On another evening with Hannah Arendt, I recall that the matter of “authenticity” came up. I told her that someday I hoped to write about Auschwitz—I had in mind, specifically, a Polish Catholic survivor of that camp, a young woman named Sophie, whom I had known in Brooklyn after the war—but I was troubled by how authentic my rendition might be. What did I know about midcentury Europe in its torment and self-immolation? She scoffed lightly at this, countering with this question: What, before writing Nat Turner, had I known about slavery? An artist creates his own authenticity; what matters is imaginative conviction and boldness, a passion to invade alien territory and render an account of one's discoveries. That was the task of a writer, she said, and I was heartened, though still doubtful. When I demurred a little—I remember saying that I could foresee dodging an assault entitled Ten Rabbis Respond—she kept up her encouragement, though not without conceding that I'd probably receive flak from those who might feel, as certain blacks had, that I was, as she put it, poaching on their turf.
One matter that never came up in our talks was the idea that I shouldn't write about the subject at all—that after Auschwitz the only appropriate response was silence. I think Hannah would have been puzzled and skeptical about any such notion, if not downright offended. I became aware of this thesis much later, when I was well along in the writing of Sophie’s Choice; and though the view was advocated by writers whom I admired, like George Steiner, it was an exhortation I refused to accept, especially when I noted that the demand for silence was often coming the loudest from those who were busy scribbling books about Auschwitz. Certainly the subject required almost unprecedented caution and sensitivity, and respect verging on reverence; but to make Auschwitz, in the literary sense, sacrosanct and beyond reach of words was a pietism I had to reject, if only because it made no sense to me that this monumental human cataclysm should remain buried and lost to memory. Why should writers be denied the chance to illuminate these horrors for future generations?
In my own case, I began to realize, it came down chiefly to the problem of distance. I knew it would be presumptuous of me to try to duplicate the brutal atmosphere of the camps already described in the narratives of Bruno Bettelheim and Eugen Kogon and Raul Hilberg and Primo Levi—or to amplify upon such searing fictional works as André Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just or Jean-François Steiner's Treblinka. These books had exposed the camps’ pathological anatomy, the seething cauldron of the interior of places like Buchenwald and Belsen, in sometimes microscopic close-up. What I needed was a new strategy and a dominant metaphor, and both of these came to me with flashing suddenness one morning in 1974. I had been stymied for a long time with a work in progress, and was open to new inspiration. Awaking on that spring day from a confused dream of the Sophie I had known in Brooklyn so many years before, and being swept at almost the same instant by the memory of Olga Lengyel's ordeal in Five Chimneys, I sensed dream and memory merging into a dramatic concept of stunning inevitability. What if I were to convert my brief encounter with Sophie in Brooklyn—she whose past had been a mystery to me, save for one or two tantalizing tales of wartime Poland she had told me, and whose tattooed arm had evoked questions I dared not ask—into a fictional narrative in which I actually got to know this young woman over a long and turbulent summer?
During that summer she would reveal to me—the callow and credulous, but not entirely unsophisticated, narrator—the secrets of her past, which would include her Polish upbringing, and the arrival of the war, and of her imprisonment in Auschwitz, and a host of other matters bearing on the Nazi terror. All of these details would be unpeeled, layer after layer like an onion, until at last there would be uncovered the most terrible secret of all: the day of her arrival at Auschwitz, and a fatal decision she would be forced to make, one that involved the lives of her children. Here, it seemed to me, was the ultimate expression of totalitarian evil: a system that could force a mother to become her child's murderer was one that had refined the infliction of human suffering to a point at which all other cruelties—the beatings, the tortures, the medical experiments—were an infernal background. And that morning, even as I realized the metaphorical authority of Sophie's dreadful choice, I realized too that I had solved the problem of distance. I would never place Sophie inside the confines of Auschwitz, where as narrator I dared not tread. Sophie would instead, in her memory, always be located in the house of the camp's commandant, outside Auschwitz yet near enough that its vile stench and daily pandemonium would compose that infernal background.
From the beginning it never occurred to me that the Jewish experience under the Nazis was not unique, or that the victimization of the Jews was not of a far greater magnitude than the oppression of others. That others were oppressed, however, and agonizingly so, remained a fact; and among these victims was the Sophie I had known, who remained to me the embodiment of the hundreds of thousands of Polish Catholics whom the Nazis enslaved and, in numerous cases, tortured and killed. As I set out to write the novel, I had no idea how to reconcile these matters within the framework of the narrative, only trusting that my instinct, along with a regard for the historical necessities, would permit me to portray Sophie's tragedy within the more spacious context of the Jewish catastrophe. About a hundred pages into the story of Sophie, I interrupted my work in order to make a trip to Poland and visit Auschwitz. It was an essential trip—among other needs, I had to absorb some of the atmosphere of Cracow, where the real Sophie had spent her childhood—and when I returned home, picking up the narrative where I had left off, I had an amazing revelation: it was a moment that showed, to an extraordinary degree, the autonomy of the subconscious in the process of literary creation.
At this point in the novel, Sophie is describing to Stingo, the narrator and my alter ego, the nature of her relationship to her dead father, a professor of law at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow. She begins to tell Stingo of her love for her father, and of her admiration for his character and his works; among the noble deeds he performed, she says, was that of protecting and hiding Jews during the war, risking his own arrest and execution. I recall halting in midpassage as I wrote this part, saying to myself: The girl’s a liar. I suddenly understood, of course, that Sophie, lying to Stingo as well as to me—the hapless, gullible author—was really trying to conceal from us both one of her most dire and sinister secrets. Her father, the distinguished professor, far from being the gentle humanist Sophie claimed him to be, was in truth a poisonous anti-Semite of frightening dimensions, a man she loathed. And this secret, gradually revealed as the story went forward, became a key to the entire novel, for the book in large part has to be read as a parable of the devastation of anti-Semitism, not only of the Nazi brand run amok, but of the genteel, intellectual variety that had transformed Poland from a nation hospitable to Jews into one seething with anti-Jewish menace.
Hannah Arendt died before my novel was finished, and I often have regretted that she never read it and was unable to observe its reception. Unlike Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice was spared a bitter onslaught of criticism, though it had its detractors. In certain quarters I was accused of “universalizing” or “eroticizing” the Holocaust, whatever these strange terms may really mean, while Elie Wiesel, a writer I respect, took me to task for what Hannah would have regarded as poaching on his turf; Wiesel wrote that, in regard to Auschwitz: “Only those who lived it in their flesh and in their minds can possibly transform their experience into knowledge. Others, despite their best intentions, can never do so.”1 One other response stands out particularly, and if its fear and inflexible rage were any gauge of the effectiveness of my work, they caused me a certain satisfaction. For, although Sophie’s Choice was translated into more than two dozen languages, including Hebrew, it was denied translation for over a decade into Sophie's native tongue. The Polish government forbade its publication on the grounds that the book's depictions of anti-Semitism were a slander against the Polish people; indeed official anger was so great that in 1982,
when calls went out for Polish actors to appear in the film version, then being made in Zagreb, the authorities warned that anyone responding to the offers would be severely punished.
After the Communist downfall, the book was published in large printings and was received generally with enthusiasm. Even so there were fierce holdouts among those Poles who refused to accept the fact that Sophie and her children, while surely victims of the Nazis, were also sacrificed to a native-born enmity. They would not allow themselves to see that Sophie, through her father and his Jew-hatred, is lost beneath a wheel of evil come full circle. It is his doctrine, after all, that crushes his innocent daughter and his even more innocent grandchildren with lethal finality. Such hatred, knowing no boundary, eventually will achieve absolute destruction, consuming everyone, Jews and Christians, even one's own flesh. The annihilation that came from this vicious advocacy, Hannah Arendt perceived, was more than a crime against the Jewish people: “Mankind in its entirety was grievously hurt and endangered.”
[Sewanee Review, Summer 1997.]
Disorders of the Mind
Why Primo Levi Need Not Have Died
Why did the eminent Italian writer Primo Levi die in the shocking way he did?
In the depths of a clinical depression, Mr. Levi, an Auschwitz survivor who had written eloquently of his ordeal under the Nazis, jumped down a stairwell in Turin in 1987.
The question appeared to haunt—indeed, nearly dominate—a recent symposium held at New York University and dedicated to Mr. Levi and his work, according to an article in The New York Times.1 Some participants reacted with simple incredulity.
Alfred Kazin, a distinguished literary critic, was quoted as saying: “It is difficult for me to credit a will to blackness and self-destruction in a writer so happy and full of new projects.”
A friend, rejecting the idea that the writer had planned to kill himself, saw the death as the result of a “sudden uncontrollable impulse”—as if rational deliberation might have somehow colored the act with wrongdoing. In this and other statements, there was at least a tinge of disapproval, an unspoken feeling that through some puzzling failure of moral strength Mr. Levi had failed his staunchest admirers.
Apparently not expressed at the symposium, though quoted in the article, was the harshest example of such a viewpoint: a suggestion in The New Yorker that “the efficacy of all his words had somehow been cancelled by his death.”2 This idea leaves the implication that the force and fervor of a writer's work is rendered invalid if, instead of expiring of natural causes, he takes his life.
What remains most deeply troubling about the account is the apparent inability of the symposium participants to come to terms with a reality that seems glaringly obvious. It is that Mr. Levi's death could not be dissociated from the major depression with which he was afflicted, and that indeed his suicide proceeded directly from that illness.
To those of us who have suffered severe depression—myself included—this general unawareness of how relentlessly the disease can generate an urge to self-destruction seems widespread; the problem badly needs illumination.
Suicide remains a tragic and dreadful act, but its prevention will continue to be hindered, and the age-old stigma against it will remain, unless we can begin to understand that the vast majority of those who do away with themselves—and of those who attempt to do so—do not do it because of any frailty, and rarely out of impulse, but because they are in the grip of an illness that causes almost unimaginable pain. It is important to try to grasp the nature of this pain.
In the winter of 1985–86, I committed myself to a mental hospital because the pain of the depression from which I had suffered for more than five months had become intolerable. I never attempted suicide, but the possibility had become more real and the desire more greedy as each wintry day passed and the illness became more smotheringly intense.
What had begun that summer as an off-and-on malaise and a vague, spooky restlessness had gained gradual momentum until my nights were without sleep and my days were pervaded by a gray drizzle of unrelenting horror. This horror is virtually indescribable, since it bears no relation to normal experience.
In depression, a kind of biochemical meltdown, it is the brain as well as the mind that becomes ill—as ill as any other besieged organ. The sick brain plays evil tricks on its inhabiting spirit. Slowly overwhelmed by the struggle, the intellect blurs into stupidity. All capacity for pleasure disappears, and despair maintains a merciless daily drumming. The smallest commonplace of domestic life, so amiable to the healthy mind, lacerates like a blade.
Thus, mysteriously, in ways difficult to accept by those who have never suffered it, depression comes to resemble physical anguish. Such anguish can become every bit as excruciating as the pain of a fractured limb, migraine, or heart attack.
Most physical distress yields to some analgesia—not so depression. Psychotherapy is of little use to the profoundly depressed, and antidepressants are, to put it generously, unreliable. Even the soothing balm of sleep usually disappears. And so, because there is no respite at all, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.
In the popular mind, suicide is usually the work of a coward or sometimes, paradoxically, a deed of great courage, but it is neither; the torment that precipitates the act makes it often one of blind necessity.
The origins of depression remain a puzzle, despite significant advances in research. Many factors seem to be involved. Aside from the basic chemical disturbance in the brain and behavioral and genetic influences, psychological reasons must be added to the equation. Mr. Levi may have been bedeviled by buried conflicts unrelated to Auschwitz.
Or, indeed, his ordeal at Auschwitz may have imposed on his soul an insupportable burden; other writers wounded by the Holocaust (Paul Celan and Tadeusz Borowski come to mind) decided upon suicide as a way out of the blackness of memory. But the overwhelming majority of camp survivors have chosen to live, and what is of ultimate importance to the victim of depression is not the cause but the treatment and the cure.
What is saddening about Primo Levi's death is the suspicion that his way of dying was not inevitable and that with proper care he might have been rescued from the abyss.
Depression's saving grace (perhaps its only one) is that the illness seems to be self-limiting: Time is the real healer and with or without treatment the sufferer usually gets well.
Even so, presumptuous as it may be to speculate from such a distance, I find it difficult not to believe that if Mr. Levi had been under capable hospital attention, sequestered from the unbearable daily world in a setting where he would have been safe from his self-destructive urge, and where time would have permitted the storm raging in his brain to calm itself and die away, he would be among us now.
But, in any event, one thing appears certain: He succumbed to a disease that proved to be malignant, and not a shred of moral blame should be attached to the manner of his passing.
[New York Times, op-ed, December 19, 1988.]
After the essay on Primo Levi was published in The New York Times I received an enormous number of letters, almost all of them from people who had experienced depression, directly or as a result of being associated with victims of depression, and who felt I had given voice to a subject too-long buried. The essay prompted an invitation from the department of psychiatry of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for me to speak at a symposium on mood disorders; this speech was eventually expanded into a long article in Vanity Fair, and eventually into a book, Darkness Visible.—W.S. (1993)
Prozac Days, Halcion Nights
In the spring of 1991 I was invited to give the keynote address at a symposium to be held in Washington, D.C., for the purpose of discussing depression and the ways to cope with the disease. The gathering, I was told, was to be made up of what might loosely be called semiprofessionals, that is, people who, though not psychiatrists or therapists, had an interest in knowing more about depressive illnesses; they would
include social and welfare workers, hospital administrators, public health and police officials, paramedics, and the like. As a result of my book Darkness Visible, in which I describe my successful struggle with severe clinical depression, I have received a lot of such invitations, and accepted a few (perhaps more than I should have) out of some missionary urge; many people who finally vanquish melancholia's unspeakable demons have the charitable impulse to tell others similarly afflicted not to give up hope, that they can get well. Such support is of critical importance to someone felled by depression. Since countless people don’t think they can make it, and play seriously with the idea of suicide, the recovered victim is walking testimony to the radiant fact that most sufferers, despite their nearly unbearable ordeal, do indeed get well; the very presence of the survivor and his words of encouragement can be lifesaving.
This message of hope was central to my little book; its upbeat nature, not falsely optimistic but rooted in the simple reality that treatment is available and usually effective, would make the foundation for the opening speech I had been asked to give. But I began to have second thoughts. While I still felt the note of cheer was important, and resolved to begin in that spirit, it seemed to me that this might be an opportune moment to sound a warning. And the warning should be one especially meaningful to the participants in the symposium, who I felt had to be put on their guard about a matter that I continue to feel is neglected or consciously shunted aside in most forums on the treatment of depression, and that is the misuse of medications, primarily tranquilizers. Tranquilizers should not be confused with antidepressants, although they are often prescribed to sedate people with depression.
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