WG Sebald would surely have hated being likened to Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding, but hear me out. Hornby and Fielding are talented writers who, through a combination of timing, judgment and luck, popularised new genres: ladlit and chicklit respectively. With Sebald, whom Carole Angier in the first major biography calls “the most revered 20th-century German writer in the world”, the genre was the genre-defying prose work, that combination of essay, memoir, history, literature – and photographs – that is now de rigueur in non-fiction. The genre-slippage is summed up in the three editions of his book The Rings of Saturn I own, which are categorised on the back first as Fiction/Travel/History, then Memoir/Travel/History, and most recently Fiction/Memoir/Travel. Nobody knows anything.
Let’s settle on “essayistic semi-fiction”, as Sebald’s friend and fellow writer Michael Hamburger put it. And it’s just how semi- the fiction is that Angier spends a good deal of her book trying to work out. After all, the chances of this being a full-blooded biography, based on the testimony of the people who knew him best, are slim, as we find out in the preface when she notes that Sebald’s widow, his closest friend and his last UK publisher all refused to speak to her. The subtitle of the book is telling: it echoes Ian Hamilton’s In Search of JD Salinger, a book about the failure to write a biography of a famously private author. “I knew Sebald wouldn’t want me,” Angier writes. The question is, do we?
Mesmerising if mournful
She is clearly a passionate admirer of Sebald and writes well about his three – or four if you include Vertigo (1990): I don’t – major prose works: The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001). A quarter of a century after first reading The Emigrants, just reading the names of the four central characters and their epigraphs (“and the last remnants memory destroys”) can make my skin shiver. Angier rightly notes that you finish reading The Emigrants “rubbing [your] eyes like someone waking from a dream”. Sebald’s long sentences, melancholy digressions and complex structures make his books a mesmerising – if mournful – pleasure to read.
The photographs they include and the narrator’s similarity to Sebald make the books appear factual, but they are a tapestry of creation and recollection: one Sebald narrator introduces a section with “as I recall, or perhaps merely imagine . . .” For a reader, that interplay of expectations may be part of the joy but, as a biographer, Angier sees it as her role to nail things down. We learn that some of the figures in his life who inspired The Emigrants – stories of Jews who carried the weight of the Holocaust to their new homes – weren’t Jewish. Does this matter? It seems to me to miss the point not just of literature in general but of Sebald’s works in particular: he said – to quote Angier’s paraphrase – that “what matters about an idea is its beauty of form and its power to move; and also its mystery.” Why does Angier see it as her role to rob Sebald’s work of this mystery?
Tinkertoy detective
Still, if this sort of tinkertoy detective work is your thing, you will find out a great deal about people like Susi Bechhöfer, who resented Sebald’s borrowing of her life details in Austerlitz, or the painter Frank Auerbach, who never forgave Sebald for using his techniques as inspiration for Max Ferber in The Emigrants. And although she can’t speak to those who knew him best in his mature years, Angier leaves no distant relative unturned in exploring Sebald’s childhood and young adulthood, which make up the vast majority of the biography.
It’s hardly surprising to learn that the author of famously lugubrious books was himself a gloomy presence. Angier attributes his worldview in part to a psychic conflict that he found irreconcilable: his sense of injustice at the difference between his idyllic childhood – he was born in 1944 – and what was happening elsewhere in Germany. (One friend from the same birthplace, though, thinks it’s more general than that: “If you ask us how we are, we say ‘Not worse’, even if we’ve just won the lottery.”)
When we do finally get to his time as a published writer – about 100 pages from the end of a long book – there’s interesting stuff, like the excruciating difficulty Sebald had in writing, or his dislike of the English translator and abandonment of the UK publisher for better money elsewhere (whose work made him famous). And there is one coup: Angier speaks to “Marie”, the woman who became a close friend to Sebald in his last years, before he suffered an aneurysm at the age of 57 in 2001, and crashed his car into a lorry, dying instantly. But this isn’t enough to rescue a work that has little value other than to send us back to the books, which are after all the only reason to be interested in a writer in the first place.
