‘There was a problem with his health.’
He meant Max. I said that my sense of the Sebaldian voyage was of a man who is not quite well, walking through a landscape of coincidences and elective affinities in search of a sepia photograph of a discontinued self. Trembling slightly, Stephen thought I was commenting on his own reaction, the physical difficulties, the struggle for breath provoked by a confrontation with overwhelming blocks of reflective glass, security-controlled parking spaces under supermarkets, gaudy Ideas Stores in place of serious book-lined libraries.
‘There was a sort of breakdown, as in Austerlitz, perhaps brought on by overwork, the usual conflict between the demands of an academic job, which he took very seriously, and his compulsion to write. I don’t know.’
This breakdown, in whatever form it manifested itself, struck me as significant, a state of consciousness uncannily connected to the area through which we were walking.
‘And I also believe,’ Stephen said, ‘there is that old familiar writer thing, money. Even when Max’s books were selling well, he had his family and a big house to keep up, the rectory at Upgate in a funny village called Poringland.’
Arriving at the high wall of the Jewish burial ground in Brady Street, I realised that the site I pictured as crucial to the close-woven topography of Sebald’s Whitechapel was not here, but further to the east, off Alderney Road. Another hidden Jewish cemetery and one that Stephen said Sebald would have seen when his train from Norwich ground to a halt, as it inevitably would, on its approach to Liverpool Street. Brady Street was my own itch: the fact that I’d never, in more than thirty years of beating its bounds, succeeded in gaining access, gave it a special potency. The cemetery, bolstering the long-demolished Peabody Buildings with the open-air chapel, and close to the vanished Roebuck pub on the corner of Durward Street, was a cherished riddle in the eccentric mythology that informed all my negotiations with Stephen’s beloved territory.
Once again, he stood confused. ‘It’s so hard to remember where I walked with Sebald and where I’m recalling accounts of fictions deriving from our conversations. I used to go through Shadwell to Limehouse and over to Greenwich all the time – but did I ever do that with Max?’
Being with Stephen, such a youthful veteran, an articulate ghost among ghosts, opened the wall. Builders were taking down the lodge, the cemetery guardian’s house, and we were free, for the first time in years, to stroll into the screened enclosure.
‘When we were together,’ Stephen said, ‘one walker always absorbed the other. Walkers became the walk, the place. But Max also ventured on his own. He talks about stepping out, as darkness falls, and wandering for hours, as far as Chigwell and Romford, Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park.’
Inside the Brady Street burial ground, we moved apart. I was trespassing on a carpet of dry brown leaves, nettle beds, star-blue anchusa among the overwhelming green, but Stephen, following the line of an erased path, was at home. He didn’t need to speak or to make reference to any of the fortuitously revealed details. He stood, fluffing his feathers: as poet, priest of place, shoulders sloped like folded wings; magenta scarf, scarlet lining to anorak, black-rimmed spectacles and aureole of wizardly white hair. I photographed decorations on sepulchres; a grey cinema of arms reaching out of clouds, chipped angels balancing the scales of judgement.
When we reached the far corner, where the bright yellow tubes of some new development opportunity rose above the old walls, Stephen recalled one particular walk with Sebald. They came to Wilton’s Music Hall, near Wellclose Square, to witness Fiona Shaw ripping into Eliot’s The Waste Land; blarneying the voices, perched on the high stage before an immense plaster backdrop, a slab of masonry that caught the shadowy outline of the performer and threw it back, in my conceit, towards Ratcliffe Highway, Wapping and the Thames. I had been in that audience too, without noticing this pair, who had broken away from an unresolved expedition, to make the double hit of Eliot and the recently opened music hall (former bar and brothel).
I returned, with Stephen, years later, when we met on that same stage, to give readings in honour of Sebald, and to launch a number of commemorative volumes. Chairs were arranged in a semi-circle as for a séance, while witness after witness stepped forward, making their sober testaments and hoping to invoke the shade of the absent author. ‘One Well-Known, Yet Unknown’: as it says above a waterless drinking fountain on Whitechapel Road.
AS Byatt, I remember, was suffering from a heavy cold. As if being there, in the cabin of that cold room above the theatre, was a required territorial penance. When the disciples and posthumous publishers droned on with their heartfelt tributes to a loss we all felt, a line from Brian Catling came into my head: ‘Safe but elsewhere’.
After Brady Street, it felt like a few minutes’ stroll down Mile End Road before we reached Alderney Road, which had never been anything to me but a Sebald divination, a chapter on which I was not permitted to trespass. Stephen struggled, visibly, with split vision, past and present; buildings he didn’t recognise, buildings that had disappeared or migrated to places they were never supposed to be. Wrong city, wrong country. Wrong author.
The Austerlitz burial ground was secure, and not to be accessed, not today. YOU MAY BE REQUIRED TO WAIT WHILE WE CONFIRM YOUR IDENTITY. YOU MAY BE REQUIRED TO RETURN. Too many intrusive readers. Too many photographs. Respectful groups of folk as old as we were played with notebooks in the deep pockets of their sensible rainwear, as they tried to identify the house in which Austerlitz suffered his fugue and knew the clamp of death on the heart: the terrible recognition of the fact of having ‘never really been alive’. One of the stillbirths of literature.
And then the convalescence, which is Sebald’s way of writing about St Clement’s Hospital, a bleak institution overlooking another East London wildwood, the tangled nature reserve of Tower Hamlets Cemetery. And here Sebald’s album does overlap with my own. I spent many lunchbreaks, in my period as a Limehouse gardener, carrying my sandwiches to this park; listening to the trains, contemplating the prison block of the hospital-asylum. Pale lights in barred windows. No visible human traffic. Tall chimneys and an Italianate clock tower. Suffering is not contained, it burrows. It contaminates. We carry it away.
BRITISH STREET, it says on the road between hospital and cemetery. Like the title of a state-of-the-nation film by Lindsay Anderson: Britannia Hospital. British Street leading to Hamlets Way. Glades. Dells. Groves. Meadows. Sanctuaries. A cemetery plan like a jigsaw map of Texas.
Slow down. Lose yourself among walks laid out with sufficient complexity to confuse the dead. To keep them to allocated spaces. To the chipped ballast of memorial slabs holding them in the ground. It is the dry whisper the trees make, the worrying at a catchment of leaves. And there is another sound beneath and beyond all that. Trains in the trees. Tangled poplar and horse chestnut, linden and ash, as a buffer against the agitation of Mile End Road, the sullen mass of the hospital.
Stone ships tossed on the pubic curl of waves. Severed hands, in oval dishes, pointing at the earth in Masonic allegiance. Autointerners. Premature hibernators. Ironworkers, medical men, widows without number. Tribes of children, new arrivals borrowing the identity of the latest loss. Babes who stayed here just long enough to register names they would never occupy. And the keeper of the Dog Inn at Upton: Her short sweet life was as the dream of an angel. I plant myself on a green metal bench dedicated to the memory of Bob Shorter, in the shade of Lime Tree Walk. It is a good place, but I am too restless to stay there, dawn to dusk, learning to let go. Rooting and rootless.
I wondered if Sebald ever wrote about driving. The published books deliver a man most comfortable with a repertoire of waiting: station hotels, Swiss lakes, views of snowcapped mountains, flights into northern cities, hikes through salt marshes on sandy paths. And always in expectation of that single justifying encounter: the trapdoor of flashback, the skewed quotation. The misremembered echo of a translated text. The page floating beneath the surface
of an urban canal.
The Sebald story, the one he would never be able to reconstruct, ends in a car. It was a heart attack, Stephen thought, on the road between the university and the Poringland Rectory that demanded so much care and financial support. His daughter Anna was with him, a swerve into the path of an oncoming lorry. In the only photograph I have seen of the celebrated walker’s house, two large cars are parked on the flooded gravel drive.
Elegies to Sebald, especially The Rings of Saturn, became a cultural industry, stalking footprints that were never there, unpicking the play of meticulously crafted fictions, making them ordinary. And bringing the faithful, in the spirit of pilgrimage, to venues like Snape Maltings, for readings, recitals, concerts and confessions. A cult of managed English melancholy and weekend breaks in moody winter resorts.
At one of these sombre gatherings, yet another Sebald Festschrift, Rachel Lichtenstein was shown a photograph of the author standing outside a hotel, a bunch of books under his arm. She wrote to me in a rush of excitement.
Stephen Watts came for the weekend, wonderful to spend time with the legendary poet and with Robert Macfarlane…
During the evening I was approached by an academic from UEA who worked with Sebald for many years and who has spent the last few years compiling a 600 page volume of essays and newly translated works by and about him. She told me, for the front cover, they are using a photograph of Max, standing outside a hotel in Aldeburgh, holding, amongst other things, a copy of Rodinsky’s Whitechapel. You can imagine how thrilled I was.
I asked Stephen if he had presented Sebald with Rachel’s book, her illustrated tour through the labyrinth of family history, an outreach of the Princelet Street recluse’s room. He thought not, but he couldn’t be sure.
The interrogation of the photograph of this man, under what I look to be the overhanging thatch of a tree, outside a seaside hotel, a bundle of books clutched against his heart, became as momentous for Rachel as her first encounter with David Rodinsky’s garret. Sebald’s brow is deeply gouged in ripples of concern. One eye is shut against the sun, the other wary. I looked again: no tree, but a hanging basket with geraniums and daisies.
Lichtenstein, in Estuary, her 2016 publication, said that Sebald was ‘the person whose writing had had a deeper impact on me than any other artist’. She felt that, in discovering her Whitechapel book clasped by this man, she had been given ‘a blessing from beyond the grave’. So she decided to abandon previous plans and to strike off into Essex for her account of the Thames Estuary. Her impulse was a standard literary conceit: in stepping away from what we think we know, we magnify our debt to the ground we leave behind, mother of stories.
Poring over the Aldeburgh photograph with my magnifying glass, I identified a scrap of paper on which Sebald might have been making notes for his Snape Maltings lecture. You can pick out the name Joseph Cornell. Discussing the way Max seeded his texts with images, and the status of those images as ‘found’ and manipulated, it became an accepted critical reflex to make the comparison with the New York artist/collector. Jim Schley, reviewing After Nature and On the Natural History of Destruction, wrote: ‘Photos are used in most of his books, not as illustrations but rather as visual detritus, ciphers or enigmatic flotsam, as in the sculptural collages of Joseph Cornell.’
And just as the snapshot of Sebald with his copy of Rodinsky’s Whitechapel haunted Rachel, so a minor discovery of my own, when I went searching for background information on the enigmatic German author, and pondered his choice of the commuter village of Poringland for his years of employment at UEA, struck home. Poringland is known, if at all, as the inspiration for John Crome’s painting The Poringland Oak (1818–20); a work which is now to be found in the Tate Britain collection. Crome is frequently credited as the founder of the Norwich School, a group of nineteenth-century artists notable for the elevation of landscape painting as a serious concern: the primary subject of the craftsman’s attention, rather than a strategic backdrop against which to show off clothes, property, possessions, children, dogs and wives.
I was interested in the ambiguity of that name, Poringland, as it hovered undecided between humours, wet and dry: pouring land. A clothed boy looking at a naked child who is reaching for his naked mother: Crome’s figures are an extension of terrain. Sexuality is distributed through the soft thrust of an ancestral oak and the play of diaphanous clouds. Local historians say that the tower on the horizon ‘could easily be All Saints Church’. The sky will darken, the bathers disappear. Sebald is buried at St Andrew’s in Framingham Earl, a short walk from the Rectory.
Returned to Liverpool Street station, after parting from Stephen Watts, I took my notes to a Caffè Nero on London Wall and wrote them up while I waited for the photographs to be processed at Snappy Snaps on Bishopsgate. A blue plaque on the north side of the road recorded the site of the second Bethlehem Hospital, the Bedlam of infamous legend.
Wallet of photographs safely tucked away, I thought I was done, but that was not the end, it never is. Now the Jewish burial ground in Alderney Road, and the fading red notice – BEWARE GUARD DOGS – on the high wall, was established as a meeting point with Stephen, leading us, after necessary diversions, to a particular grave in Tower Hamlets Cemetery. An amputee angel on a tilting plinth. A remnant from a city of the dead, as Sebald has it, after an earthquake. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away.
‘A terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that I had never really been alive, or was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death,’ Sebald wrote. The author’s private face, in snatched photographs, like the capture outside the hotel in Aldeburgh, seems to pass through the alchemy of copying and recopying, layer after layer, until it fades from reach. ‘At some point in the past,’ Sebald said, ‘I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life.’
We return to Alderney Road with the ambition of identifying the house in which Jacques Austerlitz lived. The notion is absurd, house and man exist only in the context of the novel. Standing on the pavement outside Carlyle Mews, an address you can locate, listening to the voices of children in the little park across the road, we persuade ourselves that the atmosphere is right; decades of grime on dull yellow bricks, darkly indented windows, the mews passage.
On the buttress of the crumbling whitewashed wall of the burial ground, I registered – but only when I had the photograph in my hand – black marks hinting at a full-face portrait. The holes for the eyes, nose, mouth are too accurately placed to be the result of natural decay and damage. I felt uncomfortable, towards the end of Grant Gee’s film, Patience (After Sebald), when smoke in a hedge is frozen, like a miraculous revelation, as a profile of the author; a premonition of his road accident and death. But here I was, in Alderney Road, behaving in the same way, and treating a very ordinary wall as a death mask. If I had stumbled on anything, it was a nice example of Sebald’s humour.
From Alderney Road, travelling along less familiar ways, through railway tributaries and tranquil squares, we felt as if we were stepping on the faces of the dead, a causeway of unreachable histories. The burial ground with its section reserved for the post-1657 planting of Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain, returned to England by Cromwell, flowed into a second cemetery, now open to outsiders, set among the building site that is Queen Mary College. Dark envelopes dressed with a super-abundance of Spanish bluebells.
On Bancroft Road, with direct access to the university denied while mechanical diggers chewed up the ground, we confronted episodes from our different pasts. I regretted the ‘temporary closure’ of the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives Reading Room where I had been given the freedom to rummage through file-boxes of pamphlets and cuttings, when I was a gardener looking for information on Hawksmoor’s churches. The memory of that dusty chamber with its insulation of mysterious volumes summoned the photograph Sebald inserts in Austerlitz to suggest the ‘crowded study’ where his character works, ‘not far from the British Museum’. Thi
s airless box is ‘like a stockroom of books and papers’ with hardly any space left for its occupant. Here, surely, was the studio Stephen had occupied for many years beside Toynbee Hall in Spitalfields.
Stephen, who was vague about certain sections of our walk, showed no hesitation among the bifurcating paths of the overgrown reservation of Tower Hamlets Cemetery; one of those places where I invariably succeed in losing myself. We were soon standing beside the plinth referenced by Sebald, his armless angel.
In a haunted voice, slow and steady, Stephen intoned the passage about ‘statues of angels, many of them wingless or otherwise mutilated, turned to stone… at the very moment when they were about to take flight from the earth’. I could believe, quite easily, that Stephen, like the traumatised Jacques Austerlitz, ‘had learnt by heart the names and dates of birth and death of those buried here’.
A few weeks later, courtesy of a radio programme on Sebald’s heritage, and after brief visits to Manchester and Norwich, we found ourselves inside the Alderney Road burial ground. Max had reached the point where he confessed that black and white photographs were ‘all that was left’ of the life of Austerlitz. The fictional character rings the bell, beside the locked door in the wall, and is admitted to the resting place of the Ashkenazi community, the lime trees and lilacs.
As with so many private London gardens, complacent behind a screen of houses, strategic plantings, time slows its momentum, and visitors reach for the right place in which to sit or stand in silence. The young radio producer, with her typed list of questions, to feed cues into an approved script, employed Stephen as the spirit of place – with the unspoken requirement to channel Austerlitz. A predatory ghost who had already occupied his studio and stolen his rucksack.
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