Yes, carefully disguising my goal, bit by bit, cunningly and surreptitiously, I set about making definitive preparations for a delusion. I can discern a motive for it, in the end, if I think about it. Plainly, I wanted to forge some necessary consequence from a now irremediable act — the writing of a novel — that had swallowed up irreplaceable years of life, but meanwhile I had quite overlooked the possibility that my very uncertainties might have brought the novel itself into existence through me. I have the feeling I was almost beginning, at least secretly, to consider my destiny as a writer’s destiny; even if I did not overtly reckon with it, I was almost beginning to invest my thoughts with some kind of property which sustained an unconditional need for their communication by me and for their reception by others.
Who could know where all this would have led. During that period I may have felt myself ready to regard my future life as an inexhaustible source of ideas for public display; to set down the fruits of my reflections straightaway onto paper; to call on editorial offices and publishing houses with duplicate copies of this triumphant act; and to watch out for signs on people’s faces, or even in their lifestyle, of changes wrought by the influence of those ideas. Amidst a deafening fanfare of portentous pronouncements, authoritative views, and unappealable opinions, I too would have blown on my own toy trumpet. Once released on the mirror-smooth surface of paper, my hand would have glided at breakneck speed on the skate-blade of my ballpoint pen. I would have written as if I were seeking to avert a catastrophe — the catastrophe of not writing, obviously. In other words, I would have written for fear that, God forbid, I wouldn’t write; I would have written so as to kill every minute of time and to forget who I am: an end-product of determinacies, a maroon of contingencies, a martyr to bioelectronics, a reluctant surprised party to my own character.
The old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet and doing nothing.
He was not thinking.
He was not even reading.
“It was stupid of me to get those papers out,” he eventually thought to himself.
… In this respect, and in just this one respect, the letter I received two days after the last visit I had paid to the publisher chap arrived at a fortunate moment.
“Aha!” the old boy exclaimed, picking up the ordinary, neat business letter (with the firm’s letterhead and fields for date—27/JUL/1973, correspondent — unfilled, subject — unspecified, reference number—482/73, no greeting) that he had already once picked up and scanned cursorily, but which we too, bending over his shoulder, as it were, may now read in fulclass="underline"
Your manuscript has been assessed by our firm’s readers. On the basis of their unanimous opinion we are unable to undertake publication of your novel.
We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, whereas the subject itself is horrific and shocking. The fact that it nevertheless fails to become a shattering experience for the reader hinges primarily to the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions. While we find it understandable that the adolescent main protagonist does not immediately grasp what is happening around him (the call-up for forced labour, compulsory wearing of the yellow star, etc.), we think it inexplicable why, on arrival at the concentration camp, he sees the bald-shaven prisoners as “suspect.” More passages in bad taste follow: “Their faces did not exactly inspire confidence either: jug ears, prominent noses, sunken, beady eyes with a crafty gleam. Quite like Jews in every respect.”
It is also incredible that the spectacle of the crematoria arouses in him feelings of “a sense of a certain joke, a kind of student jape,” as he knows he is in an extermination camp and his being a Jew is sufficient reason for him to be killed. His behaviour, his gauche comments repel and offend the reader, who can only be annoyed on reading the novel’s ending, since the behaviour the main protagonist has displayed hitherto, his lack of compassion, gives him no ground to dispense moral judgements, call others to account (e.g. the reproaches he makes to the Jewish family living in the same building). We must also say something about the style. For the most part your sentences are clumsy, couched in a tortuous form, and sadly there are all too many phrases like “… on the whole …,” “naturally enough,” and “besides which …”
We are therefore returning the manuscript to you.
Regards.
… The letter at least granted me a morning charged with emotions; I recall it even today with a certain sense of nostalgia. If I was surprised, it was no more than the way a person is surprised to bang his head on a protrusion in the wall he had long ago noticed was too low, and he would undoubtedly bang his head on it sooner or later. At least I would encounter a certain amount of passion and perspicacity, albeit only the perspicacity of anger and injustice — at any rate sentiments and senses worthy of the subject!
Then, as I recall, I was exceedingly amused, for instance, by the gesture, that self-assured, firm dismissive wave of the hand, with which the purpose of an endeavour I had undertaken, for motives which were problematic, and far from clear even to myself, was being expropriated, so to speak, only to be immediately destroyed; because the letter presumed, if I was following it correctly, that my sole reason for writing the novel was for it to end up in a publisher’s office where decisions are taken about these sorts of commodities. The comic aspect of this absurd loss of proportions was enough to set even my diaphragm aquiver. For I could not deny it, in the end I had taken my novel to the publisher. But that had been intended purely as a temporary resting place in a whole chain of events, which since then had already been overhauled by time and further events occurring within that time — such as this letter that had been delivered to me. “And so?” I ask myself, “Does that somehow obliterate what I have accomplished?” On the contrary, it has set a seal on it, because — and this fundamental factor had not escaped my watchful eye — that dismissive motion is, at one and the same time, also the first real, one might say, authentic proof that my novel actually exists. Yes, I may have told myself, the unstructured time which now lies behind me has gained its definite outlines precisely in the light of this letter; until now I have never seen my situation so simply — as one that, in point of fact, can be summarized in a single clear sentence: I had written a novel, and it had been rejected, presumably through ignorance and lack of courage, as well as evident spite and stupidity.
It may be — indeed, as I now know, it is quite certain — that I made a mistake when I left …
“Was that the doorbell?”
The old boy loosened the pliable wax plug in one ear.
“I already rang once before!” the old boy’s mother complained indignantly as she traversed the east-west axis of the hallway with brisk (and somehow martial) steps which belied her advanced age and, after swerving to avoid the hammered-glass door (which was now, as always, open, in view of the airlessness of the hallway), popped up in front of the filing cabinet (with due regard, naturally, to the previously described surroundings) (which it would therefore be superfluous to describe again here) (so let us merely make it clear that when we say the old boy’s mother popped up in front of the filing cabinet, this should be taken to mean that although she was, indeed, facing the filing cabinet, she actually popped up in front of the table — or, to be more precise, the table, the only real table in the flat) and (exchanging her street glasses for her reading glasses in a lightning-quick movement) was reading.