Wartime lies - Louis Begley [82]
There must be in all developed religions and in secular ethics permission to lie in self-defense, in order to avoid gruesome death. I doubt that the man with “sad eyes” is concerned about lies told in order to survive or other deceptions or even the devastating need to take Communion. But innocence and moral integrity? I am not religious, but if I were I wonder whether I would think of either Tania or Maciek as “innocent.” What do we make of Maciek’s sexual longings and his nascent sadism?
I tend to think of the world described in Wartime Lies as a world where everyone bears a burden of guilt. However, no amount of guilt that Maciek or Tania or the grandparents or any other Jews I mention may bear justifies, so far as I am concerned, the punishment visited upon them by Dante’s somma sapienza e ’l primo amore.
JM: “The highest wisdom and first love….” God is ultimately the guilty party, but neither Tania nor Maciek ever brings the indictment. There are moments when the indictment would be justified, but it is as if they have no room for it in their minds, no energy left to drag Him into court.
There is actually one prayer in the book, a borrowed prayer, the man with “sad eyes” quotes the prayer of Catullus, “Grant me this, O gods, for my piety’s sake” (O di, reddite hoc mi pro pietate mea). Catullus was a connoisseur of love, as Dante of evil, but of the afflictions and perversions of love no less than of the joys. In another line that echoes in the man’s memory, Catullus says, “Myself, I yearn to heal and to shed this foul morbidity” (Ipse valere opto et taetrum hunc deponere morbum). Can he not love with a joyous, youthful spontaneity?
During the years covered by the novel, Maciek has a degree of physical access to women unusual for his age (six to twelve). There is nothing feigned or falsified about his attraction to them. It is, on the contrary, the most honest and authentic part of his life. Why, then, does the man who remembers this boyhood sexuality repeat a borrowed prayer for recovery? Or do I misread him? Is his prayer rather to have just that kind of intimacy back again?
LB: In part you may have misread me; in part you have put your hand on something very important.
The references to Catullus are neither an indication that “the man with sad eyes” cannot love joyfully or spontaneously—except as his childhood experiences may have made him in all respects less joyous and spontaneous than someone whose childhood was such as he imagines Catullus’s, filled with sunlight and pleasures—or with our man’s precocious sexual awareness and longings. That is, in any event, what I think.
One reason why our man dwells on Catullus is that he feels that Catullus’s need to “shed this foul illness,” taetrum hunc deponere morbum, is the same in its dynamics and is equally doomed to fail as his own attempts to heal. Of course, the etiology of the two illnesses is different: desperate and betrayed love in the case of Catullus, and the hurt of war for our man. And that leads him to borrow Catullus’s prayer, although, as he notes, the gods will not cure what ails him and, unlike the poet, he has no good deeds to look back upon that might be recompensed. He might have added that he has no gods to pray to.
A more profound reason is my personal obsession with the poet’s O di reddite mi hoc pro pietate mea, O gods, grant me this for my piety’s sake. I used