The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  At any rate, before we left the island I promised Pedro that I would fill in this gap in my memoirs, trusting at the same time that this would firm up the credibility of my jottings. For it is difficult enough to separate the rock-hard reality of certain of my characters from the ostensibly shameless dissimulation that can likewise be found in my account. All of it had to be written down just as someone experienced it, especially if this someone was prone to fall for other people’s prevarications. Many of the personages in my book took me and my Vigoleis for suckers. We were fooled—thereby enriching my life, by the way, and eventually that of my recollections. Poetry and Truth, ‘bizarre mystification’ and reality—I play my games with what I have actually experienced, to the despair of scholarly exegetes of the picaresque novel, those who insist upon the fictionality of my ‘Applied Recollections,’ although in the process they themselves are striding out on the path of untruth.

  All this loquacity, some readers might be thinking, just for the sake of two nameless human offspring? Yes, indeed. By reason of their right to life they belong in my book, where, Lord knows, so much weirdness has been left out. Consider, if you will, that I excised a good 500 pages from a manuscript that took me exactly nine months to produce. In keeping with my penchant toward nihilism, I burned them in the coal stove in our apartment on Helmersstraat in Amsterdam: an anti-herostratic, barbaric act that caused unspoken distress for Beatrice, but one that to this day she has never held against me.

  Barbaric? Perhaps. But is this the dangerous “Perhaps” to be found in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil? In case of doubt, let truth once more be told.

  Lausanne-Vennes, on the street of the poet Ysabelle de Montolieu, Spring 1981

  The Great Unknown Figure of German Literature

  The surprise could not have been greater when, in the autumn of 1953, a completely unknown author mounted the German literary stage and presented a 1,000-page book. This fellow was already fifty years old, and he arrived on the scene with multifarious life experiences, accumulated in no less than five different countries. He was German, but he lived in Amsterdam. In addition to his mother tongue, he was fluent in five other languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English. Up to now, he had barely made a name for himself—other than a few poems and translations, he had published nothing at all. So it was that readers and critics were astounded to confront a work that surpassed established norms for quantity and quality. This writer hit the literary world like a meteorite—gigantic, weighty, as if hailing from some alien place.

  Not everyone was prepared to welcome this intruder. But many who paid closer attention to him were enthusiastic, and have remained so. Among these was the writer Siegfried Lenz, who wrote in 1954: “There’s no disputing that this book just must be read. If ever a book deserved to be called a major event, this one is it.” A short time later, in a letter to his wife, the poet Paul Celan wrote, “I have just read a new German novel, which looks to me like a genuine work of art.” And finally, writing in Die Zeit in 1999, the best-selling Dutch author Maarten ‘t Hart exceeded all the previous hymns of praise: “For a long time I have believed that the greatest book of the current century is The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Telen.”

  Given such a cascade of praise, it is all the more curious that Thelen is no longer quite visible as a writer. In fact, it is quite puzzling that as the author of one of the best books of the twentieth century, he counts among the great unknown writers of our time. In 1953, he came forth with a work that had no comparable German analogue in its linguistic virtuosity, depth of experience, and narrative variety. But the major critics in Germany were writing about very different books. In the current histories of German literature, as in the major reference works on the same subject, Thelen is mentioned, at best, in passing. But if there are important literary discoveries to be made as we look back on the last century, we must surely cite his name and that of his magnum opus: Albert Vigoleis Thelen and his Island of Second Sight.

  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.

  “We belonged together”

  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.

  This is surely one of the reasons for the extraordinary quality of Thelen’s book—for its grand humor and its abundance of ideas. The twenty-year gap allowed him to view his characters and their doings in a wholly different manner than if he had written things down directly, as they happened. How might Thelen’s Mallorca book have looked if he had written it while still on the island, or directly thereafter? Perhaps we would have in our hands a completely standard travelogue of the type produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thelen, we may surmise, would have described the island, its places, its people, and its culture—but not much more.

  Thelen’s “Cactus Style”

  When Moby-Dick was first published, Herman Melville’s contemporaries were disappointed. They regarded as superfluous—indeed as annoying—the abundance of metaphysical reflections and technical digressions, especially those that concerned the hunting of whales. What they wanted, instead, was Melville the travel writer, not the philosopher and whaling expert.

  Thelen, too, was criticized for his digressive form of narration. Some contemporary reviewers of the Island would have preferred a book with fewer ancillary passages, a work that clung more firmly to the narrative thread and moved faster. It is fortunate for literary history that this was not the course Thelen pursued and that, instead, he found his own inimitable style and remained true to it. In the Island he himself calls this his “cactus style”: “it [forms] branches and offshoots at random, like a cactus with its urge to sprout buds just where you would never expect them.”

  This “cactus style” places Thelen on a par with the three other first-rank practitioners of digressive narrative: Laurence Sterne, Jean Paul, and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel. These writers, too, were blamed by contemporary critics for their numerous digressions. But what the critics overlooked was the fact that the digressions were neither padding nor extraneous material, but elements of methodical narrative technique.

  Thelen, too, does not race from A to B. He doesn’t race at all; he ambles. At times he crawls. He enters secondary pathways and often takes three steps backward—sometimes into his own childhood. Often, when the reader wishes to know how the main story will continue, Thelen inserts a retarding passage. One wishes to call out to him, “That’s enough! Take us back to your plot! Tell us what happened next with Vigoleis and Beatrice!” But no, Thelen prefers to go off on a tangent. And if you choose to follow him there, you will be rewarded. In the end, after over 700 pages, you are pleased that nothing and no one has forced the author to abandon his “cactus style.”

  But just what is The Island of Second Sight, if it is so much more than a Mallorca novel in the form of a travelogue? It is a microcosm of life itself. It is a receptacle containing characters and events, a reservoir of learning, a linguistic treasury, and above all it is what Friedrich Schlegel demanded of any work of art, a “continuum of unending reflection.” It is so full of dazzling figures and happenings that even after repeated readings we have the opinion that we haven’t read all of the stories. That is why the book is inexhaustible, and why it is quite impossible to describe its contents.

  It is of course possible to summarize the contents in three sentences: Vigoleis and Beatrice travel to Mallorca to offer emergency aid to Beatrice’s dying brother. Because of their generosity, they experience turbulent financial straits that eventually threaten their very existence. And the long arm of Nazism and the nascent Spanish Civil War finally force them to flee to Switzerland.

  But such a precis comes nowhere near grasping the essence of the Island. The book’s vitality derives from the thousand stories it contains, such as the following: Vigoleis, the man of letters who is now financially ruined, keeps himself above water by giving German language lessons. He takes on a young American as a private student, and explains the lack of furniture in his and Beatrice’s apartment as the pedagogical method of the future, one that is his own personal invention and one that is destined to enter the annals of pedagogy. He calls it the “Single-Chair Method.” After several weeks, the naive pupil learns the truth and makes a sudden departure. People later speculate that just one word from the impoverished writer would have sufficed for the wealthy American to fill Vigoleis’ apartment with handsome furniture.

  This story says more about Thelen’s magnum opus than any plot summary, because with this tale, Thelen touches on two basic themes of human nature: comedy and tragedy. He approaches the tragic involvements of his characters, especially those of his hero Vigol
eis, with the stylistic means of comedy, and he succeeds at this only because he observes events from a distance.

  In addition to the chronological gap between real experiences and their depiction in writing, Thelen makes use of another technique in order to create distance: he invents a character who is said to have had the same experiences as himself. And he gives this character a name that is identical with his own second name: Vigoleis.

  Thelen consciously fashions a complex narrative construct. He reports to us what he experienced on Mallorca. That is, he offers us a portion of his autobiography, completely in keeping with the stipulation he devised in his “Notice to the Reader”: “All the people in this book are alive or were at one time… the author included.” But because he does not wish to hold rigidly to historic accuracy, he places a veil over what is true and what he has invented. The material is autobiographical, but in depicting it he exercises poetic license. Thelen is interested first and foremost in the stories that he can gather from what actually happened. In a 1967 to Günther Padelwitz, he explains his methodology this way, taking as an example an episode in a later work, when the first official act announced by the director of a Catholic hospital made it mandatory for each nun to submit to a thorough cleansing. “Not one of them climbed into the bathtub. Instead, Dr. Vasco was dismissed and brought to trial. He was sentenced to a year in jail for moral turpitude, lascivious advances to nuns, etc. —I devote a chapter to this case, and I ‘apply’ in the narration my own take on the events. Thus my ‘applied recollections.’”