In the death camp of Ravensbrück, Buber-Neumann met and befriended the doomed Milena Jesenska, who would sometimes tell her new friend about her dead lover and the bizarre tales he wrote.
The allusion to Jesenska is one of those tenuous threads that connects this true story of twentieth-century oppression to the ostensibly private, Spanish world of the narrator’s life story: we recall him, as a young man, in the act of reading Letters to Milena in the Spanish cultural bureau. This moment and others like it begin to suggest that none of the seemingly discrete narratives gathered here, the stories of small-town Spain and the stories of refugee or deported Central Europeans, is unconnected to the others. There are, to be sure, a number of stories that patently link Spain to the horrors of the mid-twentieth century, for instance stories from the Spanish civil war: one about the ruined family of a Spanish Communist who ends up in Moscow, another about an idealistic, Germanophile Spaniard who joins Spain’s Blue Division to fight along with the Nazis on the Russian front. But these more obvious links between Spain and the European disaster of the 1930s and 1940s aren’t the ones of greatest interest in revealing the author’s subtle unifying strategies.
For what ultimately connects all of the “novels” here is the spirit of Kafka, the author who more than any of the many other authorial voices that hover over this book—Proust, Herodotus, John le Carré—presides over it in its multifaceted entirety. Pace those who beat Sepharad over the head with Sebald, there is indeed a “stunning calculus of implication and association, far-ranging and centered” that courses through Muñoz Molina’s novel. These implications and associations, admittedly so far-ranging at times as to escape easy detection, derive, ultimately, from an experience shared by all of the book’s characters—the dread Kafkaesque experience characterized by the narrator in a passage that, typically, is addressed to an unidentified “you”:
And you, what would you do if you knew that at any moment they could come for you, that your name may already be on a typed list of prisoners or future dead, or suspects, or traitors?… They notified Josef K. of his trial, but no one arrested him.…
This quintessentially twentieth-century experience of sudden, seemingly arbitrary selection and expulsion is, we begin to see, the link that binds together the novel’s Spaniards and Germans, its Communists and Fascists. It is the experience typified by the life of a blond, blue-eyed, fully Austrian (or so he thought), half-Jewish youth called Hans Meyer, who, after being persecuted as a Jew, became the writer Jean Améry after the war. It is the tie that binds Spanish Republican soldiers, desparecidos in Uruguay, and leukemia-afflicted writers to Kafka himself, as an extraordinary summarizing passage suggests:
You look at your watch, cross your legs, open a newspaper in the doctor’s office or in a café in Vienna in November 1935, when a news article will drive you out of your routine and out of your country and make you a stranger forever. A guest in a hotel, you woke up one night with a fit of coughing and spat blood. The newspaper tells of the laws of racial purity newly promulgated in Nuremberg, and you read that you are a Jew and destined to extermination. The smiling nurse appears in the doorway of the waiting room and tells you that the doctor is ready to see you. Gregor Samsa awoke one morning and found himself transformed.… The healthy, blond man reading his newspaper in a café in Vienna one Sunday morning, dressed in lederhosen and kneesocks and Tyrolean suspenders, in the eyes of the waiter who has served him so often will soon be as repulsive as the poor Orthodox Jew whom men in brown shirts and red armbands humiliate for sport.…
The unifying experience, then, is what it means to be “excluded, expelled, from the community of the normal,” as the narrator puts it.
There were critics who appreciated this important motif but were nonetheless leery of its moral implications. “But what can such an equation mean when its terms are so different?” Michael Pye asked in his review; and he then went on to suggest that “without morality all these dark stories are just sensations.” But it seems to me that Muñoz Molina’s multiplex, honeycombed attempt to depict the very root of evil, to create a picture of mankind’s impulse to exclude and oppress that goes beyond the particularities of this or that ideology, should be seen as a profound grappling with a very fundamental moral issue indeed. And his insistence on assimilating to the vignettes of political oppression the experience of the suffering sick, particularly those who to all appearances are normal but who are doomed to pain and likely death (both AIDS and leukemia are invoked), is to my mind an effective means of reminding his readers, by means of an analogy, a suggestive narrative metaphor, of that other class of exiles, not the literal but the metaphorical exiles created by political oppressions, as 1492 taught us: the marranos, the internal exiles, cut off from the community of the normal to which they bear the most superficial of resemblances, stigmatized by the presence of an invisible trait for which they can bear no responsibility.
But then, to appreciate the large moral vision of Muñoz Molina’s novel, you must return, as he does, to the awkward question raised by its disturbingly allusive title. Sepharad ends with a grand and tragic gesture that suggests that willed acts of selection and expulsion (or worse) doom nations, as they do people, to a kind of metaphorical exile, an exile from themselves: the ultimate internal exile. This moving point is made in a finale that links the themes of illness, exile, internal exile, of museums and cultural survivals and nationalisms, and in so doing climactically unites the unsettling multiple significances of the fateful year of 1492.
The final section of the novel is called “sepharad.” In it, the narrator finds himself living for a brief time in what he describes as a pleasant, self-imposed “exile” in New York City. His prolonged visit from Spain to the New World might put us in mind of Columbus, of “discovery” and the horizons of new worlds and possibilities; yet the same pleasant visit inevitably brings with it reminders of that other result of 1492. (While in New York, the narrator stumbles across an ancient Sephardic cemetery off Fifth Avenue.) As an expression, perhaps, of both aspects of 1492, the last thing the narrator does is to visit what may well be described as a symbol of Spain itself, of its great imperial culture—a culture that is, now, just another exile abroad: the enormous and neglected Hispanic Society, located in uptown Manhattan, a place to which the bus journey takes so much time that it feels like a voyage of discovery itself.
We have by this point been prepared, in a fashion that is typically complex and subtle, for this strange culminating collocation of the two great results of 1492—America as a refuge and Spain as the oppressor, the expeller, the exiler. Earlier on, we learn that the Mateo Zapatón whom the young narrator idolized is not only the dashing swain of their small town but the adulterous lover of many of the small town’s matrons; and indeed the lover of the young nun about whom we heard in a much earlier story. The information is typically disconcerting: hundreds of pages after we first hear about Mateo—whose handsome face, we recall, serves as the model for his namesake, the noble Saint Matthew, in the town’s Holy Week float—we are forced to revise our moral picture of this attractive but corrupt character, a fornicator whose sins make him far worse morally, after all, than was the loathed tailor, the model for Judas, whose only sin was to have a Jewish-looking nose (a suggestion that he is the descendant of marranos, perhaps). There is a strong implication here that we are meant to think hard about the hypocrisies of the various regimes we’ve encountered in these tales, regimes that are always eager to assign guilt to certain “others,” and then to cut those others out.
The revelation about Mateo Zapatón is made during a conversation that provides the climax of Muñoz Molina’s moral argument about the human impulse to cut off and expel. Here the expulsions of 1492 are connected to the exterminations of another, more recent year, which is an anagram of the Columbus year: 1942. For even as he laughingly relates the story of his affair with the bride of Christ, Mateo himself, the shoemaker, seems unaware that his personal hypocrisy may ultimately be r
elated to a larger crime, to which he almost unwittingly refers in a reverie about lost shoes, which, he muses, are
the saddest things in the world because they always made me think of dead people, especially that time of year, in winter, when everyone is off to the olive harvest and I could spend the whole day without seeing a soul. During the war, when I was a little boy, I saw a lot of dead people’s shoes. They would shoot someone and leave him lying in a ditch or behind the cemetery, and we kids would go look at the corpses, and I noticed how many had lost their shoes, or I’d find a pair of shoes, or a single shoe, and not know which dead man they belonged to. Once in a newsreel I saw mountains of old shoes in those camps they had in Germany.
And indeed we are, I think, meant to think of Mateo, of the moral costs to Spain of its hypocrisies and sins—it is the symbolic model, here, of all such regimes and their hypocrisies and sins—in the culminating moments of the book, where the author and his wife wander about the fabulous halls of the Hispanic Society. Here, surrounded by a staggering collection of every conceivable artifact of Spanish culture, in what looks to the narrator like “a flea market where all the testimony and heritage of the past has ended”—artifacts that themselves remind him of the absent presence, of “Sepharad” (“the 1519 Amadìs de Gaula, the Bible translated into Spanish by Yom Tov Arias, the son of Levi Arias, and published in Ferrara in 1513 because it could not be published in Spain”)—the narrator and his wife encounter a female character whom, it suddenly becomes obvious, we have met before. This woman, like the narrator himself, is a voluntary exile from Spain, someone who has followed that other, liberating trajectory of 1492; yet because she has been linked, in an earlier story, to Mateo, a morally compromised character, her presence simultaneously reminds us of what we might call the sinful, sinning Spain, too. Together this woman and the narrator stare at a Velázquez painting of a girl who, you realize, with her raven hair and dark eyes, could be either Spanish or Jewish. Or, of course, both.
That culminating and poignant confusion, coming as the climax of a scene that simultaneously puts the reader in mind of exile, escape, and internal, “hidden” exile, suggests that the price paid for their relentless persecutions of “others” is, ultimately, the oppressors’ own souls. The descriptions of Spain itself, you realize, are all characterized by a sense of loss, of emptiness; it is only here, in a deserted museum on foreign soil, that we encounter what we think of as the best of Spain’s culture and its history. This, surely, is why the narrator detects, in the eyes of the haunted, hunted face of that elusive painted figure—the quintessential Spaniard painted by the quintessential Spanish painter—“the melancholy of a long exile”: a term that, by this point, clearly refers to Spain itself as well as its Jews. It is a measure of the meticulous and exacting artistry with which Muñoz Molina has constructed his vast and subtle, dreamlike and wrenching book that he has arranged for the word “exile” to be the last, devastating word in a work that is, I think, something of a masterpiece.
—The New York Review of Books, May 25, 2006
* I am indebted to Lawrence Rich’s The Narrative of Antonio Muñoz Molina: Self-Conscious Realism and “El Desencanto” (Peter Lang, 1999) for background on this writer’s career.
IN GAY AND CRUMBLING ENGLAND
EARLY ON IN Alan Hollinghurst’s big new novel The Stranger’s Child—his first in seven years, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his Man Booker–winning The Line of Beauty—a youngish man stands gazing at a tomb, thinking about an absent penis. The year is 1926, and the man, George Sawle, is a married scholar in his early thirties, to all appearances a moderately distinguished product of the comfortable middle classes. The tomb (and the penis) belong to Cecil Valance, a dashing aristocrat and promising poet who had been killed in the Great War—and who had been George’s lover at Cambridge.
As George examines the marble effigy atop the grandiose tomb, commissioned by Cecil’s grieving family, he is struck, not without a certain rueful amusement, by the contrast between the “ideal” and “standardized” quality of the statue and his private memories of their “mad sodomitical past” together. This thought inevitably leads to recollections of certain features that the tomb could not, of course, depict, and that George nearly can’t bring himself to name: “the celebrated … the celebrated membrum virile, unguessed for ever beneath the marble tunic, but once so insistently alive and alert.”
There was a time when the membra virilia you were likely to encounter in Hollinghurst’s novels were neither unnamable nor bashfully hidden away. In 1989, when he was thirty-five, he made an impressive debut with his marvelously rich and deft The Swimming-Pool Library, in which a plush style, a formidable culture, and a self-confident avoidance of then-fashionable formal tricks were put in the service of a startlingly direct and unembarrassed treatment of gay desire. The novel, set in the early 1980s, traces the surprisingly entwined lives of two gay men: Will Beckwith, a narcissistic, well-to-do young pleasure-seeker whose ambition is to keep “clear of interference from the demands and misery of other people,” and an elderly peer called Charles Nantwich, an old Africa hand with a complicated past who has asked Will to write his biography, and whom Will had met, somewhat comically, while “cottaging”—looking for anonymous sex in a public toilet.
Both of them, it turns out, have a taste for young black men, and the novel is, among many other things, a sophisticated investigation into what you could call the erotic component of colonialism. (Will doesn’t realize how patronizing is his admiration for the “happiness and loyalty” he sees in the face of a black youth in a painting.) But its most striking feature, perhaps, was its insistence on highlighting the urgent presence, in so many gay men’s lives, of what you could call the less theoretical side of desire. Penises, for instance. In one of the many scenes that take place in the shower of Will’s gym—set pieces that highlight his cool connoisseurship of the bodies he intends to have, or has had—a swoony catalog of male members gives you an idea of the way in which Hollinghurst’s velvety sentences can smoothly twine around a subject that some literary novelists might find dauntingly rebarbative:
In the rank and file of men showering the cocks and balls took on the air almost of an independent species, exhibited in instructive contrasts. Here was the long, listless penis, there the curt, athletic knob or innocent rosebud of someone scarcely out of school. Carlos’s Amerindian giant swung alongside the compact form of a Chinese youth whose tiny brown willy was almost concealed in his wet pubic hair, like an exotic mushroom in a dish of seaweed.
The deliberate elegance of the prose makes a certain point. Style, in Hollinghurst’s work, is the great leveler—it brings within the orbit of serious fiction subjects and acts that other writers, even gay writers, might “tastefully” elide.
The tension between the lush style and the gritty subject matter would become a hallmark of Hollinghurst’s writing. In his next few novels the unflinching gaze and posh pen were often trained on difficult or even unattractive material and characters. His densely atmospheric second book, The Folding Star (1994), focused minutely on the antics of an appallingly unself-aware Briton, now working in Belgium as an English tutor, who develops a Humbert Humbert–like obsession with a seventeen-year-old boy pupil. (A soupçon of ephebophilia runs through these books.) A third, entitled The Spell (1998), was a slight, rather self-conscious exercise in what some critics called “Austenian” social comedy—in it, a group of four men of all ages fall in and out of bed with one another in various combinations and with no visible consequences. The novel was bracingly matter-of-fact about the important part played by drugs and casual sex in the social lives of many educated, middle-class, “nice” gay men.
Hollinghurst’s most acclaimed work, The Line of Beauty (2004), is the story of a young, middle-class gay man’s complicated relationship with the family of a wealthy and ambitious Tory politician in the 1980s—a kind of Thatcher-era riff on Brideshead Revisited, complete with a deceptively soft-spoken
matriarch and wayward patriarch. Here, the author turns his coolly ironic gaze on the way in which its protagonist, who is given the suggestive name Nick Guest, and who begins as a graduate student working on Henry James, is led by his deluded social and erotic ambitions to “cut” his “moral nerves” (as he puts it, in a different context), leaving him with nothing but a “life of valueless excess”: cocaine, empty sex, and so on. In all of these books, the willies wag and the anuses wink with gleeful abandon. They are, Hollinghurst rightly insists, an important part of the story.
In the best of his work, the unruly presence of charged and illicit desires in otherwise traditional English landscapes is the vehicle for biting commentary by the author—on social and sexual conventions, on the way in which self-concealment can become self-betrayal, on colonial and imperial hypocrisies. “The English idyll had its secret paragraphs, priapic figures in the trees and bushes,” a character in the new book observes; or, as The Swimming-Pool Library’s Will Beckwith says of the biography he’s thinking of writing, “it’s the queer side, though, which would give it its interest.”
Indeed, Hollinghurst has Lord Nantwich make the provocative argument that “queerness” is what allows us to read the true story of the past. For him, the behaviors or attitudes of an earlier, closeted era, which to today’s gay men and women may seem hopelessly furtive or repressed, had aesthetic and even intellectual advantages:
Oh it was unbelievably sexy—much more so than nowadays. I’m not against Gay Lib and all that, of course … but it has taken a lot of the fun out of it, a lot of the frisson. I think the 1880s must have been an ideal time, with brothels full of off-duty soldiers, and luscious young dukes chasing after barrow-boys. Even in the Twenties and Thirties, which were quite wild in their way, it was still kind of underground, we operated on a constantly shifting code, and it was so extraordinarily moving and exciting when that spurt of recognition came, like the flare of a match! No one’s ever really written about it.…
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