Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

All this, plus his work as a translator, enriched Thelen’s language in impressive fashion. By comparing words, sentences, and idioms; by altering them; and by shaping new combinations, he created a multiplicity of new coinages. In this verbal circus, Thelen was the juggler, clown, and trapeze artist, all at once. As such, he performed a highly important service to German, the language of his birth. To quote Jean Paul, another brilliant German novelist, he “loosened its tongue.”

But what was Thelen’s life like before the Island was written — before a plan for the book even existed? The fifteen years that passed between his stay on Mallorca and the writing of the book went by both dramatically and calmly.

After their escape from the Spanish Falangists and the German National Socialists on Mallorca in 1936, Thelen and his wife passed through France and arrived in Switzerland, Beatrice’s homeland. Following a stay in Auressio (Canton Ticino), they planned a further escape to Portugal. From 1937 to 1947, Teixeira de Pascoaes sheltered them at his vineyard estate near Amarante in northern Portugal, protecting them from the grasp of the Nazis. During this time, Thelen worked on his translation of works by Pascoaes. Using contacts with the Dutch publishing house of Meulenhoff, which published the Dutch translations of Pascoaes, Thelen moved to Amsterdam in 1947. Here he found himself among writers and publishers, and he began to tell his stories about Mallorca.

One of his fascinated listeners was Geert van Oorschot, the Amsterdam publisher who published the Island in 1953. Thelen scholars originally assumed that van Oorschot was the first to encourage the writing of the book, but a letter written by Thelen on December 1, 1942 reveals that the publisher Meulenhoff had actually urged him to write a book of memoirs a good ten years earlier. What follows is a complete account, unavailable until now, of the correspondence between Thelen and the Düsseldorf publisher Peter Diederichs, and between Thelen and his family, insofar as it bears upon the writing of the Island.

In December, 1942, Thelen wrote to his mother:

My Dutch publisher has asked me in his most recent letter to write a book of travel impressions for his publishing house — without fancy notions of a “book”—just chatting on about my odd adventures, especially in Spain, meeting famous people, etc. A German publisher, in fact my own publisher, is likewise eager to produce such a book, so now I’ll have to decide whether to write it in Dutch or in German. Certain things come to me more easily in Dutch, but I can handle other things better using my mother tongue.

The German-language publisher he mentions was Rascher in Zurich, who published Thelen’s translations of Pascoaes. Almost a decade will now pass before Thelen begins writing his recollections. On May 8, 1951, he writes to his family in mock-officialese that on the previous day he has signed a contract with Geert van Oorschot:

The undersigned wishes to add that yesterday he concluded a contract with a publisher situated in said municipality of Amsterdam, for the purpose of securing the publishing rights for a book, yet to be written, which is to placed on the market in a Dutch version on 15 February, 1952 bearing the title “From the Applied Recollections of Vigoleis,” a novel by a. v. thelen. Now he must get a move on if he intends to produce text with his pen by the contracted deadline.

Van Oorschot, who was enthusiastic about the Mallorca tales that Thelen delivered in person, had been encouraging him to write down his experiences, and he had finally succeeded. At this time, the author and his publisher assumed that the work would be written in Dutch.

About two weeks later Thelen wrote to his family:

My publisher wants to bring out the Vigoleis “novel” in German, too, as a co-production with a German or Swiss company. He holds great promise for my jottings, based solely on a preliminary chapter that he found very impressive. I’m calling all the characters by their real names, “concealing nothing and adding nothing,” and so I plan to preface it all with a notice to that effect… I occasionally pull back from my own self, dropping the first-person narration and reporting on Vigoleis as an invented character. May the Muses look kindly upon me!

On June 7, 1951, Thelen writes to his brother Ludwig concerning his progress, and for the first time he uses the descriptive term “memoirs” in connection with the Island:

This in haste. I’ve got much to do. I’ve just finished the chapter in my memoirs where I explain how Vigoleis wants to adopt a child, and how everything works out differently from what he expected.

Before he takes a trip to Switzerland, Thelen writes to Ludwig from Amsterdam on June 13:

My tome is making progress. I still don’t have a main title, but I’m considering calling the first volume “The Island of Second Sight.” Being in the role of Vigoleis gives rise to mirror images that I am reluctant to associate with my other self. I hope to get busier in Switzerland than I have been here, where I can’t seem to calm down.

This hope apparently goes unfulfilled. Having arrived in Switzerland, Thelen writes to his family on June 25 from Locarno:

At the moment I feel stupid. No progress with my tome. I’ve lost contact with it. It will be some time before I can reconnect.

At the end of August, Thelen and his wife are back in Amsterdam, but it isn’t until October 4 that he returns to the subject of his book, in a letter to his sister-in-law Martha:

Before I put a new sheet of paper in the typewriter and get back to fiddling with my Vigoleis’ recollections, I’ll type out a few lines for you.

And on October 16, 1951, Thelen gets more specific in a letter to Ludwig:

My memoir publisher is active again. The German manuscript, ready for translation, has to be in his hands by the 31 st. One chapter went to the press today, in Dutch. In a few weeks it will appear as a pre-publication in a journal that takes risks like this one, and not just because it has the name “Libertinage.” The translation is in the best hands. No less an expert than Thomas Mann’s translator has taken on the task.

The translator was named C. J. E. Dinaux, and the chapter entitled “The Single-Chair System” appeared in the November/December issue of the Dutch literary journal. At this time, van Oorschot was planning to have Dinaux translate the entire text.

Thelen continues writing, but the deadline for submission of the manuscript (October 31, 1951) has already passed.

Speaking with Saint Paul, I no longer live, but Vigoleis lives in me. This guy Vigoleis is pestering me to deliver his recollections as the contract says I should. The manuscript keeps growing, and with it the author’s recklessness” (Postcard to his family, November 6, 1951)

And in a letter to Ludwig on November 28:

Yesterday I finished the first part (of three) of the first book. But now I must work hard in order to get the manuscript ready to pass on to the Dutch translator by the end of the year… If I’m not disturbed, I can write up to 10 pages a day, my average being 5. When complete it will be more than 400 pages.

Both the author and his publisher radically underestimated the final size of the Island. Thelen’s “cactus style” repeatedly caused his stories to engender further stories. Or to put the matter as he himself did in a letter to Ludwig on January 20, 1952, like the “sorcerer’s apprentice,” the spirits that he conjured up produced new spirits: