I recently read a biography of Napoleon, written by the French historian Georges Lefebvre, first published in 1935. I wanted to learn about him through the work of one of his own countrymen, for whom his historical importance would not be in doubt, but who nevertheless understood the many shortcomings of his rule, first as Consul and then as Emperor. I had become aware that, despite studying European history at school until I was eighteen, I had never learned much about Napoleon, and that his portrayal in England was often rather cartoonish – a short, pompous man, who over-estimated his abilities and deserved to be ridiculed – with an emphasis on his dictatorial character. By contrast, contemporary accounts by philosophers, novelists, and poets, celebrate Napoleon as the man who abolished Feudalism across Europe, introduced religious toleration, granted civil rights to the Jews, drafted constitutions, and who cut down the power of the church and the landed aristocrats. Rather than a figure of fun, for many people of his day he was a symbol of progress, the champion of the rights of the people against the old elites. Lefebvre’s book was exactly what I needed, and I think I now have a more balanced view of one of the Europe’s great but flawed leaders.
Early in the book, Lefebvre describes preparations for the Battle of Marengo (1800), which took place near a small town in Piedmont, roughly at the centre of the triangle formed by Turin, Milan, and Genoa. In May, Napoleon led the French forces over the Alps and into northern Italy, ready to face the Austrian army. As I read this, I remembered that this event is also described at the start of the novel Vertigo, by W G Sebald, a German author who lived much of his life in England and whose works have acquired something of a cult status. I picked up my copy of Vertigo and re-read the first sentence: In mid-May of the year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great Saint Bernard pass, an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible. How odd! For, according to Lefebvre, Napoleon had decided to lead the army to the Great Saint Bernard Pass which, having been crossed in 1798 and 1799, was a passage familiar to French armies. Had the French army crossed the Alps using that pass twice before, or did they do so in 1800 for the first time? Whose version of events should I trust?
Shortly after finishing Lefebvre’s biography, I decided to re-read another of Sebald’s novels, Austerlitz, which I had read when it was first translated into English, the same year the author died, in 2001. I soon discovered that I had made a couple of marginal notes in pencil, correcting errors in the text. For example, there was reference to a quotation from Psalm CLXVII, but I knew that there are only 150 Psalms in the Old Testament, so I checked and discovered that the passage in question came from Psalm 147, that is CXLVII. There was also a reference to the narrator walking from Liverpool Street station to the River Thames through Whitechapel and Shoreditch, but as a long-time resident of East London I knew for sure that Shoreditch is to the north of Liverpool Street and the River is to the south. Presumably the narrator had walked through Whitechapel and Shadwell. During my re-reading, attentive to Sebald’s proclivity to error, I noticed several other mistakes: for example, the narrator describes a walk from Greenwich to Tower Bridge that started along Greek Street, when it should be Creek Road; and, the main character in the novel lives for a while near Mile End in Alderney Street, but it should be Alderney Road. My copy of the novel now has several additional marginal notes and corrections.
I realise that some of my readers will have already concluded that the main problem here is M A Hannam, the excessively-pedantic reader, rather than W G Sebald, the slightly-careless writer. It’s a fair point. And, to be clear, notwithstanding these several mistakes, Austerlitz is one of the best contemporary novels I have read and I recommend it, without reservation, to you all.
But I remain interested in the question, were these slippages of the pen inadvertent, and did the publisher fail to spot them, or were they quite deliberate because the author was intentionally casting the veil of fiction over text which is formally presented as reported fact. Sebald writes as if he were providing a truthful account, but he has a long history of deliberate fabrication. In some cases these were not harmless cartographical mistakes, but the borrowing of the details of the lives of others, which were then altered and embroidered, and this creative process, turning fact into fiction while maintaining a factual tone, has made him very unpopular with some of those whose stories he has distorted.
Sebald’s first novel to appear in English, The Emigrants (1996), contains the stories of four different men, all of whom were exiled from home. The first story, Dr Henry Selwyn, is based on the life and death of a doctor whom Sebald met in East Anglia, Philip Rhoades Buckton. In the story, the narrator discovers that Selwyn is Jewish and that he changed his name from Hersch Seweryn after arriving in England, a refugee from Lithuania. At the end of the story, when Selwyn kills himself, it is clear that part of the reason for his suicide is his overwhelming sense of homesickness. But, as Roades Buckton’s relatives have made quite clear, subsequent to discovering the story of their family member turned into fiction, while Roades Buckton did kill himself, he was neither Jewish nor Lithuanian. The final story in the book, Max Ferber, describes the life of a German Jewish artist, now living in the UK. In the German version of the book (published in 1993) the artist is called Max Aurach, which strongly hints that this character is partly based on the artist Frank Auerbach. One of Auerbach’s drawings was reproduced in the German edition of the book without permission (but not in the English version, after the artist angrily insisted that it be removed). The other model for Ferber was the artist Peter Jordan, a one-time friend of Sebald’s. Unlike Auerbach, he did not seem to mind that his life had been used for the novel, although his aunt objected to the fact that text from a memoir she had written was used by Sebald without any acknowledgement.
And there is more. The main character in Austerlitz is based on a real life story – although of a woman rather than a man – who came to Britain on the Kindertransport in the 1930s. She was not happy to discover that her story had been re-told in fictional form by a man she had never met. The title of an article she wrote for the Sunday Times makes the point clearly enough: “Stripped of My Tragic Past by a Bestselling Author”. And Sebald’s own family were unhappy about sections of Vertigo, which described life in the small village in Bavaria where Sebald had grown up, and in which certain of their neighbours, clearly recognisable, were the subject of unflattering description. To put it bluntly, Sebald’s work is full of stories about real people, many still living when the books were published, which are close enough to the truth for the subjects to be identified, but with significant facts changed in some way to suit the narrative flow, all published without the consent of those described.
Sebald stole the stories of people he knew, and his refashioning of their experience made him famous. He is not the first writer to make use the lives of others as source material for their works, and not the first to be attacked for doing so. The best defence for his behaviour, it is that his presentation of these experiences in fiction has made them better known, better understood, and that his work prompts his readers to cultivate greater sympathy for the victims of war, exile, and trauma. He is one of the greatest of contemporary novelists and those of us who enjoy reading fiction are lucky to have his work to read and re-read. His ability to depict the lived reality of recent historical events – especially the Holocaust – and thereby to memorialise those who were victims of these events, is the justification for his fictional appropriation of others’ lives. What we must avoid, however, is thinking that everything we read in his books is true. We need to remind ourselves that he is writing fiction, and that he is not to be trusted when he asserts that no army had crossed the Great Saint Bernard Pass before 1800, or that he walked through Shoreditch on his way from Liverpool Street to the River Thames.
My first sustained encounter with the myth of Napoleon would have been during my mid-teens when I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The view of Napoleon presented in the novel seems not unlike the English view that I grew up with – a vain and over-confident man – and the lengthy epilogue reads as a sustained attempt to diminish Napoleon’s importance as a historical figure. And yet, Tolstoy’s greatness as a writer is illustrated by the fact that two of his principal characters in the story – Prince Andrey Bolonsky, who dies from wounds received at Borodino fighting the French, and Count Pierre Bezukhov, who is unjustly imprisoned by the French in Moscow – both speak admiringly of Napoleon because they see him as a representative of a new way of organising society, that does away with tradition, superstition, and servitude. War and Peace is a great novel, not least because of the way it describes the terrible effects of war on ordinary people, but it is not a reliable source book for historians and Tolstoy’s evident dislike of Napoleon disqualifies him as an impartial witness. For a balanced and evidence-based view, reading a range of different historical sources – at least some of which by French authors – would be the better approach.
To understand our world better, we need historians who have sifted through vast numbers of documents stored in archives, and collections of objects held in museums, and who have read widely both contemporary accounts and later interpretations of events, and from all this material are able to synthesise a credible account of the past, and who approach all this evidence with rigour and respect for truth. At the same time, we need novelists to bring these events to life, through the actions and thoughts of their characters, whose experiences appeal to our emotions and sympathies as well as to our understanding. To achieve a rich and rounded knowledge of the human experience we need both well-established historical fact and engaging creative fiction.
Tolstoy and Sebald both bring the past to life, in very different ways, but it would be wise to check any factual details from more reliable sources. For, like all great novelists, while their work is rooted in true stories it is embellished into great fiction by making stuff up.