Curable or Not?

The Swiss author Markus Werner—beard, curls, grizzle, glasses, absence of affect, we corresponded but I never met him—was a cult writer at the turn of the millennium, the sort of writer whose books traveled by word of mouth among readers, a Geheimtipp in the German Sprachraum. Yes, he had some qualified admirers (not in the sense of qualified admiration, but—you know), experienced and intelligent critics like Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Helmut Böttiger, and he won the odd prize, but his reputation was not one of those seeking to be imposed from above. Rather, Werner’s name was passed around among grateful and slightly incredulous readers—incredulous that something could be this swift, this bleak, and this deadly.

The literary production of Werner, who lived from 1944 to 2016, consisted of seven short, barbed novels published between 1984 and 2004, beginning with Zündels Abgang and concluding with Am Hang. The latter was translated into English by Robert E. Goodwin as On the Edge; the first, Zündel’s Exit, the third, Cold Shoulder, and now the second, The Frog in the Throat, by me. For a private, quirky, and scandal-free foreign writer, retired from schoolmastering, then from authorship, and finally from the lists of the living, this would seem to be a respectable showing, three books. But here’s the thing: if one has a taste for Werner, and not everyone does (one German reviewer actually pleaded with his readers not to buy the book), but if one does, one may well hold the author to be one of the glories of the contemporary—the recent—scene and find the product exquisitely addictive, and there are only seven of them, and why would one ever willingly stop?

Werner’s books dramatize figures on the outs with life. There is a loose thread, which may be something distinctly trivial, often something written or said, a word or a phrase in a postcard or a newspaper or a telephone call, and the Werner figure (and these exist, just as the Bernhard figure exists, or the Kafka figure exists) tugs at it. Perhaps it’s a communication cord on a train, or a bell rope or a fuse. He—it’s usually a “he”—pulls at it idly or experimentally, in a spirit of irritation or retaliation, vengeance or self-defense, and then, like the translator above, won’t willingly stop. He becomes a verbal and attitudinal terrorist. A table setting sets him off not because it’s wrong or he’s fussy (though he is) but merely by being there the night before and presuming on a tomorrow with breakfast.

He goes on picking and pulling. Existence very rapidly—in the space of a few score pages—loses its texture, its weft or its warp; shreds of it hang down looking unappealing and distinctly unlivable. Whole worlds, or what had been worlds, devolve to piles of lint: first, or most grievously, the innermost circle of the Intimsphäre, one’s minimal domestic existence in what Randall Jarrell once called the “group of two,” the home life or private life or emotional life that in Werner is always overpriced and overprivileged, the only “soft” or “premium” part of life, the desert island of feeling in a sea of verbiage and uncouthness and money. And then rapidly also one’s professional life, one’s wider setting and prospects, and finally the possibility of a continued conventional existence within language and society.

The novels seem to catch Werner’s heroes (a doubtful term in his context) at bad moments: there has been a mishap involving a cigarette machine, an ill-timed absence, an unendurable professional humiliation. A provocation that could have been surmounted, perhaps even has been surmounted, nine times is unendurable a tenth. The books give a sense—true, I believe—of something not built into being but cut down into it. They cling fast to economy, a jaggedness of utterance, a scorn for platitude, a ruthless, look-no-brakes speed. They are the kind of books that Thalmann (in The Frog in the Throat) favors, remarking that “their authors, in writing them, did so to avoid doing something far worse.” Whatever that may have been. Read enough of Werner’s books, and you will come to an appreciation that life is just about made up of such “bad moments,” one after another. And then? Then it’s a question of attitude, of self-respect, of resistance, of what the French once called contenance. If you have ever wondered why you go on taking it (whatever “it” is) and what would happen if you maybe stopped, or if you work for Elon Musk, then Werner is for you.

Werner’s books seem to touch opposites. Are they monodramas or about the condition of society? Specifically Swiss or all-purpose Western post–World War II? Are they concerned with toenails and turds, or mostly with our immortal souls? Are they couples-y or about solitary males? Timeless or niched in the 1980s? Doleful or exuberant? Political or postpolitical? Torpid or frantically energetic? Are their predicaments—as is sometimes debated with reference to Ibsen’s plays—curable or not? Do they give heart or tell the reader to abandon all hope? Do they teach independence or reward conformism? Are they tragedies or comedies? Predictably, the answer to all is “yes” or “both.”

That thing that Auden would first look for in a piece of writing, the “contraption,” is abundantly there in Werner. Hair-triggered by a moment’s mishap, they surge toward a seduction, a bid for escape, a resignation, a farcical attempt at suicide, a grill party with neighbors. Whatever is set up, the books deliver. They are fitted together like West End farces, miracles of timing, one door slamming just as another six—no, don’t open, but slam shut at the same time. The character is adrift in their draft like a withered leaf.

In the 1980s we were just through being told that life was impossible. We were beginning to worry about ecology and overpopulation. There was a working class, but that went by “middle,” or “lower-middle,” and it was threatened by the coming of automation and robots (which in another language means “work”). The word “society” had just been withdrawn and replaced in general use by the word “economy.” Unions of all sorts had fallen into disrepute. Italy was rumored to have overtaken England; the US was in a long post-Vietnam trough; powered by first-wave feminism, women had without question surpassed men; and Switzerland was no longer chocolate and cheese, or even Swiss watches and cuckoo clocks, but frankly pharmaceuticals and financial jiggery-pokery. Television—the media—was proliferating, well, like frog spawn, and our overexposed rhetorics of persuasion and opinion and even of introspection were looking distinctly shopworn. It was the dusk of the Age of Respect. Terror of the Left and Terror of the Right—separately, mind you—had set up in opposition to the Terror of the Middle.

The Frog in the Throat (Froschnacht) is Werner’s second novel, appearing in 1985, the year after Zündel’s Exit. The death promised or suggested in the title of that book has already happened in this one; it is that of the older Thalmann, Klemens by name though hardly by nature, who in some male parody of a period haunts his defrocked son Franz once a month for three days in the form of a frog in his throat and agonies of introversion and justification. The book covers the six months after Klemens Thalmann’s death, and its ten chapters are five paired solo scenes: Franz, Klemens; Franz, Klemens; and so on. (This is the “contraption.”) Franz struggles with his frog, soliloquizes through his somewhat shameful “anecdote-enriched past,” while the ancient but seemingly indestructible Klemens, his head companionably pressed against the flanks of each of his five cows in turn, reminisces about village life to his now-preferred audience. It is a book about Switzerland and about the modern age, about the great leap forward from a productive to a service economy (or what, in a further degeneration, we call the “knowledge economy”)—Franz having left the cloth and taken up the rancid calling of life coach.

What is miraculous in such a short book is how Werner manages to make such a dense weave of existence. It is possible—in fact, I would urge it—to read The Frog in the Throat again and again, so deeply and subtly is so much information dissolved in it. With just a few strokes of the pen, the writer gives us three highly individuated generations of Thalmanns across most of the twentieth century, men and women, parents and children; the long life of Klemens and his many village contacts; and the long midlife of Franz and a few of his many clients. Numerous scenes sharply assert themselves: with Helen in the lewd Greek taxi, phoning Frau Trüssel at the passport office for some pointers on a potential client, the landlady’s ribald calls in the pub, Kezia’s lakeside seduction moves, the respective quirks of five cows, the first Kennedy assassination.

Werner has an utterly distinctive way with a sentence, which in his practice is something brief but highly flavored and often studded with unexpected vocabulary, a kind of ideal labeling. Say, the syndrome that regularly befell Franz at the foot of the pulpit, that he calls “reverend’s remorse” or “taedium crucis.” What will remain of us is not whatever Larkin says, but maybe irony. Many of Werner’s sentences are exquisitely dispirited, of which just one shall stand here: “We wandered silently in the general direction of Sparta.” The book gives us births and deaths, a strong sense of a dwindling social horizon across the twentieth century; Klemens still political, still with his radio and his newspapers, and his socialist and global arguments; Franz seemingly not interested in anything beyond his job and his personal life, and the eventual realization of his aspiration, which is the completion of his switch (in the apt terms of Wisława Szymborska) from “worried Christ” to “carefree Buddha”:

I promise you one thing, though: One day I’ll be sitting under a grapevine, or maybe a fig tree. I’ll draw deep and satisfying breaths through my shamelessly open mouth, and the sun will warm my tonsils, and no one will stop me. You’ll be lying off to the side in the grass, still just about wiggling, but little more than a corpse.

The Frog in the Throat finds room for such recurring markers as the magical shrub, the elderflower, and the graveyards (not uncommon in Werner)—the one in Fez, the site of all life and all joy; the one in the local town where Kezia plies her trade; and the one in the village with the intoxicating, unapproved elderflower that Klemens planted over the grave of old Knüsel, his schoolteacher.

The two men, father and son, Thalmann and Thalmann, are at loggerheads, ten years broken, cut off, and set aside. Each man is left to hoe his own row. They are opposites, the one who lived by the rules (or did he?) morally and mortally let down by his son who kicked over the traces, the dominant and the craven, the widower and the accidental Don Juan. In fact, the book shows us, they are not so much opponents—a crossed line of battle—as they are cussed, independent souls, lines in parallel destined to meet in infinity. Both quarrel with their lot, both see themselves as done down, both are full of resentment and unappeased aggression. They put me in mind of the ending of “Remembering My Father” by another great Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter):

he himself grows in me we eat our defeats
we burst out laughing
when they say how little is needed
to be reconciled

Of course, reconciliation is out of the question, but equally there is no possibility of not laughing. Until infinity.