by Susan Sontag
What anchors the unstable consciousness of the narrator is the spaciousness and acuity of the details. As travel is the generative principle of mental activity in Sebald’s books, moving through space gives a kinetic rush to his marvelous descriptions, especially of landscapes. This is a propelled narrator.
Where has one heard in English a voice of such confidence and precision, so direct in its expression of feeling, yet so respectfully devoted to recording “the real”? D. H. Lawrence may come to mind, and the Naipaul of The Enigma of Arrival. But they have little of the passionate bleakness of Sebald’s voice. For this one must look to a German genealogy. Jean Paul, Franz Grillparzer, Adalbert Stifter, Robert Walser, the Hofmannsthal of “The Lord Chandos Letter,” Thomas Bernhard are a few of the affiliations of this contemporary master of the literature of lament and of mental restlessness. The consensus about English literature for most of the past century has decreed the relentlessly elegiac and lyrical to be inappropriate for fiction, overblown, pretentious. (Even so great a novel, and exception, as Virginia Woolf’s The Waves has not escaped these strictures.) Postwar German literature, mindful of how congenial the grandiosity of past art and literature, particularly that of German Romanticism, proved to the work of totalitarian mythmaking, has been suspicious of anything like the romantic or nostalgic relation to the past. But then perhaps only a German writer permanently domiciled abroad, in the precincts of a literature with a modern predilection for the anti-sublime, could indulge in so convincing a noble tone.
Besides the narrator’s moral fervency and gifts of compassion (here he parts company with Bernhard), what keeps this writing always fresh, never merely rhetorical, is the saturated naming and visualizing in words; that, and the ever-surprising device of pictorial illustration. Pictures of train tickets or a torn-out leaf from a pocket diary, drawings, a calling card, newspaper clippings, a detail from a painting, and, of course, photographs have the charm and, in many instances, the imperfections of relics. Thus, in Vertigo, at one moment the narrator loses his passport; or rather, his hotel loses it for him. And here is the document made out by the police in Riva, with—a touch of mystery—the G in W. G. Sebald inked out. And the new passport, with the photograph issued by the German consulate in Milan. (Yes, this professional foreigner travels on a German passport—at least he did in 1987.) In The Emigrants these visual documents seem talismanic. It seems likely that not all of them are genuine. In The Rings of Saturn they seem, less interestingly, merely illustrative. If the narrator speaks of Swinburne, there is a small portrait of Swinburne set in the middle of the page; if relating a visit to a cemetery in Suffolk, where his attention is captured by a funerary monument to a woman who died in 1799, which he describes in detail, from fulsome epitaph to the holes bored in the stone on the upper edges of the four sides, we are given a blurry little photograph of the tomb, again in the middle of the page.
In Vertigo the documents have a more poignant message. They say, It’s true, what I’ve been telling you—which is hardly what a reader of fiction normally demands. To offer evidence at all is to endow what has been described by words with a mysterious surplus of pathos. The photographs and other relics reproduced on the page become an exquisite index of the pastness of the past.
Sometimes they seem like the squiggles in Tristram Shandy; the author is being intimate with us. At other moments, these insistently proffered visual relics seem an insolent challenge to the sufficiency of the verbal. And yet, as Sebald writes in The Rings of Saturn, describing a favorite haunt, the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold, where he pored over entries from the log of a patrol ship anchored off the pier during the autumn of 1914, “Every time I decipher one of these entries I am astounded that a trail that has long since vanished from the air or the water remains visible here on the paper.” And, he continues, closing the marbled cover of the logbook, he pondered “the mysterious survival of the written word.”
[2000]
The Wisdom Project
ANOTHER BEAUTY, a wise, iridescent book by the Polish writer
Adam Zagajewski, dips in and out of many genres: coming-of-age memoir, commonplace book, aphoristic musings, vignettes, and defense of poetry—that is, a defense of the idea of literary greatness.
It is, to be sure, something of a misnomer to call Zagajewski a writer: a poet who also writes indispensable prose does not thereby forfeit the better title. Prose being the wordy affair it is, Zagajewski’s fills a good many more pages than his poems. But in literature’s canonical two-party system, poetry always trumps prose. Poetry stands for literature at its most serious, most improving, most intense, most coveted. “The author and reader always dream of a great poem, of writing it, reading it, living it.” Living the poem: being elevated by it; deepened; for a moment, saved.
From a great Polish writer we expect Slavic intensities. (The particular Polish nuance may require a little application.) Literature as soul nourishment has been a Slavic specialty for the last century and a half. It seems hardly surprising that Zagajewski, for all the calm and delicacy of his poet-voice, would hold a view of poetry more akin to that of Shelley than of Ashbery. As it happens, the reality of self-transcendence has even less credibility among younger Polish poets than among those writing in English. And Zagajewski’s transposed religious longings—to live, through poetry, on a “higher plane”—are never voiced without a grace note of mild self-deprecation. A recent collection of poems is called, with charming sobriety, Mysticism for Beginners. The world (of lyrical feeling, of ecstatic inwardness) to which poetry gives poets and their readers access is one that defective human nature bars us from inhabiting except fleetingly. Poems “don’t last,” Zagajewski observes wryly, “particularly the short lyric poems that prevail today.” All they can offer is “a moment of intense experience.” Prose is sturdier, if only because it takes longer to get through.
Another Beauty is Zagajewski’s third book of prose to appear in English. The first two are made up of pieces, some essayistic, some memoiristic, with titles. The new book is a flow of untitled (and unnumbered) short and not so short takes. Its mix of narratives, observations, portraits, reflections, reminiscences gives Another Beauty a high-velocity variance of mood and attack that we associate more with a volume of poems—lyric poems, anyway—which is a succession of discontinuous intensities, at different pitches of concern.
What kind of intensities? (That is, what kind of prose?) Thoughtful, precise; rhapsodic; rueful; courteous; prone to wonder. Then and now, here and there—the whole book oscillates, vibrates, with contrasts. (This is like this, but that is like that. Or: we expected this, but we got that.) And everything reeks of dissimilarity, savor, message, metaphor. Even the weather:
The meteorological depressions of Paris have an oceanic feel; the Atlantic dispatches them in the direction of the continent. The winds blow, dark clouds scurry across the city like racecars. The rain falls at a spiteful slant. At times the heavens’ face appears, a scrap of blue. Then it’s dark again, the Seine becomes a black pavement. The lowlands of Paris seethe with oceanic energy, thunderbolts pop like champagne corks. Whereas a typical Central European depression—centered somewhere above the Carpathians—behaves completely differently: it’s subdued and melancholy, one might say philosophical. The clouds barely move. They’re shaped differently; they’re like an enormous blimp drooping over Kraków’s Central Market. The light shifts gradually; the violet glow fades, giving way to yellow spotlights. The sun skulks somewhere behind silken clouds, illuminating the most varied strata of earth and sky. Some of the clouds resemble deep-sea fishes that have ascended to the surface and swim with mouths wide open, as if startled by the taste of air. This kind of weather can last for several days, the meek climate of Central Europe. And if, after lengthy deliberations, a thunderstorm does strike, it behaves as if it were stuttering. Instead of a sharp, decisive shot, it emits a series of drawn-out sounds, pa pa pa pa—an echo instead of a blast. Thunder on the installment plan.
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nbsp; In Zagajewski’s rendering, nature turns out to be wittily steeped in the bathos of national histories, with the crisp, bullying weather of Paris flaunting France’s indefatigable good fortune and Kraków’s tired, melancholy weather summing up Poland’s innumerable defeats and other woes. The poet can’t escape history, only transmute it sometimes, for purposes of bravura descriptiveness, into magic geography.
MAY YOU BE BORN in interesting times, runs the ancient (or at least proverbial) Chinese curse. Updated for our own hyperinteresting era, it might run: May you be born in an interesting place.
What Czeslaw Milosz calls, mordantly, “the privilege of coming from strange lands where it is difficult to escape history”—think of Poland, Ireland, Israel, Bosnia—prods and pinches, exalts and exhausts a writer like Zagajewski whose standards are set by world literature. History means strife. History means tragic impasse—and your friends being jailed or killed. History means perennial challenges to the nation’s very right to exist. Poland, of course, had two centuries of history’s chokehold—from the First Partition in 1772, which in a few years brought about the end of an autonomous state (not restored until after World War I), to the collapse of the Soviet-style regime in 1989.
Such countries—such histories—make it hard for their writers ever completely to secede from the collective anguish. Here is the testimony of another great writer living in a newer nation condemned to nonstop dread, A. B. Yehoshua:
You are insistently summoned to solidarity, summoned from within yourself rather than by an external compulsion, because you live from one newscast to the next, and it becomes a solidarity that is technical, automatic from the standpoint of its emotional reaction, because by now you are completely built to react that way and live in tension. Your emotional reactions to any piece of news about an Israeli casualty, a plane shot down, are predetermined. Hence the lack of solitude, the inability to be alone in the spiritual sense and to arrive at a life of intellectual creativity.
Yehoshua’s terms are identical with those of Zagajewski, whose first prose book in English is a collection of six pieces published in the early 1980s called Solidarity, Solitude. Solitude erodes solidarity; solidarity corrupts solitude.
The solitude of a Polish writer is always inflected by a sense of the community formed by the literature itself. Milosz, in his own great defense of poetry, the address that he delivered at the Jagiellonian University in 1989 entitled “With Polish Poetry Against the World,” pays homage to Polish poetry for having protected him “from sterile despair in emigration,” recalling that “in solitude too difficult and painful to recommend to anyone” there was always “the sense of duty toward my predecessors and successors.” For Milosz, born in 1911, a Polish writer may never escape being responsible to others. By this rule, the stellar counterexample of Witold Gombrowicz—in his fiction, in his legendarily egocentric, truculent Diary, in his brazen polemic “Against Poetry”—offers evidence, convulsive evidence, of the authority of idealism in Polish literature. History is present even by its absence, Milosz observes in a late book of prose, Milosz’s ABC’s; and the cult of altruism and high-mindedness flourishes, if perversely, in Gombrowicz’s denial of responsibility to anything beyond the self’s anarchic clamor, his ingenious harangues on behalf of the menial, the immature, the low-minded.
Squeezed right, every life can be construed as embodying exemplary experiences and historical momentousness. Even Gombrowicz could not help but see his life as exemplary, making something didactic—a rebuke to his origins—out of his gentry childhood, his precocious literary notoriety, his fateful, irrevocable emigration. And a writer whose love of literature still entailed, unresentfully, so much piety toward old masters, such eagerness to feed on the magnificent traditions on offer from the past, could hardly help seeing his life—at least his early circumstances—as some kind of representative destiny.
Soon after Zagajewski’s birth in October 1945 in the medieval Polish city of Lwów, his family was uprooted in the great displacements (and redrawings of maps) that followed the Yalta agreements of the Three Old Men, which put Lwów in the hands of the Soviet Union; and the poet grew up in the formerly German, now Polish, town of Gliwice, thirty miles from Auschwitz. In Two Cities, his second prose book translated into English, Zagajewski writes:
I spent my childhood in an ugly industrial city; I was brought there when I was barely four months old, and then for many years afterward
I was told about the extraordinarily beautiful city that my family had to leave.
The family mythology of an expulsion from paradise may have made him feel, he says, forever homeless. It also seems, on the evidence of his writing, to have made him an expert lover of cities—“beautiful, bewitching Kraków” above all, for which he left unredeemable Gliwice to attend university, and where he remained until he was thirty-seven.
Dates are sparse in Another Beauty, and the arrangement of stories-from-a-life is unchronological. But there is, implicitly, always a where, with which the poet’s heart and senses are in dialogue. Not the traveler, not even the émigré—most of the great Polish poets have gone westward, and Zagajewski is not one of the exceptions—but the continually stimulated city dweller is featured here. There are few living rooms and no bedrooms in Another Beauty, but more than a few public squares and libraries and trains. Once he’s past his student years, the occasional “we” disappears; there is only an “I.” Occasionally he will mention where he is writing: Zagajewski now lives in Paris and teaches one term each year at the University of Houston. “I’m strolling through Paris,” one entry begins. “And at this very moment I’m listening to the Seventh Symphony in Houston,” notes another. There are always two cities: Lwów and Gliwice, Gliwice and Kraków, Paris and Houston.
More poignant oppositions infuse this book: self and others, youth and age. There are plangent evocations of difficult elderly relatives and cranky professors: this portrait of the poet as a young man is striking for its tenderness toward the old. And the account of the decorous ardors, literary and political, of his student years sets his book quite at odds with the narcissistic purposes, and pointedly indiscreet contents, of most autobiographical writing today For Zagajewski, autobiography is an occasion to purge oneself of vanity, while advancing the project of self-understanding—call it the wisdom project—which is never completed, however long the life.
To describe oneself as young is to face that one is no longer young. And a pithy acknowledgment that the debilities of age approach, with death in their train, is one of the many observations that cut short a story from Zagajewski’s past. Telling the stories discontinuously, as glimpses, secures several good results. It keeps the prose dense, quick. And it invites telling only those stories that lead to some insight, or epiphany. There is a larger lesson in the very way of telling, a lesson in moral tone: how to talk about oneself without complacency. Life, when not a school for heartlessness, is an education in sympathy. The sum of the stories reminds us that in a life of a certain length and spiritual seriousness, change—sometimes not for the worse—is just as real as death.
ALL WRITING IS a species of remembering. If there is anything triumphalist about Another Beauty it is that the acts of remembering the book contains seem so frictionless. Imagining—that is, bringing the past to mental life—is there as needed; it never falters; it is by definition a success. The recovery of memory, of course, is an ethical obligation: the obligation to persist in the effort to apprehend the truth. This seems less apparent in America, where the work of memory has been exuberantly identified with the creation of useful or therapeutic fictions, than in Zagajewski’s lacerated corner of the world.
To recover a memory—to secure a truth—is a supreme touchstone of value in Another Beauty. “I didn’t witness the extermination of the Jews,” Zagajewski writes:
I was born too late. I bore witness, though, to the gradual process by which Europe recovered its memory. This memory moved slowly, more like a lazy, lowland river than
a mountain stream, but it finally, unambiguously condemned the evil of the Holocaust and the Nazis, and the evil of Soviet civilization as well (though in this it was less successful, as if reluctant to admit that two such monstrosities might simultaneously coexist).
That memories are recovered—that is, that the suppressed truths do reemerge—is the basis of whatever hope one can have for justice and a modicum of sanity in the ongoing life of communities.
Once recovered, though, even truth may become complacent and self-flattering. Thus, rather than provide yet one more denunciation of the iniquities and oppressiveness of the regime that was shut down in 1989, Zagajewski chooses to stress the benefits of the struggle against evil that flowed to the idealistic young in his portrayal of the flawed beginnings of his vocation, as a “political poet,” and his activities in dissident student and literary circles in the Kraków of the late 1960s and 1970s. (In 1968, Zagajewski was twenty-three years old.) In those heady days, poetry and activism rhymed. Both elevated, heightened; engagement in a just cause, like service to poetry, made you feel larger.
That every generation fears, misunderstands, and condescends to its successor—this, too, is a function of the equivalence of history and memory (history being what it is agreed on, collectively, to remember). Each generation has its distinctive memories, and the elapsing of time, which brings with it a steady accumulation of loss, confers on those memories a normativeness which cannot possibly be honored by the young, who are busy compiling their memories, their benchmarks. One of Zagajewski’s most moving portraits of elders is of Stefan Szuman, an illustrious member of the interwar Polish intelligentsia (he had known Stanislaw Witkiewicz and Bruno Schulz) and now a retired professor at the university living in isolation and penury. Its point is Zagajewski’s realization, thinking back, that he and his literary friends could only have seemed like fools and savages, “shaped by a postwar education, by new schools, new papers, new radio, new TV,” to the defeated, homely, embittered Szuman and his wife. The rule seems to be: each generation looks upon its successor generation as barbarians.