Fleur Jaeggy: the mystery of writing dissolved in the complicity of the heart

Fleur Jaeggy’s most famous novel, “The Blessed Years of Punishment”, published in 1989, is a short but dense narrative that continues to challenge its readers (“The more I read these hundred pages by Fleur Jaeggy – a ‘little story’, as the author puts it – the less I can make head or tail of it,” wrote an astonished Cesare Garboli). It revolves around a pair of protagonists: the nameless boarding-school pupil, the narrator of the story, and Frédérique, an enigmatic new pupil (“Her aquiline nose; her teeth, when she laughed—and she laughed rarely—were sharp. A beautiful, high forehead, where one could almost touch her thoughts, where past generations had bequeathed to her talent, intelligence and charm. She spoke to no one. Her features were those of an idol, aloof”) who bursts into the boarding school and turns the protagonist’s life upside down, as the latter is determined to win her over and enter her innermost circle.

This novel is thus characterised by a dual structure, but such pairs frequently feature in Jaeggy’s works, as in "Proleterka", featuring a young woman and the man she believes to be her father during a cruise; in "Le statue d’acqua", where Katrin and Beeklam proceed in a shared detachment from reality; or in the harrowing tale "I fratelli", where the two characters are engulfed in the coils of violence. Given the autobiographical inspiration behind her works—more or less veiled in a constant game of concealment—the persistent choice of this narrative structure invites us to interpret the possible personal implications and to trace in these couples a projection of Fleur Jaeggy and the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, a friend (“we’d met in a bar. She was sitting on a stool. She seemed protected by a shield that made her untouchable. We spoke. By chance. Until we became friends. True friends. Perhaps it is the only friendship I regret’), but also a key figure in her writing (“She left her mark on my life. She proofread the drafts of my first book with generosity and love. She was the one who encouraged me to keep writing”).

Adelphi, which has all of Fleur Jaeggy’s works in its catalogue, has recently published "Gli ultimi giorni di Ingeborg" (a volume that launched the new aesthetic of the ‘I microgrammi’ series), three prose pieces by the writer centred on this relationship which, spanning different periods of their time together, vividly capture the nature of a bond that helped shape Jaeggy’s writing. In these short texts, she seems to unite—with the magic characteristic of great literature—life and work, biographical events and the way in which these are immortalised on the page. Indeed, one finds the origin of that detachment which shapes Jaeggy’s perspective (“I try to make everything more distant; even the way I write the words must be frozen; I try to strip the sentences bare. ‘It’s a way of keeping things at a distance,’ she once said”), the ironic perspective through which she attempts to come to terms with reality (“Once, when I was eight, my grandmother asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up? And I replied, ‘I want to die’”, as recounted in the story “I Am the Brother of XX”), but also his relationships with contemporary Italian and foreign writers (from Italo Calvino to Uwe Johnson, for example, whom he met whilst on holiday in Forte dei Marmi).

In the cover photograph, taken in Vienna in 1970 by Roberto Calasso – director of Adelphi until his death and husband of Fleur Jaeggy – Bachmann’s gaze stands out as she looks, with a faint smile and lively eyes, at Jaeggy; a snapshot which, in its stillness, fully captures their bond. In her first work of prose, "La casa dell’acqua salata", Jaeggy recounts the 1971 holiday: setting off from Rome in an Alfa Romeo 2600, staying in a house in Forte dei Marmi with two Jehovah’s Witness housekeepers who seem to have stepped out of one of Jaeggy’s stories, and with days marked by a strict yet pleasant routine (“The same thing every day. A little time at the seaside. A bit in the sun. Ingeborg was a brilliant swimmer. Anyone who fancied it had breakfast: a stick of celery and something else. In the afternoon, everyone went to their own room and met up for tea. In the evening, we had dinner at home. And then late-night chats”) – interrupted by encounters that were not always thrilling, such as Calvino’s awkward visit (“He didn’t speak. He just stood there. We’d agreed: if he doesn’t speak, neither will we. It didn’t take much for Ingeborg to fall silent. After perhaps a quarter of an hour, Calvino said: ‘Er… ahem’”). Whilst the second story focuses on a visit to Vienna and the place, Klagenfurt, where Bachmann is buried, the final, poignant piece of prose that gives the volume its title reconstructs the last days of the Austrian writer’s life, spent in a sterile ward at Sant’Eugenio Hospital in Rome (“She makes a gesture as if to blow me a kiss. I shall never forget the look in her eyes. A gaze full of tenderness, heart-rending”) following extremely severe burns which, it seems, were caused by a cigarette left burning in her home. In her search for information and in her questions to the doctors, Jaeggy seems, for a moment, to let her guard down and reveal her true self in the most transparent way, as if the account of her friend’s death required words as clear as those of the Desert Fathers, whose austere wisdom illuminates the final two pages of this story, the absolute pinnacle of Jaeggy’s work and, probably, the origin of everything that followed: a style of writing that sought, through its forms and silences, to recount the unfathomable, to draw closer to the tranquillity with which death is honoured.

“I loved her, and perhaps it’s true, ‘Wir haben es schön gehabt’,” writes Jaeggy as he brings the story to a close. “We had a lot of fun” is what these words mean in German and, perhaps, that is the whole of Jaeggy’s mystery.