VIII
And what I returned to still held, Elena, and the teenage daughters – who went far and wide, as they pleased, who boldly roamed Manhattan, where their grandmother (I now heard it confirmed) was still installed in that deluxe sunset home which, very understandably, she kept mistaking for a hotel…
How solid it all seemed, this other existence, how advanced, how evolved. It wasn’t the middling-class comforts that amazed me: it was the lights, the locks, the taps, the toilets, all eagerly obedient to my touch. How tightly joined to the earth it all was with its steel and concrete, the brownstone on Strong Place.
Yes, the house felt ready to stay in one piece. But now its co-owner, in an unfortunate turn of events, suddenly fell apart.
In the tranquillity of middle-distance hindsight I easily identified the probable cause: a synergy of long-postponed exhaustion, air-travel lag and air-travel bug (a very ambitious flu), and anxiety. Which persisted. The anxiety in me was deeply layered and durable because it went back to before I was born.
My insomnia persisted too. Coming to terms with this involved mental labour, most of it done in darkness. I was home in America, the immigrant nation, stretching from sea to shining sea; and I couldn’t sleep. ‘Night is always a giant,’ wrote the champion insomniac, Nabokov, in a late novella, ‘but this one was especially terrible.’ I had another book on my bedside table. It was a short and stylish study by the historian Mark Mazower called Dark Continent; and I would sometimes go next door with that for an hour before defeatedly returning.
When I closed my eyes I was met by the usual sights – an abstract battlefield or dismantled fairground at dusk, flowers in monochrome, figures cut out of limp white paper; and the thoughts and images verged encouragingly on the nonsensical. But no; my mind was in too low a gear for the cruise control of unconsciousness.
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So many possible futures were queuing up and jockeying to be born. In time, one or other of them would break free and go surging clear of the rest…
They were coming here, the refugees, in the eye of a geohistorical convergence – themselves and their exodus on the one hand, and on the other al-Qaeda, and al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram, and the Taliban, and Sinai Province, and Islamic State.
And even now it was as if a tectonic force had taken hold of Europe and, using its fingernails, had scratched it open and tilted it, causing a heavy mudslide in the direction of old illusions, old dreams of purity and cruelty.
And that force will get heavier still, much heavier, immediately and irreversibly, after the first incidence of takfir. At which point Europe – that by now famously unrobust confederation – would meet another historic test.
And what they might be bringing, the refugees, was insignificant when set against what was already there, in the host nations, the spores and ash heaps of what was already there…Dark Continent is not a book about Africa. The rest of Mazower’s title is ‘Europe’s Twentieth Century’.
Memo to my reader – 2
As well as Germany I went to Austria, Switzerland, Poland, France, and also Spain. I say ‘also Spain’ because that country wasn’t implicated in the Holocaust, unlike all the others (very much including Switzerland – see in due course ‘Afterthought: Masada and the Dead Sea’).
Postwar Deutschland obviously had the sternest work to do in arriving at an unillusioned reckoning. And it is my amateur impression that its efforts deserve to be called, well, broadly commensurate – in itself a stupendous achievement.* Not only is Nazi criminality a part of the national conversation; highly significantly, in my opinion, the young want to talk about it. And it has to be a ‘talking cure’, a long and nauseous iteration: what other way could there be?…And now Germany has become the first nation on earth to erect monuments to its own shame. So I expected the Germans to take my novel as a minor addition to the unresting debate.
And they didn’t do that. Nearly all of them (according to my publisher’s laconic summary) rejected the book out of hand on literary principle: you see, I had on occasion applied to satire (‘the use of ridicule, irony, sarcasm, etc., to expose folly or vice’); and the German reviewers all insisted that humour could not coexist with seriousness. This is a primitively literal-minded credo which, as I’m sure you’ve already sensed, more or less obliterates the anglophone canon. The fact is that seriousness – and morality, and indeed sanity – cannot exist at all without humour…
What did I infer from this? That German literary criticism had at some point made a benighted category error and then stuck to it? Well there was nothing of much interest to think about there. But I went on to wonder if I’d touched on an unexpected sensitivity; it could be that the Germans, while fully accepting that National Socialism was atrocious, were somehow unwilling to admit that it was also ridiculous.
And it wasn’t just the reviewers. After public events one or two old boys would shoulder their way to the signing table to air their objections, and a festival organiser, under his breath, made me really wonder at his vehemence: ‘How can you presume to laugh at Hitlerism?’ I wanted to say, ‘Mockery is a weapon. Why do you think it is that tyrants fear it and ban it, and why did Hitler seek to punish it with death?’
I am familiar with the theory of ‘Holocaust exceptionalism’, which has a literary application: in its bluntest form it maintains that the Holocaust is a subject that historians alone have the right to address. This has emotional force – it is an appeal to decent reticence. But I believe that nothing, nothing whatever, should be shielded from the writer’s eye. If this is the view of a literary fundamentalist, then that is what I am.
