The so-called culture of complaint disgusts me. All right?” At that moment, we learned not to wail. She said, perfectly calmly: “Listen, boys, if I could cut it out of my ribs, I would cut it out of my ribs. His deepest memory of his mother, he writes, is of him and his brother clutching at her skirt, begging for something to eat: thesis was on the hearing of fish, took him and his siblings to live in a remote, mountainous region of Bavaria, far from the Allied bombs, where they were raised in extreme poverty with no running water and precious little food. His father was almost entirely absent, a “marginal figure” who talked endlessly of a vast encyclopedic work he was supposedly engaged in writing, not one word of which he ever produced. A fair number of pages are devoted to his childhood during and just after World War II. The memoir is more focused on Herzog’s voluminous opinions and enthusiasms, and on discrete anecdotes (fraternal stabbings, shoe eatings, and so forth), than on providing a straightforward narrative of his life, but a basic sense of his trajectory does emerge. From the moment he learned to walk, it seems, Herzog was striding stoutly down from the Bavarian hills of his childhood in determined pursuit of experience, out of which has arisen his vast and variegated (and, it has to be said, radically uneven) body of work. I will admit that this is an eccentric and perhaps foolish way of going on about a legendary filmmaker’s autobiography, but such is the relentless action of Herzog’s life, and his sheer conviction and magnetism in narrating it, that it’s difficult to avoid reading Every Man for Himself as an argument for how an artist should conduct himself in the world. And more’s the pity, I have to say-on all counts, with perhaps the exception of the rat bite/dysentery scenario. I have never even met-let alone threatened to murder as a means of extracting a powerful cinematic performance from-the dangerous madman Klaus Kinski. I have never swapped my only good shoes for a bathtub filled with fish in order to feed a film crew in the Peruvian jungle. I have never been bitten on the face by a rat while delirious with dysentery in a garden shed in Egypt. I have never taken a trip to Plainfield, Wisconsin, with the intention of digging up the corpse of Ed Gein’s mother. I have never fallen into a crevasse while mountain climbing in Pakistan. I have never hauled a 320-ton steamship over a hill in the Amazon rainforest. I have never cooked and eaten my own boot in fulfillment of a lost wager. I have never journeyed from Berlin to Paris on foot as a kind of magical-realist intervention to forestall the death of a beloved mentor. I have never worked as an arena clown riding bullocks at a Mexican rodeo. I have never been shot, or stabbed my own brother. I was not born into a country at war with the world. Herzog is a figure of such storied romance and such implacable charisma that to read about his life is to feel that you yourself have been going about the thing all wrong-certainly if you are any sort of artist, and perhaps even more so if you are not.Īs I turned the pages of Herzog’s book, and was shunted from one insane episode to the next, I was gripped by the tightening conviction that my own life was, by comparison, barely a life at all. But it’s a question that presented itself to me with maddening insistence as I read the German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s extravagantly titled new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. What kind of life should an artist live? In a way this is a nonquestion, in that the only serious answer is whatever life might facilitate the production of art.
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