How he passed the war years is still an open question. He hints that he was in wartime Germany with dodgy papers that kept him out of the conflict. Stella makes an insane attempt to see him in Berlin and gets caught in the bone-crushing machinery of the Nazis. He is unable to save her and will feel guilty forever after. In the war’s final days, he witnesses the destruction of German cities and the “death of Europe.” The war ends in 1945 and in the world of rubble and the “unfortunate reconstruction” that follows, he is in Hamburg, where his story really begins.

He never tires of telling it from all possible angles. Stella’s husband John, who always played a not completely transparent role in the thicket of British foreign policy, has the grotesque idea of calling on him to testify about Stella’s death at the Nuremburg Trials. While there, Aristides meets his future wife Christa in the cafeteria of the courthouse in Fürth. His son is born and Aristides, who is not trained in any profession and is in many respects as unworldly “as Kaspar Hauser,” “sleepwalks” into a chance to earn his living: thanks to a concatenation of circumstances, he finds work as a screenwriter for the reviving postwar German film industry. Just as in his marriage and most other personal relationships, however, the passionate need to write his book gets in the way.

That book can contain nothing but his personal story. What that means to him is not just a record of ongoing events and experiences, but also “the exasperating telescoping of present and past, the enduring presence of all one’s experience,” in a word, “the torment of not being able to exist without history.” The result is his compulsion to recount his entire life with each new experience—and thus the obsessive idea that his life is designed to be narrated, could have no other purpose than “to be a book.” “From the days of my childhood,” he writes, “with awakening consciousness and then forever after through all the years of my life, I was engaged in producing this book by living its story.”

Note:

Got into an endless debate over that sentence with Scherping yesterday. He thinks it’s so obviously true for an autobiography that saying it sounds like a “gimmicky commonplace.” Since I didn’t want to get into another argument, I just laid a typescript on his desk (following Schelmie’s good advice). Scherping can pass it on to his gofers.

In the first place, it’s not the author’s autobiography, it’s the biography of his book. Of course it’s Aristides’s story, but “story” and “history” are terms that recur in many guises and in the fullness of their semantic possibilities in A’s writing. He understands history as both a cultural fact and a chronicle, a written record or oral tradition of events that concern human beings, whether those events be collective or individual—thus as both res gestae and simple stories or anecdotes, but in addition—and this definition underlies (so to speak) all the others—truly transcendentally as “actual existence” (“I have no other reality than my history”). Not by way of deduction from ontological contemplation, but through examination of the essence of his work—writing and especially the writing of novels—he reaches the same conclusion as for example (to choose a contemporary meta-physician) Ortega y Gasset: “Man is the novelist of himself, whether it’s original or plagiarized.” And according to the rule that “for the writer, any basic insight into human existence immediately becomes part of his literary program,” he draws a practical literary conclusion.