Wartime Lies (22 page)

I
N
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
Wartime 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

A Reader’s Guide

LOUIS BEGLEY

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?