At a Safe Distance

...Hartley's Edwardian novel The Go-Betweenabout the irradiating consequences of an illicit tryst that the now grown-up narrator unwittingly helped to facilitate as a child...

...These days, of course, we are all postmodern and understand in our bones that memory is a fitful construct-that our recollection of a fateful moment, no matter how well we tell it, will never match up with, say, our brother's version...

...In one sentence Hartley says everything there is to say about the inherent limitations of the reconstructive process writers employ while trying to make sense of the largely unyielding pastness of thepast...

...The unstated but implicit enigma at the heart of this "ancient and obscure saga," of course, is not Ben Lowell in any of his guises...

...Ben himself, though, never really comes alive, never gives off larger sparks...

...An odd disclaimer, since Lelyveld, who rose from being a copyboy at the Times to a star foreign correspondenthe wrote a superb book about South Africa, Move Your Shadow-to foreign editor before becoming the top banana in 1994 with a seeming lack of guile or even much in the way of Sammy Glickish ambition, clearly does not lack for discipline...

...I can only go at things episodically, telling stories but not the whole story...

...Yet even given the undeniably subjective nature of the whole impulse, one expects a certain feigned bravura from people who set about the autobiographical enterprise: I am the author of my own life and this is how I choose to tell it-that sort of swagger...

...And if the latter, had he operated as a kind of glorified groupie on behalf of Communist Party agitprop-"a small cog in some propaganda machine"-or had his involvement been on the highest levels of espionage...

...Lelyveld requests FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act, contacts archivists and libraries, looks up childhood friends...

...The past is never dead," he ruefully noted...

...By phone, e-mail and personal visits he also energetically contacts far-flung sources, including a society hostess who knew both Ben and, farmore intriguingly, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald...

...Lelyveld may have been a "well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed youngster," as he somewhat officiously puts it, sounding momentarily like the proud director of an orphanage, but he clearly did not fare as well in the emotional nurturing department...

...Lelyveld pursues the faintest of connective links that might help him unravel the stated mystery at the heart of Omaha Blues-which is a sphinx wrapped in a riddle named Ben Lowell, "the closest adult friend of my boyhood...

...the sun was shining...

...it is the endlessly absorbing mystery of family dynamics-especially the sense of isolation that unhappy families can often breed...

...The sorrows of childhood abide with us, no matter how we grit our teeth and get on with life...

...Although American practitioners of the genre have tended to a more full-blooded approach, a few-Geoffrey Wolff, Joan Didion, Paula Fox-have successfully made this elliptical style their own...

...Omaha Blues is a worldly, graceful book...

...Was Ben merely a "na??ve and infatuated Russophile," the victim of McCarthyite witch-hunting on the part of an insecure and defensive Jewish community, or was he a bona fide secret agent, a traitor to his country...

...Still, under the "whining antinostalgia" of Omaha Blues there is an abiding feeling of hurt, of childhood grievances neither fully articulated nor fully relinquished...

...With this one shrewdly diffident stroke, Lelyveld puts the reader on notice that there will be a circularity to the events recalled, a recursive thematics in the form of "a particular circuit of memories that I feel driven to retrace and connect, where possible, to something like an objective record or the memories of someone else, in hopes of glimpsing what was once real...

...As if that were not signal enough to the determinedly indeterminate disposition of his book, Lelyveld also early on cites Holroyd's memoir as being one he admires: "I tip my cap to him," he writes...

...I'm a reporter, not a biographer...

...I may share hisneed,"he points out, "but lackhis discipline...

...All this is in aid of discovering whether the 46-year-old "husky, broad-shouldered man with crinkly good looks and expressive blue eyes that didn't look away"-who displayed "an inexplicable readiness to spend afternoons and evenings accompanying an 11- (later 12-) year-old sports fanatic to ballgames"was really, as rumor and his aborted careers as a congregational rabbi and a Jewish organization man had it, a Communist working for the Soviets...

...His beautiful and vital mother is self-absorbed and psychologically fragile...

...But I wished for a little less protective carapace and abit more emotional courage on Lelyveld's part...

...arguing that America was the aggressor in the Korean War), or because he was a front man for the KGB...

...there is a great deal to admire in it and to be moved by...

...Because he is of consuming interest to the narrator-who, in turn, is of consuming interest to us-we remain glued to the details of Ben's haphazard, feckless life: his move to Los Angeles, where he briefly sells shoes to "poor Negro and Mexican children who haven't the money to buy stockings" before finding a second wife and employment as a distributor of Soviet films...

...moment when the writer figures out with a magnificent and unerring display of retrospective insight that the butler did it...

...Maybe next time around he will shed some of his newspaper man's "carry on" mentality and borrow some of the novelist's immersion in the muck and mire...

...author, "Enchantment," "Dreaming of Hitler" The past is a foreign country...

...The youngest of their three sons, we discover late in the book, is the product of an affair between the mother and Maurice Valency, a Renaissance scholar and "man of the theater") The summer following his sixth birthday, in what turns out to be the first of several such temporary placements, Lelyveld is "abruptly exiled" to a small farm in Tekamah, Nebraska, hundreds of miles from his home in Omaha...

...We are never quite sure where Ben stood in the Communist heirarchy, but we learn a lot about him along the way: He had "a small scar on his upper lip," he assumed different identities under different names, he was a member of the first graduating class of rabbis from Stephen S. Wise's Jewish Institute of Religion, he married twice and fathered two daughters, and he was described by other adults as "magnetic" and "a charmer...

...Among other things, Lelyveld's is too guarded and unintrospective a sensibility to indulge in finger-pointing at parents no longer around to defend themselves...

...then his final retreat to Havana...

...In Omaha Blues Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of the New York Times and thus something of a paradigmatic American presence, has written the most British of memoirs...

...He gamely pores over the driest sounding circumstantial material-old court documents and temple board minutes, an unpublished memoir found in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art, a short-lived newspaper called the Harlem Liberator...

...Getting on with life' became a slogan of my inner monologues...

...Or, in what proves to be, albeit complexly, the case, that the parents didn ?? do it...

...An overly tentative and buttoned-up memoirist seems a contradiction in terms, a bit like a reluctant hooker-except that the English, trained in the gifts of demurral and understatement as they are, have made a shining art of the tight-lipped life story, one that depends on lapses and gaps as much as on revelations and connections...

...There will, in other words, be no reassuring "aha...

...the war was about to start...

...His mother spends that summer in Manhattan with his younger brother, having decided to take refuge from her resented life as a rabbi's wife in provincial Omaha by pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University...

...it felt like that...

...In fact, his memoir is something of a tribute to his exhaustive ability to track down leads and follow up on hunches like the supremely gifted journalist he was and is...

...Meanwhile, the boy whose father characterized him at age 16 as "taciturn and reserved" grows up into an adult who has learned to hold his parents "at a safe distance," the better to realize his own potential...

...his return to New York to work for Arthur Lelyveld...

...There are any number of fine examples from across the Atlantic one can point to, including Frank Kermode's wittily titled Not Entitled, Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, Michael Holroyd's Basil Street Blues, Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost, and going slightly further back, Henry Green's Pack My Bag...

...Indeed, the fallibility of individual memory as a narrative guide-the way it is forced to assume the role of a confident onlooker when it is actually more of an unreliable witness-puts us in a bind, gasping for a psychological foothold...

...Lest one have any misconceptions about the nature of his claims, he pre-emptively announces the hesitant and inconclusive character of his account by appending to it the subtitle "A Memory Loop...

...It doesn't matter...

...Did, that is, Arthur Lelyveld, the author's father, a prominent Reform rabbi who was then director of the nationwide campus Hillel Foundation, fire Ben, his assistant in 1950, because he had "a long history of taking defiantly and loudly unpopular views" (speaking out from his first and only pulpit at a temple in Montgomery, Alabama in the early '30s on "the Negro question...

...The dynamics here are wounding and invariably complicated, yet the damage they inflict is heroically underplayed...

...defending the Nazi-Soviet pact...

...The author intrigues in part because his tone of ironic, even ruthless detachment periodically threatens to break out of its confines and scoop up the wistful kid with blond curls he once was, "running up a slight slope, through high grass, on a summery day calling, 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy...

...He was first encountered in the summer of 1948 and last seen in a hospital room in March of 1953, "a week or two after the death of Stalin" and three months before Ben's own death, when the author was a high school junior...

...In conjecture begins accountability, or at least the stuff of novels and memoirs...

...they do things differently there...

...This observation, as wry as it is elegant, opens the underrated British writer L.P...

...After a rapturous beginning, the couple suffers through 17 years of an ill-suited union before getting divorced...

...Shedding was an acquired skill, a way of getting on with life, which was what you had to do, I later told myself, once you closed your mind to the possibilities of therapy...

...his "unfailingly loving" father is bewilderingly distant...

...For the next few months he lives with a family of Seventh Day Adventists, helping out with the daily chores like a regular farmboy...

...Then, being the kind of aggressively unpushy guy he is, Lelyveld immediately goes on to disqualify himself as a player in Holroyd's literary league...

...It's not even past...

...Even unsentimental, harddrinking William Faulkner knew that...

...So we look to pin down our floating, insubstantial emotional recall with the heft of ascertainable fact, the texture of physical detail, the better to be able to say: It happened there...