W. G. Sebald
from TRoL, No.11, Dec. 2001

Why do the best people, carrying within them—in soul and memory—the essence of culture and humanity, have to die? There are a lot of "artists" one could do without, but people like W. G. "Max" Sebald, who died in a car crash as this issue was going to press, are so rare, so infinitely valuable, that the loss affects all of us. The world of "high" culture—the culture to which I aspired as a young man—is short-handed enough without this blow.

To me, Max was without doubt the greatest living European writer. I remember well the first whiff of him that I had: a single sentence quoted in (an otherwise fairly indifferent) review in the Times Literary Supplement of The Emigrants, the first of his books to be so immaculately Englished by the poet Michael Hulse. That one sentence drove me immediately to our local Barnes & Ignoble, and I recall, as soon as I had purchased the book, feeling a compulsion to read it. I sat downstairs in the café with an insipid Starbucks espresso and read the opening page—"At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live." An unexceptionable sentence. This was autobiography? Norwich, Hingham. A German writer? A few leisurely pages later, after meeting Dr. Henry Selwyn, I entered the labyrinthine world that was Max's, has now become ours and, alas! will no longer entrance us: "Dr. Selwyn did indeed, after a certain hesitation, start to tell us of his stay in Berne shortly before the First World War."

At that point I put the book down, because when I, so rarely, find myself with a writer whose every turn of phrase and every thought is so clearly going to be interesting, I become self-denying. I will not just read it; I will savor it. Really good writers command that they be read at almost the pace at which they write—otherwise you will miss something. I knew that I didn't want to miss anything Max had to say. Nor have I since.

It has been our good fortune to print bits of his as often as we could: for which Max, quite typically, always refused payment, thinking that others might be in greater need.

A few months later, when he was on his first book "tour" in the States, the other Mr. B and I (and some fifteen or twenty others seated in a little circle of folding chairs) heard him talk at our local Goethe Haus in Boston. He made a remarkable impression on both of us. As being absolutely straight. A tall, solid-looking man, a powerfully physical man with a prominent moustache, he simply told us how The Emigrants had come about, its genesis in his mind and in his life. He spoke in the same style as he wrote: as though what counted was not himself but the work he had done. He didn't say what the book meant. He made no reference to the Holocaust, a presence which in that book as in all his work is adumbrated in absence—appropriately, as though shadows had more to reveal than light. There had been an alpine village in which he had been a child, there had been a teacher who had committed suicide, there had been an inexplicable break in his own life that had led him to leave Germany for England (he briefly thought of going back, but didn't), and out of that had come this book.

Few authors are modest in that way, prodigal with their gifts and asking for nothing in return. The next morning we sat around for an hour or two in a melancholy café and nothing had changed in his manner or his speech. It was level, sensible, clear, even transparent. We spoke, I remember, about absence: about how one might write about something because it hadn't happened, which of course is what The Emigrants was all about, about those who hadn't been killed, but also hadn't escaped that other kind of death which is to be exiled in one's own time and place precisely because one has escaped—the kind of affliction that caused Primo Levi to leap from the top of his stairwell.

After that we corresponded regularly. Indeed, we were due to meet, later this month, in Switzerland, to which—on one of his many journeys, so minutely recalled in his work—he said he had "already booked passage." And through these few years, which we now have to see as the last of his life, I read him again and again. I knew that the poet Michael Hulse, his first translator, had conveyed him so well, with so much distance and reflection, that Max had truly become as great a stylist in English as in German, but when I went back and read him in German I realized that he had transformed that language, too: his German maintained all its wonderful syntactic energy, all that machinery which inflections bring to bear on word order and coherence, and yet was as lucid and simple as Kafka had been, say, in his report of the air-show.

When you consider the writers Max obviously loved, the paradoxes become clear: to love both Stendhal and Sir Thomas Browne is to love the thorny thicket as much as the high view from which Napoleon viewed the battlefield at Austerlitz. It's to know the density of individual words (never in Max are these simply tossed in for show, and seldom are they rare) and the clarity of description—of objects and people seen from very high in the air. It's indeed a lovely gift he had, that led one young student to say to me recently, "I rate people I meet by whether they've read Sebald or not, by how much they value him."

Each of the books that appeared—Vertigo (I prefer the original German title, Schwindel, Gefühle, or "Dizziness, Feelings," with its feeling of one being the consequence of the other), The Rings of Saturn and, most recently, Austerlitz, showed not so much an increasing mastery (that was never in question) but rather an additional meditation—a further and closer-to-the-dead-planet ring—on the subjects which most concerned him.

These "subjects" of Max's, enhanced by the oddness, the spurious reality, the grave attraction of the photographs with which he sprinkled his texts, would have been (I suspect) perfectly familiar to the seventeenth-century writers to whom he was so deeply attracted. They included—supreme over all subjects—death and brief lives. But also manufactures, nature, the arts, movement, flight, wind, stars. In Max's book these strike the reader again as new subjects, things that an intelligent man might consider with the wonder that preceded the scientific age, and the age of Explanations. I suspect that people and objects appeared to Max's innocent eye as phenomena which would never lose their mysterious essences. It is that distinctness of vision, allied to an occlusion that is personal to Max, that made him so compelling a writer.

The Rings of Saturn is by far my favorite of his books—because nowhere else is his subtext quite so rich and the prevailing metaphor, those rings within rings, made to ring so many changes. It is a book about death, and another suspicion I have—that I hoped to ask him about in Switzerland—was that Max quite literally lived with death, that he considered death his beginning, not his end. Which is why his way of working with the Holocaust is so moving. It is the starting point from which all else proceeds. It is not something that he bewailed—no man was ever farther from being a portable Wailing Wall—but that he examined, as Sir Thomas Browne took up urn burial. A vast curiosity.

I write this in the hours that immediately follow the news of his death, and what fills me with grief is the inexorable fact that I will not be able to read the rest of his meditations, the outcome of his own inner turmoil, the breakdown that took place in his own life, so slow to heal. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much that I would have foreborne from asking him (out of discretion, but also out of pity), so much that he would have answered in those elusively long periods that still seem so simple and modest.

It is clear that his work was as unfinished as it was original. And odd. It was work of high seriousness without pretension. That is, it engaged with many of the great themes of the literature and art of the past: war, peace, life, death, art itself, memory, absence, omission. But almost as prominent was—for a writer with such high regard for the history of individuals—the almost total absence of such concerns as love, sex, family, children; or of such ordinary (and powerful) emotions as jealousy, hatred, love (again) or greed. Max's world was, like the man, a world of probity but disorder, of candor but of things gone awry. I sensed, in conversation, that he had committed himself to an exploration of meaning. That is to say that in his times and in himself there was much that he found incomprehensible, and he was going to walk through time and himself until he found the answers, much as Austerlitz did. What was the fount and origin of the dread that led to his often referred-to "breakdown," of his abrupt departure from Germany? Why were pictures from the past so moving and yet so sphinxy? So much lay before him, and when I once asked him if he did not perhaps see himself as our conscience (as he certainly was a guardian of Germany's), he demurred with a characteristic fleeting smile. One couldn't be anyone else's conscience.

One of the great pleasures Max gave was that he raised such questions. If, in Austerlitz, Max describes imagining a new color, one thought: is it possible to imagine any color other than those we know, those that exist in nature (or our perceptions)? Can we imagine anything at all that is not in the natural world, or is not the contrary (or deformation) of what already exists? Or when he asked, "In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it?" my notes for that conversation we were to have asked, are there any objects outside time?

So much we wanted to know. So much he had yet to say.

The Rings of Saturn ends, and I shall, with these words that refer to burial:

It was customary in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a lost glimpse of the land now being lost forever.

In my mind, I have so draped, to let his troubled soul flee.