In Search of Lost Books Page 6

  According to some, Lowry’s basic idea had been to combine the English socialism of the Cambridge intellectuals with the mythic Nordic vision of the Norwegian poet: two elements that were probably incompatible, especially in light of the appropriation of Aryan mythology by the Nazis that so terrified the writer, but which was sidestepped by him, so to speak, in a deft and masterful way. It made for an extraordinary bundle of elements, worthy enough of Lowry at his best.

  On the website of Ottawa University Press (later on we shall see why there in particular), it says that the novel would have featured a Cambridge student who wants to become a writer but who comes to realize that his book and in some way even his life had already been written by a Norwegian novelist: an ingenious reversal of what Lowry had inflicted on Grieg in Ultramarine!

  On the other hand, if the novel was one thousand pages long it must have contained a good deal more than this, accompanied as always by the brilliant verbal acrobatics of Lowry’s signature style.

  The problem was that after nine years it was still not finished, perhaps due to the difficulty that a demonic writer such as Lowry must have had in writing his own Paradise: the same difficulty we have seen with Gogol, and one which might explain the length of time taken, the rewritings, the enormous accumulation of material. Then, in 1944, the shack in Dollarton burnt down.

  A few years ago two friends of mine, both writers and enthusiastic admirers of Lowry, went to Dollarton together: Sandro Veronesi on a journalistic assignment, Edoardo Nessi at his own expense and out of sheer passion for the English writer. It was they who put me on to the story of In Ballast to the White Sea, urging me to include it in my journey in search of lost books.

  Sandro gave me an account of that expedition to one of the ends of the earth, where nothing remained of Lowry’s presence other than a memorial stone where the cabin once stood. We are in the vicinity of Vancouver, on the bay of Burrard. Lowry lived there, as I have mentioned, for almost fifteen years: writing, trying to drink less, swimming in the freezing sea. There were tall trees and beaches – and nothing else. It was the most westerly place in the world, and one of the furthest away from Nazism.

  ‘Who knows what we had hoped to find,’ Sandro says to me, ‘but when we arrived we saw that there was really nothing: only shacks such as those on the banks of the Po for fishing with drop-nets, not places for living in. And yet he had spent so much time there, attended to by the saintly Margerie, in a place where even supplying himself with alcohol must have been rather more complicated than in London or New York.’

  After the cabin burnt down there were further fires in two other shacks that had been built as replacements, which significantly damaged, if not destroyed them altogether. We know about these subsequent fires from Lowry’s own confusing and imprecise accounts.

  And quite a few other things do not add up. How, for instance, can he have been working for nine years on a manuscript that was destroyed in 1944? Had he actually started writing the Paradise section before the Inferno? And why did Margerie not think of keeping a copy of it, since she must have been fully aware of his previous experiences with manuscripts? It does prompt us to wonder whether the manuscript ever actually existed.

  Instead of this text we have only a few surviving fragments which are preserved as relics by the University of British Columbia: small pieces of paper with burnt edges, like maps of pirate treasure.

  The last line of the fragment which I have seen on a webpage reads:

  now he had hours, hours more…

  But precisely what Lowry lacked after the fire was the time, as well as the strength, to begin over again a novel of more than a thousand pages. And we can easily understand his reluctance to do so, given that his circumstances were also progressively deteriorating, and that the very success he had achieved with Under the Volcano turned out to be counterproductive, inciting him to start travelling again – to leave Dollarton, where he had managed to give so much of himself to writing and was settled. Even if the place in which he had settled happened to be in British Columbia and he had next to no money there, relying exclusively on a small allowance from his father whilst being cared for, encouraged, and supported by his wife.

  Sandro Veronesi tells me that many years ago, when he was the editor of Nuovi Argomenti, he published an issue of the review devoted to Lowry. It included a number of letters and recollections, including one supplied by his doctor. With the detachment of a man of science, he described the characteristics of someone suffering from – we might almost say handicapped by – an illness. Lowry constructed his texts by dictating them: he could not write due to the trembling of his hands. Standing, he would rub his knuckles on the table in a compulsive gesture until they bled. Every act of composition (and I feel the musical term is apt) entailed for him both physical and mental torment.

  And it was distressing for anyone to witness this state of illness and suffering, even for his doctor: the suffering of a man who was also a kind of genius. Unquestionably, a genius.

  I had almost finished writing this book when, surfing the internet in my customary search for some ultimate lead regarding my lost volumes (I called them this as if they were the Lost Boys and I was their Peter Pan), I came across the most startling news: Ottawa University Press had announced the forthcoming autumn publication of In Ballast to the White Sea.

  I started a further frantic online search: one of my lost books had been found! I soon discovered that its editor was already touring the world giving lectures about it. One of these was scheduled to take place in Norway, and was devoted to the novel’s Nordic elements.

  I asked myself whether I should exclude this chapter from my book. I was both pleased and disconcerted by the prospect.

  In fact, however, this Canadian publication of In Ballast to the White Sea is a draft version rediscovered amongst the papers donated to a university in the United States by Jan Gabrial. It was the first draft of the novel which the couple had left with her mother before setting out for Mexico. Dating more or less, that is, from 1936.

  Therefore it is not our book, Eduardo Nessi replies, when I send him the links necessary to examine the news.

  It definitely is not. Also extant, for instance, is a draft of Under the Volcano that is quite different from the book published by Lowry in 1947. The text in question is one of the innumerable unfinished manuscripts left behind by the author, perhaps deliberately, perhaps not. And we immediately wonder how he could have lost all recollection of it, and never thought of going to look for it after the fire. But this is the first and only case in this journey of mine in which something once lost has resurfaced. It provides more significant proof than a few charred slips of paper that the book actually existed – and that it is possible, even likely, that the subsequent version of more than one thousand pages was indeed located in that Canadian shack.

  It also makes me think that there is perhaps no one in the world, not even a man in the best of health, who would be capable of writing the same novel a third time.

  Catalonia, 1940:

  A Heavy Black Suitcase

  THE LIFE OF WALTER BENJAMIN came to an end on the 24th of September 1940 in a small town called Portbou on the border between France and Spain. And it was Benjamin who decided to end it.

  It is surely strange to think that one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century and a man associated with two of the major capital cities of Europe should find himself constrained to make such a choice, or rather to endure his destiny, in a place so marginal and remote.

  When I write that he was one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century I am certainly not exaggerating, though I feel I should add another qualifying adjective to define him: European, because if there is a man who thought of himself as being so, in those years when Europe was only a geographical term, it was undoubtedly Benjamin; pushed to move from one nation to another not only by events and because he was a Jew and therefore subject to persecution, but also on account of his inte
rests and restless curiosity.

  Born in Charlottenberg in Germany in 1892, after the Nuremberg Laws Benjamin was forced to move to France. Its capital city became a kind of second homeland for him, and the site of his intellectual passions – to the extent that one of his major works, the unfinished The Arcades Project, would be entirely devoted to nineteenth-century Paris.

  I think Benjamin is a wholly exceptional figure. It is difficult to find anyone else who was able to combine encyclopaedic erudition and a real gusto for accumulating material and ideas with the sophistication that more frequently goes with being an epigone (one tasked with concluding itineraries rather than opening up new ones) – and with his capacity to innovate, to read the world in a new light, to capture the first signs and elements of the momentous epochal changes that were to come. Those who revolutionize are not typically overly concerned with style – but rather with the need for rupture, destruction and re-invention unhampered by linguistic preoccupations.

  Yet Benjamin was a consummately refined revolutionary.

  He was the one who first understood, for instance, that the possibility of making multiple copies of a work of art through mechanical reproduction, so that it could be viewed without having to be physically present in the place where it is preserved and displayed, would consequently divest this work of its aura – a combination of distance, singularity and wonder that signalled the superiority of the artist in relation to the world.

  What was this sophisticated and creative intellectual, this deep-rooted denizen of capital cities, doing there in that small town on the border between Spain and France? And what is it that gives him a place in my search: which book of his was lost? Because it will have been guessed by now that if I have followed him to this point, to where the slopes of the Pyrenees descend into Catalonia, it has been to discover what happened to the typescript he was carrying in a heavy black suitcase from which he never wanted to be separated.

  Let’s go back a few months. Since 1933, Benjamin had been living in Paris with his sister Dora. But in May 1940, after a period with no movement on the front between France and Germany, the German troops invaded neutral Belgium and Holland, proceeding rapidly and encountering little resistance as they did so, largely due to the surprise nature of attack from this direction. They would enter Paris on June 14, 1940. The day before – just the day before – Benjamin had decided to leave the city that he loved but that was rapidly turning into a trap for him.

  Before leaving, he gave to Georges Bataille – a writer and intellectual as innovative and enquiring in his way as Benjamin himself – the photocopy of his great unfinished work on Paris, The Arcades Project. Or perhaps we should say ur-photocopy, since it was the outcome of the first attempts to reproduce documents photographically. The existence of this copy is of significance here, because even if the aforementioned black suitcase had contained the original of this work, the fact that a reproduction of it had been left with Bataille would hardly justify the anxious attachment Benjamin evidently felt towards this item of luggage.

  When Benjamin left Paris he had a plan: to reach Marseille, and in possession of the permit allowing him to emigrate to the United States, which his friends Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had managed to obtain for him, to go from Marseille to Portugal and embark from there for America.

  Benjamin was not an old man – he was only forty-eight years old – even if the years weighed more heavily at the time than they do now. But he was tired and unwell (his friends called him ‘Old Benj’); he suffered from asthma, had already had one heart attack and had always been unsuited to much physical activity, accustomed as he was to spending his time either with his books or in erudite conversation. For him, every move, every physical undertaking represented a kind of trauma, yet his vicissitudes had over the years necessitated some twenty-eight changes of address. And in addition he was bad at coping with the mundane aspects of life, the prosaic necessities of everyday living.

  Hannah Arendt repeated with reference to Benjamin remarks made by Jacques Rivière about Proust:

  He died of the same inexperience that permitted him to write his works. He died of ignorance of the world, because he did not know how to make a fire or open a window.

  before adding to them a remark of her own:

  With a precision suggesting a sleepwalker his clumsiness invariably guided him to the very centre of a misfortune.

  Now this man seemingly inept in the everyday business of living found himself having to move in the midst of war, in a country on the verge of collapse, in hopeless confusion.

  Miraculously, after long forced delays, in stages only completed with extreme difficulty, Benjamin nevertheless managed, at the end of August, to reach Marseille – a city that had become the crossroads for thousands of refugees and desperate people attempting to flee the fate pursuing them. In order to survive, to leave the city, it was necessary to have document after document: in the first place a residence permit for France, then a permit to leave the country, then another to travel through Spain and Portugal, and finally one allowing entrance to the United States. Benjamin felt overwhelmed.

  In addition, to return to Arendt’s phrase about misfortune, he had always been convinced that it had pursued him – like the ‘little hunchback’ of German folklore, a harbinger of bad luck, a jinx causing his victims to bungle and to fail. He had already experienced many instances of such misfortune: from his failure to get onto the first rung of the academic ladder with his work The Origin of German Tragic Drama (a work nobody had understood) to the fact that in order to escape the bombing of Paris he so feared, he had moved to the outlying districts of the city and unwittingly ended up in a small village that was one of the first to be destroyed. Benjamin had not realized this apparently insignificant place was at the centre of an important rail network, and therefore liable to be targeted.

  In Marseille he managed to sort a few things out. He gave Arendt the typescript of his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ so she could deliver it to his friends Horkheimer and Adorno (so this work could not have been in the black suitcase either) and collected his visa for the United States. But he lacked one crucial document: the exit visa from France, which he was unable to request from the authorities without marking himself out as a refugee from Germany, and thus being immediately referred to the Gestapo.

  Only one option remained: to cross over into Spain via the Lister route, so named after the commander of the Spanish republican troops who had used it, albeit in the opposite direction, to lead part of his brigade to safety at the end of the Civil War.

  This was suggested to Benjamin by his old friend, Hans Fittko, whom he had encountered by chance in Marseille. Fittko’s wife Lisa, then in Port Vendres near the border with Spain, was helping others who found themselves in the same situation to get across. So Benjamin set out, along with a photographer called Henny Gurland and her sixteen-year-old son Joseph. They formed a haphazard and totally unprepared group.

  They arrived at Port Vendres on September 24. And on that same day, guided by Lisa Fittko, they covered the first section of the route in a trial run.

  But when the time came to turn back, Benjamin decided not to go with the others. He would wait there until the next morning, when they would resume their onward journey together, since he was very tired and would in this way save himself the extra exertion required to go back and return. ‘There’ consisted of a small pine copse. Physically exhausted and disheartened, Benjamin remained there alone, and it is difficult to imagine how he must have spent that night: whether prey to his anxieties or calmed by the nocturnal silence beneath the star-studded Mediterranean sky, so distant from the chill of a German autumn.

  The next morning he was joined soon after daybreak by his travelling companions. The path they took climbed ever higher, and at times it was almost impossible to follow amidst rocks and gorges. Benjamin began to feel increasingly fatigued, and he adopted a strategy to make the most of his energy: walking for ten minutes
and then resting for one, timing these intervals precisely with his pocket-watch. Ten minutes of walking and one of rest. As the path became progressively steeper, the two women and the boy were obliged to help him, since he could not manage by himself to carry the black suitcase he refused to abandon, insisting that it was more important that the manuscript inside it should reach America than that he should.

  A tremendous physical effort was required, and though the group found themselves frequently on the point of giving up, they eventually reached a ridge from which vantage point the sea appeared, illuminated by the sun. Not much further off was the town of Portbou: against all odds they had made it.

  Lisa Fittko bade farewell to Benjamin, Gurland and her son, and headed back. The three of them continued towards the village and reached the police station, confident that like everyone else who had gone this way before them they would be given the permits they required to proceed by the Spanish officials. But the regulations had been altered just the day before: anyone arriving ‘illegally’ would be sent back to France. For Benjamin this meant being handed over to the Germans. The only concession they obtained, on account of their exhaustion and the lateness of the hour, was to spend the night in Portbou: they would be allowed to stay in the Hotel Franca. Benjamin was given room number 3. They would be expelled the next day.

  For Benjamin that day never came. He killed himself by swallowing the thirty-one morphine tablets he had carried with him in case his cardiac problems recurred.