For a few years now, the Swiss writer Paul Nizon has been experiencing something of a rediscovery. He, who defiantly let his literature revolve around his own life defiantly and at times harsh criticism against everyone, is gaining increasing recognition precisely because of this autobiographical mania. This also has to do with the fact that auto-fiction, i.e. writing oscillating between biographical reality and the associated, has become popular since the books by Karl Ove Knausgård and Annie Ernaux.
Paul Nizon, who has lived in Paris for almost fifty years, has dedicated himself to a kind of literature of self-assurance that is above all committed to one’s own immortality. That is why his thoughts revolve around his initialization as a writer again and again – a “baptism of fire” preceded it, the expectations were “bloody, serious, arrogant, empathic”, risks accompanied them, and the truth is always at stake about the whole. The evocation of one’s own writing mythologies are the refrain of this collection of texts, which goes as far as the grotesque reshaping of one’s own writing existence: “Certainly I can no longer be imagined in German-language literature.” Nizon’s egocentricity goes so far that he anticipates the judgment of posterity.
Since the beginning, since the prose fantasy “Canto” appeared in 1963, Nizon’s books have been published by Suhrkamp-Verlag, there is already a work edition, and his diaries, which Nizon calls “journals”, appear in good succession, each with poetically catchy titles come up with: “Forgery of documents” (2012), “Die Siege der Welt” (2013) and this year “The nail in the head”. A movie of the same name portrayed the 90-year-old last year, Nizon was happy about the new interest in his person and his work.
Taking stock, Nizon turns to its own past
This happiness runs as a rather pale red thread through the new records from the years 2011 to 2020, because it is clouded by the oppression of old age, the pain of separating from his wife Odile and saying goodbye to companions. The “inner homelessness”, from which Nizon was both socially depressed and poetically fueled from the start, is now being influenced by age-gray threads.
The author feels even more cut off from the outside world, the “knowledge democracy via the Internet and mobile phone” increases the feeling of belonging to a generation that lacks the tools to take part in communicative events. As a result, Nizon turns to his own past in accounting for these new notes.
The childhood in Bern, where Nizon grew up in a privileged upper class, with widespread relatives and a father who, with his religious conversion to the Pentecostal movement, his scientific rationality and the admiration of Robert Walser, remained an elusive figure for Nizon and for the reader. Time and again, Nizon returns to Switzerland, as a celebrated author, as one of those who fled from tight quarters, as a rather unhappy guest, who, however, knows his most loyal readership base in his home country.
Nizon has long since stylized himself as a lonely person, a grotesquely misunderstood, economic failure has become something like his tricky image, even if he writes at one point that he is “at over eighty still something like an insider tip or a secret cult author” become. Nizon has always been a writer for writers. His subject is writing, his longing for fame, and even in the often dark, sometimes at the edge of the erotic kitsch, women’s stories are about the tragic seduction of genius.
“Artists are vicarious people” – for Paul Nizon, the dictum is, so to speak, the legitimation for witnessing the times. There are really great prose etudes to be read in these diaries, the repeated attempts at short résumés, with which he peeled off his childhood, the greedy youth, the years of his permanent position as an art editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitungwhich at that time was still fresh and elegant and liberal.
Nizon experiences the present as overwhelming, because it gives him too little stimulus, language and art seem hypermedial and arbitrary to him. But in between, the homages to revered artists shine through, all of whom are mirror images. When the rock singer Johnny Hallyday, who was grotesquely adored by the Parisians, who were actually so much adored, died at the end of 2017, hundreds of thousands ran to the Champs Ėlysées to express their grief. “It’s about the level of worship, the intensity, love and death,” writes Nizon. You don’t have to do a lot of analogy acrobatics to understand that this is also about yourself.
The Parisian by choice only notes the attacks of 2015 in passing
Paris triumphs in this diary as a kind of powerhouse for the literary and erotic activity of the poet. Nizon came here for the first time in 1947 to visit his aunt, whose apartment in Montmartre he inherited in 1973 and made it the starting point of his Parisian life. Nizon wrote that he had enrolled in the city, “wanted to belong to it well-known”.
“The nail in the head” naturally also contains recordings from the terrible year in Paris in 2015, with two Islamist attacks, the murder of the satirists of Charlie Hebdo and the massacre in Bataclan and the surrounding bars and pubs in November. Both events are only mentioned in passing in Nizon’s notes. One would have liked to have known a little more precisely how deeply these catastrophes have engraved themselves on him.
Even in the afterword by the editor Wend Kässens there are no explanations for this frugality. Almost touching and almost woody-like comedy, on the other hand, is Nizon’s concern about where he should find his final resting place. His ex-wife Odile will retire to the family vault, whereas he, the great homeless, would like to have a safe place to stay, at least when his fame begins.
Nizon also had a nice idea in view of the corona epidemic, which makes traveling even more difficult for him (“A slightly queasy feeling about the long train journey with the mask”): “We’ll soon be living pegged,” writes Paul Nizon under the impression of the quarantine rules which were particularly strict and tough in Paris at the beginning. In the end, there is still a vague desire to proofread your existing texts when the strength is not enough to continue writing. Anyone who loves Paul Nizon’s dramatic inner worlds will make beautiful discoveries in these texts.
Paul Nizon: The nail in the head. Journal 2011-2020. Edited and with an afterword by Wend Kässens, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 264 pages, 26 euros.