A Great Friend to the Reality of Things
On Late Summer by Adalbert Stifter
Early on in Adalbert Stifter’s massive autobiographical novel, the narrator Heinrich reflects on his childhood view of reality. Like other children, he sees the world through fresh eyes, before boredom, fatigue, and certainty have clouded over the peaks of human experience. What’s exceptional about Heinrich, and, by extension, Adalbert Stifter, is his ability to retain and transmit that fresh-eyed view to others, using his own idiosyncratic blend of childish and mature language. The passage in question gets at the heart of why, in the absence of conventional plot and characterization, Late Summer is such a natural joy to read.
Even as a boy I had been a great friend to the reality of things as they presented themselves in creation or in the orderly course of human life. This was often a great inconvenience to those around me. I asked incessantly about the names of things, about their origins and their uses, and could not calm down when the answer was delayed. Nor did I like it when an object was made into something other than what it was. It particularly offended me when, as I thought, the object had become worse through the change. It grieved me when, one day, an old tree in the garden was felled and chopped into mere logs. The logs were no longer trees, and, as they were rotten, no cross, no stool, no table, and no rocking horse could be carved from them. When we walked through town, I asked Father who had built the great church of St. Stephen, why it had only one tower, why it was so pointed, why the church was so black, who owned this or that house and why it was so big, why, at another house, were there always two windows set beside each other, and why, at yet another house, were there two stone men holding up the cornice of the front door.
My friend Guy Merrill, a painter and musician, said that he was very curious about the stone men after reading this passage. I understand what he means. Stifter is describing a normal walk through the city of Vienna; the narrator-as-child asks questions that any curious child might ask. And yet this elicits the same amount of readerly curiosity as any sensational event, like an affair or a murder.
For the past month or so, I’ve been mulling over how to adequately convey my enthusiasm for Late Summer. When this is attempted—and I’m no exception—it’s usually done with a sort of apology, a sort of disclaimer, that the reader shouldn’t expect too much in the way of conventional fiction. There are very few events, usually nothing more dramatic than inclement weather. There are very few characters, with “Father” and “Mother” being no more and no less than that, generic manifestations of parental care rather than individuals.
Unconventional—yes, that’s true, but not the whole truth. Stifter defies convention, but in a much gentler way than, say, his modern compatriot Thomas Bernhard, or even Franz Kafka, who called Stifter, “my fat brother”, an epithet I never tire of repeating. (Maybe I’ve even repeated it in this newsletter. I’m not sure.) Anyway, the confrontations of Bernhard and Kafka have an antecedent, and Stifter is as canonical in Austria as they are, despite him being quite unknown elsewhere. That’s something I’d like to change, though I’m unsure of what the Austrians would think of it. Many of them, even in Stifter’s adopted hometown of Linz, were quite surprised, even a bit disturbed, to hear that I had read him. They like to keep things to themselves. A homeless man in Seattle once said to me, when I told him I would be teaching English in Bad Ischl, not too far from where Stifter lived, that the people in Austria were “greedy, like tigers”. This might be true when it comes to their literature.
Stifter is sober and intoxicating, mature and immature. He offers conventional pleasures to the reader in unconventional ways. I wish I could share more of his writing, maybe I will, but I’m trying to find a publisher for Late Summer and don’t want to muddle the process by posting too much of it too early. These things take patience and deliberation, faculties that Stifter, as a matter of fact, celebrated. That makes the waiting—an inevitable drawback of translating books for publication—somewhat easier, but, as I’m sure you can tell, I’m quite enthusiastic and could go on and on about him, could share more from his brilliant odd book for a long time still; at 800 or so pages, there’s a lot of material.
Have you contacted nyrb, publisher of two stiffer books in the US?