Anton saw and heard everything, but somehow he was no longer quite there. One part of him was already somewhere else, or nowhere at all. He was undernourished, and now stiff with cold, but that wasn’t all. This moment—his father cut out in black against the snow, his mother outside on the terrace under the starlight—became eternal, detached itself from all that had come before and all that would follow. It became part of him and began its journey through the rest of his life.
A quality seems evoked, of disconnection and eternity, that is present in all experience but noticeable only in crisis. As the night tumbles on, and the Germans arrive to exact their cruel and random vengeance, and the child is thrust here and there in the dishevelled machine of wartime administration, a remarkably rounded impression of occupied Holland accumulates. The German rule is harsh, but the soldiers are only human, and themselves rather desperate, as defeat closes in; the Ortskommandant of Haarlem, turning fatherly, confides to Anton, “The world is a Jammertal, a valley of tears. Everywhere it is the same. My house in Linz was bombed also. Everything kaput. Kinder dead.” For an hour, Anton is placed in an utterly dark cell with a wounded female prisoner who strokes his face, leaving traces of blood from a wound she has suffered. Next morning, a kindly sergeant called Schulz feeds the boy and dresses him in cut-down Army clothes and is fatally strafed while escorting him to Amsterdam. On this trip the texture of war dawns upon the child, torn from the stringent haven of his freezing, darkened house:
On the left the overhead wiring of the electric train and the trolley hung to the ground in graceful curves. Here and there the rails stood upright like the horns of a snail. Sometimes even the poles were lying down. On all sides, the hard frozen ground. They drove slowly. It was impossible to hold a conversation because of the racket inside the cabin. Everything was made of dirty, rattling steel, which somehow told him more about the War than he had ever understood before. Fire and this steel—that was the War.
Of course, we have been through this war many times, in newspapers and newsreels and novels and movies whose clichés have preëmpted the fading reality. The author is put to the trouble of proclaiming cliché the truth: “The German was about forty years old and actually had that lean, hardened face with the horizontal scar beneath the left cheekbone—a type no longer used except by directors of comedies or grade B movies. Today only babyish Himmler faces are still artistically acceptable; but then it was not an artistic matter, then he really did look like a fanatical Nazi, and it wasn’t funny.” From Hogan’s Heroes to Gravity’s Rainbow, art has transformed World War II into something we too readily understand. As the Napoleonic convulsions gave the nineteenth century its epic, World War II, in its European theatre, has supplied our central saga, our one eruption and defeat of unambiguous evil, and its vast emergency measures the extremes of human possibility for us. Its black-and-white imagery—blackout, bursts of light, rubble and gritty faces, curved helmets and sweeping searchlights—and its costumes and accents haunt films down to Star Wars and its spin-offs; even the galaxies must be cleansed of the swastika, over and over.
Also, we have seen, in postwar movies beyond counting (Italian, German, Russian, Polish), the claustrophobic intensity and insane destructiveness of this conflict yield to the weirdly tranquillized terrain of peace, which the contrast somehow reveals to be another kind of absurdity—self-seeking, petty, quickly jaded, and self-despising. War’s chasms of heroism and pain make other human behavior seem shallow, even phantasmal. “All the rest,” the author of The Assault tells us, “is a postscript—the cloud of ash that rises from the volcano, circles around the earth, and continues to rain down on all its continents for years.” Anton moves through the anti-nuclear march “as if each step raised clouds of ashes.” He looks upon children raised in freedom and plenty, upon young men and women never asked to kill and be killed in the service of Dutch resistance, with something like incredulousness. He cannot take the politics of postwar Europe and its protests seriously: “Everyone knew that atom bombs were produced as deterrents not to be used, but to safeguard the peace. If such paradoxical weapons were abandoned, then the chances of conventional warfare would increase and eventually lead to the use of atom bombs anyway.” His personal focus is upon anesthesia and order; he is a crossword-puzzle addict, and lets others accidentally fill in for him the puzzle of the four houses on the quay, where one neighbor’s reclusiveness and another’s pet reptiles turn out to be crucial clues to the shape imposed, in one white-hot night of forging, upon his own life. With the cool passion of a scientist, Mr. Mulisch scrapes rust from the Forties’ steel hell and gives violence its anatomy. May more of his work come into English.
On the other side of Europe, Turkish is spoken by forty-five million people; Yashar Kemal, another jacket flap assures us, “is internationally acclaimed as Turkey’s leading contemporary writer.” Opposite the title-page of The Sea-Crossed Fisherman, ten other titles in English are listed, of which Memed, My Hawk may strike a memory chord for bookish Americans. Mr. Kemal’s present offering comes garlanded with picturesque praise: A. B. Mojtabai calls him “a storyteller in the old style, and a very grand and spacious style that is”; the London Times circumspectly asserts that “the richness of writing and breadth of canvas have caused Kemal to be compared with Hardy and Tolstoy”; and John Berger claims, “He writes fearlessly, like a hero.” Like a hero, however, who, in the manner of an old-fashioned British explorer, has only the foggiest idea of where he’s going and takes few provisions save his bravery. One wants to like The Star-Crossed Fisherman, for its exotic milieu and for its flavor of headlong, open-air narrative. It begins with a gust of wind: “The roughhewn door was kicked wide open, letting in a dusty blast from the mad south wind that was churning up the sea that day, and Zeynel appeared on the threshold, a gun in his hand. He hesitated, but only for a moment. Then, with slow deliberate aim, he pointed the gun at Ihsan and fired shot after shot. The men in the coffee-house froze in their seats.”
A tall fisherman called Selim stands up, takes the gun from Zeynel, and repeatedly slaps him. We are off to the roaring start of nearly three hundred pages tracing the intertwined destinies of Zeynel, who is to become a criminal legendary throughout Istanbul, and Selim, who is “sea-crossed” by his love for, first, a blond nurse from his youth and, second, a friendly dolphin from his mature days fishing in the Sea of Marmara. The author seems to have a good idea for the framing and elevation of his material: the myth-making capacity of gossip—teahouse gossip as refracted upwards into newspaper accounts, which magnify the frightened and harried Zeynel into a national menace, a tabloid bogeyman. The Greek chorus seems reborn in the novel’s pages of communal rumor, as it spirals and spins its own reality. And some of the novel’s descriptive excursions, whether of the shifting colors seen from a boat at sea or of the congested modern Golden Horn, are worthy of a canvas by Delacroix or a diatribe by Céline, complete with Céline’s mannerism of triple periods:
The Golden Horn, a noisome, nauseating dark well, yellow, red, mauve, the many crude colours of the neon signs stirred by its swell … The Golden Horn, that deep well surrounded by huge ugly buildings and sooty factories, spewing rust from their chimneys and roofs and walls, staining the water with sulphur-yellow rust, a filthy sewer filled with empty cans and rubbish and horse carcasses, dead dogs and gulls and wild boars and thousands of cats, stinking … A viscid, turbid mass, opaque, teeming with maggots … A strange musty creature, the Golden Horn, a relic from another age, battered, agonizing, rotting away, yet still restless … Lengthening, undulating, weaving into each other, the neon lights danced over this dark fathomless well.
The trouble is, the well remains fathomless; the events pile up but don’t add up. Zeynel’s adventures, as he becomes involved with a street urchin called Dursun Kemal, and Selim’s, as he nurses the mad idea of assassinating a magnate and land-developer called Halim Bey Vezirǒglu, diverge rather than converge, and the narrative becomes delirious and disconnected, like yar
ds of randomly shot film hastily spliced together in a cutting room, or like one of those spoofs cooked up by a cocktail-sipping committee of Long Island writers, each one contributing a separate chapter. Where Mr. Mulisch’s story keeps cinching tighter around its opening incident of violence, rendering it ever more intelligible, Mr. Kemal’s expands so that things make less and less sense. Is Zeynel a vicious, addled tough or a poor lad we are supposed to pity? His erratic actions permit no empathy. By the time, more than halfway through the novel, the reason emerges for his shooting of Ihsan—Ihsan, a gangster, murdered the owner of a golden eagle who had supernatural significance for the boy—we are numbed by the intervening plethora of slaughter and impulsive behavior. Fisher Selim’s relations with the evil Vezirǒglu are inscrutable: Vezirǒglu has some land Selim wants and has planted olive trees upon; Selim goes intending to gun him down, and Vezirǒglu abruptly gives him the land; Selim no longer cares about the land but wants some other land; he buys this land with some ill-gotten gains and builds a lavish house, which he then totally neglects, still wanting, out of some belatedly acquired revolutionary instincts, to kill Vezirǒglu, who by now has become indistinguishable from Aristotle Onassis (“They are both of Anatolian stock, these two, Halim Bey Vezirǒglu and Onassis. Both playing mischief with the world”).
Guns flicker in and out of this verbal turmoil like mystical signs, and murder seems to be the only outcome that the characters and the author can think of. Violence in The Star-Crossed Fisherman is recurrent, rhythmic, and unreal; all intentions and consequences are alike mired in a bloody glue, a paralysis of coagulated rage. By the time Zeynel and Selim have their final encounter, whatever personalities and psychologies were originally constructed for them have been quite dissolved in the pervasive paranoia. Any sense of distinct human psyches moving in a tightening pattern is overwhelmed by the narrator’s indiscriminate appetite for the marvellous and for rhetoric of a wild-eyed kind. “Stop, Fisher Selim, stop! The crowd is closing in, trampling over the black-clad men, pressing them like grapes. Furiously, the people crush and pound. And suddenly they draw back and there is not a trace of the black-clad men. Only a few scattered, broken machine-guns …” What has happened, in a circumstantial way? Nothing. The prose has entertained a vision. The prose remembers its novelistic duty to show, to make us see and feel the texture of things, only now and then, as when Zeynel, eluding a police hunt dreamlike in its inefficiency, patronizes a çöp kebap—vendor. And what is a çöp kebap? The prose tells us, and something of present-day, real-life Istanbul springs into being:
“Right away,” the vendor said, pleased. He was a very old man with a short white beard, a long sallow face, shrivelled pouches under his eyes and a knife scar on his forehead. His wide shoulders were hunched, giving him a lopsided gait. Sprinkling the tiny little cubes of skewered lamb with salt and pepper, he laid them over the embers which he fanned with a piece of cardboard adorned with the picture of a naked woman. In a moment the odour of burning fat spread through the square and thick fumes smoked greenly in the neon lighting. Dextrously the man slipped the meat cubes off the sixteen skewers into a bread loaf and added half a tomato and a sprig of parsley. “Here you are, sir,” he said.
And that is how we make a çöp kebap.
Levels and Levels
LAST CALL, by Harry Mulisch, translated from the Dutch by Adrienne Dixon. 288 pp. Viking, 1989.
The Dutch writer Harry Mulisch is best known in the United States as the author of a small, perfect novel, The Assault, about a brutal incident in World War II and its continuing reverberations. A surprisingly excellent movie was made from the book and won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1987. The book was a detective story, a case history of repression, and a study in the workings of time, as the postwar decades gradually transform the physical settings and remove the living witnesses of the war. This last aspect, conveyed by visual images of a changing, modern Holland, came through even more powerfully in the movie than in the book, stunning the viewer with a sudden sensation of the abyss of the past, itself unchanging yet productive of ever fresh installments of emotion.
Mulisch’s new novel, Last Call, in its best and clearest moments evokes this same awesome dimension of reality, as experienced by the seventy-eight-year-old hero, Willem “Uli” Bouwmeester, a long-retired cabaret performer—the ignominious last of a distinguished Dutch theatrical family—who is unexpectedly cast as the star of a contemporary play, Hurricane, to be performed by a modernist playwrights’ collective that occupies the Kosmos Theatre in Amsterdam. The drama, which concerns a turn-of-the-century performance of Shakespeare’s Tempest, has levels and levels, and so does the novel; still, like The Assault, it is rooted in a wartime incident—in this case, Uli’s discreditable but not extraordinary collaboration with the Germans. The facts are set forth early, as if casually but with Mulisch’s typical circumstantial precision:
Like virtually everyone else in cabaret (and not only in cabaret) he registered with the Chamber of Culture and continued cheering up audiences until 1943, even playing for Nazi organisations such as Winter Help and Front Fare—also after his Jewish colleagues had been deported and gassed—and finally even in Germany. In the following year all German theatres were closed (the end of the beginning of the end); he spent the last winter of the war in Amsterdam with his wife and dog, and in May 1945 he was arrested. His life had run aground for good. After a few weeks in the House of Detention he spent about six months as a kind of political detainee in a number of internment camps. He was never prosecuted, not having been important enough (perhaps the fact that he had a German mother counted as a mitigating circumstance)—but nevertheless, he was finished and that at the age of forty-one.
In the fall of 1982, then, while living out a moldering senescence with his sister, Berta, in a housing estate in a recently reclaimed polder, he is called back by Hurricane to the stage and to the excitements of life; his triumph is spoiled by a television interview in which the young interviewer, whom Uli in too expansive an interview mood calls a “Jewboy,” revives the buried wartime facts. A commotion ensues. A fellow actor attacks the interviewer: “You bastard, taking on a man of eighty! Who do you think you are, coming here to act the judge?” The answer is simple: “I’m not having myself called a Jewboy by someone who has entertained the SS.”
The jacket copy of Last Call tells us merely that Mulisch was born in 1927 and is “regarded as Holland’s foremost author,” whereas that of The Assault revealed Mulisch to have been “born in 1927 to a Jewish mother whose family died in the concentration camps, and a father who was jailed for collaborating with the Nazis.” A heritage of intensely conflicted feelings forms part of his artistic capital. The Assault extends sympathy not only to the son of parents killed by the German occupiers of Holland but to the son of the collaborationist policeman slain by the resistance. The page-by-page fascination and eventually excessive muddle of Last Call stem from the author’s rich sense of moral ambiguity, his search for categories less simple than those of good and evil. We become thoroughly immersed in the consciousness of Uli Bouwmeester somewhat against our better judgment; there is much about him that is unpleasant, from his casual anti-Semitism to an impulsive ruthlessness, a “something malicious” that destroyed his modest postwar career as a director of working-class amateur theatricals. While a performance that he had purposely misdirected was collapsing onstage, a “suppressed fit of laughter finally burst out of Uli Bouwmeester, as an almost physical hurt, a thing that somehow no longer had anything to do with the show.” His behavior both past and present has a self-defeating streak, a scornful recklessness. He takes a young actress, Stella, to dinner at a restaurant without telling her he has insufficient money and, indeed, refuses her repeated offer to pay; faced at last with the bill, he leaves in hock to the restaurateur a precious silver-plated wristwatch that is the only memento he has of his father. He then arrogantly comes to redeem it after the appointed time and finds that the restaurant has moved. Later, in
a string of surreal nocturnal adventures, he loses an elegant art book he has just been given and, more crucially, loses a good night’s sleep on the eve of his play’s dress rehearsal. Meanwhile, the author mislays the issue of Uli’s wartime collaboration: the television interview’s threat to the success of the production and to continued state sponsorship of the theatre dissolves in life’s own theatre of the absurd, as the geriatric actor is slowly exhausted and emptied by a welter of bizarre events and vivid memories. The graspable, suspenseful question of war guilt and its consequences gives way to an ambitious, all-but-chaotic attempt to find, in a barrage of images from every point of Uli’s life and consciousness, an objective correlative for the experience of dying.
The attempt is magisterial, and equips itself from the full armory of modernism. As in Ulysses, many threads and characters are cunningly interwoven, and a perfect memory is demanded of the reader: a dog’s death at the end is explained by a kick casually given on page 27. The novel is arranged in five so-called acts, some scenes are described like stage scenes, and the reader is not infrequently addressed directly: “Honoured spectators! Let us enter. The die is cast.” Artifice is open and as complexly folded as a piece of origami; the skeptical and playful moods of Pirandello, Nabokov, and Calvino take on a certain Dutch solidity. The play within the novel, with its play within the play, has been thoroughly thought out, and its verse speeches are amply quoted, along with Shakespeare’s. The double role Uli plays—Shakespeare’s Prospero being acted by the turn-of-the-century thespian Pierre de Vries—possesses and annihilates him, and Pierre de Vries becomes the hero of a chapter of Last Call, the play within the novel popping up to the level of the novelistic reality. In what we take to be Uli’s dying delirium, a lengthy allusion to Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym plunges Uli and an imaginary child called Pim together into the cosmic whirlpool. All this, and lots of information about Nō drama and downtown Amsterdam, too. It is too much, and there is even more, I don’t doubt, than met my eye. The basic emotional action—an old, failed man is called back into life and crushed by the stimuli—seems itself crushed under the sheer multiplicity of arresting, studied effects. There are too many hallucinatory scenes, too many artistic characters, too many pointed hints that “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” as Prospero too famously says. The Tempest is an adventurous text for a European writer to elaborate upon, but in English its best-known speeches border on the hackneyed. It, and the world of theatrical illusion, and Amsterdam’s civic carnival of freedom all seem too lush, too quick to yield symbolic fruit. The sum of Last Call seems less than its parts.