W. Sebald - The Emergence of Memory - Conversations with W.G. Sebald

EW: What do you do?

WGS: I walk with the dog. But that doesn’t really get me off the hook. And I have, in fact, not a great desire to be let off the hook. I think we have to try to stay upright through all that, if it’s at all possible.

EW: Even as a young man, your uncle Ambros — you quote from his journal — says that memory seems to him like “a kind of dumbness,” that it makes his head “heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height.” How does that work?

WGS: It’s that sensation, if you turn the opera glass around. . I think all children, when they’re first given a field glass to look through, will try this experiment. You look through it the right way around, and you see magnified in front of you whatever you were looking at, and then you turn it round, and curiously, although it’s further removed, the image seems much more precise. It’s like looking down a well shaft. Looking in the past has always given me that vertiginous sense. It’s the desire, almost, or the temptation that you might throw yourself into it, as it were, over the parapets and down. There is something terribly alluring to me about the past. I’m hardly interested in the future. I don’t think it will hold many good things. But at least about the past you can have certain illusions.

EW: What are your illusions?

WGS: You do tend to think that the people who lived in New England in the late eighteenth century must have had a more agreeable life than nowadays. But then if you think about women having eight children and having to do all their washing in a bowl in the kitchen with a fire of sticks of wood, it’s perhaps not quite as idyllic as one tends to imagine. So there is of course a degree of self-deception at work when you’re looking at the past, even if you redesign it in terms of tragedy, because tragedy is still a pattern of order and an attempt to give meaning to something, to a life or to a series of lives. It’s still, as it were, a positive way of looking at things. Whereas, in fact, it might just have been one damn thing after another with no sense to it at all.

EW: In The Emigrants , the painter in Manchester whom you call Max Ferber thinks he’s found his destiny when he sees sooty Manchester with all its smokestacks, and he feels he’s come there to “serve under the chimney.” Why is he so drawn to dust? What does that mean for him?

WGS: We know the biblical phrase, dust to dust and ashes to ashes, so the allegorical significance of dust is clear. The other thing is that dust is a sign of silence somehow. And there are various references in other stories in the book to dusting and cleanliness. That of course has been in a sense a German and Jewish obsession, you know, keeping things kosher and clean. This is one of the things that those two in many ways quite closely allied nations shared. And there is the episode in the story of Adelwarth where the narrator goes through Deauville and a woman’s hand appears through one of those closed shutters, scarcely open shutters, on the first floor and shakes out a duster.

There are some people who feel a sense of discomfort in tidy, well-kept, constantly looked-after houses. And I belong to those people. I’ve always felt it to be difficult to be in a house where this sort of cold order is maintained, the cold order which was typical of the middle-class salon which would only be opened once or twice a year for certain days like Christmas, perhaps, or an anniversary of one kind or another, and where the grand piano would stand in dead silence throughout the year and the furniture possibly be covered with dust sheets and so on. By contrast, if I get into a house where the dust has been allowed to settle, I do find that comforting somehow. I remember distinctly that around about the time when I wrote the particular passage that you are referring to, I visited a publisher in London. He lived in Kensington. He had still some business to attend to when I arrived, and his wife took me up to a sort of library room at the very top of this very tall, very large, terraced house. And the room was all full of books, and there was one chair. And there was dust everywhere; it had settled over many years on all those books, on the carpet, on the windowsill, and only from the door to the chair where you would sit down to read, there was a path, like a path through snow, as it were, you know, worn, where you could see that there wasn’t any dust because occasionally somebody would walk up to that chair and sit down and read a book. And I have never spent a more peaceful quarter of an hour than sitting in that particular chair. It was that experience that brought home to me that dust has something very, very peaceful about it.

EW: One of the painter Max Ferber’s techniques to achieve his goal of creating dust is to put on layers of paint and then scrape it off and then rub it out and put it on and scrape it off. And there’s a point when you describe your own writing of this book where you seem to be adopting, almost, or finding yourself in the same position of writing and erasing and even questioning the whole, as you say, questionable business of writing.

WGS: Yes, it is a questionable business because it’s intrusive. You do intrude into other people’s lives, as I had to when I was trying to find out about these stories, and you don’t know whether you’re doing a good or a bad thing. It’s a received wisdom that it’s good to talk about traumas, but it’s not always true. Especially if you are the instigator of making people remember, talk about their pasts and so on, you are not certain whether your intrusion into someone’s life may not cause a degree of collateral damage which that person might otherwise have been spared. So there’s an ethical problem there. And then the whole business of writing of course — you make things up, you smooth certain contradictory elements that you come across. The whole thing is fraught with vanity, with motives that you really don’t understand yourself.

This form of creative writing, as it were, doesn’t date back very far with me, but I have always been scribbling in one way or another. So it’s a habitual thing. It’s very closely linked, as far as I can tell, to neurotic disorders, that you have to do it for certain periods of time and then you don’t do it for other periods of time, and then you have to do it again and you do it in an obsessive manner. It is a behavioral problem in one way. Of course it has other more positive aspects, but those are well known. What is less well known are these darker sides of it.

EW: I think at one point that someone says, referring to another text, that the book was heartbreaking but necessary work. It felt to me like that’s what you were doing here, that this was heartbreaking but necessary work.

WGS: Well, I’m glad to hear that some people think that. I find that reassuring up to a point, but it’s not going to allay all the misgivings that I have about it. And one of the most acute problems after a while is, of course, contending with the culture business that invariably then surrounds you, and you have to deal with it. Because when you do begin to write seriously, then it is very much like an escape route — you find yourself in some kind of compound, your professional life, and you start doing something about which nobody knows. You go into your potting shed. . For me, when I wrote my first texts, it was a very, very private affair. I didn’t read them to anybody, I have no writer friends and so on. So the privacy which that ensured for me was something that I treasured a great deal, and it isn’t so now. So my instinct is now to abandon it all again until people have forgotten about it, and then perhaps I can regain that position where I can work again in my potting shed, undisturbed.