Abstract
Since W. G. Sebald’s death in a car crash in December 2001 as a result of a cardiac condition (pp. 445–9), the mills of academe and the press have ground out books and articles on him and his work at an alarming rate. But to date there has been no comprehensive biography, a gap which Carole Angier’s authoritative and thought-provoking new book fills comprehensively and courageously, with impressive attention to detail. Her interest in Sebald, ‘the most exquisite writer I know’, has deep family roots (p. viii), and shortly after the publication of the English version of Die Ausgewanderten in April/May 1996, she arranged a meeting with Sebald that produced the substantial, albeit flawed interview (q.v.) which appeared in The Jewish Quarterly in winter 1996–7. In 2002 she brought out a well-received biography of Primo Levi, a prominent Holocaust survivor and one of Sebald’s preferred writers on that sensitive subject; and in 2016–17, by which time Sebald and his work had acquired an international reputation, Angier, with financial backing from the Society of Authors and the Royal Literary Fund (p. 453), began the research that has issued in Speak, Silence, a title, incidentally, which recalls those of Nabokov’s autobiography (which Sebald greatly admired) and a book of essays by the late Professor Idris Parry (whom Sebald knew from his three years as a Lektor in Manchester (pp. 225–76)) that was published by the Carcanet Press in early 1989.
Angier’s new biography has involved a massive amount of meticulous reading and exploratory travel, plus hundreds of interviews with people who knew Sebald well – as a close relative, long-time friend, inspired student, or devoted colleague. Consequently, her book contains a large amount of new information, even those sections that deal with those stages of Sebald’s life that one might assume to have been extensively researched already. Nevertheless, as Angier freely admits, there are still many ‘holes in [her] story’ which, I sense, hostile critics are already bemoaning. But besides identifying the most obvious lacunae with admirable tact (p. vii), she ends her ‘Preface’ with a tacit warning to would-be or soi-disant Sebald experts: her research has made her realize that during her 1996 interview, Sebald had ‘spun her a tale’ about his work, some of which has been ‘repeated as a fact ever since’ (p. x).
On 21 July 2021 Angier worked a longer and more explicit version of her caveat into the brief introductory essay to Speak, Silence that appeared in the ‘Notebook’ section of the Literary Review, no 498 (‘Sebald’s paradoxes: In search of an enigmatic author’, pp. 40–1). Here, while affirming Sebald’s ‘deep empathy with the victims of history and the whole of nature’, she discusses his ‘ruthlessness’ as a writer, citing the fierce and not always justifiable denunciations that are contained in his early critical pieces and the convenient fictions and unacknowledged borrowings that are to be found in his later literary work. More importantly, she states her intention of ‘drawing these out’ in her forthcoming biography.
So despite pre-publication fears that I have heard expressed already, Speak, Silence is not a hagiographic text, and besides raising the above three topics for further examination, Angier’s research allows her to explore the darker sides of Sebald’s psychology more thoroughly than any previous writer has done, moving Donna Ferguson to publish her proleptic review in the Observer on 1 August 2021 (no. 11,983, p. 15) under the banner headline ‘Revealed: the secret trauma that inspired German literary giant’. Although some informed readers will feel that Angier’s biographical analysis goes too far, uses unreliable and/or insufficient evidence, and does not make enough of Sebald’s understatedly dry and ‘mordantly funny’ wit, it is widely known that from quite early on in his life as an academic and writer he openly styled himself as a melancholic. At first, he regarded this disposition in relatively positive terms, almost as an advantage, since it enabled him to develop a sardonically critical relationship with a badly flawed world and use the resultant deadpan sense of humour as a means of self-defence. But Angier takes the view that his melancholic imagination metamorphosed into the more drastic, Benjaminian conviction that world history is a chain of interconnected, albeit silent because hidden or forgotten, catastrophes which demanded investigation and exposure. This account also tends to the view that Sebald’s increasingly bleak pessimism was accompanied by a quasi-messianic sense that as a writer, critic and teacher, he had been called to explore such stygian darkness, and this in turn caused him to take an aggressively dismissive or judgmental attitude towards anyone who sought to mitigate the enormity of the task. In parallel with this, Sebald’s alleged ‘ruthlessness’ could also become uncompromisingly dogmatic when he was giving a lecture or teaching students about post-war German literature (cf. Marco Stahlhut’s unorthodox, courteous, but rarely cited essay on his memories of Sebald the teacher that was published in the Feuilleton of the FAZ on 12 December 2016). Conversely, according to Angier, the same ‘ruthlessness’ could give rise to thoughts of suicide whenever, especially in his final years, his self-imposed burden as a writer became impossibly heavy or his sense of guilt at being a survivor became intolerable.
It will not be easy for competing Sebald scholars to form a straightforward and definitive opinion on Angier’s remarkable biography – partly because many of the main actants in Sebald’s complex life are no longer available for consultation, partly because some readers, even the decreasing number who knew him well, will have difficulty reconciling their more positive memories with Angier’s findings, and partly because it is hard to believe that another devotee of Sebald’s work will want, let alone have the time, to venture down a similarly serpentine research path in order to demonstrate the superiority of her/his own views. So although Angier’s work may provoke widely differing responses, even from Sebald’s many admirers, they all owe her a large debt of gratitude for making such a sophisticated and committed case with so much lucidity, clarity and care in a study that will be highly accessible to academic and non-academic readers alike. They should also be grateful for the fresh and stimulating light that her painstaking biographical research casts on Sebald’s oeuvre, some of which, like his first and still unpublished novel (written c. 1966–7; see pp, 219–24), is all but unknown.