"Sometimes God, sometimes nothing"

Once I imagined a novel in which everything seen throughout the day by a single person is reported in detail. I was a teenager in my first job and began by using company paper to describe the scrub on the slopes beside a motorway as seen from a car. I never got any further.

No doubt the idea was prompted by a chance encounter late one night with Remembrance of Things Past and a lasting intrigue with its elaborate and apparently excessive descriptions combined with an apparent lack of a story. I think of it now after reading Anna Arno's biography of Paul Celan in an English translation by Soren Gauger, half-wishing that I hadn't. Not that I have any criticism of it as a biography. At over 400 pages it may well be as comprehensive as the form allows, and, if you need a comprehensive review, the LA Review of Books has one. My wish is due not to the tendency of literary biographies to conflate life and work – an inevitability and precisely why we pick up such books – but because its limits are not limited enough and its excesses not excessive enough.

What would a literally comprehensive biography look like? Following my idea for a novel, I have imagined a biography of a writer that describes everything in and around their life outside of writing: what they did each day, the rooms in which they lived, the clothes they wore, the food and drink they consumed, how they slept; absolutely up close, absolutely unremarkable. I've read biographies of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille in which nothing of such detail is mentioned, focusing almost entirely on their public life and writings. If biographies were more like what I imagined, we might then sense the person and thereby the space between the writer and the work (Blanchot called it "the essential solitude"). Naturally, this would be impossible for a biographer, and near impossible for the subject. Somebody did try it, however. For 24 years, Robert Shields wrote a diary describing what he did in every minute of every day. The hair-raising sample pages from the diary reveal how life and work cancel each other out, becoming complementary voids. 

Of course, Anna Arno's biography of Celan doesn't go this far. She sets the scene with a novelistic portrait of his hometown of Chernivtsi and how Celan spent his youth there, followed by the war, the murder of his parents, and then his exile, first in Vienna and finally in Paris. We read about his passionate Judaism, his struggles to make a living, his friendships, his marriage, the loss of a son at birth, his devotion to his second son Eric, his obsessive need for his wife's fidelity while he conducted numerous affairs, his awkward meeting with Heidegger despite his demand that others steer clear of ex-Nazis, the terrible effects of the "Goll Affair" and subsequent psychosis, hospitalisation and suicide, with the poetry, translations, prose and correspondence providing a nested commentary by Celan himself. In fact, there's no doubt this is a serious and valuable study of the poet's life and work, and yet, at the same time, the blend proper to literary biography inevitably tends towards caricature, often prompting the reader to judge its subject's hypocrisy. The constraint on detail thereby narrows the necessary space and the in-line quotations of poetry are read as a code confirming the narrative portrait. Apart from silence then, is there an alternative? 

Many years ago I read an anecdote from a friend of Kafka's, probably Gustav Janouch, who said how, on calling at his home on yet another day when Kafka was late for their meeting, he saw Kafka bounding down the stairs, his knees kicking high as he descended. For all the wealth of Stach's biography, this felt like the closest to what it was like to be in the presence of the man himself, which, though trivial and saying nothing about his work – unless one can perhaps make an argument for its untimely quality – provides more in a single image than any 400-page narrative (similar to "The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past", the first line of Kafka's diaries). Jean Daive's Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop and published by a small press¹ rather than a major one like Belknap, offers similar images from Celan's life. 

A recollection: near Avenue Emile-Zola, Paul Celan looks for a grocery store. He buys a lightbulb that he puts in a huge netbag. Carrying the netted lightbulb he moves on in a lordly way. And the net hangs heavy. 

And: 

Recollection: Paul coming back from London. "I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room." And later Paul recalls Kafka's formulation, "Sometimes God, sometimes nothing."²

Each of these, it seems to me, with their mix of banality, poignancy and oddity, is enough. If the poems quoted in the biography open onto meaning via the life, these anecdotes, as with Celan's poetry, present as the open itself.

My imagined novel did not progress because the image of the scrub, between sky and tarmac, was also enough. It remains, sometimes everything, sometimes nothing. The surprise of being? A primal scene, again?

Notes 

1: Burning Deck originally, but no longer available in the photographed edition.

2: "Kafka's formulation" is not known to me and may be apocryphal. If you know from where it comes, please comment.