Despite contracting syphilis in the city’s brothels, Beyle cultivates “a passion of a more abstract nature” for the mistress of a fellow soldier. She ignores him, but eleven years later, deploying an “insane loquacity,” he convinces her to yield on the condition that he will then leave Milan at once. Exhilarated by his conquest, Beyle is overcome by melancholy. He sees Il matrimonio segreto again and is entirely unimpressed by a most beautiful prima donna. Visiting the battlefield at Marengo, the discrepancy between his frequent imaginings of the heroic battle and the actual presence of the bleached bones of thousands of corpses produces a frightening vertigo, after which the shabby monument to the fallen can only make a mean impression. Again he embarks on a romantic passion, this time for the wife of a Polish officer. His mad indiscretion leads her to reject him, but he retains a plaster cast of her hand (we see a photograph) that was to mean “as much to him as Métilde herself could ever have done.”
Sebald now concentrates on Beyle’s account of his romantic attachment to one Madame Gherardi, a “mysterious, not to say unearthly figure,” who may in fact have been only (only!) a figment of his imagination. Usually skeptical of his romantic vision of love, one day this “phantom” lady does at last speak “of a divine happiness beyond comparison with anything else in life.” Overcome by “dread” Beyle backs off. The long last paragraph of the piece begins: “Beyle wrote his great novels between 1829 and 1842, plagued constantly by the symptoms of syphilis.”
The trajectory is clear enough. The effort of memory and of writing begins, it seems, where the intensities of romance and military glory end. It is the “task” of the disillusioned, at once a consolation and a penance. In 1829 Beyle turned forty-seven. Sebald turned forty-seven in 1990, the year in which Vertigo, his first “novel,” was published. Coincidences are important in this writer’s work. Why?
The Beyle piece is followed by an account of two journeys Sebald himself made in 1980 and 1987 to Venice, Verona, and Lake Garda (all places visited by Stendhal). The third piece describes a similar journey apparently made by Kafka in the fall of 1913, exactly a hundred years after the French writer reports having visited the lake with the mysterious Madame Gherardi. As Stendhal was referred to only by his baptismal name and not the name he invented, so Kafka, in what is the most fantastical and “poetic” piece in the book, is referred to only as K., the name used for the protagonists of The Trial and The Castle. Or not quite. In fact, Sebald refers to him as “Dr. K., Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers’ Insurance Company,” thus bringing together Kafka’s “professional” existence as an insurance broker and his fictitious creation, begging the question of the “identity” of the man who lies between the two.
Beginning in Verona, the last piece, “Il ritorno in patria,” shows the author interrupting “my various tasks” to undertake a journey that will take him back to the village of his childhood in Alpine Bavaria, where most of the piece is set, and finally on to England, where Sebald has his “professional” existence as a university lecturer. In all three of these pieces the romantic and military adventures of the young Henri Beyle are very much behind our now decidedly melancholic characters, and yet they are ever present too. As if between Scylla and Charybdis, when Dr. K. sits down to eat at the sanitarium on Lake Garda, it is to find an aging general on one side and an attractive young lady on the other.
Similarly, on returning to the building where he grew up, Sebald remembers his boyhood longing for the company of the pretty waitress in the bar on the ground floor and the fact that he was forbidden to visit the top floor because of the mysterious presence of a “grey chasseur,” presumably a ghost, in the attic. Satisfying his curiosity forty years later, the narrator climbs to the attic to discover a tailor’s dummy dressed in the military uniform of the Austrian chasseurs. It is hard to steer a course across the wild waters generated by these two somehow complicitous follies. Was it not after all a combination of distressed damsels and military grandeur that overwhelmed Don Quixote’s sanity? Vertigo offers a number of images of ships heading for shipwrecks.
But the question of coincidences keeps turning up. In the second piece, entitled “All’estero” (“Abroad”), we are introduced to a character who could not be further from Sebald’s usually melancholic type, Giovanni Casanova. So far we have heard how the writer, in deep depression, travels from England to Vienna, falls into a state of mental paralysis, and is on the brink of becoming down-and-out when in desperation he sets out for Venice, a city so labyrinthine that “you cannot tell what you will see next or indeed who will see you the very next moment.” One of the things he sees of course in Venice is the Doge’s Palace, which causes him to think of Casanova.
With admirable reticence, Sebald has given us no reason for the cause of his depression. But if only because we have just read the Beyle piece, and there are various tiny hints scattered here and there, we suspect that romance is at least part of the problem, or, as Dr. K. will think of it in the following piece: the impossibility of leading “the only possible life, to live together with a woman, each one free and independent.” Just to see the name Casanova, then, to think of that great seducer and endlessly resourceful schemer, produces a fierce contrast. Yet even Casanova experienced a period of depression and mental paralysis. When? When, like some hero of Kafka’s, he was imprisoned without explanation in the Doge’s Palace. And how did he escape? With the help of a coincidence.
In order to decide on what day he would attempt to break out of his cell, Casanova used a complicated random system to consult Orlando Furioso, thus, incredibly, happening on the words: “Between the end of October and the beginning of November.” The escape was successful. Casanova fled to France, where he later invented for himself the identity Chevalier de Seingalt. But just as remarkable as this propitious consultation of Orlando Furioso is the fact that October 31 turns out to be the very day upon which our author finds himself in Venice. Sebald is amazed, alarmed, fascinated.
Again and again it is coincidence, or uncanny repetition, those most evident outcroppings of the underlying mysterious-ness of existence, that jerks the melancholic out of his paralysis. It is as if, disillusioned to the point where certain follies have become unthinkable (and contemporary Europe, as Sebald showed in The Emigrants, has good reason for being thus disillusioned), we can only be set in motion by a fascination with life’s mysteries, which are simply forced upon us in all sorts of ways. Between, or perhaps after, passion and glory lie the uncertain resource of curiosity, the recurring emotions of amazement and alarm. Any act of remembering will offer a feast.
Toward that midnight between October and November, Sebald rows out on the Venetian lagoon with an acquaintance who points out the city incinerator, the fires of which burn in perpetuity, and explains that he has been thinking a great deal about death and resurrection. “He had no answers,” Sebald writes, “but believed the questions were quite sufficient to him.” It is an echo, conscious or otherwise, of Rilke’s advice to his “young poet” to “have patience with everything unresolved and try to love the questions themselves.” Rilke was another German writer who had considerable problems both with military academies and with love.