A Place in the Country

INTRODUCTION

Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time, the life of the Prussian writer Kleist with that of a Swiss author who claims to have worked as a clerk in a brewery in Thun, the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from a window of the Herisau asylum, Walser’s long walks with my own travels, dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with misfortune, natural history and the history of our industries, that of Heimat with that of exile. On all these paths Walser has been my constant companion. I only need to look up for a moment in my daily work to see him standing somewhere a little apart, the unmistakable figure of the solitary walker just pausing to take in the surroundings.

What W. G. Sebald writes here, relating his first encounter with Robert Walser’s short text on the dramatist Heinrich von Kleist’s trip to Switzerland, “Kleist in Thun,” not only sets out in nuce his sense of affinity with Walser — indeed with all of the writers he discusses in this volume, to whom he wishes, as he claims in the Foreword, to “pay my respects … before, perhaps, it may be too late”—but also seems to encapsulate the themes and preoccupations of this collection as a whole. That these themes and preoccupations overlap with those of Sebald’s own creative works of “prose fiction” (as he terms them)—Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz—is surely no coincidence, in view of the fact that the first three of these works already enjoyed considerable success at the time he composed the main part of these essays in 1997.

A Place in the Country was first published in German in 1998 under the title Logis in einem Landhaus (the title itself a quotation from Walser’s “Kleist in Thun”), which might be translated literally as “lodgings in a country house”—or “house in the country.” Shortly before that, Sebald’s previous book, The Rings of Saturn, had appeared in English translation, having been published in German in 1995. In the meantime, following a visit to Corsica, he had commenced work on a book project relating to that island (which was, of course, the birthplace of Napoleon), a venture subsequently abandoned in favor of Austerlitz: extracts from the “Korsika-Projekt,” most of them previously published, appeared posthumously as essays in the volume Campo Santo. Traces of this Corsican project surface in the essays on Walser and Rousseau, as a kind of counterpoint to the Île Saint-Pierre, and it is tempting to conjecture that the essay on the philosopher from Geneva at least derives in part from that abandoned project. An interest in locality, then, notably rural and island locality, with its suggestions of being “far from home,” is a consistent feature of Sebald’s work, and in these essays, with their loose structuring around an “Alemannic” region comprising southwest Germany and northwest Switzerland and Alsace, we may detect something of a ritorno in patria, a kind of literary homecoming, after the “English pilgrimage” of The Rings of Saturn, to the Alpine regions and their hinterlands traversed by the various protagonists of Sebald’s first prose work, Vertigo. It is fitting, then, that the best-known of the Corsican essays in Campo Santo is entitled “The Alps in the Sea.”

The six essays in the present volume have as their subjects six artists and writers, spanning, as the Foreword has it, a historical period of almost two hundred years, from the Enlightenment and Romanticism in the eighteenth century — culminating in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars — via Biedermeier quietism, the upheavals of 1848, the industrialization and colonialist expansionism of the nineteenth century, and the two world wars of the twentieth; and although the rural idylls and writer’s retreats they evoke might appear far removed from such historical turbulence, the seismic effects are registered even in the remotest of areas, among which one must count Sebald’s native Allgäu. This mountainous region on the border with Austria belongs culturally and linguistically (as the name indeed suggests) to the “Alemannic” area, referring to the group of dialects still spoken there, a direct descendant of the Middle High German of the Minnesänger—even though the region is administratively now part of Bavaria rather than Baden-Württemberg. While Johann Peter Hebel (1760–1826) comes from the Basel hinterland (in Baden), Eduard Mörike (1804–1875) spent his life in the environs of Stuttgart in Swabia (Württemberg), and Sebald’s contemporary from the Allgäu, the artist Jan Peter Tripp, now resides — as an earlier draft of the Foreword pointed out — in a Landhaus across the Rhine in Alsace. The other three authors are all Swiss, but here, as in Vertigo, the Alps which these regions border function not as a dividing but a unifying feature, so that the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), across the linguistic boundary in Geneva, is linked to the Zurich-born Gottfried Keller (1819–1890) and the peripatetic Robert Walser (1878–1956) — both writing in German — via the topography of the Île Saint-Pierre in the Lac de Bienne (or, as it is known in German, the St. Petersinsel in the Bielersee) itself part of a bilingual region, and in many ways the heart of the book.

This intersection of languages and cultures in what is after all a region of many borders and transitions is reflected, too, in the fabric of Sebald’s text, where, in keeping with the characteristic features of his creative prose, his carefully crafted German sentences are shot through with quotations and allusions, some French, some English, some even in Hebel’s Alemannic dialect. There is, too, a hidden trajectory in the arrangement of the essays (which in this translation follows Sebald’s own, not quite chronological, order in the German original). If it is from Fribourg, in French-speaking Switzerland, that the young student Sebald “sets out for Manchester” in the autumn of 1966, symbolically placing Hebel’s Schatzkästlein, Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich, and Walser’s Jakob von Gunten in his suitcase, then it is initially from Germany, or its southernmost tip, the Allgäu, that his journey “far from home” begins. His first studies are in Freiburg im Breisgau, in Baden: the choice of a university in an “Alemannic” area, rather than the arguably more obvious choice of the Bavarian capital, Munich, seems significant. In moving away from the dialect world of the southern Allgäu, with its Alemannic roots and inflections fondly remembered from his grandfather, “whose use of language,” as he writes, “was in many ways reminiscent of that of the Hausfreund” (i.e. Johann Peter Hebel), he finds himself in the university environment of Freiburg, where, as he claims, only partly ironically, he had to learn to speak Hochdeutsch for the first time. From there he leaves Germany for the Université de Fribourg, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland — not far from Biel/Bienne (Robert Walser’s birthplace) and the Île Saint-Pierre — and thence, as he tells us, to England, returning a year later to spend a year teaching in a private school at St. Gallen in Switzerland, close to the asylum at Herisau where Robert Walser spent his final years.

W. G. Sebald’s “unwavering affection” for these authors, though, is not mere nostalgia, or a longing for a “return to more innocent times.” Not only are their inflections, whether “peripheral” South or Swiss German or Swiss-accented French, ones familiar to Sebald’s ear, like the distinctive regional coloring of Hebel’s prose, or the sheer quirkiness and inventiveness of Walser’s use of language; so also are the crafting of the sentences, the unrolling of the narrative path, as he writes of Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich, “sentence after lovely sentence,” and the poetic “breaths and cadences” of that prose, which attract his attention both as a critic and a writer, as he explains to Michael Silverblatt in Los Angeles in one of his last interviews:

The influence [on the rhythmic nature of his prose] came, if from anywhere, from nineteenth-century German prose writing, which also has prosodic rhythms that are very pronounced, where prose is more important than, say, social background or plot in any manifest sense. And this nineteenth-century German prose writing even at the time was very provincial. It never was received outside Germany to any extent worth mentioning. But it’s always been very close to me, not least because the writers all hailed from the periphery of the German-speaking lands, where I also come from. Adalbert Stifter in Austria, Gottfried Keller in Switzerland. They are both absolutely wonderful writers who achieved a very, very high intensity in their prose.… What they all have in common is this precedence of the carefully composed page of prose over the mechanisms of the novel such as dominated fiction writing elsewhere, in France and in England, notably, at that time.

These essays, then, offer us an unprecedented glimpse into the writer’s workshop. In an early interview with Piet de Moor for the Belgian publication Knack, shortly after the first Dutch translation of Vertigo, Sebald explains how his writing “involves a large number of much smaller tributes to other authors. These tributes take the form of citations that have casually crept into the text”; and this wry admission is echoed in A Place in the Country: “I have always tried, in my own works, to mark my respect for those writers with whom I felt an affinity, to raise my hat to them, so to speak, by borrowing an attractive image or a few expressions.…” What is more, his descriptions of their individual prose styles often seem to hint at an oblique comment on his own style of writing, as when he says of Hebel: “The highly wrought language which Hebel devised especially for his stories in the Almanac makes use of dialect and old-fashioned forms and turns of phrase precisely at those points where the rhythm of the prose demands it,” while noting Walser’s “painstaking process of elaboration,” his “playful — and sometimes obsessive — working in with a fine brush of the most abstruse details,” or his use of “regionalisms, redolent of things long fallen into disuse.” And even though the reluctant Swabian pastor Mörike does not perhaps evoke the same degree of affinity as the above writers, his work is compared to Schubert’s music for its “hidden shifts … those true moments musicaux where the iridescent chromatics begin to shimmer into dissonance and an unexpected, even false change of key suddenly signals the abandoning of all hope, or, alternatively, grief gives way to consolation,” giving rise to moments of pure limpidity such as are echoed in most of the essays here. Speculating as to how these are achieved leads W. G. Sebald to a consideration of the circumstances of the artist’s life:

What it takes to produce these effects remains, now as then, an undisclosed mystery. Certainly a rare adeptness at their craft, permitting the most minute adjustments and nuances; and then, or so I imagine, a very long memory and, possibly, a certain unluckiness in love, which appears to have been precisely the lot of those who, like Mörike and Schubert, Keller and Walser, have bequeathed to us some few of the most beautiful lines ever written.

And so it is to the fateful compulsion of these tormented souls, their absolute failure to accommodate life and art, to which Sebald returns again and again, their fates resonating through time and space and the continued beauty of their surroundings, and forming a leitmotif common to all of the writers portrayed here — the description of the unhappiness and misfortunes of the writing subject being, of course, a constant theme of both Sebald’s academic and his creative work.

If it is first and foremost as a fellow writer, rather than as a scholar and critic, that the author of these essays addresses their subjects, the intersection we find here of creative and critical discourses is by no means a new phenomenon in W. G. Sebald’s work. Articles on Ernst Herbeck and Franz Kafka published in the Austrian literary journal Manuskripte in the early 1980S parallel his literary engagement with these two figures in the fictional text Vertigo—though they are by no means the only writers to whom he “pays tribute,” there as elsewhere, by means of hidden quotations — while publication extracts from that work, such as episodes from the life of Stendhal, alternate in issues of Manuskripte with articles on these and other Austrian writers such as Adalbert Stifter, Peter Handke, and Gerhard Roth. The essays in A Place in the Country bring together — and share with his more overtly creative work — both the description of the misfortune of the writing subject and the writer’s sense of dislocation, whether in exile or in “die fremdgewordene Heimat” (the home country grown strange), as he writes of the protagonists in Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet; in other words, the sense of being an expatriate or emigrant even, or especially, when at home. These preoccupations had indeed already formed the focus of Sebald’s two earlier collections of academic essays and articles on Austrian literature “from Stifter to Handke”: Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (The Description of Misfortune) and Unheimliche Heimat (Strange Homeland), whose respective publication in 1985 and 1991, by the Austrian literary publishing house Residenz, frames that of Sebald’s first two literary works, the long poem or “Elementargedicht” Nach der Natur (After Nature) by Greno in 1988, and in 1990 Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo), in the Eichborn series Die Andere Bibliothek, founded by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In the same way, then, that the four stories which make up The Emigrants—like those in the earlier Vertigo—all have some apparently identifiable biographical basis, the pieces in the present volume trace a path between critical essay, life writing, and creative writing. Both biographical “narratives” and at the same time critical appreciations, they serve as examples of the way in which the critical interpretation of German literature (and in this case particularly Swiss and Alemannic or Swabian authors) informs and merges into the creative at all levels of Sebald’s writing. At the same time, the creative imagination is brought to bear upon the scholarly account of writers’ lives, and the interpretation of their histories, in what one might almost term a “natural history of creation,” an investigation of writers and their works in, as it were, their natural habitat, in the context both of the times in which they lived and of the physical landscapes that we see them traversing as solitary figures, often on foot.

In this, his first book with his new publisher, Hanser — followed in 1999 by Luftkrieg und Literatur (On the Natural History of Destruction) and in 2001 by Austerlitz—W. G. Sebald seems to have been determined to maintain the aesthetic standards of production set for his earlier literary works in Die Andere Bibliothek. Unlike the two earlier volumes of essays on Austrian literature (but in common with his works of prose fiction), it contains a wealth of images inserted into the text at key points; and it is worth noting that where Sebald’s essays first appear in German or Swiss broadsheets — as a good many of them do — the texts are also often accompanied by illustrations, usually grainy photographs. Indeed, A Place in the Country goes further than the works of prose fiction in introducing not just double-paged image spreads, but inserted color plates, which in the original (hardback) Hanser edition are designed to be folded out to the left or right of the facing text. Thus, as with the posthumous Unrecounted (Unerzählt), conceived in collaboration with Jan Peter Tripp, the book is not a mere collection of texts but appears to be envisaged as an aesthetic object in its own right, blurring not only the boundaries of the critical and the creative, but also between the verbal and the visual.

Indeed, the first of these essays to be written was the one which forms a coda to the volume, on the paintings of Sebald’s contemporary Jan Peter Tripp, which was originally published in 1993 in a catalog of the latter’s work entitled Die Aufzählung der Schwierigkeiten (The Enumeration of the Difficulties) — an allusion to which title, establishing a link between Tripp’s work and his own methods, closes Sebald’s Foreword: “there are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection [or, in homage to Michael Hamburger’s translation of Unrecounted, “recounting”] of things.” The remaining five essays were written during the course of 1997—as the dates on the manuscript in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, in Sebald’s characteristic Roman numerals, tell us — starting with the piece on Eduard Mörike, given as a speech on receipt of the Mörike-Preis in Fellbach (near the Swabian capital, Stuttgart) in April of that year, and subsequently published in association with that prize. There then follows the essay on Robert Walser, written in March, an extract of which was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in May 1997; the pieces on Keller and Hebel are composed in June and July respectively, and the essay on Rousseau in August of that year (this last was published a year later, in a slightly different form and without any of the accompanying images, under the title “Rousseau auf der Île de Saint-Pierre,” in Sinn und Form in July/August 1998, shortly before the book’s publication). The Foreword, finally, was added early in 1998.

Although the essays in this volume stand as individual pieces in their own right, they are nevertheless linked by “a web of interlocking signs,” motifs and images which recur from one essay to the next, linking, say, Hebel with Rousseau, Walser with Mörike, Keller with Tripp, whether via the obsessive attention to detail of the writer’s (and artist’s) craft, the predilection for small things and worlds in miniature, the unexpected mentions of Kleist and Hölderlin, or a boating trip across the water. This last, in particular, recurs in one form or another in almost all the essays, symbolic perhaps of the quest for a rural retreat set apart from both the modern world and “the hubbub of literary business”—even though such a retreat can only ever provide at best a temporary respite from the “eternal business of cogitation” to which all writers, Sebald seems to suggest, are inexorably prone. This notwithstanding, in an interview with Arthur Lubow in 2001, Sebald describes his own visit to the Île Saint-Pierre — a visit which apparently inspired the essay on Rousseau — in the most idyllic, even nostalgic, of terms:

I felt at home, strangely, because it is a miniature world.… One manor house, one farmhouse. A vineyard, a field of potatoes, a field of wheat, a cherry tree, an orchard. It has one of everything, so it is in a sense an ark. It is like when you draw a place when you are a child. I don’t like large-scale things, not in architecture or evolutionary leaps. I think it’s an aberration. This notion of something that is small and self-contained is for me a moral and aesthetic ideal.

This artistic (and by implication moral) credo echoes throughout these essays, a rejection of the relentless “general expansionism” that so characterizes the onset of the modern age. However, as readers of Sebald’s fiction will know, he is always keenly aware of the vertiginous depths lurking “beneath the surface illusionism,” as he writes in the essay on Jan Peter Tripp. Of his fiction he remarks in the interview with Piet de Moor in 1992, pointing out the way that the “beatific moments” serve to reveal the “full measure of the horror,” that

the old-fashionedness of the diction or of the narrative tone is … nothing to do with nostalgia for a better age that’s gone past but is simply something that, as it were, heightens the awareness of that which we have managed to engineer in this century.

It is this awareness of the “inherent contradiction between this nostalgic utopia and the inexorable march of progress towards the brink of the abyss,” of the storm clouds always gathering on the historical and mental horizon, which renders so poignant and so precarious the perverse perseverance, the “awful tenacity” as Sebald says in the Foreword, of those who devote their lives to literature, “the hapless writers trapped in their web of words,” who, in spite of everything, nevertheless “sometimes succeed in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity as life itself is scarcely able to provide.”

Jo Catling

Norwich, England

JANUARY 2013