Paris seems to be the current capital of Sebald land.  In addition to the December 1, 2009 event I recently wrote about, here’s the text for an event being held November 28.

Samedi 28 novembre 2009, Petit Palais Musée des Beaux arts de la Ville de Paris

Lire Sebald, aujourd’hui.

Une rencontre organisée par la Maison des écrivains et de la littérature le samedi 28 novembre 09 au Petit Palais avec les écrivains Pierre Assouline, Robert Bober, Mathias Enard, Hélène Frappat, Christian Garcin et Oliver Rohe. L’oeuvre de Sebald, disparu accidentellement en 2001, a produit un effet très singulier sur les auteurs qui le lisent et l’évoquent. Secret ou avoué, l’écho que la lecture de ses textes produit, marque indiscutablement la littérature contemporaine. Comment et pourquoi, c’est ce que nous allons tenter de discerner lors de cette rencontre où les auteurs présents évoqueront leur Sebald.

La rencontre sera précédée de la projection du film, W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) et son oeuvre, des éditions Actes Sud.

Entrée libre et gratuite, dans la limite des places disponibles.

Auditorium du Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Avenue Winston Churchill 75008 métro Ch-Elysées Clémenceau.

Sebald scholar, Ruth Vogel-Klein of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, has sent me information on an extraordinary evening that she is organizing devoted to W.G. Sebald. It sounds like an event no one should miss!

The evening will begin with the showing of a nearly unknown documentary film (50 min.) realized by Austrian Television in 1990 (in German, no subtitles).  It shows Sebald’s presentation in Klagenfurt to the jury of the Ingeborg-Bachmann Prize.  Sebald was one of numerous presenters hoping to win the prize, which was created to recognize distinguished young writers.  After his lecture, Sebald comments briefly on his story Paul Bereyter from The Emigrants, and then the film shows the discussion of the jury. In despite of some very positive judgments on Sebald’s prose by some members of the jury, other voices won and Sebald was not selected.

The film will be followed by a lecture (in German) by Sebald scholar Sven Meyer of Hamburg, editor of Campo Santo and Über das Land und das Wasser. Ausgewählte Gedichte 1964-2001.

Organization and presentation: Ruth Vogel-Klein, Sebald scholar, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
December 1, 2009
20h/8: 00 p.m.
Maison Heinrich Heine
27c, bd Jourdan
75014 Paris
(RER Cité Universitaire)
Entrance free.
Click here for a map.

Maison Heinrich Heine

Not long ago I wrote about Andre Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja, which includes embedded photographs.  In 1937, Breton wrote another photographically-illustrated novel called L’Amour Fou, or Mad Love.  Oddly, it took half a century for an English translation to appear from the University of Nebraska Press (by Mary Ann Caws).  Mad Love begins as a meandering essay about love, lovers, beauty, crystals, symbols, and much more.  Breton’s agenda in these early pages is to redefine these terms within the context of Surrealism.  The greatest kind of beauty “would not come to us along ordinary logical paths,” but will come about “convulsively.”  He points to the pleasures of automatic writing: “what is delightful here is the dissimilarity itself which exists between the object wished for and the object found.”

“Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.”   And lest anyone try too hard to understand this kind of love or beauty, he warns that “interpretive delirium begins only when man, ill-prepared, is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols.”

About a third of the way through the book, Breton explains what he is doing:

I had just some days earlier written the beginning text of this present book, a text which takes full account of the mental and emotional dispositions at that time: a need to reconcile the idea of unique love with its more or less sure denial in the present social framework, the need to prove that a solution, more than sufficient, indeed in excess of the vital problems, can always be expected when one deserts ordinary logical attitudes.

But at this moment, a woman appears who makes him desert “ordinary logical attitudes.”  She approaches him, probably in a cafe where he is writing.  It is a moment that a smitten Breton notes with unexpected precision.  “And I can certainly say that here, on the twenty-ninth of May 1934, this woman was scandalously beautiful.”

This young woman who just entered appeared to be swathed in mist – clothed in fire?  Everything seemed colorless and frozen next to this complexion imagined in perfect concord between rust and green…This color, taking on a deeper hue from her face to her hands, played on a fascinating tonal relation between the extraordinary pale sun of her hair like a bouquet of honeysuckle…

A few pages later, however, the unnamed woman disappears from the book for a long spell and Breton’s convoluted unfolding of Surrealism begins anew.  Mad Love concludes with an utterly remarkable letter addressed “Dear Hazel of Squirrelnut,” to be read in 1952 on the girl’s 16th birthday.  “Hazel” is the eight-month old daughter that resulted from this liaison.  On one level, Breton’s letter is a typical mix of fatherly advice, hyperbole about love and pain, and a wistfulness for a future he feels he’ll never witness.  But it is also a deeply moving document of Breton’s struggle.

I was thinking of all this, feverishly, in September 1936, alone with you in my famous unliveable house of rock salt.  I was thinking about it between reading newspapers telling, more or less hypocritically, the episodes of the Civil War in Spain, the newspapers behind which you thought I was disappearing just to play peek-a-boo with you.  And it was so true, because in such moments, the unconscious and the conscious, in you and in me, existed in complete duality near each other, keeping each other in total ignorance and yet communicating at will by a single all-powerful thread which was the exchanged glance between us.  To be sure, my life then hung only by the slightest thread.  Great was the temptation to go offer it to those who, without any possible error and any distinction of tendencies, wanted at any price to finish with the old “order” founded on the cult of that abject trinity: family, country, and religion.  And still you held me by that thread which is happiness, such as it pierces the web of unhappiness itself.  I loved in you all the little children of the Spanish militia, like those I had seen running naked in the outer district of Santa Cruz, on Tenerife.  May the sacrifice of so many human lives make of them one day happy beings!  And yet I did not feel in myself the courage to expose you with me to help that happen.

This section of the letter is followed by a cropped version showing the right half  of the now famous photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Children in Seville, Spain, 1933, one of twenty photographs in Mad Love by artists such as Man Ray, Dora Maar, and Brassaï.

The unnamed woman in Mad Love is a fictionalized version of Breton’s second wife Jacqueline Lamba (1910-1993).  They had a daughter named Aube (Dawn).  Breton and Lamba divorced in 1943, and she later married the American artist David Hare.

I’m still standing at the door of life, knocking and knocking, though admittedly none too forcefully, and breathlessly listening to see whether someone will decide to open the bolt and let me in.  A bolt like this is rather heavy, and people don’t like to come to the door if they have the feeling it’s just a beggar standing outside knocking.  I’m good at nothing but listening and waiting, though in these capacities I’ve achieved perfection…

I’ve been reading Robert Walser’s The Tanners for more than a month.  It’s a novel best consumed in small doses, full of wonderful writing and a touch of madness.  In a way, it strikes me as the novel that I imagine to be most like Walser himself: contradictory, plotless, modest, and occasionally magical.  It deals with dichotomies: freedom and dependence, city and country, money and the lack of money.

The Tanners is the story of the Tanner siblings: Klaus, Hedwig, Emil, Kaspar, and Simon, who is the main character.  Simon is a man of little ambition, drifting through life, jobs, borrowed places of residences, friendships. lovers.  His real talent is the gift of gab and its offshoot – the gift of self-delusion.  As he alternates between berating himself for his total lack of ambition and cherishing his utter independence, Simon spends an inordinate amount of time convincing himself – at least momentarily – of the goodness of his intentions, whatever they may be at the moment.   People either flee him in disgust or adopt him.

It’s curious that The Tanners, written in 1907, was never translated into English before this year, for the book would have been a Bible to the hippies and the Beats of my generation.  “Misfortune is educational,” Simon declaims, echoing a sentiment many of us shared as we muddled through the awful 60s.  Simon’s philosophy of life was one I could have called my own forty years ago: “I currently enjoy the respect of only a single person, namely myself.  But this is the one whose respect is worth the world to me; I am free and can always, when necessity commands, sell my freedom for a certain length of time so as to be free again after.”  What Simon rarely sees is the effect his dependence has on others; and, of course, no one can ever become dependent on Simon.

As I noted earlier, this publication of The Tanners contains the first English translation of W.G. Sebald’s essay Le Promeneur Solitaire, one of his most revealing pieces of writing on literature.

I’m grateful to a Vertigo reader for letting me know that W.G. Sebald’s book Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) is available as a German-language audio book on 7 CDs, published by Winter & Winter.  The reader is Paul Herwig.  It can be ordered directly from their website or from Amazon.de.  It was apparently released in late 2007.

Previously, the Max Ferber section of Die Ausgewanderten was available on  a pair of CDs issued by Eichborn Verlag in 2000, with Sebald himself reading.

“Walser has been my constant companion.”

Some artists obfuscate when it comes to talking about those who influenced them, while others readily identify their own artistic forerunners for us.  When W.G. Sebald reflected back on Robert Walser’s writings in an essay first published in 1998, he also traced a deliberate path connecting his own writing with Walser’s.  The essay, Le Promeneur Solitaire, which recently appeared in English in the guise of an Introduction to the new translation of Walser’s novel The Tanners (New Directions, 2009), is every bit as revelatory about Sebald as it is about Walser.

Originally published in his book of essays Logis in Einem Landhaus,  Le Promeneur Solitaire begins with photographs of Walser – specifically seven portraits that span Walser’s lifetime, plus a series of snapshots of Walser posing during his infamous hikes.  Every time he looks at those photographs, Sebald writes, “I think I see my grandfather before me,”  and he reproduces two unidentified snapshots that seemingly show himself as a young boy hiking with his grandfather (the two photographs at the top of the right hand page below).  After enumerating several similarities between the lives of Walser and his grandfather, Sebald asks:

What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps, coincidences?  Are they rebuses of memory, delusions of the self and the senses, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which is beyond our comprehension?

There is scarcely a better description of the pattern behind Sebald’s own prose than this.

Sebald identifies so closely with Walser that he “has the persistent feeling of being beckoned to from the other side.”  So, when he writes about Walser, it can be instructive on occasion to simply substitute Sebald’s name for Walser’s.

[Sebald] hoped, through writing, to be able to escape the shadows which lay over his life from the beginning…transforming them on the page from something very dense to something almost weightless.  His ideal was to overcome gravity.

[Sebald was the] clairvoyant of the small.

Sebald pays much attention to Walser’s fragile state of mind, his remoteness from other people and from the momentous events of his own time, his utter lack of possessions, his lonely hikes, his eventual institutionalization.  “He was the most unattached of all solitary poets.”   He sees the handful of portraits of Walser as “stations in a life which hint at the silent catastrophe which has taken place between each.”  Sebald turns all of this into something resembling a state of grace.  “On the subject of the collective catastrophes of his day he remained resolutely silent.  However, he was anything but politically naive.”  For Sebald, Walser’s “purity” becomes the source for what he sees as Walser’s “aesthetic and moral assurance.”

Le Promeneur Solitaire is surely one of Sebald’s most personal essays about literature and it is wonderful to have it translated into English at last.

David Patrick Stearns of The Philadelphia Inquirer reviews a world premiere composition by Michael Hersch entitled Last Autumn, a work for horn and cello and “built around poetic fragments of the late W.G. Sebald”, according to a publicist for the event.  Check out Hersch’s website for more information about the composer, including several video clips of the composer at the piano performing some of his pieces.

Somewhat buried in the notices on the copyright page of the recently published novel The Tanners by Robert Walser is the first notice I have seen that an English translation of W.G. Sebald’s Logis in einem Landhaus is in the works.  The Tanners opens with Sebald’s essay on Walser called Le Promeneur Solitaire (more in this in a forthcoming post), and the related copyright notice indicates that this essay from Logis in einem Landhaus has been translated by Jo Catling “from the forthcoming work A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald to be published by Random House.”  There is currently no mention of the book on the Random House website.

As I have written earlier, Logis in einem Landhaus (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998) includes essays on Robert Walser, Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, and Jan Peter Tripp. Undoubtedly influenced by his earlier forays into fiction – Die Ausgewanderten (1992) and Die Ringe des Saturn (1995) – Sebald inserts images of all types into the essays in Logis in Einem Landhaus. In fact, each of the six essays receives a large foldout image in full color.  Will Random House spring for the expense to do the same?  Until Catling’s translation of Le Promeneur Solitaire, the only essay from Logis in Einem Landhaus to have appeared in English is the one on artist Jan Peter Tripp, which is included in the British and American editions of Unrecounted, the book on which Sebald and Tripp collaborated.

Anselm Kiefer, Buch (The Secret Life of Plants) mixed media on lead

Tim Hill has written a nice article in the New Statesman that references similarities between W.G. Sebald and the painter Anselm Kiefer.  Recommended reading.

In Tokyo.  No posting for another week.