From Orhan Pamuk, “My Father’s Suitcase,” Nobel Lecture, December 6, 2006:

My father had a good library — 1,500 volumes in all — more than enough for a writer. By the age of 22, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book — I knew which were important, which were light but easy to read, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which were forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated very highly. Sometimes I would look at this library from a distance and imagine that one day, in a different house, I would build my own library, an even better library — build myself a world. When I looked at my father’s library from afar, it seemed to me to be a small picture of the real world. But this was a world seen from our own corner, from Istanbul.

Hey, hey, tickets are still available for Martin Amis at the end of the month.  I just called.  I haven’t loved an Amis book since London Fields, or rather since The War Against Cliche.  But I still enjoy reading his stuff, and of course appreciate his advocacy of our man Bellow.  Plus this gives me a great excuse to revisit VL’s terrific series at the Lookingglass.

WRITERS ON THE RECORD WITH VICTORIA LAUTMAN presents:

Celebrated British author
MARTIN AMIS
Discussing his latest novel, House of Meetings
Free!
Sunday, January 28: 11:45 at Lookingglass Theatre in the Water Tower Water Works
821 N Michigan Avenue

Or tune in live on 98.7WFMT Radio

For free reservations to be part of the broadcast audience for Martin Amis and Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman, call 312-832-6788 or 312-832-6789. Doors open at 11:30; the event commences at 11:45 with the live broadcast beginning at noon. Books will be sold by Seminary Co-Op bookstore and can be signed following the interview.

Upcoming authors for Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman:

ALICE HOFFMAN—— February 25: Skylight Confessions
ANNE LAMOTT——– March 25: Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
ANCHEE MIN———- April 22: The Last Empress
ARTHUR PHILLIPS—– May 20: Angelica

Should be fun: heading down there on the morning of the 28th, coming off the Sunday-morning-empty, frost-covered Mag Mile into the church-like edifice of the Water Works.  Noon mass with Father Amis, if you like.

From Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964), H. E. F. Donohue and Nelson Algren, p. 315:

I suppose outwardly the chief thing [about writing] is that it’s a way of earning a living. I don’t know if I could earn a living another way. The other way I would earn a living would be as a porter somewhere. I wouldn’t be able to work in an office.

From The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., (1791), by James Boswell, Chapter 1:

One curious anecdote was communicated by himself to Mr. John Nichols. Mr. Wilcox, the bookseller, on being informed by [Johnson] that his intention was to get his livelihood as an authour, eyed his robust frame attentively, and with a significant look, said, “You had better buy a porter’s knot.”

From The Every-Day Book (1825-26), by William Hone, the entry for September 5:

[A porter's knot] consists of a strong fillet to encircle the head, attached to a curiously stuffed cushion of the width of the shoulders, whereon it rests, and is of height sufficient to bear thereon a box, or heavy load of any kind, which, by means of this knot, is carried on the head and shoulders; the weight thereof being borne equally by the various powers of the body capable of sustaining pressure, no muscles are distressed, but the whole are brought to the porter’s service in his labour of carrying.

Jaime’s comment to this post below caused me to take Guy Davenport’s Da Vinci’s Bicycle off my shelf and reread his lovely Walser-inspired story, “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg.” When I opened it up I discovered, tucked into the book, an article from the front page of the July 21, 1961, issue of the TLS. I was three years old in 1961, but somehow despite my rudimentary reading skills this paragraph leapt out at me:

Improvisation, in Walser’s and Kafka’s sense, must be distinguished from the deliberate experiments of a self-conscious avant garde. What is particularly striking about many of the most genuine innovators of that period, including Joyce also, is that their dedication to a highly personal art involved not only a revolt against accepted canons but the complete rejection of literature as an institution; not rebellion but self-imposed exile. Each in his way, these highly skilled writers aspired to the status of amateurs.

I’m just kidding. I didn’t read this when I was three. I got it off the microfiche at the library a few years ago. But how insightful this anonymous writer is. It’s a view of Walser to which we’re only slowly making our way back, almost half a century later …

As Smyth noted in his charmingly elliptical way, I’ve set up a new blog to capture our future Walserings as well as future progress on our little translation project.  I think we’re now properly provisioned for our long walk with Walser in 2007. 

Here’s a Walser-ish subject with which to end our Walser month on GRJ . . .

Matthew Kaminski had a nice piece on novelist William Boyd in the Wall Street Journal a couple days back.  (Subs only, unfortunately.)  I loved this passage, which connects with my earlier citation on the subject of losers:

As a result, perhaps, his Europeans in America are seduced, amazed, pushed around, sometimes outright brutalized by the place. John James Todd, the filmmaker in “The New Confessions,” gets blacklisted in the 1950s. In “Any Human Heart,” the enraged father of a young girl that the aging Mountstuart, then living in New York, just bedded can’t think of a worse insult than “loser.” For Mr. Boyd, the scene gives one small insight into the values gap that separates the two sides of the Atlantic. “To be called a loser is a real mark of Cain in America, but in Europe it makes you quite an interesting person,” he says. In serious old age, Mountstuart finds serenity and peace in penury in a small French village.

The Journal has in fact been quite literary lately.  I particularly appreciated Robin Moroney’s essay on William Empson (subs only; see the pattern?), which managed to teach me a thing or two despite a raft of other Empson articles prompted by the appearance of vol. 2 of Haffenden’s Empson bio. (Check out Kermode’s in the LRB.) But somebody, get Moroney a copy of the sonnets, please:

For decades, the Shakespeare sonnet line “Bare ruined choirs, where once the sweet birds sang” became a matter of debate among scholars, as they quarreled over the validity of the nine meanings Empson found in it.

“Once” is just so wrong, isn’t it?  Reading this line is like tasting tap water where you were expecting beer.

How great the sonnets are.  Just to be even more irritatingly discursive, I’m reminded of something I heard Wynton Marsalis say on his great jazz program on XM Radio.  Citing  someone else’s remark that there was “nothing new” about a particular style of playing,   Wynton said, “Yeah, well there’s nothing new about talking, but you can still say a lot of amazing stuff.”

Here’s maybe the best loser poem of all time.

Jones replies to Smyth:

So glad you mentioned that Sebald article. Great stuff. Judging by this, Anderson’s bio of Sebald will be terrific. I had forgotten that Sebald was a Walser fan, and I’ve never read Sebald’s essay on Walser. So, something for me to look up, or rather to track down.

Strangely enough, Sebald’s hometown is smack dab in the center of the map I linked to earlier, when I was drawing what I suspected was a rather strained connection between those old Karfeld photos and Walser. Here’s the same area, except with Wertach, Sebald’s home town, highlighted. So the connection between Sebald and Walser was not only temperamental, but geographical too.

The passage about ausgewanderte was timely also, since the idea of wanderungen is central to the Seelig book. Here’s what Anderson says:

For his book about four aging “emigrants,” he deliberately avoided the term exilierte, preferring instead the capacious and somewhat antiquated term ausgewanderte (literally, those who have “wandered” or “gone out”) in order to include his own family history of emigration.

Anderson’s piece, as you probably noticed, is accompanied in Bookforum by a couple of shorter pieces (not online) by writers Hans Magnus Enzenberger and A. S. Byatt. Byatt talks about the “repudiation of German culture” within Germany after World War II as reflected in the work of postwar German artists and writers, including Sebald. Her last paragraph is particularly nice:

The image of innocence and paradise that is infinitely poignant in The Emigrants is Ferber’s mother’s Jewish sense of her Germanness before the terror begins, when preserved apples and cherries and plums are fully what they are, and the answer to the conundrum about which things give and take in infinite plenty are “the earth, the sea, and the Reich.” It is perhaps particularly touching to someone like me, who has some German but is not fluent (and therefore finds all its words beautiful and significant and strange), to read Sebald’s narrator’s reflections on the names in the Jewish cemetery. He thinks “perhaps there was nothing the Germans begrudged the Jews so much as their beautiful names, so intimately bound up with the country they lived in and with its language.” He list them. Hamburger, Kissinger, Wertheimer, Friedlander, Arnsberg, Auerbach, Grunwald, Leuthold, Seeligmann, Frank, Hertz, Goldstaub, Baumblatt, and Blumenthal. They are things — green woods, gold dust. They are the German landscape painted by Friedrich, stolen and entkitscht by Hitler, the paradise from which the artists are shut out with a flaming sword.

More from Smyth:

Quizzical readers readily query: Whither Wandering? Is Smyth steady?

Smyth says: sorry, Sam! I know how to sew but am new to webs: it seems the “status” of Sebald was simply “saved”. Now it says: “shared”. So, so, as Walser said.

More quizzes to come on Smyth’s new [se]wlog.

Most importantly: Wandering home. [Thanks to Sam.]

Trogen tomorrow. But first, January 2nd, 1944:

…”In Herisau,” Robert continued, “I wrote nothing more. And why should I? My world was destroyed by the Nazis. The newspapers I wrote for have gone under; their editors have been chased away or have died. And so I’ve become nearly a fossil.”