The emigrant

The thought of this errant soul, these covered mirrors, and the complex interplay of historiography, observation, and metaphor that concluded in those lines kept me from sleeping the entire night, and I reread the book three times in the coming days.

My reaction to Sebald — my sense of having found an author whose probity, intelligence, and rigor simply could not be compared to those of any other living writer — was one common in the English-speaking world. Susan Sontag, who helped make his career, struggled to find enough superlatives for his “moral fervency,” his “gifts of compassion,” and his “noble literary enterprise.” James Wood credited him with creating a new genre in his novel The Emigrants. A list of comparable encomia from similar figures could go on for pages. It was in English that Sebald became the writer he is, and his fame radiated from England and America. Even today, admiration for him remains muted in his native Germany, and it is not unusual to meet Germans who tell you he reads better in English.

The translator Martin Chalmers, who had failed to convince British publishers to take Sebald on in the early 1990s, once told me he felt Sebald’s borrowings were too obvious in German, and I think this is probably right. There is a canonical body of melancholy, ruminative writing in the German-language literature of the 19th century that is more or less unknown in English. At the same time, Sebald’s most obvious trademark, the insertion of uncaptioned, black-and-white images throughout his texts, while novel in English, was a tried-and-true technique in German, and moreover one that situated him within a body of openly political authors such as Klaus Theweleit and Alexander Kluge. As a consequence, the idea that has clung to him in English of the resigned, encyclopedic chronicler too lofty for present-day concerns has never quite worked in German.

Sebald’s sui generis appearance in English has motivated huge quantities of text, much of it helpful, some of it fishy, but for two decades, a biography remained a desideratum. Columbia University professor Mark M. Anderson was rumored to be working on one, but so far as I know, the project fizzled out. Uwe Schutte studied under Sebald and knows his life and work better than anyone, but he told me he didn’t care to write one out of respect for Sebald’s widow. This left an opening for Carole Angier, who has written substantial biographies of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi — and who has now tried her hand, despite considerable obstacles, at the life of the man she calls “the most exquisite writer I know.”

It is a quixotic undertaking. Sebald’s widow and daughter refuse to speak to Angier, as do several of his closest friends. She is denied permission to quote from his archives. Angier is not a Germanist, and this is necessarily a handicap in attempting to understand a man whose work is difficult to grasp beyond a sentimental level without some sense of the tradition he wrote in and how his aims as a writer merged with his peculiar position as a scholar of German literature who lived virtually his entire adult life in England. Nonetheless, Angier’s book, Speak, Silence, gathers for the first time in one place in English much that nonspecialists are unacquainted with, and she presents a rough outline of significant moments in Sebald’s life.

He was born Winfried Georg Sebald on May 18, 1944, in Wertach, a small village in Southern Germany. His father was a member of the Wehrmacht, which he had joined in 1929 as a driver after an impoverished and precarious youth. He seems never to have taken part in battle, but his son detested him for his role in the war. Much of his mother’s family emigrated to America and would send the boy jeans and dollar bills. When Sebald was four, his family moved to the town of Sonthofen, where his father took a post with the police force. Sebald was a good student, a bit of a troublemaker, and, like many boys, obsessed with cars.

As a teenager, he was rebellious, and this continued in his college years in Freiburg, where he studied literature, wrote satirical articles, and acted in English-language theater. Sebald publicly maintained in the last decade of his life that he’d become a writer out of desperation: The drudgery of the academic world had grown too oppressive for him, and he’d needed a way out. Of the mounds of evidence that this is nonsense, the first comes from this time, when he composed two versions of a novel about a young man like himself who chums around with waggish friends, has melancholy thoughts, goes out with a girl, and rebels against his parents.

Sebald left Freiburg for Fribourg in Switzerland before settling in England in 1966. Readers who know his lugubrious meditations Peter Weiss or Robert Walser might be surprised to learn of his youthful enthusiasm for Saul Bellow’s Herzog or his habit of wearing a red ball cap like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Unusual and perhaps misplaced aggression characterized his academic work at the time: In his master’s thesis, he attacked the moral conservatism of the minor dramatist Carl Sternheim, and in 1973, at the University of East Anglia, where he would teach until his death, he submitted an almost slanderous vilification of Alfred Doblin as his doctoral dissertation. Noteworthy, given Sebald’s reputation for scrupulousness, is his willingness to attack these Jewish authors as proto-fascist and to dictate, as a German gentile, the moral demands that must be placed on their work.

By the 1980s, Sebald was writing poetry and collecting the photographs, postcards, receipts, and diaries that he would photocopy, often with alterations, to paste into his texts to inject them with their trademark inconclusiveness. In 1988, he debuted as a creative writer with the three-part poem After Nature, which was followed by three major novels: Vertigo, The Emigrants, and The Rings of Saturn, published in 1990, 1992, and 1995. There was some critical notice in Germany, a few minor prizes, a disappointing showing at the Festival for German-Language Literature, and a perfunctory roasting by “literature pope” Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who deplored Sebald’s “dreadful” use of photographs. Not until the English translation of The Emigrants appeared to ecstatic reviews in 1996 would Sebald’s life as an author properly begin.

By then, his health had already begun to decline. He had been active as a young man, and his writings are inconceivable apart from his endless journeys on foot, but he smoked heavily, suffered from migraines, stress, depression, and high blood pressure, and may have had a congenital heart defect, though this remains unclear. He spent much of his last decade traveling to give readings and lectures, an activity he seems not to have enjoyed. He told friends that by becoming a writer, he had traded one prison for another.

Though Angier doesn’t use the word “affair,” her account of his relationship with a French woman named Marie — Sebald had met her when she was an exchange student in Germany in 1961, and they reunited at a reading in Paris in 1999 — is one of the most revealing sections of her book. With Marie, at least in Angier’s telling, he rediscovered something of his youth and his humor, and she gave him material for an unpublished book about military conflicts between Germany and France.

In 2001, Sebald published Austerlitz. For some, it is his masterpiece. For others, it marks the limits and weaknesses of his method, the dubiousness of combining fact and fiction to ostensibly moral ends. In October, Anthea Bell’s translation appeared in English to resounding praise, and in December, Sebald was dead. He was a notoriously bad driver and missed a curve on the day in question, running straight into an oncoming truck. But the coroner found him to have advanced heart disease and said he probably died before the crash occurred.

Approaches to Sebald in England and America have been plagued by stunning naivety. While in German, his books have a collagelike quality, in English, the surface is seamless, and consequently, the tendentious nature of his constructions is often overlooked. Angier shows the general reader how prone to obfuscation Sebald was: She catches white lies buried in footnotes or tossed out in conversation, as well as deceptions about sources and methods meant to throw critics off his trail.

But the caveat that applies to Sebald’s fictions serves for Angier’s biography as well. The hagiographic tone of her introduction never flags, and she is a sucker for whatever will make her subject look deeper, sadder, more traumatized. On the weakest of evidence, she implies that he might have been gay. She minimizes his sorrow over the loss of his grandfather, asserting that “his grief over German crimes was what broke him.” She uses the word “insight” to describe a childhood acquaintance’s claim that Sebald suffered from a “sexual wound,” all because it feels “deeply true” to her. And she uncritically, even admiringly, repeats Sebald’s most self-aggrandizing utterances as evidence of a “unique empathy” and his “absolute inability to protect himself from experience.” This is strangely suitable for Sebald, who made an art of psycho-criticism in his literary essays, presenting the authors he examined in a distorted light. The problem, for Angier, is that the job of biography is to add nuance, not blot it out with supposition.

Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator and critic and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.