5th December 2023
Elsewhere on this website, I have included WG Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) as one of my dozen favourite pieces of fiction. I have now caught up with his first novel – Vertigo – which was initially published in Germany in 1990, in the Vintage edition of 2020 with the translation by Michael Hulse.
I was quickly enveloped by some of the familiar characteristics of Sebald’s writing: his elegantly flowing prose style; the ease with which he effortlessly moves from one theme to another; his enjoyment in the discoveries to be made when travelling (usually by bus or train or on foot); and the eloquence with which he recalls people and events of the past – including his own past. In addition, there is the (occasional) uncertainty about what is actually happening in the narrative as he draws on imagination or speculation to supplement the description of events.
The opening chapter (Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet) summarises the career of a writer – Marie-Henri Beyle – from being a 17 year-old in the Napoleonic army invading the Italian peninsula in 1801 until his death in Paris in 1842. At the start of this period, Beyle has occasion to pass the site of the previous year’s Battle of Marengo between the French and Austrians: “he gazed upon the plain, noted the few stark trees, and saw, scattered over a vast area, the bones of 16,000 men and 4,000 horses that had lost their lives there, already bleached and shining with dew”.
Experts on 19th Century French literature (of whom I am certainly not one) will recognise Beyle as being better known under his pen-name of Stendhal (although this is not revealed to us). As an example of how the author sows doubt into the reader’s mind, we are led to query whether one of Beyle’s many paramours – a certain Mme Gherardi, of whom he wrote as having accompanied him on a journey through the Alps from modern-day Italy to Austria – actually existed.
The broad geographical region comprising the Adriatic, northern Italy, Austria and Bavaria also forms the backdrop to the book’s other three chapters. In the longest (All’estero or Abroad), we accompany the narrator (whom we assume to be Sebald) as he makes two journeys – seven years apart – from Vienna to Venice via Verona in the 1980s.
Sebald has an unrelenting eye for the historical and/or the beautiful, as we move on from Giocomo Casanova’s imprisonment (in 1755) in the rat-infested prison chambers below the lead roofs of the Doge’s Palace in Venice to Pisanello’s fresco (of 1435) over the entrance to the Pellegrini chapel in Verona and Giotto’s fresco cycle (completed around 1305) in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. In the last of these, “I was overwhelmed by the silent lament of the angels, who have kept their station above our endless calamities for nigh on seven centuries”.
There is an underside to his travel experiences as well, however, quite apart from losing his passport in Limone, when the hotel receptionist mistakenly hands it over on the departure of another person. In Milan, Seward wards off the aggressive attack of two pickpockets and, later – in a bout of travelogue – regrets his decision to take a stroll around for an hour or so: “any idea of the kind, in a city so filled with the most appalling traffic, will end in aimless wandering and bouts of distress”,
The book’s other chapters – Dr K Takes the Waters at Riva and Il ritorno in patria or The Return to his Homeland – also describe journeys, though with their respective emphases on the principal destinations.
As with the earlier coverage of Stendhal’s life, some key aspects of the narrative are semi-hidden. “Dr K” – the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers’ Insurance Company – is, of course, the thinly disguised Franz Kafka, who took holidays in the town of Riva del Garda on the northern shore of Lake Garda in 1909 and 1913, on the latter occasion for three weeks.
The immediate pre-First World War period features more the once in Sebald’s narrative. In Verona, he spends some time in the main library – the Biblioteca Civica – (notwithstanding it actually being closed for a public holiday) researching the local papers for the main news items of the late summer of 1913, one of which was a sensational murder trial involving one Maria Oggioni, who pleaded self-defence to the charge of shooting her husband’s batman. Sebald suggests that she might have found it relatively easy to win over the judges, as her enigmatic smile reminded observers of the Mona Lisa (and La Gioconda had recently been found under the bed of a Florentine workman who had liberated it on Italy’s behalf from the Louvre two years earlier). More fatefully, “1913 was a peculiar year. The times were changing and the spark was racing along the fuse like an adder through the grass”.
A similarly cursory disguise is given to the Bavarian village to which Sebald himself returns (at the end of his 1987 journey) in the final chapter – the village in which he had been born – which is simply labelled as “W” throughout. However, for we amateur literary detectives, Sebald provides a list of the small villages through which his bus passes towards the end of its route, after which we are informed that he walked through Unterjoch and Pfeiffermuhle to his final destination: i.e. to Wertach.
This is a nostalgic and poignant chapter. After an absence of 30 years, Sebald is disconcerted to discover that very little of what he remembered from his childhood still remained: “the village itself, I reflected, as I arrived at that late hour, was more remote from me any than other place I could conceive of”.
Most of the dwellings and other buildings had been demolished or redeveloped: the school, the fire station, the cheese dairy, the grocer and haberdashery… Likewise, not surprisingly, there is the absence of most of the village’s inhabitants whom he could recollect from that earlier time: Kopf the barber, Dopfer the hunchback, Ekram the Turk, his teacher Fraulein Rauch, the friendless and ill-fated Dr Rambousch and, not least, his grandfather, in whose company he was often to be found. One of the few remaining points of reference was now the Engelwirt Inn, in which Sebald stayed for a month; during his childhood, his family had lived there in rented rooms. (The present-day Google Maps lists the Gasthof Engel in Wertach as permanently closed).
Sebald neatly – indeed, brilliantly – completes the circle of his narrative in this final chapter. In discussion with the current owner of the Café Alpenrose, he learns of one of the village’s forebears who led a contingent of a thousand men at the Battle of Marengo, all of whom were slaughtered. Later, when Sebald is given access to the café’s attic – which had been strictly out-of-bounds when he had frequently visited the dwelling with his grandfather – he finds a vast pile of miscellaneous clutter that the previous owners – two elderly spinster sisters – had accumulated over their lifetimes: sacks, ropes, doorbells, mousetraps, beehive frames… Amongst this collection is “the uniform, trimmed in colours pink-grey and green, almost certainly belonging to one of the Austrian chasseurs, who fought against the French as irregulars around 1800”. However, “when I touched one of the uniform sleeves that hung down empty, to my utter horror, it crumbled to dust”.
WG Sebald’s beautifully written narrative has taken us back to Marie-Henri Beyle and the Napoleonic conquests at the turn of the 19th Century.
JR Alexander 