The Amnesiac

by Sam Taylor

  By the end of the war12 Tomas Ryal was a forgotten man. Solitude had been unfairly ridiculed, while Darkness simply went unread. For most of the 1950s, punctuated by financial worries and alcoholic misadventures, Ryal led an anonymous, peripatetic life, moving from town to town through France, Germany, Italy and Ireland, making enough money to live by translation work, ------ hack journalism and pornographic stories, all of which were published pseudonymously, and all the time writing the diaries and notes that would later resurface in his great final works, On the Impossibility of Remembering, The Book as a Mirror of the World, The Light, The Labyrinth, and Heaven and Hell.13

  Had it not been for a young Austrian psychologist, Dr Felice Berger, Tomas Ryal’s name might never have re-emerged from this obscurity, and these wonderful books never been published, perhaps never even written. But in 1958, while working on a thesis about the causes and effects of fear and hope, Berger came across a mimeographed copy of Ryal’s 5,000-word essay, ‘On Fear and Hope in the Novels of Kafka’, which had been published in a small Vienna-based magazine called Brainwaves in 1928. Astonished by his insights, which she described as ‘ahead not only of his own time, but of ours too’, Berger set out to find the man who had written the article.

  Her search took nearly two years14 but Berger eventually tracked Ryal down to a seedy apartment in Helsinki, where he was working as a private detective and spending his earnings on vodka and whores. Upon being asked by Berger about his seminal essay on fear and hope in the novels of Kafka, Ryal claimed he had no memory of ever having written anything of the kind. Later, when Berger had gained his trust and helped wean him from his alcohol dependency, he recalled writing it ‘in the course of two white nights one week while passing through Vienna. I’d bumped into the editor of the magazine at a bar and we’d had a conversation about Kafka. His books had only just come out at the time, and very few people knew about them. He was interested in what I had to say about The Trial and The Castle and he urged me to write it down. At first I refused, as I was planning to leave Vienna the following day, but he promised he would buy me a good meal, and I was very hungry at the time, so that was why I wrote it. I ended up distilling a lot of my emotions from the previous few years into that essay, which is, I think, where its power comes from. On the surface it may appear quite scholarly and abstract, but in truth I was performing open-heart surgery on my own past. As for the idea that hope and fear are, at root, the same emotion, and that, of the two, hope is the more dangerous and unbearable variation . . . that was something I had believed for a long time - and I still believe it now.’15

  On Berger’s invitation, Ryal - by now a thin, white-bearded man of sixty - moved to a rural village 100 km from Vienna, where Berger’s parents owned a large country house. In the grounds was a cottage, originally intended for the gardener, which had lain empty for years. Berger had this cottage renovated, and it was in this remote and beautiful place, close to a forest, that Ryal lived during the last and most prolific decade of his writing career. Each morning he chopped wood for the stove, made himself breakfast, and immediately set to work. He wrote all morning, ate lunch, and then set off for long walks in the afternoon, often disappearing into the forest for hours on end. In the evenings he would go to the main house to eat dinner with Berger’s parents, who were slightly younger than him and in awe of his talent, and then go back to his cottage to read and drink wine and ‘daydream before the fire’.

  It was from this quiet, bucolic routine that Ryal’s greatest books emerged. The first to be published was Longings (1963), his third collection of poetry, which was quickly followed by The Book as a Mirror of the World (1965), a collection of literary essays including the now-famous one on Kafka and another, described by the London Times as ‘strange and revelatory’, on Jorge Luis Borges and Philip Larkin,16 which would come to be even more famous.17 It also contains a speculative physiognomical essay (illustrated with photographs) called ‘The Good Eye and the Evil Eye’ which has been anthologised more often than any other of Ryal’s writings.18 Yet by the time these books were

  Published in 1966, this slim book, though condemned by certain critics as a work of ‘pseudoscience’, drew the approbation of several renowned scientists, who, inspired by its instinctual insights, changed the nature of their research in an attempt to ‘prove’ what Ryal believed. Put simply, his contention was that memory was a myth; that all our attempts at ‘recalling’ the past were in fact reconstructions, recreations, acts of fiction. To demonstrate the extremity of his theory - what he called its ‘radical absoluteness’ - Ryal came up with the concept of the Mneman: 19 a human being whose essential character, whose soul, ceases to exist every time he falls asleep, and is born anew each time he wakes - not as the same person, but as someone else, someone new.20 ‘And one could go further,’ he writes at the end of this chapter. ‘One could say that “I” become a Mneman not only every morning but in every waking moment, during every second; that “I” am in a constant state of flux, that what “I” call “myself” is describable only in the present. If “I” talk about how “I” was, at some point in the past, then “I” am lying, if only to “myself”.’21

  By this time, Ryal had already begun exhibiting signs of what Berger’s alarmed parents called his ‘manias’. Other observers confirmed that his working routines were now far more erratic and obsessive - he would sometimes shut himself up in the cottage for as long as seventy-two hours, his light burning continuously, and then sleep for a whole day and night - and that his moods swung wildly between an infantile serenity and a furious, wall-eyed despair.22 The Bergers’ spiritually intense Alsatian maid, Gabrielle Schwarz, whose job it was to deliver meals to Ryal during these last five years, and who consequently saw him more often than anybody else, remarked that ‘he could appear very good or very evil, but most of the time he was neither. He was like a ghost: his soul had departed elsewhere, and left behind this living shell. I was not surprised at all when his body too disappeared.’23

  Such observations fit well (perhaps suspiciously well?) with the near-ecstatic ‘abandonment to nature’ of The Light, published in 1967 as a slender single volume, and a year later alongside its lengthier and more earthbound companion piece, Darkness. Nominally a ‘philosophical meditation’, The Light is closer in tone to a prose poem or indeed a work of religious revelation. Though unequivocal in its denial of the existence of any kind of god or afterlife, it has a serenity and certainty which is gloriously at odds with the tortured dread of Darkness. Both books are essentially about death, and you could argue (as several critics have) that The Light is merely Darkness rewritten by someone in the grip of senile dementia. But such a conclusion ignores the indisputable fact that this same writer was, at the same time, working on the utterly clear-eyed Heaven and Hell. And, whatever you call the state into which Ryal transported himself (or was transported) during his composition of The Light - ‘senile dementia’ or ‘mania’ or ‘all-seeing ecstasy’24(the latter being his own preferred term) - the book retains an otherworldly power which is, to many people, undeniable and inspiring. It is, by a long way, Ryal’s most enduringly popular work.

  The last book published by Ryal in his lifetime was Dreams of Elsewhere, his fourth (and most perfect) collection of poetry. Unlike his other collections, Dreams of Elsewhere is divided into three titled parts: ‘Past’, ‘Present’ and ‘Future’, each containing seven sonnets. The first section is characterised by a melancholy but transfixingly beautiful nostalgia. The second mixes the ‘Larkinesque’- bald descriptions of the insides of his cottage, the view from his window, his sagging flesh and aching joints - with ‘Borgesian’ flights of fancy, dreams, memories and inner voices. The final part occupies a similar territory to The Light, though leavened with self-deprecating wit and disturbingly detailed and untroubled descriptions of worms feeding on dead flesh, fingernails growing and scratching the coffin’s underside, skin and bones being incinerated into ash, ash being scattered by the wind. Dreams of Elsew
here was published in September 1969.

  All the evidence suggests that Ryal kept writing until the end of his occupancy of the cottage. On the evening of 23 August 1970, Schwarz took Ryal’s dinner to the cottage, as he had not appeared at the house, and was surprised to find the door ajar. She entered, and discovered the cottage empty. It was eight o’clock, and this was the first time he had ever been absent at this hour. Schwarz left the meal on Ryal’s desk, next to a neatly stacked pile of black notebooks and a single white notebook, and returned to the main house to inform the Bergers. Alarmed by the old man’s disappearance, the Bergers and their servants organised a search party, but by ten o’clock it was dark and they had discovered no sign of him. The police were called, but despite a full-scale, three-day operation involving dogs and helicopters, they found nothing. Newspaper stories were accompanied by obituaries, but Felice Berger denounced the publication of the latter, saying there was no evidence that her friend was dead.

  During September and October, Berger took up residence in the cottage and devoted her time to reading the notebooks on the desk. This, she concluded, was Ryal’s Meisterwerk, the book he had been talking about and working upon for the past six years, ever since his abandonment of The Labyrinth. The book, Berger announced, was entitled Heaven and Hell, and was intended to be two volumes of equal length. Yet, while Hell is now famous for its 530 pages of aphorisms, anecdotes and parables expressing Ryal’s clear-eyed horror at the reality of existence,25 all that has ever been found of Heaven is a few pages, in that single white notebook, of seemingly incoherent notes. It has been speculated that the MS of Heaven was lost or destroyed, but given the careful orderliness of the desk which Ryal left, the assumption has to be that it was never written. Some critics maintain that these notes (amounting to no more than 14 pages in all, and quickly dismissed by most readers as nonsensical ravings) are in fact a sort of code or key for re-reading Hell in a different way. But other critics point to phrases in Hell which suggest an alternative solution, notably the sentence ‘Hell is a place with only two exits: the black door and the white door. The black door leads nowhere. The white door leads to Heaven.’26

  Tomas Ryal’s body was discovered on 8 July 1973, deep in the forest. By the time of its discovery, it had been picked clean to the bones,27so it was more or less impossible to calculate the timing of Ryal’s death, other than to say it must have occurred at some point between autumn 1970 and spring 1973. What we will never know is what Ryal’s life was like in those final days: what he was thinking, how he was feeling. But then, the past, as Ryal told us in Hell, ‘is always inaccessible, forever lost’.

  Hell was published in German the following year, in other languages the year after that, and the reviews were almost embarrassingly adulatory. Tomas Ryal, the man who claimed memory was a myth, ironically refuses to be forgotten.

  James sat up in bed and tried to collect his thoughts. The thirteen printed pages of ‘The Life and Works of Tomas Ryal’ were spread out over the duvet. He regarded them in the stark light of the desk lamp, wondering what it was that made him feel so uneasy. The first time he had read the article, he had been fascinated, purely and simply: Ryal, it seemed, had lived a strange and eventful life, and the descriptions of his books had made James want to read them.

  But when he’d gone online to order the books, he had been unable to find any references to them whatsoever. Puzzled, he had typed in the address of the Encyclopaedia Labyrinthus, but this had produced only a white screen with the words, ‘The system cannot find the path specified.’ He had tried again, with the same result. And that was when he had begun to suspect that the article was not what it purported to be.

  His suspicions had deepened as he re-read it. There was nothing he could put his finger on, but the more closely he looked at this story, the more he seemed to detect another, different, vaguely familiar story, somewhere beneath it. This had made James fearful: he was, he realised, thinking like a detective again. And so, resolving not to jump to any illogical conclusions, he had spread the pages out on the duvet in order to examine each of them, objectively, one by one, taking notes as he went along.

  As he read again the details of Ryal’s life story, he was disturbedby several unwelcome images. For instance, the moment he came to footnote number 3, about the possible fate of Ryal’s girlfriend, Kirstya Ellberg, he saw a picture in his mind of a departing train and felt a wrench of deep unhappiness. He was going to note this down, but in the end he decided it was a bad idea. After all, the image was nothing but a stray emotion, a vague feeling; if he began to take account of all such feelings, he would soon end up lost again in a labyrinth of hopes and fears. The important thing was to establish the facts.

  He kept on, scrutinising every sentence, every word. And then he found something that made him gape in shock. In the seventh footnote, the name of the writer who accused Ryal of murdering his fellow student was M. Trewvey. This was, surely, too strange to be a coincidence. It was only one small anomaly, but it was troubling none the less, and James found that the more he thought about it, the less convinced he was by the rest of the article. The reference to Trewvey was a loose thread, and when he pulled at it, the entire garment began to unravel. Within a few minutes, he had lost all belief in the document. It seemed to him flimsy, absurd, quite clearly fabricated: Tomas Ryal had never existed, those books had never been written. Why anyone would have gone to the bother of perpetrating such a complex fraud was beyond him. Only the author could answer that . . . whoever he might be.

  James remembered the footsteps he had heard behind him on his walk through the suburb earlier that night. Was he being followed? Was someone persecuting him, teasing him with meaningless clues? Malcolm Trewvey, he thought, looking wildly around, and I stiffened. Was it possible he could see me, standing here watching him, just beyond the pool of light cast by the desk lamp, just beyond the limits of his consciousness? For an uncomfortable moment, I wondered if the game was up, if he was on to me. But finally, thankfully, James sighed and switched off the light.

  No, he told himself, you’re just feeling tired and paranoid. The best thing to do is sleep on it; everything will seem different in the morning. He looked at the digital figures on his radio alarm clock: 05.50. As he closed his eyes and fell asleep, a last, fleeting thought crossed his mind: when I wake up it will be Christmas Day.

  James had a hangover when he woke, and he felt foolish as he gathered the sheets of computer paper and put them in the dustbin. Solipsism . . . Tomas Ryal . . . what a load of nonsense! He really ought to stop drinking so much. His head ached and his mouth was dry, but for some reason, as he walked downstairs, he felt a small throb of excitement in his chest.

  Melted butterlike daylight was staining the walls and carpet of the sitting room, the metal angels that hung from the branches of the tree reflecting it in bright and dreamy blinks. He could hear the ticking of the wall clock and, if he held his breath, the distant joyful twittering of birds. Through blurs of condensation on the French windows he could see the back garden, covered in sparkling frost. Under the tree were four small piles of objects; of course he guessed they were probably nothing special, but at that instant, wrapped in their gold and silver skins, they looked so perfect and mysterious that James felt like a child again. The world seemed magical, full of infinite possibilities.

  He found his parents and grandmother in the kitchen, wearing dressing-gowns and making tea. Involuntarily he grinned at them. They all wished him happy Christmas and his grandmother hugged him. She had tears in her eyes, and as he felt the pressure of her limbs round his body, the warmth and wetness of her lips on his skin, James almost started to cry himself. It had been a long time since anyone had held him like that.

  The rest of the day passed pleasantly enough. They opened the presents - the usual anticlimax - and ate lunch. Afterwards, bloated and serene, he listened to his gran as she described all the friends who had died or been hospitalised in the last year. She wasn’t afraid of deat
h, she insisted, but of losing her marbles. She made James’s father promise he would have her ‘put down’ if the time ever came when she didn’t know who he was. There was a long silence after that.

  Some time later, James excused himself and went to the bathroom. It was pleasantly cool in comparison to the sitting room. He had only just unbelted his trousers and lowered himself on to the toilet seat when the doorbell rang. Carol singers, James guessed, but instead of a polite ‘no, thank you’ from his father, he was surprised to hear loud voices and clattering feet. Just at that moment, an enormous fart echoed in the bowl beneath him, and someone laughed. Despite the coolness, sweat trickled from his hairline.

  The doorbell went again and James groaned with pain. More voices, laughter, the harsh tapping of stilletos on tiles. Who were all these people? he wondered. What were they doing here? His father’s voice rang out, strangely loud and confident, silencing the others. James couldn’t make out what his father was saying, but he could tell it was meant to be witty from the intonation and the bursts of laughter that punctuated each pause in his story. After a minute or so, there was a particularly loud, long guffawing, and then a new silence, as though his father had grown serious. James tried to listen more closely. What was he saying? ‘. . . our son James, who is, as I speak . . .’