WGS: It’s certainly true. I went to university in ’63 from this place where I had grown up, which I had really never left before. I didn’t really know Germany. At any rate, I went to Freiburg, which was pretty much the nearest place where you could study. And I had a sense of discomfort there all the time, but I didn’t quite know why. It was simply that conditions for studying weren’t very good, so I decided to go to Switzerland, where it was much easier to get into libraries and the numbers of students were smaller and so on. I really left Germany for practical reasons in the first instance. It’s in retrospect that I seem to think — and I’m not entirely sure whether it’s true— that I did have a sense of discomfort about the whole thing. The humanities were particularly compromised. The law profession as well, practically all. . But certainly these people had all got their stars, as it were, in the thirties and forties. And if you then, as I have done subsequently, looked at what their Ph.D.’s were about, your hair stood on end. It really was a very unpleasant spectacle. Nobody mentioned it, but there was a very deeply ingrained authoritarianism, and as I have, I think, somewhere an anarchist streak in me, I couldn’t really put up with that.
JC: Do you think that’s why you didn’t go back once you left?
WGS: There were a number of reasons, but that certainly was one of them. Because obviously once you had been in England for a number of years you could see a difference in attitude. Ideology didn’t matter in England. You had colleagues who were extreme trade unionists and others who were Church of England all day long, and they all worked together and tolerated each other. But in Germany after the students’ rebellion in the late sixties, early seventies, well, if you had leftish tendencies you could do a Ph.D. only in Frankfurt, Berlin, or Bremen. If you had liberal tendencies, you could do it pretty much anywhere. But this was it. You had to choose the train you wanted to be on.
JC: I want to talk about another subject that’s in your writing, which is the moral difficulty of the writing process itself. In The Rings of Saturn, the narrator says,
Janine had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grievous of ways.
It reminds me of something the narrator says about writing the account of Max Ferber in The Emigrants:
Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and not infrequently I unravelled what I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralyzing me. 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.
WGS: Well, yes, writing, as I said before. . you make something out of nothing. It is a con trick.
JC: But there seems to be quite a preoccupation with making what is written true.
WGS: That’s the paradox. You have this string of lies, and by this detour you arrive at a form of truth which is more precise, one hopes, than something which is strictly provable. That’s the challenge. Whether it always works of course is quite another matter. And it’s because of this paradoxical consolation that these scruples arise, I imagine, and that the self-paralysis, writer’s block, all these kinds of things can set in. I had rather an awful time with this book that’s going to come out [Austerlitz]. I don’t know how many months I couldn’t get. . Normally on a good day I can do three pages handwritten, just about. But this, I never even got to the bottom of the first page. I started at seven in the morning till five in the evening. And you look at it. One day you think it’s all right; you look at it the next day, it’s awful. I had to resort to writing only on every other line so as to get to the bottom of one page. [Audience laughter.] I found that a very humiliating experience, but it did the trick in the end. But that’s how it is. And it’s very, very hard, I think, as most writers know; doubts set in, to keep one’s nerve is difficult. Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau’s letters, for instance, they’re beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they’re all balanced, they’re all beautiful prose. Flaubert’s letters are already quite haphazard; they’re no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they’re very funny. But he was one of the first to realize that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it’s getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.
Flaubert said at one point something like, “L’art est un luxe. Il faut des mains calmes et blanches.” And then he went on to say something like, “On fait d’abord une concession et puis deux et puis on sent fou completèment.” [Audience laughter.] And that’s very true: you make one concession, you make another one, and in the end, nothing matters anymore.
JC: I was wondering if what the narrator in The Emigrants says in the Paul Bereyter section had some bearing when you were writing Austerlitz:
I imagined him, stretched out on the track [where he committed suicide]. . Such endeavors to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul, except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seem presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.
He was a teacher of yours.
WGS: Yes, a primary-school teacher.
JC: And Austerlitz is dealing with a similar subject as in The Emigrants: a man, Jacques Austerlitz, left Czechoslovakia in 1939 as a young boy, and then he doesn’t remember most of what had happened until he’s at a more advanced age. First of all, was this someone that you did know, as in The Emigrants?
WGS: The Austerlitz character has two models and bits from other lives also. There was a colleague of mine, a distant colleague in London — London is a hundred miles from Norwich, but I had some contacts there — and I had bumped into this man a number of times fortuitously, in Belgium of all places, in the late 1960s, in unlikely places. He was an architectural historian, somewhat older than me, about ten, twelve years older, a born, very gifted teacher. And whenever we met I just listened to him. Before I came to England I hadn’t had any teachers apart from this primary schoolteacher who I wanted to listen to. And this chap was interested in the architecture of the capitalist era — opera houses, railway stations, that sort of thing — and he could go on endlessly about the most fascinating details. Then I lost sight of him for a while, and in the 1990s we made contact again. So this is one foil of the story.
But there is another foil, which is the life story of a woman, and that story I came across, as one does sometimes, on television. You know how ephemeral these appearances are on television — you see a film or you don’t see it, and then it vanishes forever and you can’t get a copy of it despite your best efforts. But there was this story of a woman who together with her twin sister had also come to Britain on one of these Kindertransporte, as they were called, trains with very young children leaving Germany or Czechoslovakia or Austria just before the outbreak of war. And those two girls were, I think, two-and-a-half to three years old. They came out of a Jewish Munich orphanage and they were fostered by a Welsh fundamentalist childless couple who then went on to erase their identity. And both foster parents ended tragically, as one might say, the father in a lunatic asylum, the mother through an early death. And so the children never really knew who they were. This is just one strand, as it were, of the story which I then put together with that other life history.