An Occupied Gentleman

February 1993 Joan Juliet Buck

Louis Begley's life as a distinguished New York lawyer is, in a way, his third, and
his semi-autobiographical accounts of the other two have made him one of today's
truly compelling Holocaust writers

Two years ago, Alfred A. Knopf published Wartime Lies, the first-person story of a
young Jewish boy who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland with his aunt, thanks
to false Aryan papers. Cynthia Ozick called the novel "a virtuoso (and virtuous)
accomplishment." The Miami Herald reviewer said, "In the ever-burgeoning field of
Holocaust literature, this novel stands out as a masterfully told tale, exceptional
in its detailing of everyday life as led by the hunted." The book was nominated for
the National Book Award, won PEN'S Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award and the Irish
Times-Aer Lingus prize, and two months ago received the French Prix Medicis,
beating out Martin Amis's London Fields. It established its author as a cool,
effective storyteller who could convey the unimaginable without sentimentality.
"WartimeLies," said The Boston Globe, "has a sense of being written from the
darkest and most private chambers of a man's heart." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
pointed out that, at the end, "the child grows into manhood deformed by years on
the run, knowing full well that he escaped the horror, but he can't free himself
from its memory." Which is, of course, the question that remains at the end of
Wartime Lies: Whom did this child, called Maciek in the book, turn into, and how
did he live through his subsequent years? What became of him, and how gravely did
the memory of that wartime injure the rest of his life? This month Knopf brings out
the author's second novel, The Man Who Was Late, and it lives up to expectation,
for it details exactly how someone re-creates himself to go on living, and what the
price is for that re-creation.

Louis Begley, a soft-spoken man who lives on Park Avenue in New York and dresses in
invisible gray suits, is senior partner for international law at the firm of
Debevoise & Plimpton, which he joined in 1959. An expert in structuring far-flung
joint ventures, he prefers to keep away from the sites of the industrial
enterprises he makes possible. He says he has never laid eyes on a blast furnace,
or the Algerian natural-gas works that kept him busy in the 70s, or the iron mine
in Australia that required its own railroad and port. At present he is working on,
and keeping away from, the rich deposits of oil and gas off the island of Sakhalin,
where the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines' Flight 007 in September 1983. He and
his second wife, Anka Muhlstein, have between them five children, all grown; his
are a painter, a journalist, and an art historian; hers are a financier and a
broadcasting executive. Anka writes historical books in French; her biography of
her great-great-grandfather James de Rothschild was translated into English. They
have two houses in the Hamptons, an agreeable Siamese cat, and a social bearing
that makes people who do not know them see them as regal. He is a fulfilled and
contented man, and a lucky one. The only time he was ever beaten as a child was
when his parents placed him in a particularly rough high school on New York's Upper
West Side. Until then, his experience of personal aggression had been confined to
the hours he spent trapped in an alleyway by a sniper's bullets during the Warsaw
Uprising in 1944. That was in another life.

"It seems to me that all men are bom actors," Louis Begley wrote at 15. "They find
it easier to repeat thoughts not their own, than to be themselves even for a short
time. Of course, it is easier and more pleasant to be someone else."

By that time he was already into his third life. The first, "a very short life," as
the privileged, spoiled only child of a wealthy Jewish couple in the Polish town of
Stryj, came to an end when he was nine and went into hiding in boardinghouses
across Poland with his mother. His father's parents were shot by the Germans. His
father, a physician in the Polish army, had been sent east and was marooned in
Samarkand by the Soviets for the duration of the war. He found his wife and son
when he returned to Poland, and in 1947, Dawid, Franciszka, and little Ludwik
Begleiter arrived in New York, where they became Edward, Frances, and Louis Begley.
The family's first address was the vast Empire Hotel at the junction of Broadway
and Columbus Avenue. The other boys in the rough West Side high school objected to
Louis's accent, and were moved to violence by the plus fours he wore, considered
chic in Poland but way out-of-date in New York.

The family moved to Brooklyn, where the child improved his English at an
astonishing rate and distinguished himself at Erasmus Hall High School. He was
immediately one of the best pupils in the English class taught by a Miss Batchelor.
But: "My first sense was utter despair. I did not understand how I could live in
this world. Everybody seemed to be moving so much faster than I was, they knew
about things I didn't know, they were playing sports I didn't know how to play. I
was consumed by sexual longings and stifled by my parents and their constant
obsessive need for my presence, for my affection. My father got his medical license
very quickly, and it all started up again—but I could see them as lost in this
meaningless borough and lost in this meaningless world. They would drive into New
York to go to theater and concerts, and I would go with them; it was all so
forlorn, and it felt so hopeless. The meaninglessness of the activity and its
isolation from what they might have had as a life had their lives progressed
warless. This sense of being lost in a sea of strangeness and difference, the
absence of real affective links to anybody except me."

He never spoke about his wartime experiences. "I began by writing little stories
about my experiences in Poland"— some were published in the school magazine—"but I
got very sick of it. It was a dead world, I thought, a dead experience, and I
wasn't interested in that.

. . .1 saw there were people here who were making a profession out of those years.
I saw people continuing their refugee, displaced-person existences; that was their
occupation. I wanted to go forward." He applied to Harvard, Princeton, and
Columbia. The interview at Princeton, with a dean who was deaf, was a disaster; the
soft Begley voice was below the man's register. Columbia was local and therefore
not desirable. Harvard came through with a scholarship.

i was consumed by sexual longings and stifled by my parents and their constant
obsessive need for my presence, for my affection "

Begley arrived at Harvard in "a Rogers Peet costume" and bonded with his roommate,
who, like him, was younger than the rest of the class. He published three or four
short stories in The Harvard Advocate, and in his sophomore year took his last
creative-writing course. "I read a story in class, and quit. I came to the
conclusion that I had nothing to say. I felt I didn't know anything beyond my
Polish experience well enough to write about it. I didn't know what a family was in
this country, or about how they lived, or anything about the New World. ... I felt
I needed to have an experience that was like everybody else's; I felt there was
nothing that came before that was useful, usable. ... I stopped writing and soon
constructed a life for myself in which there was no time for anything except life.
I thought if I could just soak up enough experiences, if I could spend enough long
nights doing this or that, enough time with the people I most wanted to resemble,
somehow whatever was in me that was immutably wrong, wrong and disgraceful, would
be changed into this happier, more sunlit, more acceptable material."

Begley's self-consciousness about fitting in forms the subtext of The Man Who Was
Late. Ben, the main character, is known only by scattered notes and letters, and is
seen principally through the eyes of a writer friend named Jack. Another, vaporous
narrative voice says of Ben, "His accent had an overlay of strangeness of which he
was always aware; it would glide out of control until, dry mouthed, he listened to
his own words with panic, waiting for their end." A little later: "After all, was
he not, although perhaps the youngest and least well prepared, at the head of his
college class, and had not he won his place effortlessly, without care or plan,
while the struggles of those happier classmates, rich with memories of golden
summers, purchased mediocrity?. . .The storehouse of all the shame and
vulnerability in his life would be locked; a private museum of curios with but one
visitor, himself, to stare at the degraded and rejected lares and penates. Only new
acquisitions and artful forgeries would be on show. Clothes make a man and, with
even greater power, so do lessons learned in the right sort of childhood. Within
the limits of verisimilitude, he would have both; to his own skill he foresaw no
limit."

Begley's focus as a writer has moved from a time and a place that have become a
standard model for tragedy to the subtler tragedies of an outsider with a past,
trying, and failing, to fit in. Ben, an international banker, whose story takes
place in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Rio, is a dandy. He has a fractious tailor and
a constant awareness of what he is wearing. Two cashmere sweaters have a particular
significance in the narrative. Clothes are costume.

Louis Begley is so exceptionally softspoken that you have to strain to hear his
words, which come out in perfectly composed sentences. The occasional French word
surfaces; it is not his first or even his second language, but he speaks it at home
with Anka, and much of his mode of thought and expression seems informed by French
precision. Only when speaking about his children does he ramble a touch, discipline
derailed by affection. Neat, compact, thin, he describes himself as a faux maigre,
and insists he was a plump child. He is courtly and deferential in the way that
only exiles from a better world bother to be; his pace is measured, calm. The
single conflict he exhibits is in the contrast between his gray business suits and
the alarmed ice blue of his eyes, in which the pupils are very small. There are
many survivors of the Holocaust leading ordinary and successful lives in America,
but for most the prime identification is with their Jewishness. Louis Begley says,
"It would have been more difficult for me to become an American Jew than to say to
hell with it, which is what I did. I wasn't terrifically connected to the Jewish
aspect. The moving force, for me, was that I could substitute something for the
black hole of the past.''

He tried hard to catch up, and succeeded on every level, at the cost, he now says,
of "selling my birthright.'' With cool candor, he elaborates: "It's really very
hard on a person that age—a child—to be told that actually you are someone who
should be exterminated. If you take things seriously, it's not light to be told you
should be done away with. That anybody who turns you in is doing a good thing. That
you should disappear for reasons that go from 1 to 100. It's an appalling judgment
on you, one that has been carried out all around you. Of what value, in
contradistinction, were these little memories of Stryj [which is called T. in
Wartime Lies], and what did those memories mean when that world had disappeared?

"There is an immense difference in Louis since Anka," says the novelist Francois
Nourissier. "I think she gave him back his Jewishness."

"What, culturally, was I? Was I a Jew? Yes, I was a Jew. Why was I a Jew? Because I
happened to be bom a Jew, and therefore I was proscribed. I was a Jew because I
could be identified as such in a physical examination. Did being a Jew bring me
something that was comforting or strengthening? No. It meant nothing to me. First
danger, then a sense of being honor-bound to state it. In the most elemental
fashion, if someone asks, I say I'm a Jew. Now, that's not a very fantastic thing
to build a life upon, right?"
At Harvard, he says, he "discovered a world of subtle pleasures and subtle skills.
People who knew how to do all sorts of things, from really knowing history, really
knowing Latin, to really knowing music. They had memories that were a continuum,
parents who continued to see all sorts of old friends. They had childhoods rich
with continuing experiences. At Harvard, I had a happy life of uninterrupted
satisfaction at what was happening to me. I had a ball." He talked his way into a
class for graduate students on Proust, Joyce, and Mann. He drank too much, played
bridge, smoked cigars. He never spoke about his childhood, but derived a secret
satisfaction from having as a classmate one Stas Potocki, a member of one of
Poland's most aristocratic families. That would never have happened at home, even
if there had been no war. Although his father wanted him to be a doctor, the war
had left him with an "absolute loathing" for sick people. "I cannot stand feeling
pity, and around sick people I feel that pity very strongly; it's too much. I
cannot take people's sorrow lightly. It makes me very nervous." Medicine was
therefore out. In his senior year he directed three plays by Yeats, which he
describes as "really quite a splendid event."

Professor James Chace remembers the Harvard Louis Begley, who was a year behind
him, as "very quiet and watchful. He was deliberate in his speech, weighing things
carefully. Sixty percent of the students still came from private schools; there was
a dominant preppy ethos. There are two parts to Louis: the aesthete and the person
who wants to be accepted. He's very brilliant, but what is most remarkable is the
degree to which he succeeded in fitting in."

From The Man Who Was Late: "One surmised that he had quietly put himself through a
crash course in living the good life—good above all in its difference from the one
in which he had feared he might be confined." The dread with which Begley viewed
his parents' lives in Brooklyn has an echo in the book, where Ben's parents have
"thin days dragging on in that decaying place until some final bad end, ' ' but the
place is Jersey City instead of Brooklyn. While he was at Harvard, Begley
participated in a drug experiment at Massachusetts General to earn some cash.
During the experiment, he found himself unable to free-associate on the word
"trap." It's a little facile to think of the trap as the cage of diminished
circumstances; it might also be the trap of common mortality, from which glamour is
one of the escapes.

Begley was one of two summa cum laude English majors to graduate from Harvard in
1954. The other was John Updike. Begley was interested in literary theory, but did
not get the Rhodes scholarship he wanted. Instead he volunteered for the draft and
went ' 'to occupy Germany." He proceeded in the manner of a 19th-century cavalry
officer: he took riding lessons at an old-fashioned riding school and hired a tutor
to teach him German. He enjoyed "tearing through German towns at great speed in my
jeep with my helmet on, fantasizing about being a conqueror. But the main feeling
was a sense of great detachment."

The tutor taught him German by reading Goethe's Faust. "He was a man with a missing
arm who always told me he'd spent his time on the Eastern Front. I didn't tell him
I'd also spent my time on the Eastern Front."

He didn't tell him that he was Polish, either. "Just an American." Nor did he visit
Poland, despite the geographical proximity. In all his travels in subsequent years,
he has never returned to Poland. His time in the army was "an unreal life. We were
in a place called Goppingen; I became friends with a charming young woman who was
head librarian there. She was very musical, and we went to chamber-music concerts.
I learned to sail on Lake Constance, where I'd stay in a hotel converted from a
villa built for the mistress of a Swedish prince. Each room was named after a
composer; I stayed in 'Beethoven.' I skimmed along the surface of things; I did not
consider it a time for an excessive introspection. I'd had enough of being locked
up with myself over the war years. . . . All I wanted at the end of the war was to
sleep, to rest. The fatigue factor was incredibly important. That, and the fear.
Four years of playacting: I wanted to be left alone. And the desire I had was to
re-create myself."

While he was in Germany, he went to Paris to see a young American woman whom he had
known while he was at Harvard. Here his locutions grow even more formal: ''I
undertook to propose marriage to her. I was astonished—she accepted." Louis Begley
and Sally Higginson were married in February 1956, toward the end of his last year
in the army. ''This concentrated my mind on what to do next. I had no prospects.
She thought well of lawyers and did not think well of college professors, so
graduate school and then teaching comparative literature was not good. I applied to
Harvard Law School, where I was accepted.

''Harvard Law School was terrifying. I had loved Harvard College and liked my
classmates. At the law school they seemed to know everything about bonds and
stocks. I was unsettled there at first, and then discovered that it was interesting
to find out how people are bound by obligations: What creates those obligations?
What is their nature? What are their limits? What are the mechanical aspects of
society? How is it that one is allowed to do some things and not allowed to do
others?' '

He soon had two children; asked how he lived then, he says that he had a small
scholarship and the G.I. Bill, and that his first wife had "a fair amount of
money." He joined Debevoise & Plimpton after Harvard Law School, and was sent to
Paris to represent it there in 1965. He stayed three years. By then he was
separated from his wife, and was delighted to find that his office was at 5 Place
du Palais Bourbon—above the Vogue photographic studios. Like any other man, he was
in heaven hanging out at the corner cafe, Le Bourbon, scoping the models. Directly
after the war, when he was 13, his family had lived briefly in Paris. It was the
first place he had ever been allowed to be alone, and he had wandered around the
city, deliriously happy, peering through magnifying glasses in Pigalle booths at
pictures of naked ladies and also at flea circuses. ''My parents paid no attention
to me, and for the first time in my life I had no one to tell me what to do every
moment. I'd been watched always, always, always—as a child I had nursemaids coming
out of my ears, and parents and grandparents. That didn't let up until the Germans
came, and then it continued in a slightly lowerclass fashion: no more nursemaids,
just my mother. The only thing that could give me away was my circumcision. The
whole thing was monstrous—we were together, my mother and I, every day all the time
through those years. And my mother is a very powerful woman."

"It would have been more difficult for me to become an American Jew than to say to
hell with it, which is what I did," says Begley.

A friend of his says, ''When anyone spoke about the Holocaust, he'd turn pale and
change the subject. We knew he'd had a childhood like Anne Frank's. It was too
powerful for him to speak about."

The novelist Francois Nourissier met him in Paris in 1956; Sally Higginson had
taken him to meet the Nourissiers. Whereas those who know Begley in New York tend
to comment only on his brilliance, erudition, and good manners, seeing him as a
generic Old Worlder, Nourissier sees him in greater depth. "He has stayed
completely a Central European—there's a certain form of complication. He's without
the lightness and frivolity of the French. He's serious, and has a lenteur basse—a
low slowness—in the way he expresses himself. His character is one of the roughest
and toughest that I know. He can say brutal things. He's got a very difficult
personality, touchy, somber, silent. We've had periods of coldness and difficulty."

Over their 36-year friendship, Nourissier has heard him talk about the war only
once or twice: "He wasn't the kind of man to whom you said, 'You have to write your
story.' The most I knew was from what his mother said, one summer at their house on
Long Island, 10 years ago. She was reading Sophie's Choice, and I asked her what
she thought of it. 'It doesn't interest me—the author didn't know any of that, '
she said, and then she talked for two hours. Louis was in the city that day, and
when he came back I made a point of telling him that his mother had opened up to me
about the war. He had trouble talking to me until the end of the holiday."

The Man Who Was Late gives a skimming description of this revulsion: "Telling the
story of his life at parties was not Ben's preferred occupation. He decided that
the abridged, ironic version would do. As always, it was like hearing another man
speak. They said he must write a book; had he read The Painted Birdl Ben replied he
had, as soon as it was published; it was one of the reasons why he was proof
against literary temptations that might distract him from making money."

Begley read Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird when it came out; a mention of the
book immediately leads to his describing how much more Capote's In Cold Blood
frightened him, until he is asked for his reaction to Kosinski's autobiographical
tale about a Jewish boy in wartime Poland. "I felt, This is overpoweringly good;
how did he manage it? I felt I should have made a stab at writing earlier, always
earlier. I began to understand myself better as I grew older, and understood how
unwilling I had been to risk everything. How unwilling to venture trying to write
or to direct theater. I did feel that if I had been situated differently and
differently made I would have taken the risk as to whether I had talent. But I was
not willing to take any risks."

He was 55 years old when he took a three-month sabbatical from Debevoise &
Plimpton. He started the book at his house on Long Island, continued on his Toshiba
T1200 word processor at La Fenice hotel in Venice, and completed the manuscript at
the Alfonso XIII in Seville. In Paris, he revised the first draft. "I always told
him a book took three years to write," says his wife, Anka, who has written six. "I
was wrong. It seems it takes three months." Nourissier knew he was writing a book
about his childhood, no more. "Everyone said, 'Louis is putting himself through
something very rough.' It would not have been right to ask questions." During those
three months, Begley was apparently difficult and withdrawn.

Begley says that writing was for him ''the most appeasing thing possible. It's the
least sordid occupation in the world, more pleasant than any I have ever
encountered. When one thinks about something one is going to write, one operates on
a fairly elevated plane of existence; one is concerned with characters, narrative,
words. As opposed to wondering whether one was seated appropriately at dinner the
night before. It's a magical, elevated activity which calls things forth from
inside one that other forms of intellectual activity don't." He contrasts it with
the exaltation he has sometimes ''in the practice of law, when one really hits the
nail on the head while preparing a brief or a memorandum, when one figures out a
contract just right." But as for the effect of stirring up the old darkness, he
lets only one or two details through. He says that he made the story up based on
what he'd lived so as to have more freedom in the telling, with the result, known
to many writers, that he can no longer go back to his past in his head and know
what is true and what he made up. The character of the aunt who saves herself and
her nephew from capture through guts, guile, and large amounts of cash strapped to
her body was based mostly on his mother. ''If you were to take the skeleton of what
happens in Wartime Lies—where one goes, how one lives— it would not be an unfair
description of what happened to me," he says with full judiciousness. ''We did live
in Lvov, and Warsaw, in a succession of rooming houses. As to whether my mother
taped money to herself, she probably didn't tell me where she really kept it, and I
didn't ask her, because I didn't want to ask her. I didn't want to get into too
much reality. I felt if I stuck my finger into historical truth, there would be no
end to it. I was truly not interested in writing my souvenirs, so what difference
did it make where she kept her money or what street we lived on? That was
irrelevant. What was relevant was the truthfulness of my own emotions."

I asked him if he, like Maciek in the book, had a vial of cyanide to take in case
of capture. "I will not answer that question," he said firmly.

Wartime Lies ends with these sentences: ''And where is Maciek now? He became an
embarrassment and slowly died. A man who bears one of the names Maciek used has
replaced him. Is there much of Maciek in that man? No: Maciek was a child, and our
man has no childhood that he can bear to remember; he has had to invent one. And
the old song is a lie. No matter how long or gaily the music plays, Maciek will not
rise to dance again. Nomen et cineres una cum vanitate sepulta. [Name, ashes, and
vanity buried together.]"

Asked whether the book changed his life, Begley chooses to respond on an impersonal
level. ''It made me some money, not enough to make a real difference, but enough to
make me feel better about a few of my habitual extravagances. Presents to my
family, things like that. I have a very pleasant standard of living, but no
particularly expensive vices. I don't collect things, bet on horses. I don't ski. I
go to the tailor just enough to get clothed."

He started The Man Who Was Late before Wartime Lies came out; it took, by his
wife's estimation, 50 weekends to write. Ben, his hero, is ''a sort of amputee
emotionally. He's very lucid, and his lucidity neutralizes his self-pity." The
international investment banker has a beautiful apartment in Paris, a rich Wasp ex-
wife, good clothes, and a core that eventually destroys him. His relationship to
his background is furtive. In Brazil, Ben goes through the Rio phone book looking
for Jewish names. He is, tellingly, sterile. The woman he loves wants to leave her
husband for him, and he cannot act on that, but disappears instead to a jungle
resort in Brazil with a young blonde prostitute. His final act is to throw himself
off the Pont de la Machine into that part of the Rhone River where the water is "an
opaque hell."

Begley says that he approves of suicide only "as a way of escaping a fatal and
unpleasant illness, or dishonor," but has never felt so wretched that he would
contemplate it. "I'd rather have a glass of whiskey," he says. However, he admits
to black moods. "Whenever I'm unoccupied I have black thoughts. I see everything
that's wrong, every fingerprint on the door, every stain on the wallpaper." He says
this in the plain white study of his apartment, where the pencils by the phone are
kept in a plain glass tumbler, the shelves are built to hold books and not objects,
and a painting by his son dominates the fireplace. His eyes rise to a patch of
paint peeling from the ceiling in a comer, right above a tall tuberose plant that
fills the room with insistent sweetness.

"Young Louis was more impenetrable," says James Chace. "He's less disguised as he's
grown older and more comfortable. The more comfortable he became since his marriage
to Anka, the more open and secure he became. His literary success is probably the
greatest thing that made him happy, but it doesn't take the place of a private
life, just as a rich and full private life doesn't take the place of literary
success. He has a genuine achievement in both books. One of the most interesting
things about Wartime Lies is its control; he has the power to describe horrifying
events with coolness. The Man Who Was Late has enormous control too, exerted by
having a transparent narrator. There are almost pornographic descriptions in it,
but the eroticism comes from the distancing from his obsession."

"He's not the man that you see," says the writer Linda Wolfe, a highschool friend.
"That's what he writes about in both books, and in the short stories he wrote at
Erasmus Hall when he was 15. He was already a writer then. The character of Ben,
his not being able to feel, made me wonder about Louis's perception of his own
ability to feel."

Martha Duffy, the Time writer, who has known him since 1968 and still marvels at
how he'd work away at a Polish paperback, determined to keep up with his mother
tongue, calls him "not bright, not quick, not clever, but truly brilliant."

Robert Fizdale, the musician and biographer (Misia and The Divine Sarah: A Life of
Sarah Bernhardt, both with his late companion, Arthur Gold), met Begley at Ivan
Nabokov's in Paris. "He had such erudition, such a grasp of poetry in all kinds of
literatures, that it was dazzling! To my delight I was then introduced to Anka, and
realized this was a couple I really wanted to get to know."

Gregor von Rezzori, the Bukovinabom author, met Begley after the latter had read
and admired his Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, and became a friend; it was he who
handed the manuscript of Wartime Lies to his own editor at Knopf, Elisabeth Sifton.
Von Rezzori has a rather more down-home view of him: "We're just two chaps from the
neighborhood of Zaleshchiki—though on my side of the border it was called Grigore
Ghica-voda."

Anka Muhlstein is an attractive woman with the open face of an intelligent and
energetic jeunefille. As contrived as Begley makes Ben's life, as composed as he
makes his own seem, she appears spontaneous, studious, and warm. She studied
history and geography at the Sorbonne, thought of becoming a librarian but balked
at the extra four years of study, and went into publishing. She began writing when
she moved to New York, having married Begley in 1974. Francois Nourissier brought
them together; he is married to her sister. Their father, Anatole Muhlstein, was
bom in the Warsaw ghetto, and became number two at the Polish Embassy in Paris.
Which suggests that the Poles were better disposed toward Jews than one imagines,
until you learn that the Polish government in exile in Paris in 1940 didn't want
him, because he was a Jew. "Neither my father nor my husband ever went back to
Poland, and I have never been there," says Anka, who spent the war in New York with
her family.

"There is an immense difference in Louis since Anka," says Francois Nourissier. "I
think she gave him back his Jewishness. He's different than when he was married to
Sally Higginson. Instead of a Wasp, he found himself with a woman who jovially
said, 'We're Polish Jews, and that's that.' "

It's hard to reconcile the contented man, secure in his professional success, one
half of a happy couple, with the dark introvert of his sometimes convoluted prose.
"All serious fiction in this century has elements of self-portrait and elements of
confession," he says. His 46 years in America have gone to creating a new man; the
effort to reach back below the achievements and the blond veneers of his new life
and tell the horrors, the fear, and the compromises he lived as a child was heroic.
But one imagines that somewhere the scale of the pain in his first book must have
repelled him by its boldness, and that he wanted to create something of a subtler
texture, about the tragedy of chilled feelings. In The Man Who Was Late, the hero
is at a remove from the reader, described by the Wasp Jack, who says, as he goes
through Ben's fragmentary notes, "I cannot dismiss the possibility that, whenever
the text was written, he was striking a pose, as he did in so many circumstances,
not because he was a poseur but out of discouragement. Ben liked to joke that he
was his own invention and therefore never could be certain how he really felt about
anything or anybody."