I, too, tried to work from experience, seeking moments and events to furnish the thing I was calling up from the shadows. I chose for my main character the face of a man I had once seen in the paper, a gentle, knowledgeable, kindly face which I later discovered belonged to Klaus Barbie. That misleading face suited my character perfectly, as did the name, Berence, a name I borrowed from a strange gentleman I met on the ship from Buenos Aires to Europe, a writer who was in the habit of traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, never spending time in the port of destination, and who one night, when I was suffering from a bad cold and a high fever, told me the story of Lafcadio, who commits the gratuitous act of pushing the unworldly Amédée off a moving train in Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican. I depicted Algiers according to my memories of Buenos Aires (another pseudo-French city on the sea), and northern Quebec according to my memories of a visit to Percé. In order to bring the story to its close, I needed to describe the workings of a torturer, but not the torture itself. I imagined someone applying the brutal methods not to a person but to something inert, lifeless. My unattended fridge contained an old celery stalk. I imagined what it would be like to torture it. The scene, mysteriously, turned out to be exactly right. But I still had to give words to the torturer’s self-justification. I didn’t know how to do it. “You have to bring yourself to think like him,” my friend, the novelist Susan Swan, advised. I didn’t think I was capable. Humiliatingly, I realized that I could think the torturer’s thoughts.
But in spite of a few successful moments, the writing hesitated, stumbled, fell flat. Attempting to say that a man enters a room, or that the light in the garden has changed, or that the child felt that she was being threatened, or any simple, precise thing that we communicate (or believe we communicate) every moment of every day, is, I discovered, one of the most difficult of literary endeavors. We believe the task is easy because our listener, our reader, carries the epistemological weight and is supposed to intuit our message, to “know what we mean.” But in fact, the signs that stand for the sounds that spark the thoughts that conjure up the memory that dredges up the experience that calls upon the emotion crumble under the weight of all they must carry and barely, hardly ever, serve the purpose for which they were designed. When they do, the reader knows the writer has succeeded and is grateful for the miracle.
G. K. Chesterton observes in one of his essays that “somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.” I think every reader can find them in the books he or she truly loves; I am not certain that every writer can. As to my novel, I have a vague notion of what those words might be, and now (so many years after the fact) I feel that they would have sufficed if they had come to me then, at the beginning of the process.
The book I finished was not what I had imagined, but now I too was a writer. Now I too was in the hands (in a very literal sense) of readers who had no proof of my existence except my book, and who judged me, cared for me, or, more likely, dismissed me without any consideration for anything else I could offer beyond the strict limits of the page. Who I was, who I had been, what my opinions were, what my intentions, how deep my knowledge of the subject, how heartfelt my concern for its central question were to them immaterial excuses. Like a hovering and persistent ghost, the writer wishes to tell the reader “you might laugh at the absurdity of this passage” or “you might weep over this scene,” but then the reader is bound to answer: “If you’re so anxious to have a point made, why don’t you make one yourself?” Whatever I had not managed to convey in my novel wasn’t there, and no self-respecting reader would supply, out of nothing, the laughter and sorrow that I had left out. In this sense I’m always puzzled by the generosity with which certain readers agree to mend the deficiencies of dismal writers. Perhaps a book has to be not just mediocre but outright bad to elicit this Samaritan response.
I don’t know what — from the mass of advice given to me by the masters, of the books that set examples, of the exemplary events I witnessed and the cautionary gossip heard throughout my life—was responsible for my few successful pages. The process of learning to write is heartbreaking because it is unaccountable. No amount of hard work, splendid purpose, good council, impeccable research, harrowing experience, knowledge of the classics, ear for music, and taste for style guarantee good writing. “No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination,” wrote James Joyce to his brother on 7 December 1906. Indeed.
Something, driven by what the ancients called the Muse and we bashfully call inspiration, chooses and combines, snips, stitches, and mends a coat of words to clothe whatever it is that stirs in our depths, ineffable and immaterial, a shadow. Sometimes, for reasons that never become clear, everything fits: the shape is right, the point of view is right, the tone and coloring are right, and, for the space of a line or a paragraph, the shadow can be seen fully fledged in all its awful mystery, not translated into anything else, not in service of an idea or an emotion, not even as part of a story or an essay, but as sheer epiphany: writing that is, as the old metaphor has it, exactly equivalent to the world.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, it was customary in France for theatergoers, if they were rich, to pay for seats not in the orchestra or the boxes but directly onstage, a practice so popular that often this intrusive public outnumbered the cast. During the premiere of Voltaire’s Sémiramis, there were so many spectators onstage that the actor playing King Ninus’s ghost stumbled and nearly fell, thus spoiling a key dramatic scene. Among the ensuing peals of laughter, Voltaire is said to have stood up and cried out, “Place à l’ombre!” “Make room for the shadow!”
The anecdote is useful. Like the stage, the writing life is made up of carefully balanced artifice, exact inspirational lighting, right timing, precise music, and the secret combination of craft and experience. For reasons of chance, money, prestige, friendship, and family duties, the writer allows onto the stage, to sit in on the performance, a crowd of intruders who then become involuntary participants — taking up space, spoiling a good effect, tripping the actors — and who eventually turn into excuses, reasons for failure, honorable distractions, and justifiable temptations. Success in writing (I mean, writing something good) depends on tiny, brittle things, and while it is true that genius can override all obstacles — Kafka wrote masterpieces in a corridor of his father’s hostile house and Cervantes dreamt up his Quixote in prison — mere talent requires less crowded, less constrained mental settings than those that most writers usually enjoy. The shadow needs room. And even then, nothing is promised.
For the time being, the reader I am judges the writer I managed to become with amused tolerance, as he invents strategies for his new craft. The shadow flitting in the gloom is infinitely powerful and fragile, and immensely alluring and a little frightening, and beckons (I think it beckons) as I cross from one side of the page to the other.
On Being Jewish
“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 7
I SELDOM READ BOOKS WITH titles such as The French Identity, An Essay on Masculinity, or What It Means to Be a Woman. It was therefore with some considerable hesitation that, a few years ago, I picked up a copy of Alain Finkielkraut’s cautionary essay The Imaginary Jew. Through one of those curious autobiographical associations that a book sometimes conjures up, I suddenly recalled an event I had forgotten from far away and long ago. One afternoon when I was seven, on the bus back from the Buenos Aires English high school that I had started to attend, a boy whose name I never knew called out at me from the back seat, “Hey, Jew! So your father likes money?” I remember being so bewildered by the question that I didn’t know what to answer. I didn’t think my father was particularly fond of money, but there was an implied insult in the boy’s tone that I couldn’t understand. Above all, I was surprised at being called “Jew.” My grandmother went to the synagogue, but my parents were not religious, and I had never thought of myself in terms of a word I believed was reserved for the old people of my grandmother’s generation. But since the epithets applied to us imply a definition, in that moment (though I didn’t know it then) I was forced into a choice: to accept this vast, difficult identity or to deny it. Finkielkraut in his book tells of a similar moment and acknowledges the universality of such an experience, but his subject is not the inheritance of hatred. “I myself,” writes Finkielkraut, “would like to address and meditate upon the opposite case: the case of a child, an adolescent who is not only proud but happy to be Jewish and who came to question, bit by bit, if there were not some bad faith in living jubilantly as an exception and an exile.” These individuals of assumed identity, the inheritors of a suffering to which they have not been personally subjected, Finkielkraut, with a flair for the mot juste, calls “imaginary” or “armchair” Jews.