Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Something about all this isn’t right. While it appeals to a certain taste in popular entertainment, which cannot get enough of “old” England—Downton Abbey, most recently, to say nothing of Upstairs, Downstairs, the endless succession of Austen and Forster adaptations; a taste that, I suspect, will make The Stranger’s Child the most popular of Hollinghurst’s books yet—this abundant tenderness for an England long past sits ill with the other story that’s being told here, however atrophied it is: the subversive gay story, which reminds us of what often lay behind those impressive or charming façades: the class arrogance, the middle-class “niceness” that ruined so many lives. Mrs. Sawle’s discovery of Cecil’s love letters to George triggers a confrontation so traumatic that George ends up trapped for the rest of his life in an airless marriage to a dour lady academic.

  And so there’s a strange waffling at the heart of The Stranger’s Child. I was struck by the author’s complicated sympathy for Paul Bryant, who can’t decide if he wants to cheat Daphne’s family or infiltrate them (he ends up doing both); and wondered whether, like Paul—like many of us gay men over the past generation, with its galvanizing traumas and its great successes, too—Hollinghurst the writer can no longer quite decide who he stands with: the “queer” outsiders or the establishment. With its sepia regrets and wry chuckling over its harmlessly wayward characters, The Stranger’s Child is not the book you’d have thought this author was likely to end up writing, back in the days of Will Beckwith’s long showers at the gym. Like Cecil’s tomb, it’s “a thoroughly dignified piece of work, in fact magnificently proper,” as George admits; but one in which—as he murmurs while gazing at the curiously insufficient marble likeness—you “don’t quite feel” you’ve found the person you once knew.

  —The New York Review of Books, November 10, 2011

  * It is dismaying, indeed, to see an author of Hollinghurst’s sophistication and culture lapsing into the old British literary habit of using Jewish names, and their owners, to mark a falling away from pristine Britishness. Daphne’s marital history seems intended to suggest a descending arc: her second, untitled husband is a bisexual painter who is killed in World War II, and her third and final spouse is a certain “Mr. Jacobs,” a “nice” small-time manufacturer who did not, apparently, fight in the war. What we know of Sharon Feingold herself suggests a Trollopian caricature: she is the heiress to a vinegar fortune (used by her titled husband to fix up his castle), described as a “thoughtless social dynamo.” An equally nineteenth-century touch is that, in The Line of Beauty, the money behind the right-wing politician with whom the narrator lives and who is the book’s symbol of Thatcher-era moral corruption is a Rothschild-like Jewish banking fortune. In this context it’s worth mentioning that in the 1920s section of the book, the irritating photographer assigned to photograph the Valances at home—he refers to the children as “kiddies,” and seems intended to represent the distressingly crass “modern” world of publicity and celebrity—is called Jerry Goldblatt. While the encounter between Dudley and Goldblatt may be intended to underscore the former’s distasteful prejudices, what I see as the hidden strain of regressiveness in the author’s own nostalgia for Old England makes these small details come off badly.

  These points, when I made them, in slightly different form, in my original article and then in two letters, provoked a strong reaction, first from Galen Strawson, a philosopher and a friend of Hollinghurst’s, and then from the author himself. The full exchanges may be found at www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/08/​strangers​-child​/ ​and ​at​ ​www.nybooks.com/​articles/​archives/2012/jan/12/​strangers-child-exchange/.

  TRANSGRESSION

  LIKE ORESTES, THE hero of the Greek tragedy to which its title alludes—and which, according to its author, has from the start provided his novel with its “underlying structure”—The Kindly Ones has been both extravagantly blessed and hideously cursed. Published in France in 2006 as Les Bienveillantes, it was immediately crowned with the most prestigious critical garlands: not only rapturous reviews but also both the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française. It was, too, gilded by an astonishing commercial success, selling more than 700,000 copies in France and commanding enormous advances from foreign publishers (nearly $600,000 for German rights alone, and a reputed seven figures for the US rights). This combination of kudos and euros, together with a subject matter that is, to put it mildly, sensational—the book, which runs to nearly a thousand pages, takes the form of a memoir of an SS officer who, apart from the wartime activities that he recalls in meticulous detail, is also a homosexual matricide who has an incestuous relationship with his twin sister—has had a large part in giving the novel the luster of triumph and excess that accompanies its arrival on foreign shores.

  As for the curses, these have been abundant, too—starting in France itself. Claude Lanzmann, whose epic documentary Shoah Jonathan Littell has referred to as an inspiration for his book, was not alone there in denouncing what he called the novel’s “decor of death,” the way in which, as some critics saw it, the book and, perhaps, its author seem to revel in offering graphic details of atrocities.

  It comes as no surprise that a book that is preoccupied with giving a persuasive account of what it would be like to be an ostensibly civilized person who ends up doing unimaginably uncivilized things should, for the most part, have been enthusiastically embraced and, to a far lesser extent, vigorously resisted in a country that has such a tortured historic relationship to questions of collaboration and resistance. For the same reason, perhaps, you’re not surprised to learn that the most violent criticism of the “monstrous” book’s “kitsch” and “pornography of violence” has come from Germany and Israel: the countries, that is to say, of the perpetrators and the victims. The critic of Die Zeit bitterly asked why she should

  read a book written by an educated idiot who writes badly, is haunted by sexual perversities and abandoned himself to racist ideology and an archaic belief in fate? I am afraid that I have yet to find the answer.

  The answer to that impatient query surely has something to do with the novel’s large ambitions, which precisely address the question of why we would be interested in how an educated person could abandon himself to racist ideology, and what the ramifications of that abandonment might look like. Some of these ambitions are brilliantly realized; others much less so. But all of them make Littell’s book a serious one, deserving of serious treatment.

  The key to these ambitions lies in the complex resonances of the novel’s title. Bienveillantes is the French rendering of the classical Greek word eumenides: the “well-meaning” or “kindly” ones, the ritual appellation rather hopefully used to designate the awful supernatural beings far better known to us as the Erinyes, or Furies. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia—a work that Littell’s novel repeatedly invokes, from the protagonist’s casual reference to his closest friend as his “Pylades” to large plot elements, not the least of which is his apparent murder of his mother and her second husband—the hero Orestes is pursued by these awful, slavering, dog-faced creatures, whose province is the punishment of kin murder, after he kills his mother, Clytemnestra, in a divinely ordained retribution for her murder of Orestes’ father, Agamemnon. (Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia in order to win favorable winds for his fleet’s journey to Troy.)

  The heart of the trilogy is in fact a competition between the claims of vengeance and the claims of justice: not for nothing does its climax, in the third play, take the form of a trial scene. For Eumenides ends with Orestes being acquitted by a newly instituted formal court of law, a result that enrages the Furies, who are finally appeased with a promise that they will henceforth no longer be reviled bogies but incorporated into the life of the Athenian state and given a new home beneath the Acropolis. In accordance with their new, rather domesticated status, their name gets prettified, too: instead of the dreadful Furies they will henceforth be know
n as the Eumenides, “the kindly ones.” And yet it is hard not to feel that this ostensibly happy ending has disturbing overtones: How tame, really, do we think these superficially redubbed Furies will be?

  To name a literary work after the third play in Aeschylus’ trilogy, then, is to invoke, with extreme self-consciousness, two related themes: one having to do with civilization in general, and the other with human nature. The former concerns justice, its nature and uses: how it is instituted, and then executed, how much it conflicts with, regulates, and possibly appeases the more primitive thirst for vengeance, which it is meant to supersede. The latter concerns the unsettling way in which, beneath even the most pleasant, “kindly” exteriors, dark and potentially violent forces lurk. Neither, needless to say, is restricted to Greek tragedy, or classical civilization; if anything, both are intimately connected to the main preoccupation of Littell’s novel, the German program of extermination during World War II.

  The Kindly Ones comprises two large structural elements intended to explore these questions. The first is the historical/documentary plot—that is to say, the meticulous chronological re-creation of Maximilien Aue’s wartime career from 1941 to 1945, which allows us to track Germany’s career, too: from the mass graves in eastern Poland and the Ukraine, following Operation Barbarossa, to Babi Yar and Kiev, to the Caucasus, and thence (after he irritates a senior officer who punishes him by sending him to the front) to the disaster at Stalingrad, then back to Berlin where he becomes a favorite of Himmler and Eichmann; then a stint in Paris which allows him to catch up with friends from his student days, collaborators who, like many of the characters, are real historical figures (Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet); then a posting to Auschwitz in 1943, and finally, the fall of Berlin itself, which finds the Zelig-like Aue in Hitler’s bunker. This itinerary allows Aue to be both eyewitness to and participant in the atrocities—and, because this narrator is an educated, reasonable-seeming man, allows the reader some access to the mentality of a perpetrator.

  The second structural element is the mythic/sexual: that is, the entirety of the Oresteia story, superimposed on the primary narrative and consisting of flashbacks to Aue’s earlier life and of events transpiring in the wartime present, which establishes him as a latter-day Orestes. He is obsessed with his soldier father’s disappearance at the end of the Great War, and with what he sees as the unforgivable betrayal of his father by his “odious bitch” mother. (“It’s as if they had murdered him.… What a disgrace! For their shameful desires!”) He has an unnatural closeness to his Electra-like twin sister, Una, which turns out to be incestuous. (This is a nod to Chateaubriand’s René, a Gothic tale of brother-sister incest, one of the many French novels that preside over Littell’s text; the sibling-incest theme is also a notorious element in the work of the twelfth century German bard Hartmann von Aue, whose name Littell has borrowed for his hero). He kills, or at least believes he has killed, his mother and her second husband, in a scene closely modeled on Greek myth, including the mother’s desperate baring of her breast to her ax-wielding son. He is pursued relentlessly by agents of punishment—in this case, a pair of noirish detectives given the suggestive names of Weser and Clemens. (These were the names of the two Gestapo officers who, in real life, harrassed Victor Klemperer, the German Jew whose diaries, I Will Bear Witness, have become an indispensable document for the study of the history of the Holocaust—characterized, you might say, by the same proportion of narrative drama and mundane, meticulous, sometimes tedious detail that you find in Littell’s novel.) All this is overlaid with increasingly elaborately narrated sexual fantasies and activities, culminating in an onanistic orgy at his sister’s abandoned house as the Russians enter Pomerania.

  The surprise—and also a key to understanding the outrage Littell’s book has provoked, and the reasons for its successes and its failures—is the way in which these structures are meant to tackle the large themes suggested by his Aeschylean title. For it is, in fact, the historical structure that is meant to shed light on the problem of human nature; while it is the mythic-sexual element—and above all, if I am reading Littell’s complex allusion to a much more recent revision of the Orestes myth correctly, those explicit and even pornographic sexual scenes—that are meant to explore the nature of crime, atrocity, and justice.

  The conflict between civilization and the ugly energies that civilized institutions seek, and often fail, to contain is a tension that stands at the center of any discussion of the moral implications of the Holocaust—a tension that can be seen reflected at the level of individual psychology, too. For the question of how it could have been possible for a country with Germany’s superior cultural achievements to have also created Auschwitz inevitably raises, as well, the related question of how individual Germans (or Poles, or Ukrainians, or Latvians, or Lithuanians, or Frenchmen, and so forth)—who, for the most part, saw themselves as reasonable, normal people, and indeed led normal-looking lives throughout the war, apart from their participation in the crimes—could have perpetrated horrors which, perhaps naively, perhaps self-servingly, we like to refer to as “inhuman.”

  But in a passage that typifies a provocative aversion to sentiment that is likely to alienate some readers, Littell’s protagonist disdains any use of the word “inhuman” when talking about Nazi atrocities. Here, Aue recalls the case of a soldier who, he learns, had originally joined the police force because “it was the only way to be sure I could put food on the table,” and had ended up as part of a unit given the horrific task of liquidating hopelessly wounded soldiers—German soldiers—at the collapsing Russian front:

  There was a lot of talk, after the war, in trying to explain what had happened, about inhumanity. But I am sorry, there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity: and that Döll is a good example. What else was he, Döll, but a good family man who wanted to feed his children, and who obeyed his government, even though in his innermost being he didn’t entirely agree?

  The singular achievement of Littell’s novel is the way in which he brings us uncomfortably close to the thinking of people whose careers took them from police work to euthanasia, and worse. The twist is that while Aue tries to get into the mind of an ordinary, working-class man like Döll, Littell very persuasively illumines the thoughts of Aue himself. And why not? He is a well-educated and indeed sensitive person, musical, literate, cultured, who far from being monstrously indifferent to the crimes he sees perpetrated and that he himself is called on to commit, spends a good deal of time reflecting on the questions of guilt and responsibility that a self-aware person could be expected to entertain. Littell makes a point of having Aue—at least at the beginning, before he collapses into his garish Götter-dämmerung—refuse to acquit himself of responsibility, the defense that became the notorious byword of the war-crimes trials:

  I am not pleading Befehlnotstand, the just-obeying-orders so highly valued by our good German lawyers. What I did, I did with my eyes open, believing that it was my duty and that it had to be done, disagreeable or unpleasant as it may have been. For that is what total war means: there is no such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between the Jewish child gassed or shot and the German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method; both deaths were equally vain.…

  “My duty and … it had to be done,” of course, begs the question of the morality of the duty to Nazi ideology. The character’s fierce attachment to the “absolutes” of ideology is meant to be explained by the book’s mythic/sexual elements, by that landscape of psycho-sexual aberration: a psychologizing cliché that many critics have dismissed. But I think that there is something to Littell’s interest in showing us a picture of ideology in action, of what things look like once ordinary and even thoughtful people begin to help carry out ideologies that may well look appalling to others—Manifest Destiny, Iraq, the West Bank.

  It’s for this reason that Littell keeps reminding us that Aue himself is disgusted by the overt sadists he enc
ounters, rightly objecting that “the ordinary men that make up the State—especially in unstable times—now there’s the real danger. The real danger for mankind is me, is you.” Anyone who has studied the Holocaust will recognize the bitter wisdom in this statement; its history is peopled with soldiers and civilians, Germans and Poles and Ukrainians and Dutch and Frenchmen, who went to church on Sunday, worried about their health, took care of their sick wives, fretted about their raises and promotions, slapped their children for lying or cheating, and spent the occasional afternoon shooting Jewish grandmothers and children in the head. While some will denounce Littell’s cool-eyed authorial sympathy for Aue as “obscene”—and by “sympathy” I mean simply his attempt to comprehend the character—his project seems infinitely more valuable than the reflexive gesture of writing off all those millions of killers as “monsters” or “inhuman,” which allows us too easily to draw a solid line between “them” and “us.” The first line of the novel takes the form of Aue’s unsettling salutation to his “human brothers”: the purpose of the book, one in which it largely succeeds, is to keep alive, however improbably, that troubling sense of kinship.

  How Littell accomplishes this aim is worth considering, and brings us to the question of his novel’s style and technique—one that has often been raised by his detractors. It is true that at the level of words and sentences, Littell’s style is unremarkable, even pedestrian—his translator, Charlotte Mandell, has produced an admirably fluid English version that is more pleasing to read than the French. This novel invariably goes off the tracks when the author strives for writerly effects. Sentences such as “My thoughts fled in all directions, like a school of fish in front of a diver” or “I emerged from the war an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame, like sand crunching in your teeth” are all the more wince-inducing for the success with which Littell so often conveys the drearily everyday chitchat, the gossip about promotions and orders, of his military milieu.