NEW YORK, NY.- I dont believe a word of filmmaker Werner Herzogs new memoir, which bears the self-deprecating title Every Man for Himself and God Against All. (What is this, a Metallica album?) But then, Im not sure were supposed to take much of it at face value.
Like Jim Smiley in Mark Twains The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Bob Dylan, and Tom Waits, Herzog is an old-school, concierge-level bluffer. And ham. He wont tell you the truth, not quite, unless it falls out of his pocket accidentally, as if it were a cigarette lighter.
Speaking about his documentaries, Herzog uses the phrase ecstatic truth. When you imagine that phrase uttered in his droll, stoic German accent, it sounds less evangelical and less like something Kellyanne Conway would say.
The first three paragraphs of Every Man for Himself and God Against All indicate what the rest is going to be like, so you have time to hunker down against something firm. Paragraph 1 begins: The lamentations ended about noon. Paragraph 2 depicts the noble teenage Herzog fishing for cuttlefish (At nightfall, I went out to sea) off the south coast of Crete. Paragraph 3 includes these two sentences, after a catharsis that involves staring up at the suddenly fishy cosmos:
I was certain that there and then I knew all there was to know. My fate had been revealed to me. And I knew that after one such night, it would be impossible for me to ever get any older.
All right, Peter Pan, lets go.
Writer Douglas Adams coined a term, pulverbatch, to denote the first paragraph on the blurb of a dust jacket in which famous authors claim to have had a series of menial jobs in their youth. Herzogs book is one luxuriant, well-waxed batch of pulver.
He grew up in rural Bavaria, and then in Munich. Before making his early films, he tells us, he worked as a minder of cows, a laborer, a spot welder, a larcenous parking warden, a rodeo clown, and a smuggler of stereos and then guns into Mexico. Of what its like to have been internationally famous for more than 50 years, and to have spent a great deal of time on daises at film festivals and in penthouse suites, there is vastly less documentation. The wise reader, still hunkered, will at this point reach for a helmet, and check for his or her wallet.
In nearly all these occupations, Herzog was banged up. He is, for sure, the worlds most grandiloquent crash-test dummy. He has fallen off a barn and broken both arms. He has had 14 stitches in his chin, a soccer injury, and a tooth pulled after declining anesthesia because the pain was synonymous with the way I expected the world to be. His collarbone was detached from his breastbone while ski jumping. He has been lifted off his feet by random explosions. He fell 40 feet on an opera stage and sprained his neck. He was hit so hard by a stuntman while filming a scene for a movie that two crowns popped loose from his molars. He has intentionally leaped into a cactus field and has eaten his shoe (which he cooked at Chez Panisse). He missed an airplane that crashed, and he came close to being beheaded in Peru by the Shining Path. He was shot, and slightly wounded, while being interviewed by the BBC in Los Angeles. A few days later, because he is Werner Herzog:
I rescued Joaquin Phoenix, who had happened to crash on the highway right in front of me, from his upside-down car. I think he was in withdrawal and presumably shouldnt have been driving. Hanging upside down between fully inflated airbags, he refused to hand me the lighter he was trying to light his cigarette with. He didnt notice that there was gas leaking everywhere.
On this books cover, in a still photo from his documentary about volcanoes, Herzog looks like Wile E. Coyote after being smashed by a boulder. No wonder that, on difficult shoots, he carries Luthers 1545 translation of the Bible in a facsimile reprint, so the Book of Job is nearby and he can meditate on the universality of unmerited suffering.
The bulk of Every Man for Himself and God Against All consists of Herzogs thoughts on the subjects that interest him, about which he has made movies or would like to: cave paintings, hypnosis, twins, the so-called vanishing area paradox, nuclear waste, forgery, thought transference, deep space, Antarctica and mummies.
There is one intentionally funny sentence. Writing about livestock auctioneers, he says, I always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under 14 minutes.
This book has been translated from the German by the superb Michael Hofmann. But every so often, the language is awkward. One unfortunate sentence begins, My father entered one of my half brothers, Ortwin. Any G-rated sentence that begins that way and does not include the words in a contest is a strange one.
There is a good deal here about the making of Herzogs best-known film, Fitzcarraldo (1982), and about his testy friendship with professionally baleful Klaus Kinski. This stuff has been covered better elsewhere.
Herzog has an ego the size of downtown Buenos Aires. Other people appear in this memoir wives, lovers, collaborators on his films but with the exception of his friend, travel writer Bruce Chatwin, theyre not observed closely. Theyre as hollow as chocolate bunnies, described in a way that brings to mind a line from Mary Gaitskill: To overpraise is a subtle form of disrespect and everybody knows it.
This book will be a boon to those people who, after dinner, sometimes like to unwind by reading choice morsels from books aloud. There are some instant classics here.
There was also a witch who came for me, but my mother caught up to her and snatched me back, and from that time on, I knew I wouldnt wet my pants anymore.
I want to make a film with Mike Tyson about the early Frankish kings.
There were dark trees and chipmunks, which have something consoling about them.
Occasionally, I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldnt avert his eyes.
I can still milk a cow, and I recognize others who can as well.
Purple imaginings settled over me.
Happily, there are more where those came from.
Publication Notes:
Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir
By Werner Herzog
(Translated by Michael Hofmann)
355 pages. Penguin Press. $30.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.