Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  ** The German actor Frederick Valk, who plays Redgrave’s Freud-like psychiatrist Dr Van Straaten in Dead of Night, also appeared in Thunder Rock as the ghostly Austrian anaesthetist Dr Kurtz.

  †† It’s interesting that Machen locates the house in England, because quite clearly Caermaen represents Caerleon; a similar coyness about its Welshness is displayed in The Hill of Dreams, though by the time of Far Off Things – the first of his autobiographical works from the 1920s – there’s no such ambiguity.

  ‡‡ Despite my earlier ignorance of Machen, I would have seen references to him among the ‘weird fiction’ of H. P. Lovecraft, who I was obsessed with during my first years at secondary school; two of his best stories, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, owe a considerable debt to, and even namecheck, the Welsh writer.

  §§ The harsh ‘hissing syllables’ of Machen’s fairy language are mirrored in Lovecraft’s ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, where we learn of ‘Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation of human speech which made surprising offers to lone travelers on roads and cart-paths in the deep woods …’

  ¶¶ This use of esoteric terminology is something Lovecraft is fond of too – he even co-opts the ‘dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity’, mentioning it in two of his stories.

  Chapter 8

  LONELIER THAN RUIN

  The sea sizzles, its brown waves churning and depositing fine shingle in an endless spin cycle. I’m crunching along the strandline set down by the last tide. My steps take me into a mild, though breezy, southerly that’s whipping up the restless surface. A desiccated plant fragment blows beyond the reach of the breakers, like tumbleweed in a western.

  I walk up the beach, out of the sun and into shadow, a drifting mist of spray in close pursuit. In places the cliffs have subsided beneath gullies of cascading sand. Layers of yellow-brown strata are exposed to the elements where brambles and grasses have been unable to get a grip. A raft of sea cabbage at my feet is trying to gain a foothold between the larger pebbles, and a sycamore sapling has sprouted to almost my height; it will not attain maturity before the waves once more overwhelm this meeting point of water and land. Fragments of masonry – one of them, carved and grey, has the look of the ecclesiastical, which here, below the ruin of Dunwich’s Greyfriars Priory is not unlikely – lie among twisted lines of rusted metal.

  A sign warns CLIFF FALLS ARE FREQUENT AND DEADLY.

  In the distance I see a group of three figures. Through my binoculars I make out a middle-aged couple and their son, a rangy teenager, heading towards me; the woman is to the seaward side of the man and holding him by the hand, skipping aside when a surge overshoots her expectations. The lad’s further back, striding alone, his hands in his pockets.

  We too walked this same stretch of beach, all that time ago, though then the crumbling cliffs would have extended metres beyond where now they collapse in on themselves.

  Do you remember?

  I stare into the haze. How did we miss its approach? A figure formed of sea spray that must have hung there, unseen, for a moment – a play of the light above the shingle – before it dissolved to nothing.

  The ephemeral pied piper who whistled you away.

  Photo (W. G. Sebald) Ulf Andersen/Contributor via Getty Images

  On my twenty-eighth birthday, a writer I was then unfamiliar with died in a car accident a few miles outside Norwich, where at the time I was living. I remember reading the news in the local paper, the Eastern Daily Press, a day or two after, wondering why I had not come across the work of this man who had lectured for three decades in my adopted city, at the university I was myself, five years later, to attend. (He even, for a single semester before his untimely death, taught on the Creative Writing MA I was to take.)

  Winifred Georg Sebald was known on his books by his initials, W. G., and, throughout his adult life, as Max to his friends (he disliked his first two given names). He was born in 1944 in Wertach im Allgäu, a village in the Bavarian Alps. His father, who had been a soldier in the German Reichswehr, the 100,000-strong army Germany was permitted under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, became part of Hitler’s Wehrmacht when it was formed in 1935; he fought in the Second World War, not returning to his family until 1947. By this time he was a stranger to his son, having been held since the end of the hostilities in a French POW camp; later, his father’s own complicity with history was a source of discomfort to the young Max, who grew up in a bucolic world close to the Austrian border where the conflict and its atrocities were not spoken about. This silence was to feature at the heart of Sebald’s non-academic work, all of which was written after he passed the age of forty. Finding a form that could adequately encapsulate so much loss – so much wilful amnesia – took him that long to hone. Or, perhaps, to stumble upon.

  After finishing his schooling, Sebald undertook a degree in literature at the University of Freiburg, one of the oldest educational establishments in Germany, founded in 1457. The small city on the western fringe of the Black Forest is where the great Dutch scholar of the Renaissance, Erasmus, came after fleeing the Reformation in Basel. For two years (1529–31) he lived at the striking Haus zum Walfisch (‘The Whale House’); this red-plastered, Gothic residence, which these days is a branch of the Sparkasse Bank, was the inspiration for the ‘celebrated Academy of Freiburg’, the bewitched school of dance in which a young American, Suzy Bannion, decides ‘to perfect her ballet studies’ in Dario Argento’s 1977 horror film Suspiria.

  Joergens.mi/Wikipedia (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/legalcode); 296, reproduced by kind permission of C. Buckton

  The movie wasn’t actually filmed in the city, but a convincing approximation of the building’s façade (complete with a replica of its commemorative plaque marking Erasmus’s residency) – and a dreamlike, fictionalised Art Nouveau interior featuring Aubrey Beardsley panels and Escher-like murals – was reconstructed on a studio lot in Rome. Suspiria is a technicolour visual feast, which, along with Roger Corman’s adaptation of Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, has perhaps my favourite use of colour in a horror film: its lurid vermilion rooms, and the bright scarlets of its corn-syrup blood, virtually burn themselves onto the viewer’s retina, while the electronic soundtrack by the aptly named Italian prog rock band Goblin leaves a similarly deep aural scar.

  Like Suzy Bannion – albeit in less dramatic circumstances – Sebald’s stay as a student in Freiburg was also cut short. After two years he left the stuffy confines of German academia because, as he later wrote, he found it impossible to study the things he was interested in there, transferring instead to the university in the near-namesake, French-speaking Swiss town of Fribourg: like many of his family before him, Sebald had become an emigrant. This disorientating break with his past gathered pace when he took up a teaching post in German literature at the University of Manchester in 1966, despite at this point having little knowledge of English. Four years later he moved to Norwich and the fledgling University of East Anglia. Here he lectured on European literature, though it was nearly two decades before he began to produce the poetry and, in particular, the ‘prose fiction’ (Sebald’s own classification of his hard-to-define work) for which he is now so lauded.

  The book of Sebald’s that most resonates with me is The Rings of Saturn, a meandering journey around the East Anglian coast and the lives of various imagined and historical figures, along with digressions that include the long-ago deforestation of Britain, the natural history of the herring and the silkworm, and the liberation of Bergen-Belsen – all of which take place within a strangely hypnotic atmosphere of ennui and entropy. While researching this chapter I found one of my father’s few old letters that I possess, written to his aunt and uncle in Australia while he was undertaking National Service in Germany as a young man of nineteen. Looking up the address (BFPO 30) where the 1958 communication was sent from, I discovered the camp was H
ohne in Lower Saxony, built four years before the war by the Nazis, and the location to which, at its liberation, the skeletal survivors of nearby Belsen were moved.

  I’m staggered by this new-found knowledge, because Dad – like one of Sebald’s characters – never once mentioned his youthful proximity to such a grim, infamous place. I feel the need to share this information, and instinctively reach for my phone to call my brother even though I know he won’t answer.

  Three staccato beeps.

  Our line’s dead.

  One of the most notable episodes of The Rings of Saturn occurs at the very beginning of Sebald’s melancholic walking tour. Though, to be more accurate, I should say the journey undertaken by the unnamed narrator who acts as a version of the German writer – because he is a figure who is similar to, yet not quite Sebald – in the same way that places in the book are not-quite-correct approximations of where they pertain to be.

  It was on a grey, overcast day in August 1992 that I travelled down to the coast in one of the old diesel trains, grimed with oil and soot up to the windows, which ran from Norwich to Lowestoft at that time.

  Just inside the Suffolk border, Somerleyton Hall is located in a wooded pocket of hinterland, less than five miles inshore from the most easterly point of the British Isles and the faded seaside grandeur of Lowestoft. Yet unlike Sebald’s melancholic narrator, I do not arrive here by train – though it is an overcast August morning, and those same diesel-spewing locomotives, now a quarter of a century older, continue to belch out their noxious fumes into the big skies that overlay the floodplain of the River Waveney – but by car, driving through what Nikolaus Pevsner describes as the hall’s namesake ‘weird village’, before turning through the understated gate and along the protracted cattle-lined drive. The residence, when it eventually comes into view on my left, is impressive: a sprawling mix of red and cream bricks, with various squared-off, church-like towers jutting skywards.

  Somerleyton Hall is Victorian, though the building work, which began in 1844, incorporates elements of the Jacobean mansion that previously occupied the site. The architect, who also designed the – to my mind – attractive houses in the village that Pevsner disparaged, was the upstanding John Thomas, more famous as a sculptor, and buried in Arthur Machen’s ‘goblin city’ of Kensal Green Cemetery.*

  Sir Samuel Morton Peto was the man responsible for funding the hall’s transformation into grand spectacle. Peto had hauled himself up from humble origins, starting out as a fourteen-year-old apprentice for his uncle’s London building firm, where he learned practical bricklaying, masonry and carpentry skills, and developed his talent for technical drawing. After his uncle’s death in 1830 he inherited, along with his cousin, half of the company. The firm’s stock rose rapidly thereafter through the winning of numerous high-profile tenders for public works, including the rebuilding of the Lyceum Theatre (where Bram Stoker was to work for two decades as manager), the construction of the Reform Club (the start and end point of Phileas Fogg’s fictional eighty-day journey around the world), and, later, in 1843, the definitive monument to Norfolk’s ‘Hero of the Nile’: Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.

  The coming of the railways was to bring still greater prosperity Peto’s way, with the undertaking of building work for the new form of transport – including the nearby line and station Sebald’s narrator alights from in The Rings of Saturn. During the 1840s Peto held thirty-two line-laying contracts worth an estimated £20 million, making him, according to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the richest contractor at the time in the world. But British rail was not enough, and soon Peto was carrying out construction works in Scandinavia, Canada, even Australia. However, an underfinanced and unsecured deal to extend the London, Chatham and Dover Railway into Victoria Station was to be his downfall, resulting in bankruptcy and something of a fall from grace. In 1862 Peto moved from Somerleyton, and the house was sold to a Yorkshireman, Sir Francis Crossley, whose own fortune had come from the more genteel manufacture of carpets. Crossley’s son Savile was to become the first Lord Somerleyton, and their descendants continue to own the hall; the two women guides point out various ostentatious portraits of contemporary family members as they take a paying group of us on a tour – a variant of the same one I imagine Sebald must himself at some stage have participated in – of the public parts of the building’s interior. Childishly, every time the current Lord Somerleyton is mentioned (it happens frequently) I can’t help picturing Lord Summerisle from The Wicker Man – especially when we all mill around the bottom of the grand staircase above which the walls are decorated with numerous sets of vast deer antlers, like those that adorn Christopher Lee’s ancestral castle in the film.

  I feel disproportionately young. Everyone else on the tour is a pensioner, including a jolly woman in her sixties who, at one o’clock in the afternoon, seems already at least half-cut, amusing herself and the rest of us (though not in the way she thinks) by asking various irrelevant questions and then guffawing. I’m writing in my notebook, an action I’m conscious has been noted by the guides, as one of them makes a comment to me that ‘you don’t need to worry, you’re not going to be tested.’ Shortly after the other sidles over and asks if I’m interested in anything in particular. I almost wonder whether they think I’m casing the joint – noting down the pieces of china or taxidermy I have my eye on – so I explain I’m here to research a book (I give no clue as to what it’s about). ‘I’ve worked here for forty years,’ she tells me convivially, ‘so just ask me at the end if there’s anything you want to know.’

  The Rings of Saturn describes the hall’s ‘incomparable glasshouses’, part of its Winter Garden, no longer extant, but which, according to a lavish spread in The Illustrated London News of January 1857 (the periodical owned by the unfortunate Member of Parliament for Boston drowned in Lake Michigan), was lit by jets of gas and adorned with ‘eight wire baskets, from which hang in graceful negligence lovely creepers’. Sebald makes much of this now-vanished, glass-domed wonder, which he contrasts with the faded glory his melancholy narrator sees everywhere about the hall and its motley collection of ‘bygone paraphernalia’. He concedes, however, that the Winter Garden must have been a tremendous sight, and embeds into the book’s text an indistinct, doctored etching of the illuminated nocturnal spectacle.

  As the two guides lead us further through the ground floor of the hall there’s much from them too about the old glasshouses; the courtyard once enclosed by their intricate structures is now a white-flowered garden where newly married wives and husbands can pose for their wedding photographs. Currently, two large mallard-type hybrids that have taken over the small square pond at its centre are the only ones posing; both are in their moulting, eclipse plumage, so it’s hard to tell whether they are indeed a happy couple, though they seem inseparable. Sebald’s narrator delights in telling us of the demise of the former pleasure palace which, a little over a century before, would have framed the sky above where the ducks are sitting: ‘Somerleyton strikes the visitor of today no longer as an oriental palace in a fairy tale. The glass-covered walks and the palm house, whose lofty dome used once to light up the nights, were burnt out in 1913 after a gas explosion and subsequently demolished.’

  And here I am given notice of the traps hidden in Sebald’s method. Not everything his narrator says can be taken at face value. Truth and fabrication are hard to distinguish. I should know this already of course, but The Rings of Saturn’s languorous, almost-reportage style is tricksy, and has a habit of making me want to believe its every word. The book’s rambles around the byroads of Norfolk and the Suffolk coast present themselves as an autobiographical work of narrative non-fiction – though my copy categorises itself in small lettering on its back cover as FICTION/MEMOIR/TRAVEL – and perhaps my own familiarity with many of the locations has lulled me into letting my guard down to a greater extent here than when reading his other great works, The Emigrants and Austerlitz (although the same approach is
employed there too). This detail, however, reminds me that Sebald’s narrator is unreliable: because the story the two guides tell about the last days of the Winter Garden does not end in a gas-filled conflagration, but a more gentle dismantling of the structure at the start of 1914, the titanic glassed area having become too uneconomical to continue to heat.

  Sebald goes on to describe in the most beautiful of phrases an unlikely apparition he encounters in the house.† As our tour meanders further through the rooms, I am pleased to find that it, at least, does indeed exist, still positioned in the place he describes: ‘The stuffed polar bear in the entrance hall stands over three yards tall. With its yellowish and moth-eaten fur, it resembles a ghost bowed by sorrows.’

  What The Rings of Saturn does not point out is that there are in fact not one, but two near-identical lifeless bears guarding either side of the hallway’s inner door (of course, both may not have always been on show). They are indeed massive – three yards is no exaggeration – and posed in a mirror image of each other, both holding out a giant front paw in a slightly camp wave. Four faded, torn Indian tiger skins hang on the walls, and the skull of a hippopotamus rests on the floor’s Minton tiles, its huge molars giving it a jaunty smile. But it is the bears that hold my attention. They’re captivating.

  The giant Arctic-dwelling predators were taken by Sir Savile Crossley in 1897, in eastern Svalbard. Fifty-five were shot during the expedition, of which three complete mounted specimens remain (the third is on display in Norwich’s Castle Museum), as well as various skins and skulls. In addition, two live polar bears were brought back to Britain – it’s believed one may have survived for several years in Regent’s Park Zoo. A contemporary newspaper account described one of Sir Savile’s subsequent talks about the grim adventure, in which he detailed how the killing was carried out: