Saint Sebastian's Abyss by Mark Haber

After reading the email from Schmidt I knew I would have to fly to see Schmidt on his deathbed in Berlin. After rereading and reflecting on the more emphatic passages of his relatively short email, I was convinced I'd have to visit Schmidt one last time as he lay, in his words, dying in Berlin. Although we hadn't spoken in years, the email, sparse and cruel, hadn't surprised me, it felt suspended, as if it had been written years before and was merely waiting for me to open and read it. The tone of Schmidt's email hadn't surprised me either. Schmidt had been my best friend and confidant, my spiritual companion in art, art history, and art criticism, our interests drawn to the Northern Renaissance, specifically Dutch Mannerism and, more specifically than that, the painting Saint Sebastian's Abyss by Count Hugo Beckenbauer, Saint Sebastian's Abyss the focus of both our early studies and later our entire careers.

An unnamed narrator receives a nine-page email--that is, we are told, relatively succinct--from his old friend and colleague Schmidt, who is dying at his home in Berlin. Schmidt and the narrator are the world's two foremost experts on Hugo Beckenbauer, a once-obscure Viennese painter whose masterpiece, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, was discovered by the pair in a textbook at the Ruskin School of Art when they were just students. (Which of them saw the painting first is a matter of longstanding debate.) The narrator and Schmidt built their careers on Beckenbauer and Saint Sebastian's Abyss, until a falling out turned them into rivals and bitter enemies. Schmidt has called the narrator back to his deathbed for, it seems, a final settling of accounts, a final word about the painting that has animated, and destroyed, their friendship.

Schmidt traces the fault line in their friendship back to a comment the narrator made during a conference, a comment he calls that horrible thing, and which turns out to be the simple affirmation that art is essentially subjective and democratic. For Schmidt, art appreciation is entirely objective: once he chides the narrator for letting himself be overcome by his emotions when viewing Saint Sebastian's Abyss, saying that whenever he is overcome by a flood of emotions, he steps away and return when his faculties are more under control. Schmidt tells the narrator that he endeavors to approach the painting as its enemy, and when the painting bests him again and again, it is further proof that it is the greatest painting in the world. Schmidt is elitist, anti-democratic; he believes that all art produced after the death of Cezanne in 1906 is trash, and employs this belief to torpedo both of the narrator's marriages, both to modern art critics. In this way Saint Sebastian's Abyss dramatizes the tension between attitudes toward art which must remain in tension, I think, for criticism to function.

But Saint Sebastian's Abyss has less heady things going on, too. Chief among them is the depiction of a deeply troubled and codependent relationship that outlasts everything else in the protagonists' lives. You wonder, actually, do the narrator and Schmidt really feel so strongly about Saint Sebastian's Abyss, or is it a convenient object of transference for their turbulent attachment to each other? (In one of the funnier touches of the novel, the narrator describes packs of roving Schmidite hoodlum-critics who harrass him in public, wearing Schmidt's trademark bushy mustache as a kind of gang symbol.) The painting, which is described in slow dribs--the line of apostles floating into the sky, the high cliff, the "holy donkey"--is a field of contradictions on which a psychic battle of love and hatred is waged. Schmidt and the narrator explore large abstractions there, like death, belief, and the end of the world, but to what extent are our convictions about these things really about our feelings for each other?

Over the course of the novel, which takes place mostly in flashback, between the narrator's reception of the nine-page but relatively succinct email and his arrival at Schmidt's apartment in Berlin, the narrator gives us the story of Beckenbauer himself, a syphilis-ridden and perhaps completely blind sex addict who died in grotesque circumstances. He describes the intervention of a Jesuit named Vogel who tries, with uncertain success, to convert Beckenbauer on his deathbed, and the comparison between the two pairs is clear. Will the narrator be able to convert Schmidt to his principles of belief and democracy at last? Or will it be the sickly, apocalyptic Schmidt who converts the Jesuit? The novel finds a third way to these options that is, I think, entirely satisfying.

One thing that makes Saint Sebastian's Abyss work so well, I think, is Haber's style, which is simultaneously long-winded and drastically restricted. The narrator is repetitive to the extreme, as befitting someone who is dwelling on a long history in its last stages; the way that stock phrases (the horrible thing, for instance, but also the monkey paintings, which is used to describe Beckenbauer's two surviving lesser works) recur really captures how key moments in our lives crystallize into significance. These stock phrases allow Haber to write fantastically long and comma-strewn sentences, which are nevertheless easy to read because they involve escalating arrangements of the same words and ideas. It's a neat strategy that really captures the narrator's frame of mind.