Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

In chapter VII of The Rings of Saturn, as rendered into English by Michael Hulse, Sebald’s narrative persona describes, after a battle to escape the ‘labyrinth’ of Dunwich Heath, his first visit to Michael Hamburger’s home in Middleton, Suffolk. He appears to quote some spoken observations of Hamburger’s verbatim, none perhaps more characteristically despondent (and so much so that they could be Sebald’s own words) than those in this sentence:

For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane.

Sebald goes on to note several coincidences between the pair of them. (But then coincidences are easy to find: my father, also called Michael, was born in 1933, the cataclysmic year for Hamburger in which he and his family left Berlin for exile in Edinburgh, and did his stint of National Service in the same army regiment, the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent, as that in which Hamburger served in the last years of the war and just after; and Sebald lived, and is buried, in Poringland, Norfolk, barely nine miles from the village whence hailed generations of my mother’s maternal ancestors.) In a hallucination of sorts, Sebald almost sees Hamburger as another self:

But why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain. All I know is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room with its north-facing windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael said he no longer worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer; and that, while we talked of the difficulty of heating old houses, a strange feeling came upon me, as if it were not he who had abandoned that place of work but I, as if the spectacles case, letters and writing materials that had evidently lain untouched for months in the soft north light had once been my spectacles cases, my letters and my writing materials.

Sebald’s writings are chockful of Freudian examples of ‘Das Unheimliche’ like these. Sebald goes on, a few pages later, to air another uncanny sense:

Scarcely am I in company but it seems as if I had already heard the same opinions expressed by the same people somewhere or other, in the same way, with the same words, turns of phrases and gestures. The physical sensation closest to this feeling of repetition, which sometimes last for several minutes and can be quite disconcerting, is that of the peculiar numbness brought on by a heavy loss of blood, often resulting in a temporary inability to think, to speak or to move one’s limbs, as though, without being aware of it, one had suffered a stroke.

I read Sebald because I intuit that he, perhaps more than another writer I’ve ever read, aligned the dream state and consciousness, the dead and the living.

Without mentioning its title, Sebald’s narrator also refers in passing to Hamburger’s A Mug’s Game (Carcanet, 1973), subtitled ‘intermittent memoirs 1924–1954’. (Its title derives from Eliot’s description of poetry.) I first read the book about twenty years ago, having acquired it for 50p at a summer fair at my children’s primary school, and years on gave it to Oxfam, but I’ve recently bought another copy and re-read it. It’s a frustrating read in many ways, not least in that it stops when it does, at the point when he gave up the penury of freelancing for comparatively steady employment in academia. However, it has its rare moments of elucidation, such as this comforting passage:

As for the mug’s game of poetry, its pursuit has become harder and easier. Harder, because ambition, like every external incentive, has fallen away. Easier, because that loss is another liberation. I can be no more sure than I was thirty years so that my poems are good enough to be worth the price paid for them, by which I mean not the time and work that have gone into them but the specialization they demanded, the concentration claimed at the cost of other pursuits and commitments. What I am sure of now is that, whether good or bad, durable or negligible, the poems I write are those I have to write. The profession of authorship has no bearing on that. The opinions and judgements of critics have no bearing on that. Nor have the anxieties that used to beset me when I couldn’t write.

Curiously, Skoob, the marvellous secondhand bookshop in London, later, in 1991, re-published the memoir under a different title (which perhaps deliberately echoes the title of Louis MacNiece’s ‘unfinished autobiography’, The Strings are False), String of Beginning, the only addition being a postscript written, in late middle age, in 1990, in which Hamburger briefly reflected further on his vocation:

Whatever I may have done or known in my life, my poetry came out of a kind of wonderment whose other side – the left hand – is a sense of outrage. In general, too, this capacity to wonder, and to feel outrage, strikes me as a distinguishing attribute of poets, and a condition of their persistence in the mug’s game.         

Wonderment and outrage again. I can’t disagree.