Walking across Suffolk, WG Sebald stops off at the Sailors' Reading Room in Southwold, now a one-room maritime museum "almost always deserted but for one or two surviving fishermen and seafarers sitting in silence in the armchairs, whiling the hours away." Sebald starts leafing idly through one of the ships' logs on display and then notices a large photographic history of the first world war, dating from 1933, where "page after page of pictures from Serbia, Bosnia and Albania show scattered groups of people and stray individuals trying to escape the War by ox-cart, in the heat of summer, along dusty country roads, or on foot through drifting snow."
Later the same day, he sits in the restaurant of his hotel, picks up a newspaper and finds more images of Balkan massacres, committed 50 years before by the Croatian Ustasha militia ("its hand strengthened by the Wehrmacht and its spirit by the Catholic church") at places such as the Jasenovac camp, where "700,000 men, women and children were killed in ways which made even the hair of the Reich's experts stand on end." Other children were deported to Croatia, many "so hungry that they had eaten the cardboard identity tags they wore about their necks."
At hand was "a young Viennese lawyer whose chief task was to draw up memoranda relating to the necessary resettlements... For this commendable paperwork he was awarded the silver medal of the crown of King Zvonomir (with oak leaves) by Croatian head of state Ante Pavelic"-an early step in a career which eventually led to the post of UN secretary general. "In this last capacity he spoke onto tape, for the benefit of any extra-terrestrials that may happen to share our universe, words of greeting that are now, together with other memorabilia of mankind, approaching the outer limits of our solar system aboard the space probe Voyager II."
Sebald is not the first to have pondered the ironies of Kurt Waldheim's career, but this vignette is full of clear-eyed bewilderment and a despairing sense of what his German compatriots and their collaborators inflicted on the world. It is sections like these which recall his magnificent novel (or fictionalised memoir) The Emigrants (Harvill, 1996).
The Emigrants opens with a house-hunting expedition in Norfolk. The narrator meets an ageing eccentric called Dr Henry Selwyn, the first of four Jewish men whose lives have been ripped apart by the upheavals of recent history. There follow accounts of his old primary school teacher, his great-uncle-a gentleman's gentleman-and a painter whose life recalls Frank Auerbach's. Their four stories, laboriously pieced together and each longer than the one before, slowly build up into a great lament for lost worlds, the terrible cruelties of Europe and the unending pain of those who were caught up by it. Yet part of what makes the book so affecting is that Sebald seems to stumble upon a whole universe of pain and trauma just beneath the sedate surface of English life. He never attempts to simplify or ennoble the messiness or sheer oddity of the victims' lives. His sensibility-scrupulous, compassionate, introverted and melancholic-is perfectly attuned to his subject.
There are moments in The Rings of Saturn which read like out-takes from The Emigrants. When Sebald visits the poet and translator Michael Hamburger, who left Germany as a child in late 1933, he finds him wondering if it is possible to change history, so that "Grandmother Antonina, who had refused to go with us to England, would still be living in Kantstrasse... would still be concerned about the well-being of her goldfish, which she washed under the kitchen tap every day and placed on the window ledge when the weather was fine."
Sebald embarked on his walk across Suffolk to dispel a sense of inner emptiness. He writes: "In retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me... when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place... a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility."
He describes his breakdown with great vividness and a total lack of self-pity, but this still makes a very portentous opening. Many people could manage to cross Suffolk without succumbing to "paralysing horror," and at times the framework narrative and deeper themes are almost ludicrously ill-matched. Too often the text seems wilfully to veer away from what is before his eyes into private cul-de-sacs ending in atrocity or tales of desperate eccentrics living in the wrong time or place. Sebald sleeps through a documentary about Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement; and this provides a pretext for an account of the horrors of Belgian rule in the Congo. He meets a man trying to create a model of the temple of Jerusalem, a Dutch merchant fascinated by the role of sugar magnates as patrons of the arts, a gardener at a country house who is obsessed with the bombing raids on Germany launched from East Anglia in 1940.
Nobody seems keen to have an ordinary conversation about football or sex. Clear-eyed melancholia can be highly revealing-the book contains a superb lament for the damage inflicted by the "Great Storm" of 1987-but it can easily slip into self-parody. The airport in Amsterdam feels like "an ante room of that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns. Every now and then the announcers' voices, disembodied and intoning their messages like angels, would call someone's name." A pig which Sebald strokes "sighs like one enduring endless suffering." A couple having sex far below him as he looks down from the cliffs seems "misshapen, like some giant mollusc washed ashore... a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out to sea."
Moment to moment, much in this book is marvellous. Sebald (with the help of his translator Michael Hulse) is a superb stylist; and I trust almost every word he writes as an authentic expression of his own reactions. He brings a deep knowledge of history and the natural world to his digressions. But it is hard to make them cohere into something more than the sum of their parts.
As he crosses the bridge over the river Blyth, for example, he starts thinking about the narrow-gauge railway which once ran across it and whose train had originally been built for the emperor of China. "Lengthy research" has not determined which emperor gave the order, why it was rescinded or "why this diminutive imperial train, which may have been intended to connect the palace in Peking... to one of the summer residences, ended up on a branch line of the Great Eastern Railway." Yet this thin thread provides the basis (or excuse) for a huge digression on Chinese history of roughly the right period: a catalogue of natural disasters, imperial cruelty and paranoia.
We then proceed towards Dunwich, a town which was swept away into the sea in the middle ages and hence became a place of pilgrimage for melancholy Victorian poets such as Swinburne. This leads into a lovely anecdote from his childhood, when an aunt told him a spooky story about travelling in a carriage late at night after a ball, and being stopped by a group of dark figures who were burying a suicide at a crossroads. We are invited to imagine the spellbound "little boy with his big head and fiery hair standing on end, wringing his hands and beseeching: 'Tell me more, Aunt Ashburnham, please tell me more.'"
Sebald makes some feeble attempts to forge chronological links between the Chinese emperors, mediaeval Dunwich and Swinburne's ancestry and career. There are also some more hidden connections. The Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi had her nephew locked away (and probably poisoned) in a moated palace in the Forbidden City, where a doctor discovered that "the floors and all the furnishings were thick with dust, as if the house had been long since deserted." This is like Swinburne's closeted life as a Victorian invalid. Tz'u-hsi saw her silkworms as her ideal subjects, "diligent in service, ready to die, capable of multiplying vastly within a short span of time... wholly unlike human beings, on whom there was basically no relying." A house guest looking at Swinburne (and we can only presume this is a genuine historical detail) was reminded of the ashy grey silkworm.
None of this feels very resonant. It is as if Sebald has threaded together a sequence of strange, melancholic, free associations which, although intriguing and vividly described, have little organic unity. Perhaps because of this, when the final chapter attempts to pull things together, there is a sense of straining for significance. There is a long discussion of silkworms. The biology is fascinating and the history has a musty kind of charm-the friars who smuggled the first eggs from Byzantium to the west in hollowed-out bamboo canes; the links between weaving and melancholia; the theories that "the best place to hatch silkworms was in hotbeds or the bosoms of young girls'; the propagandists who argued that silk cultivation would "produce a veritable moral transformation."
Where does all this lead? To the Nazis, again, who took up the cause and argued that silkworms should be reared in schools, thereby providing many useful lessons in "the structure and distinctive features of insect anatomy, insect domestication, retrogressive mutations, and the essential measures which are taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to pre-empt racial degeneration." (I guessed that such a punchline was coming and can only regard it as rather cheap.)
Here Sebald signs off. He completed the text on 13th April 1995, the day of his father-in-law's death and the anniversary of many notable events, most of them gloomy. Our history, he concludes flatly, is "but a long account of calamities." Even he seems to think that this is fairly feeble, and launches into two final digressions about the former restrictions on upper class mourning dress and an old Dutch custom, in bereaved households, of draping all mirrors and naturalistic paintings in black, "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 last glimpse of the land now lost for ever." Sebald remains a formidable talent, but this is a book of fascinating fragments; like the rings of Saturn, a sensibility looking for a subject.
The rings of saturn
WG Sebald
Harvill 1998, ?15.99
