Clemency suggests

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A master shrouded by mist

Ferdinand Mount

Saturday, 26th February 2005

At the end of the 1960s, three young lecturers arrived at the University of East Anglia: Malcolm Bradbury, Lorna Sage and, from south Germany by way of Manchester, W. G. Sebald, always known as Max. All three were to spend the rest of their lives teaching there, and they all died rather young within about a year of one another. Each produced at least one memorable book, Bradbury’s The History Man, Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood and Sebald’s The Emigrants. Each had a huge knowledge and understanding of literature of all kinds. These reservoirs of sympathy did not, however, extend very far into human relations. As is not unknown among academics cooped up together for years on end, they did not get on. For Lorna at least, this antipathy became as pleasurable a drug as the cigarettes which fed her emphysema. It was impossible to be in her company for five minutes without her exploding into gurgles of indignation about the latest tiresomeness of Malcolm or Max. This puzzled me, as both her colleagues seemed quite affable, positively genial in the case of Bradbury and mild, even shy in the case of Sebald. Yet her irritation did alert me to the possibility that Sebald might not be quite as easy to pin down as he seemed.