Tim Parks, novelist and translator, says he came across a copy of Fleur
Jaeggy’s novella, I
beati anni del castigo, while browsing in an Italian bookshop. His translation of
it, Sweet
Days of Discipline, won the John Florio Prize in 1992. One can see why he was
so attracted to this brief tale of boarding school life and its dark
consequences. Jaeggy’s works are a translator’s dream: short, lucid and
complex. Her distinctive vocabulary and syntax move elegantly and it would seem
effortlessly into the English language. The translator has time to weigh and to
discriminate: none of the slog here of translating long volumes against the
clock. Parks could consider, and refine, and he has done so to fine effect. It
is a compliment to his version that one wishes at times to consult the
original, to see how the smooth transition was made.
Fleur
Jaeggy is multi-lingual and has also worked as a translator. Swiss by birth,
born in Zurich in 1940 into an upper-class family, she writes in Italian, but
she has also translated into Italian Thomas De Quincey’s The Last Days of
Immanuel Kant and Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives.
In These
Possible Lives (2017, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor) she offers three
very short biographical sketches of Keats, De Quincey, and the fin-de-siècle
symbolist orientalist Jewish Parisian Schwob. Schwob is a character best known
to me, bizarrely, as a kind friend to Arnold Bennett in his lonely Paris days;
more pertinently, he was a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé and Alfred Jarry, and is
said to have influenced Borges. Her three subjects are loosely linked by opium,
by malady, by a delectatio morosa or morbid delight, and her essays are prose
poems rather than factual narrations. She does not give facts or dates, but
tells us of Wordsworth’s habit of cutting the pages of books with a butter
knife, of De Quincey’s nightmares, of Schwob’s love for a tubercular
working-class girl and her dolls, of Keats begging “in a lucid delirium” for
more laudanum. Their hallucinatory intensity and heightened language recall the
prose poems of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, with their invocations of wine
and hashish, their pose of le poète maudit.
Jaeggy
invokes Baudelaire in Sweet Days of Discipline – recently republished by the
independent imprint And Other Stories – along with the Brontës and Novalis, and
on the very first page, Robert Walser. Walser was a German-speaking Swiss
writer who died in the Appenzell snow in 1956, after decades spent in various
sanatoria and institutions; the novella is set in a boarding school in the same
region and in the same mountainous but prettified and half-tamed landscape,
described as “an Arcadia of sickness”. Thus we are confronted from the start
with premonitions of doom and decline and ill-health – the mountains inevitably
suggest tuberculosis and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
The
frame of literary reference is wide and multicultural, reminding us that
Switzerland is the linguistic crossroads of western Europe, and the text is
sprinkled with German and French phrases – the heavy German Zwang, the softer
French faisandé and carnet de bal. The narrator speaks in German to her father,
Herr Doktor, but in French to Frédérique, the slightly older fellow pupil with
whom she becomes (for life, as emerges in later short stories) obsessed.
The
story is deceptively simple. It opens: “At 14 I was a boarder in a school in
the Appenzell”, and we discover that the narrator is a lonely and isolated girl
who has spent her life in institutions, rarely hearing from her mother in
Brazil, spending uncomfortable vacations with her father and dancing in hotel
ballrooms with his elderly acquaintances. She is uneasy in her relationships
with her fellow boarders, and mildly repelled by her room-mate, a German girl
from Nuremberg who wears bright white underwear and files her nails and combs
her curls and dreams of lovers. She describes her own condition with a chilly
understated dignity. “I hardly got any letters. They were handed out at
mealtime. It wasn’t nice not to get much post.”
The
atmosphere of an all-female community of adolescent girls is powerfully
conveyed; it is a stagnant hothouse world of spying and of “crushes” (passione
in Italian), of teachers who have favourites, of girls waiting for Daddy to
come to dance with them at the school ball, or to whisk them away at the end of
term in a black Mercedes. There are echoes of other novels in the
boarding-school genre: the references to the Brontës are not accidental, though
the food at the Bausler Institut is much better than the burnt porridge of Jane
Eyre’s Lowood, and the narrator is reprimanded for dunking her bread in her
coffee “out of sheer greed”.
Villette
also hovers behind the text, and Mme Beck shares characteristics with the solid
head of the Institut, Frau Hofstetter, “broad as a cupboard in a blue
tailleur”, who takes a fancy to the only black girl in the school, daughter of
the president of an African state, a child who is clearly tubercular. It is
suggested that the standard of teaching is high, though our heroine is
interested only in French literature.
Those
who have attended a girls’ boarding school will recognise the rituals – the
obligatory pairing off for walks, the pigeon holes too often empty, the keeping
of locked diaries, the emphasis on the neat folding of clothes in cupboards,
the packing of trunks at the end of term. (I am embarrassed to be reminded of
how pleased I was when the maths teacher, a severe woman whom I with reason
feared, told me I was learning to be “a good little packer” as she supervised
the row of trunks laid out in the school gym – laid out, Jaeggy would have
written, like coffins. (School lockers, Jaeggy says, are “the dear little
mortuary of our thoughts”.)
Jaeggy insists that convents and girls’ schools are
inevitably full of spies. “A boarding school is a strong institution, since in
a sense it is founded on blackmail.” The question of whether Catholic or
Protestant schools are more prone to blackmail is raised but not answered; the
narrator had been to a Catholic convent before the Bausler, and her father is
Protestant, but her sensibility is caught in the baroque swirls and eddies of
Swiss theology and practice. In Muriel Spark’s The Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie, a study of the intensity of relationships in a
girls’ day school in Edinburgh, we remember that the pupil who betrays Miss
Brodie, Sandy, converts to Catholicism (like Spark) and at the end of the novel
is seen clutching at the bars of her grille, as if to escape. It is a
disturbing image, and one that Jaeggy would have recognised.
The narrator is mesmerised by her bold and
free-thinking friend Frédérique, and their complex relationship – not physical,
but une amitié amoureuse – lives on after their
schooldays into a bleak, dreamlike aftermath as Frédérique becomes
mentally ill, tries to burn down her mother’s house in Geneva, and is
institutionalised, this time forever.
This
short work is packed with violent premonitions, sudden deaths, stabbings,
hangings and the language of insanity. There are metaphors drawn from shrouds,
altar cloths, coffins, corpses, funeral marches, gallows, guillotines, nooses,
cults of the dead and, most affecting of all, stone tablets set in churchyard
walls. We are all dying, even as children: as Rilke believed, we carry our
deaths within us. Frédérique tells the narrator she has an old woman’s hands;
the schoolgirls inhabit “a sort of senile childhood” and they have “a mortuary
look”.
Frédérique
reappears in a volume of short stories, I Am the Brother of XX (translated by
Gini Alhadeff), suggesting there was or is a real-life source, along with other
sketches which are overtly autobiographical and introduce us to Oliver Sacks,
Italo Calvino, Jaeggy’s husband the writer and publisher Roberto Calasso, and,
most significantly, the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann.
The
fictional stories deal with by now familiar motifs of arson, ill health,
insomnia, suicide, isolation, hauntings, vendettas and murder: some are Gothic
tales of the supernatural, featuring ghosts and saints and mandrakes. We learn
in “An Encounter in the Bronx” that Jaeggy herself, morbidly sensitive to cold,
types in fingerless gloves, indoors, swaddled in layers of clothing. The prose
here has grown even more staccato and poetic: here are the orchids from a sinister
tale of jealousy, “Agnes”: “Growing in the damp. White, with purple eyelets.
Rosy, pale, an evil expression. Acidulous. Yellow. They last a long time. Not
much earth. Not much nourishment. They reawaken in the dark, at night. Avid for
company. When they wilt, they become small skulls in tuxedos.” These are
flowers from the world of Sylvia Plath: death blooms, fleurs du mal. And death
haunts: the death of Sissi, Empress of Austria, assassinated on the shores of
Lake Geneva in 1898; the suicide of the Austrian poet and painter Adalbert
Stifter, who cut his throat in Linz in 1868 (English-language readers have to
look these events up: there are no notes).
There is
no note to tell you the background to the shortest piece of all, a single
paragraph called “The Aseptic Room”. It begins: “Once with Ingeborg we talked
about old age, she smiled at that word, but that word was accompanied neither
by the heart nor by a real smile.” The aseptic room is in the burns unit of the
hospital of Sant’Eugenio in Rome, and it is clear that we are reading of the
death of Ingeborg Bachmann in 1973, who, like Barbara Hepworth, appears to have
set her bedroom on fire with a lighted cigarette. Bachmann was a very
well-known poet and dramatist, whose long correspondence with Paul Celan,
master of the elliptical short poem, was recently turned into a film, The
Dreamed Ones.
She also
appears, more happily, in the last recollection in the volume, “The Saltwater
House”, an episode that brings her back to life in the summer of 1971, as she
and Jaeggy set off together for a summer month in Poveromo on the Tuscan coast
in an Alfa Romeo 2600. The house was vast, the water salt, the tea disgusting
and the garden sickly, but they seem to have a good time, with visits from
writers and publishers and Jaeggy’s husband-to-be, Calasso. The second sentence
of this episode must be one of the most everyday sentences that Jaeggy ever
wrote: “Ingeborg Bachmann manned the road maps.” They did not know then how
near the end of the journey was. But Jaeggy writes, simply, “I would have liked
it to go on a long time. And always.”
Girls’
schools and Gothic: inside the dark and dreamlike world of Swiss writer Fleur
Jaeggy. By Margaret Drabble. The New Statesman, April 2, 2018.
If Fleur
Jaeggy is less well known than many of her European contemporaries — writers
like Joseph Brodsky and Thomas Bernhard — it’s perhaps because her books are
small and few. But over the past four decades the 77-year-old Swiss Italian
writer has given us at least two real masterpieces: “Sweet Days of Discipline”
(1989, translated by Tim Parks), and “S.S. Proleterka” (2001, translated by
Alastair McEwen). These are haunting books, both with narrators struggling to
retrieve a past that exists only in their memory and through notes and
photographs. Like W. G. Sebald’s novels, they depict the mind in a holding
pattern, circling around subjects that, being absent, can never be reached.
In both these
books, Jaeggy recounts a Swiss childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, seemingly a
lot like her own: boarding school, a tyrannical grandmother, a divorced mother
and father both geographically and emotionally remote. As a writer, she is
foremost a portraitist, describing figures from the past as they moved into and
out of her narrators’ lives. A fellow student “had a fine, high forehead, the
kind of forehead that makes thought tangible.” A father’s journal entries, read
years after he has died, are “silent and absent. Names and dates. Nothing else.
Written by a man even more absent, precise in his absence.” It’s hard to
capture in a line or two the strange precision of Jaeggy’s prose, even harder
to explain why her often halting short sentences and sudden shifts in tense or
perspective are wonderful rather than irritating. The writing moves the way a
camera might, circling around, trying to capture its subject from various
angles at once. Out of many perspectives emerge people rescued from paling
memory, and “if their faces are forgotten, if certain features have faded, as
in a painting, all that remains are our own voices, which we feel can’t be
answered.”
Now two
new Fleur Jaeggy books arrive, very different from one another, both turning
her interest in portraiture into a theme in itself. The first, “I Am the
Brother of XX,” is a collection of stories, monologues and memoir, less
cohesive than her previous books but with the same stark, surprising prose,
here translated by Gini Alhadeff. These are grim tales, often violent. In “The
Heir,” an old woman signs over her estate to a young assistant who leaves her
to die in a house fire. In “The Aviary,” a man psychologically tortures his
wife out of an obsessive love for his dead mother. The title story and a few
others are less traumatic, and there are some lovely personal remembrances,
mostly of literary friends. Yet even in these softer, melancholic pieces,
darkness seems never far away, and literally isn’t, since much of the book is
filled with tales of death and madness.
It is
also filled, to an uncanny degree, with actual portraits. In “The Last of the
Line,” an old man sits before paintings of his long-dead siblings before
shooting his dogs and committing suicide. In “The Black Lace Veil,” a woman
holding a photograph of her dead mother sees desperation in her eyes, “and felt
a pang of love for her mother who perhaps had always hidden from her that she
was terribly unhappy and let herself be discovered in a photograph.” For
Jaeggy, a painting or photograph is a doorway to the dead, and entering through
it involves existential risk. “It is the unknown,” she writes. “It is the abyss.”
That
same abyss is visited with a lighter heart and more graceful wit in “These
Possible Lives,” a collection of three biographical essays, lyrically
translated by Minna Zallman Proctor. It’s an eclectic group: Thomas De Quincey,
John Keats and the late-19th century French symbolist Marcel Schwob (who is
woefully underrepresented in English, though his books are now being published
by Wakefield Press). Other than shared roots in Romanticism, the only thing
these three seem to have in common is that Jaeggy is the Italian translator of
both De Quincey’s “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” and Schwob’s “Imaginary
Lives,” two books that take an elliptical approach to biography, less
interested in historical events than in rendering the tone of a life, its
uniqueness. “The book that describes a man in all his irregularities will be a
work of art,” Schwob wrote. A true biographer, he declared, “must create human
characteristics amidst the chaos.”
With “These
Possible Lives,” Jaeggy becomes an heir to this genre of biography, with Schwob
and De Quincey now subjects and Keats a poetic third. “His sister Jane lived
three years,” she writes of De Quincey. “When she died, Thomas thought that she
would come back, like a crocus. Children who grow up in the country know about
death; they can, in a manner of speaking, see their own bones out the window.”
Keats, we learn, “is unable to contemplate himself,” though Wordsworth “predicted
great acclaim for him based on his appearance.” Schwob “inherited an ample
forehead, sensual mouth, and a sad half smile in his eyes.” All his life he
longed for an adventure, though when he finally had one it proved
disappointing.
Brilliant,
associative and short, Jaeggy’s essays have the beauty and economy of poems but
the souls of portraits, discovering “human characteristics amidst the chaos” —
which fairly describes her project overall.
Fleur
Jaeggy’s Portraits of Past Lives. By
Martin Riker. The New York Times,
November 3, 2017.
“The
house was built like a fortress,” Fleur
Jaeggy writes, “isolated from the rest of the village, and isolated in the mind
of the rest of the world.” Jaeggy’s stories take place in boarding schools,
snowy mountain ranges, and in solitary mansions on cliffs. “The town has few
inhabitants. The houses are surrounded by a wall,” she writes. “There are no
shops. But twice a week a siren announces that the provisions truck has
arrived.” Another narrator plainly states, “I live alone. I earn enough on my
salary.” Jaeggy’s characters live in a solitary abyss; maybe Jaeggy does, too.
Jaeggy
was born in Switzerland but writes in Italian and lives in Milan. I Am the
Brother of XX, her new story collection from New Directions and her fourth book
in English, is translated by Gini Alhadeff. Her two novels and one other story
collection are difficult to find: there are only a few copies left in stock on
Amazon, and from where I write, in Providence, Rhode Island, just one copy of
one of her books exists in the Rhode Island Public Library system.
The few
interviews with Fleur Jaeggy that exist are mostly in Italian. In the single
recent interview in English in TANK magazine, Jaeggy mostly redirects the
interviewer’s questions about her life and writing into anecdotes about animals
she has known. Her brief Wikipedia page says that when she left Switzerland and
moved to Rome, she met Thomas Bernhard. The two of them make sense together:
both are experimentalists, philosophers, and obsessives. Both layer narrative
and lyric purposes into each line; both find the strange remote corners of the
soul and recline into them. But even this relationship is shrouded in mystery —
there’s no way of knowing how much time Jaeggy and Bernhard even spent
together. Though she’s been publishing in Italian since 1968 and a decade
hasn’t passed without one or two of her books being released, she has very
little footprint in English. Like the characters in her stories, she seems to
be set apart from the world.
Susan
Sontag once admiringly called Jaeggy a savage writer. You need to be, to write
these stories about loners and orphans with such levity. Fleur Jaeggy is like
Edward Gorey without the monsters, or Lemony Snicket without the slapstick,
though she can be funny, in a sinister way. “Once when I was eight years old my
grandmother asked me, what will you do when you grow up?” Jaeggy writes in the
title story about a strange pair of siblings. “I answered, I want to die. I
want to die. I want to die when I grow up. I want to die soon. And I think my
sister really liked that answer.”
A genius
of rich, terse prose, Jaeggy writes paragraphs that are gorgeous labyrinths.
One sentence pulls ahead, the next circles back to reexamine something from
earlier, and the next one might dead-end or take you somewhere entirely new —
but to the characters and the reader by extension, it all happens
simultaneously. Like great photographs or paintings, Jaeggy’s writing pulls
your attention in, and then lets it wander. You can spend a long time in a Jaeggy
paragraph, staying behind for the fun of it even once you know the way out.
From the
crystalline prose emerge scenarios with sinister motifs. In a story about an
old unmarried woman taking in a 10-year-old orphan girl, Jaeggy writes:
The
fräulein is a kind woman, wilted and very lonely. And solitude had made her
even kinder, she practically apologized. Lonely people are often afraid to let their
solitude show. Some are ashamed. Families are so strong. They have all of
advertising on their side. But a person alone is nothing but a shipwreck. First
they cast it adrift, then they let it sink […] That afternoon, the air was
becoming stifling. “I am about to faint,” said Fraulein von Oelix. It was a
lucky thing that the girl was there. So calm, tranquil, not gripped by panic.
The
building is on fire, and Hannelore, the orphan, is so calm that she enjoys the
blazing experience during her escape. She doesn’t even call the firefighters.
She admires the fire’s ability to annihilate. “She doesn’t even have a past. Or
a birthday,” Jaeggy writes. “She sprang from trash and to trash will return.
She sprang from the swamps of the dead. And to the swamps she will return. That
is why the fraulein took her in.”
In a
story about a small girl who takes wicked advantage of a lonely old woman — not
for her money, but for the joy of destruction — Jaeggy achieves the surreal
pitch of conveying that this is a fulfilling situation for them both. In one
scene, the fraulein watches Hannelore dress her naked body. Jaeggy writes:
“Hannelore did so slowly, almost like a professional. To please the fraulein.”
The fraulein decides to sign over her entire estate. She announces,
“[Hannelore], you will be my heir.” She’s exhilarated by the prospect of
leaving everything to a destitute girl. Soon after that, Hannelore burns the
Fraulein von Oelix’s house down and kills her. Not for the money. Not for any reason,
really. “[E]veryone believes there is a why, in human gestures and impulses,”
Jaeggy writes. “The girl saw her thoughts on the window panes like insects
swollen with blood on the walls of a room. Her thoughts distant, detached, as
though someone else’s […] What does thinking matter? Thinking is iniquitous.”
Jaeggy’s
interest in her characters alternates fluidly between amusement and disregard.
In a story about a cat killing a butterfly, an apt metaphor for the way Jaeggy
handles her creatures, she writes, “It’s as though [the cat] has forgotten the
fluttering wings that only moments earlier had inspired his total dedication.
That which had possessed him before, as though it were an idea, a thought. Now
he pulls away. Looks elsewhere.” The brief moments when Jaeggy shows a version
of warmth toward her characters are quickly abandoned; she more often leaves
people physically and emotionally stranded.
But
somehow Jaeggy doesn’t treat her characters unkindly; she treats them in the
manner in which they have grown comfortable. In a story in which a woman shares
a moment with a fish in the restaurant tank, the woman observes about herself,
“My hands get cold. My neck. I am cold in a way I am tempted to call internal,
a terrible word, but never mind. An internal cold. Frost within.” The woman is
uncomfortable around other people, particularly her easily overheated husband.
She’d rather just be alone.
In a
story fittingly titled “The Last of the Line,” Jaeggy writes about a rich man
named Caspar. Caspar’s parents and brothers are dead, and Caspar is all that is
left of his family. His dogs follow him through the house, submissive,
exhausted, and shaking with tremors. Caspar stands looking at his families’
portraits in the long hallway:
The last
generation are children. Anton, seven years old, and Stefan, nine. They stand,
their apathetic expressions sweet as can be. They are Caspar’s brothers. After
sitting for the portrait, they seem to say: “We are no longer here.” And more
or less that’s what happened.
This
story captures the tension in Jaeggy’s writing between the desire to be apart
from the world and the expectation to stay within it. Again and again, Caspar
returns to the long hallway where he watches his dead family members watching
him. Did they expect something more from him? Probably yes, just as they
probably imagined something different for themselves. Caspar draws up a will,
even though he has nobody to leave anything to, not even the dogs after he
shoots them. Then at the age of 79, he turns the gun on himself. “The funeral
was grand,” Jaeggy writes at the end of the story. “The old people of Rhäzüns
and the children, too, followed the carriage, dancing almost. The carriage like
a dead ship, slid over the snow, giddy and mute.”
The
writer Fleur Jaeggy most reminds me of, though Danish and from a different
generation, is Dorthe Nors. Nors had her English language debut with a slim
collection called Karate Chop, then a combined set of experimental novellas
called So Much for That Winter. Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, which was shortlisted
for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, is coming to the United States in
2018. Jaeggy and Nors both formulate sentences and paragraphs that demonstrate
faith in the reader, that don’t stop to explain or fill you in but barrel
forward with the accurate understanding that if you surround a reader with
vivid sensory detail, they’ll come with you. They’ll want to chase you. They’ll
catch up.
In
Nors’s story “Do You Know Jussi?” she writes about a suitor leaving a family’s
home right after he has possibly molested the daughter upstairs. The story
starts after the act has already ended, and there is just stillness and
household noises and smells. Nors writes,
[E]verything
is quiet again, apart from her older brother turning on the shower across the
hall […] [S]he is lying on the bed with a pillow between her knees. She can
still feel the wetness of his saliva just beneath her nose, and his fingers. He
made an effort to be nice, that was it, and she turns on the TV.
Like
Jaeggy, Nors will stop and study something, then skip three moves ahead, then
go back to a thought from earlier. Thrillingly, she keeps the reader with her.
In
“Adelaide,” one of the more heartwarming stories in Jaeggy’s collection, an
abandoned mother and son share a love for payback. The story opens with
Adelaide drinking beer by herself in the dark kitchen. Her baby is in his
outgrown crib in the next room. She’s thinking about the priest who wronged
her, who wouldn’t baptize her son. The priest judges her for having a child out
of wedlock, though Adelaide is thinking about how this man had preyed on her
and her sister. “And you dip your filthy fingers into the holy water,” Adelaide
thinks. “You’ll kneel before me so that I might punish you with a whip.”
The
pitch-black setup and pursuit here epitomizes the register of a Jaeggy story. A
mother wants to kill the priest who once seduced her and now won’t baptize her
son, but she’s too timid to do it on her own, so she waits for her son to grow
up and help her. While too much darkness can be claustrophobic, in Jaeggy’s
case it lends itself to expansiveness and explosions. You don’t know what’s
coming next, but you keep running into things. In “Adelaide,” the boy’s
deadbeat father comes to visit, and the son drives a knife through his father’s
heart. The mother and son get drunk, then take the body and bury it. “[N]ow it
was the priest’s turn. They had waited too long already,” Jaeggy writes.
“Together they got to work.”
Jaeggy
seems nearly on the verge of dropping from cultural awareness, though perhaps
this year that will change, with the release of I Am the Brother of XX alongside
a set of her essays. She achieves more in a paragraph than many can pull off in
an entire story; there’s very little out there that resembles Jaeggy’s dark and
surreal intensity. Though I’m inclined to say Fleur Jaeggy deserves to be
popular, based on her characters, stories, and her slim biography, she seems to
like being left alone. Maybe there’s a good reason she’s not a bigger literary
figure. Maybe that’s how she prefers it.
SS
Proleterka was the last of Fleur Jaeggy’s currently available translated works
that I had left to read and I did not want it to end. I used to think Sweet
Days of Discipline was my favourite but this novel is far more subtle, real,
and painful. And with none of the gothic overtones that creep into so much of
her other work. A most dispassionate and restrained coming of age story, it is
cold, calculated, yet charged with a deep, sorrowful beauty.
Central
to this novella is the account of a cruise to Greece that the unnamed narrator
and her father take when she is fifteen years old. It will turn out to be the
last opportunity they have to get to know each other. Her parents separated
when she was young, and she was deposited with her maternal grandmother,
leaving her father effectively exiled from her life, forced to request time
with his daughter—applications that were frequently denied or strictly
curtailed. To have two weeks together over the Easter holidays is
unprecedented, and precious, but unlikely to resolve the existing distance
between parent and child. They are too much alike, too accustomed to emotional
self-preservation. But, with almost surgical precision, Jaeggy’s crystalline
prose exposes the currents of repressed affection that run deep beneath the
surface of their relationship.
Our
protagonist is looking back from mid-life, at her childhood and youth. She
offers an unsentimental, clinical assessment of her own experiences, emotions,
and interactions. It is a learned response to the world. Occasionally she
speaks of “my father”, but most commonly she refers to him by his first name,
Johannes. With respect to herself, she alternates between first person and
third, talking of “Johannes’ daughter,” “she” or “the girl”—at times employing
all three in the same paragraph. She is thus able to step back and place
herself within the regard (or lack thereof) of others. Detachment is her means
of coping.
As a young
girl, she tells us, she lived with Orsola, her mistress or “the mother of my
mother, of her who had been Johannes’ wife.” After her own parents’ divorce,
her father’s parents who had moved south for the health of their other son, an
invalid, lost the textile factory that had been in the family for generations.
Johannes lost his inheritance and his wealth. For the narrator, her father’s
family hold a tragic fascination. She does not know them beyond their
photographic images. But then she hardly knows her father any better. It is her
mother’s family who control her destiny, which will ultimately be boarding
school. She is disposable and knows it early on. Still, she describes her
“quasi-glacial” relationship with her maternal grandmother as the most intense
she ever had, even if she is at a loss to know if she felt affection for the
woman:
Orsola treats
me like an adult. Like a peer. Obedience does not mean subordination. I close
all the shutters. I do not open them in the mornings. A continuous closing. I
close the day. Closing is order. It is a form of detachment. An ephemeral
preparation for death. An exercise. It was entirely natural that that woman and
the garden corresponded to the vision of a happy land. How much time did I
still have at my disposal? The curtains at the window are fragile, almost dust.
And she, the mistress, looks like a white plaster bust.
If her
relationship with Orsola is formal and defined by expectation, her mother
exists almost entirely in absentia. She is “Johannes’ wife.” By the time the
protagonist is recounting her tale, she too is dead. Her daughter has only her
jewels and her piano to remember her by. It is the Steinway, purchased in New
York and carried across the ocean to Europe, that is the narrator’s closest
connection to her mother. As an object resting in a specially prepared room,
she endows it with personality, demonstrating an intimacy she could never find
with the pianist who once played it:
You do
not want me to touch your keys yet. My fingers are unfamiliar to you. That
slight hint of carnality. But I am sitting beside you. I watch over you. In the
first years I always kept the door closed. I wanted to be sure that no one came
in. You alone, locked in. Now no longer. Now I allow you more freedom. And at
the same time I allow myself more freedom too. I have become wiser. Before, if
I felt resentment, it seeped into my veins, my eyes, my thoughts. An insomniac
resentment.
Aboard the SS
Proleterka, the connection between father and daughter is marked by a formality
that neither can seem to breach. They have, she has told us, always been able
to “perceive the exceedingly fine line between equilibrium and desperation.” By
the time they are on this shared voyage, the daughter on the cusp of womanhood
and the father aging quickly, they can no longer negotiate that line. The ship
has been chartered by the Guild to which Johannes has belonged since he was a
student. Having fallen into poverty, he is treated by his peers with a measure
of pity. He is awkward, out of step. His daughter, meanwhile, is looking to
test other waters while they are out to sea. As the voyage progresses, she
engages in a number of rather abrupt sexual encounters with several of the
officers. She is being used and she knows it, but she wants the experience. She
likes and dislikes it at once. Having been raised by a family who could not
show love, she seems unable to accept more than brute affection. Yet there is
also the sense that she wants to evoke a reaction in Johannes, protective,
angry, disappointed—anything—but if he registers her absences from their cabin
he refuses to show it.
Day by day,
their extended visit slips away. Trips ashore to visit ruins and others sites,
exhaust Johannes and confuse his daughter. At Knossos, for example, his sadness
weighs on her and distracts her:
I should
pay attention to the woman’s explanations, says Johannes; I continue to look at
her white gloves, the seams of her stockings. Her calves. “Höre, höre zu,” says
Johannes, listen. I cannot catch her words. Only in my mind’s eye can I grasp
what I see. The words are too much. And the light is extremely bright. The
journey is important for Johannes. The journey to Greece, father and daughter.
The last and first chance to be together. But we do not know this. Or perhaps
he does.
There
will be no magic breakthrough on this voyage, nor in any of the remaining
visits the narrator makes to have dinner with her father in the hotel where he
lives. There is an emotional stasis that defines their relationship and in a
strange way it suits them. The narrator’s father will be long dead before she
really confronts the importance of their bond. And even then it is stretched
taut and unarticulated.
Perfectly
paced and tightly controlled, the devastating power of SS Proleterka lies in
the way Jaeggy manages to capture the complicated and unexpressed affection
that underlie even the most strained parent-child relationships, while
demonstrating the lengths to which a child who knows they have been disposed of
will go to maintain a sense of identity. Self-preservation requires distance.
If the narrator seems dispassionate at times, she is also resilient and real.
SS
Proleterka is translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen who maintains a
remarkably clean, even tone throughout, seamlessly incorporating the German
dialogue, and allowing the stark beauty of Jeaggy’s prose to shine. Highly
recommended.
The
truth has no ornaments: SS Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy. By Joseph Schreiber. roughghosts, March 31, 2018.
Dutch
translation of I beati anni del castigo.
(originally published in 1989) from 1990.
Dutch
translation of La paura del cielo. (originally published in 1994) from 1996.
