It was the biggest talent search for a Hollywood film in the 1950s. More than 18,000 unknown actresses from the United States and Europe auditioned, but a pretty seventeen-year-old girl from Marshalltown, Iowa, won the chance to play Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger’s 1957 film, Saint Joan.
A curious passage occurs in “My Father Is a Book,” Janna Malamud Smith’s tender, touching 2006 memoir of her father, Bernard Malamud. In the spring of 1978, when the novelist was in his mid-60s, he and his wife, Ann, had dinner with Philip Roth and Claire Bloom in the latter couple’s London apartment. In a letter to his daughter describing the visit, Malamud affectionately characterizes Claire Bloom — “absolutely unpretentious” — and then, in parentheses, adds this detail about greeting Roth: “We kissed on the lips when I came in. He couldn’t have done that two years ago.” Now wait a minute.
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| Bernard Malamud |
The Human Remains
Tony McKibben
January 8, 2018
Bernard Malamud is a hard writer. This is not the same thing as saying he is cold or aloof. His writing can be cruel but never dismissive, harsh but with compassion. He rarely describes a character as they would wish to be described, seeing them in all their physical decay, yet is sympathetic to their mental anguish. “My novels are more moral than philosophical” Malamud says. “I am a novelist, a moralist. Not a philosopher. The notions of hope, of redemption are essential to my characters.” (‘Studies in American Jewish Literature’) His resistance to the philosophical but acceptance of the moral might seem unusual for a post-war writer, and Malamud in this sense is the absolute antithesis of the important French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet insists, while “I have no training in philosophy proper”, that he sees his novel The Voyeur and Camus’ The Outsider as “phenomenological novels, insofar as they present a perception of human consciousness that is of a phenomenological order” (Paris Review), as he admits the importance of Hegel and Heidegger on his work. He would clearly prefer the philosophical to the moral. “When a novelist has “something to say,” they mean a message. It has political connotations, or a religious message, or a moral prescription. It means “commitment,” as used by Sartre and other fellow-travelers. They are saying that the writer has a world view, a sort of truth that he wishes to communicate, and that his writing has an ulterior significance.” “I am against this”, he says, “Flaubert described a whole world, but he had nothing to say, in the sense that he had no message to transmit, no remedy to offer for the human condition.” (Paris Review)
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| Joyce Carol Oates by David Levine |
Blonde is almost a thousand pages long in the Fourth Estate paperback and an unequivocal account of Marilyn Monroe without quite passing for a biography. It is a work of literature rather than of research, with Joyce Carol Oates saying “I’d hoped to evoke a poetic, spiritual, “inner” truth”, and insists she did not do “considerable research” (Prairie Schooner) It is instead an autobiography of the dead, ghostwritten, with Oates trying to find her way into the mind of Norma Jeane Baker/Marilyn Monroe. It is a work of interiority rather than exteriority and this requires the skills not of the logistical tabulator of life experience, but the novelist who wants to put together the emotional reality of somebody’s life. We would make very poor biographers of our own existence as we so often settle for the approximate over the precise: our childhoods, for example, are a jumble of impressions, of imprecisions, yet they are held together by a consciousness giving them a contiguous place, allowing us to marshal them according to various emotional and psychological needs in the present. Even in therapy, we wouldn’t be expected to remember our past with biographical accuracy; simply to give it a fuller context in relation to the impact events have had on our lives.
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| Anthony Hopkins |
At eighty-three, the actor says, performing is easier than it’s ever been. Every role slips into the story of life.
Sir Anthony Hopkins had his breakthrough film role in 1968, as Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn’s power-hungry son in “The Lion in Winter.” Half a century and many roles later—among them Richard Nixon, Alfred Hitchcock, Pope Benedict XVI, King Lear (twice), John Quincy Adams, Pablo Picasso, and, of course, Hannibal Lecter—Hopkins is eighty-three and deep into his own lion-in-winter years. But he isn’t roaring. On Instagram, he treats his two and a half million followers to tossed-off bits of Chopin from his home in the Pacific Palisades, where he has been quarantining for the past year. He paints, reads, plays with his cat. Life seems mellow.
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| Anthony Hopkins Photo by James Mollison |
Alcoholism and ambition fuelled the actor’s rise to the top. He talks masculinity, fame – and why he’s finally ready to play Lear
For anyone who looks toward their later years with trepidation, Sir Anthony Hopkins (“Tony, please”) is a proper tonic. He is 79, and happier than he has ever been. This is due to a mixture of things: his relationship with his wife of 15 years, Stella, who has encouraged him to keep fit, and to branch out into painting and classical composition; the calming of his inner fire, of which more later; and his work.
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| Anthony Hopkins |
Hopkins loves to work. Much of his self-esteem and vigour comes from acting – “Oh, yes, work has kept me going. Work has given me my energy” – and he is in no way contemplating slowing down. You can feel a quicksilver energy about him, a restlessness. Every so often, I think he’s going to stop the interview and take flight, but actually he’s enjoying himself and keeps saying, “Ask me more! This is great!”
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| Anthony Hopkins |
P . G. WODEHOUSE once described a character as looking like a Welsh rarebit about to come to the height of its fever, and it is this very cheese dish at an acute stage of meltdown that Anthony Hopkins's face now resembles.
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| Anthony Hopkins |
PLAYBOY: With your recent knighthood, must we address you as Sir Anthony? HOPKINS: They say "Sir Hopkins." What do Americans think of all that? PLAYBOY: We're impressed. But never mind what Americans think, what did you think when you found out about it? HOPKINS: It was a big surprise. It's nice. I'm honored, but I don't know how to use it. Maybe I can get special tables at restaurants. |
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| Howard Jacobson |
The novelist was in Tenerife when news of Covid-19 hit. He reflects on a month of uncertainty and the search for hand sanitiser
Howard Jacobson“It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned again in Holland... ” So begins Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.
It was about the beginning of 2020 that I heard a new plague was heading this way from China. On the morning of 27 February I sat with my wife Jenny in a cafe in La Caleta, a pretty fishing village in Tenerife, which we were leaving to go home to London later that day. But for the calima, when wild winds lifted the Sahara and deposited it on our living-room floor, we’d been enjoying glorious weather. This morning was cruelly beautiful. We didn’t want to leave. But while there had been only one reported case of coronavirus on the island, we weren’t entirely convinced the authorities were on top of it; we weren’t sure how well-equipped for dealing with a severe outbreak they were; and we thought that if it did come to hospitalisation, at least in London we spoke the language. We no sooner took that decision than we regretted it. A sadness settled on us – a calima of the spirits – that hasn’t lifted.
A plane is not a comfortable place to be when the proximity of other people makes you anxious. This was early in the scare and no one was talking yet of social distancing let alone isolation, but I am a social distancer by instinct. The immigration hall at Gatwick was deserted. Once clear of customs, I bought the first English paper I’d read in days. “UK warns against mass panic as race to halt outbreak intensifies,” the Guardian proclaimed. So that was what we’d left the silvery-sweet air of La Caleta for: mass panic.
The next day we meet friends down from Manchester for lunch. They are in as much of a hurry not to kiss us as we are not to kiss them. We substitute some clumsy elbow banging. Jenny favours the Hindu namaste. I favour backing out of the restaurant. I don’t follow any of the conversation. I am not a good concentrator on other people at the best of times, but dread has now taken up all the room in my attention. At the next table people in their 20s are hugging and kissing.
Jenny shops for sanitising gels and wipes only to discover when she gets them home that they are the wrong gels and wipes. We aren’t killing bacteria, we are killing a virus. I don’t want to admit I don’t know the difference. Something’s got it in for us. Who cares what it’s called. But details matter. To be effective against the virus, sanitisers have to be 60% alcohol. “Why don’t I just breathe on every surface,” I joke. But even I don’t find me funny.
Jenny goes on one of her marathon trawls through the world’s online retailers. Only 20 infected and one dead and already every chemist has run out. Boris Johnson appears on television flanked by experts. I marvel that we have any left after the contempt shown to them by Brexiters. This is the first time I have seen the prime minister without a single inane grin on his face. Has something finally struck him as unsmirkful? But looking urgent isn’t the same as acting with urgency. Where are the sanitisers?
Somehow Jenny finds some that clip to your lapel like badges. I feel I’m warding off a vampire with a clove of garlic. She has stumbled in her researches on to a wipe for anus whitening. “There are still things I don’t know,” she says. “Why does anyone want to whiten their anus?” I ask. However little she knows, I know still less.
But it increases my sadness to be given this reminder of the ingenuity of human playfulness and desire, and to think how our incorrigible variety is being brought low, robbed of its virtuosity and joy, reduced to a single pitch of panic, by a virus. It is absurd to anthropomorphise Covid-19, but like all pestilence it is puritanical in intent. Its purpose is to flatten us out.
The infected rate continues to rise. We have to be told, but I’d still prefer not to know. Let the dead number the dead. I ring my sister in Manchester to see how she and my 97-year-old mother are getting on. Fine. Fine? Yes, fine. “What will be will be,” my sister says. We grew up in the same house: where the hell did she learn that philosophy?
I have taken to wearing gloves when I venture out but get confused as to whether I need to keep them on or take them off to touch my face. If I’ve sanitised my hands before putting on gloves, does that mean the gloves are sanitised from the inside? Or will they have contaminated my hands? I drop my bottle of gel and don’t know whether to pick it up gloved or ungloved. I look around to see who’s witnessing this sad fiasco. No one is. The streets are empty.
THE GUARDIAN
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| Auschwitz |
It once felt impious just to mention Auschwitz. Now, 75 years after its liberation, the death camp has spawned a literary subgenre – and Hitler is in Oscar-nominated comedy Jojo Rabbit. Are we betraying the dead?
Silence is the angel with which literature wrestles. The silence of inadequacy to the task of expression – TS Eliot’s struggle against “last year’s words” while “next year’s words await another voice”. The silence of moral hesitancy or humane consideration. The silence enjoined by laws of blasphemy, or fears of persecution. The silence of bad conscience or exhaustion. The silence of tact.
Over and above these, the Holocaust for many writers and thinkers made reticence not a matter of choice but a moral and psychological obligation. “No poetry after Auschwitz” – the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s famous phrase, ringing through the deathly quiet like the plague bell, could be read both as an injunction and a lament.
Either way, it didn’t simply mean no fancy language. It meant not rushing to possess by articulation, or even to explain what might have been beyond explanation, while the thing itself was still warm and its consequences still unfolding. The issue wasn’t language’s ineffectualness in the face of a terrible event. The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, who as a boy was transported to a labour camp and later spent three years foraging and in hiding, wrote of “learning silence” as a mode of forgetting, burying “the bitter memories deep in the bedrock of the soul, in a place where no stranger’s eye, not even our own, could get to them”.
We think of understanding as our greatest gift, and language as our greatest means of expressing it, but it was Primo Levi – author of If This Is a Man, the finest of all accounts of life in the camps – who warned against “understanding” the Nazi project to eliminate the Jews, as though it were susceptible to rationality. It might be that the deep bedrock of the soul is a better place to house what defeats reason than the printed page or the cinema screen.
For many who survived incarceration and torture, Appelfeld’s silence became a way of being, without consolation or salve. The idea of cure, let alone transfiguration, belongs to a later generation of Holocaust excavators, those who had not experienced for themselves but wanted to speak as though they had, either to berate those they felt hadn’t learned its lessons or simply to profit from it in some way – peddling kitsch being the most profitable.
Once it felt impious just to say the word Auschwitz. The clutch of cruel consonants caught in one’s throat. Now, as we reach the 75th anniversary of its liberation on 27 January, the horror associated with those consonants has dissolved into an almost jaunty familiarity. Auschwitz today is a tourist destination, whether you mean to go there by train and come back with a trinket or travel to it between the covers of a book. It has even spawned a popular subgenre – the Auschwitz novel. Auschwitz Lullaby, The Child of Auschwitz, The Librarian of Auschwitz, The Druggist of Auschwitz, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Chiropodist of Auschwitz. Only one of those is made up by me, and who’s to say it isn’t being written this minute?
Look at the publicity for these novels and you discover the same claim being made for all of them. The Druggist of Auschwitz is a “documentary” novel. The Child of Auschwitz is described as historical fiction. The Librarian of Auschwitz is based on “an incredible true story”. As for the latest, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, it is the real-life story of how a Slovakian Jew fell in love with a girl he was tattooing in the camp. In other words, they are all novels that are not prepared to take the risk of being works of the imagination, and therefore exist in some no man’s land between fact and fancy.
How we feel about novels making claims to be true, over and above what we mean by imaginatively true, will tell us how we feel about novels altogether. It isn’t new for writers or their publishers to make such declarations. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was sold on the assurance that his “Life and strange surprizing adventures” were “written by himself” and therefore authentic. Moll Flanders the same. And that was 300 years ago. But the novel has evolved considerably since then and it hasn’t been thought necessary to assure us that Thomas Hardy based Jude the Obscure on a real Dorsetshire loser who wasn’t able to kill a pig. That we are returning to fact to justify fiction is the sure sign that the novel no longer commands the respect it did.
Only when a story avowedly tells of something that really happened, it seems, are we willing to grace it with our credulity and tears. Ironically, a number of these works have been criticised by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum for failing to live up to their own promises of authenticity. Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz, the Memorial complains, “contains numerous errors and information inconsistent with the facts, as well as exaggerations, misinterpretations and understatements”.
The publisher’s response – “Heather is a fiction writer, not a historian” – is a disingenuous attempt to have it both ways. Either you’re aiming to tell the historical truth or you aren’t. The classic defence of novels and films of this sort, that they are “based” on real events, is no defence at all. “Based” conceals a world of subterfuge, giving the author access to the best of both worlds – “truth” in the historical sense and “truth” in the imaginative – while having to bear responsibility for neither.
The question we have to ask is why readers are so eager to enter into this shady contract. What is it about “historical truth” that licenses them to be moved in a way that “imaginative truth” no longer seems to? The Tattooist of Auschwitz fulfils two of the classic expectations of kitsch. By sweetening the horrors of the camps (“I tattooed a number on her arm. She tattooed her name on my heart”) it answers to Milan Kundera’s claim that “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit”. And in its faux historicism – right down to the inclusion of photographs of the actual tattooist whose story the novel borrows – it angles for those double tears that are the hallmark of kitsch: weeping over the suffering of others and weeping a second time over our capacity to do so.
To be clear: it is not my argument that the Holocaust should be approached as though it is the Holy of Holies. I have been chased from the Temple myself, accused of defacing sacred memory in my novel Kalooki Nights by detailing the adolescent hero’s obsession with Ilse Koch, the notoriously sadistic wife of the commandant of Buchenwald. An early copy of Lord Russell of Liverpool’s The Scourge of the Swastika, complete with grainy, semi-sadomasochistic photographs, falls into the boy’s hands when he is of an age to be susceptible to its imagery. Thereafter, his imagination riots in the hell of Buchenwald.
But there is all the difference in the world between pornographic exploitation of the Holocaust and a dramatisation of how reading about it can be deranging. The forms in which we receive and process images of the camps are integral now to what the Holocaust means to us. There is nothing titillating about their study.
Nor is there blasphemy in disturbing the solemn hush with parody and satire. If we are to know and bear witness while accepting Levi’s injunction against “understanding”, we need all our wits about us. Sometimes the comedy just isn’t comic enough, as is the case in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator; or not funny at all as in Roberto Benigni’s film Life Is Beautiful; and sometimes it makes us squirm and fret, and then wonder why we shouldn’t, as in Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest. But comedy can be a contentious and disruptive force whether or not its subject is the Holocaust. The important thing is to accept that seriousness can take many forms.
Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit has several Oscar nominations, including for best film (warning: spoiler details ahead). It tells of a 10-year-old German boy living at the end of the second world war, who moves from being a member of the Hitler Youth to helping conceal a Jewish girl in his house. To complicate his loyalties, his imaginary friend is the Führer, played farcically by Waititi himself. In a gesture that might be said to complete his de-Nazification, Jojo finally shouts, “Fuck off, Hitler,” and kicks him out of the window. Is this too cute to be cathartic? “Kitsch is a parody of catharsis,” Adorno wrote. Could Jojo Rabbit’s breezy optimism be deceptive? Could it be concealing a parody of kitsch?
Whatever the film is up to, it can’t be accused of spurious reverence. An atrocious event doesn’t automatically confer seriousness on every representation of it. Seriousness has to be earned again each time. A feelgood Holocaust – whether it takes the form of pseudo-historicity or redemption romance – not only exploits the dead, it demeans the living.
“I am afraid of one thing,” Dostoevsky said. “That I won’t be worthy of my torment.” We who never experienced the torments of the Holocaust for ourselves bear a double responsibility: first to those who did and then to our own capacity to imagine without false solace. Silence was once thought to be the only way to penetrate this darkest of dark places. Now we are talking again, we owe it to humanity not to belittle or betray the deep bedrock of the soul.
