SURFING ON WORDS: GEORGY RIECKE REVIEWS WOLFGANG HEIZLER’S
BIOGRAPHY OF JOHANNES SPEYER

 

Notorious though they may be, the last words of Johannes Speyer certainly bear repeating, if not only to remind readers that the author of this article was one of those fortunate enough to find himself amongst the hallowed company that circled the great writer’s hospital bed on that fateful day in January, 1984. ‘I have only read War and Peace twenty one times,’ croaked the pale-cheeked Speyer: ‘Therefore, I am a failure. Twenty-two – that is the true number’. And with this, he died.

Twenty two. He was referring, of course, to the number of times he felt a reader should read a book before being able to say with confidence that they had really read it. Twenty-two. In 1954 Speyer published a pamphlet in which he suggested a book should be read ‘around four times, for maximum effect’. By 1962, this figure had risen to seven. In his 1976 work Riding on the Crest of Culture he pushed this up to fourteen. Eight years later, on his deathbed, he appeared to have settled on twenty-two – though it is impossible to say where he might have gone after this. Wolfgang Heizler  - his biographer - proposes that if Speyer was alive today the figure would be up around thirty-five or so. My own calculations suggest something in the region of forty three.

As it happens, twenty-two has turned out to be a prophetic choice, for disciples of Speyer have had to wait exactly twenty-two years since their hero’s death for the first biography of him to appear. Though Heizler began this particular work back in 1995, progress has been slow, due partly to the seemingly complex nature of his subject, but also to restrictions surrounding access to important sources, some of which were only released a couple of years ago. As to whether it has been worth the wait, I cannot say. Though this is very much an incomplete document of a life, it is difficult to ascertain whether or not a biography of Speyer could be anything but, considering the paucity of sources relating to his childhood, personal relationships and general private life. As a result, Surfing on Words is no more than a biography of Speyer as a critic; its primary source being those that any man can read at will: Speyer’s books. Fortunately, Heizler is by no means the very poorest interpreter of these specific labours.

It seems to me – and I am by no means alone in this - that  Johannes Speyer is remembered by the some members of the literary establishment almost as if he were a character in a popular comedy show. His ostensible catchphrases are no less popular than those of many such characters’; his personality scarcely more rounded. And unfair though such a summary may be, it is in many ways no more than the man deserved. Perceptive he may have been, driven he certainly was – but he was also repetitive: his views on certain things hardly changing over a period of thirty or forty years. Though he periodically updated his opinions concerning the amount of times a book ought to be read – as we have already seen -  the thinking behind this attitude remained remarkably consistent, however unique. And it is this, after all, for which Speyer is principally remembered: this obsessive, almost onanistic fixation with the art of re-reading that gripped him from his student days up unto his death. For him, the secret of literature lay always in the sublime act of reading. If a book could not be understood, it needed to be read again. If it still could not be understood, then it should be read once more. ‘Read, re-read and re-read again’, as he was maddeningly fond of saying.

It is for this reason that Speyer – great literary critic that he was – never really contributed much to the discussion of books. All that concerned him were theories as to how to go about discussing a book. He never found the time to get round to actually doing it. How could he? He never felt that he’d read a book enough times to be able to criticise it equitably. War and Peace is a good example. As Heizler explains, Speyer was commissioned to write a study on Tolstoy’s work back in 1970, but he died before starting it, having yet to feel that he had read the book enough times. Having studied under Speyer myself, I witnessed firsthand the frustrating, if not impossible nature of his philosophy – the only advantage of which was that it allowed many of his students to get away with never writing anything. Indeed, this was in fact something he encouraged us to do. Writing suggested that we thought we had read enough: getting on with our work was therefore in his eyes the lazy option (we were avoiding reading), whereas refusing to complete our theses showed that we had won over our weaknesses, though we had in reality achieved nothing except to read a book several times over.

In this sense, then, Speyer was a critic of critics or, as Heizler calls him at one point, an anti-critic, albeit one who communicated his thoughts via the medium of criticism. The fact is, he was immensely unhappy with the way that people went about the job, but being that he never quite discovered another way of doing it, he was inclined to follow the victims of his criticism along the well-trodden paths of acceptable failure (though it is questionable as to whether he ever actually accepted this acceptability). As Heizler is at pains to indicate, this rather awkward outlook did not endear Speyer to certain factions – in particular those unfortunate individuals who got themselves in the position to publish his books. In his 1974 work High Tide for High Art? Speyer admonished the modern trend for reading books just once, overtly inviting his readers to stop buying new books, which he considered nothing less than a crime. Unsurprisingly, his publishers weren’t especially keen to produce a book that asked readers to stop buying books and suggested he toned down certain passages. In a famous letter Speyer refused, adding ‘I suppose you would prefer it if my works expressed no opinions whatsoever’. Later, however, he managed to convince the publishers that his extreme views would prove to be a selling point of his work and that he very much doubted whether readers would take them seriously. He was right, of course (though hoping not to be).

This is one of many tensions in Speyer’s professional life with which Heizler deals relatively well. Elsewhere, however, he struggles like the habitual squirrel in a bird-trap to make sense of the man. One of the main problems he comes up against is how to deal with that which underlies Speyer’s theory of multiple re-reading: i.e. his rather hysterical belief in the unrestricted brilliance of the writer. Why is it that Speyer respected writers so much, and yet critics so little? Why was he content to spend much of life zealously and repeatedly pouring over the arrangement of words composed by people of much lesser intelligence than himself?

Heizler’s inability to deal with this conundrum can hardly be criticised. I struggle myself to squeeze a single juicy bead of sense out of it. In my opinion, Speyer’s relationship with some writers came close to being spiritual. His call to re-read novels reminds me often of evangelists’ appealing to their followers to re-scrutinise their biblical texts. Rarely, if ever, did Speyer seem to register the fact that novels were written by mere human beings. Every word he considered as if it were created and put in place by some divine power. He would never come close to considering the possibility that a comma was misplaced. All text in a work of fiction was for him sacred text, whereas all text in a work of non-fiction was for him inherently flawed.

The excessively reverent manner with which Speyer handled the purveyors of fiction will probably never be explained. This is probably for the best, as Heizler’s attempts to link it to some unknown childhood event are clearly misconceived. It comes as no surprise that a biographer of Speyer should be a frustrated creature, but it is saddening nevertheless to see how often Heizler slips into the foggy bogs of over-interpretation and how frequently he attempts to heave himself out of this precarious position via the sham rod of Freudian analysis. Of course, it is very tempting to delve into Speyer’s childhood to find answers, but the very action strikes one as akin to thrusting a hand behind a sofa and expecting to find a hundred pound note. At the very least you are likely to discover a penny, which is fair enough, but biography is not meant to be so inexact an art, so reliant on chance.

True to his nature, Heizler resorts to these tactics again when confronted with the other great mystery surrounding Speyer’s critical career – the small matter of the ‘surfing metaphors’. For a man who was born, brought up, educated and lived his whole life in Austria, Speyer’s constant recourse to ‘cool’ coastal imagery has long confused both his critics and those who knew him well. Heizler is confident enough in his research to state that ‘Speyer never went surfing, nor witnessed it firsthand’, but when it comes to explaining why it was then that Speyer consistently invoked the littoral sport in his critical works, he is much less sure of himself. Needless to say, his attempt to link the phenonomen to a swimming competition in which Speyer may have taken part (or seen) at the age of fourteen is weak at best. In fact, he is probably closest to the truth when he tentatively hints that it may have had something to do with ‘reaching out to a new audience’. Though it may seem naïve to modern readers to suppose that a man of such vast intelligence as Speyer might have consciously started to flavour his critical works with references to surfing merely in the hope of attracting youthful readers, I do not think it as unlikely as it sounds. Clever as he was, Speyer was never quite in touch with reality. No doubt he caught a line or two of an early Beach Boys number in the mid 60s and thought it would be a good idea to harness such imagery in his own work. Once he’d started doing so, he became addicted and, clumsy though the majority of these references are, they nonetheless remain one of the more endearing aspects of his work. Indeed, in one of his more illuminating passages, Heizler reminds the reader that Speyer was certainly not alone amongst the great and the good in having a weak-spot for a particular facet of ‘popular culture’. Einstein, as is well-known, had a thing for sherbet dabs.

Outside of his career, as I have already hinted, there is little of Speyer for the biographer to get his hands on. Trying to get to grips with what kind a person he really was is as easy as trying to catch a fish with your bare hands whilst balancing on a surf board on the surface of a storm shaken lake. Words such as ‘complex’ and ‘bizarre’ are often used. Personally, I think that he was a much simpler man than many presume him to be, but admit that he could be exceedingly difficult to deal with. Franz Ludo’s comment, made shortly after Speyer’s death, is as close as anyone has come to summing him up in a sentence: ‘very intelligent, very inept’. Heizler makes only one or two forays into Speyer’s private life and comes up with very little that I didn’t already know, but most of it proves Ludo right. For a man who seemed to be paranoid, Speyer’s failure to succeed with the opposite sex seems to have been due to a kind of misplaced arrogance. When asked by one friend why it was a certain relationship ended, he is said to have replied ‘She was okay, but she wasn’t me’. On other occasions he struggled with the very rudiments of life (he was often seen around town with his trousers on back to front).

In the last chapter of the biography, Heizler attempts to chart Speyer’s legacy. He very rightly puts his best critical works – 1963’s The Ebb and Flow of Ideas and 1976’s Riding on the Crest of Culture – amongst the greatest academic achievements of the last century, but he seems uncertain as to whether Speyer will last. Though he concedes that Speyer’s was a ‘unique voice’ he goes on to argue that there are few writers around today who are willing to take his ideas seriously. Goodness knows how this came to be so, but it is clear to me Heizler is unaware of much of the Speyer-influenced work to be been produced under the banner of this very journal, which only goes to show how narrow-minded Heizler is, and in what size of sea he is in the habit of casting his cultural net (to be sure, it isn’t nearly big enough). I would go so far as to say that I sometimes consider Underneath the Bunker to be a living monument to the life and work of Johannes Speyer, a fact which really ought to have been registered by this biography, which contains a little less life, though just enough – at least – to make it readable. Regarding the title, though it adequately represents the style of the biographer's prose, if not the reaction a reader is most likely to have to it, it remains a remarkably unjust way to illustrate the subject's project – though both ‘surfing’ and ‘words’ were central to Speyer's philosophy, the concoction of the two suggests something entirely alien. If Speyer did anything to words, it was to burrow into them, not to surf over the top of them.