The Great Good Thing

by Andrew Klavan

  It seemed every other person I met would ask me, “What sort of name is Klavan?” At first, I thought they wanted to know about my family background. I would launch into some cheerful explanation about how my people had come over from eastern Europe and Austria, how some official at Ellis Island had probably changed our name from Klavansky or whatever. But soon I realized what they were really asking me. After a while, whenever someone said, “What sort of name is Klavan?” I would respond quickly, sharply, “I’m a Jew,” and then watch them blush and stutter.

  Whenever I heard an anti-Semitic comment, I answered it in my blunt, obstreperous American way. Nonetheless, over the years I started to feel a kind of racial awareness I’d never felt before. For the first time in my life, I felt conspicuous—and conspicuously Jewish—as if I was wearing my heritage on my face. It was the faintest taste—just the faintest—of what it must be like to be black in a majority white country.

  So I was not only asking myself questions about my love of Western culture in light of that culture’s core anti-Semitism, I was living those questions out to some degree: loving England, loving Britain, loving Europe—all the while seeing and hearing evidence of its enduring shadow self.

  I mentioned earlier how I visited Munich one Christmastime, how I went to the Christmas Market in Marienplatz—Mary’s Square. There was a light snow falling on the square’s massive Christmas tree. There were carolers singing on the balcony of the ornate neo-gothic city hall. There were red-cheeked children ogling the wooden toys and glass ornaments on display everywhere. And there was that smell of baked goods that carried my memories back to Mina’s house and Mina’s Christmas so that I had the visceral sense that I was home.

  But earlier that day, Ellen and I had paid a visit to Dachau, the notorious Nazi concentration camp just outside the city, close enough so that every adult Munchner must have known that it was there. Dachau was not a “death camp,” and many of the prisoners tormented and killed in it weren’t Jews. But toward the end of the war the Nazis did install their signature gas chambers in the place, though they were never used. I had seen countless pictures of these murder machines in the books I had been reading, but these were the first I ever saw in reality and up close. The moment I laid eyes on them, I had the strangest experience. I heard a terrible noise nearby me, a strangled sob of grief and anguish. I looked over one shoulder and then the other to see who had cried out. Several seconds passed before I realized the noise had come from my own throat.

  I was a man who felt at home in the living Christmas card of Marienplatz. I was also a man whose people had been slaughtered wholesale by this country. Were these two men, both inside me, so alienated from each other that they could never be reconciled?

  I began to write the novel I’d been planning back in America, the first of the three novels that helped me through this impasse: Agnes Mallory. It’s about the friendship between a corrupt Jewish politician named Harry Bernard and Agnes, a Jewish sculptress who works in wood. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Agnes is haunted by the fact that she had a half sister who died in the camps before she was born. She can’t reconcile her desire to create something beautiful in the Western tradition with the West’s mass slaughter of her people. She feels that the very concept of Western beauty itself has been called into question.

  When Harry’s corruption is exposed in the New York City scandals of the 1980s, he runs away and hides out with Agnes in her secluded Vermont cottage. As his friendship with Agnes becomes a romance, Harry finds himself confronting a mystery. Every day he hears Agnes chiseling away in her studio. Every dawn, she throws a log on the wood-burning stove and goes out for a swim in the nearby river. But the only work of hers he ever sees are the beautiful statues that lie rotting in a ghostly valley of dead elms in the forest around them.

  Agnes has discarded the statues there because she feels she cannot sculpt an image that is at once beautiful and at the same time embodies the dreadful truth of her culture, the truth exposed in the death camps of World War II. Ultimately, to his horror, Harry discovers what’s going on. Every day Agnes is re-creating a fabulously beautiful sculpture of her lost half sister—and every dawn she is destroying the sculpture in the wood-burning stove. It is the only way she knows how to capture the essence of the Holocaust in art. The rest of the story spins out from this act of creative purity and madness.

  To my great sorrow, I could not find a publisher for this novel in America. It came out in England but only became available in the United States some twenty years later when I cajoled an e-publisher into re-issuing it with a number of my early thrillers. Baffled and frustrated by my inability to sell in my home country what I knew to be a very good piece of work, I showed the Agnes manuscript to a friend of mine. He was a highly perceptive and intelligent writer, widely read, with a PhD from Yale. “Don’t you understand?” he said to me, with some exasperation. “Your thinking is going in completely the opposite direction to the intellectual trends of our times.” I don’t think even he knew how right he was.

  Maybe if I could have published the novel at home, I would have felt a sense of closure and let the matter rest. But I don’t think so. Something was going on inside me below the level of consciousness. The epiphanies and revelations of my therapeutic years were continuing to do their work even without my knowledge. I thought I was an agnostic for life. I thought I had accepted what I had come to call “The Burden of Unknowing.” It wasn’t so. I was changing inside. I should have seen it in my next novel, the second of these three, True Crime.

  True Crime is a thriller about faith and doubt. It tells how an innocent Christian on Missouri’s death row faces the existential fact of injustice and death while a cynical atheist reporter prays for a miracle as he tries to save him at the last minute. As the hour of execution nears and the prisoner’s faith begins to crumble, a pastor visits him. The pastor tells the prisoner that, whether he lives or dies, his religious vision has to be big enough to include the injustice and suffering of human existence.

  “You want to believe in God,” the pastor says, “you’re gonna have to believe in a God of the sad world.” When I reread this passage now, it seems to me my heart was talking to itself, teaching itself again the hard lesson it had learned in a darkened room back in Manhattan: even in the realms of faith and history, maybe especially in the realms of faith and history, sometimes you just have to play in pain.

  Still, the matter of my own relationship to faith and history remained unsettled. So when I began to plan my next novel, the final one in this series, I returned to the dilemma that was bothering me. With that, I began the single strangest writing experience of my life and produced my weirdest novel, aptly named The Uncanny.

  To this day, I don’t know whether The Uncanny is any good or not. I know some people love it; but more, I suspect, hate it—hate it a lot. “This book stank,” is one of the more concise reviews of it on Amazon.com. I’d like to have the book back to write again from the beginning. I even tried once to refashion the core of the story into a play. In doing so, I felt I came closer to what I would have liked the plot to be. But I’ve never had the play produced, so I don’t know if it would work any better with an audience than the novel did.

  What I do know is that writing the book changed me. It was as if, even in the happy years that followed my therapy, there was one more knot inside me that needed to be untied and somehow writing The Uncanny did the job. I don’t believe in writing as a form of self-exploration. I don’t write for myself. I write to tell stories, communicate a vision. The reader is the point of the exercise, not me. But whenever I think of The Uncanny—which is often—whenever I scold myself for writing a book I knew very few people would enjoy, I can’t help but remind myself that this was the book that undid that final knot inside me and freed my mind at last for faith. I chalk it up to an act of God.

  The core of the narrative concerns Richard Storm, a shallow but lovable producer of horror films, and a fully assimilated A
merican Jew. (His father, a small-time actor, was originally named Morgenstern, but John Wayne gave him the stage name Storm. When you have been “christened” by John Wayne, you are about as assimilated as you can get!) When Storm discovers he might be dying, he comes to England, searching for the source of his favorite Victorian ghost story. His hope is that he will discover something uncanny on which he can base a faith in the afterlife. Instead, he finds himself tracing the story back through a series of related tales from various time periods. At last, he discovers the story’s origin in a true tale of a twelfth-century anti-Semitic atrocity. It turns out the very wellspring of the culture he loves is imbued with a hatred for his race.

  The novel has a strong strain of satire. It is full of parody references to other novels, especially those like Henry James’s The Ambassadors, that deal with the differences between American and European cultures. Its running joke is that the heavy, morbid European sense of the burden of history transforms Storm’s shallow but happy American ignorance into a kind of accidental wisdom. In a nod to Faulkner’s famous dictum, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Storm goofily but rather profoundly asks, “If the past isn’t past, what is?” With that attitude to guide him, even in the light of the European murder of the Jews—even in the face of his own death—Storm retains a childlike American faith in the power of each new soul to start the world again.

  The plot of The Uncanny entangles various European legends into one big vast and eternal conspiracy, but somehow, the writing of it untangled me. Every day as I worked, I felt my mood elevated, sometimes almost to the point of mysticism. Sometimes I would leave my office with a powerful sense of the great unity behind and beyond the minute particulars of life. It was as if I was glimpsing again that sea of love I had seen and nearly entered at my daughter’s birth. It reminded me of the sense I’d had then that our mortal lives were just incarnate metaphors, that we are stories being told about the living love that created us and sustains us. It made me wonder if maybe that was true of all history. Maybe all of history’s beauty and bloodshed was a story not about pleasure and pain and power but about humanity’s relationship with an unseen spirit of love. We yearned for that spirit but we feared and hated it, too, because when it shone its terrible light on us, we saw ourselves as we were, broken and shameful, far from what the spirit of love had made us. Maybe all our wars and rapes and oppressions were just our attempts to extinguish that light and silence that story.

  The very moment I put the last period on The Uncanny’s last sentence, I knew the work had done something to me. I could sense the change right away, and as the days went by I became certain of it. The proof was this:

  There had been one annoying neurotic symptom that had remained with me after my therapy. Every now and then, I would find myself in an internal, imaginary argument with my father. This was not my real father anymore, of course. He and I had come to a distant but peaceable understanding with each other. This was what the psychologists call an introject, the idea of my father that lived in my own mind, and now spoke to me as a part of myself. When these arguments with introject Dad got started in my head, they would become compulsive, addictive. I would get a rich, sickly pleasure out of rehearsing them over and over. By an effort of will, I had trained myself to stop them as soon as they began, but it bothered me that the old man, even in imagination, still had this sort of power over me.

  But the moment I finished The Uncanny, the internal arguments stopped, never to return. As the weeks went on, I knew I had become free in a new way, a special and uncommon way. With William Faulkner, I understood that the past is never dead, but like Richard Storm, I had now come to feel—truly feel—that the past was past. If the past isn’t past, what is?

  In this new mental freedom, I came to see that the dilemma I had been wrestling with—my love of a culture that had done so much evil and yet produced such lasting beauty—was only my personal portion of the greater human paradox. We are never free of the things that happen. Every evil weaves itself into the fabric of history, never to be undone. Yet at the same time—at the very same time—each of us gets a new soul with which to start the world again.

  It would take a few more years, but I would finally come to understand that I had, in effect, reinvented the doctrines of Original Sin and Salvation. This paradox, my paradox, was the riddle solved by the incarnation and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He offered a spiritual path out of the history created by Original Sin and into the newborn self remade in his image. It is the impossible solution to the impossible problem of evil. All reason says it can’t be so. But it’s the truth that sets us free.

  I would come to feel that the West’s enduring hatred of the Jews only made sense in light of the truth of both that indelible sin and that miraculous salvation. In the Bible, the Jews are “chosen” in the sense that God selects them as his doorway back into the world after the separation of the Fall. As such, they represent all people everywhere, a microcosm of what we are like in relationship to God. Seen in that context, the statement “the Jews killed Christ,” begins to make sense. It means we all killed Christ, all humanity, to the last woman and man. To limit that killing to the Jews is a simple act of racist denial and willed blindness, an attempt to say, “They did it, Lord, not us; not us.”

  The Holocaust was the crucifixion compulsively reenacted on a grand scale: an attempt to kill God’s people in order to extinguish the Light of the World that shows us as we are. Sigmund Freud called this the “return of the repressed,” a concept he discusses, not so oddly enough, in his essay “The Uncanny.” According to this idea, we bury the trauma and guilt of our past—in this case, the murder of God—and then we keep reenacting that trauma helplessly, in this case through the murder of God’s people. The things we can’t face come back and back to us, shaping our actions, getting bigger and bigger, until finally we either face the cause of them or they destroy us. Europe, in the end, was destroyed. It was their great culture that died in those death camps. The Jews—and their God—live on.

  There are some people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The very fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God’s existence. More than that. The Holocaust was an evil that only makes sense if the Bible is true, if there is a God, if the Jews are his people, and if we would rather kill him and them than truly know him, and ourselves.

  CHAPTER 13

  MY CONVERSION

  One winter’s night near the end of the last millennium, I lay in bed reading a novel. I was in midlife at this point, around forty-five years old; still living in London, in a pleasant block of flats on the border of South Kensington and Earl’s Court. It was around midnight. My wife was asleep beside me. My teenage daughter was asleep in her room down the hall. My nine-year-old son was asleep in his room beside hers.

  The novel I was reading was a sea story by Patrick O’Brian. It was one of his wonderful series of adventure novels set during the Napoleonic Wars. The series featured a British naval captain named Jack Aubrey and his friend, a surgeon named Stephen Maturin. Like Holmes and Watson or Jeeves and Wooster, Maturin and Aubrey are a mind-body pair. Aubrey is a bluff, handsome, go-straight-at-’em warrior. Maturin is a dark, ugly, sometimes tormented philosopher. Making my way through the series, I had become emotionally invested in both these make-believe men. But Maturin, I came to feel, often acts as a stand-in for the author, so I identified with him a bit more.

  I don’t remember exactly which of the books I was reading that night. But just as I was starting to doze off, I reached a scene in which Maturin also went to bed. O’Brian described him climbing wearily into his hammock on whatever ship he was in at the time. Then, with a single sentence, the author told how the Catholic surgeon said a brief prayer just before he fell asleep.

  The scene came at a break in the chapter. It was a good p
lace to stop for the night. As I lay the book by the clock on my bedside table, I thought to myself, Well, if Maturin can pray, then so can I.

  It seemed an almost random thought, but it wasn’t really. For some time I had been wondering whether I might let go of my agnostic resistance and allow myself to believe what I knew deep down I had come to believe. The logic of good and evil supported me in my half-buried faith. So did the undeniable reality of certain inward experiences: the experiences of beauty and truth and of love above all. My old objections—that faith might be a crutch in hard times or some other form of neurosis—were simply no longer plausible. The hard times had been over for quite a while. And bizarre as it was even to myself, I was not neurotic anymore. I was at least as sane as any man I knew.

  As I closed my eyes, I thought very quickly of the people I loved tucked up in their beds all around me. I thought of the life I had—a life of writing, and family, and traveling the world. The life I’d always longed for. I thought of the happiness and sanity and inner peace I’d never expected and which was still such a daily visceral pleasure to me.

  And I prayed. I prayed: Thank you, God. And then, like Maturin, I fell asleep.

  It was, looking back on it, a small and even a prideful prayer: an intellectual’s hesitant experiment, three words intended to test the waters of belief without any real mental commitment.