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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

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