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CHAPTER 1
REFLECTIONS ON MY LIFE
As I write this autobiographical essay, I am aware of two opposed principles that guide my pen. One of those two extremes is chance; the other is the order that gives shape to life. Can all the factors that were responsible for my coming into the world and enabled me, although threatened by death many times, to survive unscathed in order finally to become a writer — moreover, one who ceaselessly strives to reconcile contradictory elements of realism and fantasy — be regarded only as the result of long chains of chance? Or was there some specific predetermination involved, not in the form of some supernatural moira. not quite crystallized into fate when I was in my cradle but in a budding form laid down in me — that is to say, in my genetic inheritance was there a kind of predestiny befitting an agnostic and empiricist?
That chance played a role in my life is undeniable. In the First World War, when the fortress of Przemysl fell, in 1915, my father, Samuel Lem, a physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was taken prisoner by the Russians, and was able to return to Lemberg (now Lvov), his native city, only after nearly five years, in the wake of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. I know from the stories he told us that on at least one occasion he was to be shot by the Reds on the spot for being an officer (and therefore a class enemy). He owed his life to the fact that when he was being led to his execution in a small Ukrainian city he was noticed and recognized from the sidewalk by a Jewish barber from Lemberg who used to shave the military commander in that city and for this reason had free access to him. The barber interceded for my father (who was then not yet my father), and he was allowed to go free, and was able to return to Lemberg and to his fiancée. (This story, made more complex for aesthetic reasons, is to be found in one of the fictitious reviews — of "De Impossibilitate Vitae," by Cezar Kouska — in my book A Perfect Vacuum.) In this instance, chance was fate incarnate, for if the barber had happened to pass through that street a minute later my father would have been irrevocably doomed. I heard the tale from him when I was a little boy, at a time when I was unable to think in abstract terms (I may have been ten), and was thus unable to consider the respective merits of the categories of chance and fate.
My father went on to become a respected and rather wealthy physician (a laryngologist) in Lvov. I was born there in 1921. In the rather poor country that Poland was before the Second World War, I lacked nothing. I had a French governess and no end of toys, and for me the world I grew into was something final and stable. But, if that was the case, why did I as a child delight in solitude, and make up the rather curious game that I have described in another book — the novel The High Castle, a book about my early childhood. My game was to transport myself into fictitious worlds, but I did not invent or imagine them in a direct way. Rather, I fabricated masses of important documents when I was in high school in Lvov: certificates; passports; diplomas that conferred upon me riches, high social standing, and secret power, or "full power of authority," without any limit whatsoever; and permits and coded proofs and cryptograms testifying to the highest rank — all in some other place, in a country not to be found on any map. Did I feel insecure in some way? Threatened? Did this game perhaps spring from some unconscious feeling of danger? I know nothing of any such cause.
I was a good student. Some years after the war, I learned from an older man who had held some position or other in the prewar Polish educational system that when the IQs of all high-school students were tested — it must have been around 1936 or 1937 — mine was over 180, and I was said to have been, in the words of that man, the most intelligent child in southern Poland. (I myself suspected nothing of this sort at the time of the test, for the results were not made known to us.) But this high IQ certainly was of no help in surviving the occupation of the Generalgouvernement (to which administrative unit Poland had been reduced by the Germans). During that period, I learned in a very personal, practical way that I was no "Aryan." I knew that my ancestors were Jews, but I knew nothing of the Mosaic faith and, regrettably, nothing at all of Jewish culture. So it was, strictly speaking, only the Nazi legislation that brought home to me the realization that I had Jewish blood in my veins. We succeeded in evading imprisonment in the ghetto, however. With false papers, my parents and I survived that ordeal.
But, to return to my childhood in prewar Poland, my first reading matter was of a rather curious nature. It was my father's anatomy books and medical texts, in which I browsed when I was still hardly able to read, and I understood them all the less since my father's professional books were in German or in French. Only the fiction in his library was in Polish. Pictures of skeletons, of neatly dissected human skulls, of human brains precisely sketched in many colors, of intestines in preserved condition and embellished with magic-sounding Latin names provided my earliest contacts with the world of books. Hunting through my father's library was, of course, strictly forbidden to me, and it attracted me precisely because it was forbidden and mysterious. I must not forget to mention the actual human bone that was kept behind the glass doors of my father's bookcase. It was a skull bone — os temporale — that had been removed during a trepanation; perhaps it was a relic from the time when my father was studying medicine. I held this bone, without any particular feelings, several times in my hands. (I had to steal my father's key to be able to do this.) I knew what it was, but I wasn't frightened by it. I only wondered about it in a certain way. Its surroundings — the rows of big tomes of medical textbooks — appeared quite natural to me, for a child, lacking any real yardstick, is unable to differentiate between the banal or commonplace and the unusual. That bone — or, rather, its fictional counterpart — is to be found in another novel of mine, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. In this book, the bone became a whole skull, cleanly dissected from a corpse, that was kept by a doctor in a ward — one of the many stations in the hero's odyssey through a labyrinthine building. A complete skull like this was owned by my uncle, my mother's brother, who was also a physician. He was murdered two days after the Wehrmacht marched into Lvov. At that time, several non-Jewish Poles were also killed — mostly university professors — and Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski, one of the best-known Polish writers. They were taken from their apartments during the night and shot.
Now, then, what objective, extrinsic connection — i.e., not one imagined by me and consisting solely of associations — could there be between a little boy's fascination with the parts of a human skeleton and the era of the Holocaust? Was this apparently significant and fitting omen a matter of chains of chance, purely of coincidence? In my opinion, it was. I do not believe in manifest destiny or predetermination. In lieu of a preestablished harmony, I can well imagine (upon the basis of the experiences of my life) a preestablished disharmony, ending in chaos and madness. In any case, my childhood was certainly peaceful and Arcadian — especially when compared with what happened in the following years.
I grew into a bookworm, and read everything that fell into my hands: the great national poems, novels, popular-science books. (I still remember that a book of the kind that my father gave me as a gift sold for seventy zlotys — the price was written inside — and that was a fortune in those days; for seventy zlotys you could buy a whole suit. My father spoiled me.) I also — I can still remember it — looked with keen interest at the male and female genitalia reproduced in my father's anatomy books. The female pubis struck me especially — as something spiderlike, not quite nauseating but certainly something that could hardly have a connection with erotic feelings. I believe that I was later, during my adolescence, sexually quite normal. But since my subsequent studies in medicine included gynecology, and since I was, for a month, an obstetrician in a hospital, I associate the pornography of today not with sexual longing and with copulative lust but with the anatomical pictures in the tomes of my father, and with my own gynecological examinations. The thought that a male may be highly excited by the mere sight of female genitalia strikes me as very peculiar. I happen to know perfectly well that this is a case of libido — of the instincts built into our senses and programmed by evolution — but the desire for sex without love strikes me as something comparable to an irresistible urge to eat salt and pepper by the spoonful because dishes without salt and pepper lack full flavor. I feel no repulsion but no attraction, either, as long as there is no specific erotic bond of the kind that is called "love."
As an eight-year-old boy, I fell in love with a girl. I never uttered as much as a word to the girl, but I observed her often in a public garden near our house. The girl had no inkling of my feelings, and most probably never even noticed me. It was a burning, long-lasting love affair dissected, as it were, from all actual circumstances — even from the sphere of any kind of wishful thinking. I was not interested in becoming her friend. My emotions were restricted to worshiping her from afar; aside from that, there was absolutely nothing. May the psychoanalysts make what they will of these feelings of a small boy. I do not comment further on them, because I am of the opinion that such an episode can be interpreted in any way one chooses.
At the beginning, I mentioned the opposites of chance and order, of coincidence and predestination. Only as I wrote the book The High Castle did the thought cross my mind that my fate — my profession as a writer — was already budding in me when I looked at skeletons, galaxies in astrophysical tomes, pictures of reconstructions of the monstrous extinct saurians of the Mesozoic, and many-colored human brains in anatomical handbooks. Perhaps these external circumstances — these impulses and sensuous impressions — helped to shape my sensibility. But that is only speculation.
I not only imagined fantastic kingdoms and domains but also made inventions and mentally created prehistoric animals unheard of in paleontology. For instance, I dreamed up an aircraft shaped like a giant concave mirror, with a boiler situated in the focus. The circumference of the mirror was studded with turbines and rotors to provide lift, as in a helicopter, and the energy for all that was to be derived from solar radiation. This unwieldy monstrosity was supposed to fly very high, far above the clouds, and, of course, only during daytime. And I invented what had already existed for a long time without my knowing it: the differential gear. I also drew many funny things in my thick copybooks, including a bicycle on which one rode moving up and down, as on a horse. Recently, I saw something like this imaginary bicycle somewhere — it may have been in the English periodical New Scientist, but I am not quite sure.
I think it is significant that I never bothered to show my designs to other people; indeed, I kept them all secret, both from my parents and from my fellow pupils, but I have no idea why I acted in this way. Perhaps it was because of a childish affection for the mysterious. The same was the case with my "passports"— certificates and permits that, for instance, allowed one to enter subterranean treasure troves. I suppose also that I was afraid to be laughed at, for, although I knew that these things were only a game, I played it with great seriousness. I divulged something of this childhood world in the book that I have already mentioned, The High Castle, but it contains only a small part of my memories. Why only a small part? I can answer such a question at least partly. First, in The High Castle I wanted to transport myself back into the child that I had been, and to comment on childhood as little as possible from the position of the adult. Second, during its gestation period the book generated a specific normative aesthetic similar to a self-organizing process, and there were certain memories that would appear as dissonances in this canon. It was not the case that I intended to hide certain things because of, say, a feeling of guilt or of shame but, rather, that there were memories that would not fit into the pattern that I presented as my childhood. I wanted — something impossible to attain — to extract the essence of my childhood, in its pure form, from my whole life: to peel away, as it were, the overlying strata of war, of mass murder and extermination, of the nights in the shelters during air raids, of an existence under a false identity, of hide-and-seek, of all the dangers, as if they had never existed. For, indeed, nothing of this had existed when I was a child, or even a sixteen-year-old high-school boy. I gave an indication of these exclusions in the novel itself. I do not remember exactly where, but I signaled that I had to or wanted to keep certain matters out by dropping a parenthetical remark that every human being is able to write several strikingly different autobiographies, according to the viewpoint chosen and the principle of selection.
The meaning of the categories of order and chance for human life was impressed upon me during the war years in a purely practical, instinctual manner; I resembled more a hunted animal than a thinking human being. I was able to learn from hard experience that the difference between life and death depended upon minuscule, seemingly unimportant things and the smallest of decisions: whether one chose this or that street for going to work; whether one visited a friend at one o'clock or twenty minutes later; whether one found a door open or closed. I cannot claim that in following my instinct for self-preservation I always employed a minimax strategy of extreme cautiousness. To the contrary, I exposed myself to danger several times — occasionally when I thought it necessary but in some cases through mere thoughtlessness, or even stupidity. So that today, when I think of such idiotically reckless patterns of behavior, I still feel wonder, mingled with bewilderment, about why I acted as I did. To steal ammunition from the so-called Beutepark der Luftwaffe (the depot where the German Air Force stored its loot) in Lvov and to turn it over to somebody totally unknown to me — somebody of whom I knew only that he was a member of the Resistance — I considered to be my duty. (I was in a position to do so since, as an employee of a German company, I had access to this depot.) But when I was instructed to transport something — a gun, in this case — from one place to another just before curfew, and was told, strictly, not to use the tram (I was supposed to walk), it happened that I nevertheless disobeyed the order and climbed onto the footboard of a tram, and that a "Black One"— a Ukrainian policeman who was a member of the auxiliary police of the German occupational forces — jumped onto the footboard behind me and put his arm around me to reach for the door handle. It could have meant an ill end for me if the policeman had felt the gun. My act was insubordination, thoughtlessness, and folly all in one, but I did it anyway. Was it a challenge to fate, or only foolhardiness? Up to this day, I am not sure. (I am better able to understand why I visited the ghetto several times — risky though this was — when it was open to visitors. I had friends there. As far as I know, all, or nearly all, of them were transported to the gas chambers of Belzec in the fall of 1942.)
At this point, the question arises whether what I have reported so far is relevant at all, in the sense of having any direct, causal relationship to my profession as a writer, or to the kind of writing I have done — excluding, of course, autobiographical works like The High Castle. I believe that such a causal relationship exists — that it isn't mere chance that I attribute in my work such a prominent role to chance as the shaper of human destiny. I have lived in radically different social systems. Not only have I experienced the huge differences in poor but independent, capitalist (if one must call it that) prewar Poland, the Pax Sovietica in the years 1939–41, the German occupation, the return of the Red Army, and the postwar years in a quite different Poland, but at the same time I have also come to understand the fragility that all systems have in common, and I have learned how human beings behave under extreme conditions — how their behavior when they are under enormous pressure is almost impossible to predict.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Microworlds"
by .
Copyright © 1984 Harcourt Brace & Company.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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