William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  He had a spacious yet discriminative style, flecked with sparks of irony. It could be at the same time caustic and seductively convivial. The language was, in fact, superbly articulated German, which in itself had helped gain Professor Biegański his ample measure of renown in such Olympian centers for the propagation of anti-Semitism as Welt-Dienst in Erfurt. His writing had an idiosyncratic charm. (Once that summer in Brooklyn, I pressed upon Sophie a volume of H. L. Mencken, who was then, as now, one of my infatuations, and I observe for what it is worth that she remarked that Mencken’s scathing style reminded her of her father’s.) She took his dictation with care, but because of his runaway fervor, in some haste, so it was not until she got down to the job of typing it out for the printer that she began to glimpse seething in that cauldron of historical allusions and dialectical hypotheses and religious imperatives and legal precedents and anthropological propositions the smoky, ominous presence of a single word—repeated several times—which quite baffled and confounded and frightened her, appearing as it did in this otherwise persuasively practical text, this clever polemic which voiced with breezily scurrilous mockery the sly propaganda she had half heard more than once over the Biegański dinner table. But this word that so alarmed her was a new departure. For those several times he had made her change “total abolishment” (vollständige Abschaffung) to Vernichtung.

  Extermination. In the end it was as simple and as unequivocal as that. Even so, subtly introduced as it was, steeped in the pleasantly spiced broth of the Professor’s discursive, entertainingly acrid animadversions, the word and its full force and meaning—and thus its full meaning as it informed the entire substance of the essay—was so horrible that she had to shove it into the back of her mind throughout the entire bone-chilling winter weekend during which she labored over her father’s impassioned screed. She found herself preoccupied about his rage should she misplace an accent, omit an umlaut. And she was still repressing the very meaning of Vernichtung until that moment in the drizzling dusk of Sunday when, hurrying with the bundle of typescript to meet her father and her husband, Casimir, in a café on the Market Square, she was smitten with horror at what he had said and written and what she, in her complicity, had done. “Vernichtung,” she said aloud. He means, she thought with stupid belatedness, they should all be murdered.

  As Sophie herself implied, it would perhaps add gloss to her image if one could say that her realization of the hatred she bore toward her father not only coincided with but was motivated by her realization that he was an aspiring Jew-killer. But although the two awarenesses did merge together at almost the same moment, Sophie told me (and here I believed her, as I often did, for intuitive reasons) that she must have been emotionally ripe for the blinding revulsion she suddenly felt for her father, and that she very well may have reacted in the way she did had the Professor made no mention whatever of the approaching and wished-for slaughter. She told me she could never be sure. We are speaking here of central truths about Sophie, and I think it is testimony enough to the nature of her sensibilities that exposed for so many years to the rancorous, misshapen, discordant strains of her father’s obsession, and now immersed like a drowning creature in the very midst of the poisonous wellspring of his theology, she should have retained the human instinct to respond with the shock and horror that she did, clutching the atrocious bundle to her breast and hurrying through the misty crooked twilight streets of Cracow toward her revelation.

  “That evening my father was waiting for me at one of the cafés on the Market Square. I remember it was very cold and damp, bits of sleet in the air, feeling like snow might come, you know. My husband, Kazik, was at the table with my father, waiting too. I was quite late because I worked all afternoon typing the manuscripts and it take much longer than I thought it would. I was terribly afraid that my father would be angry at my lateness. The whole thing have been done in such a hurry, you see. It was what I think you call a rush job, and the printer—the man who would print the pamphlet in German and Polish—was to meet my father at the café at a certain hour and pick up the manuscripts. Before this, my father had planned to spend time at his table there correcting the manuscripts. He was to correct the German typescript while Kazik checked over the one in Polish. That was the way it was supposed to be, but I was very late, and when I arrived there the printer had already come and was sitting with my father and Kazik. My father was very angry, and although I made my apologies, I could tell he was just furious, and he quickly take the manuscripts from me and order me to sit down. I sat down and I could feel something painful happen in my stomach I was so afraid of his rage. Strange, Stingo, how you remember certain details. I mean, just this: that my father was drinking tea and Kazik was drinking slivovitz brandy and the printer—this man that I had met before, named Roman Sienkiewicz; yes, just like the name of the famous writer—was drinking vodka. I’m sure I remember such a detail so clearly because of my father’s tea. I mean, you see, after working all afternoon I was just completely exhausted and all I wanted then was a cup of tea, like my father. But I would never order it myself, never! I remember looking at his teapot and his cup and just longing for hot tea like that. And if I had not been so late my father would have offered me tea but now he was furious with me and said nothing about tea, so I just sat there looking down at my fingernails while my father and Kazik began reading the manuscripts.

  “It seemed to take hours. The printer Sienkiewicz—he was a fat man with a mustache, I remember he chuckled a lot—I spoke some things to him about the weather, nothing things, but mainly I just sat there at this cold table, keeping my mouth shut, wanting tea like I was dying of thirst. Finally my father looked up from the manuscript and stared at me and said, ‘Who is this Neville Chamberlain who so loves the works of Richard Wagner?’ And he was looking at me hard, and I didn’t exactly understood what he meant, only that he was terribly displeased. Displeased at me. And I didn’t understood and I said, ‘What do you mean, Papa?’ And he said the question again, this time avec l’accent on Neville, and I suddenly realized I have make a bad mistake. Because, you see, there was this English writer Chamberlain that my father was using in the essay everywhere to support his own philosophy, I don’t know if you have heard of him, he wrote a book called Die Grundlagen des—Oh well, in English I think it have the name Foundation of the Nineteenth Century, and it is filled with love of Germany and worship of Richard Wagner and this very bitter hatred of Jews, saying they contaminate the culture of Europe and such as that. My father had for this Chamberlain such great admiration, only now I realized that when he dictate this name to me I put down unconsciously Neville over and over, because then he was so much in the news because of Munich, instead of putting down Houston Chamberlain, which was the name of the Chamberlain that hates the Jews. And now I am filled with fear because I have repeated this mistake over and over in the footnotes and the bibliography and everywhere else.

  “And oh, Stingo, the shame! Because my father, he is so crazy for perfection that this mistake he can’t fermer les yeux... overlook, but he have to make a big thing out of it then and there, and I heard him say in front of Kazik and Sienkiewicz this, I’ll never forget it, it was so filled with contempt, ‘Your intelligence is pulp, like your mother’s. I don’t know where you got your body, but you did not get your brains from me.’ And I hear Sienkiewicz make a chuckle, more in embarrassment than anything, I guess, and I look up at Kazik and he is giving this little smile, only I was not surprised that this look on his face seemed to share my father’s contempt. You may as well know now, Stingo, about another lie I told you weeks ago. I really had no love for Kazik either at that time, I had no more love for my husband than for a stone-faced stranger I had never seen before in my life. Such an abundance of lies I have given you, Stingo! I am the avatar of menteuses...

  “On and on my father go about my intelligence, or failure of it, and I felt my face burning, but I shut up my ears, turned my hearing off. Papa, Papa, I remember saying to myself,
please, all I want is a cup of tea! Then my father stopped attacking me and went back to reading the manuscript. And I was suddenly very frightened sitting there, looking down at my hands. It was cold. This café, it was like a premonition of hell. I heard people murmuring on all sides of me, and it all seemed to be in this hurtful key of a profound minor, like one of Beethoven’s final quarters, you know, like grief, and there was this... this clammy wind sighing outside on the streets, and I suddenly realized that around me everyone was whispering about the coming war. I thought I could almost hear guns somewhere far-off, on the horizon past the city. I felt a deep fright and I wanted to get up and run away, but all I could do was sit there. Finally I heard my father ask Sienkiewicz how long it would be for the printing, rush job, and Sienkiewicz said the day after tomorrow. Then I realized that my father was talking to Kazik about the distribution of the pamphlets to the faculty of the university. Most of the pamphlets he was planning to send to places in Poland and in Germany and Austria, but he wanted a few hundred of the pamphlets which was in Polish to be passed around among the faculty—passed around by hand. And I realized that he was telling Kazik—telling I say, because he have him under the thumb just like me—that he wanted him to distribute the pamphlets personally at the university as soon as they were printed. Only he would of course need help. And I heard my father say, ‘Sophie will help you pass them out.’

  “And then I realized that almost the one single thing on earth that I did not want to be forced to do was to be impliquée any more with that pamphlet. And it make me revolted to think that I must go around the university with a stack of these things, giving them to the professors. But just as my father said this—‘Sophie will help you pass them out’—I knew that I would be there with Kazik, passing out these sheets just like I done everything he told me to do since I was a little girl, running these errands, bringing him things, learning to use the typewriter and knowing shorthand just so he could use me whenever he wanted. And this terrible emptiness come over me when I realize just then there was nothing I could do about it, no way of saying no, no way possible to say, ‘Papa, I’m not going to help you spread this thing.’ But you see, Stingo, there is a truth I must tell you that even now I can’t understood or truly make clear. Because maybe it look much better if I said I would not help pass out this thing of my father’s just because I finally see he is saying in it: Murder Jews. That was bad I knew, terrible, and even then I couldn’t hardly believe this was actually what he’d written.

  “But to be truthful, it was something else. It was at last coming clear to me that this man, this father, this man which give me breath and flesh have no more feeling for me than a servant, some peasant or slave, and now with not a word of thanks for all my work was going to make me... grovel?—yes, grovel through the halls of the university like some newspaper vendor, once more doing what he said just because he said I must do it. And I was a grown woman and I wanted to play Bach, and at that moment I just thought I must die—I mean, to die not so much for what he was making me do but because I had no way of saying no. No way of saying—oh, you know, Stingo—‘Fuck you, Papa.’ Just then he said, ‘Zosia,’ and I looked up and he was smiling at me a little, I could see his two false teeth shining, and the smile was pleasant and he said, ‘Zosia, wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?’ And I said, ‘No, thank you, Papa.’ Then he said, ‘Come, Zosia, you must have some tea, you look pale and cold.’ I wanted to fly away on wings. I said, ‘No, thank you, Papa, I really don’t want any tea.’ And at that time to keep control I was biting the inside of my lip so hard that the blood came, and I could taste it like seawater on my tongue. He turned to talk to Kazik then. And it happened, this sharp stab of hatred. It went through me with this surprising quick pain and I got dizzy and I thought I might fall to the floor. I was hot all over, in a blaze. I said to myself: I hate him—with a kind of terrible wonder at the hatred which entered into me. It was incredible, the surprise of this hatred, only with awful pain—like a butcher knife in my heart.”

  Poland is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, soul-split country which in many ways (I came to see through Sophie’s eyes and memory that summer, and through my own eyes in later years) resembles or conjures up images of the American South—or at least the South of other, not-so-distant times. It is not alone that forlornly lovely, nostalgic landscape which creates the frequent likeness—the quagmiry but haunting monochrome of the Narew River swampland, for example, with its look and feel of a murky savanna on the Carolina coast, or the Sunday hush on a muddy back street in a village of Galicia, where by only the smallest eyewink of the imagination one might see whisked to a lonesome crossroads hamlet in Arkansas these ramshackle, weather-bleached little houses, crookedly carpentered, set upon shrubless plots of clay where scrawny chickens fuss and peck—but in the spirit of the nation, her indwellingly ravaged and melancholy heart, tormented into its shape like that of the Old South out of adversity, penury and defeat.

  Imagine, if you will, a land in which carpetbaggers swarmed not for a decade or so but for millennia and you will come to understand just one aspect of a Poland stomped upon with metronomic tedium and regularity by the French, the Swedes, the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and possessed by even such greedy incubuses as the Turks. Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories. Pride in ancestry and family name, and also, one must remember, in a largely factitious aristocracy, or nobility. The names Radziwill and Ravenel are pronounced with the same intense albeit slightly hollow hauteur. In defeat both Poland and the American South bred a frenzied nationalism. Yet, indeed, even leaving aside these most powerful resemblances, which are very real and which find their origin in similar historical fountains (there should be added: an entrenched religious hegemony, authoritarian and puritanical in spirit), one discovers more superficial yet sparkling cultural correspondences: the passion for horseflesh and military titles, domination over women (along with a sulky-sly lechery), a tradition of storytelling, addiction to the blessings of firewater. And being the butt of mean jokes.

  Finally there is a sinister zone of likeness between Poland and the American South which, although anything but superficial, causes the two cultures to blend so perfectly together as to seem almost one in their shared extravagance—and that has to do with the matter of race, which in both worlds has produced centuries-long, all-encompassing nightmare spells of schizophrenia. In Poland and the South the abiding presence of race has created at the same instant cruelty and compassion, bigotry and understanding, enmity and fellowship, exploitation and sacrifice, searing hatred and hopeless love. While it may be said that the darker and uglier of these opposing conditions has usually carried the day, there must also be recorded in the name of truth a long chronicle in which decency and honor were at moments able to controvert the absolute dominion of the reigning evil, more often than not against rather large odds, whether in Poznan or Yazoo City.

  Thus when Sophie originally spun out her fairy tale regarding her father’s hazardous mission to protect some Jews of Lublin, she surely must have known that she was not asking me to believe the impossible; that Poles on numberless occasions in the near and distant past risked their lives to save Jews from whatever oppressor is a simple matter of fact beyond argument, and even though at that time I had small information about such things, I was not inclined to doubt Sophie, who, struggling with the demon of her own schizoid conscience, chose to throw upon the Professor a falsely beneficent, even heroic light. But if Poles by the thousands have sheltered Jews, hidden Jews, laid down their lives for Jews, they have also at times, in the agony of their conjugate discord, persecuted them with undeviating savagery; it was within this continuum of the Polish spirit that Professor Biegański properly belonged, and it was there that Sophie had eventually to reinstate him for my benefit, in order to interpret
the happenings at Auschwitz...

  The subsequent history of the Professor’s pamphlet is well worth recording. Obeying her father to the end, Sophie together with Kazik did spread the pamphlet around in the university hallways, but it turned out to be a decisive flop. In the first place, the members of the faculty, like everyone else in Cracow, were too preoccupied with their apprehension over the coming war—then only months away—to be much concerned with the Biegański message. Hell was beginning to erupt. The Germans were demanding the annexation of Gdansk, agitating for a “corridor”; while Neville Chamberlain still dithered, the Huns were clamoring in the west, shaking the flimsy Polish gates. The cobbled, ancient streets of Cracow became filled daily with the hum of a subdued panic. Under the circumstances, how could even the most committed racists among the faculty be diverted by the Professor’s cunning dialectics? There was too much in the air of a sense of onrushing doom for anyone to be diverted by such a shopworn crotchet as the oppression of Jews.

  At the moment all Poland felt potentially oppressed. Moreover, the Professor had made some basic miscalculations, so grossly off kilter as to call into question his guiding judgment. It was not only his sordid insertion of the issue of Vernichtung—even the most hidebound of the teachers had no stomach for such a notion, presented in whatever Swiftian mode of corrosive ridicule—but it was that Third Reich worship and pan-Germanic rapture of his which at this late date would make him blind and deaf to his colleagues’ own throbbing, heartfelt patriotism. Sophie eventually saw that only a few years before, during Poland’s Fascist resurgence, her father might have gained some converts; now with the Wehrmacht edging ponderously eastward, these Teutonic screams for Gdansk, the Germans provoking incidents along all the borders, how could it be other than a sublime foolishness to ask whether National Socialism had the answer to anything except Polish destruction? The upshot of the matter was that while the Professor and his pamphlet were generally ignored in the accelerating chaos, he also received a couple of unexpected nasty licks. Two young graduate students, members of the Polish army reserve, roughed him up badly in a university vestibule, breaking a finger, and one night Sophie recalled something shattering the dining-room window—a large paving block painted with a spidery black swastika.