Wartime Lies
Page 17
It doesn’t matter. One day soon, Tania will leave. Then Maciek and his father and Pani Doctor Olga will also go away. He will never see Kościelny again or have news from him, because Kościelny will not know Maciek’s name or what he has become. And where is Maciek now? He became an embarrassment and slowly died. A man who bears one of the names Maciek used has replaced him. Is there much of Maciek in that man? No: Maciek was a child, and our man has no childhood that he can bear to remember; he has had to invent one. And the old song is a lie. No matter how long or gaily the music plays, Maciek will not rise to dance again. Nomen et cineres una cum vanitate sepulta.
Afterword
by Louis Begley
IN order to prepare this Afterword, I reread Wartime Lies last month, for the first time since 1995, the year in which it appeared in Polish translation. Such a long absence from one of my texts is by no means unusual: I pore over them strenuously when I correct galleys, I read from the finished books when I am on reading tours that follow their initial appearances, and I review and correct translations into languages that I know. I remember vividly that reading the Polish translation, which was excellent, moved me to tears. This is what my book would have been like, I said to myself, if I had not left Poland just before my thirteenth birthday, if I were a Polish writer. When I came to my senses I told myself, more reasonably, that in truth I could not have written Wartime Lies in Polish or any other language if I had not become an exile, someone not unlike the “man with a nice face and sad eyes” who, on the opening page of my novel, broods over the Aeneid and his native town in far distant eastern Poland.
I realize that I have just concurred in the general assumption that I am not unlike that man, and I will go further and acknowledge the truth of what has seemed obvious to many readers and critics: little Maciek’s life in T. in the years before World War II was not very different from my own life during that time in a town called Stryj. T. and Stryj are located in the same part of pre-World War II Poland, and the subsequent adventures of Tania and Maciek resemble, in broad outline, my mother’s and my experiences when, using Aryan papers in Lwów, Warsaw, and the Mazowsze, we disguised our Jewish identity and so escaped capture by Germans and assassination. Nor is my own impression of Poland directly after the war dissimilar from what I portrayed as Maciek’s perception of it in Chapter VIII of Wartime Lies. At the same time, upon rereading my book, it is clearer to me than ever, that it is quintessentially a work of fiction and not an autobiography or memoir, and that I had to write the story of Maciek and Tania in the form of a novel. The form was no less necessary than the emotional distance from the events I was going to evoke conferred by exile and the passage of time.
Perhaps I should briefly explain what I mean when I refer to the form of the novel. I understand the convention of the realist novel—a tradition in which I place myself—to require the novelist to write avowedly invented stories that so engage the reader’s interest and sympathy that, while the spell lasts, he believes they are true or, at least, suspends disbelief. Novelistic invention does not, of course, preclude use of the novelist’s own experiences and observations—of himself and others—in addition to material whose connection to his actual experience may be tenuous or indiscernible as he puts words down on paper. That is because the act of writing has the power to release thoughts and images of which one has had no premonition; one did not know they were within one’s ability to summon up. Of course, when the novel has at last been finished, none of the material included in it has conserved its nature, whether it be personal experience, make believe, or serendipitous discovery; all of it has been transformed, as though the writer were a silkworm, and the bits and pieces of memory, associations, and knowledge leaves of a mulberry bush. These characteristics of the novel as form have an importance for me that I cannot overstate. They give the freedom to invent, consistent with the profound moral and psychological truth of the story being told, that I treasure as my essential prerogative, and, like the passage of time and exile, they provide a psychic screen that has permitted me to approach matters, including the annihilation of Jews in Poland, that would otherwise seem intractable, even forbidden.
It should by now be clear that my insistence on the fictional nature of Wartime Lies is not a form of coquetry, and has nothing to do with some bizarre need on my part to avoid embarrassment to my mother or me. Neither of us has any more cause to apologize for or be ashamed of our lies or degradation during those war years than did Tania or Maciek—if I exclude the profound shame and disgrace of belonging to the same animal species as the men and women whose cruel and vile deeds I describe.
There are simpler reasons, too, why Wartime Lies had to be a work of fiction: As I have said in the course of many interviews, even if I had been interested in writing some sort of historical and autobiographical account, the memories of the first years of my life and of the war that I had at my disposal were too skimpy. They had to be built upon by the faculty of imagination to permit me to fashion the story I had in mind. Moreover, I had no intention to write about my mother while she was alive. I wanted a different heroine for a time of unprecedented upheaval and horror: a desire no different in nature from Stendhal’s, when he created the Duchess of Sanseverina, or Pasternak’s, when he created Lara. As for my vision of myself as a little boy, I thought that the figure I remembered would come through as too indistinct for my purposes; its contours had to be sharpened and its hue heightened. Only the grandfather in Wartime Lies is as true to my memories as I could make him. That was an act of love and piety for the dead, which I succeeded in repeating only partially when it came to the portrait of the father, because the story required that my recollection of my father and of myself be somewhat altered, and that certain elements be added.
I have dwelt on the inadequacy of recollection, the alteration of what had been in fact remembered, and the freedom to invent in order to tell the story. Do I mean to suggest that Wartime Lies is to be distrusted? Certainly not. As I reread my novel, with that question among others in mind, I recognized once more the fundamental psychological honesty of what I had written, as well as its historical truth in all essential aspects. It so happens—but I consider this circumstance largely irrelevant—that the significant incidents in Wartime Lies, even those that are the most extreme, contain few elements of fancy; the invention has consisted in the collation of images and actions, the compression of scenes, and the addition of occasional details for aesthetic purposes (typical examples that come to mind are the parrot in an open cage being carried on the shoulder of a man and the tweed of which the suit worn by the young mother was made, both in the description of the march to the Central Station almost at the end of the Warsaw uprising). The same can be fairly said of the thrust of the conversations. If that is so, a reader may ask, why do you not admit that you wrote a memoir, after all? Why do you instead insist on your book’s being a novel? The answer lies in the description I have given of the composition of Wartime Lies. The quantity of material in it that does correspond to specific observations is not related to an ambition to write a history, or to any failure of my imagination; it has, however, much to do with my desire to treat a period of despair with total tenderness and respect. A skeptical reader may also wonder how I can be certain that I recognized, fifteen years after writing it, the truth or error of my portrayal of events that took place more than sixty years ago. The answer is that one may forget distant events and yet have no doubt that a representation of them is false, if that is the case. And, the skeptical reader should remember that I lay claim to psychological honesty and historical truth in essentials, and not to the factual truth of an on-the-scene reportage.
That I have striven for fundamental honesty in Wartime Lies is not unique: That has been my goal also in my other novels, for aesthetic if not moral reasons. I believe that no effort to create a work of art can succeed otherwise, the adherence to a standard of verisimilitude being a separate matter, dependent on other ambitions. In the case of Warti
me Lies, after I had completed the text and had gained a modicum of assurance as to its artistic merit, I was nevertheless deeply troubled about the rightness of publishing a work on the subject I had chosen unless it was purely scientific, in other words unless it was as accurate a historical account of what had transpired in Poland during World War II as scholarly effort could achieve. But, I had a story to tell that was not a lie, and at a certain point I came to see that I had told it as well as I could, in the only way I knew how to tell it. The conclusion followed that the taboo I feared did not apply. I did not lock the manuscript in a drawer of my desk. Instead, I sent it to its original publisher. I do not regret my decision.
MARCH 2004
WARTIME LIES
A Reader’s Guide
LOUIS BEGLEY
A CONVERSATION WITH LOUIS BEGLEY
Jack Miles, former book editor of the Los Angeles Times and past president of the National Book Critics Circle, won a Pulitzer Prize for his book God: A Biography (Vintage). After the publication of Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God in 2001, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. A former Jesuit, widely published on cultural, religious, and literary topics, Miles serves as senior advisor to the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust and as senior fellow with the Pacific Council on International Policy.
Jack Miles: The body of this novel is written in the first person, but it opens and closes in the third person, and the voice we hear then intrudes twice along the way—I think, especially, of the end of Chapter IV. What were you aiming at by this shift? What should readers be watching for in their own reaction at these points?
Louis Begley: There are several reasons for the change that occurs at the very end of Chapter IV from first-person narration—the speaker until then having been ostensibly little Maciek—to narration in the third person by an authorial voice.
The first one involved my personal, very intimate feelings. During those years of catastrophe and horror, the conduct that hurt and humiliated me most was that of my fellow Poles: their hatred of Jews, their utter callousness in the face of the unspeakable suffering and extinction of their former friends and neighbors, their contemptible duplicity. It was a breach of fundamental good faith and betrayal that scarred me more than anything I saw done by Germans or Ukrainians. I know perfectly well—and you and my readers should not doubt—that there were Poles who showed extraordinary decency and courage in their dealings with Polish Jews, risking death and torture at the hands of Germans. Alas, they were invisible to me in the vast grey mass of the others. The ultimate injury and betrayal was, of course, the virulence of Polish anti-Semitism in evidence immediately after the Soviet army drove the Germans out of Polish territory, as demonstrated for instance by the pogroms and killings in Kielce and Cracow, events that cause little Maciek, his aunt, and his father to continue the lie of Aryan identity. I found myself overwhelmed, unable to control my voice, when I tried to describe the continued humiliation in words spoken by Maciek, and to show through him the depth of his disillusionment and despair. It occurred to me that this was a job for a grownup. So I let the author or perhaps—the ambiguity is intentional—the same “man with a nice face and sad eyes” who in the first pages of the book remembers his childhood in Poland express Maciek’s anger and scorn. And, of course, announce the “death” of the little boy.
Second, I thought that as a matter of aesthetic choice it would be right to balance the first pages of the book, which give the point of view of a grownup—the man who we are led to think was the child he chooses to call Maciek—with a return on the closing pages to a grownup’s vision and tone of voice.
Finally—I return here to deeply personal feelings—there were moments during the composition of Wartime Lies when I literally needed to pause for breath. The italicized passages drawing on Dante’s Inferno are such stops on my via dolorosa. They represent attempts by “the man with a nice face,” or perhaps by the author, to call to his aid the greatest connoisseur of evil in Western literature, one who was equipped with a remarkable grid of values through which to assess it. They allowed me to have someone other than Maciek speak. That was an urgent necessity. Curiously, I thought of those passages at the time as a window letting in fresh air just as I was close to suffocating. Something of the same nature was at work in the intrusion that closes Chapter IV.
It is a task for the reader’s sympathy and imagination to search for further links between these disclosures and Maciek’s story.
JM: Is your ideal reader one who will forget the adult Maciek—actually, as you point out, an unnamed, sad-eyed adult—most of the time and simply relive the harrowing, suspenseful experiences of the boy? Or do you instead dream of a reader who will, at each step of the journey, think not so much of the boy as of the adult remembering him?
LB: My ideal reader is attentive and blessed by the gifts of sympathy and imagination. You will note that I am going back in this reply to what I said in answer to your first question. Provided the reader has those qualities, all I want to do is to withdraw, to get out of the way and let the reader make of my work what he or she wishes.
That being said, I believe that if I were the reader I would think of myself as Maciek; I would crawl into his skin. I also believe that I would not be able to keep out of my mind the questions raised by the passage in which the adult man remembers what may have been his own childhood: What is such a man like? How does one grow up after a childhood that has been similarly blasted?
It may interest you that my working title for Wartime Lies, which I abandoned with some reluctance, was The Education of a Monster.
JM: That title strikes the ear as a slap strikes the face. I wince at it. But even Wartime Lies, as a less confrontational alternative, has something hard and unflinching about it. “Lies?” the reader thinks; “Don’t you mean disguises? Or maybe ruses?” But what were objectively disguises or ruses were subjectively lies. To give the matter a very innocuous formulation, Maciek acquired some bad habits, thanks to Nazism and Polish anti-Semitism. When wartime Poland was behind him and he could finally drop the ruse and shed the disguise, those bad habits may have lingered.
Something in the reader, as this theft of childhood takes place, wants you to go a little easier on Maciek—one might even want you to like him a little better. But during the war, Maciek dared not go easy on himself or, so to speak, sweet on himself. A single moment of self-indulgence, and all would have been lost. This may be the wartime attitude—I do not call it a lie—that lingers most powerfully into this book about his experiences.
Perhaps Maciek’s “education,” in the dark sense of your abandoned tide, when just after a Jewish visitor, Bern, has left the house, Maciek’s grandmother gives a bitter little speech, repudiating her daughter and her husband at a stroke and linking them by emotional association to, of all things, a pogrom she witnessed as a girl. This is shocking enough, but then she says that as bad as that was, what Bern has said is worse: … never, in all that time, or anytime until now, had she heard anyone talk as shamelessly as Bern.” What is so utterly shameless about what Bern has said? How could it possibly be worse than a pogrom?
LB: Here’s why. Bern, after musing about how in the town of T. the Germans have already imposed on Jews the obligation to wear the armband and the yellow Star of David, goes on to say that “If the Jewish community offices acted responsibly, and our dear café intellectuals for once avoided provoking the Poles, perhaps we could remain as we were.” Of course, this is nonsense and goes to prove—if additional proof is needed—that Bern is a fool. The disasters befalling Polish Jews have nothing to do with whether they “act responsibly” by collaborating with the Germans or with whether Jewish intellectuals “avoid provoking” the Catholic Poles. They are instead irreversible steps being taken by the German occupying forces on the road to the final solution.
The grandmother is not as bright as Tania and does not seem capable of the deep, fearless insights of the grandfather. But she has her common sense which makes her unde
rstand the shameful reality that lies behind Bern’s chatter: Bern is identifying himself with the enemy, and adopting the enemy’s point of view, probably because the German enemy is overwhelmingly strong and the Catholic Poles who abet the enemy are so dangerous. He is deserting his own side, if I may use that metaphor, although he does this for a short while only: Soon afterward he flees to the forest to join a group of partisans. Something rather similar happens to Maciek when he kills bedbugs in the various rooming houses in Warsaw and when, in the games he plays with lead soldiers, he decides that his best troops are the Wehrmacht and the SS because “they looked like winners”. Perhaps today one would conclude that Bern and Maciek suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.
Why is what Bern said worse than a pogrom? I suppose because the pogrom that the grandmother remembers did not shatter the solidarity of Jews in the face of their tormentors. Now she perceives the possibility that Jews may be turning against other Jews.
JM: Let’s talk about some more complex and costly desertions. Maciek says “Now [Tania] thought she loved [Reinhard, a German soldier who had become her lover and the family’s protector], probably as much as she had ever loved anybody.” Am I right to link this to, “The day of my first Communion came. Tania offered to give me breakfast on the sly in our room, but I refused. I wanted to be clean inside, just as Father P. had directed?”