MONTAUK MAX FRISCH Translated by Geoffrey Skelton Introduction by Jonathan Dee

MONTAUK MAX FRISCH Translated by Geoffrey Skelton Introduction by Jonathan Dee ∏IN HOUSE BOOKS / Portland, Oregon & Brooklyn, New York Copyright © 1975 by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main English translation copyright © 1976 by Max Frisch and Geoffrey Skelton Introduction © 2016 by Jonathan Dee All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210. Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frisch, Max, 1911-1991. [Montauk. English] Montauk / by Max Frisch ; translated by Geoffrey Skelton ; with an introduction by Jonathan Dee. pages cm ISBN 978-1-941040-24-9 (alk. paper) 1. Frisch, Max, 1911-1991. 2. Authors, Swiss—Biography. I. Skelton, Geoffrey, translator. II. Dee, Jonathan. III. Title. PT2611.R814Z513 2016 838’.91209—dc23 [B] 2015033844 The epigraph is from The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journals, Letters, translated by Donald M. Frame, published by Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, copyright 1943 by Donald M. Frame, renewed 1971, copyright © 1948, 1957, and 1958 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Printed in the USA Interior design by Jakob Vala www.tinhouse.com INTRODUCTION In the spring of 1974, the polymorphously great Swiss writer Max Frisch—best known in this coun- try for novels such as I’m Not Stiller, Man in the Holocene, and Homo Faber—flew to New York to embark upon one of those humiliating treks through the border region of celebrity known as the book tour. This one, though, took an unexpected turn: in the of- fices of his American publisher, Frisch, who was then in his early sixties, met and quickly began an affair with a woman more than thirty years his junior who worked in the publicity department. The centerpiece of this fling was a secret weekend trip to an inn on the eastern tip of Long Island; not long afterward, when his tour came to an end, Frisch flew home to V MAX FRISCH Switzerland and the young publicist returned equa- bly to her tiny Manhattan apartment and low-paying job. They spoke by phone only once after that. The impulse to write a book about such a liai- son seems suspect at first. Opportunities for mas- culine self-aggrandizement abound, of course, but even grimmer is the prospect of false shame, the egocentric, performed humility that dogs so many book-length personal histories, by the famous and un-famous alike. Let’s face it, a self-deprecating memoir is close to an oxymoron. And it’s true that Montauk, notwithstanding its Brief Encounter-like setup, has only one full-fledged character in it. About “Lynn,” the young publicist in question, we learn very little—an act of gallantry and discretion, to be sure (especially since his memoir was published scarcely a year after their affair), but also an underscoring of Frisch’s own solipsism, particularly as it pertains to women. One of the book’s most discomfitingly funny moments comes when Frisch recalls his mother—his own mother!—telling him “with a certain asperity” that he really shouldn’t write so much about women, because he doesn’t understand them. But Montauk finds an unanticipated path. Frisch’s dirty weekend passes smoothly, almost without VI MONTAUK incident; and as it dawns on him, over the course of the trip, just how well the truncated, ersatz intimacy of this no-stakes love affair suits his emotional capac- ities, his middle-aged satisfaction gives way to a kind of horror—and Montauk becomes a prism through which the author reviews, freshly and pitilessly, a life- time of mostly catastrophic long-term relationships with women. Two failed marriages, a third, oper- atically ugly domestic partnership with the Swedish poet Ingeborg Bachmann (“We did not show up well at the end,” Frisch says, “either of us”), a bitter adult daughter to whom he rarely speaks: these and others are revisited in flashbacks that often take the form of single, multi-page paragraphs, turning the memories themselves into something unrelenting, from which there is only one outlet. All this personal history lies beneath Frisch’s May-December idyll like an iceberg whose true dimensions and dangers his young lover will never have to see. He isn’t even fully present with Lynn during their one secret weekend together; he is al- ready standing apart from it, having conceived the intention to write about it even as it’s still going on. The borderline between experience and material grows hazy. “The writer is afraid of feelings that are VII MAX FRISCH not suited to publication,” he admits; “he takes ref- uge then in irony; all he perceives is considered from the point of view of whether it is worth describ- ing, and he dislikes experiences that can never be expressed in words.” Little wonder that Montauk’s narration toggles restlessly, as if uncomfortably, between first- and third-person, sometimes within the same sentence. Frisch’s tryst with Lynn is founded on a pseudo- affinity that’s at least as fortunate as it is sad, in the context of a life and a personality best suited for such encounters, for getting in and getting out before any real, lasting damage can be done. The better their affair goes, the more heartbreaking and damning it comes to seem. Even as the weekend ends content- edly in a Sunday evening traffic jam on the Long Is- land Expressway, Frisch cannot make himself forget that this ignorance, this amicable shallowness, is the key to their utterly genuine affection for each other: Presumably she too had been somewhat ner- vous that the weekend might go wrong. Now it is no longer necessary to gloss over the ner- vousness . They know too little and at the same time too much about each just to chat VIII MONTAUK superficially. He does not even know yet in what area Lynn is vulnerable and what would lead to their first quarrel. Lynn does not seem in fact to be thinking about it at all. Once in a while does no harm. You need a marriage, a long one, to become a monster. Montauk is written in the format of Frisch’s later novels, with short scenes and lots of open white space, making not only for an atmosphere of punc- tuated silence but for a particular license in terms of abrupt transition: from present to past, from Cen- tral Park to the White Horse Tavern, from Lynn’s shoes lying in the sand to a self-quotation from Homo Faber. Unusually, the book’s dialogue is almost all capitalized—as if even the simplest or most intimate remarks are too loud, a kind of shout, a violation. Frisch died in 1991, at the age of seventy-nine. Today Montauk fits seamlessly into a style of writing most commonly referred to as “autofiction” (as prac- ticed by Karl Ove Knaussgård, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti et al.), but at the time of its publication there were very few books like it. As with Frank Con- roy’s Stop-Time, as with Edmund Gosse’s Father IX MAX FRISCH and Son, the fact that Montauk still comes across (at least from a formal perspective) as so contempo- rary shouldn’t blind us to its significant place in the long history of experimentation with fiction’s formal techniques in the search for autobiographical truth. That Frisch himself knew this history is evi- dent even in his book’s brilliant epigraph, which re- minds us—as does Montauk itself, now—that much of what we think of as new in literature, as a product of its cultural moment or a sign of its development or decline, long predates us. —JONATHAN DEE X TRANSLATOR’S NOTE The few slight divergences from the original text in this translation have been made either at the author’s instigation or with his consent. THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN IN GOOD FAITH, READER. IT WARNS YOU FROM THE OUTSET THAT IN IT I HAVE SET MYSELF NO GOAL BUT A DOMESTIC AND PRIVATE ONE . I HAVE DEDICATED IT TO THE PRIVATE CON- VENIENCE OF MY RELATIVES AND FRIENDS, SO THAT WHEN THEY HAVE LOST ME (AS SOON THEY MUST), THEY MAY RECOVER HERE SOME FEATURES OF MY HABITS AND TEMPERAMENT . FOR IT IS MYSELF THAT I PORTRAY. MY DEFECTS WILL HERE BE READ TO THE LIFE, AND ALSO MY NATURAL FORM, AS FAR AS RESPECT FOR THE PUBLIC HAS ALLOWED . THUS, READER, I AM MYSELF THE MATTER OF MY BOOK; YOU WOULD BE UNREASONABLE TO SPEND YOUR LEISURE ON SO FRIVOLOUS AND VAIN A SUBJECT. / SO FAREWELL. MONTAIGNE, THIS FIRST DAY OF MARCH, FIFTEEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY. MONTAUK A sign promising a view across the island: OVERLOOK. It was he who suggested stopping here. A parking lot for at least a hundred cars, at the moment empty; their car is the only one standing in the grids painted on the asphalt. It is morning. Sunny. Shrubs and bushes around the empty parking lot; so no view here, but there is a path leading off through the shrubs which, they decide, will take them to the viewing point. Then she goes back to the car, and he waits. They have plenty of time: a whole weekend. He stands there not really knowing what he is thinking at the moment .

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