Just who is this “Thelen,” the man who tells us so many stories, and whose life could provide material for several Hollywood films? Who is this impoverished writer, who accomplished so much but who has remained virtually unknown? Whose name is no longer mentioned in the popular media, but gets passed around as a secret tip for connoisseurs? It is not my intention to explain in every detail the history of this author’s magnificent achievement and his wrenching lack of success, but I wish at least to point out the most important phases of his life.
Born on September 28, 1903, Thelen grew up in a comfortable but decidedly un-literary environment — more petit-bourgeois than cosmopolitan. Süchteln, his Lower Rhine hometown, could not offer him what he needed for his true development, and his three brothers treated him as an antisocial bookworm. The fact that he liked to write things down was considered by his family as something to be tolerated, but also as an activity beyond their ken. They thought him a stranger in their midst; his parents must have wondered about what would become of this boy.
What then took place is what generally happens under such circumstances. At first, the black sheep of the family moves around from job to inappropriate job, only to arrive at the conclusion that he is a complete failure. With Thelen, this meant training as an auto mechanic, followed by a course in technical drawing, attendance at a vocational school for textile workers, and, eventually, university study in the fields of German language and literature, print media, philosophy, and Dutch philology. Young Thelen pursued these studies in Münster and Cologne.
All this activity was not for naught, and his achievements were duly recognized. But this was not what he was after. He wanted to live literature, to live language. He wanted to translate and to write for himself. He had been a writer since childhood, but most of what he wrote was either destroyed by his own hand, or had received rejection notices from literary periodicals. What he needed, clearly, was some sort of fundamental reorientation, which would let him reach the goals he was aiming for. He would have to bring about this kind of change by himself.
In 1931—the year that was to become the most significant turning point in his life — he changed his name and left Germany.
Both of these events were of signal importance for him. His past life now behind him, he immersed himself in a string of new experiences. The things he now went through were, for the most part, happenstance. He left behind little Albert Thelen from Süchteln, and now declared as his second name the nickname bestowed on him by fellow students in the German Seminar at Münster University. The subject of this graduate course was the medieval verse epic Wigalois, by Wirnt von Gravenberg. The hero of this set of exploits, whose name Thelen adopted as his own, rides forth at the age of twenty to enter into a series of adventures. In the end, as compensation for his exemplary moral behavior, he leads a life of pleasure and contentment. Because the name “Alois” sounded too German to him, Thelen modified slightly his student-era nickname, from “Wigalois” to “Vigoleis.” From then on, this name became for him a new identity, one that he held on to until his very last days. “Vigoleis,” “Vigo,” and, in Spain, “Don Vigo,” was forevermore his true name. He published his written works under this name, and he turned “Vigoleis” into an alter ego, into the hero of his books.
Thelen’s move to the Spanish island of Mallorca was his first voyage to a foreign land. The cause of this sudden departure was a dramatic event: an appeal for help from his partner Beatrice’s brother, which reached the couple in the form of a telegram containing the laconic message, “Am dying. Zwingli,” As it turned out, this was a vast exaggeration: Zwingli was actually in the best of mental health, although physically he was not at all tip-top. He was held in thrall to a Spanish whore.
Thelen had met Zwingli and his brother, Albert Theophil Bruckner, in 1928, and soon after, they introduced him to their sister, Beatrice Adele. As an assistant to Albert Theophil, Vigoleis worked at the “Pressa” Exhibition, while Peter Herbert Zwingli Bruckner was studying art history at Cologne University. Vigoleis and Beatrice got to know each other during the preparations for the “Pressa” events, and they eventually married, and would remain together until the very end of their lives. Theirs became one of the greatest love affairs in literature, as well as in reality.
Beatrice came from a Swiss academic family. Her father was a theologian, and her father’s brother was a linguist. Like Thelen, she was an aspiring artist from a family for whom such pursuits were foreign — she was hoping to become a classical pianist. But Albert and Beatrice’s lifelong love affair was about more than shared backgrounds and interests. There was clearly something deeper, as when, in Cologne, Beatrice had rescued him — this melancholy, depressive man — when he attempted suicide by leaping into to the Rhine. Asked about this event in their lives, Beatrice remained regally silent.
That Beatrice saved Vigoleis’ life in 1928 may not be very important — after all, she saved his life often enough during the following sixty-one years they spent together. No, the greatest gift she gave him was what he desperately needed: orientation. Above all, she supported his intention to become a writer. She nourished a talent that others failed to notice, and she was surely the first person to discover Thelen’s extraordinary literary gifts. Without her there might never have existed a writer named Thelen.
Later, while he was writing The Island of Second Sight, Thelen read aloud to her every evening the text he had composed during the day. There were times, she said, when they laughed themselves silly. Beatrice refrained from criticizing her husband’s work. And why should she? She had decided in his favor — to support the man and the artist. “Even at the worst of times on Mallorca, under the threat of getting shot and all that, I never intended to leave Vigoleis,” she said in an interview in the early 1980s. “We belonged together, and I was absolutely in agreement with what he did, what he said, and what he wrote.”
Their journey to the Balearic island turned out to be an enormous test of strength — one that endowed their still young relationship with a permanent bond. What is still unclear, though, is whether Thelen viewed this removal as an escape from the atmosphere of his hometown in Germany — not unlike Goethe’s escape to Italy — or, rather, as an accidental but welcome opportunity to start afresh. It remains a fact that Thelen stayed on Mallorca, his “island of second sight,” for six years, so at the very least, he was consciously avoiding a quick return to his former surroundings.
But regardless of his initial intentions, we know that his sojourn — those six years — transformed Thelen’s literary life. In Mallorca, he translated (from the Dutch); he reviewed works by emigrants from Germany (for the Dutch newspaper Het Vaderland); he discovered the Portuguese poet and mystic Teixeira de Pascoaes as a kindred intellectual soul; and, without realizing it, he absorbed material for his magnum opus. What he and Beatrice experienced between 1931 and 1936 would later find its way into The Island of Second Sight. Their Mallorcan escapades and misadventures provided the stimulus for one of the grandest and richest works in the history of world literature.
Back then, Thelen had no inkling of any of this, and he had no plans to exploit his experiences. He never kept a diary, and it was only later that he wrote down from memory what he had lived through. The only direct record of his experiences is contained in his letters from that earlier period, only a few of which have survived. Twenty years had to pass before Thelen used real-life events to give shape to the work that would establish his fame forever.