The Great Good Thing

by Andrew Klavan

  I knew I had to grieve the past, then let it go. Otherwise I would miss the gift these last few years had given me: a miraculous second chance to live out just such a life—a life of gratitude and charity and rejoicing—in a new family of my own.

  I left the gutted station and the unchangeable truth of the past, and let them both trail off into the distance behind me.

  There came a therapy session near the end where I was talking about these things: dark things, sorrowful things, ugly things too. In the midst of it all, I began to laugh. I couldn’t stop myself. I laughed and laughed, twisted and doubled over in the patient’s chair, clutching my belly with one hand, wiping my eyes with the other. It wasn’t hysterical laughter. It wasn’t tragic laughter either. It wasn’t even happy laughter really. It was just laughter, pure laughter, pure hilarity, pure mirth. Something—no, everything—struck me as funny. Really funny. Funny at its core, in its very nature: my past, my sorrow, my future, this moment; life; everything. I laughed and laughed. I couldn’t stop.

  Finally, coughing, giggling, gasping, I managed to force out the question: “Why . . .? Why am I laughing? Why can’t I stop laughing?”

  And my psychiatrist, my beloved mentor, my beloved friend, said quietly, “Because this is who you really are. This is how you really see the world.”

  The fifth epiphany. The fifth fragment.

  The truth of suffering. The wisdom of joy. The reality of love. The possibility of clear perception. The laughter at the heart of mourning.

  I had them all now, all the pieces I needed. The five revelations that were really one revelation: the presence of God.

  CHAPTER 12

  THIS THING OF DARKNESS

  It was about ten years between the end of my therapy and the beginning of my faith. They were ten good years, taken all in all. I had come out of the therapeutic process a changed person, almost a different person. The delusions and tormenting thoughts of the past were gone. Ideas that had once seemed certain to me now looked like simple madness. My personality was so transformed I hardly recognized myself. Even little neurotic tics had somehow evaporated. Before, I had been a fearful flier. Afterward, I enjoyed flying so much I eventually earned a pilot’s license. Before, I had been a nervous public speaker. Afterward, I spoke and performed with ease. I had not worked to fix these glitches particularly. They had just gone away as my fractured psyche was restructured into the man I was meant to be. I can take no credit for any of it really. It was the work of a brilliant doctor, a genius at his trade.

  My only role had been to go on the journey. Now that it was over, it was hard to believe it had ever happened. I sometimes likened the experience to hacking my way through an enchanted jungle. I slashed through entangling vines and clustered branches. I battled raging beasts and survived life-threatening dangers. And when at last I broke out into the fair country on the other side, I looked behind me and saw the jungle was gone, nothing but open plains as far as the eye could see, as if none of the obstacles and monsters had ever really been there in the first place.

  My world was full now. I did the work I loved. My family prospered. Ellen and I had a second child, a son, Spencer. Like our daughter, Faith, he proved the truth of one of our family slogans: “More love, more life.” He was a cheerful addition to the clan too. Once, when he was about three years old, he sat playing in a sunbeam on the back porch of our weekend house in Connecticut. He looked up into the light and said aloud, “Thank you, sun, for shining on me.” At this point, I felt pretty much the same way.

  There was a time when I used to ask myself why it took so long—a full decade—before I faced up to the conclusions of my own reasoning and experience and accepted what should have been so obvious: the presence of God in my life. But I think I know the answer now. In part, it had to do with coming to trust this new mentally healthy self of mine. It took a while before I was fully convinced that my delusions were gone for good, that my outlook was sound and the things I believed about the world around me were true. It took a while, too, before I grew confident in my self-education and felt competent to disagree with the sages of postmodernity.

  And there was something else, something more, a final problem I had to resolve in my own mind before I could move forward in my thinking and in my beliefs. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back I see it clearly. Before I could free myself to accept my latent spiritual conclusions, I had to think through the issue of Western anti-Semitism. In the next few years, I would write three novels that helped me find my way.

  For me, this problem was personal. Western anti-Semitism created a dilemma in my mind, which was this: Through my years of reading, I had come to believe, as I do still, that the nations of Europe from, say, the Renaissance to the First World War, had produced more of mankind’s greatest artistic achievements than any others. I know this is now an unpopular sentiment. Some people condemn it as triumphalist. Some even call it racist. Some consider it merely impolite. In fact, it sometimes seems to me the entire postmodern assault on the concept of truth has been staged to avoid just this conclusion: some cultures are simply more productive than others and the high culture of Europe has been the most impressive so far. It’s as if, in the aftermath of the racist cataclysm of the Holocaust, Western thinkers have grown so skittish around the idea of racism they will do anything to avoid naming their culture as superior to others, even if it means avoiding the evidence of their own eyes.

  I despise racism. It’s in conflict with everything I feel and everything I believe. But for me, the greatness of European culture is neither a racial issue nor a moral one, just an observational truth. As the discoveries and calculus of Newton are more important scientific breakthroughs than anything that came before or since, as the Constitution of the American founders is the most profound piece of distilled political wisdom in all history, it makes simple sense that the artistic culture that underlay those advances, the culture that includes the poetry of Shakespeare and Keats, the music of Bach and Mozart, the painting and sculpture of Michelangelo and Raphael, and the novels of Cervantes, Zola, Tolstoy, and Dickens was somehow better, richer, and deeper than any other culture that has ever existed on earth.

  This has nothing to do with whether these people were nice or decent or did good things. It only concerns the objects they made and left behind. I don’t think it’s a matter of mere taste either. No matter what the popular thinking is, I can’t convince myself that the greatness of a work of art lies in the appreciation of the observer. I believe art does something. I believe it records and preserves the inner experience of being human. I believe some art does this better and more honestly and more completely than other art, whether I happen to enjoy it or not. I’d rather read Raymond Chandler than Gustave Flaubert, but Flaubert is greater.

  So I thought—and think—that the beauty and truth of man’s inner life—the beauty and truth of the human spirit—were recorded in the artworks of high Europe more consistently than in any others. This, in turn, gave me a deep respect, bordering on awe, for the underlying philosophy that shaped and informed these works: the Christian worldview.

  But if Christianity was the spiritual light that shone within the greatest art of Europe, it was also the dark face of its philosophical shadow: Europe’s hatred of the Jews.

  I am a Jew. Even now, even in Christ—I would say never more so. I’m proud of this, belligerently proud. Mine is a uniquely great people. We represent about .2 percent of the world. Not 2 percent. Point two. Statistically almost zero. Yet make a list of the most consequential individuals who have ever lived and Jews will be thick among them, from Moses, David, Jesus, and St. Paul to Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. Around one-fifth of all Nobel Prizes have gone to people of Jewish heritage, more if you only count the science prizes. Point 2 percent of the population. About thirteen million souls. There are single cities with more people in them than that.

  And these Jews, these thinkers of thoughts, these writers of books, these doc
tors, inventors, entertainers, tradesmen—these are the single most despised and put upon people on the face of the planet, bar none. In an age where victimhood carries with it a sick sort of glamour, where any number of interest groups demand to be proclaimed the most oppressed—too late! The Jews have won that thorny crown going away. From the Roman destruction of Jerusalem to the ceaseless pogroms and exiles of the European Middle Ages, from the Holocaust to the current attempts to isolate and destroy the state of Israel, the Jews are the perennial victimized Others of the West.

  No one today would call Jew-hatred Christian, but as Christianity shaped every good thing about Western culture so it shaped this bad thing as well. “The Jews killed Christ.” This was the central Christian teaching on the subject of my people for centuries. It’s not even an English sentence really. It’s like that Noam Chomsky formulation that makes grammatical sense but is semantically ridiculous: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. It’s like saying The whites held slaves or The blacks rioted in Los Angeles or The Germans killed the Jews. Did some poor shnook who wasn’t there do it? Did the guilt seep into his cells through some racial radiation and then flow down through his DNA into his children yet unborn? It’s a colorless green idea, all right, and it has slept furiously in the mind of man for way too long.

  So for me, who loved Western culture so much, who spent his life studying it, and who even worked in it in my small way, the question was this: If Jew hatred was Western Christendom’s shadow self, were the two inseparable? Were the two really one? Was the great art and culture of Europe—the art I felt best led a man to wisdom—so infected with this poison that to feed on the one was to die of the other?

  Even when I was a young man, these questions bothered me. Anti-Semitism was there in many of the books I loved so much. In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there was the puling character Robert Cohn with his “Jewish superiority” and his “sad Jewish face.” There was Shylock in Shakespeare; Fagin in Dickens; the horrible Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. So many bent, weak, whiny, grasping, dishonest Jewish characters in Western fiction, so many of them identified only as “The Jew.” I understood these works reflected attitudes of their times. Some might even have given fair depictions of true-to-life figures the authors had met. Still, these writers were my culture heroes and, more to the point, this culture was my culture, and for much of its history, my people were its central image of the despicable.

  And then, of course, there was the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews by one of its greatest nations. It was as if, as its great culture came to its conclusion, Europe was transformed into its own shadow, spiraling down to die in the darkness at its core.

  My father was obsessed with the Holocaust. He was convinced that at any moment it would begin again, right here in America. Any cultural development that worried him seemed to him the prelude to the mass extermination of American Jews. Any politician he disagreed with was a Nazi. Was there an upsurge in conservatism? A call for more law and order? Even a rise in patriotic feeling? As my father saw it, this meant the country was only one step away from rebuilding the death camps at some secret location, no doubt somewhere in the ever-so-threatening midwest.

  A lot of Jews of my father’s generation felt something like this for a while after World War II. It was an understandable reaction to the trauma of having lived through the Holocaust era. But as time wore on and other Jews recovered, my father’s fears grew more fixed and pathological. He developed an almost comical knee-jerk reaction to nearly every event in the news. It only took some blowhard getting elected dog catcher, and he’d be at it again: Here it comes. This is it. Hitler’s back. We’re all dead men. In the midst of American peace and plenty, he saw the storm clouds of slaughter forever gathering above us. He even kept a collection of gold bars hidden in one of his bedroom closets in case we needed to bribe the guards at the Canadian border as we escaped from blood-soaked tyranny to freedom like the von Trapp family at the end of The Sound of Music.

  From childhood on, I could see that Dad was irrational on this point. Still, his paranoia kept the issue of anti-Semitism always before me. As my love of European culture grew—and as its wisdom drew me subconsciously toward its Christly center—I began to question whether its bigotries were central to its vision. Was the Holocaust inherent in the Sistine Chapel? Was it inevitable from the moment Michelangelo’s Adam extended his hand toward the hand of God?

  With the crisis of my madness over, with my work going well and my life going well, I began to study the Holocaust with a rigor and clarity I’d never really had before. For months I read the books, watched the documentaries, and suffered through the resulting nightmares almost every night.

  The Holocaust is not the worst thing that ever happened in history. It’s worse even than that. It lives in a darkness beyond history. It’s the Marquis de Sade’s philosophy brought to fruition: hell on earth. The Holocaust is beyond art too. It’s the opposite of art, the opposite of Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” the opposite of a world imbued with and understood through the human spirit. Stories of humanity during the event—even true stories like Schindler’s List or The Hiding Place—are so anomalous as to amount to sentimental lies. There was no humanity, and so there can be no true fictions about it, no paintings, no music. I’ve visited those death camps. Art has no power there. Even the birds don’t sing.

  It may seem paradoxical, but I began to plan a novel about this very fact—about the fact that the whole Western idea of beauty and art was called into question by the truth of the Holocaust. It was my way of dealing with the issue that was haunting me: whether Western Jew-hatred undermined the whole cultural enterprise of which I, a Jew, was now a small part.

  About this time, we left New York City and moved to England. I had never enjoyed New York much. Now that I could afford it, I wanted to get away, put some distance between me and my parents, and see the world. On top of this, I was beginning to find the growing American mania for so-called political correctness oppressive. In Manhattan, at least, PC had begun to curtail and poison nearly every intellectual conversation. You could hardly express an opinion without finding yourself condemned for it, especially if the opinion was obviously true. It was as if people thought reality could be lied into submission. If you would only say the world was what it wasn’t it would magically become what you said it was.

  One night, I stunned an entire dinner gathering into embarrassed silence by making the shocking observation that boys and girls are different. This self-evident truth was now a sexist blasphemy. As we walked out of the restaurant, I turned to my wife in sardonic disgust and said, “We’re leaving the country, baby.” Soon afterward, we did.

  We found a flat in South Kensington, London. Moving to London seemed the easiest option. I had some friends there, fellow writers and publishers, and I could speak the language more or less. I only intended to stay for a year, put some breathing space between me and America, get some perspective on my homeland. But I fell in love with the place, the city first and then the entire country.

  It really was like love, too, the whole experience—it was just like a romance. I couldn’t stay away from London. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Down the hidden cobbled streets and past the stern Victorian piles, along the ancient Thames and out into the brick-and-chimney suburbs and the rolling countryside—I walked and walked everywhere, rapt and fascinated. The sense of deep history seemed to flow up out of the ground into my shoe soles and all through me. It made me feel peaceful somehow just to know so much civilization had been where I was now. I woke up every morning happy, eager to be near it, really just like in a romance. When our year there was over, I found I couldn’t leave. We ended up staying in London for seven years.

  But at the same time I was falling in love with both the city and the country, I could not help but notice the anti-Semitism everywhere.

  I met in Great Britain some of the kindest, most decent, most civilized, cultured, and witty people
I have ever known. But the open racialism of the British startled my innocent American sensibilities. At a literary party I attended about a month after our move, a man buttonholed me and, in all seriousness, began to instruct me in the differences among the peoples of the Isles. The Welsh were cheap, the Scots were stupid, the Irish drunk, and so on. Finally, irritated at his open bigotry, I drawled at him in my best Ugly American fashion, “This country’s the size of Oregon, man, how different can y’all be?” Well, at least it ended the conversation.

  To be fair, for the most part, the English hated other races only just a little more than they hated their own. That is, in general their racialism targeted everybody alike, including themselves. Whenever I told one of my British friends how much I loved their country, they invariably responded with a startled, “Why?” I had to explain to them why it was a great place and how they were a great people.

  But the British hostility toward the Jews was different. It was special. It had the heat of fever to it. I had lived thirty-five years in America. I had traveled through almost every state, spoken to every class and kind of person, and I had had virtually no experience of true anti-Semitism, none. Now, suddenly, I found myself sitting in London restaurants and clubs and overhearing normal, civilized people ranting out loud about the evildoing of “the Jews.” The Jews caused wars. The Jews ruined economies. The BBC news stories about Israel were so slanted they amounted to hate speech. Even friends—good friends, good people—made remarks that appalled me. “The Jews secretly run this country.” “A Jew can never really be an Englishman.” “Jews cling to eye-for-eye justice instead of Christian mercy.” And so on.