Wartime lies - Louis Begley [84]
LB: You are exactly right. That is the conclusion to which I hoped to bring the reader.
JM: When my neighbor’s sons, now teenagers, were small, I used to hear them and their friends at play through the window of my study. What struck me—always in a happy way—was the enormous excitement and animation they brought to their games. In games, in make-believe, children are like that. Everything is a matter of utmost consequence and urgency. But children’s accounts of actual urgency, or real catastrophe, seem often to go to the opposite extreme. I have heard children in court speaking with a soft, almost affectless simplicity that was more affecting for the hearer than animation would have been. It is difficult, for example, to imagine a child bringing an indictment against God, like Goethe crying “Mehr Licht” on his deathbed. Do you see any connection between your decision to make Maciek your narrator for most of Wartime Lies and the restrained style of the work? Would you care to comment on the rhetorical range that suits this subject matter best? Where do you locate this work in the literature that the Shoah has provoked? Or do you ever think of it that way at all?
LB: I can give a partial answer.
Clearly, the decision to have the little boy tell the story—a decision that I reached at the very outset and never put in question afterward—imposed the simplicity of the narrative style. There was also the constraint that came from my writing Wartime Lies in English, although everything in it was taking place in my mind in my native tongue, which is Polish. I wanted to be somehow faithful to the strains of Polish I heard in my ear, and a certain chastity of expression was the only solution I found. You will have doubtless noticed, by the way, that I avoided direct dialogue. That was because I would not have known how to render it in English. To give you a small—but for me very important—example, I could not have borne to have the little boy address his father as “Daddy”!
You are right about the way children become almost silent when hurt or under extreme pressure. That has been, almost always, my own response.
Then there is the fact—an odd one—that when I was writing Wartime Lies I had in mind Madame Lafayette’s “Princesse de Clèves,” a love story set in late sixteenth-century France. The subject is clearly a world away from mine, I have only read Madame Lafayette’s masterpiece in French, and yet it is the style of that little novel, which is as pure as a diamond of the first water, that was my conscious model.
I avoid placing myself on lists of writers or my novels on lists of works by other authors. Also, I have largely avoided Shoah literature, for some of the reasons I have attributed to the “man with sad eyes” in an answer to one of your earlier questions. The most I can do is to name the authors who have written about the Holocaust I admire fervently: Tadeusz Borowski and Primo Levi.
JM: Dante for evil, Catullus for love, and Virgil, I suppose, the third poet who presides over this work, for catastrophic defeat and noble recovery: Sunt lacrimae rerum. Virgil rather than Homer: Homer is for those who win their wars.
On the language question, some have seen Joseph Conrad’s style in English as mysteriously indebted to Polish. Some survivors of the Holocaust have wanted to leave their native languages behind—as have, by the way, some Germans. Some, like Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz, have gone back and forth. The subject of how and why a writer chooses to write in a second language is a large and tangled one. Perhaps English, precisely by its foreignness, enabled you to clothe memories that would have been, as it were, naked in your native language and too painful to