Don’t always judge a writer by his writing

From time to time, auction houses sell letters and manuscripts by dead authors. Tomorrow, Bonham’s are auctioning various letters by W. G. Sebald, the distinguished German author who lived in Norfolk until his death in a car accident in 2001.

Sebald’s books, such as The rings of Saturn, were notably gloomy, and so his readers expected Sebald to be the same in person. In one of the letters on sale, Sebald complains that, at public readings, ‘ sometimes people in the audience . . . seem disappointed that I am not on the verge of suicide’.

of course, many famous writers, perhaps most, turn out to be just as you would expect from their writing. E.m. Forster once wrote this, after visiting Thomas Hardy, who was then an old man.

‘T.H. showed me the graves of his pets, all overgrown with ivy, their names on the headstones. Such a dolorous muddle. “This is Snowbell — she was run over by a train . . . This is Pella, the same thing happened to her . . . This is Kitkin, she was cut clean in two, clean in two.”

‘How is it that so many of your cats have been run over, mr Hardy? Is the railway near? “Not at all near, not at all near — I don’t know how it is. But of course we have only buried here those pets whose bodies were recovered. many were never seen again.”’

Forster found it hard to keep a straight face, because, he said, ‘it was so like a caricature of his own novels or poems’.

The same was true of the novelist Henry James, whose prose can be extremely convoluted, sometimes to the point of longwindedness. James once travelled to Windsor with his friend and fellow novelist Edith Wharton.

Upon arrival at Windsor, their driver couldn’t find the King’s road, so they stopped their car, and James asked an elderly passer-by for directions.

‘my friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough, that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from rye, which was our point of departure and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station . . . in short, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already — as I have reason to think we have — driven past the turn down to the railway station, which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right, where are we now in relation to. . . ’

And so he went on. Eventually, Wharton interrupted him and asked the elderly passer-by where the King’s road was.

‘Ye’re in it’ came the reply. The novelist Evelyn Waugh created characters who were notably cruel and self- centred. In his autobiography, his son Auberon wrote of the day in his childhood when bananas arrived for the very first time. ‘Neither I, my sister Teresa nor my sister margaret had ever eaten a banana throughout the war, when they were unprocurable, but we had heard all about them as the most delicious taste in the world.

‘ The great day arrived when my mother came home with three bananas. All three were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three.’

JUST a year or so before W.G. Sebald died, I went to see him give a talk in Suffolk, and was invited to lunch with him afterwards. I found him charming, and wryly funny.

I had written an anonymous parody of his gloomy writing in Private Eye magazine a few weeks earlier. ‘

The sky appeared blue, but I knew that, somewhere else in the world, yet more clouds, black and bruised, were gathering.’

In my cowardly way, I avoided telling him over lunch that I was the author. But after he died, two of his obituaries said that my parody had made him laugh: further evidence that you should not always judge a writer by his writing.