A century ago, a distinguished Austrian scholar observed that Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was “the most difficult problem in literary history” and that the more we learned about him, the more of a problem he became. That state of affairs has not changed.

Kleist’s short and mostly unhappy life was a muddle of contradictions. His small dramatic oeuvre ranges disconcertingly wide, from comedy of manners to domestic tragedy, from social realism to gothic fantasy. His prose, of which Peter Wortsman has here collected and translated a welcome new selection, is stranger and more unsettling still. Romantics, Expressionists and Existentialists have all claimed him as an inspiration. Kafka called him a “blood-brother.” But Kleist belongs to no literary school and remains, as Thomas Mann observed, in a class uniquely his own. Outside the German-speaking lands, he is all too little read.

Kleist was born in the market town of Frankfurt on the Oder into an aristocratic Prussian family that had produced a long line of distinguished military men. Following tradition, he joined a regiment of the royal foot guards when he was not yet 15. He saw action against the French, but he was quite unsuited to the discipline and monotony of military life. “So many officers, so many drill masters, so many soldiers, so many slaves,” he wrote.

After a few years of service, he left the army and returned to his home town to study philosophy, physics and mathematics at the university. He acquired a reputation as a serious young man, a bit of a loner. Determined to pursue his intellectual development to the full, and guided by some firm though unspecified plan, in his early 20s Kleist embarked on a decade—his last—of anxious, unsettled life: endless travel; civil service; much reading; much ill health; a flaring of Prussian nationalist zeal; a rash attempt to join the French army; brief imprisonment as a suspected spy.

He also founded a short-lived literary journal and a daily paper. He got to know, and managed to alienate, the grand old men of German letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Christoph Martin Wieland. The literary Romantics—including Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano and the brothers Grimm—liked him, even revered him. An awkward, anguished soul, he might have stepped from the pages of one of their works.

Through it all Kleist wrote, though to no very wide acclaim: essays, anecdotes, shorts stories, plays. Then, on Nov. 21, 1811, at around four in the afternoon, on a small hill by the shore of the Wannsee lake just outside Berlin, having first shot dead a woman called Henrietta Vogel, who was the wife of an acquaintance and who in the subsequent autopsy would be found to have been suffering from incurable cancer, he placed a pistol in his mouth and killed himself. He was 34.

Kleist in his youth had espoused with enthusiasm all the optimism of the Enlightenment. Reason would conquer all; happiness would come with experience and understanding. In March 1801, however, by his own account, he seems to have encountered the thought of Immanuel Kant (it is not clear what precisely he read), and his world fell apart. By testing the nature and limits of human knowledge, Kant had sought primarily to establish the possibility of a meaningful metaphysics. To Kleist, however, it was much grimmer than that: Kant had shown, he believed, that empirical knowledge was unreliable, reason illusory, truth unattainable and life quite meaningless. “My sole and highest goal has vanished,” he wrote. “Now I have none.”

It was an extreme overreaction, not to mention a misreading of Kant’s philosophy, but Kleist was like that. The universe inhabited by the characters in his works is bleak and bizarre—as “Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist” reminds us. In his essay “On the Theater of Marionettes,” an ironic, fictionalized dialogue, Kleist consider’s Man’s fall from Eden and asks whether human self-consciousness is less a blessing than a curse. The characters in his works, particularly in his extraordinary short stories, try to make sense of a senseless world, to behave rationally in the face of madness, to act with purpose while at the mercy of cruel chance.

In “Michael Kohlhaas,” the eponymous protagonist is a wronged horse dealer who pursues justice to the point of death. In “The Marquise of O,” a virtuous widow who finds herself inexplicably pregnant seeks the truth quite heedless of her own disgrace. (In the mid-1970s, Eric Rohmer made this story into a compelling film.) Fate, for the lovers in “The Earthquake in Chile,” is utterly malign. Religious faith, for the iconoclasts in “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music,” amounts to murderous bigotry. Political principle, amid the racial strife of the Haitian revolution in “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo,” is a cloak for primal violence. Recounting these horrors, Kleist does not moralize or philosophize. He does not even try to explain.

What makes these dark narratives not just bearable but readable—compelling sometimes, at the unlikeliest moments even funny—is Kleist’s extraordinary prose. Exploiting to the full the rigors of German syntax, he uses language to impose order and meaning on a profoundly disordered world. Clause follows clause in a stately, dispassionate procession of appalling events, commas marking time, paragraphs and even single sentences stretching on inexorably for line after line. Catastrophes unfold in a subclause. Idiosyncrasies of word order defer full, terrible understanding to the last possible moment.

English does not lend itself readily to Kleist’s syntactical effects. Mr. Wortsman rises to the challenge with relish. He achieves readability while preserving something of the structure and even the rhythm of Kleist’s dense yet lucid sentences: no easy task. This curious author’s contemporaries must have found his prose almost as odd and involving as it seems to us. Even in his own day, no one wrote quite like Kleist.

Poet of Paradox

Heinrich von Kleist’s dark conjuring yields a strange, enlivening joy

Geoffrey O’Brien

Apr/May 2010

On the morning of November 21, 1811, Heinrich von Kleist and his terminally ill friend Henriette Vogel strolled to the shore of the Wannsee, near Berlin, and carried out a suicide pact. A passerby had seen them moments earlier, walking hand in hand, apparently in gay spirits. A few days before, the thirty-four-year-old Kleist had sent his cousin Marie a letter in which he described his life as “the most tormented that any human being has ever lived,” and on the morning of his death he wrote to his half-sister, Ulrike: “The truth is that no one could really help me on this earth. . . . May Heaven grant you a death at least half as happy and full of unutterable joy as mine.”

He must have seemed to himself the very type of the failed writer. He had written once to Ulrike: “Hell gave me my half-talents, Heaven grants a man a complete talent or none.” Few at the time would have disagreed with him. (Goethe found him too unhealthy a specimen: “His hypochondria destroys him both as a man and a writer.”) It would take decades for the magnitude of his achievement to become apparent. In eight years or so, he had written—along with a mass of essays, political articles, poems, and letters—eight plays and eight stories that mark the moment when European culture, or more precisely the European conception of what culture was, came asunder. As an artist he sought not to destroy but to build, yet his works unavoidably gravitated toward the contemplation of destruction. Outward catastrophes—earthquake, massacre, cannibalism, warfare, the iconoclasm of religious fanatics, the savageries of thuggish barons—mirrored equally terrifying forms of inward fissure. His protagonists were condemned to bewilderment, self-doubt, obsession. Yet this was a writer who in his early youth believed, or wanted to believe, that happiness consisted of “the pleasant observation of the moral beauty of our own selves.”

He came from an old military family, an aristocratic Prussian line of much pedigree and little money. A soldier from the age of fifteen, he fought against Napoleon in the war of 1792, came to despise army life, and resigned his commission in 1799 to devote himself to science and philosophy. There followed a prolonged period of wandering, a broken betrothal, various halfhearted attempts at earning a living, life plans mapped out and abandoned, works drafted and destroyed. Undertaking to fuse Sophocles and Shakespeare into a new form of verse drama, he wrote plays (among them Penthesilea, Little Katherine of Heilbronn, and The Prince of Homburg) that, while they found no audience in his lifetime, are without doubt the greatest of their period in any language: tortuously twined theater-poems of violence and desire that strain at the forms that embody them. The almost dungeon-like rigor of Kleist’s dramaturgy encloses a counterforce of rebellious fury. His plays, like his stories, are constructed with strands of legal argument and military strategy, each bit of linkage reasonable in itself, but leading to a point where the inexorability of human logic becomes an aspect of the world’s unappeasable irrationality.

The stories—of which six are translated by Peter Wortsman in his very welcome Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, along with a few brief but endlessly suggestive essays and fragments—were written in between the plays and in between the episodes of a life rapidly unraveling. Kleist spent nine months as a minor bureaucrat in Prussia’s taxation department and six months as a French prisoner wrongly suspected of espionage. He had a brief career as a newspaper editor and was fervent in the cause of German nationalism. His personal circumstances were dire. The stories offer no direct commentary on any of this. They are tales, supernatural incidents, mock-historical chronicles, exotic adventures, discreetly erotic comedies. None point to an obvious moral; in fact, they deviously confound attempts to locate any such thing.

Two of them—The Marquise of O . . . and the novella-length Michael Kohlhaas—seem to me pretty much the best stories ever written, and the rest are of nearly equal fascination. Yet there is nothing to which their manner and texture can really be compared. They are machines that, once turned on, move ineluctably forward: sometimes with the swift, destructive force of a military unit, sometimes with the lumbering, exhausting weight of a protracted lawsuit, sometimes with the maddening, hair-splitting insistence of a theological argument carrying with it the threat of some savage punishment, and sometimes like a joke spun out beyond normal bounds. We wait for a punch line, which, when it comes, plunges us deeper into mystery. The stories do not pause for breath; even less so in Wortsman’s translations, which seek to convey the intricately enmeshed patterns of Kleist’s syntax, so that, for example, the hundred or so pages of Michael Kohlhaas seem almost a single sentence. Once one engages with Kleist’s narration, its peculiar urgency forces attention even as the plot spins into unforeseen byways.

He is the least quotable of great writers. Extracting a sentence from one of his stories is like taking a stone from a wall of Machu Picchu—every phrase is wedged into its context. Yet in Kleist’s paradoxical fashion, these sentences do not so much shore one another up as engage in low-level conflict. A meaning is asserted, only for an ensuing sentence to sabotage or undermine it. His unities are built out of internal contradictions. The Marquise of O . . . by its premise (a respectable and virtuous woman who inexplicably finds herself pregnant and sets out to discover the father of her child) might be the sort of elegant, ribald joke a Boccaccio or Aretino would have told. Yet as it moves from one psychological conundrum to another, the joke mutates by turns into a medieval saint’s legend and a kind of modern novel not yet invented. We guess what the solution must be, yet, even as the answer turns out to be as obvious as we supposed, new questions arise that make the joke mysterious and troubling. Who, after all, are these people? We know more about them than any simple jest could contain, yet what we know only leads further into the unfathomable. Between any two connecting points of Kleist’s remorselessly airtight structures lurks a potential abyss.

No Kleist text offers a simple reading. However neatly it works out—and there is no one like Kleist for elaborately logical explanations of improbable events—the import remains naggingly suspended. His art enacts a resolution and by the same gesture shows it to be impossible. “It is not we who know, but rather a certain state of mind in us that knows,” he writes in an essay included here, hinting at the dark recognition toward which his stories advance, an intimate and appalling apprehension that the abyss is where we already live. His parables reveal only reversible truths, as if there were always the possibility that everything might be otherwise, that love might after all be hate, justice deception, understanding madness. Everyone has their reasons, even the corrupt noblemen of Michael Kohlhaas and the vengeful revolutionaries of The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, and all their reasons fail to account for uncanny and savage manifestations of unearthly justice like the miracle that turns bullying religious bigots into howling madmen in Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music, or the visitation recounted in The Beggar Woman of Locarno, one of the greatest (and shortest) of ghost stories.

Michael Kohlhaas, the tale of how an upright horse trader evolves into a ferocious avenger because of a small incident involving the misappropriation of two horses, has often been seen as a somber parable of justice denied. Yet a dark hilarity runs through it as Kleist savors the chain of random circumstances that drags in, finally, the infrastructure of a society. At every point, an imminent solution is forestalled by yet another contingency, some accident (such as a messenger seized with cramps) or coincidence or overlooked minor law or privilege. The story desperately wants to conclude but cannot. Toward the end, the beleaguered hero entertains a notion to “ship off to the Levant or East India,” the sort of escape forbidden to anyone inhabiting the universe of Kleist. Then, when the tale seems closest to finding an exit, Kleist injects a subplot involving a Gypsy prophecy and the fate of the Electorate of Saxony, an interpolation some critics consider an aesthetic mistake but that yields a suitably hermetic closing image: the hero, just before his execution, swallowing a piece of paper so that no one will ever read what is on it.

Whatever death wish may have gripped Kleist throughout his short life, there is nothing the least morbid, ghostly, wan, or attenuated about his work. Although it can hardly be discussed without invoking despair and the erosion of self, that work is infused nonetheless with an enlivening energy that can properly be called joyful. It is a joy perhaps limited to artmaking, in a life otherwise intolerably conflicted and frustrated but nonetheless bursting out, bright and exhilarating, in every branching, relentless thrust of invention.

Geoffrey O’Brien is the author of The Fall of the House of Walworth, to be published in August by Henry Holt.

“The Marquise of O.”, one of Heinrich von Kleist’s best-known novellas, tells the story of Julietta, a respectable widow, who feels obliged to advertise in the local paper that “she had, unbeknownst to her, been gotten in the family way; that the father of the child that she was about to bear had best make himself known; and that, for family considerations, she was resolved to marry him.” Some months previously, the citadel her father commanded was attacked by Russian troops: the castle was stormed, and the Marquise dragged off by a gang of Russian soldiers. She is rescued by the commanding officer, the dashing Count F., who, like an avenging angels, strikes down her assailants, before decourously offering his arm and leading her to safety.

As her pregnancy progresses, the Marquise alienates her family by her stubborn refusal to reveal the father of the child, and, worse, her continuing protestations of ignorance and indeed innocence. While her family, maddened, eventually turn her out, Count F. asks for her hand in marriage and distinguishes himself by his unfailingly gentlemanly conduct. Needless to say, it turns out that it was Count F. who had taken advantage of her, and naturally, the Marquise refuses him, at least at first: as she explains, he wouldn’t have seemed like a devil to her, had he not, the first time she saw him, appeared like an angel.

In the figure of the Marquise the divide between the uncompromised ideal and the reality of an imperfect world is patched over; this otherwise unbridgeable chasm is one into which Kleist’s figures stumble with unerring regularity. In the story “Michael Kohlhaas”, the eponymous horse-trader, cruelly ill-treated by the local nobleman, pursues hi rightful case with the Kleistian inflexibility that refuses to accept the flawed state of the world. In his crusade for justice, parts of the town of Wittenberg are burnt down and Martin Luther himself has to intercede before his horses are restored and Kohlhaas’s honour is satisfied – even though he knows that he will have to put his head on the block for breaking the law of the land.

This selection unites most of Kleist’s novellas (but regrettably leaves out “The Duel” and “The Foundling”), and supplements them with the best-known of his philosophical writings, “On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking” and “On the Theatre of Marionettes”. Peter Wortsman’s direct and fluent translation makes this an accessible introduction to Kleist for English readers; the afterword seems a missed opportunity, however, in that it is disappointingly short and adds little that is new.

 

Roughton’s beautiful, poetic translation of Laxness’s novel tunes readers in to the frustrated genius of its principal character, far better than that character’s own lengthy philosophical discourses do. Shortly after World War I, Steinn, a young Icelandic poet-philosopher, heads abroad to make himself “the most perfect man on earth” and perceive “glory on the visage of things.” Leaving behind his homeland and would-be sweetheart, Diljá, for Europe, Steinn proves a master of any doctrine he cares to take up, but fails to satisfy his longing for perfection. His “aesthetic soul” leads Steinn to embrace communism while abandoning his own mother, and later to join the order of the Benedictine monks at the expense of worldly intimacy. Much of Steinn’s agony stems from the fact that his quest for perfection is solipsistic; even in his most pious phase, he shows utter disregard for people, including Diljá and his own family. Though he’s destined to fall from the get-go, it’s intriguing to see how Laxness’s antihero dives into manifold ideologies, achieving essentially the same result each time.

Finally, finally, an imposing work of fiction, which rises like a cliff from the flatness of Icelandic poetry and fiction of recent years!  Iceland has gained a new master novelist, and we are certainly bound to admit that with joy.  Halldór K. Laxness wrote this novel in his 24th year.  I doubt that it happens once in a quarter century that a writer so young composes as brilliant a work as this saga of his.  It has never before happened at latitude 64 degrees north.

The Great Weaver from Kashmir is no masterpiece but its style is rare and elegant.  It has its faults in many places, but in general it is more robust, passionate, spiritual, alive, inspiring, wild, true, and youthful than any other Icelandic novel.  The development of the Icelandic novelistic style has taken a half-century leap with this book of H.K.L.  At times its character descriptions are amateurish and unconvincing, but overall they are incredibly well done.  Steinn Elliði, Diljá, Madam Jófríður, Örnólfur, the Ylfingamóðir, into all of these characters the writer has blown a warm and human living spirit; their faces are clear, picturesque, memorable.  The novel’s spirit is in some places affected, false, overworked, the metaphors flavorless or foul… but this is caused by the writer’s fallible taste, and not by his infertile imagination.  His work is in fact ripe with outstanding poetic ideas, that burst forth as if from nowhere and witness to his genius.

H.K.L has been influenced strongly by they style and world-view of many of the main writers of Europe of recent times such as Tolstoy, Strindberg, d’Annunzio, Hamsun, Wilde, Jóhannes V. Jenssen and others.  He has also learned from younger, less known French writers and from and the style and form of Þórbergur Þórðarson.  This is no surprise:  even the most unlearned writers in the world have benefited from the rich influence of older writers.  As a whole his work bears witness to an independent and awesome personality, a copious intelligence, a great cultivation of his own talents.

Kristján Albertsson, Vaka 1927, review of The Great Weaver from Kashmir

 

The Great Weaver from Rekjavic

(The treasured “independence” of a small Scandinavian nation became both matrix and subject for one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists.)

Thanks in large part to the championing of his work undertaken by American poet and novelist Brad Leithauser, the eminent Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness (1902-98) is enjoying a considerable – if as yet incomplete – renaissance.

Laxness, who won the 1955 Nobel Prize for Literature, is in many ways a throwback: a novelist with the soul of an epic poet, whose broad canvases accommodate much of his homeland’s embattled history and rich (oral and written) literary culture. His major books might be called Tolstoyan were they less rigorously down to earth; less precisely focused, not on watershed historic events or glorious adventures, but on the quotidian struggles of stoical – and, sometimes, annoyingly stubborn – ordinary people.

Four of Laxness’s novels – the ambitious masterpieces Independent People and World Light, and two quirky and charming later novels, The Fish Can Sing and Paradise Reclaimed, are currently in print in this country. Of the more than sixty volumes published during his long working lifetime, six other works of fiction – notably the early Salka Valka, the unconventional pastiche saga The Happy Warriors, and a mordant political satire, The Atom Station – have appeared in English translations (most of them unavailable for many years).

And that’s all we have: less than twenty per cent of the total oeuvre of a writer of enormous range and high accomplishment, long since acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s most gifted and protean creative artists.

The cradle, as it were, in which this talent was nurtured comprises a tiny Scandinavian country’s experience of subjugation by larger and more militant neighbor nations (for many centuries, Norway; thereafter Denmark – from which Iceland achieved full independence only as recently as 1944), and also a devotion to the spoken and written word that manifests itself in an unusually high degree of literacy. In every Icelandic household. a common saying declares, you’ll find at least one of Halldor Laxness’s books. But, beyond Laxness, there looms the single most important source of what must be called a national commitment to literature: the literary form Iceland gave to the world, that of the medieval sagas.

Written down mostly in the tenth through twelfth centuries (though preserved and transmitted orally long before that), these stark, fatalistic narratives of exploration, feuding, murder, and revenge simultaneously echo the themes and preoccupations of classical Greek epic and tragedy, and anticipate the modern realistic novel.

Their emphases on struggles for property and respectability waged by laymen who boldly oppose the stronger forces of nobility and royalty (as in the celebrated Egil’s Saga, which details a poor landowner’s one-man rebellion against a greedy Norwegian king) finds echoes in several of Laxness’s persistent (not to say mule-headed) everymen. The later writer’s fascination with travel may well have been stimulated by The Vinland Sagas (stories of westward Viking voyages), and it’s more than likely that Laxness’s deep empathy with iconoclasts and troublemakers was influenced by the colorful figure of the outlaw antihero of Grettir’s Saga (a tale incidentally replete with folklore and supernaturalism). Furthermore, the antecedents of the strong women characters who are such vital presences in even Laxness’s very early fiction can probably be found in the great, mad figure of Gudrun, the much-married monster of appetite who proudly bestrides the operatic Laxdaela Saga.

What we know of Laxness’s early years (for details of which I am indebted primarily to the Swedish critic Peter Hallberg’s expert Halldor Laxness, published in 1971 in Twayne’s World Authors Series) testifies to his sedulous absorption of such literary influences. He was born Halldor Guthdjonsson in the capitol city of Reykjavik in 1902, and raised on a farm purchased shortly thereafter by his father, who was also employed as a road construction foreman. The comforts of rural life obviously benefited the young Laxness’s precocious bent for reading and writing (though the demands of farm labor, as scattered autobiographical writings confess, appear to have appealed rather less to him) – and became the subject of an idyllic first novel, Barn natterunnar (“Child of Nature”), published in its author’s seventeenth year.

Adopting the persona of a young aesthete (and also a pen name derived from the name of his family’s farm: “Laxnes”), the fledgling author traveled extensively throughout Europe and North America, reading everything, recording his observations of foreign mores and lifestyles – and finding himself drawn to the majesty and serenity of formal religion. In 1922, he spent several months as a guest in a Benedictine monastery in Luxembourg, acquiring a penchant for contemplation (and reading knowledge of several foreign languages), but eventually deciding not to enter the priesthood.

Both an early book of short stories and an openly autobiographical novel, Undir Helgahnuk (1923; English translation, Under the Glacier) followed this religious experience. But this juvenilia pales in comparison with Laxness’s first major novel Vefarrin mikli fra Kasmir (“The Great Weaver from Kashmir”), which was published in 1929. It’s a pointedly discursive novel of ideas, whose “divided” protagonist Stein Ellidi pursues an artistic vocation as a means of escaping his bourgeois family’s ingrained materialism. The (ironically observed) process of renunciation through which Stein abandons love and marriage, among other earthly entanglements, is a study in obsession which, Laxness later revealed, was heavily influenced by the psychologically based fiction of Dostoevsky and Strindberg. It’s undoubtedly also a vestige of its author’s (wavering, though obviously sincere) religious preoccupation. It was a great popular and critical success, which made his reputation, and confirmed the appropriateness of the path Laxness now knew he had chosen.

During these years of incipient artistic maturity, Laxness’s travels brought him to North America, where he would send nearly two years (late 1927 through 1929) living in the United States. An abortive career as a Hollywood screenwriter, and a friendship with the muckraking American novelist (and sometime political office-seeker) Upton Sinclair precipitated a fundamental change in Laxness’s thinking. He saw the Great Depression in embryonic form, in lengthening breadlines filled with unemployed workers, and the fervent sympathy with the lives of the disadvantaged, expressed in his early works as a kind of idealized solidarity with poor farmers and fishermen, now became crystallized.

Returning to Iceland in 1930, Laxness declared himself a socialist, and settled down to his life’s work: recording and celebrating, not the rarefied condition of the artist as distinct from society, but the grit and monotony of everyday life; the heroism of simple perseverance and devotion to duty. The struggle for survival would become his abiding theme. And never again would he idealize or romanticize the natures or fates of those caught up in it.

The first important fruit of this resolution was the novel published in two parts as Puvinvidur hreini (“O Thou Pure Vine”) in 1931 and Fuglinn I fjörunni (“The Bird on the Beach”) the following year, and known in English translation as Salka Valka.

Its eponymous heroine – perhaps the most vibrant of all Laxness’s women characters – is first seen arriving by mail boat with her unmarried mother Sigurlina in the rough-and-tumble fishing village of Oseyri. The novel initially focuses on the contrast between timid, stolid Sigurlina (easy prey for every man she meets) and self-sufficient Salka, who foils an attempted rape by the brutish fisherman Steintor Steinsson (an incarnation of pure malevolent superego), and joins the man she chooses, socialist intellectual Arnaldur Björnsson, in a fisherman’s strike against Oseyri’s merchant patriarch Johann Boresen.

Though it’s more fully plotted, Salka Valka has many points of resemblance with Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun’s wry tales of village life (though Laxness rejected the comparison, perhaps unwilling to be linked to Hamsun’s notoriously fatalistic sensibility). The novel has pace, and color, and considerable narrative momentum. And the figures of the well-meaning, though effete Arnaldur and the amiable, condescending Bogesen bespeak a subtlety even more pronounced in the rich characterization of Salka. She’s an avatar of courage and determination (while Arnaldur declaims and theorizes, she assumes the care of four motherless children) who’s also impatient, humorless, and narrow-minded. She’s a very considerable creation – and forerunner of even more fully human and imperfect characters yet to appear.

One such is Bjartur, the unforgettable protagonist of Laxness’s most famous novel Sjalfstaeet folk (1934-35; English translation, Independent People). He’s a farm hand who buys a plot of land (which he hopefully names “Summerhouses”) from his wealthy employer and embarks on a life of stoical combat with unending misfortune. His first wife dies while giving birth to another man’s child: the daughter (Asta Sollilja) whom Bjartur raises as his own. His second wife also dies; crops fail and livestock perish (in a symphony of mischance reputedly caused by a fabled Irish sorcerer who had cursed the land Bjartur works); Summerhouses is sold at auction to the avaricious bailiff who is Bjartur’s worst enemy (and Asta’s biological father); Asta is seduced and impregnated by a visiting tutor, and becomes alienated from the only parent she knows.

Laxness subtly plaits together a lengthy narrative that nevertheless gathers a hurtling momentum, a vivid picture of a nearly primitive culture saturated with folk beliefs and the felt presences of unearthly forces (a scene in which Bjartur subdues and rides a maddened reindeer feels very like an excerpt from ne of the sagas), and several powerful characterizations. The haunted imagination of Bjartur’s sensitive youngest son Nonni, either an artist or a victim in the making, is beautifully drawn – as is Asta’s vacillating love and hatred for Bjartur, with whom she achieves a fragmentary, doomed reconciliation.

But Laxness’s triumph is Bjartur, an indomitable force of nature who might himself be a saga character (Laxness notes Bjartur’s admiration for the storied outlaw “hero” Grettir the Strong). Yet as much as his stubborn endurance impresses, a contrary truth is repeatedly hammered home: Bjartur’s cherished, jealously guarded “independence” isn’t real. He’s a victim of supernatural and human inimical forces – and both his strength and his tragedy derive from his refusal to acknowledge this self-evident truth.

Independent People is perhaps in part a retort to Hamsun’s earlier (1918) The Growth of the Soil, a much more benign portrayal of peasants’ hard lives. It’s the most harshly realistic of Laxness’s novels, and probably represents the most artful interweaving of narrative, characterization, setting, and theme that he ever achieved.

It was followed by another masterpiece, the four-volume epic collectively entitled Ljos heimsins (1937-40; English translation, World Light). This is the story of Olafur Karason, a poor farm boy abandoned by his mother who grows up a ward of his parish, endures numerous (mostly amatory) misadventures (described, early on, as “one long ordeal, as in the folk tales where people fought with giants, dragons, and devils”), and becomes a noted folk poet.

Laxness’s acknowledged source for the character of Olafur is the historical poet Magnus Hjaltason Magnusson (1873-1916). if Bjartur of Summerhouses may be seen as a tragic hero (as I believe he may), then Olafur is a comic one: a reflective and inoffensive vessel of good will whose impulse toward the ideal (symbolized by the “light” glimpsed through a bedroom window) is repeatedly compromised by his dealings with entrepreneurs and worldly wise men, and especially with alluring women.

Following a Dickensian childhood spent with an abusive widow and her hardhearted children, Olafur becomes involved with a sympathetic married woman (herself a poet), the older and wiser Jarprudur, then her effervescent younger counterpart Jorunn (who bears him a daughter), a passionate young pupil at a school where he later teaches (which dalliance lands him in jail), and a cruelly brief idyll with beautiful Bera, the love of his life, who will be snatched away from Olafur by whatever gods seemingly control his absurd destiny.

Throughout this long book, Laxness pits Olafur against both these formidable women and such contrary men of the world as socialist visionary Orn Alafur and tireless businessman Petur Plihross (a great comic character), a wheedling pragmatist whose ceaseless activities (oddly) include founding a Society for Psychical Research. The result is an unusually replete picture of live lived both in the world (albeit reluctantly) and on an ideal plane summarily embodied by the novel’s memorable conclusion – which occurs during Easter Week, and pictures Olafur walking toward the “world light” emanating from a towering glacier. It’s his assumption into the higher reality toward which he has, despite numerous slips and sins, been ever reaching.

Laxness’s reputation, now high and secure, was further enhanced by the appearance of the novel trilogy Islandslukkan (1943-46, “Iceland’s Bell”), which, unaccountably, has never been translated into English. Peter Hallberg describes this work, which is set in the early eighteenth century, as an elegy for Icelandic culture cast in the form of a complex historical tale.

Its central conflict features the characters of Snaefridur Eydalin, a lawyer’s daughter with a knowledgeable reverence for her country’s traditions and folkways, and Arnas Arnaeus, a professor of history and collector of manuscripts whose desire to possess a collection of ancient artifacts destroys his relationship with Snaefridur and propels him into a ruinous marriage with a rich widow. The counterpoint to these characters is escaped prisoner Jon Hreggvidsson (accused of murdering the Danish king’s executioner), a wily survivor whose own love for his country’s lusty hero tales is shown to be a far more vital force than Arnaeus’s narrow pedantry. It sounds potentially schematic, but Iceland’s Bell was another major critical and commercial success. One wonders why it has so long escaped the attention of its author’s translators.

In 1948 Laxness shifted gears, with the publication of Atomstödin (English translation, The Atom Station). Inspired by Icelanders’ reactions to the United States government’s 1945 request for permission to establish permanent military bases on Icelandic soil (a request that was partially granted a year later), it’s a compact story of accommodation and collusion, centered in the figure of Member of Parliament Bui Arland.

Laxness likens Bui’s elastic politics (and morals) to the social and sexual misbehavior of his hilariously dysfunctional family – and contrasts them with the idealism of the novel’s other protagonist: music student Ugla Falsdottir, who also works as a chambermaid in the Arland home. And the fallout, as it were, from the Icelandic Parliament’s conspiratorial negotiations is further linked – with savage irony – to preparations for the ceremonial burial of beloved national poet Jonas Halgrimsson. Thus are several of Laxness’s trademark themes conjoined, in a resonant satirical novel that contains much more than comedy.

More major work was ahead. In 1952, Laxness’s most directly historical novel, Gerpla (English translation, The Happy Warriors), appeared. Based on the classic Fostbraedra saga, among other sources, it’s a densely detailed and largely affectionate parody of the world of the sagas. Though much of its content treats conventional heroic material with broad comedy (a celebrated “skald,”or singer, is actually a notorious liar; an overeager knight blithely beheads an innocent bystander), there is real power in Laxness’s portrayals of his protagonists: ill-starred Borgeir Havarsson, who grows up a very Don Quixote, enthralled by tales of conquest and slaughter; and his foster brother Bormodur, who will leave a comfortable and loving home, and sacrifice himself to the obligation he feels to pursue a bloody revenge.

The Happy Warriors undoubtedly contains an implicit criticism of allegiance to the goals of earthly power and glory – both in its central actions and in a long sequence set in Greenland, where home-centered, peace-loving Eskimos are very pointedly contrasted to eternally restless “warriors.” It is therefore probably not surprising that this novel was followed by the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Laxness in 1955.

After receiving it, the already world-famous novelist became a different kind of international celebrity; a cultural ambassador without portfolio, if you will. He embarked on a world tour in 1957-58, lecturing in many countries (including America), preaching a pacifism compounded of his lifelong skepticism of governments and ideologies, the remnants of his (long since formally renounced) Catholicism, and a burgeoning interest in Asian wisdom; specifically, the path of nonviolence counseled by the Taoism of Chinese philosopher Lao-Tse.

In the years following the Nobel Prize, Laxness, continuously productive throughout his old age, kept on producing volumes of essays and autobiographical pieces at regular intervals. he turned with renewed energy to writing plays, and the decade of the 1960s saw the publication and production of several of his most celebrated dramatic works (only one of which, the 1966 “Dufnaveistan,” has appeared in English translation – as “The Pigeon Banquet”).

And he continued to write fiction. Of the later books, the most purely enjoyable is perhaps Brekkukotsannall (1957; English translation, The Fish Can Sing), a brilliantly detailed picture of its protagonist Alfgrimur Hansson’s youth in a small fishing village, and a vivid contrast between Alfgrimur’s identity with his benevolent surroundings and the tortured progress of an ambitious concert singer who cannot adapt to either the world of his origins or the “higher” one he’s desperate to enter and conquer. It’s a celebration of life that leaves a bracingly bitter aftertaste.

Paradisarheimt (1960; English translation, Paradise Reclaimed) deals with the uncommon subject of Mormonism, in the lively (and often very funny) tale of landowner Steinar Steinsson’s impulsive travels, abandonment of his family to live and work in a Mormon community in Utah, and eventual return to his homeland, where he cheerfully accepts the burden of rebuilding his life. Filled with comic and melodramatic echoes (including experiences of seduction, persecution, and betrayal) of Laxness’s earlier fiction, its an ebullient hymn to the survival instinct –and another tribute to the life-giving unworldliness that Laxness continued to find in religion’s observances and its retreat from the imperatives of getting and spending.

Both these late novels are currently available in lively English versions. Alas, the same cannot be said for their successors, of which only Kristnihald undir jokli (1968) and Sagam af brauddinu dyra (1987) have been translated into English (as Christianity at Glacier and The Bread of Life, respectively). Laxness published an astonishing ten books between 1968 and 1987, and it’s tempting to wonder whether these have not attracted translators because of their presumably more heavily religious emphases, or because their author (who lived until 1998, his ninety-sixth year) had outlived his formidable talent.

We in the English-speaking world may never know. Still, it seems perfectly reasonable to expect, if not demand, that much more of Laxness’s magnificent body of work be made available to us. My personal perpetual literary wish list includes new editions of Salka Valka and The Happy Warriors (though informed opinion advises that the latter’s existing English version is stilted and lifeless). Some enterprising publisher might wish to track down the English translation of The Great Weaver of Kashmir (which was made during Laxness’s residence in America, but never published here), or commission translations of Iceland’s Bell, or Laxness’s essays, or his plays.

In this opinion (based, to be sure, on no more than a half dozen titles), he’s a writer of almost unparalleled range and vitality. No American or British equivalent comes to mind (though I detect a little of Twain and Dreiser, and even Faulkner in him – not to mention a healthy dollop of Dickens). His countrymen understandably compare him with the great Russian novelists. But Laxness, by virtue of his heritage and his individual talent, is something very near to a unique figure: a compassionate, and enormously skillful chronicler of the ordinary and the everyday, whose clear-eyed gaze takes in the nimbus of “world light” (and shadow as well) that embraces, transforms, and exalts the commonplace.

 

The Piranesi “Carceri” etching that provides the cover image for this translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Faux Saulniers could scarcely be more appropriate. Not only is it reminiscent of the endless stairways and the central galleries and hidden cells that Nerval uses to allegorize his own mind in Aurélia, his retrospective description of his mental breakdown, it also refers to the carceral universe of the Prison de Fort-L’Évêque, and then to the Bastille itself, both of which figures in this extraordinarily digressive text. The subtitle, Histoire de l’abbé de Bucquoy, signals the (endlessly thwarted) narrative that sets out to trace the life history of this abbot, a kind of intellectual Houdini or Papillon, who thumbed his nose at the twilight despotism of the Sun King by escaping from the Central State Prison in the opening years of the eighteenth century. As both Richard Seiburth, the genial translator of this text, and Jacques Bony, who edited it for the three-volume Pléiade edition of Nerval, both suggest, even the title is a red herring. Les Faux Saulniers, rendered here as The Salt Smugglers, refers to the rather romantic, swashbuckling figures who aimed to foil the hated salt tax, or gabelle, imposed on the populace by Versailles, which obliged them to purchase a certain amount of salt each year at an abusively high price. In Nerval’s text, the smugglers operate around the writer’s childhood home of the Valois, just to the north of Paris on the way to Compiègne, thereby enabling him to wax lyrical about the beautiful, melancholic landscapes of woods and lakes and fields of that region; these also find their way into several texts of his maturity, including his masterpiece, Sylvie.  The smugglers have a brief, eventful and somewhat perplexing brush with Nerval’s hero, the abbé de Bucquoy, in fact a documented historical figure, Jean-Albert D’Archambaud, comte de Bucquoy (1650?-1740). But apart from that they play no part in the rest of this shaggy dog story, recounted, in Sieburth’s apt phrase, with “Shandyan amiability” — and indeed Nerval became known as “le Sterne français.”

The historical background to The Salt Smugglers is as complex as the narrative itself: a clumsy attempt at censorship, brought in under the government of the “prince-président,” Lous-Napoleon, in July 1850, directly contributed to the tortuous and highly original form of Nerval’s tale. A law known as the Riancey Amendment set out to impose a stamp tax on all newspapers that published the type of roman-feuilleton, or serial number, that had recently made the fortune of Alexandre Dumas, Nerval’s one-time Maître, and with whom he had collaborated on a number of dramatic works. But Nerval was no Dumas — a ripping yarn like The Count of Monte-Cristo was beyond him — and in any case, this new law expressly forbade that kind of enterprise. Officially, the Riancey Amendment was introduced to protect the book trade, but its true motivation, as Jacques Bony suggests, was political. It was introduced to suppress anything that might resemble Eugène Sue’s monumental and avidly read serial novel Les Mystères de Paris, which was judged to have spread dissent and subversion in the minds of the people. The general [political] climate throughout Europe, after the failure of the so-called liberal revolutions of 1848, had turned repressive, and certainly this was the case in France. Nerval’s text had been scheduled to run in the newspaper Le National during the autumn of 1850, which was just after the introduction of this new attempt at censorship, and a year before the establishment of the Second Empire with Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 1851, and the consequent removal into exile of Victor Hugo.

The Riancey Amendment did not impede Nerval, whose text appeared as scheduled in the liberal-leaning Le National between October and December of 1850. In fact, it provided something resembling a fruitful literary constraint, for as Paul Valéry once remarked, “la constrainte produit.”  In Nerval’s case it gave a wonderful opportunity for a game of cat-and-mouse with the censors. Ostensibly declaring that he is writing nothing but straight documentary history, the fragmentary, chaotic, and generally inaccessible nature of his material continually threatens by its very nature to transgress the shadowy boundary between fact and hypothesis, especially as one long section is devoted to the life story of the dashing, petticoated, rebel-for-love Angélique de Longueval, apparently the abbé de Bucquoy’s great-aunt. Nerval comes across her “autobiography” while searching for traces of her great-nephew in the Paris Archives. None of its contents can be verified by other “objective” sources. As Sieburth remarks in his “Translator’s Post-face,” with the Riancey Amendment the state “was now prepared to police the boundary separating the real from the imaginary.”

The Histoire de l’abbé de Bucquoy itself does not commence until well over halfway through Nerval’s text, once he finally gets his hands on the volume that supposedly serves (though in fact it doesn’t) as his principal source — which he first found at a bouquiniste’s stall in the markets of Frankfurt but did not buy, thinking he would be able to acquire it more cheaply back in France. This volume does indeed exist, and the present translation reproduces its original frontispiece, showing a sinister engraving of the Bastille mounted on its ancient escarpment (a section of which is still on show in the Bastille métro station) with wedge-shaped steps stacked at regular intervals along it, very much something out of Gérard’s nightmare in Aurélia. The first two-thirds of the text is a prodigiously prolonged exercise in throat-clearing and digression, which only the brilliantly gauged tone — that “Shandyan amiability” — of the first-person narrator, identified as Gérard de Nerval himself, sustains it all. It contains letters to the Directeur of Le National, bookplates and bibliographical details fastidiously reproduced, copies of legal writs and an eviction order served on the narrator himself, letters from his readers, repeated and elaborate apologies to his readers, followed by promises to embark on his real theme when the long-sought volume, obtained in the end at a private auction, comes into his possession. Meanwhile, he dances nimbly around the Riancey Amendment, taking ironic potshots at its absurdity, and even cutting audaciously close to the bone, comparing Germanic censorship favourably to the French system: “Given our national character, there is always the tendency to exert force simply because one possesses it, or to abuse power simply because one happens to exercise it. — What to expect of a situation that so seriously endangers the interests and even the security of non-political writers?”  In fact, the one most significant thing that Les Faux Saulniers reveals about Nerval is his political knowingness and foresight — not at all a quality usually associated with this otherwordly Romantic. Sieburth goes so far as to call him “one of the savviest political novelists of the Second Republic.”

Two episodes in particular, neither of them much connected either to the salt smugglers or to the abbé de Bucquoy, may serve as illustration. A recurrent and endearing feature of Nerval’s rackety life involves his scrapes with the law (he once wrote a piece called “Mes Prisons”). The events of this kind in The Salt Smugglers will be familiar to readers of La Bohème galante and of Angélique and Sylvie from Les Filles du feu, for the good reason that Nerval later recycled and cannibalized Les Faux Saulniers in three different places (the history of the abbé de Bucquoy is more commonly found in its truncated form in the volume on Enlightenment eccentrics and proto-republicans — the “prophètes rouges” — that were gathered under the title Les Illuminés). Moving from questions of censorship to the behavior of common gendarmes, the narrator recounts his arrest in Senlis by provincial policemen suspicious of his Parisian garb. The police commissaire demands his passport, which Gérard — or the narrator — does not have. But typically in this text, the tension is diffused when the narrator declares himself to be engaged in historical research. “Ah, Monsieur is a writer?  Well so am I!  I wrote poetry as a young man…. I composed a tragedy…. We were clearly not out of the woods; — the police officer was threatening to invite us home to dinner in order to read us his tragedy.”  A little further on, in another digression, a similar but less good-natured episode is recounted involving an archaeologist who is arrested from examining a church somewhere in the Oise, too attentively for the taste of the baffled local gendarme. The archaeologist is arrested and transported back to Paris. The tone is still light, but Nerval’s message is clear — and it is a continuous stout thread running through the text of The Salt Smugglers: we are not so far from having a police state instituted under our very noses. The analogy created throughout, and this is another brilliant and apparently artless tactic of the accident-prone narrator-historian, is with the despotic fin-de-règne of Louis XIV. This is a regime that can throw the abbé de Bucquoy into gaol for no other reason than that he might be a quite other gentleman from a similar-sounding name, the abbé de la Bourlie.

One well-worn device that Nerval uses to bate the censors is the old rhetorical trick of praeteritio, that is, of saying something by insisting that you are not saying it. Once into the story of the abbé proper, when the narrative picks up some welcome pace, Nerval still cannot resist elaborating a semi-fictional character, the shadowy Captain Roland, leader of a group of salt-smugglers, and then declaring “What a fine novel all this material could have made! The abbé de Bucquoy and the captain are quite compelling as characters. Let’s imagine what would happen if we slightly nudged the story along a different route…” etc. The point being, of course, that he thereby insists that he is not perpetrating a novel. When the abbé is finally incarcerated in the Bastille, in the section called “l’Enfer des Vivants,” rendered here as “Living Hell.” we enter on by far the most entertaining and sustained passage of the narrative, though here again, its major elements are not provided by the original Histoire of the abbé, but by Constantin de Renneville’s L’Inquisition française (1724). The early, honeymoon days of the abbé’s “stay” in the Bastille are highly entertaining, the place described sounding more like a gentleman’s club, or an Oxford college with an excellent cellar, than a state prison. “The abbé of Bucquoy, playing at piquet with Renneville under a trellised arbor, remarked: ‘How comfortable we are here; with evening soon approaching, who would even think of trying to escape?’” But as time goes on, the abbé himself, having suffered the horrors of being thrown into “the hole,” and being apprised of the corruption of the turnkeys, and of the scandalously arbitrary sentences imposed upon the “guests” of the Bastille, tries repeatedly to escape — and finally succeeds.  His latter days, spent writing mildly proto-republican tracts in Hanover, and in Holland, are briefly sketched by Nerval to round off his tale.

There is some excitement in the blurb, and Sieburth himself lends support to the “spin” that would recruit Nerval’s strange narrative as a kind of postmodern text avant la letter. He calls it “polyphonic,” and it is true that Gérard allows multiple voices to sound, including the rustic Sylvain’s, who recounts his fantastical drama concerning the death of Rousseau. But what is surely most remarkable is the sostenuto of the unified narrative voice, and its genial tone, which announces the “auto-fictions” of Sylvie and La Bohème gallante with their ramblings around the magical place names — Mortefontaine, Loisy, Senlis, Chaâlis, Ermenonville — of the Valois, or the Parisian noctambules recounted in Les Nuits d’octobre. At one point Nerval announces all his intertexts, beginning with Diderot and Sterne, and going back all the way to The Odyssey, that foundational epic digression. But there is nothing of the knowing or the programmatic nature of postmodernism in this utterly original work, this récit indécidable, this oeuvre transgénérique, it we care to use such modish approximations. What is certain is that it was invented week by week, on the hoof, by an ingenious and financially strapped jobbing newspaper columnist. To my mind, the more interesting trace of the postmodern lies in Nerval’s spellbound diachronic descriptions of topology, as in his visions of Senlis: “I greatly enjoyed this town where virtually every street, stable, or cellar offers a glimpse of Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance. I mentioned ‘the Roman towers in ivy clad!’” In this elegant, sprightly translation, Sieburth has added a valuable text to his own previously published selections from Nerval. The Salt Smugglers is also a delight, because in it we encounter a Nerval who seems relaxed, urbane, witty and even chipper, his mind clear, his intelligence unclouded. And for once, he is not obsessed or lovesick, except by proxy, and that is indeed a sweet relief.

 

George Büchner’s story Lenz, written probably in October 1835 and published in 1839, tow years after its author’s early death, has become a totemic work of German literature.  It straddles fiction and documentary by sticking closely to the ascertainable facts concerning Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-92), a poet and dramatist whose main works date from the Sturm and Drang period of the 1770s, and who fascinated Büchner as a literary ancestor.

Lenz and his generation revolted against neoclassical idealization, demanding instead the creation of lifelike characters.  Sharing the literary Anglophobia of eighteenth-century Germany, Lenz defined his aspirations by playing off Richardson against Fielding: “What is Grandison, that financial abstraction, compared to a Partridge who stands there in front of you?” he wrote in his programmatic Notes on Theatre (1774).  His preferences for Partridge, the comic servant in Tom Jones, indicates a commitment to “low” subject matter, reinforced by the enthusiasm for Shakespeare which was shared by Büchner sixty years later.  Büchner works into his narrative a dialogue on aesthetics where Lenz passionately defends realism: “What I demand in all things is life, the potentiality of existence, and that’s that; we need not then ask whether it be beautiful or ugly.”

Respect for reality also determines Büchner’s literary method.  He had access to unpublished documents reporting how in January 1778 Lenz, after being expelled from the presence of his adored Goethe in Weimar, stayed in the Vosges mountains with the famous Protestant clergyman J. F. Oberlin (after whom Oberlin College in Ohio is named). Oberlin’s own circumstantial narrative of Lenz’s stay is reprinted here.  It shows us how carefully Büchner adhered to the record, taking over entire sentences and, in particular, preserving as much as possible of the direct speech Oberlin retains.  Thus the moment when Lenz bursts into Oberlin’s house and, with his disheveled blonde locks, is initially mistaken for a journeyman but greeted with “Welcome, whoever you are,” is as vivid in Oberlin’s account as in Büchner’s narrative.  This respect for reality reminds us that Büchner was a contemporary of Carlyle, who, in his essay “Biography” (1832), comments on a little incident preserved by Boswell (when Johnson said to a street-walker, “No, no, my girl, it won’t do”): “Strange power of Reality! Not even this poorest of occurrences, but now, after seventy years are come and gone, has meaning for us.  Do but consider that it is true; that it did in very deed occur!”  But of course Büchner also interprets reality.  Lenz in 1778 was threatened with madness.  Having rebelled against an authoritarian father, he had unsuccessfully sought a substitute in Goethe.  He repeatedly tried to bolster his self-esteem by frequenting (perhaps harassing) women associated with his authority figures, such as Goethe’s ex-girlfriend Friederike Brion.  When rebuffed, he fell into appalling fantasies of guilt, imaging that he was a murderer who had sinned against the Holy Ghost.  He terrified the Oberlins by repeatedly attempting suicide, and had to be kept under constant watch.  Büchner shows us this mental state from the inside.  As Lenz crosses the mountains to reach Oberlin, landscape merges into mindscape: “gray clouds drifted across the sky, but every-thing so stifling, and then the fog floated up and crept heavy and damp through the bushes, so sluggish, so clumsy…Everything seemed so small, so near, so wet, he would have liked to set the earth down behind an oven.”  The inner desolation from which Lenz seeks refuge in Oberlin’s happily devout and orderly household finally triumphs when “atheism crept over him and held him fast in its firm imperturbable grasp.”

That last cadence, neatly matching the emphases of the original, illustrates Richard Sieburth’s verbal sensitivity.  Slips like “oven” above, where “stove” is required, or “the eternal Jew” which ought to be “the Wandering Jew,” are very rare.  Though this version does not surpass John Reddick’s excellent Penguin translation, it provides a worthy American counterpart.  Sieburth also provides detailed notes and a well-informed afterword, with much about Büchner’s Revolutionary and scientific activities, and a chronology of Lenz’s life. Büchner’s story, Oberlin’s recollections, and some unsympathetic paragraphs about Lenz from Goethe’s autobiography, are all given in German with the translation opposite.  As a result, Büchner’s limpid, direct, concrete and urgent prose is made accessible to learners of German, for whom this neat little book can be especially recommended.

 

First published in 1839, Lenz is a novella based on three weeks in the tortured life (1751 to 1792) of the schizophrenic Livonian playwright J.M.R. Lenz. This new translation includes two important additions: a section from the diary of the pastor J.F. Oberlin, who took care of Lenz for several weeks, and a portion of Goethe’s memoirs. (The two writers were friends in their early 20s.) Translator Richard Sieburth calls it “a cubist portrait painted from several perspectives at once,” but the most striking is Büchner’s original novella. Authors such as Rimbaud and Canetti were haunted by its intensity. Lenz’s madness is acute; he finds refuge in Oberlin’s household but is unbearably sensitive to every sound, emotion, flicker of light. “Only one thing remains, an infinite beauty passing from form to form, eternally unfolding,” he thinks in a calm moment. “Now I feel so confined… sometimes I feel as if my hands were hitting up against the sky; O I’m suffocating!” he cries in another. And sometimes he is so lucid that Goethe dismisses his madness as a “species of self-torture which, in the absence of any external or social constraints, was then the order of the day, afflicting precisely those possessed of the most exceptional minds.”

 

Georg Büchner (1813-1837) was primarily a playwright whose works inspired Brecht, Ionesco, and even the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. Lenz, a novella about a playwright who becomes schizophrenic, is presented here in a bilingual edition. Translator Richard Sieburth refers to the story as “an experiment in speculative biography, part fact, part fabrication,” and very modern, for it tells of insanity from the inside. Also included in the book are excerpts from two works on which the novella is based: Goethe’s Poetry and Truth, a memoir of his relationship with Lenz, and the diary of J.F. Oberlin, a pastor who took care of Lenz.