Travel once around The Rings of Saturn
Exploring the worlds of the late writer W.G. Sebald
I discovered a very unusual book this past October when we visited Suffolk and Reydon Hall once again. You might remember that Reydon Hall was the family home of the Stricklands. We were there as guests of the owners of Reydon and I was scheduled to give a talk in Southwold on the famous Canadian Stricklands — Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Famous here, but, alas, only in Canada, and more precisely only in Ontario. To my delight about 60 folks turned out on a rainy day to hear more about them.
The book, a translation from the original German, was passed on to me by our host at Reydon Hall. On a local level it is an interesting ‘read’ about the Suffolk shoreline and the town of Southwold. My sense of “discovery” came in following its many changes in subject matter and its unusual approach. Entitled The Rings of Saturn, it is billed as a novel but is far from being a conventional piece of fiction. Its author is a German expatriate academic named W.G. (Max) Sebald, who taught at the University of East Anglia for years and was killed in a car accident near Norwich in 2001. He was only 57 when he died. Occasionally in the past I had heard great things about Sebald as a writer; having meant to read him, I was ready to take up the challenge. Moreover, I was quite surprised to learn that he had enjoyed close connections to Norwich and the Suffolk coast.
Reading Sebald is not for everyone; however, it is worth noting that he has been the recipient of much high praise over the years, largely for his unusual approach to novel-writing. His books (Vertigo, Austerlitz, The Emigrants) have been described as “utterly unique” while Sebald himself has been called “one of contemporary literature’s most transformative figures” by one critic and a James Joyce for the 21st century by another. That latter bit of excessive praise is somewhat undermined by the inescapable fact that he died in 2001, less than two years into the current century.
His novels are best described as “prosefiction hybrids” — they combine fiction, biography, memoir, autobiography, history, myth and travelogue; as a result Sebald’s prose seems to shift seamlessly from present to past, from the personal to the historical, and from plotline (such as it is) to long passages of meditation. One critic described his books as “notable for their curious and wide-ranging mixture of fact (or apparent fact), recollection and fiction, often punctuated by indistinct black and white photographs set in evocative counterpoint to the narrative rather than illustrating it directly.” There are many such photographs in The Rings of Saturn just as there are lengthy meditations on writers as diverse as Thomas Browne, Gustave Flaubert, Joseph Conrad and Chateaubriand and on historic individuals like Sir Morton Peto and Roger Casement. Following along (or staying with) Sebald can be a challenge for readers who rely on a well-designed plot to carry them forward.
Living in Norwich and being a walker by inclination, Sebald set out in 1992 to walk the Suffolk coast from Lowestoft south to Ditchingham, ending at Ditchingham
Hall. At the same time it is a walk through history as it relates to that coastline and its vulnerable terrain. Curiously, Sebald’s descriptions of the North Sea coast were fewer in number than I would have expected; rather those descriptions usually give way rather quickly to his melancholic but imaginative meditations about the darker sides of the human experience over the centuries. As a German, for instance, he can’t help returning to aspects of World War Two and the problem of bearing a German identity on the English side of the North Sea whence planes once set out daily during the war to bomb his homeland. His complex sense of guilt and pride in his heritage makes itself evident on numerous occasions.
How dark is Sebald’s vision? Dark and depressing enough, I would say, but his darkness is leavened by a lively imagination, a penchant for restoring connections apparently lost in history, and a concern with ecological and economic changes. His mind roams freely across places and ages, sensitive to changes and losses. At one point he writes, “It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes.” Such are Sebald’s meditations on history and its changes. Seen from a distance, epochs do evolve and then fade away quickly.
The attentive reader is constantly learning as he walks with Sebald from place to place along the way. For instance, I did not know that Joseph Conrad (nee Korzeniowski) learned the English language in Lowestoft while working there in 1890 as a Polish sailor. Nor that Roger Casement of County Antrim, Ireland (who Sebald learns about in Southwold) had an extraordinary career as an English Knight, an Irish Nationalist, and ultimately a British traitor who was executed for high treason. Casement met Conrad in the Congo when Conrad was witnessing the awful realities of King Leopold’s reign of terror and Casement was writing a stinging report for the British government on Leopold’s treatment of the native population. Conrad’s novel, The Heart of Darkness, and Casement’s report met very different fates. The one has been acclaimed for nearly a century, the other was received and then forgotten.
Sebald has several imaginative companions along the way but none more persistent than Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), a 17th-century doctor who often meditated about death and the frailties of the body. Sebald tells the story of Browne’s displaced skull and mentions that he is translating Browne’s Urn Burial, which he has no intention of publishing; but, as he walks, he often turns to Browne for observations and insights that set off his own meditations.
The walking excursion also recognizes many of the problems besetting the Suffolk coast. Once a favoured place for wealthy German spa seekers, the entire coast had by the 1990s seen better days. Lowestoft, like many coastal towns, had fallen on hard times, its past significance all but vanished. The fishing business (herring) was faltering while the coastline itself has been eroding at a frightening pace. The record is in fact longstanding.
Much of the town of Dunwich, a onceimportant seaport in the Middle Ages, fell into the sea centuries ago. So too Covehithe with its magnificent abandoned cathedral seems now an historical anomoly. Sebald places the blame on the looseness of the soil and the burning of the forests that once covered the coastal region. Over time the need for wood and the use of fire destroyed the landscape, but he adds, “Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we [humans] create.” Sebald mines striking ironies set deep in human history, though they are often forgotten in the present day.
To follow Sebald on his excursion is to watch him dig up many stories and to realize, through his vision, how complex and problematical history can be. History, he concludes, is “a long account of calamities.” In such a view failure is everywhere. He seems to suggest that an informed melancholy is the best response available to the sensitive individual.