Albert & the Whale
by Philip Hoare (4th Estate, 2021)
Palimpsest: n. a manuscript overwritten for another use
Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, 1977
A palimpsest. Several books in one. Multiple stories interwoven or scrambled or over-written one atop the other. Each of them in search of Dürer.
Albert is Albrecht Dürer, the extraordinary Northern Renaissance artist. The Whale was one of many beached on the shores of the North Sea during his lifetime, or rather the idea of the whale. He sought them out in vain, in his search to encounter and depict the bestiary of exotic creatures appearing in Europe for the first time. So begins the book, with Dürer’s journeys and his mundane journal, recording each place and each minor cost incurred, but none of the impressions he gained; none of his leaps of imagination and wonderment that appear in his art.
Too many threads?
Albert & the Whale is many books. It is an art history; it is an autobiographical sketchbook; it is a 20th century literary journey; it is a travelogue and polemic against humanity’s exploitation of Nature. Is it trying to be too much at once?
From an exposition of the 14th/15th Century artist’s work, it soon outgrows the accounts of Dürer and his contemporaries encountering natural history – their medieval imaginations made flesh in the animals from the East and from the Sea. In no time we are reading about 20th Century author Thomas Mann, the poet Marianne Moore etc. This feels unexpected, but is at least linked to Dürer’s art and where the writers’ interests in the sea – and especially whales – breach the surface of the tale.
The praying hands
But without any warning we are suddenly plunged into an account of bereavement, aging, mortality. We experience the author’s nervous meditation about an operation on his hand, for a condition that – evidenced in Dürer’s self-portraits – Hoare shared with the artist. And next we experience his mixture of unbounded joy and revulsion in his encounters with whales dead and alive, and humans’ brutal history of whaling. The author of Leviathan wears his heart on the page.
His travelogue has a distinctive style. Hoare describes the journey, the city, the building (often a museum or gallery) but he rarely if ever identifies where he is! His observation is precise. Every sentence is short. And he notes the price of tickets and tea (“eight euros fifty”). Once again this was quirky and confusing until the pfennig drops: he is invoking the very style of Dürer’s own travel diary, which lists every item of expenditure, but omits so many details that we can now never know, and tells us nothing of his searching, artistic eye.
Philip Hoare’s digressions and tangents balloon into sea monsters, bigger than the narrative boat we thought he was steering. His travels to seek out the artist’s haunts assume some kind of hide-and-seek with each work. At the end of the book, this search melds into a re-tracing of the journey of W H Auden and James Stern through 1940s war-torn Europe. The paintings and drawings are survivors living amongst the rubble of history.
By turns this book was fascinating and unsettling. His interpretation of the Dürer’s peerless drawings was completely absorbing. But at the turn of the page I found myself as lost as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s dreamscape novel The Unconsoled, or in the comic and confusing fantasy of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. But when I learned to let the waves of words roll over me and allow myself to drift with the current of wherever the book took me, then I was delighted and moved.
Elsewhere on the shelves
- Philip Hoare, LEVIATHAN, or the whale (4th Estate, 2009) – perhaps if I had shared his fascination for Moby Dick, I might have appreciated it better. I certainly want to re-read this now.
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651) – not really related except for the superb biblical title, but actually a gripping read in its own right and food for thought about how the politics of the state works in any age.
- Philip Marsden, The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven and the Age of Sail (HarperPress, 2012) – the rise and fall of Falmouth from the 16th century onwards, and the colourful history of fame and notoriety of those that sailed from there.