Falstaff and Shared Secrets

An insight came home to me with force the other night as I was watching Verdi's Falstaff at Santa Fe. Here I was in a crowd of hundreds--thousands?--of opera lovers, mostly solvent, some pig rich (with a few music lovers to season the mix). Anyway, these are people who know to handwrite their thank-you notes, and when to use the oyster fork.

So here we are all together on a balmy summer evening, watching the machinations of (as I said before) a "vain, greedy, lecherous, old fool." It was, as I wrote in an earlier post, something of a mixed bag, but the main line--Falstaff's character--is clear enough.

And the thing is: everybody got it. Whenever Falstaff did something particularly mean or lewd or otherwise egregious, everybody laughed, or at least "chuckled"--at any rate, everybody gave some hint of recognition.

And that's the point: these are not hicks or yokels or in any absolute sense; by any conventional standard, they are housebroken. Yet every one of them greeted Falstaff with a glow of recognition.

And that brings us to the insight. It's from Amos Oz, more specifically from his grandfather, his mother's mother, who must have been one of the kindest men ever. it was grandpa who said (but I quote from memory) that everybody has the same secrets. I think grandpa meant it as an act of compassion, or at least an identification--I think of Goethe saying he didn't know of any crime he couldn't imagine himself committing. Sure seemed like it in Santa Fe to me. Everybody has the same secrets, and they lay out big stacks of Andrew Jacksons to share the recognition.

Survivors

For no very obvious reason, I have spent a lot of time lately reading about the politics of the mid-20^th century—the nexus being perhaps 1948, when I would have been 12. For even less obvious reasons, I’ve been pursuing a subset of what you might call “Jewish survival” literature, and I take it for granted that the theme of Jewish survival is a central theme of the period.

The keystone was surely Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir (link), which is in a class by itself. A companion piece Heda Margolius Kovály’s account of her life in and out of Prague (link)-not so elegant as literature, but an earnest, heartfelt tale by a woman who survived the death camps only to find herself thrust into the maw of the Soviet conquerors. I followed up on Kovaly with a memoir by her son, Ivan Margolius, born in a dark time, but surviving into personal and professional security, not to say recognition (link). I had high hopes for Ivan’s story because I like these “essays in retrieval,” and because Heda had left a lot of questions that I hoped he would answer. Indeed it is an okay book in its way, but it is full of a lot of rookie errors—sidetracks and space-fillers—that substantially impair its potential.

But then I moved on to two more which can be discussed somewhat as a matched set: Five Germanys I Have Known (link),and Amos Oz’ Tale of Love and Darkness (link). Each is the first person account of a boy who became a man amidst the turbulent politics of the time. And although neither experienced much directly in the way of political violence [Hah!--What was I thinking? Seen Afterthought II below], still each one found his life defined by it.

And that is the virtue they share: Stern and Oz both have a remarkable knack for uniting the personal and the political: of telling their own story, the stories of their dear ones, and to an extent the stories of their ancestors known and unknown, as part of the fabric of the times.

For Stern, it comes naturally: he’s an historian by trade. It is therefore not surprising that the best of his “Germanys” is no one of the five but rather a sixth—“it is the Germany of the years before World War I, that I think I understand the best.” He paints a vivid and compelling picture of the life of middle and upper-middle class Jews in the highly assimilated world of Wilhelmian Germany—indeed, I don’t know anyone who does a better job of setting the background for the Hitlerian cataclysm to follow.

Ironically, perhaps the happiest part of Stern’s book comes at its darkest hour. We’re talking about World War II, when the Stern family, emigrants at last, tries to scratch as place for itself in wartime New York City. Stern is not yet an adult—he was born in 1926—yet as the most mobile and the most adaptable of the clan, he finds himself thrust into an adult world. He is the manager, the fixer, even the housekeeper. It sounds like a much of a muchness, but in fact he thrives on it, juggling friends and connections on two continents, in half a dozen languages. He emerges almost like the Robert Mitchum Character in Herman Wouk’s Winds of War, or maybe Woody Allen’s Zelig, always on hand, always in the picture. We find him in a chat with Isaiah Berlin, then getting college advice from Albert Einsten. No wonder he went onto a distinguished career as an academic administrator and a member of the “invisible choir: of post-war German-American relations.

Sadly but perhaps inevitably, Stern’s book loses some of its force as he gains in eminence. It still has its merits, but more and more and more it becomes an essay in “and-so-I-told-the-Pope” (literally: see pp 339-42) which necessarily impels the reader into a snooze.

Oz’s life (and book) is the same only different. He’s about 12 years younger than Stern. He was born in Israel, the only child of two parents, each fighting his or her own disappointments, and in a vast network of relatives and neighbors, all with their own demons and aspirations. He’s a precocious child who seems to assimilate almost everything around him and so he is able from an early age to assemble a mosaic of Israel’s complicated place in a complicated world. Like Stern, Oz too has played a part in the public life of his time but unlike Stern, Oz doesn’t make much of it explicitly in the book. He’s a writer, not an historian. Perhaps by definition, then, his account is more inward and elegiac. Yet of all these, next only to Levi he does the best job of conveying what it is to be a person in these trying times.

Afterthought I: If you like the literature of survivorship, then for a total change of pace, read the biography of Judah P. Benjamin (link), the Confederate Secretary of War, who, after Apomattox, succeeded in reinventing himself as a lawyer and leading law scholar in London.

Afterthought II: Political violence? What was I thinking? I guess I was thinking of the Hitler wars in Europe. They missed that, alright, but Oz as a nine-year-old child underwent the Arab onslaught against Jerusalem after the partition in 1948. No day at the beach, let me tell you.

Against Universal Love: A Credo

Amos Oz on his grandfather; I have no quarrel with a single word of this.

He considered all human beings to be reckless children who brought great disappointment and suffering on themselves and each other, all of us trapped in an unending, unsubtle comedy that would generally end badly. All roads lead to suffering. Consequently virtually everyone, in Papa’s view, deserved compassion, and most of their deeds were worthy of forgiveness, including all sorts of machinations, pranks, deceptions, pretensions, manipulations, false claims, and pretenses. From all these he would absolve you with his faint, mischievous smile, as though saying (in Yiddish): Nu, what?

The only thing that tested Papa’s amused tolerance were acts of cruelty. These he abhorred. His merry blue eyes clouded over at the news of wicked deeds. “An evil beast? What does the expression mean?” he would reflect in Yiddish. “No beast is evil. No beast is capable of evil. The beasts have yet to invent evil. That is our monopoly, the lords of creation. So maybe we ate the wrong apple in the Garden of Eden after all? …

“But what is hell? What is paradise? Surely it is all inside. In our homes. You can find hell and paradise in every room. Behind every door. Under every double blanket. It’s like this. A little wickedness, and people are hell to each other. A little compassion, a little generosity, and people find paradise in each other.

“I said a little compassion and generosity, but I didn’t say love. I’m not such a believer in universal love. Love of everybody for everybody—we should maybe leave that to Jesus.” …

—Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness 149-50 (2004)

Oz on America

More Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness. We’re reading it aloud, and it is almost impossible to speak it in anything other than a faux Catskills accent:

In America… people dig for gold, hold up mail trains, stampede herds of cattle across endless plains, and whoever kills the most Indians ends up getting the girl. That was the America we saw at the Edison Cinema: the pretty girl was the prize for the best shooter. What one did with such a prize I had not the faintest idea. If they had shown us in those films an America where the man who shot the most girls was rewarded with a good-looking Indian, I would simply have believed that that was the way it was.

--Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness 17 (2004)

Lift 'em Up, Put 'em Down

Mrs. Buce has been telling me I must read Amos Oz’ A Tale of Love and Darkness. God bless ‘er, she’s right again:

In Jerusalem people always walked rather like mourners at a funeral, or latecomers at a concert. First they put down the tip of their shoe and tested the ground. Then, once they had lowered their foot, they were in no hurry rto move it: we had waited two thousand years to gain a foothold in Jerusalem and were unwilling to give it up. If we picked up our foot, someone else might come along and snatch our little strip of land. On the other hand, once you lifted your foot, do not be in a hurry to put it down again: who can tell what coil of vipers you might step on.

--Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness 7 (2004)

Amos Oz, Spy

Caution: This post is about Amos Oz' To Know a Woman (link). It's not really a spoiler but if you are planning to read the book, you might not want to read this just yet.

Anyway--The Mr. and Mrs. Buce Readaloud Club has completed its perusal of TKAW. I still can't quite make up my mind about it, but in this case, that's a compliment: I suspect it is intentional that the book leaves loose ends, questions unanswered, issues unresolved--some things we'll never know. So, high marks, and I may have stuff to say about it in, oh maybe a couple of months.

But one thought. The protagonist is/was a spy. It's not a spy novel in the Eric Ambler sense of the term, but spying and the spy' s mind do factor in. The protagonist watches and listens. He takes in his surroundings as if--because--his life depends on it. And he never lies.

I have no reason to suppose that Oz was ever a spy. Or at any rate, not in the nationalist/professional sense. But for a writer, perhaps spying is a way of life. He watches and listens, he takes stuff in. And he never lies. Or at any rate, he tries not to lie, and in this case, I'd say that Amos Oz, writer and spy, has pretty well brought it off.

Next up: Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity.

Update: Okay, so I never said it was original (link):

Mr. Oz warns sternly against reading the novel as "political allegory" or "confessional," but agrees that Ravid [the protagonist of TKAW] could stand in for him. "A secret agent is a perfect metaphor for a storyteller," he said. "What he does for a living is what I do for a living: put himself under people's skins, try to be empathic, to see four or five contradictory points of view, to have more than one identity."

New York Times, February 24, 1991

Oz on the Spy's Life

The Mr.and Mrs.Buce Readaloud Circle is immured in Amos Oz' To Know a Woman. It is more or less of an impulse choice. I had never read Oz. Mrs. Buce had read Tale of Love and Silence and loved it. This one was handy, so we gave it a whirl.

We're not deep enough in yet for me to have got the story arc, but I must say (a) it feels like Israel, even though he offers very little by way of physical description; and (b) he's precise and economical in particulars, and he never seems to set a foot wrong. Here, for example, an Oz character recalls a spy's life even duller than George Smiley's:

According to a calculation he had once made in his head, he had spent approximately ninety-five per cent of all the hours of his professional life, the hours that made up twenty-three years in all, in airports, on board aircraft, in trains and stations, in taxis, in waiting rooms, in hotel rooms, in hotel lobbies, in casinos, on street corners, in restaurants, in darkened cinemas, in cafes, in gambling clubs, in public libraries, in post offices. … He almost always wore a conventional gray suit. He had got into the habit of traveling the world with a single suitcase and a bag that never contained so much as a tube of toothpaste, a shoelace, or a scrap of paper made in Israel. He had got into the habit of killing whole days alone with his own thoughts.

-Amos Oz, To Know a Woman 39-40
(Nicholas de Lange trans. 1991)

Hm, I wonder where I have spent 95 percent of my professional life. No, skip it, I’d rather not calculate.