Île Saint-Pierre

In the early autumn of 1765, during his exile in Switzerland, Jean-Jacques Rousseau took two rooms in an old priory on the tiny Île Saint-Pierre, later declaring, in the Fifth Promenade of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, that he had been happier there than anywhere else. In a state of utter exhaustion when he arrived, Rousseau hoped to find quiet and stillness that would be interrupted only by ‘the cry of the eagle, the song of an occasional bird, and the rushing of the mountain streams’, and despite having to escape from frequent visitors, sometimes through a trapdoor in his room, Rousseau was able to devote himself to the study of botany and to put together a comprehensive herbarium of the plants on the island. ‘I set out to compose’, he wrote, ‘a Flora Petrinsularis, and to describe every single plant on the island in enough detail to keep me busy for the rest of my days. They say a German once wrote a book about a lemon peel; I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks - and I did not want to leave even one blade of grass or atom of vegetation without a full and detailed description’.

While still a student, W.G. Sebald caught a glimpse of the little island on the Lac de Bienne and resolved that one day he would visit it. About thirty years later he did so: ‘As I sat in Rousseau’s room’, he wrote, ‘it was as if I had been transported back to an earlier age, an illusion I could indulge in all the more readily inasmuch as the island still retained that same quality of silence, undisturbed by even the most distant sound of a motor vehicle, as was still to be found everywhere in the world a century or two ago. Towards evening, especially, when the day-trippers had returned home, the island was immersed in a stillness such as is scarcely now to be found anywhere in the orbit of our civilised world, and where nothing moved, save perhaps the leaves of the mighty poplars in the breezes which sometimes stirred along the edge of the lake. The paths strewn with a fine limestone gravel grew ever brighter as I walked along them in the gathering dusk, past fenced-in meadows, past a pale motionless field of oats, a vineyard, and a vintner's hut, up to the terrace at the edge of the beech wood already black with night, from where I watched the lights go on one after another on the opposite shore’. Shortly before his unexpected death, when asked by an interviewer where he felt most at home, Sebald replied that it was on Île Saint-Pierre.

Speak, Silence - In Search of W.G. Sebald, Carole Angier’s new and lengthy biography, is impressively detailed and seems to have been exhaustively researched. It is likely, however, that Sebald, a notoriously private man, would have preferred it not to have been written, and it is probably for that reason that his widow, daughter, and some of his closest friends chose not to speak to the author. While this was an obvious challenge, the biography is admirably comprehensive, affectionate, and gracious, and although there is much new information about the man and his work, there is little that is controversial, except, perhaps, an account of a late intimate friendship with a woman he knew in his youth, references to apparent ruthlessness in some business dealings, and especially the discovery that Sebald often avoided the truth when talking about his life and explaining the background to his stories. It is possible that many of his readers, like Angier, may feel disturbed by these revelations, partly because they appear to undermine the sense of honest integrity that characterises the narrators in his books, and also because Sebald himself is so often described as a gentle and kindly man, but they are not really so very shocking. With regard to what Angier calls his ‘lies’, Sebald was well aware of what he was doing and chose to ignore the possibility that blurring boundaries between fact and fiction, as well as ‘borrowing’ other people’s life stories without their permission, might prove to be troublesome - and this is not without precedent among honourable writers and artists. Similarly, an obsession with privacy and solitude meant that he was never comfortable talking about the details of his personal life, and he clearly liked to lead interviewers slightly astray. One way or the other, ambivalence and ambiguity seem not to have bothered him greatly.

Angier follows accepted interpretations of Sebald’s books, emphasising that their main concerns are the Holocaust and other human tragedies, and that they are infused with empathy for exiles and outsiders. The reasons for this, she says, are the German ‘silence’ with regard to World War II that Sebald found deeply troubling as he grew up in the 1950s, and the personal family traumas that he may have suffered in his childhood. She also suggests that his old-fashioned, painstaking, and poetic prose does much to account for the emotional resonance of the books. Nonetheless, neither his subject-matter nor his style of writing are quite enough to justify the widespread enthusiasm with which Sebald’s writing was embraced in the early years of this century, nor his swift and unexpected rise to fame, and these points are left unresolved.

At the end of the biography Angier allows herself to speculate about Sebald’s inner life, and her thoughts on the subject are among the least expected and most intriguing aspects of the book. Proposing that Sebald’s many phobias and sensitivities were rooted in an inability to protect himself adequately against life’s inevitable troubles, and that ‘normal experience was a trauma’ to him, she goes on to describe him as a ‘mystic and visionary’. Sebald was searching, she writes, for a sense of ‘oneness’, the state of being that exists before life is divided into space and time, and consequently into sorrow and separation. An interest in metaphysical ‘oneness’ might help to explain the dreamlike fluidity of the thoughts, feelings, and associations in his books, as well as his attraction to coincidences, but Sebald’s depressive and pessimistic view of the world, which he often tried to assuage by taking long solitary walks, is far from typical of spiritual mysticism, which is usually optimistic and joyful. It is nevertheless true, as Angier also points out, that his writing is infused with passages of great beauty and intensity, and there are moments when it approaches a kind of pantheism, as when he once remarked that ‘while looking, we sense how things are looking at us, and we understand that we are not here to pervade the universe, but to be pervaded by it’. This mood seems frequently to have come upon him, but perhaps the place where he experienced it most vividly and benignly was on Île Saint-Pierre.

For further exploration:

Sebald on Île Saint-Pierre: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/20/place-country-wg-sebald-extract

Review of Speak, Silence: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/15/speak-silence-in-search-of-wg-sebald-by-carole-angier-review-the-artful-master-of-repressed-memories

Another review of Speak, Silence: https://newrepublic.com/article/163070/lost-world-wg-sebald-speak-silence-review

An interesting website related to Speak, Silence: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/discover/non-fiction-features/speak-silence-by-carole-angier/

Grant Gee’s documentary on Sebald: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En3VlxsAVgQ

Lotte Reiniger and ‘The Storyteller’

The Peace of Wild Things