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.

Installation view – Rings of Saturn, 2006 (Photograph courtesy Tate Photography)

Over the past three years I have written about a number of exhibitions inspired in one way or another by the work of W.G. Sebald.  Without doubt, the book that seems to have the most influence on visual artists has been The Rings of Saturn.  A reader of Vertigo has pointed out that the Tate Modern held a group exhibition from September to December 2006 entitled Rings of Saturn, which included eight artists.  (I began Vertigo in January 2007.)  Here is the exhibition blurb from the Tate’s website:

The title of this exhibition is borrowed from the German writer WG Sebald’s 1995 novel, an elegiac and fragmentary meditation upon history, its lost customs and eccentric figures. Sebald’s anonymous narrator wanders the melancholy landscape of East Anglia, discovering remnants of the past that prompt meticulously researched digressions interspersed with enigmatic photographs. Taking Sebald’s tone and method as an inspiration, the exhibition is similarly allusive and associative. The work of Steven Claydon and Thomas Zipp explores the nature of history and its lesser-known protagonists, and its critical moments of transition, energy and change.

David Noonan’s prints bring together fragments of the past with the uncanny power of a half-remembered dream, while David Wojnarowicz’s photographs evoke a ruined, dissolute city haunted by the archetypal figure of Arthur Rimbaud. Buried traditions of European folk and fairy tales resurface in the work of Nathalie Djurberg and Dorota Jurczak. Thomas Helbig takes existing objects, such as kitsch figurines, and fashions them into grotesque forms, bringing disturbing new associations to the trace of the original object, while Saul Fletcher’s photographs provide a reflection upon solitude, personal identity and death.

At the Tate website there is a bit of information about each of the artists in the exhibition, along with a few images.  It does not appear that a catalog was issued.

Sometimes it takes a map. We tend to remember W.G Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn as it is described on the back cover: “a walking tour of the eastern coast of England.”  But a map shows how oversimplified that is.

I have to credit the blog of Darius Himes for pointing out a very interesting mapping project involving The Rings of Saturn.  A recent post of his sent me to a Litmap by Barbara Bui. A Litmap is an interactive tool which uses Google Maps to link geographical references from the text of The Rings of Saturn with their locations on the globe.  Sebald, we are quickly reminded, references Europe, Asia, and North and South America, from Surabaya, Indonesia to Versailles, Kentucky.  And if you don’t recall when or why Sebald mentions Versailles, Kentucky, you simply follow the numbered reference on the map to a quote (from page 40), where you will be reminded that the gardener at Somerleyton Hall tells the narrator of two US pilots crash on the Hall’s grounds near the end of World War II – one from Versailles, Kentucky, the other from Athens, Georgia.  the owner of Somerleyton Hall buried their remains on the grounds.

Barbara Hui, it turns out, is a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, where her dissertation is called Space, Place, and Complex Global Networks: Reading/Mapping the Literature of W.G. Sebald, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Steven Hall.  There is much more to see at her website.

Just imagine where this will lead.

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.