A Writer Who Challenges Traditional Storytelling Style

W.G. Sebald’s four books, “The Emigrants,� “Vertigo,� “The Rings of Saturn� and, just out this month, “Austerlitz,� occupy the thickly carpeted rooms of literary haute couture. This is not a whimsical comparison. These are books, some of them called novels, that, with their small black and white photos and drawings, and an elusive narrator named W.G. Sebald, challenge traditional forms of fiction and nonfiction. Particular and profound all at once, they are very much about detail, very much about history and very much in vogue.

The writer has come a long way from the remote and silent valley 3,000 feet up in the Bavarian Alps where he was a boy, though at times, facing his almost cult-like readers, a life of seclusion has a mighty appeal. His books are now translated into 16 languages in 19 countries. Sebald’s reluctant book tour drew big crowds in Berkeley and at Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, but the turnout in Los Angeles at the Central Library on Thursday was slightly disappointing.

Why? Well, it’s a long drive back downtown. Why? Well, it takes awhile to build an audience for books that travel through our culture by word of mouth. Why? “Kafka, Calvino and Borges took awhile, too,� says Scott Moyers, Sebald’s editor at Random House. “At first people don’t know what to make of him, then the word gets out, and they learn how to read him, they get a bead on him.�

Sebald writes the way the mind works, moving from observation to memory and back again, jumping or flowing, but moving all the time. His densely weird books, in which the narrator seems to wander for days through East Anglia or Antwerp, through the train stations and libraries of Europe, through its civic underbelly, have drawn superlatives from such strange bedfellows as Susan Sontag and Mark Levine, writing for Men’s Journal. “I’m under the spell of the writer W.G. Sebald,� Levine wrote, as if calling for help from a craggy ravine. “Sublime,� wrote Susan Sontag of “The Emigrants.�

Many of Sebald’s characters, like Jacques Austerlitz, the focus of the new novel, are people whose lives were radically diverted by World War II. Austerlitz, as a small boy, was shipped from Prague to Wales on a kindertransport , to be raised by a minister and his wife. His name was changed, his costume was changed, and he spent the rest of his life in a distant dance of courtship with his own identity.

An Uneasy Sense of His Own Identity

One has the sense that Sebald’s own past is unfolding as he writes, that, like Austerlitz, he may have an uneasy sense of his own identity. Though he left Germany in 1970 to teach at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, where he has been ever since, he carries with him the sensitivities and mysteries of his childhood in the Alps. The valley in the Bavarian Alps, for example, was snowed in half the year. The snow created a muffled silence. To this day, the writer cannot bear loud noises. The sound of a piano in the next room puts him in a low tuck in the corner of a sofa.

Sebald, 57, teaches European literature, Kafka seminars and now and then a course in German cinema (he is particularly fond of the silent film director W.F. Murnau). But his life is punctuated by sojourns, when he will travel to a town, walk everywhere, research in local libraries and knock on the doors of strangers. He is used to staying in modest hotels, arriving in small hours, conversing with cabdrivers.

Meeting a guest at the best hotel in Los Angeles, Sebald has no desire to go for a walk. He is wearing a blue jacket and solid walking shoes. He is scowling through professorial glasses, but in a friendly way, that has often evoked the image of Eeyore. He is mortified by the wealth, by the huge bouquets that seem to block each doorway. There is a moment of uncertainty while we wait for the photographer, who might not appear because of a rumor, which quickly dissipates, that a building has blown up downtown. For a moment, no one is sure.

“This must all be more familiar to you than it is to us,� I say, “since we have not fought an international war on home ground.�

“It is familiar,� agrees Sebald, “in that wherever I went as a small child in Germany, there was usually rubble. In some small towns, 80 to 90% of the buildings were destroyed and took a long time to be built up again. The Germans are experts in not looking back, in channeling their anxiety into different things. It is difficult to imagine a collective mourning, a whole culture incapable of working. How can a whole nation do that? This is why you find so may oblique references such as, ‘In that horrible night when our beautiful town was destroyed.’ How many lives were destroyed in the air raids? Was it 600,000?�

Sebald (pronounced SAY-bald)--the W.G. stands for Winifred Georg--has been thinking about aggression. He clearly falls into the Hobbesian camp of Western philosophers who believe that man is, by nature, aggressive. “How do you treat that?� he asks, rubbing his forehead in a gesture so characteristic that it’s a wonder he has any skin left to cover his skull. One thinks of the photographs in the beginning of “Austerlitz,� of the animals in a Nocturama (a zoo exhibit that features animals that become active at night and sleep during the day) that Sebald visits, their eyes wide open like certain philosophers’, as if to penetrate the darkness.

“In the past, we waged war, now, I’ve heard, you can attend aggression classes, or yoga, where you shout and let it all out.� He thinks for a moment on how little we have in common. “I remember traveling to New York once on publishing business� (hearty scowl), “and taking a taxi, with a driver sniffing white powder, to a waiting room somewhere, and it was as if I was on the outer rim of Uzbekistan. It was midnight, the carpet was mauve, two-thirds of the people waiting in the room were obese, of every conceivable race, but all they had in common was their obesity. And these were my traveling companions.� Is this what Sebald thinks of America? “No, no, everyone is extremely polite. But the waste of it. This is one of the miracles of civilization, and we all want to be released from it,� he says, gesturing to include the couches, the lacquered table, the mint tea, the white carpet. “But how do you stop the wheel? Look at the Babylonian sums of money that suddenly appeared to deal with the Sept. 11th crisis. If you had asked for that money for hydroelectric power, for example, you would have been laughed out of Congress.�

Los Angeles, he says, his mind shifting from conjecture to observation, is like one of Italo Calvino’s cities. Flying over it, it seemed all the buildings were ranch height, he says, “glowing away like so many embers, all shades--white light to dark mauve, orange and yellow patterns, quite overwhelming.�

He Started Writing for a Good Cause

How did he begin writing? “It all started for a good cause,� he says, referring, perhaps, to his attempts to describe the lives of Holocaust survivors, or perhaps to his style of interrupted prose, or more practically, remembering the way he began writing with a series of 10 short pieces back in the 1960s for a local newspaper to make some money. “I found a patch of my own. It was a kind of therapy, self-therapy. I never thought it would take over, but you write one thing, and then you feel compelled to write another. It’s a kind of compulsive disorder. Writing is quite painful. There’s the odd chapter I can do in my sleep, but for the most part, I grind away with dogged persistence. I keep notebooks and scraps of things. It’s a primitive instinct, hoarding, a kind of bricollage, and gradually it all comes together. There are no rituals that I observe, I don’t even need a PC.

“It’s a graft, art and occupation, that doesn’t become easier with time. Look here,� he says, changing the subject only slightly to writing as a profession, “if you were a solicitor, your job would become easier with time; cutting out appendices becomes easier with time. Not writing. The more you do it, the harder it gets. Few writers produce more than two good books their entire lives. One becomes paralyzed and more self-conscious. I for one, am acutely conscious of being alien. I write in German, but I haven’t lived there for 30 years. When I arrive home in Norwich and take a taxi to my house, the cabdriver will ask me where I’m from. It’s a kind of depaysment . The British will politely accept you, but you’ll never really fit in. Am I homesick for Germany? Yes, but as soon as I get there it’s gone.�

As for British literary company and culture, Sebald says that he prefers the company of bricklayers to that of writers. “You remember what Kafka said, when two actors embrace each other, they hold onto each other’s hairpieces.�

One can see that Sebald, who is married and has a daughter, needs his solitude. He loves to travel, but says he must do it alone. He overcomes inhibitions while traveling, and finds that trust comes quickly from the people he talks to, “as though they had been waiting their whole lives to tell me something.� He keeps their stories, like a squirrel.

“I watched a squirrel the other day with a chestnut. With his tiny paws, he fetched a whole chestnut out from that spiky shell, which he left almost whole on the ground. When I picked it up, I noticed that he had cut a perfect hole in the shell and drawn out the nut.�

It’s hard to avoid the metaphor. Suck out the meaning, using whatever tools you have available, and leave the spiky case. Sebald uses a slightly formal style of writing and incorporates photographs, some of them his own, most of which he says are real, meaning they pertain directly to the subject matter.

As a schoolboy, Sebald found the darkroom a good hiding place. Since he could hardly sit through a whole school day, he would escape to the darkroom for hours watching with awe as the images floated up from their white sheets.

Sebald believes in the power of photographs to disorient readers, to make them pause. Also in the credibility that photographs bring to a narrative. “I must admit a suspicion of most novels,� Sebald says, “in which the narrator claims omniscience but tells us nothing of who he is or where he’s from. Why should we believe him? All we have are fragments filtered through the minds of another. For instance, you might be thinking of your grandmother, eating an egg, reading Pascal, when you are interrupted by your daughter. The mind is pulled in many directions, which is why regular forms of storytelling are highly artificial.�

One has the distinct sense that Sebald is burdened by his stories. But when asked if he thinks he will ever work his way through this subject matter he laughs ruefully, “No, I shan’t get out from under it; I can’t just forget about it and, what? Go on a cruise?�

The Line Between Truth and Fiction

The day before this meeting, Sebald had breakfast with an elderly couple in Philadelphia. They brought their photographs, taken in Westphalia and Hanover before they were driven out of Germany. One, taken in 1929, shows a big black dog and two brothers. The photograph spoke volumes to Sebald. “The boys have no idea about what will happen to their world. A beautiful image can stop the flow of time. It says, ‘I’ve been here,’ when no one will believe you. Sometimes unfulfilled stores stay in your mind. Those things that you cannot forget, you embroider. That is the line between truth and fiction. The more you tell, the farther you travel from the truth. Literature as lie; the only excuse is some higher purpose.�

Literature as lie. And yet, for all its formality, all its dispassion, Sebald’s writing has a deeply personal, prophetic, subconscious quality as well. The last passage in “Vertigo� (1990) describes the falling towers of a city, a bloody fire and white ash, with dying pigeons.

“A lot happens that is uncanny, the way you run into people, things that don’t fit the rational order of life,� he says. He refers back to a traumatic event in his own life when, on a bus to a Kafka conference, in Riva, Italy, he saw two boys, one of whom was the image of Kafka as a young man. When he asked the boy’s mother if he could take a picture she refused, as if he imagined, he were some sort of pederast.

He cannot bear the loss of the photo or the shame of her reaction. “It’s not difficult to be prophetic,� he says, rubbing his poor forehead. “All you have to do is predict disaster. It’s not hard to see that we are on a very steep gradient.�

Sebald refers often to his “compatriots,� the Germans, in a slightly sarcastic but also sincerely reluctant tone. “My compatriots,� for example, “who strung up 99% of the male population in Tulle, France.� It is as though he were once again pondering the question of violence. He refers again and again to an old friend in Picardy, France, whose father, a 24-year-old member of the Resistance was killed in September 1944. His friend accepted the Legion d’Honneur for her father.

“My own father,� he says, “was stationed an hour’s drive away from Tulle. The SS division, Das Reich, went on up to the eastern perimeter in the final months of 1944, where my friend’s father was killed. I can’t get over the notion that I came from this year, 1944,� he says, trying to piece the story together.

Sebald says that he hopes to visit the village where his father was stationed. “Perhaps it would be worth reading 23 volumes of complicated notes. Perhaps it’s some kind of a web. I want to find out as much as I can about that time, but I have a sense that as I pull out threads the entire fabric will come undone. Then again, I have always loved complicated patterns,� Sebald says, almost smiling.

“As a boy I used to sit under the kitchen table with a bag of string that I would use to weave the chairs to the table legs. I would watch the legs of the grown-ups. I am following lines of pain. We are deeply disturbed as a nation, collectively deranged.� He is looking down at the soft white carpet, miles away from Los Angeles. I have to bend to hear him murmur these words:

“Who murdered my friend’s father in 1944?�