Writers on the Foggy Frontier

Truman Capote cheated. With his 1966 book In Cold Blood, on the killing of a Kansas farming family, he claimed to have invented the “non-fiction novel” by merging facts with the techniques of fiction writing. Actually, he lied and polished the “facts” with invention. The result was a “true crime” best-seller.

Ryszard Kapuściński fabricated. Three years after his death, the reputation of the renowned Polish journalist and travel writer was hit by Artur Domosławski’s biography, which revealed that many of the marvels decorating the acclaimed books were phony. The international Ryszard Kapuściński Award for literary reportage is given annually by the Warsaw City Council.

In his essay “The Literature of Fact”, Timothy Garton Ash considered the non-fiction writers who add improvements to their texts with inventions and fabrications as they wander across the border between, what he calls, the “literature of fact” and the “literature of fiction”. The times themselves, he notes, are against a defence of the boundaries: “Who cares? It’s all entertainment anyway.” Garton Ash argues the defence is worth undertaking because of “the moral and artistic quality of witness”. In order to defend, he concedes what every historian, journalist and policeman knows, that there are very different and opposing “facts” and memories. The writer’s testimony may err but it can’t be improved or invented, and “any meaningful notion of witness depends on having a clear delineation of this frontier and knowing which side you are supposed to be on at any one time”. The essay posed a worthy challenge: “It may seem a grave limitation for any writer to leave the facts as facts, but self-limitation is a key to art. On this frontier we should stand.”

In America, Lee Gutkind’s quarterly magazine Creative Nonfiction stands beside Garton Ash when offering guidance for its author readers:

“Creative” doesn’t mean inventing what didn’t happen, reporting and describing what wasn’t there. It doesn’t mean that the writer has a licence to lie. The cardinal rule is clear—and cannot be violated. This is the pledge the writer makes to the reader—the maxim we live by, the anchor of creative nonfiction: “You can’t make this stuff up!”

Sometimes, when the stuff is made up, as in the case of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, there is a strong media and public reaction; sometimes not—especially when the “Who cares?” tactic is brought into play.

In a far country, surely well behind the “literature of fact” frontier, a pit has been dug in an open field near some woods. In it are children—Jewish children. Soon they will be covered with soil and murdered. Standing above, close to the edge, are laughing Germans. They throw the children sweets.

Belarussian Svetlana Alexievich, armed with tape recorder and pen, appears to be an honoured citizen in the territory of fact—where nothing is invented by the author. Book chatter led me to La Fin de l’homme rouge, ou le temps du désenchantement (The End of the Red Man, or the Time of Disenchantment; the original Russian title is Second-Hand Time). For over 500 pages Red Man leads readers across the dead empire of the old USSR listening to the voices of the people who were born Soviets and now belong to quite different countries. The cover blurb calls it a “magnificent requiem”. Either already published or with rights sold in sixteen countries, it has not yet been published in English. In France it won the Médicis essay prize and was book of the year for literary magazine Lire.

Previous books by Alexievich in English include collections of interviews about Chernobyl and the Soviet Afghanistan War. For several years she has been suggested as a highly ranked contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Last October, a New Yorker headline on an article promoting her candidature read: “Nonfiction Deserves a Nobel”. Quite so, but only as long as we are sure which side of the frontier she inhabits.

Red Man presents a marvellous and vast assemblage of witnesses: “I’ve been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life. I tried this and that and finally I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves.” The texts are beautifully written, or spoken: “Sometimes I am asked: do people really talk so beautifully? People never speak as beautifully as when they are in love or near death.” The characters in her book are not all in love or near death. It’s a pretty response that doesn’t answer the question or go a step further and explain how the stories in her books are so satisfyingly complete, like short fictions rather than untidy lumps of lived lives.

On opening the covers of Red Man you tumble into a fast-flowing current of reminiscences that throw you about in time and place from the earlier days of the Soviet Union until the fragmented 1990s. Brief snippets of overheard street conversations, interviews in kitchens and trains: Alexievich is listening to people anywhere and everywhere. Sometimes the place and occasion are noted but often not. There are love and suicide and war, torture and disease, nostalgia for Stalin, nostalgia for life pre-Gorbachev. Alexievich interviews hundreds of individuals and may return several times to record the same people—this is surprising to learn, as the impression given is that the interviews were recorded during chance encounters or on single specific occasions. Of fifty to seventy pages of notes she may only use anything from half a page to five pages. Though she cleans up a little (there are no ums and ahs) and deletes repetitions, she doesn’t stylise, she says, and keeps the real language of her interviewees. People aren’t telling history but their own stories. “I don’t write the history of facts, but that of souls.” Without the punctuation of “facts” in her text it is impossible to verify the truth of what she is being told, and has transcribed.

Praise for Alexievich’s writing seems undeserved, for surely the words belong to the individuals who spoke them. Alexievich’s written contribution to the text is confined to simple insertions that add details that act like stage directions to help set the scene. She appears to be an inspired interviewer, editor and assembler, but not a writer. Though the stories are remarkable, it is unusual that an oral history compiler should be considered for a Nobel Prize. As a reader of Red Man I began with complete trust and enthusiasm but gradually came to a point of uncertainty where I was left wondering whether the compiler had become author, and burrowed across the frontier into the literature of fiction.

“Vassili Pétrovich N., member of the Communist Party since 1922, 87 years old”: the introduction to the speaker is typically brief, and obscure. The old man sits with his cat on his knees. His grandson is also present and interjects with a few political jokes. His story includes a moment in his youth when the Kulaks were being deported and a train was halted at a railway station he was guarding: “I opened a wagon and, in a corner, saw a half-naked man hung by a belt. A mother nursed a baby in her arms, and an older child, a little boy, was sitting on the floor. He ate his excrement with his hands, like semolina.” The words shock. It is like suddenly seeing a photograph, never seen before, of utter brutality. If true memory, this quite perfect representation of a Stalinist Holy Family is a description to place beside the words of Robert Conquest, Martin Malia, Nicolas Werth or Alexander Yakovlev—but is it true? About the same time, at another railway station, a German journalist threw a chicken bone he had finished with out of the train window. The peasants standing about threw themselves on it. For Malcolm Muggeridge, “It was one of those little, quick scenes which live with one like stigmata.” In Red Man I feel an uncertainty as to whether I am reading the lacerating memory of an old man or a striking fiction which perfectly represents a time of horror. No doubt Alexievich’s tape recordings of these interviews would clear up any doubt.

“The Son” follows a narration by “Anna Maïa, architect, 59 years old”. When her story concludes, this section begins. In an author’s note Alexievich says he has asked that his name not be given. His text covers about seventeen pages and in it he tells how at one time he was engaged to a girl whose grandfather, he discovered one day when he and the old man were talking alone together, had been an NKVD torturer and executioner. Over three pages of text the old man speaks of his past. It is horrifying and extraordinary and presented as a first-person account. One man, in a taped interview, has suddenly started talking as another man. It is as if an actor has come onstage and begun a monologue and then assumed the identity of a completely different man for a quite different monologue. As a theatrical performance it could be brilliant—but it does not sound like an interview.

“A Man’s Story”. Within the narrative of his life an elderly Jewish man tells of the day he and his family were taken from the Minsk ghetto to be murdered. As they waited, pits were dug in a field near woods. It’s a surprisingly vague reminiscence. “It’s as if in a fog,” he says. Parts of his account are familiar from other survivor stories told by Soviet Jews. During the terrible day children were buried alive. “Laughing Germans” looked into the pit and threw them sweets. The parents could do nothing. After the narrator escapes and joins the partisans he encounters Rosa, a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl who had joined the partisans and was sexually abused by them. He recalls a comment made by one of the men: “She’s only got down, just like little girls! Ha! Ha! Ha!” Becoming pregnant, she was taken deeper into the woods and “put down like a dog”.

The old man remembers his mother cutting and sewing Stars of David for the family. Possibly the familiar Star is the word choice of the French translator; if not, then there is a problem with the quality of the evidence. Soviet Jews in Minsk wore distinctive cloth badges, but not the star-shaped symbol forced on European Jews.

Versions of both “Rosa” and the “sweets” memory were used by Alexievich when accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2013. There was no mention that they had been told to her by this elderly man. Instead, they were put forward as stories she heard from women in her Belarus village after the war. And she referred to “young SS soldiers” rather than the “laughing Germans” in the book.

The story of Rosa cannot be verified but the inclusion of “sweets” during the massacre does lead into other Holocaust testimony. It raises the question of whether we are looking at two different incidents in Minsk or whether the Red Man story is a creative version of a documented account. In that testimony the “sweets” are not part of a foggily remembered event but an element in an incident which occurred at a specific place on a specific date and with named participants.

In Minsk, on March 2, 1942, children and staff from the Jewish Children’s Home were buried alive in Ratomskaya Street. The Generalkommissar, Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube, later criticised by a colleague for showing “friendliness to Jews”, threw sweets to the children in the pit. The account was first published in Yiddish by Ghetto survivor and historian Hersh Smolar, in Moscow in 1946: “The screams and cries could be heard far into the ghetto. Children stretched out their hands pleading for their lives. Kommissar Kube walked alongside the ditch, tossing pieces of candy into it.” Smolar’s book, published in English as Resistance in Minsk, is a standard reference work. The incident took place within the ghetto, not outside where Alexievich’s old man’s story places it—and the nearby woods are necessary for his story to explain how he escaped. So we have the old man’s testimony, Alexievich’s remembered story, and a similar but very different account. Is this genuine new Holocaust testimony, questionable oral history, or “faction”? It would be strange if Minsk-based Alexievich were not aware of Smolar’s testimony.

I asked two of her publishers if Red Man is fiction or non-fiction. The replies were not single-word answers, and one suggested that analysing “her complex writing technique” would be a good subject for a PhD thesis. Alexievich won the Ryszard Kapuściński Award in 2011: it might be worth getting on with that thesis before a Nobel Prize heads in her direction.

“You can’t make this stuff up!”

The setting is a Paris café in 2005. An Australian writer is talking to his French publisher and translator: “‘Actually,’ I said, ‘Daniel doesn’t exist. I invented him.’ My publisher was not just nonplussed but flabbergasted.”

The characters are Robert Dessaix and Marie-Pierre Bay, and he is the storyteller. The book is Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev—the winner of several Australian literary awards. On learning that the Mercure de France is about to release a fabricated travel memoir, Madame Bay’s reaction was not quite what I would have expected: “‘But he’s so real,’ she said, slowly lowering her expensive spoonful of crème brûlée, ‘so completely French, so believable. Perhaps you should be writing fiction.’” He is.

She had turned this account of Dessaix’s first meeting with “Daniel” into elegant French, believing it to be true:

We’d met in Kuala Lumpur, of all places, a few years before when he’d been in his Sufic phase. He’d asked me to take his photograph in the butterfly house at Lake Gardens—we’d had to wait for a trembling iridescent blue creature to alight on his shoulder—then we’d run into each other again in one of those crowded, aromatic streets around Bukit Bintang and had a meal together under a sign which read: REFLEXOLOGY CLINIC. IN DOOR AND OUT DOOR. FOR THE HEALTHY FOOT. These are the kind of trivial things one remembers about pivotal moments. What we actually talked about now escapes me. Sufism, butterflies, Baudrillard, tie-dying—with Daniel it could have been absolutely anything.

Smart, the French. On the Mercure de France website the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction in 2005 is classified as fiction. The paragraph above, typical of Dessaix’s intelligent and carefully observed autobiography and travel memoirs, becomes pretentious and arch, and very funny when you realise he is making it up, and had successfully fooled us readers and critics who accepted it as a beautifully written exemplar of the “literature of fact”.

Earlier this year a media and internet storm destroyed the career of a US news reader who invented a story that he had been in a helicopter hit by enemy fire in Iraq. About the same time, it was announced that the upcoming Adelaide Writers Week was to be dedicated to Robert Dessaix: “Festival Director, Laura Kroetsch, said she was thrilled because Dessaix is the first non-fiction writer to receive the honour.”