Dear Mr. M

by Herman Koch

  Is that a hard-and-fast rule?

  “A rule? How am I to see that?”

  You should see it in the sense that perhaps it’s always that way. That friendships can exist only between writers who find each other’s work fairly ho-hum. That you can never be friends with a colleague who is more or less your equal, who writes books that stand comparison to yours. Let alone with a colleague who is better than you.

  “Jealousy exists. Envy. Why do I sell much less than colleague R? Why does L always come in right at the top of the bestseller list? I mean, these days it’s no longer such a circus for me when it comes to sales figures, but back in the days when I wrote the occasional bestseller, I felt as though I needed to apologize all the time. Sorry, my book is selling well. There are people who want to read my books. I’m so sorry. Next time I’ll try to write something no one wants to read.”

  Among women, among girls, one often sees that a pretty girl chooses a very unremarkable girl as her best friend. Not an ugly girl, no, an unremarkable girl. The unremarkable girl’s function is to cast her pretty friend’s beauty into even sharper relief. At the disco, it’s immediately clear that the pretty girl will get the pretty boy and the unremarkable girl will get the nerd. Is it that way with friendships between writers? That the successful writer, for example, surrounds himself with less successful writers? As “friends”?

  “That’s a striking comparison you make there. It could very well be. One does, indeed, rarely see two beautiful women who are best friends. That’s too much competition.”

  Take your colleague N, for example.

  “What about colleague N?”

  At this moment, he’s your most direct competitor. In your age category, perhaps your only competitor.

  “You’re right, he suffers from no lack of attention. Completely deserved, by the way. I should say that right away. The Garden of Psalms is also, without a doubt, his best book.”

  Do you really think so?

  “Well, let me put it differently. People consider it his best book. The critics. My own taste is different, but he is good in his own way. I see that too.”

  But you don’t wish you’d written it yourself?

  “No, no, not at all. I mean, however good it may be, I find the style…the subject matter, how shall I put it…a bit too easy. And that title. Why not call things by their name?”

  Would you have had a better idea for the title?

  “Not right off the bat. I mean, I’d have to think about it. But The Garden of Psalms…I don’t know, it’s as though the title was already there before N used it. That’s not good.”

  N recently changed publishers.

  “Really?”

  He hasn’t done badly by the switch at all.

  “But the important thing is the book itself, first and foremost. If the book’s no good, all those posters around town won’t help.”

  Do you really believe that? You sound a bit like your own publisher. “The book’s the thing,” isn’t that what he always says? But do you believe that as well?

  “Quality will always win out, I’m convinced of that. A good book can get by without posters or an author who speaks so glibly on all kinds of talk shows.”

  But isn’t it also the times that are changing? Isn’t “the book’s the thing” just another way of saying, “in any case, we’re not going to push it”?

  “In the days when my books were still being bought and read widely, at least, that wasn’t necessary.”

  You’re referring to Payback?

  “Payback was the first big success, but a few of the other books that followed didn’t do badly either. The Hour of the Dog…”

  But these days it’s all subsided a bit, right? Liberation Year, of course, is still “the new M.” But do you mind my asking how many print runs it’s had till now?

  “There’s a new one coming up. But you should also know that the first print run was quite large.”

  What kind of numbers are we talking about here?

  “I’d have to ask for the exact figures. But they’re the kind of figures a debuting author could only dream of.”

  Until recently, you and your colleague N had the same publisher.

  “That’s correct.”

  In the interviews about his new book, N wasn’t very complimentary about his former publisher.

  “We found that rather bad form too. By ‘we’ I mean the collective authors. That kind of thing is simply not done. It’s the kind of ‘kick them when they’re down’ tactic one usually sees only on the soccer pitch.”

  But was he right?

  “About what?”

  Was he right to say that his former publisher, and now your publisher alone, has lost all contact with reality?

  “He still has a very impressive list. One author who runs off can’t change that.”

  But they’re all authors who are closer to the grave than to the cradle, if I may put it that way.

  “Age is not a factor here. There are plenty of examples of writers who only really blossom at an advanced age.”

  Do you count yourself among those? Do you feel that your best work is yet to come?

  “I never think that way. I go from book to book. If I knew that I had already written my best work, I could just as well stop right now.”

  But meanwhile, the sales of N’s latest book are astronomical.

  “That’s true, and I’m happy for him. I sincerely mean that.”

  Do you ever dream about that, that one of your books might take the bestseller lists by storm?

  “The answer to that is the same as my earlier one. As to whether my best work is yet to come. I don’t worry about bestseller lists. No self-respecting author should.”

  Let’s talk about Payback. Your most successful book to date. Do you also consider it your best book?

  “No, definitely not. People ask me that sometimes. But I wrote better books before that, and afterward, too, if you ask me. Payback took on a life of its own. Apparently, I struck a chord somewhere. An open nerve.”

  And which chord was that, in your opinion?

  “A writer should never try to analyze his own work too deeply in retrospect. That can be crippling. Overly deep analyses by others can be fatal too. Sartre needed a whole book to interpret Jean Genet’s work. After that, Genet never wrote another word. But all right, it was a long time ago, so I’ll try to answer you. Even though I believe I’ve formulated that answer before this, so please don’t expect anything earthshaking.”

  An “open nerve,” you said. I’ve never heard you say that before. Personally, I find that much more evocative than a “chord.”

  “The particulars were well known. Everyone was shocked by that affair. Two young people—still children, really—do away with a teacher. Or at least make him disappear. No body was ever found. I remember it so well, the newspapers of course weren’t allowed to publish pictures of the culprits. To protect their privacy. But a couple of magazines did anyway. We saw their faces. A school picture. That girl with the long black hair. The boy with his blond curls. Not exactly two killers you would pick out of a lineup later on. Pick out of a lineup in retrospect. On the contrary. The girl was absolutely the prettiest girl in the class. But I looked hardest at the boy. He wasn’t bad-looking either, maybe even more handsome than most of the other boys in the picture. But then handsome in a way not all girls like. I can’t recall exactly what it was. A face that was a little too thin, a slender body. Gawky. What happens with a boy like that when the prettiest girl in the class chooses him? I asked myself. I saw a story in it right away. Just a story at first, then later it become a complete book. Did he do it for her? That was what I asked myself. That was the question I would try to answer by writing the story.”

  But that wasn’t the nerve.

  “No, the nerve was how recognizable it was. Every parent’s nightmare. Children who look normal in a school picture may turn out to be killers. And not just the parents’ nightmare. Also for their own age gr
oup. It’s still one of the books read most often by high-school students. Could that boy or girl sitting beside me be a murderer? Does that nice neighbor, who always feeds the cats when we’re on vacation, have his wife’s chopped-up corpse in the freezer? They were normal children, the ones we saw in the school picture. Perhaps a little more than normal. A pretty girl, a handsome boy. Not losers.”

  There was also someone else in that picture.

  “You’ve seen it?”

  It’s on the Internet these days. A number of other pictures too. The little house in the snow. The teacher’s car. The nature preserve where he might be buried.

  “That’s right, that teacher was also in the school picture. I cut it out of that magazine back then and hung it on the wall above my desk. Every day, before I started writing, I looked at that picture for a few minutes. It was taken a couple of months before the murder, that’s what made it so trenchant. There they are, I thought each morning. There’s the victim, and there are his killers. In one and the same classroom. He still doesn’t know a thing. They don’t know yet either. At least, that was my assumption. That the idea came up only much later.”

  But in your book the idea came up beforehand. And not just after the teacher came by the holiday home.

  “It was difficult. I struggled with the motive. Or let me put it another way: I simply couldn’t believe that they would have done it just like that. And of course, just like that wasn’t interesting for a book. In dramatic terms. Dramatically speaking, a murder is better if it’s planned beforehand.”

  And do you still see it that way? What I mean is, did you actually believe in a murder that happened just like that, but decided that a murder like that wasn’t dramatic enough for your book?

  “That’s an interesting question. I asked myself the same thing while I was writing it, and afterward too. Whether there really was a motive. That teacher had had an affair with the girl. She breaks it off, but he keeps bothering her. He goes to find her at the holiday home where she’s staying with her new boyfriend. Motives aplenty, you might say. An adult—an adult in a position of power—imposes himself on a couple of minors. They could have reported him to the police. Maybe that wouldn’t have helped much, but the teacher would have been fired at the very least.”

  But these days, do you believe a bit more in the just like that theory? In the lack of a motive?

  “There are any number of classic situations in which the balance of power is out of kilter right from the start. In which the stupid ones sometimes have more power than the intelligent ones. The few intelligent ones, I should say. An army, a prison. A sergeant humiliates a recruit who’s smarter than him. Guards torment a prisoner. At a high school, the balance of power is not so very different. A high-school teacher is not among the most intelligent of the species, and that’s putting it very mildly. A physics teacher will hardly be the one to develop a new theory of relativity. Generally speaking, they’re sort of stuck in the middle. Lame and frustrated. You can keep that up for a few years with empty talk about idealism and the transfer of knowledge to coming generations, but in the long run a frustrated intelligence like that devours itself from the inside out. Teachers don’t stick around long enough to get old. That has nothing to do with their ability or inability to maintain order. Day in, day out, they stand in front of a classroom full of intelligences just as mediocre as their own. In principle, things can go on that way for years. But every year there are also a few people in the class who are more intelligent than them. They can’t handle that. Just like a soccer trainer who was once a mediocre player himself, teachers will try to frustrate an intelligent student wherever and whenever they can. The soccer trainer makes his best player sit on the bench. The teacher can’t give low grades to the student who’s smarter than him. That student already gets those. Only mediocre, hardworking students get good grades. The above-average intelligence is bored to death in high school. A C-plus is the best he can do. And so the frustrated teacher thwarts him in other ways.

  “Deep in his heart, what the frustrated teacher hopes for is that the goaded student will explode. You can go on tormenting a prisoner until he finally stabs a guard to death. In the barracks, the recruit who has been provoked will yank the machine gun out of the sergeant’s hands and open fire. The employee who has been sacked returns to his former place of work and kills the personnel manager and his secretary before taking his own life. But that still happens only rarely at high schools. Whenever one or more of the students finally settles accounts, it’s automatically front-page news. We are shocked by it. We are conditioned to have it shock us. A high school! What’s become of the world when high schools are no longer safe? But we see no further than the ends of our noses. What has always surprised me, in fact, is that it doesn’t happen much more often.

  “For years, a student is made a fool of by a teacher—by an inferior, mediocre intelligence. One day the provoked student comes into the classroom to get even. He restores the natural order of things. Sometimes a student like that will go wild and wreak vengeance on the whole school. On the innocent. Innocent in the objective sense, perhaps, but seen from a broader perspective those are the stooges who are now getting a taste of their own medicine. The obedient students, the eager beavers who have spent all those years trying to cull favor with their teachers. The weaklings who have lowered themselves. During the nightly news shows after a massacre, all the attention focuses on the culprits. People say that they had been acting peculiar for years. They had watched violent films, of course, and played even more violent games on their PlayStations. The ‘wrong’ books were found in their bookcases and desk drawers. Biographies of Hitler and Mussolini. They also dressed weirdly or extravagantly, of course, and were severely withdrawn because they didn’t take part in all kinds of school social activities. But then you can still wonder: Who is more disturbed? The student who wants to be left in peace, or the student who takes part voluntarily in all kinds of idiotic activities meant to develop his or her ‘social skills’? In an army, it’s always the socially skilled who volunteer first for an over-the-top suicide charge. Those who function well in a group will find it easier to herd the villagers together onto the village square. To torch the houses and then separate the men from the women.”

  In your book you chose to use the perpetrators’ perspective. For the moment, let’s leave aside the question of whether they were actually perpetrators in the usual sense of the word. Did you ever consider trying to meet with them? To ask them what happened? Or what might have happened, I suppose I should say.

  “Of course I considered that. I would have been interested to find out more. On the other hand, though, I realized right away that it would curtail my freedom. My freedom as a novelist. As it was, the teacher’s disappearance was only a pretext. I could fill in the rest myself. What do they call that: ‘based loosely on the facts’? I was afraid that, if I actually succeeded in meeting the boy or the girl, I would hear things that would endanger my novel, the way I saw it in my mind’s eye.”

  So you already had it planned out? Before you started?

  “No, no, absolutely not. All I’m trying to say is that I didn’t want to risk curtailing my freedom by being confronted all too abruptly with the facts. My imagination had to do the work. I’ve already told you about my premise. The relationship between the two of them. Pretty girl, a somewhat less handsome but still reasonably attractive boy. Who has the power over whom? As far as that goes, that teacher wasn’t interesting. He is only the victim. No one deserves to be bumped off for something like that: stalking a female student. But you can never completely shake the feeling that he, at least in part, brought it down on himself. That’s what we read back then in the first newspaper reactions, that’s what we heard in the conversations, both on TV and in the cafés. A grown man, a teacher who does something like that, can’t count on much sympathy. But I wasn’t interested in his motives anyway. Grown man falls for young girl, you can be sure he wasn’t the first man to hav
e that happen. He is rejected, can’t take that and goes crazy. He turns into a bothersome stalker. Our sympathy rarely focuses on men who pant on the telephone, men who follow young girls all the way to their doorstep, who stand guard under their bedroom window at night. From that moment on, in fact, the girl becomes the victim. If she had gone downstairs, walked outside and kicked him hard in the balls, we would all have applauded.”

  You talk about the novelist’s freedom. About his imagination, which could be obstructed by too much knowledge of the facts. But the reader is very much familiar with the facts. Of the most important facts, in any case. One reads your entire book knowing how it will end: with the teacher’s disappearance.

  “That’s true. As a writer you’re free to use that, I think. It’s about the imagination, how do you as a writer fill in the blank spots: Could it have gone this way or that way? The real facts, the ones everyone knows, I should say, serve only as the perspective within which the narrative takes place. There are plenty of examples of that: you write about a Jewish family in Germany in 1938; everyone knows then that something is going to happen, that the sinister shadow of the future is already looming over the characters. These days a lot of writers—especially American writers—have their story begin on the morning of September 11. Or one week before. One day. Six months. It makes you read that story differently. Throughout the entire book you’re waiting, as it were, for the first plane to slam into the North Tower. That’s also the way I started on Payback. A teacher, a boy, and a girl. A high school. A holiday home in the snow. All the ingredients are laid out on the counter. The only thing left is to prepare the meal itself.”

  The only difference being that everyone knows roughly when World War II started. The same way everyone knows—now, in hindsight—that neither of those planes flew into the Twin Towers by accident. But in Payback, you fantasize blithely about exactly what might have happened in that holiday cottage. Using what you call your imagination, you saddle the suspects with a theoretical murder.