Where Survival Is at Stake

...For Busch memory is always a unique and virtually indescribable element of personality...

...A Memory of War is an exercise intended to prove Alex wrong...

...It is an exploration-using domestic details to perfection-of the difficulties inevitably caused by such analysis...

...In one of his sessions with Alex, William announces that he is writing "a memoir...

...The new identity thrills and fascinates him...

...About Des Pres he has declared: "He wrote as if his life were at stake...

...He rejected the contention that imprisoned victims grew anxious about defilement because it was a symbol of larger ills at work...

...Otto, she believes, made it past the horrific scene at the latrine, and managed to will himself a sense of worth in a place "with no dignity...

...He made an impassioned case against the relevance of metaphor...

...Weeping and weak, the man is pushed into the deep shit hole by a vengeful Capo...

...Perhaps he summoned thoughts of Hegel, the most noetic topic Sylvia supposes her lover could ponder while standing before that utter horror, an abstract barrier against drowning in an ocean of excrement...

...Of the father I never knew...

...Only at the end of this passage do we realize that the one person who knows about these scenes is Sylvia, Alex' mother, a Polish exile living in England, where Alex spent his first months of life...

...Once Alex undertakes much-needed analysis, he will begin with the troubling topic of the War, the story's starting place and endpoint...

...so that you may rinse the frail cloth of [your] trousers and sleep a little and wake without having fouled the bed...

...How can you remember what you don't remember...

...One is Nella, whose parents were at Auschwitz...

...This may prompt readers to dislike or distrust Alex' psychological insights-at least until the last page of this beautifully written novel, when Busch persuades us that Alex' entering the burning liaison is in fact a forgivable countertransference...

...They say shit...

...The refusal of the easier escape of submission, Sylvia says, is the essence of being human...

...Alex replies: "Doesn't 'memoir' have to do with memory...

...The analyst thinks she is driven by the need "to be a suitor for [her] father's affections...

...It is not merely a fictional rejoinder to Des Pres' vision of excremental aggression or his refusal to psychoanalyze survivors...

...All life is domestic," Busch recently maintained in a new Introduction to Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, "no matter its political or historical context...

...Through Alex, Busch reports domestic particulars at Auschwitz: "You squat and shit when permitted to...

...All of life, including the new one inside her, is shit...

...Now she must live with the memory of a man she knows only from the tales of an Army buddy trapped in his wartime past...

...Others told of standing knee-deep in waste, waiting to relieve themselves hoping not to fall and sink in the deep, wide ditch bridged only by wobbly planks Yet what was so bold about Des Pres was not his assault on the reader, but his insistence that modern psychotherapy was all wrong about the experience of literal defilement...

...It also enables him to comprehend his own post-Holocaust situation...

...He is himself, after all, the child of survivors...

...Therapeutic models, he strongly implied, cannot explain the many horrors of detainees' lives after release...

...It was the first piece of writing to gather testimonies on the once-taboo topic of living amid the feces that were seemingly everywhere in the camps...

...The details become painfully graphic: Otto squats, and afterward steps back from the pit before falling in...

...As Nella begins therapy with Alex, he recognizes that her father's silence and estrangement sexually tortures her...

...Another consistent fundamental influence is family...

...Unethically, he permits Nella's misguided desire to envelop him...

...The survivor's behavior, he argued, is not, as psychoanalysis would have it, "inherently symbolic...

...It is an "understandable transference," Alex knows, "among the children of survivors...

...You must find enough energy at night...

...Part of what is so good about A Memory of War is, I think, Busch's willingness to grapple with a recollection that cannot be recalled with certainty...

...Where survivors are concerned it is not a form of infantilism, nor a return to the parental scene as a means of working through present (usually familial) problems...

...For years, trying to encourage young creative-writing students to be bolder, Busch told them "something must be at stake" in their writing...

...By allowing Nella to seduce him in place of her father (and not facing up to the complexity of that primal relationship), Alex has cast himself as a Holocaust survivor...

...In War Babies (1989) Hilary Pennels is burdened with her father's military heroism-more important to him, she claims, than his domestic life...

...When Alex drives out of Manhattan to find Nella's father, we journey to the Chenango Valley of upstate New York, real-life site of the Busch-Des Pres convergence (at Colgate University, where they both taught...

...The second is a half brother he did not know about, William-the result of an affair in England between their mother, Sylvia, and a German POW, Otto, who is later caught trying to join the French Resistance...

...In Frederick Busch's new novel, set in 1985 (repeated mention is made of President Ronald Reagan's decision to visit SS graves at Bitburg), a psychotherapist named Alex, himself the wartime child of Jewish escapees from Poland, must interpret the traumas of two patients also affected by the Holocaust...

...Dickens did not give us a book simply about the French Revolution, says Busch...

...The victim "sank, he rose, and then, as if his disappearance was an escape, he stayed under...

...The statements of Gisella Perl, for instance, were quoted at length: In the women's block diarrhea "flooded the bottom of the cages, dripping through the cracks into the faces of the women lying in the cages below, and, mixed with blood, pus and urine, formed a slimy, fetid mud on the floor...

...Frederick Busch read it then, and at least once more a few years later...

...Defilement is defilement...

...If you cannot regulate yourself, you are too ill to work, and then you are selected out, and you are dead...

...If he was not quite tormented, it is clear from the essay about Des Pres included in Busch's collection ? Dangerous Profession (1998) that he continued to grapple with the significance of the scholar's audacious theory of Holocaust survival...

...Like marriage (and infidelity), war is a common theme in Busch's fiction...

...Alex is depressed, too, because he suspects his best friend, a fellow psychiatrist more adept at interpreting neurosis, is having an affair with his wife and his marriage is disintegrating...

...The most shocking chapter in Survivor was "Excremental Assault...

...Another prisoner is not so lucky...

...Reviewed by Alan Filreis Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania IN 1976 Terrence Des Pres published a book entitled Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, which Elie Wiesel rightly called "tormented" and "tormenting...

...Sylvia is given the novel's sole consistentthough not necessarily approved-thesis: This War "is waged upon a world made of shit," or, while pregnant with William: "Life is this, she thinks...

...His reading triggers what Freudians call transference: She comes to sessions having removed her undergarments in the women's bathroom of a restaurant, to "deliver herself to him...

...ironically, in the novelistic act of "tightening] his focus" he opened the lens wider to include "the fate of all humankind...