t 34, Benedict Wells has already published four novels, nearly finished his fifth, and a short story collection is due later this year. Basic maths suggests that he must be cranking out literary works at an alarming rate, so it is a surprise to hear him say that his last — and first published in the UK last month — took seven years to write. The End of Loneliness is already a bestseller in Wells’s native Germany. Still, seven years sounds agonisingly slow, as if this book were somehow out of sync with his precocity. But then, it presented him with an unprecedented personal challenge.
“When I started to write the book, I was 24, and it was too big for me,” Wells says. “I had to become the writer that was able to write the book.”
The novel, which won the European Union prize for literature, charts the lives of three siblings whose parents die when the youngest child, Jules, is 11. The children are sent to boarding school, where they must adapt to the loss of their parents and to the prolonged, slow losing of each other, separated by age, ambition, friendship groups, character, corridors. A romantic love story, between Jules and a classmate, runs alongside the sibling love story; both are fragmentary, faltering, recovering.
Wells says it is the most personal book he has written. Like his protagonists, he grew up in a boarding school. “I was using my experiences of loss, loneliness ... The story is fictional, and the ink is true.”
Wells was six when he was sent to a state boarding school in Bavaria. He enrolled because “one parent was sick and couldn’t take care of me, the other parent was self-employed and in financial trouble.
“But!” he exclaims brightly. “My luck compared to the characters of the book is that I came to boarding school that early. I had nothing to lose.”
I doubt that many people would describe a 13-year stint at three boarding schools instigated by an unfortunate turn of events as luck. But Wells is adamant. “I had nothing to lose. I was six and my first experience was to be in a boarding school.” His parents were “in the background, loving me”.
By six a child can read, write, form and break friendships, understand that they will not live forever and, with care, make a cup of tea. It seems incredible that a child of six would see nothing to lose in leaving home, and when I email Wells later to say so, he replies: “This is how I feel today. Of course, it was different as a child ... The events before I came to boarding school were so strong and probably difficult — the separation of my parents, the illness of one of my parents — that a boarding school was quite OK. It was not easy in the beginning ... but it got better and better until I felt at home.”
Unsettling memories
He took small, unsettling memories and used them to recount the experiences of Jules and his siblings. What kind of memories? He thinks for a minute. “Me being seven, after the holidays, dark evening, this feeling of being unwell, you don’t want to go back there.” He says all this with a ready smile, and I wonder if the smile is so ready partly because it’s intended to deter the appearance of other emotions.
“Of course, this makes you independent and somehow in an interesting way made me angry,” he says. “Really, with that anger, when I was 19, I started writing.” In his mid and then late 20s, when he struggled with The End of Loneliness, when he rewrote it all into the third person and then back into the first because his agent and editor felt the story wasn’t working, “I used that anger to keep going. At the same time I had love. And that is a very special combination, love and anger. The best combination to write.”
I’d like to know more about the anger, but Wells thinks that anger is probably not the right word after all. “You want to prove yourself.”
He has certainly done that. His first novel, Beck’s Last Summer, was turned into a film and his third, Almost Ingenious, spent months on the Spiegel bestseller list. As well as picking up the EU prize, The End of Loneliness has sold in 27 territories.
And yet for a long time, publication seemed a hopeless dream. After he left school, Wells rented a tiny apartment in Berlin with no heating and a shower in the kitchen, and gave himself two years to write. He worked — as a waiter, a hotel concierge, in the multiplex, at a TV company — and wrote at night. When the two years lapsed, he took a third, then a fourth. “Rejections, rejections, rejections. From agents, publishers, open mic nights in Berlin for unpublished authors...” But he kept going.
Wells is relentlessly bright, despite a visibly painful-looking head wound. Already on crutches for a football injury, he slipped on ice the day before our meeting. He is also a curious mixture of forthright and withdrawn. As an example of the forthrightness, in 2016, halfway through his acceptance speech for the European Union prize for literature, he switched to English to say how important it is “that we live in a Europe where countries help other countries”.
When he sold his first novel at 23, he insisted on a “no ebook” clause. “I thought many other writers would do it too. But nobody did.” He hated seeing his beloved record shops close: WOM in Munich, MoST in the Allgau, near school. So he wanted to “make [people] aware that bookshops might die if you don’t buy your books there”.
On personal matters, however, he is less outspoken. His explanation of why he boarded is familiar from other interviews. When I ask which parent was ill and which self-employed, he replies that he doesn’t want to say. He is not easily drawn from the script. He has an open demeanour but is fervently given to non-disclosure. His date of birth, the name of his schools, are details he has never shared publicly.
He has, however, made one very public statement, to dissociate himself from his grandfather, Baldur von Schirach, who was head of the Nazis’ Hitler Youth movement from 1933 to 1940. At 19 Wells legally changed his surname: “I did not want to be judged by what my ancestors did, but only as my own person,” he has said. (His cousin Ferdinand von Schirach has written eloquently about their grandfather in Der Spiegel.)
Given that The End of Loneliness is in part an exploration of the past, of what can be lost and what can never be let go, I wonder if Wells’s self-severance from the family tree informed these themes in the book. (Which, incidentally, features lots of symbolic trees.) But Wells says: “It had nothing to do with it.” Neither did the ominously entitled Dangerous Heritage, a short story he wrote as a young schoolboy; that was about The A Team. At school, he liked pretending to be Hannibal.
He took the name Wells from John Irving’s The Cider House Rules because its hero Homer Wells “was always at an orphanage. Irving was the reason I started to write again.” Wells once took a night train from his then home in Barcelona to Zurich just to hear Irving read. He told the legendary author about his name change and is unsure what Irving made of it. “It must be such a weird thing from his perspective!” Irving did supply a cover quote for The End of Loneliness though, calling it “bold, affecting and accomplished”.
It is fair to say that The End of Loneliness is a tear-jerker. Wells cried while he wrote it. The novel does not shy away from melodrama. Its occasionally platitudinous balms — “The only way we can overcome the loneliness within us is together” — may not soothe the unsentimental and its reliance on dream sequences for plot twists may irk the critical. But it is impossible to look away from it, from the unravelling, reforming lives of its characters.
Writing it was like carrying a 50kg weight. Wherever he was — in Berlin, Barcelona, chatting with friends — there was this ... Wells gestures behind him. Something bad, but what’s the word? He picks up the book. He must know the English translation well because he quickly finds what he is looking for. “Abyss! There was this huge abyss.”
Maybe that is another reason why Wells smiles so much. The book is a bestseller that has chimed with hundreds of thousands of readers worldwide, and perhaps that really does mark the end of something.
Certainly it was cathartic to put this story on paper. “This book I had to write,” he says. “The next books I want to write. I feel absolutely free now.”
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
The End of Loneliness is published by Sceptre.
