The big stumbling block, though, is why is that article no longer mine? To put it another way, if I am incapable of looking at it with a stranger’s eyes, why am I unable to read my own novel with my own eyes? Within the novel, for instance, a train is moving toward Auschwitz. Crouched in one of the wagons is the subject of the story, a boy of fourteen and a half. He gets up and in the crush squeezes a place for himself by a window slit. Just at this moment the summer sun climbs red and balefully into the periphery of his field of view. While I was reading, I recalled precisely how much difficulty and racking of brains both this as well as the passage which follows it had caused me. Somehow the events of that sweltering summer morning just would not unfold under my hand onto the paper. It was abnormally gloomy here inside, in the room, as I toiled over the text; from the table I looked out on a foggy December morning. There must have been some traffic disturbance on the roads, as the trams were constantly rattling by beneath my window. Then all at once, with astonishing suddenness, the sentences fell into place and enabled the train to arrive and the subject of the story — the fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy — finally to leap out of the stifling gloom of the cattle truck onto the blazing hot ramp at Auschwitz. As I was reading this passage, these memories came alive within me, and at the same time I was able to verify that the sentences fitted together in the organic sequence I had envisaged. That was all very well, but why had not what existed before those sentences, the raw event itself, that once-real morning in Auschwitz, come to life for me? How could it be that those sentences for me contained merely imaginary events, an imaginary cattle truck, an imaginary Auschwitz, and an imaginary fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy, even though I myself had at one time been that fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy?
So what had happened here? What is it what the publisher’s readers had referred to as “your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences”? Yes, what had happened to “the material of my experiences,” where had it vanished to off the paper and from within me? It had existed at one time, indeed it had happened to me twice over: the first time, improbably, in reality, the second time, with much more reality, later on, when I recollected it. Between those two time points it had lain in hibernation. It did not so much as cross my mind at that certain moment when I knew I had to write a novel. I had laboured with various types of novels, only to scrap them one after the other; not one of them had turned out to be a possible novel for me. Then all at once it had popped up within me, from some obscure place, like a brain wave. I suddenly found myself in possession of a body of material which at last offered a definite reality to my agitated, but until then constantly disintegrating, vision and which, solid, pliant, and shapeless, started forthwith to ferment and swell within me like a yeasty dough. A strange ecstasy took hold of me; I lived a double life: my present — albeit halfheartedly, reluctantly, and my concentration-camp past — with the acute reality of the present. My readiness to immerse myself in it almost scared me; even now I could not give a reason for the voluptuous feeling which attended it. I don’t know if memory itself is attended by that delight, irrespective of its subject, since I would not say that a concentration camp is exactly a bowl of fun; yet the fact is that during this period the slightest impression was enough to hurtle me back into my past. Auschwitz was present here, inside me, sitting in my stomach like an undigested dumpling, its spices belching up at the most unexpected moments. It was sufficient for me to glimpse a desolate locality, a barren industrial area, a sun-baked street, the concrete pilings of a newly started building, to breathe in the raw smell of pitch and timber, for ever-newer details, input, and moods to well up with something like the force of actuality. For a time, I awoke each morning on the barrack forecourt at Auschwitz. It took a while for me to realize that this perception was evoked by a constant olfactory stimulus. A few days before, I had bought a new leather strap for my wristwatch. At night I put the watch on a low shelf directly by the bedside. Most likely that characteristic smell, reminiscent of chlorine and a distant stench of corpses, had lingered on the strap from the tanning and other processes. Later on I even used the strap as a sort of sal volatile: when my memories flagged, lay low inertly in the crannies of my brain, I used it to entice them from their hiding places — smelling them to pieces, so to speak. I shrank from no means and no effort in waging my battle with time, wresting from it my due right. I crammed myself with my own life. I was rich, weighty, mature, I stood at the threshold of some sort of transformation. I felt like a wild pear tree which wanted to bear apricots.
However, the more vivid my memories, the more abjectly they were caught on paper. While I was remembering, I was unable to write the novel; but as soon as I started to write the novel, I stopped remembering. It’s not that my memories suddenly vanished, they simply changed. They transformed into the contents of some kind of lucky-dip tub into which I would reach, at the intervals that I deemed necessary, for a negotiable bank note. I would pick and choose among them: this one I needed, that one, not. By now the facts of my life, the so-called “material of my experiences,” only distracted, confined, and hampered me in my work of bringing into life the novel for which that life had originally provided the conditions for life and had nourished from first to last. My work — writing the novel — actually consisted of nothing else than a systematic atrophying of my experiences in the interest of an artificial — or if you prefer, artistic — formula that, on paper, and only on paper, I could judge as an equivalent of my experiences. But in order for me to write I had to look on my novel like every novel in general — as a formation, a work of art composed of abstract symbols. Without my noticing, I had taken a run-up and made a big leap, and with a single bound I had suddenly switched from the personal into the objective and the general, only then to look around me in astonishment. Yet there was no reason to be surprised; as I know now, I had already completed that leap as soon as I made the start on writing my novel. It was no use my trying to plod back to the intention, no use that my original ambition had been directed solely at this one novel and did not so much as squint at anything beyond it, did not extend beyond the pages of this manuscript: by its very nature, a novel is only a novel if it transmits something — and I too wanted to transmit something, otherwise I would not have written a novel. To transmit, in my own way, according to my own lights; to transmit the material that was possible for me, my own material, myself — for, overloaded and weighted down as I was by its burden, I was by now longing like a bloated udder simply for the relief of being milked, being interpreted … however, there was one thing that, perhaps naturally enough, I did not think of: we are never capable of interpreting for ourselves. I was taken to Auschwitz not by the train in the novel but by a real one.
That’s right, I had failed to reckon on just this one small matter. Meanwhile, while I withdrew into my private, indeed most private, life (my “private affairs,” as my mother used to say); while I was shutting myself off from everything and everyone else in order to be able to grub around peacefully in my own world of thoughts; while I did my utmost to insure that nobody else would be able to interrupt me in my solitary passion, I had started innocently, and with a heartfelt diligence, to write — for others. Because, as I now see clearly, to write a novel means to write for others — among others, for those who reject one.