W. G. Sebald's influence on Theodor Storm - safely locked away in the secure land of the past

The beginning of Theodor Storm's short story Journey to a Hallig (1871):

"There were once vast forests of oak along our coast, and so dense were the trees that for miles a squirrel could spring from branch to branch without touching the forest floor...

But these forests have long since disappeared; only occasionally is a petrified root still dug out of the dark earth of the moors or out of the mud of the tidal flats, which gives us descendants a sense of just how violently those crowns of leaves must have swayed in their struggle with the north-west storms." (tr. Denis Jackson and Anja Nauck)

Theodor Storm had clearly been reading W. G. Sebald. The connection to the end of Chapter IX of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1995), describing the destruction of southern England's trees by the 1986 hurricane, seems obvious to me:

"The forest floor, which in the spring of last year had still been carpeted with snowdrops, violets and wood anemones, ferns and cushions of moss, was now covered by a layer of barren clay. All that grew in the hard-baked earth were tufts of swamp grass, the seeds of which had lain in the depths for goodness knew how long. The rays of the sun, with nothing left to impede them, destroyed all the shade-loving plants so that it seemed as if we were living on the edge of an infertile plain. Where a short while ago the dawn chorus had at times reached such a pitch that we had to close the bedroom windows, where larks had risen on the morning air above the fields and where, in the evenings, we occasionally heard even a nightingale in the thicket, its pure and penetrating song punctuated by theatrical silences, there was now not a living sound." (p. 268)

And then, as if this were not clear enough, two pages later the characters in the Storm story sail over the sunken port of Rungholt, utterly destroyed by a storm in 1365, a passage clearly modeled after the Dunwich section of Chapter VI of The Rings of Saturn, which describes the pulverization of an English port on the opposite coast of the North Sea in 1328.

Perhaps it was Sebald who was reading Storm.* Regardless, what a marvellous story. It's a close relative of Immensee, with the narrator reflecting back on the moment he ruined a love affair. Or maybe he didn't, maybe it wouldn't have worked anyway:

"I kept my hat and my moustache until finally both became the general fashion and were absorbed in it. On the other hand, it has not been vouchsafed to me to know whether in the course of life the look of those blue eyes, besides the radiance of a precious stone, might not also have taken on something of the same hardness. The day on our Cousin's hallig, and in the middle of it Susanne's youthful figure, remain for me, like Rungholt, safely locked away in the secure land of the past." (p. 88)

Journey to a Hallig is set in, thematically as well as physically, the North Sea tidal mud flats, a strange and possibly unique landscape (a "hallig" is an island, just barely, at high tide). Meine Frau, it turns out, has not only been there, but went swimming with seals. I asked her if the terrain was like the mud flats we saw in the Ria Formosa Natural Park in Portugal. Yes, she said, except completely different. The Denis Jackson translation, linked above, includes a useful map.

Since I wrote about Immensee I have read a bit more Thedor Storm. Even though it was immediately clear to me that Immensee was a real work of art, I had sort of assumed that Storm was otherwise a minor writer. I am now sure that I was wrong about that. More Storm, and less Sebald, the rest of the week.

* I'm obliquely responding to this post at The Valve, which as usual I only half understand.

A glance back at Scott - his influence, whatever that means

Charles Dickens had begun thinking about a novel centered on the Gordon riots years before he wrote it. Most writers at the time probably thought about writing historical novels. They were popular, and they were relatively prestigious. Novels were still inferior to poems, but historical novels were somehow classier than domestic novels. Because they required research, I guess.

For a while, almost everyone was influenced by Walter Scott in some way. The phenomenon extended throughout America and Europe, although there's an irony that in most countries Scott was read in hasty, sloppy French translations. Alexandre Dumas and James Fennimore Cooper were direct imitators, although they found their own voices over time. The first novel Balzac put his name on, Les Chouans, is pure Scott, and it's no coincidence that Balzac has young Lucien of Lost Illusions bring two manuscripts to Paris: a book of sonnets, and a historical novel, The Archer of Charles IX. And there was a mound of others - Ainsworth, Bulwer-Lytton - names from literary encyclopedias; Gogol, Pushkin - names still very much alive.

Influence can be a slender thing, though. My two favorite historical novels of the early 19th century are Victor Hugo's Notre Dame of Paris (1831) and Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (1827). Both are big, lively, exciting books, dramatic and humorous. Both contain complete imaginative worlds. Scott, or the imitators of Scott, may have planted the idea of writing a historical novel, but any influence ends there. These writers didn't need Scott's help with anything.*

At some point, the popularity of the genre made Scott's influence too diffuse to be noticed. I doubt War and Peace (1869), or Salammbo (1862), or maybe even The Tale of Two Cities (1859) owe much to Scott.

But there may have been another way that Scott left his mark, more important than his affect on the popularity of a particular genre. To differentiate then from now - a primary goal of historical fiction, one would think - the novelist must detail the differences. Clothes, food, speech, coaches and houses have to be described in some detail. Customs, laws, society, those, too, but also the physical world. Attentive readers of Fielding or Richardson or Austen's earliest novels will understand how new this level of detail is. John Galt, for example, understood that he could write in similar detail about contemporary life in Scotland. I think he picked this up from Scott. Although, come to think of it, his masterpiece The Entail (1823) covers a García Márquez-like hundred years, which sounds a bit historical.

Anyway, maybe there are a few more traces of Scott in Flaubert and Tolstoy than one would guess.

*Manzoni's framing narrator may have an element of parody of Scott. Manzoni later wrote a book length essay on the genre (On the Historical Novel), which I have not read, and should.

Farewell to minor early Victorian poet week

Well that was fun.

This cohort of minor poets (Browning and Tennyson as well), so different from each other, were all directly inspired by and in their earliest poems imitated either Keats or Shelley or both. It’s interesting that barely twenty years after the revolution of Lyrical Ballads both Wordsworth and Coleridge were already old fogies. And don’t even bother with Byron. These young geniuses wanted the new stuff.

It’s easy to overdo the “influence” business. Professional Readers have a sophisticated way of discussing the issue that I don’t really know how to use. In the case of these poets, though, it’s obvious how direct the Keats and Shelley influences were at the beginning of their careers. During his first 10 years as a poet, Browning wrote nothing but two long poems, “Paracelsus” and “Pauline”, that look like direct imitations of Shelley’s long poems, except that they’re even less comprehensible. And this is a poet who would later become one of the most original in the language.

Meanwhile, in Russia, in France, in Italy, the only British poets who counted were Scott and Byron. Especially Byron, always in French translation. For Pushkin and Lermontov, Byron was the early influence they had to shake off. Alfred de Musset actually wrote a poem replying to critics who had dismissed him as a Byron imitator. Again, all of these poets outgrew or overcame or escaped Byron’s influence. Any poet who did not is probably forgotten now.

Let’s have one more poem. Here is a poem about a mouse by John Clare, a major early Victorian poet. Maybe I’ll write more about him some other time:

I found a ball of grass among the hay
And proged it as I passed and went away
And when I looked I fancied somthing stirred
And turned again and hoped to catch the bird
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheats
With all her young ones hanging at her teats.
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me
I ran and wondered what the thing could be
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood.
Then the mouse hurried from the crawling brood
The young ones squeaked and when I went away
She found her nest again among the hay.
The water oer the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.