Along with close reading, English majors learn the art of apologizing for their studies. While working toward my master's degree in prose fiction at the University of East Anglia, I got to know the list of UEA's more prominent creative-writing teachers and alumni. The master’s program, the oldest of its kind in the UK, was founded by Malcolm Bradbury and graduated Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, and I invoked them all when people asked me about UEA. W.G. Sebald came up too, although he generally only impressed my fellow English majors. In the UEA fiction pantheon, Sebald was attached to but still somewhere outside these notables, tangent to them in the way that his work lies tangent to prose fiction. He’d taught literature and translation at the university, but he was not, as far as I knew, involved with the fiction master’s. No one exactly came in wanting to be Sebald. We knew, though, that he had famously walked the flat coastal land of Norfolk and Suffolk—part of the Netherlands in a previous continental arrangement, the UK customs officer said when I told him where I was going—and with this in mind, it was easy to walk around even just the UEA Broad, a quarried lake on campus that joins the River Yare, and imagine some sort of writerly affinity, if you ignored the fact that you were probably out walking—or more likely running, in my case—to avoid the terror of sitting in front of a blank Word document with the cursor blinking, you blinking right back. There was something to be said for drumming up writing focus by taking a ruminative ramble. The brief tight community formed in the master’s program was altogether too much fun, in a laidback way well-suited for an introvert, and, though I wasn’t much of a partier, I began to have the perverse sense that I wasn’t lonely enough to be writing well. Despite the jealous competition supposed to prevail among aspiring writers, we enjoyed an uncomplicated camaraderie, to the point that even our professors seemed slightly disappointed in our collective lack of angst—in other years, we heard, participants had broken each other’s hearts, stolen each other’s girlfriends, and trashed each other’s work, but we remained happily platonic and scrupulously polite even while being scrupulously honest in workshop. The members of my workshop—some of whom, to the great benefit of my English-apology efforts, now already have work available for preorder on Amazon—were generous and supportive. We joked that at one of our get-togethers someone would eventually get drunk and call someone else “a bad writer”—or maybe a genre writer, burn—but in practice, late-night rantings tended to be less mean and more simply eccentric, as when one of my friends informed another that the ceiling of her apartment had been designed by Nikola Tesla. (He believed her.) Maybe it was inevitable that you might start feeling as if you ought to induce a little meditative pain, to get back in touch with the narrative of writers-as-unhappy. Another classmate once mentioned a certain path as a “good place to walk and feel melancholy,” as if it was part of creative maintenance, the opposite of a health regime. My own obsessive runs sometimes seemed to have the same function. Perhaps this was what writers required for optimal productivity, a morning deconstitutional.

Writers suffer, and they suffer alone, at least in the popular imagination, and quite frequently in their own imaginations as well. Moreover, they proverbially cannot abide each other’s company. “Few things are as immutable as the vindictiveness with which writers talk about their literary colleagues behind their backs,” writes Sebald in A Place in the Country, his latest posthumous publication, where he seems to accept, more or less without irony, the truth of writer-pain. Per Sebald, creative people “torment” themselves with their creations; aesthetic beauty perhaps issues not only from craft and intelligence but also from “a certain unluckiness in love” that he notes in Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, and Robert Walser, all of whom make appearances here. A profound, ambivalent mood of separation emerges as a constant in W.G. Sebald’s analyses of the lives and creative works of his six subjects. They suffer geographic exile, they are ignored or reviled at home; not always of sound mind and body, they undergo a kind of alienation from themselves. Frequently, they walk—away, alone.

An expatriate German who died in England, Sebald recorded his own famous walking tour of Norfolk and Suffolk in The Rings of Saturn, a travelogue-novel-memoir hybrid that orbits thematically around its geographical center, from Swinburne to fishing to silk cultivation. A musing near the end of the book on the eighteenth-century weavers of Norwich, the now-quiet city where UEA stands, glancingly acknowledges the mournful strain that aches through the book: “That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable . . . It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.” Far from the grounded collegiate communities fostered in the age of workshops and retreats, Mark McGurl’s “program era,” Sebald’s solitary, peripatetic figures can hope for a sense of social connectedness only through their difficult solitude. Sebald, who clearly feels and often explicitly claims a kinship with his disparate cast—“I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time,” he writes in the chapter on Swiss writer Robert Walser—suggests that a writer inevitably hates and seeks isolation and detachment. The creative urge is both enabled and suppressed by these removes; they are at once flights to concentration and to oblivion, forced and voluntary in both cases. His Walser ends his life in a sanatorium as a result of a deliberate “inner emigration,” producing texts that Sebald defends as the work not of a delusional mental patient but “of someone compelled . . . to be thinking of something somehow very far distant.” Anticipating that his work will be unwelcome in Nazi Germany, Walser literally shrinks his writing to the point of illegibility; he cedes the hour to the “Heimat poets,” whose “solid earthiness” evokes the homeland that he has metaphysically left in order to go on writing. At the same time, his health slips over the years of “unremitting composition” that Sebald figures as working on Walser more than Walser works on it. By night and by day, he flees it on foot, a “solitary walker” who dreams of traveling farther abroad but never goes, though Sebald allows him a flight into a counterfactual history: “It is not difficult to imagine him hidden in a green leafy picture by Henri Rousseau, with tigers and elephants, on the veranda of a hotel by the sea while the monsoon pours down outside, or in front of a resplendent tent in the foothills of the Himalayas, which—as Walser once wrote of the Alps—resemble nothing so much as a snow-white fur boa.” He was offered a job in Samoa, Sebald writes, and though his reasons for turning it down are unknown, Sebald readily proposes one for his capricious subject: “Let us simply assume that it is because among the first German South Sea discoverers and explorers there was a certain gentleman called Otto von Kotzebue, against whom Walser was just as irrevocably prejudiced as he was against the playwright of the same name, whom he called a narrow-minded philistine, claiming he had a too-long nose, bulging eyes, and no neck,” and had been popular when Walser’s preferred Heinrich von Kleist suffered obscurity. A reader can almost hear Sebald’s fond chuckle at Walser’s intergenerational literary loyalty—fond, and knowing.

Sebald is strikingly tender in this chapter, where he finds his own grandfather in Walser and vice versa—“something about the way each had of holding his hat in his hand, and the way that even in the finest weather, they would always carry an umbrella or a raincoat”—and invites the reader to compare photographs of the two: a hatted Walser out for a walk during his days in the Herisau home, a similarly dressed and similarly mustached man on a country road with a very young Sebald by the hand. Such correspondences are not trivial to Sebald, who cannot ignore the fact that his grandfather and Walser died in the same year, nor that his grandfather died just before Walser’s final birthday. Sebald does not attempt to speculate on the meaning of this apparent synchronicity, though he clearly wishes to draw some from it:

“Perhaps that is the reason why now, when I think back to my grandfather’s death—to which I have never been able to reconcile myself—in my mind’s eye I always see him lying on the horn sledge on which Walser’s body, after he had been found in the snow and photographed, was taken back to the asylum. What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps, and coincidences? Are they rebases of memory, delusions of the self and of the sense, or rather schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which lies beyond our comprehension? . . . I . . . will just set down without comment what happened to me recently while reading the novel Der Räuber [The Robber], the only one of Walser’s longer works with which I was at the time still unfamiliar. Quite near the beginning of the book the narrator states that the Robber crossed Lake Constance by moonlight. Exactly thus—by moonlight—is how, in one of my own stories, Aunt Fini imagines the young Ambros crossing the selfsame lake . . . Barely two pages farther on, the same story relates how, later, Ambros . . . made the acquaintance of a lady from Shanghai [who] marked the beginning of his Trauerlaufbahn [career in mourning]. It is a similarly mysterious woman . . . whom the Robber meets, two pages on from the moonlit scene on Lake Constance, in a pale November wood—and nor is that all: a little later in the text, I know not from what depths, there appears the word Trauerlaufbahn, a term which I believed . . . to be an invention entirely my own. I have always tried, in my own works, to mark my respect for those writers with whom I felt an affinity, to raise my hat to them, so to speak, by borrowing an attractive image or a few expressions, but it is one thing to set a marker in memory of a departed colleague, and quite another when on has the persistent feeling of being beckoned from the other side.”

Indeed, Sebald’s voice rises with a seer’s authority—or maybe simply the authority, and liberty, of a novelist—as he conjures Walser’s “nocturnal epic marches with the moon shining a white track before him,” as he at once sees “the view from a window of the Herisau asylum” and hears “the pistol shot across the Wannsee” that killed Kleist, a death he connects to that of Walser, who wrote similarly speculative meditations upon Kleist’s life and work. Walser’s mystical presence descends on Sebald in Sebald’s moments of walking and of writing: “On all these paths Walser has been my constant companion. I only need to look up for a moment in my daily work to see him standing somewhere a little apart, the unmistakable figure of the solitary walker just pausing to take in the surroundings.” Walser’s gaze becomes Sebald’s, and through Walser, Sebald’s becomes Rousseau’s: “[S]ometimes I imagined that I see with [Walser’s] eyes the bright Seeland and within this land of lakes the lake like a shimmering island, and in this lake-island another island, the Île Saint-Pierre.” With Walser mediating this vision of the Swiss island where Rousseau took temporary refuge, the three writers find some sort of communions; they bleed like watercolors into each other. Translator Jo Catling, a UEA colleague of Sebald, negotiates these delicate layers of embedded identity with a sensitive and confident hand. Her renditions of Sebald’s words and the words of his subjects—quoted at length in the text—are at once distinct from one another and remain of a piece in mood. She gives us not just Sebald’s voice but the voices of Sebald’s Walser, Sebald’s Walser’s Rousseau.