A Memory of War
by Frederick Busch

List Price: $14.95
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345460510
Publisher: Ballantine

Karen Novak is a novelist whose most recent work, Innocence, was published by Bloomsbury in 2003. She lives in Mason, Ohio.

Karen Novak: Your earlier novels, Closing Arguments and The Night Inspector, also deal with war and its aftermath through memory. Why is the act of remembering war such an important aspect of your work?

Frederick Busch: War is the largest public convulsion we know. It cannot be ignored. It invades every aspect of the lives of citizens whose nation is at war or is a battleground. While I find myself drawn to writing about domestic events, interior conflicts, I also wish to establish such moments in the most dramatic exterior context. I believe that I attempt that binocular view because of my pleasure in reading the novels and journalism of Charles Dickens; his commuting between private and public life is exemplary to me. So, I think, I end up writing about small events that are huge in my characters' lives and, simultaneously, trying to throw the light of giant solar flare-ups—say,wars—on those lives.

As to why my characters remember wars, or why I supply the recollection for them: Our lives, no matter how forward-looking, are lived to some degree in terms of the past. The past is never over, as Faulkner said. How we understand and come to terms with the past—whether it is an individual's childhood or a nation's war or a people's fondness, say, for enslaving Africans—determines who we become. Fiction is about time, and novels chart how time passes in us.We name and understand—we write, you could say— what happened; as we try to understand or merely to survive our past,we re-create it.We are each the protagonist and the author of the novel about our life.

KN: Alex is a psychologist digging into memory; his mother, Sylvia, works breaking up earth and one day happens upon longburied bones; his wife, Liz, is trying to find the painting yet to be on a large canvas. Do those efforts compare with writing this novel?

FB: I knew from the start that Liz (on whom I have a crush, by the way) would be a painter. I needed her to be an artist, just as I needed Alex to be a doctor who treated the mind. I wanted one of them to be working from an artistic vision, from some kind of commitment to expression of interior responses to the world, while the other would be required to work expressively too, but with a responsibility to focus on someone else's—his patients'— visions. In other words, Liz could fantasize all she wished to, if that was what her art required. But Alex, I thought,would have an obligation to speak for the patient.What he did, of course,was speak for himself instead. His ethical lapses are enormous. On the other hand, we need to admit that what he's doing is what we all do: thinking more about ourselves than about others. But he is supposed to be strong for his patients, to sacrifice, for the fifty-minute hour, his own needs; he wants to, but he can't. While Alex fails to do his job well, he does my job rather niftily. He reminds me, on a tiny scale, of the director in Fellini's great film 8½: He is confronted, simultaneously, by his childhood, his adult life, his mistress, his wife, his work; he faces them, or versions of them, and imagines aspects of them—creates and re-creates his own life and the lives of those he loves—and comes to terms with it all. In that sense,Alex is like an artist, yes.

KN: The novel ends with the fate of a major character left undetermined, except through Alex's assumption of what has happened. Readers, accustomed as we are to having our mysteries solved, may have difficulty with leaving Nella's fate an unanswered question. Can you explain your reasons for leaving her "out there?"

FB: I wasn't writing a murder mystery, the conventions of which seem to include wrapping up each character's fate. Alex has gone so far off the ethical track with Nella that he has all but killed her on his own. And life does not solve every puzzle or rescue each endangered soul. I was writing, you could say, a realistic novel: I wanted it to display some of the shaggy sadness of our lives.And I wanted Alex, at the end, to be seen as a good man gone bad, a man who did bad things while intending the good.That's why even on the final page, in the closing paragraphs, as he thinks of Nella, the language is "But he had thought of the war": the war in which he began, and the war that even now goes on within him. He ignores poor, endangered Nella, and he thinks of himself—hence the "But" with which he interrupts the thought of her. She is lost to him and since he is the core of the novel's consciousness, she gets lost to us.

KN: Physical settings have near character status in your novels. Here the places—New York, Piel, the Tile and Brick Works— seem essential to the narrative for reasons beyond staging or suspension of disbelief.Why is the sense of placement so necessary to A Memory of War ?

FB: I don't like to ask my readers to see and hear my characters in the abstract. I want the characters actually to seem to exist during the time my readers are good enough to care about them. The places of which I write, where I claim my characters live, are ways of forcing the characters to express themselves memorably. So Sylvia lives in the stink of stale cooking and soiled diapers in what is virtually an outhouse in the hall outside her flat; she moves through cold fogs over slick cobblestones, and my readers, I hope, can feel the footing of the wet stones and smell the ocean salt on the fog; if they do, then they can feel the characters themselves. These realities faced by the characters become, if they work, a kind of sensual argument for the characters' existence. I want the reader to hear and see and smell and feel the world of these people-onthe- page; I want the reader to believe. Poor Sylvia, on her hands and knees, digging up bones with a dark, Baltic pleasure in her pain and in the pathos of what she has found: She knows that she and her lover will be bones; she is desperate to feel everything now because she feels time roaring through her, knows that her affair with Otto must one day be over, that she will one day be alone. So the hated Tile and Brick Works becomes a holy ground of sorts to her, and she knows the heft and grain of the cold soil intimately because she needs to.The reader, in turn, can know Sylvia, to some extent, through that place as well.

KN: Toward the end, one of the characters remarks that these are "times of enormity."What made 1985, the year in which the novel is set, more a time of enormity than other years?

FB: Most obviously, with regard to 1985 as a time of enormity, I had in mind President Ronald Reagan, who, over the protests of Elie Wiesel and other spokesmen for Shoah survivors, laid a wreath on German graves in Bitburg; he was trying to support the German chancellor and maybe to say, with certain other politicians, that the Shoah was done,we're all friends now, a few million are dead, but let's get on with it.That was an act of astonishing stupidity. It was a major revision of history, pretending that among those graves were not buried forty-nine Waffen SS, men who served in the same outfit that staffed the killing camps. Running through the novel is a concern with seeing history as opposed to revising history. But enormities are committed by characters on a smaller scale: Liz may see Alex in that way, and surely Nella's father must think that of Alex with his daughter; Slowacki's stories of Vietnam and Alex's lapsing off while his needful patients pour out their confusions might also fall into that category.

KN: Research, fact, and invention have a huge presence in the novel. Can you describe how you went about the massive amount of research Memory of War required? How does a fiction writer choose among facts to create what Alex terms "a version" of life or of lives?

FB: Second question first: Each of us chooses among facts to create a version of a life or of lives. A couple argues. He remembers her calling him a disgrace. She claims that she in fact told him that she didn't want to make him seem a scapegrace. He says she bullied him. She claims the opposite. What really happened? Each creates a version of the event, and it becomes the truth of that moment for him or for her.When a fiction writer is choosing for his characters, however, he shapes their recollections, the novel's version of the story of their lives, in a cold manipulation; his purpose is to put the characters in danger, of one sort or another, and see what they do to themselves and each other as events transpire.

I did a great deal of research for this book. I talked to psychologists and corresponded with them, I read texts that Alex might have used at Michigan, I queried police officers, studied topographical maps and street maps from the 1940s; I consulted newspapers from that time and place, history books, a translator, Polish dictionaries, some unpublished memoirs. What I chose to use, in the construction of these lives, is what would make the characters vivid and plausible, what would help to make them matter, and what enlivened my own imagining of them. The Brick and Tile Works did exist. I don't think Land Girls farmed there, but I was charmed by the idea of an urban farm, so I insisted it into being; with Sylvia there, I was offered interesting opportunities for her dalliances with Otto, and I was able to pay homage to the residents of Barrow, a city for which I have great affection, and especially to the brave souls who endured the World War II bombing raids. I tried to respect the realities of history, but also, since I was not writing history but fiction, I permitted myself to create historical events as long as I felt that I was not trivializing the great truths of endurance, courage, loneliness, and suffering that are part of what happened in that war.

KN: You put the reader in the role of traditional analyst to Alex. We witness the telling and revisions of the intimate stories that comprise his understanding of his life. In doing that, you also make us aware of the real psychic distances between individuals, how limited our access is even to those we love most. It seems risky in these times of televised counseling services and antidepressant medications to ask the reader to comply with such profound helplessness. Was it an active artistic choice on your part, or is this how Alex spoke to you as a character?

FB: I distrust any assurances, whether by clergy, video quacks, or licensed psychologists, that we can easily know one another.The great endeavor of a human relationship is in learning the other person over time, with respect for the dark differences between lovers or friends; and the great sorrow of lovers surely must reside in the fact that we cannot quite get to each other, to the world under the sleeping eyelids of the other one, to the dreams and terrors that people cannot speak of with any ease. I loved the paradox of Alex's being such an unknowable man to the women who loved or needed him—Nella and Liz—while his work required that he help people bridge the distance between them and those they loved. I often seek such paradoxes in my work—in a novel, for example, called Rounds (1979), where a pediatrician becomes responsible for the death of his own child; or The Night Inspector, published twenty years later, in which the protagonist,William Bartholomew, is an ex-sniper, a man who specializes in seeing, yet is so maimed in the Civil War that people cannot bear to see him. Such tensions are useful in displaying the secret corners of characters' lives.

KN: Alex's perhaps half-brother,William, terms his times as "the age of the memoir." Twenty years on, it seems memory is even more of a commodity. A great many resources are being poured into capturing the memories of those who survived "times of enormity."How do you think we should approach these collected recollections? What are their value to us?

FB: Many contemporary memoirs seem to have been therapeutic for their writers, and of course you can't begrudge people their efforts to feel better. But great memoir writing—Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, or Stuart Hood's Carlino, about imprisonment in Italy during World War II, or Paula Fox's Borrowed Finery, about imprisonment in a neglected childhood—always creates with precision a single life lived and raises it to greater importance. It doesn't indulge in phony poetry or operatics about suffering; it creates the particular, and you end up seeing matters cosmically. I engage with memoirs for what I have called elsewhere their binocular vision:We see the little and the great at the same instant. Important memoir writers tell us of themselves, but they show us the vastness of existence. Many memoir writers can't do this; they're locked into the small. I seek memoirs that will teach me more about being an honest person in the scary, huge world.

KN: In the scene where seventh-grader Alex presents the William Carlos Williams poem as his own work, his teacher instructs him to redo the assignment, to write "something you couldn't otherwise say." Do you feel that A Memory of War says something you could not otherwise say?

FB: I wanted very much for this novel to say something I could otherwise not say. I want to write fiction that is artful, and I believe that art is how we try to say what we otherwise can't. In that regard, art and prayer work similarly, I think. My Miss Casey in this novel is my love song to an actual Miss Casey who taught me English in the seventh grade. And her fictive injunction is actually my own. It is the definition of the writer's job.We must try to do no less.And if writers come close to anything like success in saying the unsayable, then they serve the reader as well as themselves.

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Excerpted from A Memory of War © Copyright 2008 by Frederick Busch. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.

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