Leavetaking

by Peter Weiss

  PRAISE FOR LEAVETAKING AND PETER WEISS

  “This is a dynamic work, a re-creation and exorcism of the past rather than a recollection of it in tranquility. Brief though it is, its truthfulness and imaginative power are such as to involve the reader in what may have begun as an act of personal liberation.”

  —MICHAEL HAMBURGER, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

  “[Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance] is a magnum opus which sees itself, almost programmatically, not only as the expression of an ephemeral wish for redemption, but as an expression of the will to be on the side of the victims at the end of time.”

  —W. G. SEBALD, FROM ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION

  “Bertolt Brecht comes automatically to mind, but Weiss’s style has its own hypnotic force.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “Peter Weiss is one of the most interesting dramatists writing now … To accept his work plain is to miss the whole point; he seems to want to put on stage huge explosions of the instinctual life, instincts that have become politicized, but are not merely politics.”

  —ELIZABETH HARDWICK, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  “A great novel … Weiss’s account takes us through familiar territory by new routes, so that we see the landmarks as we have never seen them before.”

  —THE HUDSON REVIEW

  “Must be counted among the most important European authors of the 20th century.”

  —THE COMPLETE REVIEW

  “Yes, The Aesthetics of Resistance is intimidating. But it is also exhilaratingly strange, compelling, and original. Readers who dare enter this demanding verbal landscape will not come away empty-handed.”

  —BOOKFORUM

  LEAVETAKING

  PETER WEISS (1916–1982) was born in the Prussian province of Brandenburg to a Jewish father, who had converted to Lutheranism, and a Christian mother. He spent his childhood in Bremen and, as an adolescent, began his studies in the visual arts in Berlin. In the early thirties, with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, the family immigrated first to England and then Sweden. Weiss studied photography and painting at the Polytechnic School of Photography and the Prague Art Academy. He began to correspond with Hermann Hesse, who became a friend and mentor. In 1939, Weiss followed his family to Stockholm, where he would spend the rest of his life, receiving Swedish citizenship in 1946. His first play, The Tower, was produced in 1950, and he joined the Swedish Experimental Film Studio soon after. But his greatest international success was in the theater: in 1965, the director Peter Brook staged his play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade in London and New York, winning multiple Tony Awards. Weiss’s politically engaged drama also included The Investigation, about the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. A multitalented artist, Weiss wrote fiction throughout his career, and he spent the last decade of his life working on a monumental three-part historical novel, The Aesthetics of Resistance, which W. G. Sebald referred to in On the Natural History of Destruction as a “magnum opus.” Weiss died at the age of sixty-five in Stockholm.

  CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON is an acclaimed Canadian poet and translator. He is a cofounder of Arc Poetry Magazine and the Harbinger Poetry imprint of Carleton University Press.

  SVEN BIRKERTS is a literary critic and essayist. His many books include The Gutenberg Elegies and The Other Walk.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  LEAVETAKING

  Originally published under the title Abschied von den Eltern

  Copyright © 1961 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

  Translation copyright © 1967 by Calder Publications

  Published by arrangement with Alma Classics Ltd.

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Sven Birkerts

  First Melville House printing: July 2014

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weiss, Peter, 1916–1982.

  [Abschied von den Eltern. English]

  Leavetaking / Peter Weiss; Translated by Christopher

  Levenson; Introduction by Sven Birkerts.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61219-331-1 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-61219-332-8 (ebook)

  I. Levenson, Christopher, 1934– translator. II. Title.

  PT2685.E5A6213 2014

  833′.914—dc23

  2013045408

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Epigraph

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Sven Birkerts

  First Page

  INTRODUCTION BY SVEN BIRKERTS

  The German-born novelist, dramatist, artist, and filmmaker Peter Weiss, who adopted Swedish nationality after World War II, is part of that generation of German-speaking writers (including Heinrich Böll, Alfred Andersch, and Max Frisch) who came into young manhood in the years preceding the war and whose work almost inevitably explores questions of power and morality within that historical frame. In the decade leading up to his death, Weiss—who is best known for his play Marat/Sade—was finishing what many consider to be his masterwork, the three-volume The Aesthetics of Resistance, of which only the first volume has been translated into English. That novel, as its title suggests, takes on the vast subject of the European opposition to the rise of Nazism. Another play of Weiss’s, The Investigation, meanwhile, assembles documentary evidence to assess the findings of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. His claim on posterity would seem to be as a key figure of witness and moral inquiry.

  Readers may well be surprised to discover, therefore, that the writer had a powerful and highly refined subjective register as well, displayed in his surrealism-inspired paintings (he’d studied first to be a painter) as well as in a pair of imagistically compressed autobiographical novellas, Leavetaking (1961) and Vanishing Point (1962). Indeed, so intense is Weiss’s sentence-by-sentence charge in this mode that one could be excused for assuming it is his central expressive register.

  Coming-of-age is, of course, one of the great archetypes. And the basic narrative template is familiar. The narrator/protagonist is depicted as alienated from the outside world as well as from family; there are bitter struggles over the failure to conform. Great ambitions and great loves are nurtured in an uncomprehended privacy. Until eventually comes the breakaway. He (in this version of archetype, it is usually a young man) experiences the travails of formation—conflicts, losses, and sunderings—but at last finds himself standing, if teetering a bit, on his own two feet.

  There is nothing new in Weiss’s use of this narrative pattern in Leavetaking. The stages are ones we recognize, yet through every page this short work is arresting, confirming—if
confirmation were needed—that much important art is a matter of the how rather than the what. Which is not to discount the subject matter, only to stress how often it is the treatment that shows the hand of the master.

  Leavetaking projects a distinctive tone, a decisive confidence, and captures with complete freshness a sensibility in development. This confidence is manifest immediately in Weiss’s declarative opening:

  I have often tried to come to an understanding of the images of my father and my mother, to take bearings and steer a course between rebellion and submission. But I have never been able to grasp and interpret the essential being of these two figures standing at either side of the gateway of my life. Both died almost at the same time and it was then I saw how deeply estranged I was from them.

  Though Weiss begins with an admission of uncertainty, he does so with a frankness that will be carried through in every line of this unscrolling account of his younger years. I use the adjective “unscrolling” deliberately, for the author appears to be an early pioneer of the unparagraphed text, and the visually effortful—at times frustrating—business of reading this novel-as-memoir from start to finish is clearly part of its intent. But what is such a choice of presentation stating? That life will pause for no organizing afterthought; that in the chaos of becoming, immediacy is the rule; that it is better to preserve this sense of an undifferentiated onrush than to try to wrest from events an impression of circumstance mastered in retrospect?

  Weiss achieves these effects, and after a few pages during which we experience that “irritable reaching after fact and reason” that Keats described in one of his letters, there is (there was for me) a shift to acceptance. While it is not exactly a stream of consciousness that the author is deploying, it is definitely a refusal of easy narrative footholds. Weiss wants us to take away a sense of relentlessness, of exacerbated awareness, the sensations of a life that has thus far (it ends in the narrator’s young manhood) attained no vantage of comprehension.

  This suspension of narrative norms extends deep into the structure of Weiss’s account, for though the events that take him from his earliest days to the emancipation augured in the title are narrated in essential sequence, they in no way correspond to expected proportions. Particular childhood moments distend into pockets of duration, requiring our close regard of the least granular detail. Events and transitions that would seem to demand extended exposition are sometimes accomplished within the space of a sentence, and as the sentences come to us in undifferentiated flow, the imagined import is radically reframed. Changes of country, whole years of immersed activity—as they used to say of those small highway-side towns (before the advent of the commercial strip), “If you blink, you’ll miss it.” What we experience is the absolutism of memory, memory given full editorial control, a project not unlike the one pursued by Virginia Woolf in her densely lyrical—and sometimes maddeningly intermittent—essays, like “A Sense of the Past.” The work is doing double duty, offering at once an exposure to the sensations and events of the life and a portrait of the mechanism of recollection itself. Welding the two together is a feeling, understood explicitly at the very end, that the whole presentation reveals the psychological stages of the narrator’s core formation, what he understands as his destiny as an artist and as a man.

  The original ambush of recollection, which leads us back into the first stirrings of this formation, happens in the narrator’s parents’ house, where he and his siblings have gathered after the death of his father—the second of his parents to die—in order to bury him and divide up his possessions. The grim, affectless scene reveals straightaway that all members of the family are estranged and that emotional alienation is the banner under which they move. Weiss stands in the echoing space, looking out through the tinted panes of the glass door to the garden. He reflects:

  At the time of this viewing, my basic nature had already been formed, and only when the observing, controlling part of me wearies and my consciousness loses its hold do impulses arise in me out of my earliest life, and it is in half sleep, in dreams, in periods of depression that I re-experience the helplessness, the feeling of having been handed over and the blind rebellion of the time when strange hands tamed, kneaded, and did violence to my being.

  The key signature has now been established. From here on the author carries us along through a subjective impressionism that is at once fluid in its feeling, rolling on and on through the long, unparagraphed sentences that are strikingly—vividly—particular in their detailing. As when he captures his early sense of his street, which “in the green twilight was full of the trundling of drays laden high with barrels,” and where the “heavy, sweet smell swelled in waves from the breweries.”

  Such a crowd of sensory recollections! Alongside these, gradually emerging like a photograph in a developing tray, is a portrait of the family: the distant mother; the overworked and submissive father; the siblings; and the strong counterbalancing presence of Augusta, cook and housekeeper. It is Augusta who takes the boy out on what is for him an epic exploration of the city; in her presence is the world made vivid and tactile, a complete contrast to his sense of the cold, quiet rooms at home.

  In these opening pages, too, the narrator meets the neighbor boy, Friederle, a sadistic tormentor—every young life has one—who we will later learn, very obliquely, became an enthusiastic partisan of the Reich. The obliquity of the revelation matters here, for it is very much Weiss’s intent—even though his coming-of-age is contemporaneous with the rise of National Socialism and, later, the war—to have the focus reflect emphatically a young man’s nonpolitical self-absorption. We deduce the historical situation, and here and there get flashes of the temper of the times, but the intensities represented are nearly all interior and private. There is no question, though, that the unstated historical is present throughout—it saturates the pages with atmospheric dread; we feel it everywhere in the wings.

  As the narrative progresses, Weiss plaits together various thematic strands. These can be itemized—named—but doing so suggests that they are separable, when in fact they are not. Sexuality, struggles for autonomy within the family, the rearing up of a powerful expressive impulse—these and other forces are densely entangled here. Uncensored eruptions of adolescent lust veer toward the incestuous. Their repressed intensity underscores the guilt, rage, and isolation that have everything to do with the relations between father and son, and, too, with the boy’s need to paint images and, later, to begin writing.

  To try to elicit a clear narrative or thematic sequence from a work that has evolved its uniquely expressive form precisely to convey the dense subjective interpenetration of event and implication seems a violation. Indeed, the point, manifest in the prose throughout, is that the business of formations, as experienced and as then later refracted through memory, is profoundly alchemical. We need only take tissue samples of the prose, and these can be taken anywhere.

  Midway through the work, for instance, with a characteristic abruptness, we learn of his sister Margit’s mysterious, traumatic death. The event is unexpected, unprepared-for; it rears up with a frightening hallucinatory force. Weiss characterizes it as “the beginning of the break-up of our family,” intensifying all sorrow, heightening the already painful distances between the narrator and his parents, neither of whom have any way to integrate the loss. Here, as elsewhere, the movement of the prose showcases Weiss’s way of bending together exposition, confessionalism, and the wounding vibrancy of select details. He describes his own state of mind after Margit’s death:

  Past events rose up in me like a gasping for breath, like the pressure of a straitjacket, the past would hem me around in a slow, black seepage of hours, and then suddenly recede and become nothing and allow a brief glimpse of freedom. Then I saw my parents and was full of sympathy and compassion. They had given us all that they had to give, they had given us food and clothing and a civilized home, they had given us their security and their orderliness and they could not understand
why we did not thank them for it. They could never understand why we drifted away from them … Thus we confronted each other, children dissatisfied, parents insulted … My parents’ embarrassment became my embarrassment. Their voices live on in me. I chastised and beat myself and drove myself to forced labor. Again and again the swamp fever of inadequacy gripped me. There I was again, a failure at school, sitting locked into my room, and the warm seething life outside was unattainable. There sat my mother next to me and heard me repeat my lessons and I could get nothing right. Schwein is pig, pig comes from to pick—pick, pick, pick, and she took hold of me by the scruff of the neck and pressed my nose into the vocabulary book, pick, pick, pick, so now perhaps you’ll remember it.

  We note the piling on of urgent analogies, the rhetorical repetitions of exposition (“they had given us …”), and then the insistent and tactile immediacy of the mother’s coercions. The pressure builds as Weiss creates the picture, the inward accounting, of how it was, from earliest childhood constraints on through the long years of psychological entrapment, during which he worked in a reluctant servitude as his father’s assistant, all the while building what rocket engineers call the “exit velocity.”

  However, even attaining that is a fraught and long-term process. It requires that the young man get away, leave the country—there is a Hesse-like “master” he seeks out—but then, following a Beckettian script of enmeshment, he becomes entrapped again. He returns home and finds himself thrust back down into what feels like a timeless well of failure. It’s as if the terms of life are set in stone. But then at long last, and seemingly not because of anything he has done or prepared, but rather because something long in the maturing is finally ready, he does break free: he achieves his eponymous leavetaking. And this, when it comes—because of the prose—does not feel like a resolution from without, but very much an attainment from within, a moment destined from the start, its arrival encoded in his processing of every last twist and turn in his experience.