afraid of being cheated,  prejudiced against foreigners and Jews, and haunted by recollections of his own harsh imprisonment and exile some fifteen years earlier.  Each gambling episode takes him through a cycle of optimism, ecstasy, despair and abasement, as he pawns nearly everything they own in order to continue losing.

Is this not the explanation of the so-called crisis that Dostoyevsky went through during his penal servitude? – could his morbid pride ever have become reconciled  with the humiliations to which he was subjected there? – no: he only had one way out: to consider these humiliations as his just desserts.

Toward the end of the book, as Dostoyevsky and his wife make their way by a series of trains back to St. Petersburg, the narrator’s train arrives in the same town, renamed Leningrad.  He makes his way through the snow-filled streets to the apartment where will stay, a tiny flat occupied by an assortment of women of several generations, one of whom is his elderly friend.  In passages of Vermeer-like delicacy, Tsypkin describes the apartment and the women, painting a haunting miniature of life at the tail end of the Soviet era.

…then, getting out my towel and walking on tip-toe so as not to wake up the neighbors, I would go into the bathroom – a large room with doors on either side, crammed with old furniture and wash-tubs, with the bath itself taking up only part of the space and partitioned off by screens hung with washing to dry, as were the numerous pieces of rope strung out across the room, so that it resembled the backstage of a theatre more than anything else.

In an episode reminiscent of several from Sebald’s books, the narrator visits Dostoyevky’s apartment, which has been made into a museum filled with memorabilia of the writer’s life – the old photographs, furniture, clippings, books, the writer’s hat and umbrella, and, of course, the same views out the window that Dostoyevsky stared at as he wrote.

Reading Dostoyevsky on the apartment’s small couch, the narrator muses at length on what is probably the real core of the book: Dostoyevsky’s vehement anti-Semitism,

hoping to discover…at least some ray of hope, at least some movement in the other direction, at least some effort to view the whole problem from a new angle…and it struck me as strange to the point of implausibility that a man so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others, this jealous defender of the insulted and the injured who fervently and even frenetically preached the right to exist of every earthly creature and sang a passionate hymn to each little leaf and every blade of grass – that this man should not have come up with even a simple word in the defense or justification of a people persecuted over several thousands of years…

Part II of my post on Summer in Baden-Baden is here.

Nadja

I finally reread Andre Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja for the first time in many years and it was hard not to see intriguing parallels with the photography-embedded books of W.G. Sebald.   It was a little shocking to realize that Nadja, first published in Paris in 1928, wasn’t available in English until Richard Howard’s 1960 translation for Grove Press.  Nadja often gets referred to as a Surrealist love story, although Nadja doesn’t appear until more than sixty pages into this this brief 160-page novel (in the English version, that is).  Those first sixty pages or so are a blend of theory, Surrealist gossip, Breton’s back story, dreams, and assorted excursions through Paris.  When Nadja appears, the book briefly shifts to dated diary entries, as if the impact of their meeting momentarily demands immediacy.  Ultimately, Nadja is commited to a sanatarium and the novel returns to straightforward prose when the narrator finally has the distance to analyze Nadja’s impact on his life and thinking.

After Nadja, the second most important character in Nadja is the city of Paris.  Breton’s Paris serves a similar purpose as cities like London, Manchester, and Antwerp do for Sebald, acting as a kind of stage, potent for its ability to disorient the viewer and reward him with strange new sights and insights.

There are many ways of thinking about Nadja and what she represents for Breton.  She’s a free spirit who describes herself as a “soul in Limbo.”  She’s clinically unable to exist long in the normal world and ends up in a sanitarium, where she spends the remainder of her life.  “The essential thing is that I do not suppose there can be much difference for Nadja between the inside of a sanitarium and the outside,” the narrator grimly notes. Neverthelss, Nadja unlocks endless unforeseen possibilities for the narrator, who is immediately captivated by her eyes.  “What was it they reflected – some obscure distress and at the same time some luminous pride?”

The character Nadja reminded me of Ernst Herbeck, the prolific Viennese schizophrenic poet that Sebald visits Vertigo.  The two spend a long day taking a walk, during which they seem to exchange very little with each other.

When we parted, Ernst, standing on tiptoe and bowing slightly, took his hat from his hand and with it, as he turned away, executed a sweeping motion which ended with him putting the hat back on; a performance which seemed to be, at the same time, both childishly easy and an astonishing feat of artistry.  This gesture, like the manner in which he had greeted me that morning, put me in mind of someone who had travelled with a circus for many years.

Breton and Sebald find in Nadja and Herbeck a kind a inexplicable, inarguable authenticity that no “normal” person seems to offer up.

“Happily the days of psychological literature, with all its fictitious plots, are numbered,” Breton wrote early in Nadja, prematurely predicting the demise of traditionally plotted fiction.  Nadja is not too dissimilar to Sebald’s style of prose fiction in which history, autobiography, travel, literary criticism, and other genres coexist.  Curiously, both  Sebald and Breton elevate coincidence to a higher level of meaning; although for different ends, I think.  For Breton, good Surrealist that he is, accidents and coincidences are much like automatic writing; they are events that set aside the limits of traditional logic and perception and spontaneously create new, unexpected connections.  Sebald, on the other hand, often uses coincidences to suggest a sense of hidden interconnectedness.

As far as I am aware, Nadja, with its forty-four illustrations, is just the second novel to appear with embedded photographs – the first being Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892) which included a number of scenes of the city of Bruges.  Breton doesn’t embed photographs in the same way that Sebald does.  Instead, they are treated like illustrations in a typical work of non-fiction.  Each illustration is a full-page plate, with plate numbers, captions, and, on occasion, a credit to the photographer (Man Ray, for example).  To assure that the reader makes the correct connection between the illustration and text, each plate mentions the page number on which the related quote appears.  Nevertheless, Breton’s playful selection and use of illustrations foreshadows Sebald’s own practice.  In addition to portraits and buildings that let the reader visualize his text, Breton adds some Surrealist touches by reproducing incidental things like documents and drawings.

The great book cover for Nadja, by the way, which Grove Press has stuck with for nearly fifty years now, is by designer Roy Kuhlman, who did many of Grove’s classic book covers.

Tel’s Beijing

Who can believe in Beijing?  Only those who’ve never been and those who’ve left…

Not too long ago I wrote about Jonathan Tel’s 2003 novel Freud’s Alphabet, which has embedded photographs at the head of selected chapters.  His new book of short stories The Beijing of Possibilities (Other Press, 2009) also contains embedded photographs, but this time they are more randomly placed in the manner of W.G. Sebald.  Tel’s cities (Freud’s Alphabet is really about London) are wonderful constructs of the imagination.  “While in New York he writes about Beijing, while in Beijing he writes about New York,” reads the blurb about Tel on the cover of Beijing.  His books continue a rich literary tradition going back at least to Baudelaire of presenting cities as juxtapositions of the random and the fortuitous, where it’s almost possible to believe in the impossible.

Tel’s Beijing is a vast, unknowable stage where opposites clash.  In a number of his stories, almost like a scientist working with lab rats, Tel drops honest but naive country people down in the midst of urban chaos to see how they manage.  Other stories pit sophisticated world travelers against Chinese who have never left their neighborhood, the technological present against the fading traditions of grinding hard work, people with scruples against those without.  In Tel’s world the result is not a morality play.  Instead, things are often resolved by blending, twining, or mirroring the protagonists.  People exchange lives, a maid and her employer’s daughter become one, characters disappear into their fate.

She slipped on her robe and got a screwdriver and went out into the corridor and removed the 23 from the apartment door – because those who know where they live, know, and those who are invited will be told, and those who neither know nor are invited really have no business here.

The book itself is set up like the ouroboros, the serpent which turns and swallows its own tail.  It begins with a Foreword about Beijing (“the center of the universe”) by a “Helan Xiao”, followed by Tel’s Preface, in which he mentions befriending the poet Helan Xiao.  In the book’s final story, The Most Beautiful Woman in China, Helan Xiao is a struggling writer who is given the opportunity to write the libretto for an opera called The Most Beautiful Woman in China.  In the end she is cheated out of both credit and fame and decides to write a book of short stories to be published abroad under a foreign pseudonym.  “She pretended a foreign author had made up these stories – a tall, handsome, courteous man – …[who] humbly requested the right to translate her own works into English and to publish it under his name…”  At the very end, The Beijing of Possibilities turns and swallows its own tale.

It strikes me as rather arbitrary that Tel uses one and only one photograph for each of his stories (plus a final photograph facing the Acknowledgements page).  The photographs – which I like as images – nevertheless seem incidental, contributing little to the text or to the sense of Beijing as a largely imaginary place.  If anything, the photographs seem more like source material for ideas and characters within the story.  Highly recommended.

Tel’s London

For this is a city where the outside cannot be assumed to correspond to the inside; in fact seldom does.  As a rule they are unrelated.

Jonathan Tel’s novel Freud’s Alphabet (NY: Counterpoint, 2003) is a playful and sometimes wondrous ode to the city of London.  And, yes, it’s also about Sigmund Freud.  Fleeing the Nazis, Freud comes to live at 20 Maresfield Gardens in London, encouraged by his disciple Dr. Ernest Jones.  Freud sees patients, struggles with the final stages of cancer, and awaits the inevitable onset of war.  But mostly, he observes his new city, keenly looking and listening, trying to understand its rules and patterns.  But Tel’s London defies categorization.  “In this city, people do not possess a consistent personality.”  A city of fogs and mirages, London is overlaid with its rural past, its long history, and its rich literature.  But even as London eludes the analytical Freud, it becomes a rich playground where the boundaries between truth and fantasy are pleasantly blurred by the book’s omniscient narrator.  At one point, the narrator imagines a “simulacrum of Great Britain, to be tethered permanently in the North Sea” inviting incoming German planes to bomb the faux country rather than the real one.  It’s a neat metaphor for Tel’s book, which repeatedly finds the distractions of the narrator’s disorderly mind to be profoundly more interesting than the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.

Freud, too, must confront his own doppelgänger.  He is invited to Madame Tussaud’s to see himself modelled in wax and wearing some old clothes he had donated.  Freud is disappointed.  It doesn’t look like him.  He would never wear those clothes together.  Nobody stops to remark on the coincidence of the Great Doktor assessing himself, they only want to know where to find the axe-murderer.  This, he worries, is his legacy.  Tel paints a bittersweet portrait of  a dying, befuddled Freud who nevertheless is still capable of performing miracles with his patients to the very end.

Freud’s Alphabet is fashioned from twenty-six episodes with alphabetically-ordered titles: Apple, Boy, Cat, Diamond, Elephant…Xenolith, Yacht, Zebra.  As the narrator remarks near the end of the book, “toddlers make up stories possessing remarkable coherence and narrative thrust on the basis of an illustrated alphabet book: the kind that begins with apple and ends with zebra.” However, it isn’t your ordinary children’s book in which U stands for Unbedenklichkeitserklärung!  [That seems to be a kind of "declaration of safe passage" used for packages going through customs.]

The twenty-six episodes, in turn, are separated by a half dozen interludes, which are usually more Freud-centered than the other chapters.  Each of these interludes is preceded by an archival photograph credited to the Freud Museum or the Imperial War Museum.  The photographs (like the one of Freud’s famous couch, shown above, or a statue of Freud, below) strike me as both enigmatic and vaguely humorous at the same time.

Tel uses his post-modern devices with a light, sure hand.  Nothing is neatly packaged, and often within each revelation is buried the seed of the next complication.  Freud’s Alphabet is an allusive, entertaining paradox, reminiscent of writers such as Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Walter Abish, but finding its own path forward.  I’ll be posting in the next week or two on Tel’s newest book of short stories (many with embedded photographs) called The Beijing of Possibilities.