Wartime
by Louis Begley

List Price: $12.95
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0449001172
Publisher: Ballantine Books

Louis Begley lives in New York City. His previous novels are Schmidt Delivered, Wartime Lies, The Man Who Was Late, As Max Saw It, About Schmidt, and Mistler's Exit.

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 one involved my personal, very intimate feelings. During those years of catastrophe and horror, the conduct that hurt and humiliated me most was that of my fellow Poles: their hatred of Jews, their utter callousness in the face of the unspeakable suffering and extinction of their former friends and neighbors, their contemptible duplicity. It was a breach of fundamental good faith and betrayal that scarred me more than anything I saw done by Germans or Ukrainians. I know perfectly well --- and you and my readers should not doubt --- that there were Poles who showed extraordinary decency and courage in their dealings with Polish Jews, risking death and torture at the hands of Germans. Alas, they were invisible to me in the vast grey mass of the others. The ultimate injury and betrayal was, of course, the virulence of Polish anti-Semitism in evidence immediately after the Soviet army drove the Germans out of Polish territory, as demonstrated for instance by the pogroms and killings in Kielce and Cracow, events that cause little Maciek, his aunt, and his father to continue the lie of Aryan identity. I found myself overwhelmed, unable to control my voice, when I tried to describe the continued humiliation in words spoken by Maciek, and to show through him the depth of his disillusionment and despair. It occurred to me that this was a job for a grownup. So I let the author or perhaps --- the ambiguity is intentional --- the same "man with a nice face and sad eyes" who in the first pages of the book remembers his childhood in Poland express Maciek's anger and scorn. And, of course, announce the "death" of the little boy.

Second, I thought that as a matter of aesthetic choice it would be right to balance the first pages of the book, which give the point of view of a grownup --- the man who we are led to think was the child he chooses to call Maciek --- with a return on the closing pages to a grownup's vision and tone of voice. Finally --- I return here to deeply personal feelings --- there were moments during the composition of Wartime Lies when I literally needed to pause for breath. The italicized passages drawing on Dante's Inferno are such stops on my via dolorosa. They represent attempts by "the man with a nice face," or perhaps by the author, to call to his aid the greatest connoisseur of evil in Western literature, one who was equipped with a remarkable grid of values through which to assess it. They allowed me to have someone other than Maciek speak. That was an urgent necessity. Curiously, I thought of those passages at the time as a window letting in fresh air just as I was close to suffocating. Something of the same nature was at work in the intrusion that closes Chapter IV. It is a task for the reader's sympathy and imagination to search for further links between these disclosures and Maciek's story.

JM: Is your ideal reader one who will forget the adult Maciek --- actually, as you point out, an unnamed, sad-eyed adult --- most of the time and simply relive the harrowing, suspenseful experiences of the boy? Or do you instead dream of a reader who will, at each step of the journey, think not so much of the boy as of the adult remembering him?

LB: My ideal reader is attentive and blessed by the gifts of sympathy and imagination. You will note that I am going back in this reply to what I said in answer to your first question. Provided the reader has those qualities, all I want to do is to withdraw, to get out of the way and let the reader make of my work what he or she wishes.

That being said, I believe that if I were the reader I would think of myself as Maciek; I would crawl into his skin. I also believe that I would not be able to keep out of my mind the questions raised by the passage in which the adult man remembers what may have been his own childhood: What is such a man like? How does one grow up after a childhood that has been similarly blasted?

It may interest you that my working title for Wartime Lies, which I abandoned with some reluctance, was The Education of a Monster.

JM: That title strikes the ear as a slap strikes the face. I wince at it. But even Wartime Lies, as a less confrontational alternative, has something hard and unflinching about it. "Lies?" the reader thinks; "Don't you mean disguises? Or maybe ruses?" But what were objectively disguises or ruses were subjectively lies. To give the matter a very innocuous formulation, Maciek acquired some bad habits, thanks to Nazism and Polish anti-Semitism. When wartime Poland was behind him and he could finally drop the ruse and shed the disguise, those bad habits may have lingered. Something in the reader, as this theft of childhood takes place, wants you to go a little easier on Maciek --- one might even want you to like him a little better. But during the war, Maciek dared not go easy on himself or, so to speak, sweet on himself. A single moment of self-indulgence, and all would have been lost. This may be the wartime attitude --- I do not call it a lie --- that lingers most powerfully into this book about his experiences.

Perhaps Maciek's "education," in the dark sense of your abandoned title, begins on page 39, when just after a Jewish visitor, Bern, has left the house, Maciek's grandmother gives a bitter little speech, repudiating her daughter and her husband at a stroke and linking them by emotional association to, of all things, a pogrom she witnessed as a girl. This is shocking enough, but then she says that as bad as that was, what Bern has said is worse: . . . never, in all that time, or anytime until now, had she heard anyone talk as shamelessly as Bern." What is so utterly shameless about what Bern has said? How could it possibly be worse than a pogrom?

LB: Here's why. Bern, after musing about how in the town of T. the Germans have already imposed on Jews the obligation to wear the armband and the yellow Star of David, goes on to say that "If the Jewish community offices acted responsibly, and our dear café intellectuals for once avoided provoking the Poles, perhaps we could remain as we were." Of course, this is nonsense and goes to prove --- if additional proof is needed --- that Bern is a fool. The disasters befalling Polish Jews have nothing to do with whether they "act responsibly" by collaborating with the Germans or with whether Jewish intellectuals "avoid provoking" the Catholic Poles. They are instead irreversible steps being taken by the German occupying forces on the road to the final solution. The grandmother is not as bright as Tania and does not seem capable of the deep, fearless insights of the grandfather. But she has her common sense which makes her understand the shameful reality that lies behind Bern's chatter: Bern is identifying himself with the enemy, and adopting the enemy's point of view, probably because the German enemy is overwhelmingly strong and the Catholic Poles who abet the enemy are so dangerous. He is deserting his own side, if I may use that metaphor, although he does this for a short while only: Soon afterward he flees to the forest to join a group of partisans. Something rather similar happens to Maciek when he kills bedbugs in the various rooming houses in Warsaw (pages 93-94) and when, in the games he plays with lead soldiers, he decides that his best troops are the Wehrmacht and the SS because "they looked like winners" (page 66). Perhaps today one would conclude that Bern and Maciek suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. Why is what Bern said worse than a pogrom? I suppose because the pogrom that the grandmother remembers did not shatter the solidarity of Jews in the face of their tormentors. Now she perceives the possibility that Jews may be turning against other Jews.

JM: Let's talk about some more complex and costly desertions. On pages 68-69, Maciek says "Now [Tania] thought she loved [Reinhard, a German soldier who had become her lover and the family's protector], probably as much as she had ever loved anybody." Am I right to link this to page 120, "The day of my first Communion came. Tania offered to give me breakfast on the sly in our room, but I refused. I wanted to be clean inside, just as Father P. had directed?" Tania's most extended, elaborate dissimulation involves sex; Maciek's involves religion. She has a German lover; he is about to make his First Communion as a supposed Catholic. Absent all duress, Tania and Reinhard would almost certainly not be a couple, and Maciek would not be taking instruction from Father P. Are they deceiving others or deceiving themselves?

LB: Perhaps I should go back to your question about the grandmother and Bern, at page 39. At the top of the very next page Maciek relates how Tania responded to the grandmother: "Tania looked very tired and very calm. After a while, she turned to my grandmother and said, You don't know yet what is shameless, you don't know yet what we will do, just wait, you will see before you die." Of course, Tania is right, because worse is yet to come, including --- although she cannot possibly foresee it specifically --- her liaison with the good German, Reinhard. However understandable and justifiable, that is the ultimate disgrace, and a reader who follows carefully Maciek's report of Tania's and his own existence in Lwów (especially pages 60-73) will see how that aspect of her condition is present in her mind. This leads me to think that you are right in your assessment: To love Reinhard --- possibly she really thinks she does --- makes her case less sordid, even if it doesn't exculpate her. I believe also that she is likely to think that telling the little boy that she loves Reinhard will make it easier for him to accept the searing fact of their ménage.

I agree that something similar is at work when it comes to Maciek's catechism class and taking Communion. According to Maciek's rules of decency, what he is doing is despicable. He will do it nevertheless, because he has no choice, but he will perform the defiling act as cleanly and respectfully as possible. An absurd notion? Perhaps. But I think that is the psychological truth.

JM: And that subtle psychological truth is, I gather, what you want the reader to understand, whether the reader excuses it or not. Earlier in this conversation, you called Dante a "connoisseur of evil." Perhaps only a connoisseur of evil would see Tania's interaction with the begging Jew, Hertz, as bringing her to a point "so degraded, that she had no trust left and no pity." A coarser mind might think that sleeping with a German soldier had degraded her worse. But this is not how she sees the matter (page 73), and the aftermath of her encounter with Hertz is evidently one of those moments in the writing of this book that were so intense for you in the writing that you had to, as you say, "pause for breath" in the interlude on pages 73-75. Would you care to comment?

LB: Yes. Once again, I must go back to the grandmother, and her outburst about the shamelessness of Bern's talk. As I have said, I think she has in mind the shattering of solidarity among Jews. In the passage you have now referred to, Tania's sees further and more deeply. I believe that she takes her fear and distrust of Hertz to be signs of the shattering of all human solidarity, a vaster, and, for me, an unbearable vision.

JM: "I was chained to the habit of lying, and I no longer believed that weakness or foolishness or mistakes could be forgiven by Tania or me" (page 171). This seems to be a moment of bleak truth for Maciek corresponding to the one mentioned just above for Tania. The reader is prepared to forgive the two of them almost anything and wants to believe that their integrity will emerge unscathed from their ordeal. They themselves seem not to share this belief. They do not see moral integrity and psychological deformity as mutually exclusive. Innocent though they are, their experience has left them in some sense morally damaged. It must be both emotionally and conceptually difficult to speak of this damage and yet pointless to speak of the experience at all without speaking of this aspect of it. Does this explain why "Our man avoids Holocaust books and dinner conversation about Poland in the Second World War" (page 4)?

LB: I do not think that the man with "sad eyes" would agree that he has --- except for his skin being "intact and virgin of tattoo" --- escaped unscathed, and I doubt that he thinks that Tania has had that good fortune. On the contrary, "he believes that he has been changed inside forever, like a beaten dog . . ." (page 5). He expresses no view about Tania but I think that if he were to do so it would turn out to be the same. He avoids "Holocaust books" and conversations about wartime Poland for complex and somewhat contradictory reasons. As for conversations, there is first of all his pudor, his sense of decency: he does not want to desecrate this subject by loose talk. Books either do not come close enough to the truth as he understands it and, therefore, their effect may also be a form of desecration, or, on the contrary, when by the force of their emotional truth they put him face-to-face with his memories, they are unbearably painful to read.

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 sapïenza 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. On page 5, 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 to repeat those words to myself over and over, thinking about my father and about how little good came to that kind man in return for all the good he had done.

JM: You endow literary quotation with an almost liturgical effect. When you quote Catullus, it is as if you acknowledge the legitimacy of the wish and, to that extent at least, assuage the pain of its unfulfillment. Quotation as minor catharsis. . . .

Hearing this regret about how little recompense your father had for his kindness puts me in mind of Tania's grief when she learns that her father, Maciek's grandfather, has been murdered. This was, Maciek says, "the worst day in our lives" (page 184).Autobiographical fiction, on those rare occasions when one can see it from the inside, so often seems to work this way. What was in real life a son's prayer for his father becomes in the novel a son's prayer for himself. What was the grief of a son for his father becomes the grief of a daughter for hers, and so forth --- all in service to the larger truth that the fiction attempts to convey.

One might well think, though, that the "worst day" would have been that last ghastly day in Warsaw --- the gang rapes, the baby dropped down a manhole, the moment-tomoment terror. What is it that makes this one death worse still? Is it just that Tania loves her father so much? Earlier (page 69), Maciek says "she claimed she had always had a heart of stone except when it came to grandfather and me, and neither of us even knew she loved him." Is it that at this moment Maciek discovers that, yes, Tania does at least truly love this one man? Or is it that Tania, so supremely adult on the surface, having sustained herself through everything by thinking of the father who would somehow be there to shelter and protect her after the war was over, now becomes something of a lost child herself ? And is Maciek --- weeping for grandfather, weeping in fear --- weeping as well because he does not know whether Tania loves him as much as she loved grandfather? This is the boy, one remembers, who anxiously asked everyone, "Do you like me?" Finally, thinking of your first answer, above, is this the worst day of their lives because the grandfather has been killed by Pan Miska, his own former estate manager?

LB: The answer to each of these questions is yes. I might add another reason: the immense weight of wartime fatigue. Those two do not think they have enough strength --- never mind hope --- left to go on, to keep their bizarre and desperate show on the road.

Indeed, as you have doubtless noticed, soon afterward Tania makes her first big mistake. She permits herself to insult the black market operator Nowak, who promptly denounces them to the German police.

JM: "According to Tania, it's just as well: Can you imagine her hand being kissed?" (page 195). Tania's sardonic comment about Maciek's new stepmother caught me in a surprise laugh, the only laugh in the book. It made me believe that Tania was going to be all right, after all. She may be one of those women who only love vertically: up to father or down to child. And yet, like her father (to her mother's annoyance), she is vivacious, sexually unabashed, and still young. One does not imagine her, years hence, quoting Catullus, as "our man" does in the opening pages, or yearning for a healing that will not come. She is still herself, right?

LB: I am probably less optimistic about Tania. Of course, the damage to her will be different from the damage done to Maciek. She is a grown-up with a fully formed and strong personality. But memories like hers are corrosive. Also, she may never again have occasion to reach such heights of courage and resourcefulness. Will a more quiet life inevitably seem mediocre and insipid?

But that is speculation about matters that are outside my novel and I have no better information about them than you or any other of my readers.

JM: A somewhat similar moment --- a moment of sudden vigor and freedom --- comes for Maciek when he defeats his rebellious dog and, later, reacts with murderous anger as well as grief when the dog is run over. But in this revival, there is no flash of humor, and in the final paragraph we read: "Maciek will not rise to dance again." Tania may be still herself, but Maciek will always be looking for himself because the lies of his wartime fell between his sixth and his twelfth year. He will remain, beneath the surface, twisted into the shape those lies forced him to assume. Is this too much to say?

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 speak aloud. Your reference to the word daddy is painful even to read. I suspect, though, that among the readers most grateful for your turning this subject into fiction are those who have had comparable experiences themselves, comparable pain in speaking of how the experiences marked them, and comparable reactions to what has been made of them in others' writings and others' art. Wartime Lies has found a wide and varied international audience; but had it been written even for them alone, as a long personal letter to the members of a fraternity of pain, it would be a signal service as well as a moving literary achievement.


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Excerpted from Wartime © Copyright 2008 by Louis Begley. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books. All rights reserved.

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