Wartime lies - Louis Begley [77]
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