“I read of the world of the Russians and the French, of the English and Americans and Scandinavians, and nothing stopped me feeling at home there. I was akin to Gauguin in Tahiti, to Van Gogh in Arles, to Myshkin in St. Petersburg, to Lieutenant Glahn in the Norwegian forests and to Fabrizio in the Charterhouse of Parma.”
Exile is a training ground for a dedicated reader: rootless, inwardly alone, and never without the solitary good company of a book. In Leavetaking and Vanishing Point, Peter Weiss offers an eloquent expression of the twentieth century as the age of alienation. “For me there were no lost home and no thoughts of return, for I had never belonged anywhere.”
Cosmic and social unity is gradually displaced by commodification and selfish individuality, transformations accelerated during the industrial revolution. The wars of the twentieth century and their continuing aftermath, perpetual crisis, wars, persecution, have made rootlessness a common experience. Even those fortunate enough to lead relatively settled lives are, to borrow Camus’s term, irremediable exiles.
Weiss’s two autobiographies are remarkable for their evocation of the emotional and intellectual dimensions of not belonging: the simultaneous yearning for security and fear of the loss of freedom. Like many solitary wanderers, Weiss turns to literature both as reader and writer. In these spiritual autobiographies, he recollects his tentative beginnings as an artist and reflects on the literature and experiences that formed the substratum of his life. Without a home, all literature is foreign, yet it is precisely in the strange and unfamiliar that life most vividly asserts itself.