The sepia saga business - De Waal borrows Sebald's voice

What Sebald did for me was to say that a particular voice was allowed.  That voice was very internal, very quiet and credible across a whole piece of writing.  I think I learnt that entirely from reading Sebald.

Edmund de Waal did a little interview with a “pick five books” theme.  W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz was one of them; see above for why.

It is possible that I could write another post about de Waal and Walter Benjamin, another of his five picks, if only I had read Benjamin.

From the quotations I used yesterday, I would not guess that de Waal was especially Sebaldian, but he has more than one rhetorical mode, and at least one of them is the one he describes in the interview, Sebald played on a less complex instrument.  This is aside from common interests in modern European history, or the meaning of objects, or the meaning of loss.  De Waal has separated himself from Sebald enough to put captions on the images he uses, although he is writing non-fiction, which has different standards.

Some odd coincidences pop out.  De Waal’s great uncle, the one from whom he inherits the netsuke, was homosexual (a word never used by de Waal).  He finds a home, a career, and a companion, a husband, in Japan after World War II.  Part Four of The Hare with Amber Eyes is a portrait of the marriage of Iggie and Jiro, “my Japanese uncle.”

They explored Japan together, travelling to an inn that specialized in river trout one weekend; to a town on the coast for an autumn matsuri, a jostling parade of red-and-gold floats…  But music was closest to the heart of their life together…

And this is the fourth resting-place of the netsuke.  It is a vitrine in a sitting-room in post-war Tokyo looking out across a bed of clipped camellias, where the netsuke are washed late at night by waves of Gounod’s Faust, played loud.  (310-11)

This text is above a photo of the two smiling men, the young Jiro’s hand on the balding Iggie’s shoulder.  You can see it at de Waal’s website, along with a shot of Iggie and his vitrine.

Readers familiar with The Emigrants will likely find it hard to escape an overlay of the section of that books about Sebald’s great uncle, Ambros Adelwarth, and its narrative about his gay marriage before the fact, including this weird intersection:

Once, at Mamaroneck, said Aunt Fini, Uncle Adelwarth spent all of one afternoon telling me about his time in Japan.  But I no longer remember what he told me.  Something about paper walls, I think, about archery, and a good deal about evergreen laurel, myrtle and wild camellia.  (79)

The next page has a photo of a pagoda built over a lake, perhaps that “floating and well-nigh empty house” where Adelwarth lived for a time with his Japanese lover.

Why does de Waal need Sebald’s help?  Because he is not a writer. 

I know that my family were Jewish, of course, and I know they were staggeringly rich, but I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss.  And I certainly don’t want to turn Iggie into an old great-uncle in his study, a figure like Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, handing over the family story, telling me: Go, be careful.

It could write itself, I think, this kind of story.  A few stitched-together wistful anecdotes, more about the Orient Express, of course, a bit of wandering round Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Epoque. It would come out as nostalgic. And thin.  (15)

This is early.  De Waal has not even started researching the book.  He is expressing his fear about how to tell the story he wants to tell, how to avoid all of the clichés and received ideas of the genre.  He needs to do a lot more work – the book is in part a chronicle of his work – and he needs a model for the voice.  He finds it in Sebald.

Perhaps a new set of clichés will form around Sebald as his style hardens and dims in the hands of his imitators.  Not yet, though, not in The Hare with Amber Eyes.  Of course de Waal does write a narrative of loss.  But it is not nostalgic, not thin.

The spelling is not for a man in haste - John Galt, master of dialect and voice

The Laird's work consisted of about half-a-dozen small copy books, such as schoolboys are in the practice of using, two or three of them with marble covers; on one I observed a parrot, and on another the ruins of Palmyra.  The penmanship was not very legible; it was narrow, crampt, and dotty, and the orthography made me pause at the first sentence.

"Ye're troubled wi' my hand o' wrote." said he, "and deed I must own it's no schoolmaister's, but wi' a thought o' pains ye'll soon be able to read it."

"I think, Laird, I could make my way with the writing, but the spelling is not for a man in haste." (The Last of the Lairds, 1826, Ch. 3)

John Galt is a master of Scots dialect.  He claimed that Scottish writers had the advantage over English writers because they also had possessed the magnificent Scotch vocabulary.*

The Provost's Provost writes in a mishmash of proper English and Scots dialect:

For many a year, one Robin Boss had been town drummer; he was a relic of some American-war fencibles, and was, to say the God's truth of him, a divor body, with no manner of conduct, saving a very earnest endeavour to fill himself fou as often as he could get the means; the consequence of which was, that his face was as plooky as a curran' bun, and his nose as red as a partan's tae. (Ch. 32)

"Divor" means bankrupt. "Partan's tae" is a crab's claw. Do any of the other words need translation? "Fill himself fou" is vivid enough, right? And a face as plooky as a currant bun - that takes care of itself.  That's great.

 I know that some people just hate dialect writing, no matter how well done, no matter for what purpose. So Galt is not for such a reader, not until he overcomes that prejudice.   Galt's novels now come with glossaries.  The Last of the Lairds comes with two!**  Is the anti-dialectician now happy?  I thought not.

I don't have it quite right when I emphasize Galt's dialect writing.  He's really interested in voice, and uses whatever tools are needed to make his characters convincing.  So The Provost has to mimic the voice of a proud and successful but only lightly educated man who has never written a book before.  The Annals of the Parish (1821), a companion to The Provost, is "written" by a minister, more sophisticated, more educated, so his writing is more Latinate and somewhat less Scotch ("Poor old Mr Kilfuddy of the Braehill got such a clash of glar on the side of his face, that his eye was almost extinguished," Ch. 1).  The parliamentarian of The Member is barely Scottish at all.***   The Ayrshire Legatees (1820) is a Humphrey Clinker-like epistolary novel, requiring distinct voices for four letter-writers, plus a separate set of letter-readers. 

For Galt, the concept is primary.  The character, the realistic voice, trumps plot.  The conceptual purity of the voice of Ringan Gilhaize (1823) almost destroys the book.  That's a complicated case that I'll save for next week, along with The Entail (1822), where voice, dialect, character and plot all come together perfectly. 

*  Reference sadly misplaced.

** One character is an idiotic Nabob who speaks in a bizarre pudding of English mixed with Indian and military words.  "My aubdaar will cool it for you, with a whole seer of saltpetre: for my ice-house has gone wrong, you know, by the mason leading the drain wash-house through it, like a d--d old fool as he was." (Ch 17).

***  The glossary of The Member is a page and a half long, and many of the words are political jargon rather than Scots.  The Last of the Lairds has an amazing six pages.  "begrutten" = tear-stained. "wally-waeing" = lamentation.  And "pawkie," the name of the narrator of The Provost, = sly.

Jane Eyre - creativity, revenge, and the art of the novel

I have been writing about a book called Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë, published in 1847. The original title page did not have Brontë’s name on it. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, Edited by Currer Bell.

In the world of Brontë’s Jane Eyre, there exists this other book, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, written, obviously, by Jane Eyre. In the world of the novel, why was this book published? Why was it written?

In 1847, Jane is 58, and Rochester is – how old is Rochester? – 75, at least, maybe as old as 80. Perhaps the publication of Jane Eyre signals his decease. Perhaps they have both died.

Why does Jane write the book? One reason not to: it makes her beloved husband look pathetic, criminal, lunatic, perhaps worse. But that suggests a possibility: revenge. Jane calmly, systematically destroys all of the men who wanted to destroy her: Mr. Brocklehurst, her cousin John Reed, and, most of all, her cousin St. John, the only man who almost defeated her. Perhaps that’s why the last two paragraphs of the book are entirely about him.

Revenge on Rochester? I’m not willing to make that case. Rochester is such a perverse, peculiar fellow that I imagine him actively enjoying the worst that Jane could write about him, even encouraging her. This is one reason they’re such a lovely couple.

The voice of the narrator is not the voice of the character. The narrator is calmer, more rational. She’s channeled some of the wildness of her imagination. Channeled into what? Into an emotionally rich marriage, and into Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. This tension between young Jane and narrator Jane is one of the most interesting things in the book. I don’t understand this aspect of the book well enough to write about it now. When I reread, it's one thing I’ll look for.

The narrative voice harkens back to Defoe, and Pamela – the references to 18th century books are not coincidental – but creates something new, and more sophisticated. None of her predecessors were quite like her, nor her contemporaries. Dickens wrote seven novels before trying the first person in David Copperfield, published a few years after Jane Eyre. Brontë knew what to do with it right away.

So many more ideas in the book. I’ve barely scratched Brontë’s prose, which, besides the quality of the voice, includes some lovely metaphorical language (“the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop,” Ch. 12), and only a few real clinkers, mostly in dialogue.

Some readers of Jane Eyre may think I've skipped the heart of the book - Jane and Rochester, should Jane do this or that, and so on. Ethical aspects of the novel. Maybe so. But I think the ethics cannot be correctly understood without also studying the art of the novel, so that's what I usually try to write about. Charlotte Brontë was a literary artist of high caliber. Seems strange to me not to treat her as such.