On socks and other arrangements - Jenny Turner in LRB:

“Jaeggy was born in Zürich in 1940 and writes in Italian, with intrusions from French, even English sometimes, but mostly German, ‘the language of funerals, of sermons’, and it can’t be an accident that the first bit of German in her most famous book, Sweet Days of Discipline (1989), is the word for ‘duty’, Zwang. Of the eight books she has published in Italy, translation has been haphazard, UK publication even more so. Her first two books remain untranslated; The Water Statues, her third – the one with Beeklam in it – first came out in 1980. Sweet Days of Discipline came next, then a short story collection in 1998, Proleterka (2001), These Possible Lives (2009) and I Am the Brother of XX(2014). In the US, Tim Parks’s version of Sweet Days of Discipline was published in 1993; Last Vanities, his translation of the short stories, followed in 1998; and Alastair McEwen’s Proleterka came out in 2003. In the UK, however, Jaeggy’s books have appeared in a different order: I Am the Brother of XX (2017), Sweet Days of Discipline (2018), Proleterka(2019), The Water Statues (2022).
These Possible Lives was translated by Minna Zallman Proctor and published in the US in 2017. It’s tiny, the size of a promotional freebie, and composed of three short, pictorial essays about three dope-fiend authors, Thomas de Quincey, Marcel Schwob and John Keats. The essays are clearly the product of much reading – Jaeggy has translated Schwob’s Vies imaginaires and De Quincey’s Last Days of Immanuel Kant into Italian – though it’s the reading not of a scholar but an artist, interested only in what Schwob called ‘the unique’. Wordsworth cut the pages of Burke’s Reflections with ‘a buttery knife’. ‘In 1803, the guillotine was a common children’s toy.’ ‘TDQ’, in his last days, did not suffer from senilis stultitia quae deliratio appellari solet – the fun for Jaeggy being that the architect of Pure Reason, according to De Quincey, did.”

(…)

“The covers of the UK editions, published by And Other Stories, add to a reader’s worry she might be missing important clues. Each has a smudged, Sebaldy photo of Jaeggy herself, blonde and bony, ultramontane – the books don’t say the pictures are of the author, but most of them are identifiable from elsewhere. A girl with plaits sits in the mountains with a brother: ‘There is one spot there, high up on the cliff, from which the limestone humps descend ceremoniously and lethargically down to the water; and it’s as though a faint recollection were telling me that I’d lived there – or in the water long ago.’ A toothy teen in a sinister national costume: ‘the Tracht ... with the black bonnet trimmed in white lace’. A model on a contact sheet, a crocodile on her jumper: Jaeggy did indeed work as a model, after finishing school in the 1950s. Older, in a deckchair smoking, wearing a hairclip and a demonic, doll-like smirk: ‘that depth toys have, that impassive, fatuous rigidity, that stupor of good little children’. The photos, I was told, came from Adelphi, Jaeggy’s Italian publisher – from 1968 until his death in 2021, Jaeggy was married to the writer Roberto Calasso, who was also Adelphi’s editor-in-chief. The photographs, the relationship with Calasso, certain friendships – especially that with the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann – are important to the iconography, the personal mythology, that Jaeggy builds in her books.

Jaeggy’s best two novels are Sweet Days of Discipline and Proleterka – it’s the name of a ship. Both refer to what look like a common set of images, memories, stories, perhaps, of an author’s life. There’s a blighted, poor-little-rich-girl childhood, abandoned to a series of chilly boarding schools by an absent, bolted mother – Italian, Catholic, a pianist, remarried – and an ageing Protestant Swiss-German father. There may be a brother, maybe dead, there may be a grandmother who likes flowers better than people (‘It only seems like a nice thing.”

(…)

“And expensive schools and expensive clinics, expensive treatments, expensive deaths. The school in which the sweet days happen is not the Chalet School, except in the million creepy ways it sort of is: dorms, pashes, nuns and Nazis, Kaffee und Kuchen; that occult fascination with illness you so often find in girls’ school stories, especially at schools that promise lots of exercise and healthy mountain air. ‘You have this feeling that inside something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on.’ Jaeggy takes particular interest in the rancid trope of the bewitchingly frail favourite, whom she does as ‘the black girl’, the daughter of an African president and the school’s pariah, supposedly on account of the fuss the teachers make of her, if you want to go along with that. Words such as Krieg and Hitler are never mentioned, although the narrator’s much loathed roommate was born in Nuremberg ‘just in time to see the Germans march their goosestep and the geraniums in the windows’. ‘Perhaps innocence has something crude, pedantic and affected about it, as if we were all dressed in plus fours and long socks.’”

(…)

“The narrator is fourteen, has been a boarder at one school or another for years already and seems at first resigned, pretty much, to the death-in-life to which she has been condemned. ‘A double image, anatomical and antique. In the one the girl runs about and laughs, in the other she lies on a bed covered by a lace shroud’: pupils are ‘cellmates’ and later ‘stylites’, the locker room a columbarium, ‘our minds ... a series of graves in a wall’. But then it happens, one day in the Speisesaal, at lunch: a new girl, her looks ‘those of an idol, disdainful’, pullovers ‘loose’ and ‘elegant’, hair ‘straight and shiny as blades’. Her name is Frédérique, she’s the daughter of a banker in Geneva, and ‘the first thing I thought was: she had been further than I had.’ In class she is ‘top in everything’ and out of it, rolls her own cigarettes. She talks of a man friend, ‘of a man as of a completed parabola’. ‘She was eloquent. She didn’t talk about justice. Nor about good and evil ... Her words flew.’ And so, the narrator is determined to ‘conquer’ her. ‘Even now, I can’t bring myself to say I was in love with Frédérique, it’s such an easy thing to say.’

Frédérique, however, cannot be ‘conquered’ in this way, because Frédérique, as the narrator dimly recognises, is already lost. Out of school one day, in the village cake shop, keeping an eye out for passing men, ‘I saw a strange light in her eyes, like the snowflakes, mad and pointless, hanging still in the air.’ Playing Beethoven, she is ‘absolute and impregnable ... confronting a power we know nothing of’. Another new girl arrives, ‘extrovert’, Belgian, promising everybody invitations to ‘her great ball, the most extravagant party in Europe’, where her ‘daddy’ will flirt and dance with everybody – ‘Sehr elegant, rassig, die Neue,’ as the hated German roommate says. And so, the narrator throws Frédérique over. ‘What mattered was that there should be movement, confusion, applause and Daddy ... What Micheline wanted from life was to have a good time and wasn’t that what I wanted too?’”

(…)

“‘Jaeggy always snags her mysticism on the whetted edge of a decorative object,’ Audrey Wollen wrote in the New York Review of Books last year. ‘She’s writing about longing in the face of an endless abyss, after all, which means writing about fashion.’ ‘Clothes, furniture, adornments, floral arrangements, personalised stationery’ are among the examples Wollen collected, as well as the vestments and the crucifix, accessorised with its ‘nails and a crown of thorns’. Fashion, the It-girl Alexa Chung once said, is just what happens when you have been wearing one thing for ages, then get bored with it. Is this the reason Jaeggy has become so fashionable, because readers are tired of big books and humanist fiction, all that inwardness that isn’t really inward, all those vulgar, boring families with ‘all of the advertising’, as Jaeggy once put it, ‘on their side’? Chung again, explaining a ‘sensation’ she gets from clothes she becomes ‘obsessed with’: ‘At first I find them almost grotesque, they make me feel a bit sick. Then I look at them again, and realise it’s not repulsion, but desire.’ In 2021 the New Yorker published an interview with Jaeggy by Dylan Byron, who found her ‘impeccably elegant in crisp whites and royal blues, her fine silver hair clipped back in a signature tortoiseshell barrette’. Jaeggy twice complimented Byron on his tie and noted that his red socks were the same as hers. She showed him ‘Hermes’, which is the name she gives her ‘swamp-green’ typewriter. She told him about ‘Erich’, a swan she met on a visit to Germany, somewhere near Berlin.”

Read the article here.

I’ve only read “Sweet Days of Discipline’ – I wrote about it in a Dutch, only in Dutch. You can read it here.

I would not say that “Sweet Days of Discipline” has nothing to do with humanist fiction. You can say the novella is populated by characters who are not ashamed for a chance of their upper-class background and yet, their misery is real.

As Frédérique who doesn’t talk about good or evil, nor does she talk about justice; what’s left are the floral arrangements, the (red) socks, some furniture.

Jaeggy is popular (is she really so popular?) because some readers might sense that this is indeed what’s left.

Real existing humanism is a floral arrangement.