During my senior year in college, I enrolled in a class that would become one of the most important of my undergraduate education, a survey of 20th century ‘war literature.’ The professor was one I had taken before, a gaunt, stooped, diminutive woman of Austrian descent, well advanced in years. She had served as my introduction to literary Modernism the previous year (she pronounced Eliot’s famous poem The Vase Land). Her thick German accent—not to mention her Yoda-like stature—seemed to lend to her words an automatic legitimacy, particularly when she turned to war literature. Of course, many of the students had zero affection for her; she was irascible and had zero affection for the spoiled, lazy kids who filled her classroom, but I thought very highly of her. We had our scrapes initially, but then settled into a kind of playful combat founded on mutual respect, I the intractable realist and she the idealist forever reminding me that my realism was not quite real.
As I recall her telling it, she was a young woman during World War II and served in a hospital as a nurse late in the war. One evening, during the frequent Allied bombing runs, a shell had sliced through the hospital; she claimed to be stunned, shocked into motionlessness, as she stared out into the charred and smoking courtyard. The sixth-floor hallway down which she was walking had been transformed into a ledge as the building partially buckled, sending one half of the hospital crumbling below.
Oddly, it didn’t occur to me immediately that it was our shell that did the damage, the abstractions of an historical us and them overcome by sympathy for the flesh and blood standing in front me. Of course, I had a distant cousin who had served as bombardier in Europe; hell, it could have been his crew that dropped the bomb destroying her hospital, for all I knew. It was a few days after her storytelling, as I remember, that I tried to unpack the grisly hospital scene, our young literature-professor-to-be bombed into a stupor, blood, guts, smoke, screaming. Surely the bomb was a mistake, I would say to myself. We wouldn’t bomb hospitals! Precisely then it was that I first appreciated the hell of war, not necessarily the maiming and death—which are bad enough—but war’s true hell: the capacity to render everything into shades of gray, to smirch us all with a stain that cannot be erased. The fighting may stop, but a war never really does. Even 50 years after the hospital collapsed around my professor, I suspect it collapsed again and again, every day, and in falling brought that hard knowledge of who we really are. Maybe that’s why she decided to teach a class on war literature.
Our reading list that spring was pretty standard stuff, as I recall: Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls; Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead; Heller’s Catch-22; Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five; Hersey’s Hiroshima; Caputo’s A Rumor of War…and then there was one author of whom I’d never heard, Jerzy Kosiński. After reading his The Painted Bird that spring, I wished I’d never had. To me, at the time, Kosiński’s book was talismanic, a raw book depicting an absolute orgy of violence, not the action-movie variety, but a highly particularized violence that did something so few things tended to do—it shocked my consciousness. It gave me nightmares; it even rendered the concept of Grace suspect…we are all so very filthy, I thought.
For me, part of the power of The Painted Bird was in the book’s packaging, its cryptically worded placement within the genre of autobiography, or in its case, ‘semi-autobiography’. The self-regarding student of literature isn’t supposed to be moved by such gimmicks; ‘based on a true story’ is only supposed to reel in housewives and office girls, but I must admit, the pretense of reality was the hook on which The Painted Bird caught me, terrified me. It was the pillar on which the book’s moral authority rested.
Imagine my relief when, several years later, I learned that the book was not really based at all on actual events. Not that those events couldn’t have happened, but discovering that the story was pure fiction ultimately diminished the ethos of the author. Suddenly, the book’s strategy, its almost pornographic treatment of bedlam and depravity, was less a product of artistic obligation and more the result of a psychosis, one I was willing to grant in the realm of autobiography, but not fiction. Why? That’s a divagation for another day, I suppose, but suffice it to say that The Painted Bird is not a book I’ll revisit anytime soon.
My relief then turned to anger, anger at Kosiński himself for fracking about with an already unreliable genre, and then, ultimately, at my erstwhile professor, who never hinted to us that the book was not what it claimed to be…and anger, too, with myself, for being so thoroughly duped. Reckoning with one’s deception often reveals one to be an all-too-willing accomplice; I had wanted to believe Kosiński; I had wanted to believe that all Europe—all mankind—had gone over to the wolves, that Church, State, Family—all of it—was a sham. And that is why the book is so pernicious: it abets one, under false pretenses, in the dismantlement of a social order that, quite frankly, isn’t as bad as all that.
Besides, Kosiński’s little book took in a lot of folks. Here’s how Elie Weisel summarized it in a review for The New York Times in 1965:
The task of the chronicler seems somewhat easier. He writes not to reach conclusions and be rewarded for them; all he asks is to be heard, to be believed. For he knows what to say and what to omit, when to commit blasphemy with word or prayer, and also when to remain silent. His purpose then is not to bring forth new grandiloquent ideas or to exercise death or guilt, but simply to bear witness in behalf of himself and of those whose voices can no longer be heard.
It is as a chronicle that ‘The Painted Bird’…achieves its unusual power. It is the story of a little boy and his experiences in exile. Whether he wants it or not and despite his willingness to forgive, he serves as witness for the prosecution. One of the best. Written with a deep sincerity and sensitivity, this poignant first-person account transcends confession and attains in parts the haunting quality and the tone of a quasi-surrealistic tale. One cannot read it without fear, shame, and sadness.
Of course, all of that was fine and good, except The Painted Bird is neither a confession nor a chronicle. It is no more real than Alice in Wonderland. The book still has power, still has things to teach us, but its ultimate fictiveness makes one wonder what Weisel’s take on it is today. Perhaps he’s bitter, perhaps not. Perhaps the book’s fictions capture a truth he wants to believe, needs to believe, that ‘man is wolf to man,’ as the poet David Slavitt once wrote. For me, the furniture of history is dark enough without Kosiński applying a few fanciful layers of stain.
I was led to think upon my old professor and Jerzy Kosiński when Günter Grass revealed this weekend his service during 1944-45 in the Nazi Waffen SS. I must admit to having little affection for Hr Grass, a feeling based on his politics rather than his novels, which I’ve never read. Like Robert Musil, he’s one of those authors I hope to read one day, but haven’t as yet (so many books, so little time). But to discover that a man who (too often for my tastes) plays the role of self-righteous political windbag has hidden this awful secret for 60 years is enough to produce a certain Schadenfreude, but it is, in the end, sad. After all, no one is without secrets or shame. And isn’t that the lesson of war, the stain that won’t fade?
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