WGS: Essentially, yes, with some small changes. . Dr. Henry Selwyn, for instance, lived in that house, not in Hingham, but in another village in Norfolk. His wife was just like that, Swiss and very shrewd. She’s still alive, I think, and so is Elaine, their most peculiar maid. Dr. Selwyn and his wife lived a smart county life for years. Terribly well spoken, he was, terribly well spoken. . he told me about Grodno, sooner than I say in the story, but very cursorily. The first time I thought, this is not a straight English gentleman, was at a Christmas party they gave. There was this huge living room and a blazing fire, and one very incongruous lady. Dr. Selwyn introduced her as his sister from Tel Aviv. And of course then I knew.
CA: What about Dr. Selwyn’s friend, the mountain guide Johannes Naegeli, and the extraordinary coincidence of your finding that article on a train, about the glacier releasing his body seventy-two years later? It’s such a perfect image of the whole book—“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.”
WGS: Dr. Selwyn told me about his time in Switzerland before the First World War, about his friendship with a Swiss mountain guide, and how much it had meant to him. Later I couldn’t recall the name he’d mentioned, or if he’d mentioned any name at all. Nor did he say that his friend had disappeared. But I did find that article on a train, just when I was starting to write the story. A mountain guide, in the same year, in the same place. . It just needed a tiny little rapprochement to make it fit.
CA: Was Ambros Adelwarth, the subject of the third story, really your great-uncle?
WGS: Yes, absolutely. That wasn’t his name, of course.
CA: What was behind Adelwarth’s despair? Was it his homosexuality?
WGS: His story began with a photograph. When I was in the United States in 1981 I went to see my aunt, and we sat and looked at her photograph albums. You know how it is with family photos — usually you’ve seen them all before. But there’s always one you haven’t. And the photograph of Uncle Adelwarth in his Arab costume was one of those. I had known about this uncle, I’d met him as a boy, but he had never made any sense to me. Now, as soon as I saw that picture, I knew the whole story. . In a Catholic family that all gets repressed. It isn’t even ignored — it’s not seen, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t fit in anywhere at all.
CA: There’s also a diary in “Ambros Adelwarth,” which is itself photographed. Did your great-uncle really keep a diary?
WGS: Yes, in several languages.
CA: I know. You can just make out one of the entries, and it’s in English.
WGS: Ah. That, however, is falsification. I wrote it. What matters is all true. The big events — the schoolteacher putting his head on the railway line, for instance — you might think those were made up for dramatic effect. But on the contrary, they are all real. The invention comes in at the level of minor detail most of the time, to provide l’effet du réel.
CA: Or to provide a linking image, like the one of Nabokov?
WGS: I don’t know that Ambros saw Nabokov in Ithaca, but it’s entirely plausible. He lived there for ten or fifteen years. Everyone in Ithaca saw him at one time or another, with his butterfly net.
CA: But what about Max Ferber’s mother meeting him in Bad Kissingen in 1910? Did you actually find that in her diary?
WGS: That’s an episode from Speak, Memory. When I came across it I’d already read the memoir on which the diary is based, and in which there’s a Sunday-afternoon excursion in the country. What you need is just a tiny little shift to make it match up. I think that’s allowed. There are always elements that stray in from elsewhere. I take this to be a good sign. If you are traveling along a road and things come in from the sides to offer themselves, then you’re going in the right direction. If nothing comes, you are barking up the wrong tree.
In the Paul Bereyter story, for example, there are echoes of Wittgenstein in his period as a schoolteacher in Austria: the whistling, for instance, or, on the one hand, sacrificing himself to these peasant children and, on the other hand, feeling abhorrence for them. My schoolteacher did remind me of Wittgenstein; he had the same moral radicalism. But these details in the story come from Wittgenstein.
CA: And Ferber?
WGS: Ferber is actually based on two people. One is my Manchester landlord, D. The story of Ferber’s escape from Munich in 1939 at the age of fifteen and of what subsequently happened to his parents is D.’s. The second model is a well-known artist.
HE SPEAKS AS QUIETLY as ever, but I suddenly feel slightly dizzy. “Which of the two, then,” I ask, “is in the photo of Ferber as a boy?” He smiles, a combination of the ironic and the open, and says, “Neither.”
“Ninety percent of the photographs are genuine,” he adds quickly, like someone throwing a life belt to a drowning man. But that leaves 10 percent which aren’t. . And what about the other “documents?” The message on Adelwarth’s visiting card, for example—“Have gone to Ithaca”? He went to Ithaca, all right; but Sebald wrote that too. And Ambros’s travel diary? Sebald wrote about half of it.
This is the answer to my question, then: The Emigrants is fiction. And the photographs and documents are part of the fiction. It’s a sophisticated undertaking, and perhaps a dangerous one, given its subject. But I agree with Sebald that novelizing the Holocaust (“a quick chapter about Auschwitz, then back to the love interest again”) is much worse. If literature can be made of this subject, it must be like this, solidly grounded in the real world. Besides, he himself has more doubts than anyone, which he expresses in Max Ferber. (“These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing.”)
So the reader does not need defending. He may feel a bit dizzy, like me, but that is a small price to pay for the elation of reading an extraordinary book. But I do have one doubt left: what about its models?
WGS: Yes, this whole business of usurping someone else’s life bothers me. And of course I’m never certain I haven’t committed errors of tact, of judgment, of style. . But — unless they’re dead — I ask them. I show them what I’ve written before I publish it; and if anyone objects, I don’t do it. In this way, for example, D. endorsed my use of his story and also of his aunt’s autobiography, which he had given me, and which I used for Max Ferber’s mother. In the case of the lady at Yverdon [who tells the narrator about the later years of Paul Bereyter], it was more complicated. It took me a long time to convince her that what I was up to was actually all right.
CA: Has anyone ever objected?
WGS: Yes, the artist who was the other model for Max Ferber did.
CA: But you still used him?
WGS: I changed his name from the German version, where it was quite close to the original, to something completely different. He doesn’t want any publicity whatsoever, and I respect that. On the other hand, he is a public figure, and I got all my information about him from published sources, mostly from a huge tome about him by an American. If one is describing a creative process, one must be able to use material of this sort.
CA: It’s the combining of the two stories that’s the problem. I can just see people recognizing the artist and then believing that this is his life story forever after.
WGS: Exactly. So one has to be very careful.
I TRY TO PRESS HIM on this. But all he says is: “I think the vast majority of factual and personal detail that I use is very viable.” At first I wonder if “viable” isn’t a fudge word, used (perhaps unconsciously) to evade. But then I realize that he means it quite precisely. He simply isn’t thinking any longer of the effect of his book on his models, no matter how hard I try to make him do so. He’s just thinking of his book.