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Montauk

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"Montauk" is Max Frisch' final novel in which the mature writer - he was 64 at the time - gives an account of two weekend trips with a relatively young woman he has only just met. This is not a story of romance. These are two people who happen to like and trust each other enough to spend a few days together, without the burden of expectations with respect to a longer term commitment.

Two uneventful trips to Long Island form the backbone of the narrative. And Frisch sets himself the task to use this modest subject matter as `truthfully' as possible: no embellishments, no cutting-and-pasting, no twisting of facts and characters for the sake of artistic or ideological ends. Frisch' ambition in this novel is to come as close to `writerly truth' as he can. At the same time, the novel offers him a canvas to reflect on what has been left unsaid or what has been said untruthfully in his earlier literary work. So, the novel can be read at different levels: as a modest travelogue, as an epistemological experiment in search of `truth', and as a confession of past `sins'.

Frisch' infatuation with recording factual and emotional truth is interesting but one could wonder whether, from a reader perspective, it ultimately isn't a superfluous element. It is perhaps nice to know that he factually saw Lynn and Long Island during these days as recorded in the novel but that in itself does not necessarily make "Montauk" a more rewarding reading experience. What makes "Montauk" such a compelling read is the truth that has been there all along in Max Frisch' work: it is his unadorned view on a fractured, dislocated human condition and it is the truth that pervades his direct, precise yet warm prose.

Frisch' protagonists are smart people. But their smartness can't avoid them losing their bearings in the truthlessness, pain and spiritual poverty of late 20th century, western society. They are heroic people too. Invariably they face up to their failures and they perish with full conscience of their shortcomings and the wounds inflicted on others. It is this willingness to ultimately see truth in the eye which makes a Frisch novel often such a moving journey.

However, more than anything else it is the truth of Max Frisch' language that keeps drawing me to his work. I have alluded to the `precision', `directness' and `warmth' of his prose. It is really very difficult to put the finger on the very particular texture of his writing. Every sentence has weight. Individual words are clearly etched against a luminous background and yet together they form a balanced whole. There is also a most peculiar tension between a certain timelessness - derived from an apparent simplicity and honesty in the choice of words and structure of sentences - and graphic references to very specific circumstances of time and place. Frisch has been an inveterate traveler and this cosmopolitanism has always pervaded his books. Remarkably, also in our age of widespread and unrestrained traveling, I remain mesmerised by the exoticism of his locales (whether it's his beloved Ticino, Greece, Cuba or US). When Frisch reminisces about a trip to the Greek island of Mykonos, there is still the `frisson' of the unknown, as if we are undertaking the long-anticipated trip ourselves for the very first time. Similarly, when, from an airplane window, he watches the sunlight vanish from the summit of the Finsteraarhorn (in the Bernese Alps), it is as if we are witnessing this mundane and yet timeless spectacle ourselves.

I would ultimately characterise Frisch' prose as "earthy" and that is at the same time a phenomenological, esthetic, moral and epistemological quality. It is phenomenological because it tells us how the earth is perceived by our senses. It is esthetic because it tells us how the earth bestows her grace on human affairs. It is moral because it tells us what the earth commands. It is epistemological because it tells us how the earth separates truth from untruth.

In that deeper sense, all of Frisch' work is truthful. And that is why I really don't care whether everything happened as described on those days, sometime in 1974. He might as well have made up every bit of "Montauk": I would love it nonetheless.

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN IN GOOD FAITH, READER
and what does it keep concealed? And why?

The above, capitals and all, is one of the shorter stand-alone paragraphs in Max Frisch's 143-page book MONTAUK, published in 1975. Although perhaps best known as a playwright, Frisch wrote several novels such as I'M NOT STILLER and HOMO FABER; he also published four volumes of journals. Which is this? The ostensible story is a weekend drive from New York City to Montauk Point at the Eastern tip of Long Island in the company of a young woman called Lynn, thirty years his junior. Frisch sets himself the task of total objectivity: "I should like to be able to describe this weekend, this thin present moment, exactly as it is, without inventing anything." And so he does, in sections scattered throughout the book: a walk through scrubland from a roadside parking lot, a stop in well-groomed Amagansett, arrival at the hotel, sitting side by side on the beach, a game of ping-pong, breakfast looking out on the pouring rain, missed directions on the journey back, buying provisions for supper at a supermarket. It is a small masterpiece of deceptive honesty.

Deceptive because Frisch uses the story of himself and Lynn merely as the portal to an entire edifice of memories and reflections, built of truth, no doubt, but as carefully constructed as a work of fiction. Perhaps there are changes -- the real Lynn, for example, was a young woman named Alice Locke-Carey -- but I have little doubt that they are insignificant. The fiction is not in the times they share together, but what they do not necessarily share: the things he keeps to himself yet shares with his readers. All true also: "There was little need for lies when silence would do." Gradually we piece together his life as a student looking up to a rather more sophisticated mentor, his financial difficulties, his brief career as an architect, his marriages (he has a wife waiting for him back in Berlin), his long affair with the writer Ingeborg Bachmann, his fear of death. But not so obviously; the ideas emerge gradually, out of sequence, sometimes with deliberate confusion. The pronoun "she" may refer to one woman at the beginning of a sentence and quite a different one at the end of it. He switches between "he" and "I" in the same paragraph, simultaneously being the actor in his objective description and the author commenting. Most paradoxically, there is fiction even in his use of truth. "I have been serving up stories to some sort of public," he writes, "and in these stories I have, I know, laid myself bare -- to the point of non-recognition. I live, not with my own story, but with those parts of it that I have been able to put to literary use."

Unfortunately, Geoffrey Skelton's fine translation of this extraordinary little book is no longer in print, and even used copies sell at the rate of about four pages per dollar! The GERMAN ORIGINAL is available through Amazon, however; I have a copy by me, though do not read easily enough to make that my primary source. One interesting thing that could not be reproduced in the translation, however, is that most of the capitalized paragraph headings which break up the text are in English in the German edition also, their linguistic gear-changes and shifts of direction lending a springing rhythm that lightens the whole. It is a fascinating work, making a link between the French nouveau roman and the "fictional autobiography" as practiced, say, by J. M. Coetzee, most recently in SUMMERTIME. But it is also an absorbing account of an interesting though not especially admirable man, artist, and lover, off his home territory, shown warts and all, and well worth reading for its own sake.