Notwithstanding the disclaimer, the joy of reading Sebald is the pleasure of stepping into the quirky treasure-house of his mind. “I don’t consider myself a writer,” he said. “It’s like someone who builds a model of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks. It’s a devotional work. Obsessive.” His books are like some eighteenth-century Wunderkammer, filled with marvelous specimens, organized eccentrically. Even without the inclusion of the blurry black-and-white photographs that became a trademark, they would feel like journals or notebooks. Sebald himself, when I asked why every character in his novels sounded like the narrator, said, “It’s all relayed through this narrative figure. It’s as he remembers, so it’s in his cast.” He credited the monologues of Thomas Bernhard, in which the layers of attribution can run four deep, as an influence. Like an old-fashioned newspaper reporter in the era before blind quotes, Sebald believed in naming sources. “Otherwise, there’s either the ‘she said with a disconsolate expression on her face’ or ‘as thoughts of regret passed through her mind,’” he complained. “How does he know? I find it hard to suspend my disbelief.” He was a literary magistrate who admitted nothing but hearsay as evidence. Or, to put it more precisely, he thought that a statement can no longer be evaluated once it is prised from the mind which gives it utterance.
In person, Sebald was funnier than his lugubrious narrators. He was celebrated among those lucky enough to hear him as a witty raconteur. Of course, one knows not to confuse a narrator and his author; but as I was reminded when speaking with Sebald, that admonition is merely one corollary of the impossibility of knowing with assurance another person’s mind. “Say you write fairly gloomy things,” he told me. “They think they should sue you under the Trade Description Act if you tell a joke. Who’s to say? What you reveal in a dark text may be closer to the real truth than the person who tells a joke at a party.” Some of his own melancholia came to him as a personal legacy: both his father and grandfather spent the last years of their lives morbidly depressed. His father, who in Sebald’s telling resembled a caricature of the pedantic, subservient, frugal German, didn’t like to read books. “The only book I ever saw him read was one my younger sister gave him for Christmas, just at the beginning of the ecological movement, with a name like The End of the Planet,” Sebald said. “And my father was bowled over by it. I saw him underlining every sentence of it — with a ruler, naturally — saying, ‘Ja, ja.’”
Sebald’s talk often turned to death, which he regarded with the same dry, wry eye that he cast on life. When I asked him casually why he had changed publishers, expecting the usual tale of finances and contracts and agents, he instead explained that it had all begun with the mysterious suicide of his German publisher, who hopped the S-Bahn to the mountains outside Frankfurt, drank half a bottle of liquor, took off his jacket, and lay down to die in the snow. “When hypothermia sets in, it’s apparently quite agreeable,” Sebald said. “Like drowning,” I said. To which Sebald replied, with a nod, “Drowning also is quite agreeable.”
He dated his own fascination with the no longer living to the death of his maternal grandfather. At the time Max was twelve, and his gentle, soft-spoken grandfather had been his hiking companion and confidant. “My interest in the departed, which has been fairly constant, comes from that moment of losing someone you couldn’t really afford to lose,” he said. “I broke out in a skin disease right after his death, which lasted for years.” Was that where his interest in death began? A few moments later, paging through a family photo album from 1933, he pointed to a photograph that his father took of a fellow soldier who had died in a motor accident. Lying on his back, his unseeing eyes staring upward, the dead young man is surrounded by flowers. Seeing this picture for the first time at the age of five, Max had “a hunch that this is where it all began — a great disaster that occurred, which I knew nothing about.” So perhaps this image of a corpse is where it commenced, his fascination with both photographs and death. Then he turned to another photograph, a finely detailed print of two women in mid-calf-length dresses and a man in lederhosen and loden jacket standing in a neatly tended flower garden in front of a tile-roofed Bavarian-style chalet. These are Sebald’s parents and a woman whose husband has snapped the picture. The photograph was taken in August 1943 in a park near Bamberg. The women are chic, cheerful, and prosperous looking. There are no swastika banners, no signs of wartime privation, and certainly no Jews in striped uniforms. You would not guess that less than thirty miles away is Nuremberg, seat of the Nazi Party rallies, a medieval city fated to be laid waste by Allied bombers the next year. Or that the man, Sebald’s father, is home on an army furlough. But the Nazi regime flickers in this picture as a ghost image: everything here has been state approved, including the name Winfried Georg, which would be given to the child conceived on this furlough, a boy who would rather be called Max.
According equal status to the living and the dead — after all, they jostled side by side for space in his mind — Sebald would perhaps view his own passing with equanimity. He is spared the labor of writing the next book. For the rest of us, not having that book to look forward to is a blow, a subtracted hope. I am reminded of Sebald’s account of an experiment that intrigued him. “They put a rat in a cylinder that is full of water and the rat swims around for about a minute until it sees that it can’t get out and then it dies of cardiac arrest,” he told me. A second rat is placed in a similar cylinder, except that this cylinder has a ladder, which enables the rat to climb out. “Then, if you put this rat in another cylinder and don’t offer it a ladder, it will keep swimming until it dies of exhaustion,” he explained. “You’re given something — a holiday to Tenerife or you meet a nice person — and so you carry on, even though it’s quite hopeless. That may tell you everything you need to know.” He chuckled. Disconsolately, merrily, companionably, bitterly, resignedly, darkly, theatrically, dourly, inconsolably? One is in no position to say.
Contributors
CAROLE ANGIER was educated at McGill, Oxford, and Cambridge universities. She is the author of Jean Rhys: Life and Work and The Double Bond: Primo Levi: A Biography. In 2002 she was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the founder and teacher of The Practice of Biography at Warwick University and now teaches modern biography at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is currently working on Writing Biography, Autobiography and Memoir.