But just who is this narrator and who is he to us? The first four of the book’s five segments, or stories, are narrated in the first person. The “I” that runs through these four sections grows older but is generally consistent, exhibiting a number of identical attitudes, many of them repugnant, and traits, many of them regrettable, in addition, always, to a vanquishing charm and an enchanting verbal panache. This “I” seems always to have been born around 1914 in the Bukovina and to have spent significant portions of time in Vienna, where he has family, and also in Berlin and Bucharest. And those of us who are at all familiar with Rezzori’s biography are bound to recognize in this the general outline of his life.
Any first-person narrator’s claim borrows from the unassailability of autobiography—often very effectively so, even though we know that it is only a conceit designed to do just that. And to present a narrator, as Rezzori does, whose name is primarily, confidently “I,” is to strike a pact with the reader—to put the reader into a special, intimate, engaged position vis-à-vis the narrator, who seems to be saying something like, “I’m sharing a confidence with you, one that’s important to me. It might be private, really, and embarrassing, but I’m not so ashamed that I can’t tell you.” The corollary is, of course, “Let’s pretend this is me I’m talking about.” And in the case of this book, in which some of the narrators are called “Gregor” and some of their experiences resemble the author’s, there’s the further, teasing, suggestion, “Who’s to say it isn’t?”
But there are little reminders throughout—even to those unfamiliar with particulars of Rezzori’s life that diverge significantly from his narrators’—that what we’re reading is not autobiography. Though we’re content to assume that the personal history of one section’s narrator informs the thinking of the narrators of the other sections, the sections clearly aren’t designed to be particularly cohesive. The foot-loose narrator of the harrowing “Löwinger’s Rooming House” tells us, following his casual, pointless betrayal of a fellow lodger, “After nearly four years of the Balkans I’d had my fill and felt homesick for Vienna. I arrived there just in time for March 1938.” Yet just a few pages later, it’s a ridiculous love affair that brings the narrator of “Troth” to Romania and then to Vienna in February 1938.
Were these passages written on the day the writer interrupted his work to answer the phone? Was the editor asleep? Obviously not; this is fiction we’re reading, and its purposes are the insights and illuminations of which fiction and only fiction is capable. Nor is this contradiction of circumstances a mistake in a novel. “Löwinger’s Rooming House” and “Troth” are two distinct narratives, both of which require their protagonist to be in Vienna for the prelude to Anschluss, but each of which is working to a different end.
Also reminding us that fiction is what we’re reading is the sheer artistry, conspicuously, even perhaps suspiciously so, in the forefront, of both structure and language. Is that display designed, we might ask, not only to thrill and delight, which it does, but also to bedazzle, to seduce—actually to distract? Or designed, rather, to make us note what it is to be seduced, bedazzled, and distracted? How will the author manage to land on his feet at the end of this whirling arabesque of a sentence? What outlandish sight will he unveil next? Look over there! There, at the party, the lovers, the hilarious passersby, not over here, where the train is being loaded up with Jews for its journey east.
But what would an author, who is so clearly devoted to verisimilitude, gain from pointing out to us, now and again, that it is fiction rather than strict autobiography we’re reading? Once the question is asked, the answer seems obvious: when we’re aware of reading fiction, rather than memoir or autobiography, we’re aware that the book is not about the singular experience of the author; the focus, the effort, the purpose lie elsewhere.
Each of Rezzori’s disarming, capering, mischievous raconteurs puts an arm around us as he gambols at our side, turning our attention to this or that, and we can’t help but read as a companion—or, one might say, as an accomplice; the charm is collusive; we can hardly pretend we’re not party to his confidences! Nor can we pretend we don’t understand his states of mind. What was so clear in hindsight, before we began the book—the step-by-step progress toward inevitable catastrophe—is obscured by the vital presentness of Rezzori’s urgent and intimate narration.
The unexpected postwar narrator of the anguished, subtle, final section, “Pravda,” with its inconclusive paragraphs and its unstable balancings of rage and resignation, is not “I” but “he.” And the sensation of finding ourselves at a remove, alienated from prior convictions, habits, milieus, is deeply unsettling. Who is this “he,” this other, whom life has made us? Where did we split off from ourselves, and what happened to our firm reliance on our received view of things? “The artful feat of always holding up a new possibility of himself, a fiction of himself, and the knack, the balletic skill, of eluding reality, withdrawing the fiction at the last instant before colliding with reality—those were talents no one could emulate,” the protagonist, “he,” observes.
One of the extraordinary capacities of fiction is its amenability to rendering conditions of self-deception, to enable us to read with a sort of double brain; we can be instructed to look at something and look away from it simultaneously. Rezzori has provided us with a detailed examination of how the brain works when it’s getting itself to think things that are advantageous to the person in whom it’s housed and of how the brain works when it’s getting itself not to think things disadvantageous to that person. And he has traced the mental consequences of those mental achievements, too: What happens when one’s interests come to conflict, as in the event of divided loyalties and affections? What happens when reality runs out of room for one’s system of beliefs and sense of oneself?
The relationships between these stories is one of a development of a consciousness, a consciousness that belongs to many people, to a world that has sustained seizures of destruction, that is waking from delusional dreams of glory and heroism to find itself grotesquely maimed, and drenched with blood.
It is perhaps in this retrospective section, “Pravda,” that we become more uncomfortably aware of the future than the past. We recall from the earlier sections specious discussions, telling instances of misdirected focus, expressions of breathtaking shortsightedness. The narrator of “Troth” who has come to Vienna for a tryst, as it happens on the night of Anschluss, stands at the window the next morning with his lover
and looked down at the Opernring, now empty, where all the night through there had been ecstasy—a sudden ecstasy that had its source in the silent marching blocks, and that drew people out of their houses and made them run toward the marchers, shouting, roaring, embracing one another, swinging flags with swastikas, throwing their arms to heaven, jumping and dancing in delirium. It was an icy cold yet gloriously sunny day, quite unusual for the middle of March. It was so cold that you would not allow your dog to stay outdoors for longer than five minutes. There was nobody as far as you could see except two or three of the old hags, wrapped, onionlike, in layers of frocks and coats, who sold flowers in the New Market. They were running across the Ring and throwing their roses and carnations in the air, yelling, “Heil!” What did they have to do with it, anyway?
What indeed? Everything, of course. While the narrator has been pursuing his amusements and various personal concerns, taking in no more information about the world he lives in than what impinges directly upon him, the irrelevant “old hags” have been starving, have been assiduously cultivated into perhaps Hitler’s most powerful constituency. And it almost must occur to the reader that although self-involvement might seem to be a minor and relatively innocent (to say nothing of prevalent) character flaw, perhaps there’s nothing inherently minor or innocent about it; perhaps it’s the context that determines just what it is and what its potentialities are.
If we take Rezzori’s anti-Semite seriously—and how can we not?—we are compelled
also to recognize the portrait, or reflection, of a comfortable person in a period of social deterioration or economic crisis, a period of political fragility. Now and again it occurs to most of us to wonder, I suppose, what the consequences of our own unexamined attitudes or biases might be; it occurs to us to wonder how something to which we’re not particularly forced to pay much attention is going to develop, or whom it affects.
How many actually evil people does it take to accomplish a genocide and reduce much of a continent to ash? Only a handful, it seems, but that handful requires the passive assistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky. It’s easy enough for most of us to distance ourselves from attitudes of virulent racism, but what about from carelessness, poor logic, casual snobbery—either social or intellectual—inattentiveness? Rezzori reminds us painfully that the great and malignant hazard of privilege is obtuseness.
“Blood still flows today as it did then,” the narrator of “Pravda” observes. “That it was not his own blood was due to random circumstances that one cannot even call fortuitous: the only dignity to be maintained in our time is the dignity of being among the victims.”
Yes, we wonder, what does it take to be a “decent person”? Maybe the most significant component is luck—the good luck to be born into a place and moment that inflicts minimal cruelty and thus does not require from us the courage to discern and to resist its tides.
Rezzori keeps his nerve; he ensures that his “I” has no idea what the year “1933” is, or the year “1938”—what those numbers will mean to the reader, or, indeed, will mean to his future self. And in doing so, the author also ensures that just before—or just after—we dismiss the feckless young narrator as an idiot, a question inserts itself: What year is, for example, “2007”?
—DEBORAH EISENBERG
MEMOIRS OF AN ANTI-SEMITE
Skushno
Skushno is a Russian word that is difficult to translate. It means more than dreary boredom: a spiritual void that sucks you in like a vague but intensely urgent longing. When I was thirteen, at a phase that educators used to call the awkward age, my parents were at their wits’ end. We lived in the Bukovina, today an almost astronomically remote province in southeastern Europe. The story I am telling seems as distant—not only in space but also in time—as if I’d merely dreamed it. Yet it begins as a very ordinary story.
I had been expelled by a consilium abeundi—an advisory board with authority to expel unworthy students—from the schools of the then Kingdom of Rumania, whose subjects we had become upon the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the first great war. An attempt to harmonize the imbalances in my character by means of strict discipline at a boarding school in Styria (my people still regarded Austria as our cultural homeland) nearly led to the same ignominious end, and only my pseudo-voluntary departure from the institution in the nick of time prevented my final ostracism from the privileged ranks of those for whom the path to higher education was open. Again in the jargon of those assigned the responsible task of raising children to become “useful members of society,” I was a “virtually hopeless case.” My parents, blind to how the contradictions within me had grown out of the highly charged difference between their own natures, agreed with the schoolmasters: the mix of neurotic sensitivity and a tendency to violence, alert perception and inability to learn, tender need for support and lack of adjustability, would only develop into something criminal.
One of the trivial aphorisms my generation owes to Wilhelm Busch’s Pious Helene is the homily “Once your reputation’s done/You can live a life of fun.” But this optimistic notion results more from wishful thinking than from practical experience. In my case, had anyone asked me about my state of mind, I would have sighed and answered, “Skushno!” Even though rebellious thoughts occasionally surged within me, I dragged myself, or rather I let myself be dragged, listlessly through my bleak existence in the snail’s pace of days. Nor was I ever free of a sense of guilt, for my feeling guilty was not entirely foisted upon me by others; there were deep reasons I could not explain to myself; had I been able to do so, my life would have been much easier.
I see myself in that difficult period as in a snapshot taken by one of those precision-engineered cameras blessed with a wealth of tiny screws and levers, gaping lenses, and pleated black-leather bellows which one pulled like an accordion from gleaming nickel scissor supports, cameras that were produced by the same Zeitgeist—still close to the horse-and-buggy world—as the clear-angled, high-wheeled automobiles that so aroused my boyhood fantasy. I envied my classmates—the well-behaved ones whom I left behind when I was sent from school—when they received such photographic apparatuses as birthday or Christmas rewards for success in their schoolwork, though I did not much value the photographs they gave me now and then.
I can see one snapshot now: it is of a boy with the rounded, defiant face of violated and soon assassinated childhood; his glum resolve, focusing exclusively on himself, is a bit ridiculous, and it deceives us about the earnest ordeal of adolescence, which—awkward in this respect too—can find no better expression of its genuine agonies. The day is overcast. I am sitting on a log, wearing a windbreaker of stiff, waterproof linen with a military belt and large pockets, the kind of jacket sported in the late 1920s by members of ideological associations, whether of the far left or the extreme right. In my case, of course, I was remote from anything philosophical, and I simply used the jacket on long rambles I took whenever I could, wandering lonesome and aimless into the countryside around Czernowitz. In the sunshine-basking seasons, the landscape with its vast horizon was as beautiful as a park; under a wintry sky, aswarm with crows, it offered only melancholy leagues of farmland, plowed up into black clods; far away, beyond the snowy strips that marked the hollows in the rolling terrain, the black lines of woodlands stretched all the way to the mountains, twilight blue and barely visible at the milk-glass edge of the sky dome. It was just such a day, in late winter, that corresponded best to my mood of skushno.
I have no hat; my hair is tousled by the wind. Smooth as a seal, my dachshund Max sits at my feet, worshipfully gazing up at me. He is my sole playmate and buddy, my friend, my comforter, in whom I find if not instant understanding then certainly unconditional love and unreserved approval of anything I do.
This photo does not exist—I must quickly point out—for I kept to myself so completely that no one could have snapped it; the schoolmates I have spoken of were now far away. Max and I bummed around the countryside near Czernowitz like a pair of tramps. Morally, too, we were rather footloose. We had a tacit agreement that any guinea hen venturing too far from its home coop was fair game; likewise any cat caught mousing in the furrows. Felines were my special prey, for, much to my sorrow, Max, despite all his other praiseworthy qualities, was not fierce. He would quite eagerly, indeed hysterically, rush at his game, but if it stood up to him, at the slightest nick on his nose he would turn tail, retreat yowling behind my heels, and yelp ignobly from his refuge. I comforted myself with the thought that he was still young and I was probably asking too much of him. Anyway, I carried a good slingshot and a handful of lead pellets in the pocket of my nonpolitical windbreaker, and my aim was almost as good as that of a circus marksman. Even the most tenacious tom reeled off in a daze when the bean-sized bullet struck his skull. Max then had a much easier time of it.
Today, dogs and cats share my home peaceably. But in those days I regarded the enmity between them as a law of nature; and, being a dog-lover, I was of course a cat-hater. I was the son of a man to whom hunting meant everything; the necessity of annihilating prey was as established a fact for me as the categorical imperative was for my teachers; and everyone knows that in shooting grounds, cats are pests. As for attacking the guinea fowl, that was a deliberate iniquity, an act of defiance. Raised according to the strictest rules of sportsmanship, I found a painful satisfaction in being a chicken thief. I was flouting the etiquette of
venery, thus to a certain extent sullying my father’s name. For the sheaf of thoughtfully severe punishments that were to make me conscious of my waywardness included, alas, the penalty of not being allowed to go hunting with my father. Every spring and summer since early boyhood, I had been permitted to accompany my father in the seasonal cycle of sporting joys: tracking woodcock and snipe at Eastertide, and, in my summer vacations, stalking bucks. Then, later, growing more robust, I had occasionally been taken along on the principal part of the annual hunt, during the rutting season of the deer in autumn and the wild-boar hunt in winter. But now I ran, straight out of Czernowitz and then on aimlessly cross-country, to escape the afflicting temptations that would have been unendurable at home: the nostalgic images of the mountain forests where my father hunted, resounding with the mating cries of blackcocks and woodcocks along the margins of the forests and, when everything was green again, the billy goats’ gamboling in the first summer heat, the air alive with dancing gnats. This year, I was forbidden these pleasures.
The stubblefields underfoot were still wet from snow that had only recently melted away. Buds were gleaming on the brookside willows, and you could count on your fingers the days remaining until spring: the buds would soon be breaking open into furry catkins, the sky would be blue again and striped with wet white clouds, the cuckoo would be calling everywhere. But I was chained to my guilt. My moral delinquencies were not the only sins I had to make amends for. I dragged around the syllabus I had missed and now had to make up as a convict the iron ball on his ankle. I knew—after all, it was droned into me every day—that if I passed the makeup exam in the fall, I would be reprieved: that is I would have one last chance for scholastic rehabilitation. Even though I knew this would mean nothing but one more year of boarding-school exile, far from home, far from my beloved country, from hunting, and from my dachshund Max, I was nevertheless resolved to do everything in my power to pass this examination.
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 2