Timebends (89 page)

This quest for the total self now seemed to define the search in
Hamlet,
in
Oedipus Rex,
in
Othello:
the drive to make life real by conquering denial, the secret thrust of tragedy.

Talking with these scientists, I entered a dark and unknown land ruled by the cruel tyrant Irony; having set free the most awesome forces of nature, they now found themselves imprisoned in narrow contradictions, chiefly that basic decisions were not theirs to make but were left to politicians whose minds and motives were too often petty and unwise. The great good science was doing in medicine had justified it as a lifesaving art, but it could extinguish all life. To which side of this equation did an inventing physicist connect himself?

In the end, Oppenheimer's protective caution made intimate discussion difficult; I supposed he had good reason to be suspicious of writers. Still, my questions seemed to interest him, even though he allowed himself mostly noncommittal replies, except to the
central one—whether we all tended to deaden our connections, and hence our psyches, to those actions we found it difficult to justify. Plainly moved, his eyes filled with what I took for vulnerability, he looked directly into my eyes and said with quiet emphasis that this was not always true. In other words, he was indeed suffering, was not merely a man who had known power and was able to distract himself by recollecting his unique accomplishments. It was sufficient response for me at the moment.

I came away with the belief that to put the question was to answer it. Men had to deny, and the palpable gloom around these truth-seekers seemed to me now the gloom of denial; they had finally to believe that the great swath of history had simply swept them up much as an immense gravitational force sucks new stars into its gorgeous path. And yet the fact would not go away that all their marvelous craft had placed in the hands of ignorant, provincial men the destroying power of the gods.

Back in Roxbury I wrote page after page of a play in blank verse about an Oppenheimer-like character preparing to signal the fateful test explosion of Fat Man, the first experimental bomb. The scenes had a certain elegance but would not bleed—I was too remote from the character's daily life. But in the process of writing, it occurred to me that guilt of this kind might be a spurious, slyly invented pseudo-relationship with a person or event, something we fabricate to deny our real responsibilities. Guilt supplies pain without the need to act and the humiliation of contrition; by feeling guilt, in short, we weaken the need to change our lives.

It was clearer now why Camus's
The Fall
had left me unsatisfied; it seemed to say that after glimpsing the awful truth of one's own culpability, all one could do was to abjure judgment altogether. But was it enough to cease judging others? Indeed, was it really possible to live without discriminating between good and bad? In our eagerness to accept the fecund contradictions of life, were we no longer to feel moral disgust? And if we were to lay no more judgments, to what could we appeal from the hand of the murderer?

The bomb play was interesting when it should have been horrifying. I did not know how long I would live, and I longed to leave something absolutely truthful; this play might well illuminate the dilemma of science, but it failed to embarrass me with what it revealed, and I had never written a good thing that had not made me blush (nor did I think anyone else had either).

I began to search for a form that would unearth the dynamics of denial itself, which seemed to me the massive lie of our time—while
America, as I could not yet know, was preparing to fight a war in Vietnam and methodically deny it was a war and proceed to deny the men who fought the war the simple dignity of soldiers. I saw American culture, the most unfettered on earth, as the culture of denial; even as the drug, in expanding the mind, denied that it was destroying the mind, and the new freedom of sexuality denied that it was dissolving the compassionate self-restraint that made any human relationship conceivable over time. Costume and fashion allowed the stockholder's mind to deny the wearer of worker's jeans and secondhand clothes, whose free-flowing hair denied personal uninvolvement masquerading as liberated sensibility.

Inevitably the form of the new play was that of a confession, since the main character's quest for a connection to his own life was the issue, his conquest of denial the path into himself. It seemed neither more nor less autobiographical than anything else I had written for the stage. From the play I had abandoned a decade before, about a group of researchers suborned by a pharmaceuticals magnate, the figure of Lorraine emerged as the seeming truth-bearer of sensuality, contrasted with the constricted, mind-bound hero who looks to her for the revival of his life as she more and more comes to stand for the catlike authenticity of a force of nature.

Some weeks after the completion of
The Misfits
Marilyn had returned to New York, phoned me in the hotel where I was living before I moved to the Chelsea, and asked, “Aren't you coming home?”

It was a long moment before I could speak. She seemed genuinely surprised not to find me in our apartment, even though I had said I would be living elsewhere; had she forgotten her fury against me, or had it not meant to her what it did to me? Her voice now had its old softness and vulnerability, as though nothing at all destructive had happened in the past four years, years that seemed to blanch out as she spoke, like a color photo of violence that had been left too long in the sun. Suddenly the real past was as holy to me as life itself; this amnesia seemed like trying to die backwards. Now the unstated question posed in
The Fall
was not how to live with a bad conscience—that was merely guilt—but how to find out why one went to another's rescue only to help in his defeat by collaborating in obscuring reality from his eyes.
The Fall
is the book of an observer; I wanted to write about the participants in such a catastrophe, the humiliated defendants. As all of us are.

I was quickly piling up pages, too many for a normal play. I worked in the Chelsea and half the time in Roxbury, in the house that Marilyn, in her way, had longed to make her home, just up the road from my first house, where I had lived with Mary and the children for half a decade; but the past was no less mysterious for being so close by. In the curve of the road approaching that first house was a certain maple tree gradually dying of a wound inflicted by a car that smashed into it on the day Marilyn and I married. In an attempt to avoid the press, we had had the ceremony at the Westchester home of Kay Brown, my agent and friend of many years. She and her husband, Jim, my parents and Joan and Kermit and their spouses, the Rostens, and a cheerful Rabbi Robert Goldberg could not dispel Marilyn's tension, which by now I had come to share, if only because the world, quite literally, was out searching for us. Returning home later in the afternoon, we came on a Chevrolet askew in the road a quarter of a mile from the house, its front end mangled around this tree. We stopped, and I got out and looked and saw a woman stretched out on the front seat, her neck obviously broken. At the house, which we reached in a moment, an ambulance was already pulling up, and a mob of some fifty newspeople, cameramen, and onlookers was directing the driver to the accident. The unfortunate woman, Mara Scherbatof, a Russian of high birth, was head of the New York bureau of
Paris-Match
and had hitched a ride with an American photographer. Inquiring for my house from a neighbor, he had mistaken a passing car for mine, roared off in pursuit, failed to make this turn, and collided with the tree. It was so useless a death, and so pointless a mission in the first place, that a pall of disaster fell over both of us. The struck tree slowly rotted and after half a dozen years finally toppled over, leaving a stump that my eye could not avoid looking for in the weeds whenever I drove past.

One learns to listen to what a developing play is trying to say. The theme of survivor guilt was emerging from the gargantuan manuscript. Months earlier, after our tour of the Rhineland, Inge and I had found ourselves in Linz, Hitler's Austrian birthplace, still famous for its anti-Semitism. Just outside the city, high on the crest of a low, forested mountain, stood the Mauthausen concentration
camp, which Inge thought I might want to see. She had suffered under the Nazis, but she had also survived them, and her mind kept sifting through a past with which she wished to make peace.

As we drove by the small farms, it seemed strange that none of the people so much as glanced up to see who was passing on this rarely traveled road to a long-empty concentration camp. Naturally, I assumed they had been doing precisely what they were doing now when the trucks packed with people whined up this road during the years the camp was in operation. Nor could I blame them altogether, and that was the troublesome part. I inevitably wondered what I would have done in their place, powerless as they were to intervene—if indeed such a thought had ever entered their heads.

Built like a castle fortress, the camp was surrounded by a massive twenty-five-foot-high stone wall instead of the usual barbed wire fence on poles. This place was obviously to be a permanent killing ground for the Thousand-Year Reich. Beside the tall gates, locked shut, was a small wooden door. We knocked and waited in the country silence. The loveliness of the countryside falling so soothingly away in undulating waves of dense woodland mocked everything one knew. Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.

Presently an inquisitive, roundly overweight Austrian appeared, smoking a long bent pipe just as in the cartoons, accompanied by his smiling overweight dachshund, perky and as full of curiosity as her master. The man, doubtless bored by his watchman's job, was happy to let us look inside. Not without deference to the thousands who had been murdered here, he was nonetheless lively as he showed us through barracks buildings and courtyards, pausing to explain about the stone slab, with its carved cradle to fit the head and the funnel at one end to let out the blood, on which cadavers were shorn of hair and their gold teeth knocked out. The living were also worked over here. Neither flooding with sympathy and remorse nor cooled by indifference, he was as interested in the horrors he described as he was respectful toward the victims, and clearly blameless in his manly heart. (And what else should he be? Was he not to live?) In an open alley between two barracks he pointed out a pyramidal stone obelisk recording that here a Russian general had been forced to stand in below-zero weather while water was poured over him until he froze to death in a column of ice.

Down below in a little roadside bar where we sat having coffee shortly afterwards, a burly fortyish workingman with fat hands sat at a table with a girl of eight or nine and with a caring sternness corrected her arithmetic in her school notebook. Probably he had lived here in the killing time only twenty years before, had known what those trucks constantly climbing up the hill each day were carrying. Through it all, Inge moved very straight, saying little, but pale and fighting her fear. Tears were constantly threatening the rims of her eyes. The builders of this place and the indifference we saw about us now—to say the least—had destroyed her youth and laid on her for the rest of her life a debt that she did not owe and could never pay and yet carried always, because of her humanity. It was a mystery. Though she saw that the world beyond the German lands left little more room for confidence in the human animal, she was apparently able to stand fast against pessimism. There were always, it seemed, a few individuals to whom one could appeal . . .

And if, as I thought, I would have done anything not to be one of the people inside the trucks grinding up that hill, was that why I felt something less than a purely mournful union with the dead?

Shortly after our trip to Linz, the
International Herald Tribune
reported in a four-line squib that a trial of former Auschwitz guards was going on in a Frankfurt courthouse especially built for these proceedings. I had never laid eyes on a Nazi, and I thought it worth a few hours' drive to do so.

In the new and impressively sedate tan marble courtroom, we sat down among a sparse dozen or so curious onlookers. After only a few minutes a reporter from one of the wire services came over to say that he hoped I'd be writing about the trial since he and his colleagues were having trouble getting their stuff into the European, American, and British press, there being a distinct absence of interest in the Nazi phenomenon now, more than fifteen years after the war. I had not come to the trial intending to write about it, but at the request of the
Tribune
I ended up doing a long piece, which was also published in the
New York Herald Tribune.

Shards of that day remain. Facing the judge's high tribunal and the witness box, some twenty-three defendants, all men in their fifties and sixties by now, sat on a raised platform behind their lawyer, a tall, portly man named Laternser, who represented General Motors in Germany—too expensive a man, I would have thought, for these former guards, who were obviously neither educated nor well-to-do. Fritz Bauer, the chief prosecutor, explained
this puzzle; he had learned that the accused guards had threatened to expose the murderous role of the head pharmacist at Auschwitz in the so-called medical experiments unless the pharmacist, a scion of a wealthy German family, provided them with a top attorney. Indeed, the pharmacist was seated right next to me, a nearsighted man of perhaps fifty, with a studious expression and a very good greenish tweed suit, who followed every word of the trial with understandably intense concentration. He was not yet indicted and was clearly hoping not to be.

One of the guards, responding to Laternser's questions, which were designed to portray him as a perfectly respectable family man of blameless habits, described his fatherly guidance of his four children into useful adulthood. Laternser, satisfied, began to turn away, but the guard continued, “Except for my youngest daughter. I don't speak to her.” This seemed a real surprise to Laternser, who quickly tried to cut his client off. But the former Auschwitz guard, filled with naive indignation, insisted on showing the court what a faithful German he was, and went on to tell how he had broken off relations with his daughter once she decided to marry an Italian. The treacherous Italians, of course, had folded before the Allied advance, deserting the Reich, and anyway were dark, untrustworthy folk.