THE VIRTUOSO and THE TRUTH LIES ELSEWHERE: An Encounter with the Past through a Reading of W.G. Sebald's AUSTERLITZ A creative project (novel) and exegesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Sonia Orchard BA BAppSc (Hons) School of Creative Media Portfolio of Design and Social Context RMIT University January 2007 Declaration I certify that: • except where due acknowledgement is made, all work submitted is my own; • the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; • the content of this doctorate is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; • any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged. Signed Sonia Orchard, January 2007 11 Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without the support and assistance of many people and organisations. This research has been partially funded through a Commonwealth Government Australian Postgraduate Award. In June-July 2003, I spent 8 weeks in London researching for the novel. I am extremely grateful to all those who agreed to be interviewed about Noel Mewton-Wood: Dr John Amis, John Dalby, Dr Patrick Trevor-Roper, Lady Pauline Del Mar, Margaret Kitchin, Tim Gordon, Bryce Morrison and Denys Gurvault. In addition, John Amis gave me access to his collection ofMewton-Wood concert programmes and was of enormous assistance during my stay in London. I would also like to acknowledge the following British organisations and institutions, and their very helpful staff: the British Library (including the British Sound Archives), the British National Archives, the BBC Written Archives, the Britten-Pears Library, the Lambeth Archives, the National Gallery (Archives dept), the British Music Information Centre, the English National Opera, Wigmore Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music. And an enormous thankyou to the gorgeous Kim Maddever who made my London stay so enjoyable. In Australia, thankyou to Susan Hamilton, great-grandniece of Dulcie Mewton­ Wood, for her time, enthusiasm, anecdotes, and access to the surviving personal effects of Dulcie and Noel Mewton-Wood; and to Margaret Bourke, for allowing me to interview her about Noel Mewton-Wood and London life during the war. I am also grateful to the staff at the University of Melbourne Music Library, the State Library of 111 Victoria, Carey Baptist Grammar School (Archives dept) and the National Archives of Australia. While researching for the novel manuscript I read and perused too many helpful books and websites to mention, but I would like to particularly acknowledge the following: Amis, John. Amiscellany: My Life, My Music. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Dowley, Tim. Schumann. 1982. The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers. London and New York: Omnibus Press, 1984. Gallup, Stephen. A History of the Salzburg Festival. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987. Marek, George R. Beethoven: Biography of a Genius. London, Kimber, 1970. McKenna, Wayne. W.]. Turner: Poet and Music Critic. Kensington, N.S.W. :New South Wales University Press, 1990. Schonberg, Harold C. The Great Pianists. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963. Tchaikovsky, Modeste. The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. 1906. Trans. Rosa Newmarch. New York: Vienna House, 1973. I would like to thank Andrew Morgan, Shannon Hayes, Julie Ann Morrison, Cassandra Austin and James Livingston for reading the novel manuscript and providing such helpful feedback; Jeff Sparrow and Kalinda Ashton, respectively, for their meticulous proof reading of the exegesis and novel manuscript; and the entire RMIT postgraduate creative writing workshop group for their insight, support and company on the novel­ writing road. A big thanks to my dedicated supervisor Dr Fiona Capp for her generous assistance with the novel manuscript and exegesis, and a special thanks to Antoni Jach, lV my second supervisor, mentor and friend, who encouraged me to embark on a PhD and has shown great enthusiasm for the novel manuscript from its beginning. Lastly, a huge thankyou to my mother and to the truly wonderful and supportive James Livingston. v Preface In 2003 I spent two months in London to research the life of Noel Mewton-Wood- a Melbourne-born concert pianist who lived in London from 1939 until his suicide in 19 53 - for the purpose of writing a fictional autobiography on his life. As well as visiting many of the concert halls and other sites that Mewton-Wood would have frequented, I also conducted a series of interviews with Mewton-Wood's friends, peers and lovers. I was determined to try and establish a sense of who Mewton-Wood really was, and why he had taken his life, and maintain as much historical veracity as possible, limiting the fictional aspects of the novel to the dramatisation of 'real' events. However, it wasn't long after my arrival that I realised the difficulty of achieving my objectives. The more acquaintances I spoke with, the more versions ofMewton-Wood's character arose; the more I questioned why he'd taken his life, the more shrugs, head shakes and varying hypotheses I received. Even though I felt I could almost feel the presence of this larger­ than-life personality in the homes, bars and concert halls I visited, the more I tried to conclude anything about him, the more unknowable he became. The experience reminded me of the response I received from several people to my first book, Something More Wondeiful (Sydney: Hodder Headline, 2003), a memoir about a year in my life when I helped care for a friend, Emma, who was terminally ill with cancer. These friends knew a different Emma to the one depicted in my memoir and their version of events deviated from mine. Even though my book was only ever intended to be a memoir- my story - their contrasting stories made me increasingly aware of the complexities involved in creating a record about a person and series of Vl events, where conflicting eye-witness versions exist, none more or less 'true' than any other. I decided I needed to find a method of recording and honouring the events in Mewton-Wood's life but, at the same time, not claim historical objectivity. I became uncomfortable even with the level of historical veracity suggested through the dramatisation of real events based on research. I realised that what I wanted to write was neither 'fact' nor 'fiction' according to traditional definitions that places each mode in a relationship with 'the truth'. The approach I finally adopted occurred to me following an afternoon interview with one of Mewton-Wood's ex-lovers and friends. I had been talking with the friend for several hours about Mewton-Wood, asking for facts, anecdotes and figures of speech Mewton-Wood might have used- all the things that a novelist forages for when creating character- when we started discussing Mewton-Wood's death, an event which had occurred SO years earlier. After having chatted excitedly only minutes earlier, the friend fell silent for sometime and looked away, then said, more to himself than me - 'I just wish Noel had called me that week [before he committed suicide] ... I really feel I could have helped him ... '. After a further silence, the friend left for the kitchen to pour some drinks. Of the many hours of interviews I recorded, that interviewee's silence and interrupted testimony seemed to me the most poignant, and came to represent what it was I wanted to encapsulate in my writing on Mewton-Wood. Not only did I want to depict a personality that couldn't be summarised in an historical document, I also wanted to convey the effect his life, his music and his death had on those around him, and in doing so, infer the challenges faced in creating an account of his life, or any life, whose essence is -like music - unfathomable. Vll W.G. Sebald is one of many post-modern authors who has emphasised the importance of eye-witness accounts in history, and the subsequent difficulty of producing an historical record that purports to record the truth of an event. But Sebald is equally harsh in his criticism of the way events have slipped through the cracks in the historical record (as a result of censorship, repression and silence), as he is of the formulation of 'objective truth' in history. For Sebald the answer lies in recording eye witness testimonies of the past, while constantly drawing attention to the lens of human error, desire or comprehension through which they're viewed, so that a person's flawed process of remembering and recording- often as a result of the effect of events upon the witness - become an integral part of the historical record. After completing my London interviews, and considering the ways in which Sebald, in Austerlit~ uses fictional first-person narrative to comment upon the problems inherent in attempting to capture 'historical truth', I started rewriting my manuscript on Mewton-Wood, telling the story- or rather, a story- ofMewton-Wood from the point­ of-view of an eye witness: a romantically obsessed ex-lover. As in Sebald's Austerlit~ my narrator takes on the role of historian, providing an extensive and elaborate account of Mewton-Wood's life. However, my intention is that a reader will become aware throughout the manuscript that they are learning less about the 'truth' ofMewton-Wood than the difficulty the narrator has in understanding the 'truth' of Mewton-Wood's life (due to being blinded by obsession), a situation that draws attention to the difficulty in locating any 'truths' about any person or event behind the eye witness's or historian's layers of prejudice, miscomprehension or error.