Die Zehnte Muse (The Tenth Muse), published by Steidl in 2020, is a genre-bending novel set in the Black Forest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The story focuses on two main characters, Algernon Blackwood and Paul Severin. Blackwood is modelled on the twentieth-century supernatural author of the same name, well known for his short stories “The Willows” (1907) and “The Wendigo” (1910), while Severin is modelled on the German expressionist painter Karl Hofer. The novel centres on the mystery of Talitha, a timeless figure both men develop fixations on, twenty years apart, after glimpsing her in the forest.
Pechmann deftly weaves together strands of philosophy and layers of storytelling in under two hundred pages. On some levels, the book feels like a classic gothic ghost story. There are all the major elements: a forest; restless, disillusioned young men; a creepy, strict religious boarding school; a supernatural presence. But the book also covers the nature of time, dreams, spiritualism, and the occult, the psychological, Gnosticism, art history, translation, and Yenish culture. The Yenish are a nomadic people from central Europe, whose distinct culture emerged in the early nineteenth century, although the Yenish language predates this. Here, Pechmann discusses the many-layered novel and the enduring mystery of Talitha.
Anna Rumsby (AR): How would you classify this genre? I’m tempted to say neogothic, but it’s also a fairy tale, historical fiction, a semi-biography, and in some places almost a philosophical essay.
Alexander Pechmann (AP): In some reviews, the book was called a “Künstlerroman” (art novel) or a psychological ghost story. That’s OK, but I like to call it—as well as my other novels—a “spiritual adventure” or “adventure of the soul,” in contrast to “adventures of the mind,” such as detective stories or science fiction, or “adventures of the heart,” such as stories about love and relationships.
Adventures of the soul are rooted in dreams and make use of ancient traditions, fairy tales, superstitions, and religious ideas. Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen wrote this kind of fiction, and Blackwood also had a certain love for symbolistic paintings. Symbolism had a strong influence on me while I was working on the novel, but I feel also close to the Romantics with their deep love for nature, and classic Austrian writers like Leo Perutz who mixed historical facts with fantasy.
AR: How did your experience as a translator and linguist inform this novel? There’s a huge attention to language—I’m thinking specifically of the Bible translation chapter regarding Talitha, but there’s a great blend of English, German, French, and Yenish throughout.
AP: I have a special interest in writers who move freely between cultures and languages. I’m thinking of Lafcadio Hearn, who was born in Greece, grew up in England, went to the USA, and ended up in Japan, or Marmaduke Pickthall, who went to Syria as a young man and would be the first English translator of the Holy Quran. Algernon Blackwood spoke German and French fluently and was also a traveller between cultures. The attention to language in Die Zehnte Muse grew naturally out of the fact that the school of the Moravian Brothers in Königsfeld was and still is visited by students from all over the world. Also, the Black Forest, the background of the novel and place where I live, has always been a melting pot of different languages, dialects, and cultures. While working on the novel, I learned more about Yenish and was astonished that this language uses both Hebrew and Yiddish words. This fit in perfectly with my idea that Talitha was accepted by the Yenish, even though she obviously came from some other ancient culture.
AR: Who or what is Talitha?
AP: In my first draft, she was just a wild child, living in the forest. I knew she was somehow related to the Yenish, so I was searching for typical Yenish names. I liked Talisha or Talitha best, and then I read the story of a priest’s daughter named Talitha who was raised from the dead by Jesus. This opened up new possibilities for my story. Could someone who was resurrected by Jesus grow old and die like a normal person? What if this girl was damned to live on and on? I do not answer this question in the novel and leave it up to the reader to decide whether she was just a lost Yenish girl, the ghost of a murdered girl, or the resurrected biblical Talitha. She might also just be a fantasy of Paul Severin, she might have stepped right out of Maurice Denis’s painting, or she could be even an incarnation of time itself.
AR: There’s a lot of reference to Yenish culture in this work. Have you had a lot of contact with this culture? There’s a need to tread carefully about portraying marginalised groups in twenty-first-century literature, and there is a longstanding history of “othering” the “Gypsy,” portraying them as outsiders or thieves, or capable of magic and curses. As someone with Roma heritage, I found the portrayal of Yenish culture in Die Zehnte Muse largely sensitive. I do think Severin’s Yenish background goes some way towards alleviating this “othering,” as though by speaking her language, he can act as the bridge between Talitha and the fictional present.
AP: When I started working on the novel, I didn’t know much about Yenish culture, but I found out that the farmers in the area around Königsfeld, where my story takes place, used to buy magical spells from the Yenish to protect their cattle from evil spirits and witches, even in the early twentieth century. So I read some books about the Yenish and by Yenish authors, especially the autobiographical works of Engelbert Wittich, a Yenish writer, ethnologist, and artist who was born in 1878. He was about ten years younger than Algernon Blackwood and also went to school in the Black Forest.
The information Wittich gives about the use of symbols, as well as about the everyday life of the Yenish in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was very useful. I have tried to depict Yenish culture as something very special and rich with deep roots in much older traditions, and Severin’s loss of his cultural bonds as something deeply traumatic.
At the same time, I see his wandering between cultures, languages, and different artistic styles as something typical for any artist’s career. Artists, writers and translators are to me some kind of travellers. They are “travellers” of the mind (or of the soul, if you like: “spiritual travellers”).
AR: This book is preoccupied with male fantasies of the “muse” in art, women as ethereal, beautiful, passive (they are the painted, not the painters). Did you aim to satirize or challenge this in any way? Talitha points out Severin’s self-seeking behaviour, and you show how Talitha is in some ways just a projection: the men only see what they want to see. This is also set over a hundred years ago, when people had completely different conceptions of what women could and should be, which complicates the matter even more. But there is also an argument that the Talitha-image spills into the gratuitous, as in the scene where she splashes naked among the waterlilies.
AP: I do not see Talitha as a passive woman. In the first chapter, I mention a painting by Millais showing a beautiful woman lying dead in the water (Ophelia). This is a good example of a passive woman in art. Severin’s portrait of Talitha dancing is meant as a contrast to such passive women in symbolistic art. It also refers to portraits of Diana bathing, the Roman goddess who was worshipped in the Black Forest.
Talitha is active in many ways. She has control over the artist, she shows him the way, she tells him the truth about the death of his mother, she gives him the clues he needs to set her free. On the other hand, Talitha seems to be the ideal woman for an artist or symbolist. She is a child of nature, a femme fatale, a kind of goddess, a mystery, a sphinx. These might be male ideals or conceptions, but they surely do not fit conventional conceptions of what a woman should be. When Talitha tells Severin to hate her, all conventional and unconventional conceptions are rejected.
The muses are not necessarily passive either. They could be an active force behind any piece of art. Plato called the Greek poet Sappho “the tenth Muse,” so this special kind of muse might be creative and inspiring, active and passive at the same time.
AR: What piqued your interest in philosophy, spiritualism, and the occult?
AP: My interest in spiritualism and the occult has some roots in my own family history, especially in the stories my grandfather told me. He spent a part of his childhood in Egypt and lived in a haunted house in Austria, so the supernatural seems quite natural to me. I often visited my grandparents, who lived in a village near Salzburg, where every rock and every tree seems related to some ancient folktale.
The key question in the book, “Haben Sie je über das Wesen der Zeit nachgedacht?” (“Have you ever considered the nature of time itself?”), came to me in a dream, and I used it as a starting point to study the various ways people and religions try to cope with time’s evanescence and the transitoriness of life. I did not read much about Gnosticism, but I enjoyed the poetic symbols and haunting ideas of this ancient belief. I recommend Hans Jonas’s book The Gnostic Religion.
AR: What does the Black Forest mean to you? It was a beautiful choice and natural given Blackwood’s experience at a boarding school there. There’s something eternally enchanting and creepy about this region.
AP: I have lived in Vienna and Heidelberg, but the Black Forest is the region I love most. I have always loved the forest and trees and wilderness, as well as its related stories and folktales. This region is full of almost invisible history, ancient graves, Celtic and Roman places of worship, Roman roads, and farmhouses that are at least seven hundred years old. Königsfeld is a rather modern community, founded about two hundred years ago, but surrounded by much older places full of superstition and tales about ghosts and witches. People seem to forget these stories as well as their own cultural history.
AR: Time plays a huge role in this novel, and the linearity of time is often challenged. You start and finish the novel with a tricky-to-translate question about the “Wesen” (being/essence/nature) of time. Why time itself? Did you always know it would be a nonlinear novel?
AP: The first sentence of the book as well as the “time-storm” at the end of the novel were inspired by dreams and also somewhat by emotional losses. My first draft was different—I had a rational ending in mind, but it just didn’t seem to be working. When I was thinking about ghost stories and strange appearances which are reported even by very rational people, I had the impression that these phenomena might have something to do with time and might be shadows from the past or the future. They might be a sign that time is not a one-dimensional, one-way street but rather an intricate maze. I was happy to use such ideas in my novel because they seem to make a fantastic ghost story rather credible. And I think that Blackwood would have liked them too, since he was playing with unusual perceptions of time in some of his tales.
AR: Finally, why Algernon Blackwood?
AP: I’ve loved Blackwood’s story “The Willows” since I was about twelve years old, and I was quite excited to learn that he spent a year in my neighbourhood, that he went to school in Königsfeld and learned German, and that his time in the Black Forest inspired him in many ways.
When I was working on my second novel, Die Nebelkrähe (about spiritism in the 1920s, Hester Dowden, and Oscar Wilde’s ghost), I went to the Donisweiher (Weiher means pond) almost every week and wrote a little episode about Blackwood, who appears as an expert in supernatural phenomena. In this episode, he talks of a strange incident that happened when he visited Königsfeld: He looked into the little pond and saw the reflection of two strangers instead of his own. It was meant as a private joke for a dear friend of mine who often visited the Donisweiher with me, but in the end, it became much more. It inspired me to read Blackwood’s biography again—and to begin a new novel.
Photo credit: © Aaron Bircher/Steidl Verlag
Alexander Pechmann is an Austrian author and translator. He has now written three novels: Sieben Lichter (2017), Die Nebelkrähe (2019), and Die Zehnte Muse (2020). He also specialises in translating nineteenth-century British and American literature into German, having translated Herman Melville, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling, to name just a few.
Anna Rumsby is an MA literary translation student at the University of East Anglia. She also teaches English as a foreign language, writes poetry and historical fiction for her blog, and volunteers for the educational arm at Asymptote. She has translated and commented on extracts from Die Zehnte Muse as part of her master’s dissertation.
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