The
first scratchings of these, chiefly, investigation of the workings of
memory & consequences of early childhood psychological wounds -
for this self-analytic memoir of age one to twenty-one – my way of
finding out who I am, to come face to face, face to face with myself:
I try to think what motivated me, the then mid 1960s obscure sense
that it might be a good thing to find out what that murk inside me
was, I felt troubled, and it turns out I was so for good reason. Even
within the first half dozen years in the United Stated, from age 14
in 1950 to Sophomore College year in 1956, I felt haunted by the
country that I had fled - “like a black bear with Texans and their
hounds at its heel” is my exorbitant analogy - yet longed for a
particular place – a fir forest that was also part farm, called
Fichtenhof/ Fir Place or Manor - whose initial loss - I was four
years old in 1940 and taken away to avoid the bombings – was one of
my first wounds, which wound - by this writing - has grown into one
of my most important “screen memories,” a veritable magnet for
associations of all kinds. That screen memory, together with an even
richer one of six months prior, of a catastrophe when two toy
railway train locomotives collide inside an Alpine tunnel, and you
and I have the fractured psychogram of a young child. And if you know
just these two screen memories plus my aboriginal Oedipal dream of a
Billygoat chasing a four year old me up a clearing in Fir Place, you
would be a seriously worried child analyst! However, there was no
child analyst around! Not even anyone to wonder why I might have
looked such a delighted child as my mother leads me, a harnessed
toddler, through the flower beds, who then looks so miserable, like
such an unhappy child, in his sandbox with his governess hovering
nearby.
Fir
Place kept pre-occupying me, always hovering in the back of my
mind, during the first two years in the so sour experience of West
Orange, New Jersey, and while at summer camp or when camping, and
also at Oakwood School: on graduating from high school I was meant to
spend a summer as a lumber jack in the Quebec north woods. I was
pretty “woodsy” and had started to become so during early
childhood.
Subsequent
to coming to the U.S. in 1950, – - I returned twice to Fir Place,
during a Junior Year abroad in 1957 and in 1964, a year spent
literary scouting and translating. Both times I paid brief, memorial,
walk-about visits to a place and its village that evidently occupied
a paradisiacal spot in my experience.
Paradise
lost, the reasons why were discernable, were clear to me. But I can
visit any time, virtually, courtesy of Google Earth! Although Fir
Place is much changed, the surrounding farming area not so much. As a
matter of fact, the surround is much spruced up since the end of
World War II in 1945. The Fachwerk (wood-reinforced walls of
the) farm houses look freshly painted, the huge clump of a Chateau
looks glazed – in my recollection it is filled with refugees who
have hung ragged laundry out of the windows.
The
one good story I wrote in college – Sandro – also features
Fir Place. I had the idea for the story – after just having written
a truly dreadful, forced something - outlined it for a toughy, for
Professor John Ashmead, discussed it and had it in two drafts. An F
was succeeded by an A+. Everyone loved it, Bill Packard published it
in the Haverford-Bryn Mawr review prior to a breakdown as editor of
the campus paper. Sandro (see Appendix) came as no other story
had so far in English, it welled up, formed like a fairy tale, sort
of wrote itself, the way I had started to write shortly before
emigrating. It is a lyrical story of death and loss, set in Fir
Place. I was astounded at what one Bryn Mawr girl brought to, found
in it – and I suppose ought to have married, entrusted myself to
someone who had such deep insight, ways of seeing into matters of
which I was unconscious.
Thus
the first scratchings were made in the mid-1960s & I showed them
to Aaron Ascher, an editor at my publisher, Viking Press, and I think
I showed them to Aaron because Aaron was my then best friend Frank
Conroy's editor for Frank's famous-to-be memoir Stop
Time.
Frank had found his voice. I read chapters as he was completing his
childhood (the then too hurried) memoir in his shoebox of a studio on
Ann Street, vis-a-vis City Hall Manhattan - and suggested to a
Partisan
Review
editor to do a section, as they then did. Were Frank and I in
competition with each other? I am uncertain, which may means that in
some respects the answer may be yes even though I had no intention of
emulating his way of sinking mine shafts into childhood for a series
of them to form a spectrum of the whole of it. I realized that I
would have to go about it very differently. I can't really find too
many other signs of competitiveness in my relationship with that
friend (but of his with me in a # of matters, see the Conroy portrait
in the Appendix): we played even-steven at chess for thousands of
miles & months of summers!, and Frank was, I knew early on,
brighter than I, who, however, knew that he was the deeper and slower
of the two. Aaron said that he found the material utterly
fascinating, a reaction that both surprised and intrigued, and thus
encouraged me over the years to keep scratching away while I was in
the world of N.Y. publishing and had a contract with Viking, and a
different editor, dear Alan Williams, for a very different book - on
an important figure in the German resistance to Hitler - that yet
related in many ways to the material of what is now called Screen
Memories.
That book, on Colonel Kurt Grosskurt of Canaris's Abwehr,(German
Counter Intelligence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abwehr
had
been suggested by Ladislas Farago a code cracker & historian of
espionage.
The
subject of the German opposition interested me because my parents,
since the mid-30s, as well as other family members had been in that
opposition (other family member had been in the SS!) and then became
involved in the the 20th of July plot to assassinate Hitler, were
arrested,
spent
time in Gestapo prisons, were strung up or had heir heads cut off,
and the fact that the parents, especially my grandfather,
survived
- while I as a child was in debilitating "protective custody"
- was the kind of improbable event that is then termed miraculous. Or
as the street has it: "That is the way the cookie crumbles!"
Well, in instances it is possible to look at cookie crumbs crumb by
crumb. E.g. Why was my grandfather not executed after being condemned
to death after he had been so fortunate to have a most dubious friend
(Count von Helldorf)
suggest
that he spend the night of the "Long Knives" in 1934
at
his hunting lodge? After all, he had ridiculed Hitler at a famous
lunch (his wife, my grandmother, famously said that she'd just as
soon "not have that gentleman for lunch again."!), Hitler
had accused Opa A. of being the "certain Herr von A." who
had been about to launch a coup that the "Night of Long Knives"
had allegedly averted & had made the threat (it was a joke and
justifiably paranoid Hitler had taken it seriously) to call out the
Potsdam garrison to have Hitler arrested - something that my
grandfather's superior, General Schleicher,
Hitler's
predecessor as Chancellor, had indeed been in a position to do, but
didn't, just as little as Opa had the good sense to kill a man he
knew to be the head of a murderous & mad organization; and so Opa
A. instead spent time in four different concentration camps, was
liberated at Buchenwald, but occasionally was on vacation (!), during
one of which, Christmas 1940, he figures significantly in my so
all-important first screen memory, as a displacement for a
threatening disliked father. Cockie crumbs become boulders. What
would that screen memory look like without him, what would have
replaced the metaphor of two toy train locs that collide
catastrophically inside a make-believe papier mache tunnel?
That
I was born into Hitler's world therefore had all kinds of quite
personal consequences of which you/ I become (gradually) aware, awake
as your historical awareness wakens, becomes conscious.
Research
on Grosskurt was bound to deepen my background on that subject, but a
book on Grosskurt, at that time, in the 60s, also, I hoped, would
serve as model for military opposition to the Vietnam war. Grosskurt,
initially, seemed a fine prospect for such an undertaking. As
compared to the Junker Military caste's often belated nationalist
opposition to Hitler, Grosskurt's origin as Protestant Pastor's son,
in Bremen, pointed to opposition for reasons of conscience.
One
of my favorite reading moments was coming on darling Jean Genet
realizing, in his Thief's Journal, that as he worked his way
back from Poland through Germany to France that in Germany the police
and the criminals were one and the same - how this appalled his
French sense of how the world was constituted!
And
it was not just my parents' role, but my grandfather - who in that
astonishingly brief Christmas time - became especially dear to me,
that played into my interest in that past; that is, even initially,
the interest was historical and political. That it lacked
psychological self-understanding was remedied, at least roughly, with
a psycho-analysis that I undertook in the 1980s. Yet from early on
the family configuration, and as it existed in my psyche -
exquisitely Oedipal - and in some respects contradictorily - seemed
determinative, and interest in the determinative aspects of the past
became intimate once I regarded it from the perspective of the long
term effects of a child's psychic wounds.
I
took a few stabs at the book as the years wore on, however became
ever busier with translating and entry into editing, book publishing.
The Grosskurt project itself was abandoned in the mid-70s because
Grosskurt had, for one, been unable to overthrow the government or
prevent the outbreak of WW II (pathetically, in frustration, he had
tossed a rock at the Reich's chancellory in 1938, the kind of detail
that will stick) but - the Hitler government receiving intimations of
disloyalty - shipped him off to the Eastern Front; taken prisoner of
war at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 he died a Russian p.o.w.:
there was no book there, certainly not of the kind I envisioned,
although the research on it, in the Gestapo trove that the U.S. had
schlepped to Washington, D.C. and at the IFZ, Institute for
Contemporary History, Munich, proved invaluable.
For
example, I found out that dear old philandering Dad had had one of
his numerous affairs with Colonel Grosskurt's secretary – no matter
how dire the life or death situation, all kinds of hanky-panky
flourishes, in the underground of the opposition as well, and rarely
is it of the Casablanca high romance kind. And that my mother
saying "the police always know less than you think they do"
proved correct. What had the Gestapo had on my father when they
arrested him immediately after the failed 20th of July coup? That, as
the head of the Unilever-owned German fishing concern Nordsee
Deutsche Hochsee Fischerei, he had supplied the conspirators with
fish! That was one matter for which you were not strung up! At least
not in advance! But you'd keep you eyes on the guy! A discovery from
a house search in 1943. My mother's links to the Rote Kappelle
must
have shown up when that conspiracy was decimated.
In
the early years of the new millennium I wrote up the analysis as A
Patient's Experience of his Analysis. Screen Memories (including
its title) would be inconceivable without having done that work.
At
that point, 2003, I could look back and see someone like myself born
in the mid-30s to parents who turn the child over to a governess
because they are too busy, also with conspiratorial work that
invariably overlaps with social life, and for class reasons, and
which child's earliest years are shaped by the experience of war,
that for reasons of the village culture and for reasons of reading
lots of fairy tales, acquires a dark fairy tale quality - B-17teens
become mythical birds of prey, moths in the night-time sky that
searchlights spot with puffs of smoke going off near them, dragons
teeth are sowed, a nearby camp becomes the place where lives the man
who eats children, and is to be avoided.
You
could scarcely call my early life typical of a German boy my
generation, yet via the media - radio, newspapers - I became absorbed
by and in war, and a militant nationalist by age six, so it appears!
Parents of course utterly appalled, Guenter Grass then 14 and living
in Gdansk cheers me on as I sing "We Lay off-shore Madagascar
and had the Plague on board" to my parent's Christmas telephone
call in 1942.
I
was raised chiefly in rural environs; kids in the cities had a much
harder time of it. I imagine I can be said to have been privileged
with that unfortunate governess protector jailer Ms. No who kept me
in emasculating protective custody & neglected in not that
atypical a fashion; yet it was the kind of neglect that allowed for
time to read and to dream. A streak of sheer orneriness (and perhaps
the example of the negative role model uncle) kept me alive and not
totally goodified, and then linked up with what I call "My
Idyllic years" (1945-1950} with its inception with the arrival
of refugee cousins at our place in the vilage of Schönebeck
{Prettybrook) outside Bremen - "Idyllic years" was one
initial title for the book, the most favorable memories had displaced
the grimmest. Peter Weiss's Abschied von den Eltern (Farewell
to my Parents) played a role, also because Peter had become a friend.
Perhaps
my experience as an emigrant who has to make his way in the demos is
somewhat more typical.
In
1991, sick of Bush I, of the savings and loan debacle and a Malibu
where every home owner had a real estate license and tried to sell
the neighbor's house, I went to Mexico, supposedly for six months, to
complete the book. I had in mind something called "Hotel
Franscesca" in the former French copper-mining town of Santa
Rosalia, opposite mainland Guaymas in Baja Sur - seven pesos a day
for a room and breakfast and a view of the Sea of Cortez/ of
California. Already on my way down Mex I, on the elongated peninsula,
rumors abounded that Hotel Franscesca was closed down or had become a
whore house.
Initially,
traveling alongside the Pacific and its cold Japanese current and
lacking for warm water, I headed for Bahia de los Angeles, of
Steinbeck's American Flyer fame,
and seriously considered putting up in a trailer in Tony Resendiz
camp (Tony the Turtleman who was bringing the turtles back, a
descendent of Steinbeck's Doc marine biologist) & converting my
computer to D.C. electricity, but chance would have it that -
retrieving mail in Santa Rosalia - I encountered someone who sang the
praises of Mulege (Moo-lay-hay) a town a few miles further south,
that proved a semi-tropical rural haven as compared to Bahia de los
Angeles and Tony the Turtleman's exceedingly ascetic frugal
semi-desert ways. And indeed the Hotel Franscesca was closed:
climbing the northern bluff of Santa Rosalia (a town of three
avenidas thrust into a copper canyon) to check on a splendid wooden
structure, it happened to be open house for hombre de nogotacion
who would resuscitate the hotel's commercial viability. The gentelmen
asked me if I was a prospective Norte Americano hotelier.
LINKS
All
impulses of the kind needed for the completion of any of my several
major projects faded in the idyllic pastoral rural, if occasionally
exceedingly hot and amoeba-rife Mulege environment. I produced one
long very shaggy dog screenplay (amusing the hell out of myself!),
translated an Erich Wolfgang Skwara novel and did a few Handke essays
for an annual Austrian lit conference at U.C. Riverside. Who wants to
dwell on the "Third Reich" with Mangoes falling ripe off
the trees into your mouth! Shuffling through the mucho pulvo rural
paths, or a burro as transport for longer forays into a wonderful
back country. And you could probably make a mint selling something
called "Hitler Cola" to anti-American Mexican sheeples? If
the small stipend on which I lived, that and some royalties, or if
Roger Straus had not bilked me out of three quarters of my royalties
- I had the fantasy of moving to Michoacan to live in a tropical high
altitude (cool!) pine forest with the tribe that worships the Monarch
butterfly!
With
my Handke project in pretty good shape around 2013, and several other
entirely unanticipated books completed (1) but, but for many fine
sections, a huge novel, Darlings & Monsters unlikely to be
completed in this lifetime, I set to serious work on Screen
Memories - that I could get done in a few years, and for once
complete it I did, without indulging in too over-optimistic a
fantasy. The minutae keep flooding in from an aroused deeply ploughed
memory!
Initially,
I wrote a section, a very contemplative one (since eliminated) for
the morning that 14 year old me is about to step ashore the U.S.N.S
General Maurice Rose at the Brooklyn Port of Embarkation in
October 1950. In that section, which coursed over the major events of
my young life, I toggled between calling myself Gabriel & I
[Gabriel/ I is how that looked] a combined first and third person!]
which contained the truth of uncertainty; how well did I actually
know myself, recall who I had been at that time; even with a
psychoanalysis and subsequent working through. This was a time that I
sought to objectify my casenes as it were & Screen Memories
was meant to become “objectified” & I called myself Gabriel
Orloff, but in the process seemed to lose all intimacy, and not
really gain anything, rather the opposite: a not fruitful constraint,
not the wished for novelistic freedom - yet, though abandoned, that
perspective will not have entirely disappeared, and I regard it,
retrospectively, as a valid step in acquiring an outside perspective
on myself. The idea of a Gabriel Orloff had seemed to permit the
introduction of fantasy – I was hoping that some kind of
transfiguration might transpire, into a Farbrizio!, as it had with
the Sandro story during freshman year: unconscious dreamwork
could be trusted to do that work - after all, though I find memory to
be untrustworthy, dreams are not, nor are Screen Memories which are a
species of historical dream (2).
However,
I was forced to give up on novelistic temptation which would also
have meant the sacrifice of certain journalistic truth values. So
what was it going to be?
The
book, as it developed, changed titles from Irretrievable Losses,
to Losses to The Idyllic Years [for the transitional
years 1944-1950 having been the best of them] to Screen Memories
for the importance of the major traumas and how they were remembered
& transfigured, how they figured in my life.
My
objective in writing, as I proceeded, with numerous unearthings along
the way, then became to investigate the long-term effect of a series
of early childhood traumas, which manifest themselves in a series of
major screen memories of age 4 - evidently the most exciting and
eventful year - 1939-1940 - of my life, I kid thee not!
To
that end I went over the first 21 years of my life sometime in great
detail (and could go over the rest, especially its major turning
points) to discover the unconscious as well as conscious effect of
these traumas - that elicited what you might call automatic passive
compliance or active semi-compelled decisions with existential
consequence; and in that process became engaged with my memory and
its workings. E.g. I became puzzled why I had no recollection
whatsoever how I came from Fairbanks to the forest fire I had started
to fight outside Galena, at the Yukon, in Summer 1960, why I drew a
total blank where I had anticipated memory to speak, as it had in
nearly every other instance: I had gone 24 hours without sleep, and
the memory that was laid down during my next sleep session, however,
starts with my being on the fire line, and a P-38 above showering me
with fire retardant. What immediately precedes it is forgotten, has
in fact never had the opportunity to be remembered. The initially
discovery of this lacuna proved to be a very disturbing experience,
it cast doubt not so much on the experiences that I seemed to
recollect with considerable certainty but on the overall record:
where I had been able to say that “the body does not forget” -
however its many ways of remembering - and be in a position to prove
it, doubt was suddenly cast on that certainty.
Sleeping
on events to lay down, inscribe memories suddenly became very
important. When had I not slept for extended periods of time, and
thus not be able to remember possibly crucial events in my life? -
For the first two major screen memories and the preceding first
nightmare evidently well enough. Subsequently there were stretches
upon stretches of nighttime bombing attacks and nights spent awake.
The
date of the first bombing attack on Bremen coincides with the second
screen memory, that becomes that of a tearful expulsion from
paradisaical Fir Place. Yet was I really in Berlin when the Zoo was
bombed and the animals screamed or did I only hear of that attack and
fantasized, projected their screams into my memory and into a 1955
story: after all, I recall very distinctly being in an above-ground
reinforced beton bunker in Spring 1944 as a physician was preparing
to remove my tonsils and I was drifting off into the land of
anesthesia as the bunker shook and the mirror trembled. In other
words: whether or not I actually heard the screams of the animals
from my parents apartment in the Budapester Strasse in Berlin, if Zoo
animals screams were even audible there!, what the recollection
shares with that of the first bombing attack in Spring 1940 is my
hysteria, which was induced much earlier, by my governess; my Oedipal
dream, also at age four, provides ample evidence.
The
memoir ends with that mad resolve in November 1960, at a McCabe &
Mrs. Miller (the Altman film) type party on Chena Ridge,
Fairbanks Alaska - a resolve that apparently shook me physically so
that fire-fighting friend Carlson could not but help comment that I
had just reached a major resolve... it happened to be to follow the
path of Pound's ABC OF READING: that being the adventure I was going
to be on instead of the variety of anything but artistic ones I had
been contemplating, and of which the ABC OF READING route had not
been one but, evidently, surfaced unconsciously; where what seemed to
matter most asserted itself: yet without the kind of realistic
preparatory assessment to which I was subjecting the other
adventures: I had already ruled out driving nitroglycerine trucks in
Venezuelan oilfields (I had evidently seen one too many films!), not
yet entirely the fantasy of diving for conch shells (The Moon and
Six Pence - I was not going to be poor in the South Seas!). As I
mention: if I had known that the negative role model of my youth, an
uncle in Mozambique, had been a big game hunter & enforcer of the
poaching laws in a territory the size of Switzerland, and no longer
ship-chandlering in Lorenco Marquez, I would have joined him. I was a
good enough shot, I was sure healthy after nine months in Alaska. I
would learn Portuguese. Although Werner had lived fairly crazily as a
young man, by the time Frelimo got him to leave his game preserve
fastness in the 1980s (they tied him to a Baobab tree and fried one
of his now beloved animals to death before his eyes, as they knew it
would break his heart - but, after all, they did not kill him the
former enforcer of the poaching laws!), he'd become quite wise: he
only did photo safaris & confessed that everything important he
knew he had learned from his friends in the bush, and, nearly albino
white blonde, had adopted the facial physiognomies of a black
chieftain. With my ideological convictions I can see myself joining
Freelimo & might have been shot dead by Portuguese colonialists
if not by an adder that wrapped around a front axel and stung through
the brake pedal opening & I imagine I would not have stayed
forever in P.E.A.
What
to do with your analysis is the question, now that you have at least
an inkling, perhaps more of self understanding, existentially in your
context & time and place.
1)
LIST OF BOOKS/ Write Some Numb's Bitch, The Developing Account of
Time in the Baja Part I, Steeped in Seattle (Prose Poems), the Handke
essays
2)
Screen Memory definition/
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