Hannah Arendt | Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil / 1963 || Deborah E. Lipstadt | The Eichmann Trial / 2011 || Bettina Stangneth | Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer / 2014

three eichmanns

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963; revised and enlarged edition, 1965).

Deborah E. Lipstadt The Eichmann Trial (New York: Schocken Books, 2011)

Bettina Stangneth Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)

 

Over the past few years, two major new books on Adolf Eichmann and his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, Deborah Lipstadt’s The Echmann Trial (2011) and Bettina Stangneth’s carefully researched and documented Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), have intelligently analyzed Eichmann’s role as, what many have described, the “Manager of the Holocaust,” his life after the fall of Germany, and his final trial and death, as well as the significance of these events. Both books also—Lipstadt’s as a direct confrontation and Strangneth’s book by clear implication—refute many of the arguments Hannah Arendt expressed in her 1963 work, based, in turn, on her reports in The New Yorker during the Eichmann trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil—effectively dismantling any responses that Eichmann was a banal figure who was simply following orders and had had little actual role in bringing millions of Jews to the camps. Accordingly, along with reading these new titles, I felt it necessary to revisit the Arendt book as well, and have spent the last several months (including a day on jury duty) encountering three somewhat different perspectives of the Nazi leader who, although may have killed no one personally (that is, by immediate “hands-on” actions), and having described himself—quite ridiculously—as no “Jew-hater” but a man who was even a “friend to the Jews,” nonetheless sent so many thousands upon thousands to their deaths.

       Eichmann represents a highly disturbing phenomenon, not only because he was such a thorough and seemingly incorruptible believer in the necessity of destroying an entire people— which, had the Germans won the War might also have included the Poles and citizens of other cultures which Hitler’s Aryan fantasies perceived as inferior—but was proud of continuing to carry out Hitler’s Final Solution even after most all of the other despicable Nazi’s still living at the time of Germany’s defeat, had abandoned such activities or ordered them to be ceased.

      And yet, as Arendt’s arguments indicate, the ordinary-looking man Eichmann, had fate simply dealt him a different set of cards, might have never even reached the position in which he found himself. Certainly few others, with far greater intelligence and ambitions, might not have been so eager to accomplish the destruction of so many human beings, while remaining so distant from the actual horrors as they took place. In short, he was a monster who didn’t reveal himself to be one, a very contradiction of the root meaning of the word (monstre, to warn by showing). Yet he didn’t exactly shirk his involvement or blame only others, as did so many at the Nuremberg Trials, but proclaimed that because it was his sworn duty, he felt proud in helping to carry out the round-ups and shipping of Jews to the camps such as Aushwitz, Chelmno, and Theresienstadt.

    From Strangneth’s book, we now know that, whether or not he was intelligent, he was a wily actor who knew how to twist history so that what might appear as totally absurd might be represented as somewhat reasonable and logical, at least from his point of view; and the personality he portrayed in Jerusalem had been practiced and crafted from this on-tape interviews with Nazi supporters in Buenos Aires, the so-called Sassen tapes, after the war. He was not stupid, and, if nothing else, we now know, he was seldom banal, in the sense of being trite or unoriginal. Eichmann’s planning and organizing abilities, often requiring him to work apart and even against other departments of the Nazi bureaucracy, were astounding, particularly with regard to his ability to convince some Jewish leaders to actually engage in playing a role in their own and their compatriots’ destruction. And, finally, we now know that, even if he had been given another deck of cards which would have made his life far different, he worked extraordinarily hard to keep playing out the game with the same players and the rules that had been ordained.     

     Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial is a seemingly straight-forward and highly informative summary of Eichmann’s war-time activities, a succinct account of his arrest, years later, in Argentina, and of the Jerusalem trial itself; and as such is perhaps the best place to begin any study of Eichmann and the events surrounding him for today’s everyman reader.

      Her book begins with a quite startling announcement in 1960 by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to Israel’s Knesset:

 

              I have to inform the Knesset that a short time ago one of the great

              Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible together

              with the Nazi leaders for what they called the Final Solution, which

              is the annihilation of six million European Jews, was discovered

              by the Israel security services. Adolf Eichmann is already under

              arrest in Israel and will be placed on trial shortly under the terms

              for the trail of Nazis and their collaborators.

 

The shock was palpable as a confused silence spread over the parliament, followed a few moments later by, as Lipstadt describes it, an “eruption”: “People wept, hugged, and marveled.”

     What follows is a clearly expressed summary of how Eichmann’s Argentina address was discovered—a series of events which began in the late 1950s when Sylvia Hermann began dating Eichmann’s son Klaus, who, in turn, bragged to Sylvia’s family that his father had been a high-ranking Waffen-SS officer. The girl’s father, Lothar Hermann, a nearly-blind German half-Jew, was appalled by Klaus’ suggestion that the German’s “should have finished the job of exterminating the Jews,” connected up the boy’s statements with what we soon after read in the German-language newspaper, Argentinisches Tageblatt, that Eichmann was one of Nazi criminals still at large, and wrote to the Frankfurt prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, who responded by suggesting that Hermann should attempt to locate Eichmann’s address. The daughter was sent into the run-down neighborhood where Klaus lived, where she “asked around until she located the ‘ramshackle’ Eichmann home.” At the house, she was met by a middle-aged man, who described himself as Klaus’ uncle, and invited the girl to wait for his nephew’s return. When Klaus finally returned, he suggested he might accompany Sylvia to the bus, and as they left, addressed the man as “Father.”

     Receiving the address, Bauer determined to further investigate, but not through the German security services or even the German judicial system, because both had proved wary of involving themselves in the trials of former Nazis and some members of these organizations, still harboring Nazi sympathies, might even warn Eichmann. Instead he passed on the information to Israel, and the information was ultimately passed on to Isser Harel, the head of Mossad (Israel’s security services). Four months later, however, when an Israeli operative was ordered to check the address, he determined that such a dilapidated building could not possibly be the home of such a former high-ranking officer as Eichmann. When Bauer heard of this “lackadaisical approach,” he insisted that Harel meet with the Hermanns directly to assess the quality of his information.

      Yet a few more months passed, and when the agent met with Herman, he was “nonplussed to discover that their informant was blind.” Sylvia convinced him, however, that there may be some truth to the matter, and he asked them to help by checking the property records for Eichmann’s address, where they discovered that the building was owned by an Austrian named Schmidt, but “that the utility bill went to a Ricardo Klement” (Eichmann’s alias in Argentina). Hermann proposed that Schmidt was Eichmann and suggested (without any evidence) that Eichmann had had plastic surgery to disguise his appearance, ideas which, when the Israelis looked into them, proved to be mistaken; accordingly they, once again, dropped the case. In the meantime, however, Bauer was able to discover from other sources that Eichmann, now known as Klement, was indeed living in Argentina.

     Visiting Israel in December 1959, Bauer met with General Haim Cohen, expressing his disappointment with Harel’s inactivity. Summoned to Cohen’s office, Harel once again took up the search, dispatching Mossad’s chief interrogator, Zvi Aharoni, to Argentina, where he discovered that indeed Eichmann and Klement were the same man. Upon hearing of this, Ben-Gurion immediately ordered that Eichmann should be “apprehended and brought to Israel to stand trial.”

     Even after a group of Israeli security volunteers entered Argentina on false papers, leasing houses, renting cars, and establishing other connections, the entire project met with another snag when it was discovered that the Eichmann family had now moved to another house, a hand-built construction of cinder-block that had no electricity or running water. At that time Eichmann was working at a Mercedes-Benz assembly plant, and took the bus home each evening to his somewhat secluded domicile.

     Lipstadt dramatically describes his arrest:

 

                On May 11, 1960, the Israelis parked two cars midway between the bus

                stop and his home. One had its hood up. The men assigned to grab him

                huddled over the engine as if they were checking a mechanical failure.

                The second car parked down the road, facing the first car. When Eichmann

                neared the “disabled” car, the driver of the second car switched on the

                headlights, effectively blinding him. Peter Malkin, a hand-combat

                specialist and one of the agents near the “disabled” car, jumped him.

                While they struggled, Eichmann emitted what Malkin described as “the

                primal cry of a cornered animal.”

 

And so, the discovery and abduction that almost didn’t happen, was over. Eichmann, soon after brought to Israel, was on trial for his life.*

    

      Lipstadt’s most significant contribution, however, is her detailed presentation of the trial, pointing to both the rationale of and errors made by the prosecuting attorney, Gideon Hausner, who, with the support and likely encouragement of Ben-Gurion, determined to make the Israeli trial very different from the previous Nuremberg court procedures; the Israelis wanted to make this a trial not just about the criminal and his horrific deeds, but to allow for the trial itself to be an occasion during which surviving Jews from around the world might be able, for the first time, to express their grievances, helping to insure that the true dimensions of the Holocaust, in which Eichmann had such a significant role, would not go unspoken or be forgotten. Lipstadt is particularly good at pointing up the justifiable reasons for doing this, as well as expressing the views of those who felt the whole affair to be only a show-trial that had lost its focus on its one necessary duty, to lay out a coherent case for Eichmann’s criminal guilt.

     The jurors themselves, in fact, often stood at odds with the endless testimonies of those called by the prosecution; while Eichmann’s lawyer, Robert Servatius, at times seemed disinterested in asking specific questions or even in challenging some of the accusations, while at other times steering his client into long illogical harangues of self-justification. The very fact that Israel had abducted Eichmann, moreover, and that, in a very real sense, the victims were trying their murderer, brought international questions of whether or not Eichmann could possibly get a fair trial. The fact, moreover, that the trial was conducted in Hebrew (translated into not always perfect English and even worse German in daily reports) before jurors, lawyers, and witnesses who primarily spoke German seemed senseless to other critics such as Hannah Arendt.    

     In her short text, nonetheless, Lipstadt brings clarity to the issues of the trial, negotiating the complexities of a series of such horrific acts that, in many senses, simply could be not possibly be coherently expressed. In the end, the judges ruled Eichmann guilty, specifically noting that despite his insistence that he wanted to tell the truth, and the fact that he had given specific testimony about his activities, he was also a liar whose “entire testimony was nothing but one consistent attempt to deny the truth and to conceal his real share of responsibility.” Eichmann’s arguments that in Vienna his work to move the Jews to the camps had been for the “mutual benefit” of Jews and Nazis were contradicted, so the court declared, by “witnesses and the documents.” His plan to relocate thousands of Jews to Madagascar, which he argued, if it had materialized, “everything would have been in perfect order to the satisfaction of the Germans and the Jews,” was, in fact, “far from the truth.” Eichmann’s argument that he reacted to the failure of the trucks-for-lives negotiation concerning about-to-be-deported Hungarian Jews with “sorrow,” “fury and…anger,” was “sheer hypocrisy,” particularly given the fact that he was simultaneously working (even against Heinrich Himmler’s orders) to deport Hungarian Jews as quickly as possible.

     Yet the judges were not thoroughly persuaded by Hausner that Eichmann actually murdered a small boy in Budapest, that he had been connected to Kristallnact, or even that his deportation activities in Vienna, Prague, and Nisko during the early years were “brutal,” given the fact there was no proof, at that time, that it was part of a program to exterminate the Jewish people, having occurred before Hitler’s announcement of The Final Solution.

     It is in the last chapter of her book, however, that Lipstadt reveals that she has another motivation for retelling the Eichmann story, which seems to have more to do with settling scores that explaining history. Most notably Lipstadt expresses her outrage against Hannah Arendt and her reports of the trial in The New Yorker, furious that Arendt pretends to report on the entire long months of the trial, much of which she did not actually attend. 

     Lipstadt’s larger fury, moreover, arises from Arendt’s seemingly predetermined intention of finding a man like Eichmann to be an ignorant and lazy thinker who reveals the banality of evil. And, finally, Lipstadt, like so many others, is angry at Arendt’s penchant for suggesting that hundreds of the Jewish victims were themselves collaborators in their own and others’ deaths. If at moments Lipstadt is quite fair-minded about Arendt, one clearly feels that she still has a grudge to settle—one to which the reader, at least this reader, is somewhat sympathetic. If nothing else, however, using Arendt’s writing as an example of how the issues surrounding Eichmann remain, even today, confused and conflicted is an important analysis of the Eichmann trial.

      Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem shines a light upon SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann and his trial that takes both Lipstadt’s and Arendt’s writing into entirely different dimensions. Like a masterful sleuth, the author has tracked down nearly all of Eichmann’s movements after the War from the American prisoner war camp to Oberpfalz (where he lived under the name Otto Eckmann) from he escaped, to yet a new identity as Otto Heninger near Celle in Lower Saxony, and eventually to Argentina, this time under the name of Ricardo Klement. 

     The author also presents, in the early chapters, specific details on Eichmann’s rise to power, often on the basis of false credentials, such as the notion that he was a skilled “Hebraist” (in fact, there is no reason, except for his purchase of a textbook, Hebräisch für Jedermann, “Hebrew for Everyone,” that he knew any but a few words of Hebrew and Yiddish), a myth which Eichmann promulgated and used to achieve his ultimate position as the man who met with the Jewish committees and arranged for the deportation transports in Austria, Hungary and elsewhere of Jews to the death camps.

     Strangneth also reveals more clearly than other writers that he most likely attended the meeting where Hitler outlined The Final Solution, and she argues that Eichmann himself insisted that he had “coined” the term. Far more in depth than Lipstadt, moreover, Strangneth’s research makes clear just how resolved Eichmann was in his determination to send all the Jews to their death, working against the expressed orders of his superiors to ship out Hungarian Jews even as the War itself was drawing to a close.

     Most importantly, Strangneth, for the first time in print, analyzes and recreates the contents of over 1,300 pages of written notes and the seventy-three audio reel recordings, the so-called Sassen tapes, upon which Eichmann extensively outlined his war-time experiences, detailing many events of the Holocaust. Indeed, the Nazi group, headed by Wilhelmus Antonius Maria Sassen and other Argentina-based or relocated Nazis who one-day hoped to revive Nazism not only in Germany but throughout the world, and who were as equally anti-Semitic, if not more than Eichmann, expressed their intrigue with the famed Nazi figure among their midst. Many of them were slightly fearful of Eichmann (he had known so many of the Nazi leaders), and, more importantly, were curious as to what the actual truth of the Holocaust was—specifically with regard to the actual numbers of Jews actually deported and killed—in their attempts to discover the truth. Their hope, as the author suggests, was that the numbers had been highly inflated, and if they could prove this, with information from Eichmann, they felt they could surely resurrect their cause. Strangneth explains the situation quite succinctly:

 

             No topic provoked the Düurer circle [the group of Argentinean Nazi supporters]

             more than the number of Jewish victims. By 1957, no one in Buenos Aires still

             believed that articles like “The Lie of the Six Million” and the Hester Report

             could throw the genocide into doubt—mainly because the Dürer circle had been

             largely responsible for manufacturing these revisionist denials. Once the new

             body of source material became available, all they could do was try to make

             the scale of the genocide appear as small as possible. It is difficult to understand

             why the question of victim numbers continues to occupy old and neo-Nazis, and

             the New Right, like no other, considering that the legal and moral problem of

             the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews does not depend on an absolute number. The

             ‘reparations’ negotiations would hardly have had a different outcome if four or

             eight million, rather than six, had been the figure under discussion. It is as if 

             these men, who had mastered the power of symbols with their cult of the 

             Führer, were always more afraid of the “enemy’s” powerful symbol—the 

             six million—than anything else.

 

But even more importantly was the fact that it was Eichmann who first mentioned this number, and even during the Nuremberg trials, Der Weg had argued that it was a pity, “after the deaths of Adolf Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and Kaltenbrunner,” that Eichmann might not be tracked down to testify as “the only credible inside witness.”

      Despite considerable prodding, argument, and intense questioning, however, Eichmann—proud as ever for doing what he saw as his duty—could not be dissuaded from the number of Jews who might have been destroyed, nor did he fully perceive any true guilt for his efficiency in trying to carry out The Final Solution. Yet, through the tough challenges of the several figures attending these taping sessions—often consisting a significant number of individuals from German community—including a quite mysterious figure who clearly knew intimate details of Nazi structure (suggesting, obviously, that he had been a figure of some importance in the Nazi hierarchy), Eichmann did, at times, retract some of his enthusiasm, shift course in his extensive discussions, and, most importantly, reevaluate the reception of his words and ideas. It is clear, accordingly, that—even as some of the Jerusalem observers had suspected—these important tapes served as a trial run for Eichmann’s self-defense in Israel. If nothing else, we hear in these tapes, at least as Stangneth reports their content, that Eichmann intimately learned just how singular and unpopular his viewpoints and past activities were now perceived. And Strangneth, without literally saying so, seems to indicate that the Eichmann who survived the taping sessions was no longer the same man, in some ways, having given up on some of his staunch convictions and, almost intentionally putting himself in harm’s way, with expectation of the dramatic arrest which Lipstadt so effectively describes.

     By the time of the Jerusalem trial, having written out yet another version of his experiences, Eichmann had indeed—either intentionally or effectively—become a different person. Although, attempting still to characterize his actions as justifiable and even moral (although based on a very twisted notion of what that meant), he now seemed worn down, confused, even, sometimes, rather stupid, representing himself as a kind of mere bureaucratic errand-boy than as an actual player in the events of Nazi Germany which he was. This is the Eichmann Arendt saw, and frankly misunderstood. He was no longer the swaggering SS Obersturmbannführer, a somewhat handsome young Nazi resolute to destroy every Jew he encountered in an attempt to rise in the Nazi world. What Arendt saw in Eichmann—and as Lipstadt argues, she wanted to see because it might explain away the notion that an entire nation of individuals had been swept-away by a suicidal pride and hate of others: the fact that anyone might be evil, the possibility that evil itself was something trite and meaningless.

     Yet that is not at all what Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem actually proclaims. Certainly there is much to anger one about Arendt’s significant work. She begins her book like a princess dowager, entering the room with the hot breath of utter disdain. After being called to her feet with the words “Beth Hamishpath,” Arendt immediately frets about the scene, the three judges (who, German-speaking, she admires throughout), below which sit:

 

                    the translators, whose services are needed for direct exchanges between

                    defendant or his counsel and the court; otherwise, the German-speaking

                    accused party, like almost everyone else in the audience, follows the

                    Hebrew proceedings through the simultaneous radio transmission, which

                    is excellent in French, bearable in English, and sheer comedy, frequently

                    incomprehensible, in German. (In view of the scrupulous fairness of

                    all technical arrangements for the trial, it is among the minor mysteries

                    of the new state of Israel that, with its high percentage of German-born

                    people, it was unable to find an adequate translator into the only language

                    accused and his counsel could understand. For the old prejudice against

                    German Jews, once very pronounced in Israel, is no longer strong enough

                    to account for it….)

 

For Arendt, a former Zionist, all things Israeli are intolerable, and she often displays the German-Jewish pique over what she describes as Eastern Jews.

 

    Arendt was also strongly convinced that the trial should not have been an Israeli one, but an international tribunal, with representatives from all the countries who had been effected—an issue with which I might agree with her, were it not that I can also completely comprehend why this necessarily had to be a trial in which the Jews indicted one of their major murderers, finally being able to act after so many decades of victimization.

     As Lipstadt indicates, Arendt is often too quick to blame the Judenrat—often consulted and, when not completely existent, established by Eichmann and other Nazi leaders in order to help make things appear to be fair and organized, as well as giving the illusion that relocation was in the Jews’ best interest—as being “an instrument in the hands of Nazi murderers,” in short declaring the victims as collaborationists. She is so convincing at times, one can imagine that such groups might, in certain instances, have sacrificed others for their survival. But the question that returns again and again is what other choices did they have? Were they simply deluded (Eichmann, as he performed in the trial, was evidently a masterful actor) or were they simply grasping at straws? What choices do people have when herded up with the barrels of guns jabbed into their backs?     

      And then, obviously, there are those final last words which weigh down Arendt’s narrative with what none of us truly want to believe: that “this long course in human wickedness….[was simply] a lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

      We might excuse Arendt today, since she had only a slight knowledge of the Sassen tapes, as published in Life and German magazines. And even after reading of all the seemingly unrepentant, yet quite coherent statements of Eichmann before Jerusalem in Strangneth’s book, we still realize that Eichmann was no genius. Might any of the Nazi leaders truly be described as brilliant? Clever perhaps, charismatic, lucky; but such hate seldom can cloak itself in a truly intelligent mind.

      Moreover, in reading Arendt’s often intelligent account of Eichmann’s career in Eichmann in Jerusalem we meet another woman, a conflicted being perhaps, but an often remarkably perceptive figure who not only takes us, in her narrative, through the various aspects of the Nazi’s anti-Semitic mania, but recounts, one by one, the various theaters in which their attacks against Jews (and others) took place, and how and why they worked—or in some extraordinary places didn’t succeed at all. The Nazis simply presumed that their own view of anti-Semitism was so universally shared that it would be easy to accomplish their extermination of all Jews (and later, all Poles, all Gypsies, and all homosexuals) throughout Europe and, I suppose, throughout the world. In fact, they were almost right in their suppositions—except for the strange Mussolini concept that “his Jews” ought to left alone, and the Danes’ willingness to take on a Jewish identity from their King on down to every bicycle rider on the streets, and the pacifist Swedes’ endless willingness to take in everyone who no one else wanted, and the majority of the Dutch...and, as I’ve expressed elsewhere in this volume, some extraordinarily brave French Protestants who reacted quite differently—a difference, I might suggest, that is similar to Derrida’s la différence, a difference which changes everything.

  Arendt convincingly makes her case that not everyone went along so pacifically with Hitler’s hatred. I find her accounting of the different fronts and how its people were affected by the Nazi dictates to be one of the most transparent evaluations of war-time behavior to have ever been written. And these chapters, alone, make her problematic book worth the reading.

     Finally, her Epilogue and Postscript analyze the legal and jurisprudential issues with apparent sophistication. 

                 

     The three versions of Eichmann represented in these 3 volumes, if radically different, represent the impossibility of truly ever comprehending a being like Eichmann—and, by extension any of Nazi hierarchy. As much as has been written on Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Mengele, and Hitler himself, the more impossible it becomes to comprehend their ideas and actions, which seem to lie outside of human fellow-feeling and moral precepts. How did such sick individuals come together at such a moment to destroy so many of their fellow human beings?

     In a terrible way, Eichmann, perceived in retrospect, was a bit like a perfectly-made robotic creation who, brilliantly carrying out the behavior with which he was programmed, could simply not comprehend why his actions might not be perceived as anything but heroic. After all, he believed in a god whose name was Hitler, and he had obeyed that god and did his very best to maintain his faith. Might he too not quote Kant to argue that he had done his moral duty—even if he forgot, as Arendt points out, Kant’s concept of moral duty is “bound up with man’s faculty of judgement”? That his god was the devil himself, he simply could not imagine, and only in that sense, was he banal; but at the same time, through this fatal flaw, he was also a oddly tragic figure, someone who simply could not comprehend the consequences of his own and others’ acts. An unforgivable and unredeemable tragic monster is nearly impossible for most of us to comprehend and, certainly, difficult for anyone with a conscience to accept; one might even argue that in order to define beings or events as tragic involves the monster’s awareness of and feeling of guilt for his acts. If glimmers of guilt cracked through the armor of Eichmann’s personae, they seemed always to be distorted by what he perceived as various overlays of changing historical viewpoints. Within the claustrophobic confines of his Nazi mindset, his truth never varied. His negotiation with reality was such a brutal one that it left him outside of any other perspective of human behavior, turning him into a kind of Macbeth without a hand-washing wife (which, perhaps, is why he aligned himself, during the trial, with Pontius Pilate, washing his own hands in mock reassignment of any guilt). In our daily reality, we cannot truly get a fix on such a beast.

      Perhaps one needs three books each presenting a different vision of such a figure to even to begin to get a fix. But, of course, in another sense, there can never be a fix, only a raw roar of sorrow and suffering.

 

Los Angeles, May 5-6, 2015

Reprinted in Green Integer Blog (May 2015).

 

*Lipstadt also chastises Naxi hunter Simon Wiesenthal for claiming that he had known the whereabouts of Eichmann. But Strangneth reveals that he may, indeed, have had knowledge, but was simply ignored by numerous governments when he attempted to notify them of his discovery. I should also add that Stangneth’s depiction of the series of events that led up to Eichmann’s abduction are significantly different. She suggests that Bauer, once he had the information, buried it, and no further action was taken within the German system.

Reynolds Price | The Tongues of Angels / 1990

an attack of the heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reynolds Price The Tongues of Angels (New York: Atheneum, 1990)

 

As I mentioned in My Year 2004, I met Reynolds Price only one time, when he appeared with a group of other Duke University professors, interviewing me for an assistant professorship. I think he asked me several questions, but only one remains in my mind, as he leaned forward to seriously query in his North Carolina dialect, "Mr. Messerli, do you intend to abandon Southern literature."  Yes, I did indeed intend to give it up, since I felt, having written significantly on Faulkner and Welty, that I had rather worn it out. And that was pretty much what happened until more recently, when working on essays for my cultural memoirs, I have written on Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, and others.

 

   But way back in 1978 I simply could not confess to that, and replied: "No, not at all. As you've noted, I've turned more recently to writing on what some might describe as "postmodern" authors. But I still believe there's much to be written about on writers like Doris Betts (a professor at the nearby University of North Carolina) and you, Mr. Price." I don't know if he bought that or not, but the others seemed genuinely pleased by my reply.

    Unfortunately, Price never lived to see the honesty of my statement. He died early this year on January 20th. Immediately I determined to write something. But the only book I had previously read, A Long and Happy Life, was in the mid-1960s, a few years after it was published in 1962. I would have been happy to reread it, but our local Beverly Hills Library did not own a copy. So I chose, instead, a fiction from Reynolds' mid-career, coming after some of his better known works, A Generous Man, The Surface of Earth, and Kate Vaiden and before his completion of his Great Circle trilogy.

     Accordingly, I'm not sure that this book is truly representative of Price's work, but it does seem honest and somewhat autobiographically based, or, perhaps, I should say it seems largely authentic, filled with the detail of a 1954 boys' camp in the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, where the 21-year-old "hero," Bridge Boatner, takes on the responsibilities of caring for several rowdy boys, living in large room in a summer camp. In that sense, Price's fiction might almost be read as an all-male version of his mentor, Eudora Welty's long story, "Moon Lake."

     Like Welty's story, wherein one young orphan girl, Easter, seems far more mature and daring than the other giggling schoolgirls, in The Tongues of Angels, one young boy, Rafe Noren, also a kind of orphan (he has seen his mother and her maid murdered) possesses talents and knowledge that awe both the other "reedy voiced" boys and the young Boatner, a budding painter trying to lay to rest his own demons connected with father's recent death.

     Rafe, blessed with a beautiful smile, but also mercurial and far too deep of a thinker for a boy of his age, helps Boatner to find his way not only in his painting, spurring him to do far greater things and simply to see far more that he has before, but also to deal with the past. Like most 21-year-olds Boatner is, in several ways, no more mature than the boys whom he must teach and care for. First of all, he is still a virgin.  Secondly he is—somewhat like the author of this book—a sentimentalist; as he describes himself, he is an "easy weeper."

 

                              My eyes tear freely at the least intensification of gladness,

                              almost never at anger or grief. I fog up for instance at TV

                              commercials that advertise long-distance phone calls—sons

                              calling their mothers who drown in tears.

 

And finally, Bridge Boatner is simply unprepared for life. As an only child, he has been coddled and kept safe from the dangers that lurk in the corners of his young charge's eyes. A visit with another camp counselor to the Thomas Wolfe House in Asheville, almost leads him to promise to marry the young country girl living within. His friend Kev pulls him safely away from self-destruction.     

     So it is no surprise that a figure like Rafe Noren, the son of a wealthy plantation owner, who quotes the Corinthians bible passage behind the fiction's title—"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal."—should be somewhat incomprehensible to his elder; and, while Boatner is able to save the boy from a poisonous snakebite, in the end he is unable to charitably give Rafe the love he truly needs.

     There is almost a bitterness in Boatner's statement that the "really rich are different from you and me—they're starved. And what they crave of course is what we never give them. The way other people want peace and quiet, the rich want absolute love and loyalty in spite of their money."

      It is his inability to show his love to Rafe that Boatner truly fails. But in presenting this figure the way he does, Price also takes an easy way out. The story he tells, apparently, is told to the narrator's sons, years later, as an explanation of the painting upon his wall and a kind of confession for what he sees were his failures. Yet, it is just not believable, given the character Price has created in Boatner, that he is a heterosexual with a sensitive past.

      I can well understand why the author, himself gay, did not wish to implant a gay man in a room with young boys for several weeks. The complications of what that might suggest, and the critical reverberations would be more than painful. But yet the way Price tells this story calls out for that explanation for both the deep bonding of the two and the later withholding of love. It is as if Price has refused the implications of his own tale. I cannot for one moment believe Boatner's desire for a young woman named Viemme, who, the one time he calls, betrays him by staying out all night in a place she cannot be reached. Everything that moves him, that energizes Boatner and pushes him into ecstatic delights lies in the boy's camp, encapsulated in Rafe Noren and in the Indian lore taught by a Native American named Day, both representing something "outside" the normative community. Finally, it is difficult to comprehend why the painter's request to "draw the boy" should invoke such guilt as Boatner displays if that offer did not implicitly contain the sexual implications the phrase often suggests. There is no real connection between his request and Rafael's subsequently being bitten by a rattler—unless it's a symbolic one.

     It seems to me that Bridge Boatner needed far more understanding of himself than his creator has allowed him. Certainly his sexuality and his need to contain that in the situation in which he has found himself, would help to clarify the book's sad ending, in which the young beloved boy (seen as a true angel by everyone in camp) is found dead of a stroke at the sacred Indian prayer circle above their cabins. Price describes it as a stroke, while the reader understands it as an attack of the heart.

    

Los Angeles, March 6, 2011

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (March 2011).

Frederick Barthelme | There Must Be Some Mistake / 2014

a thing of chance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frederick Barthelme There Must Be Some Mistake (New York: Little, Brown, 2014)

Living in Kemah, Texas at the edge of Forgetful Bay, Wallace Webster suddenly discovers himself overwhelmed by death. Although he is only in his late 50s, Webster has been “let-go” from his job as an advertising designer. And a few years earlier, he divorced his second wife, Diane. His daughter, Morgan, is off to college in nearby Houston, and Webster, often left alone, stays up nights to watch Scandinavian crime dramas on DVD. It probably doesn’t help that he is fascinated by all things decaying and tacky, a world on the underside of the American belly which reveals what used to be called the American Dream in absolute decay. The people who surround him are, for the most part, misplaced individuals, many of whom have come to Forgetful Bay to…well, to forget, yes, but also because they seem to have no place else to go. The not so glamorous views of the Bay, the numerous run-down oyster houses and bars—including the outlandish Velodrome, atop which is attached, like an alien space-ship which crashed into the roof of the concrete monstrosity, a “small Airstream trailer.” The bar and restaurant is owned by Webster’s neighborly condominium owner Chantal, who, along with a former co-worker, Jilly, quickly becomes one of the coterie surrounding the sexually worn-out once-time artist. In short, Webster is suffering from what used to be described as a mid-life crisis, as he now, trying to outwit death, passively goes through the motions of living without much of vision of what might lay ahead.

     If this down-and-out “hero’s” mind is occupied with presages of destruction and death, moreover, it doesn’t help that his condominium has suddenly been hit by a series of inexplicable attacks, violence, and deaths. Chantal has been attacked by a figure attempting to paint her “Yves Klein blue.” Another neighbor, Forest Ng,” dies in a car crash. A man Webster hardly knows, former Homeowner Association president, Duncan Parker, stops by to confess to Webster that he has fallen in love with another woman and is desperate to find a way out of his marriage to his gigantically-framed wife; soon after Parker seemingly commits suicide. Or was it suicide? Some of the condominium members ponder the possibility of murder, particularly when Parker’s giantess wife disappears on a cruise-ship voyage to Canada.

     Meanwhile, Webster’s new friend-lover, Chantal admits she has killed one of her former husbands, but, apparently, has gotten away with the murder; she casually mentions that she also attempted to kill another of her mates. Her daughter, Tinker, suddenly shows up; the heavily tattooed girl, a wannabe performance artist, giggles through lunch with her mother about her punishment of a man who has tried to sexually accost her, who she threatened to expose and from whom she stole his car. Webster, at heart more conventional than he imagines himself to be, is taken aback, and reconsiders his friendship with the life-hardened Chantal, but is unable to imagine an easy way of extracting himself from their relationship. Indeed, if there is one unifying pattern in Webster’s life, it is that he seeks, time and again, the easy way out.

 

    Things become even more complicated and less simple when another homeowner, Oscar Peterson (no relation to the famous jazz pianist) is found dead in a car still parked in his garage. When Chantal admits that she has had a serious relationship with Peterson, everything begins to link up in the hyper-active minds of other condominium owners, particularly the new HOA president, Bernadette Loo, and Jean Darling, a police detective who owns one of the units. And everything goes haywire when, at a meeting of the homeowners held to discuss the events, an elderly attendee has a heart attack!

     As if the “easy-going” Webster needs anything more in his suddenly complex life, his former wife, Diane, threatens to move back to Forgetful Bay with her new lover Cal, who just happens to be Webster’s closest friend, Jilly’s, ex-husband—a shifty character who she’s terrified of again encountering and who has recently been charged for having sex with an underage girl.

      Frederick Barthelme’s fiction, itself a kind of easy-going narrative that rambles through the detritus of semi-urban American life it describes, might be subtitled, “The Woman in My Life,” as the various figures surrounding the narrator gather about him, strangely enough all getting along quite nicely, even if occasionally, they gang up to tease the semi-beloved male at their center. And, in that sense, Barthelme’s work might be described as a kind of middle-aged male fantasy focusing on a self-satisfied persona that seems to share a great deal with its author, who, clearly, loves the kind of sad-sack landscape tarted-up with decorative plastic statues he attributes to Webster’s environment. And although this fiction admittedly is a real joy to read because of its patch-quilt plotting, too often the author seems to take the easy way out.

       Even when Webster seems to get up the energy to confront Chantal about her past life and quit their affair, he stops midway to his voyage, breaking down in the parking lot of Tommy King’s Highway Oasis, after putting his car through a carwash dozens of times—as if the act might literally wash Chantal out of his hair. A call from Diane, who is perhaps just indecisive as her ex-husband, notifies Webster that she is returning to New England and, more importantly, clarifies his confusion with regard to Jilly: “She’s in love with you…. You really ought to do something about that, one way or the other.”

     The news upon his return home that Chantal and her daughter have apparently vanished, saves him, once again, from of any responsibility or confrontation. Acting on Diane’s advice, the now slightly transformed Webster even hints to Jilly that he’s ready, if she is, to commit to marriage. “She’s so easy to be around,” one can almost hear him whisper to himself. Maybe they’ll even move to the nicer, pristine tourist community of Destin, Florida, where early on in this fiction, he checked up condos for sale.

     Slightly pleased with the results of his utter placidity and lack of action, Webster sits out the night upon his deck, with Jilly and daughter Morgan tucked into their beds within. A plane, glimpsed on the horizon, suddenly seems to sputter out and go dead, only to come back to life before sputtering out once again, regaining its engines only to go silent as it appears to head directly toward his apartment. Webster hasn’t even time to wake his loved ones, let alone save them from destruction. All he can do, once more, is to hope, the fiction ending with his absurd affirmation: “I was almost certain that it would recover at the last minute and miss us all.”

    If Webster has survived amidst all the images and realities of death surrounding him, it surely won’t be for long. We know, that, even if he imagines that there must be some mistake, like the plane in its alternating roar and sputters, his life is just on hold, a thing of chance that if not now will one day, soon, come crashing in upon him.

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2016

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (January 2016).

Wendy Walker | Blue Fire / 2009

burning blue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wendy Walker Blue Fire (Brooklyn: Proteotypes [Proteus Gowanus], 2009)

 

Sometimes the revenant is discovered because his grave is visible, usually by either a blue fire of blue glow.... The blue glow, in European tradition, is frequently interpreted as the soul, and it is seen as an indicator of buried treasure through much of Europe, apparently because its shows where a body is buried, and bodies were frequently buried with valuable grave goods.

 

—Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality as quoted in Blue Fire

 

Wendy Walker describes her new book, Blue Fire, as "a poetic nonfiction." This book concerns the great 19th century child murder of Savill Kent, which was thought by many at the time to have been committed by his nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, and Savill's father, Samuel, on account of the boy's having awakened during the night and witnessed them in a sexual embrace. The Road Murder, as it was named, was one of the most sensational events in England of the late 19th century, resulting in an explosion of media coverage and inspiring at least two fictions of the day, Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and, created out of events revealed at the inquest, Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood; there were also two prose recountings, John Rhode's 1928 book The Case of Constance Kent and Joseph Stapleton's 1861 book The Great Crime of 1860, the latter book attempting to remove any blame from Stapleton's friend, Samuel Kent. Indeed, Walker found the "rhetoric, marked by the easy confidence of an educated man," so repellent that she had difficulty in reading it.

 

    The inquest, which also focused on the possible guilt of Savill's sister, Constance Kent, ended, because of lack of evidence in an investigation that was badly bungled, in the conclusion that Savill had been "murdered by persons unknown."

     After the trial, Constance was sent away to France to the Convent de la Sagesse. In 1863 she returned to England to enter St. Mary's Convent in Brighton as a nurse trainee. There she met and came under the influence of Rev. Arthur D. Wagner, a member of the Oxford Movement, who wanted to return the practices of Anglicanism closer to the Roman Church, and was a particular enthusiast of  confession.

     What occurred between the young woman and her confessor is unknown, but two years later Constance traveled to London in his company to confess to the Road Murder. Her detailed description of how she had committed this crime was, as Walker describes it, "A tissue of fiction, contradicting forensic evidence and important testimony." Yet Constance was tried by a judge who sentenced her to death. For the next twenty years Constance Kent was remanded to penal service in five national prisons: Millbank Prison in London, Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, Brixton, Woking, and Fulham. Her sentence of death having been commuted, in 1885 she was released, moving to Australia under the name Ruth Emilie Kay to live with her brother William. At the age of 46 Constance began nursing studies with a woman who had trained under Florence Nightingale, and over the rest of her life she served in several Hospitals, becoming matron of the Paramatta Industrial School for Girls before serving at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Mittagong and, at the age of 66, opening an old age home for nurses. Constance Kent lived to 100 years of age.

      As anyone who has read the circumstances around this murder has wondered, why did Constance Kent admit to a crime—refusing to deny her testimony for the rest of her life—that she most probably did not commit? How can one come to any understanding of a figure seeking and achieving so much good after, at least her own mind, committing such an atrocious act? The child, after all, was not just smothered, but cut with a knife before its body was thrown into the privy!

     The problem here, as Walker recognizes it, is how to "tell" this story without making further assumptions about the young woman's life or simply throwing a web of one's own imaginative desires across the almost obliterated truth of the circumstances.

      To "trick" herself into reading the biased Stapleton book, Walker employed a method used by John Cage, the mesostic, in which she selected "one word from each line of Stapleton's book, proceeding line by line but never choosing two words that followed consecutively." This she poses as a "poetic" revelation of the now-liberated text on the left-hand side of each page, while on the right she selected extant passages from texts about the murder, including Constance's own "Sydney Document," written in response to Stapleton's book, and selections from other works in the Kent library. Walker also traveled to the houses and graveyards of the Kent family and to churches known to contain mosaic works done by Constance during her imprisonment, representing those visits with photographs.

      The result is an amazing work of erudition that not only asks important questions about Constance and her family, but reveals the cultural context surrounding a young, somewhat bored and occasionally rebellious girl, haunted, perhaps, by the familial relationships between her own mother, who lived in one part of the house, and her father, who lived with the nanny, Mary Pratt (who later became the second Mrs. Kent) in the other. Constance's mother, perhaps always a frail woman—several of her children died in childbirth—was also rumored, mostly by the father, to be mentally unstable.

      As Walker demonstrates, the role of a young English girl of this period was to live out life of such overwhelming sacrifice that it might lead even to invisibility. What women represented was more important than their reality: they were emblems of perfection, even saintliness.

     Constance was none of these. She was an intelligent and highly curious child who was punished, time and again, for the smallest of infractions or inability to learn her school lessons by Pratt. She had seen her mother, moreover, ousted from her own life in a manner not unlike the wife of Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre. So unhappy was she that, at one point, she convinced her younger brother to escape with her to sea, with the hope of joining their elder brother, Edward, who had joined the Merchant Marines. She cut her hair, dressing as a young boy, and the two escaped to Bath where they were uncovered by a hotelier and returned to their father.

      By quoting from various reports of the murder (including newspaper clippings of the time, Rhode's and Stapleton's books, and Constance's own writing) and Victorian writings as varied as Dickens, Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Florence Nightingale, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Darwin, and numerous others, the author recreates the tenor of the period  with the reader beginning to comprehend the psychological aura of this young, rather plain-faced, slightly obstinate child. Walker does not "explain" or answer anything, but through her choices of texts conjectures, convincingly it seems to me, that if Constance did not commit the crime, she felt, in her sense of failure and out of her confused emotional responses to family life, that she was nonetheless guilty—guilty of something. Her own disposition was to give of herself, to sacrifice, and the only way she knew how to accomplish that for her own family, whether or not she realized the truth of the situation, was to take on what was perhaps her father's guilt, to become the scapegoat that might salvage the others' beings. Given her outsider role within family life, perhaps she had no other possibility.

     My only quibble with Walker's work—and even that word is perhaps too strong since it is apparent that Walker is purposely bringing up these issues—is the book's subtitle. Blue Fire is indeed "poetic," but not simply because of Walker's application of the mesostic method. As Walker and I have discussed previously, all great fiction writers are also excellent poets. Walker herself has proven that in all of her fictions, and major fiction writer-poets such as Herman Melville,  James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner have often done their best poetry writing in their fiction rather than in their books described as poetry. Walker's word choices in the mesostic construction, lines such as "strides of blood among questions / those consequences of narrative," "insinuation of screen in truth / to conduct criticism," "any English simplicity of negligence can say / reading this after usual murder son feelings / will question truthfulness of women," (I could quote from almost any page) is more emphatically prose-oriented, in that it reveals possible "truths," rather than attending primarily to language. I am not suggesting that these passages are not poetically compelling or linguistically challenging, but positing the idea that, perhaps because of the source material, the mesostic work syntactically suggests a prose coherency.

     Her "non-fiction" passages, on the other hand, although all representing material from extant works, are more fictional in their careful arrangement than some so-called novels. Prose, it seems to me, pretends, at its heart, to a sense of "truthfulness," however slippery we know it to be. Whether the prose writing be autobiographical, historical, philosophical, sociological, political, reportorial, whatever, we expect in reading it to be the truth, even though we recognize that truth in all these fields is a nearly impossible thing. That is why, when we discover a work described as prose such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces (touted as prose by Oprah Winfrey) is actually fiction, there is a public outcry.

     But that is just the problem. It is our presumption that there can be an objective reality that falsely separates prose writing from fiction, that misleads us time and again, the reason, in fact, that Walker had such difficulty reading Stapleton's prose. All prose is equally imbued with the writer's desires, imagination, miscomprehensions, and personal views, immediately transforming what is presented as "truth" into a kind of fiction. Perhaps only in a purposeful fiction can we really speak the truth.

     In Blue Fire Walker is less interested in discerning any one "truth," than in questioning the multiple possibilities; and in that sense, it is not directed in the same way as "nonfiction," but represents an extremely artful construction of texts not at all unlike original fiction.

     I read the book, accordingly, by using the mesostic passages as poetically-charged prose that stood alongside and against the reportage and writings of the period, the one overlaying the other ricocheting into new realities. (Indeed, I attempted to do something similar in one of my own works, Along Without, in which I used short passages of other writers' fictions to create the "story" for a film, in which the characters spoke in a highly poeticized diction.)

     Blue Fire uses poetry and prose, but in a manner that is closer to fiction, I would argue, than most works describing themselves as such.  For the soul beating at the heart of Walker's work, is, like blue fire, a hotter evidence of warmth and desire, a buried treasure hidden in the actions of a young girl who gave up her soul in order to enrich others' existences—a truth that was not to be comprehended in Constance's real life.

 

Los Angeles, December 14, 2009

Reprinted from Or (No. 4, April 2010) and EXPLORINGfictions (December 2009).

 

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard | En Tid for Alt (A Time for Everything) / 2009

extinguishing the fire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard En Tid for Alt, translated from the Norwegian as A Time for Everything by James Anderson (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2009)

 

One of the most interesting books of late 2009 was Karl Knausgaard's A Time for Everything. Generally, books with religious or spiritual themes do not particularly attract me. But this past year I not only reread all the publications of Flannery O'Connor—works immersed in her deep Catholicism—and the Biblical Book of Daniel, but for four weeks buried myself in Knausgaard's profound retellings of Biblical stories from Abel and Cain, Noah and the Flood, Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Ezekiel, and other tales involving angels. I also reread these works in the Bible, rediscovering in the process how significantly this Norwegian author has expanded them, psychologizing his figures, and placing them into an anachronistic setting that would remind one of the novels of Knut Hamsun. Indeed, the Old Testament figures of Knausgaard's versions live a in world of fjords, wooden houses and barns, and changing seasons that resemble his native Norway.

 

     For that reason, of course, most fundamentalists would abhor this religious fiction; in fact even some church liberals might describe the work as heresy. Yet Knausgaard's prolix sentences draw one into to the Biblical stories in a way that helps one to make sense of the spiritual issues of each.

     In this writer's retelling of the Cain and Abel story, for example, Abel is a talented and appealing figure, drawing everyone to him through his singing and storytelling and intense good looks. He is beloved by all, particularly by his Father. Cain is more stolid, less attractive, slow to speak; yet in many respects he is the more loving of the two as he carefully analyzes family relationships, painfully seeking a way to ingratiate himself with both his father and brother. Because he is so gifted, Abel is also often cruel, unable to contain his sometimes destructive curiosity. When a family sheepherder is found dying of wounds inflicted by a bear, the brothers agree that they must kill him so that he no longer suffers. Yet Abel draws out the process in an attempt, so it appears, to explore the body parts; Cain is forced to step in, ending the boy's life quickly by thrusting a rock upon his head.

     Later, Abel tries to reenter Eden in an attempt to find the Tree of Life, and is horribly burned by the Angels. In his deep love for his brother, Cain gently nurses him again to life, yet Abel, thought to be in a coma during his illness, later mocks Cain's gentle musings. Ultimately, Cain's murder of Abel seems almost inevitable, the only way, perhaps, to save Abel from his own self-destruction.

     Similarly, the simple Bible story of Noah is focused less on Noah and his construction of the Arc than on the family he has left behind in the valley, fleshing out their daily activities, their loves, fears, and hates. The God who destroys them indeed is an angry and jealous God, and the dark black visage of Noah and his arc rises up in this telling as a kind of cruel and uncaring force, not unlike the all-white Moby Dick.

     Threading these various tales together is Knausgaard's retelling of the story and writings of the Sixteenth century figure Antinous Bellori, who, after seeing two angels at the age of eleven, spent most of the rest of his life studying and contemplating the lives of the angels, collecting his findings in On the Nature of Angels.

 

                                                         Painting by Susan Bee

    His questions are profound. Why, for example, did God destroy the Earth? Yes mankind had been evil, but how had that evil changed so significantly that God was determined to begin the process over again, to destroy all but a single family? Why did the angels appear infrequently as messengers from God in the early part of the Bible, but appear more often to people in later ages until finally, with the Birth of Christ, they completely disappeared, only to return after Christ's death with increasing frequency, this time as small and bothersome baby-like beings, "tubby little infantile figures" who, as the composer Scarlatti reports, had to be rooted out of the house because of their robbery of food and dirty activities?

     In an attempt to understand these radical changes, Knausgaard, with Bellori's help, explores the changing role of angels, from messengers to beings who sometimes behaved, in the case of the Lot story, more like men. Knausgaard through Bellori believes he can explain the cause of God's anger and his destruction of mankind through apocryphal writings in The Book of Enoch and The Book of the Apocalypse of Baruch which suggest that the angels had taken wives and partners in their mingling with human beings, producing the "giants in the earth," the Nephilim, described in the Bible. According to Enoch, beside their carnal lust, the angels had grown too close to man, sharing with human beings "knowledge about everything from medicine, mining, and weaponry to astronomy, astrology, and alchemy," knowledge that man, apparently, was never meant to have. It was not mankind that had changed, it was the relation of man and the sacred that doomed the human race.

     The various changes of the angels themselves are explained by Bellori in a manner that is strangely similar to Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection. According to Bellori, Christ was not just a symbolic or temporary manifestation of God the Father, but was God himself, the spirit become a carnate being in order to save Man. His death, accordingly, was also the real death of God, and with God's death the angels had nowhere else to go. In order to survive among mankind they transformed themselves from the fiery, fearsome and horrific winged beings who Bellori witnessed as a child and who later may have killed him into more appealing looking figures, resembling human infants. With God's death in Christ, they were forced to extinguish their own inner fire. When that transformation also failed, so Knausgaard seems to suggest, they become, as legend has it, seagulls, the highly intelligent birds of the Lariade family who have small, finger-like appendages under their wings.

     If all this text (452 pages before the "Coda") sounds a bit like heretical nonsense, one might recall that Bellori's writing was labeled as such. But Knausgaard's work is not so much a religious exegesis, but a fictional speculation in the guise of a religious exegesis, a form, I am certain, that will put off many readers. Some English critics (where this book bore the less lyrical title of A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven) criticized the work for its extended arguments and overinflated sentences.

     Yet any attentive reader can realize that Knausgaard is a superb stylist (as is the book's excellent translator, James Anderson), capable as he is also of a more pared-down narrative evident in his "Coda."

     This last section "explains," or perhaps I should say "reveals" those significant changes in the relation of humans to the divine. In Henrik Vankell's isolated and gull-covered island, man is represented as a sinner who has no one to turn to, but is able only, as so much Scandinavian literature and film reiterates, to turn within. We are never told what terrible crimes Vankell (a character who appears in two other Knausgaard fictions) has committed or what awful act of self-destruction his father committed that helped mold Vankell's being. We only know that he has run from human company and finds his only solace in the silence of this barren but beautiful landscape.

     On the day we follow him he does, primarily, what he does every day: walk various routes along the ocean according to set and ritualistic patterns, eat, fish (quite ineffectively), and watch the few islanders move about. But on this day, his mother calls having had bad dreams which she sees as tokens of something about to happen. A ship that inexplicably enters the harbor, terrifies Vankell. Yet there are no other signs that he might accomplish the horrifying self-immolation that by book's end he has achieved. Slowly, without explanation, he cuts himself down his chest and mutilates his arms and face, sitting in a hot tub of water, apparently awaiting death.

     But then who could be telling this first-person story? Despite his self-punishment he has perhaps survived, a survival which may signify that despite this man's immense separation from his spirit, he has found a way of truly forgiving himself, perhaps in the telling of this spiritual story. 

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2009

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (March 2010).