AN OCCUPIED GENTLEMAN

Books

Louis Begley's life as a distinguished New York lawyer is, in a way, his third, and his semi-autobiographical accounts of the other two have made him one of today's truly compelling Holocaust writers

JOAN JULIET BUCK

Two years ago, Alfred A. Knopf published Wartime Lies, the first-person story of a young Jewish boy who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland with his aunt, thanks to false Aryan papers. Cynthia Ozick called the novel "a virtuoso (and virtuous) accomplishment." The Miami Herald reviewer said, "In the ever-burgeoning field of Holocaust literature, this novel stands out as a masterfully told tale, exceptional in its detailing of everyday life as led by the hunted." The book was nominated for the National Book Award, won PEN'S Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award and the Irish Times-Aer Lingus prize, and two months ago received the French Prix Medicis, beating out Martin Amis's London Fields. It established its author as a cool, effective storyteller who could convey the unimaginable without sentimentality. "WartimeLies," said The Boston Globe, "has a sense of being written from the darkest and most private chambers of a man's heart." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch pointed out that, at the end, "the child grows into manhood deformed by years on the run, knowing full well that he escaped the horror, but he can't free himself from its memory." Which is, of course, the question that remains at the end of Wartime Lies: Whom did this child, called Maciek in the book, turn into, and how did he live through his subsequent years? What became of him, and how gravely did the memory of that wartime injure the rest of his life? This month Knopf brings out the author's second novel, The Man Who Was Late, and it lives up to expectation, for it details exactly how someone re-creates himself to go on living, and what the price is for that re-creation.

Louis Begley, a soft-spoken man who lives on Park Avenue in New York and dresses in invisible gray suits, is senior partner for international law at the firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, which he joined in 1959. An expert in structuring far-flung joint ventures, he prefers to keep away from the sites of the industrial enterprises he makes possible. He says he has never laid eyes on a blast furnace, or the Algerian natural-gas works that kept him busy in the 70s, or the iron mine in Australia that required its own railroad and port. At present he is working on, and keeping away from, the rich deposits of oil and gas off the island of Sakhalin, where the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines' Flight 007 in September 1983. He and his second wife, Anka Muhlstein, have between them five children, all grown; his are a painter, a journalist, and an art historian; hers are a financier and a broadcasting executive. Anka writes historical books in French; her biography of her great-great-grandfather James de Rothschild was translated into English. They have two houses in the Hamptons, an agreeable Siamese cat, and a social bearing that makes people who do not know them see them as regal. He is a fulfilled and contented man, and a lucky one. The only time he was ever beaten as a child was when his parents placed him in a particularly rough high school on New York's Upper West Side. Until then, his experience of personal aggression had been confined to the hours he spent trapped in an alleyway by a sniper's bullets during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. That was in another life.

"It seems to me that all men are bom actors," Louis Begley wrote at 15. "They find it easier to repeat thoughts not their own, than to be themselves even for a short time. Of course, it is easier and more pleasant to be someone else."

By that time he was already into his third life. The first, "a very short life," as the privileged, spoiled only child of a wealthy Jewish couple in the Polish town of Stryj, came to an end when he was nine and went into hiding in boardinghouses across Poland with his mother. His father's parents were shot by the Germans. His father, a physician in the Polish army, had been sent east and was marooned in Samarkand by the Soviets for the duration of the war. He found his wife and son when he returned to Poland, and in 1947, Dawid, Franciszka, and little Ludwik Begleiter arrived in New York, where they became Edward, Frances, and Louis Begley. The family's first address was the vast Empire Hotel at the junction of Broadway and Columbus Avenue. The other boys in the rough West Side high school objected to Louis's accent, and were moved to violence by the plus fours he wore, considered chic in Poland but way out-of-date in New York.

The family moved to Brooklyn, where the child improved his English at an astonishing rate and distinguished himself at Erasmus Hall High School. He was immediately one of the best pupils in the English class taught by a Miss Batchelor. But: "My first sense was utter despair. I did not understand how I could live in this world. Everybody seemed to be moving so much faster than I was, they knew about things I didn't know, they were playing sports I didn't know how to play. I was consumed by sexual longings and stifled by my parents and their constant obsessive need for my presence, for my affection. My father got his medical license very quickly, and it all started up again—but I could see them as lost in this meaningless borough and lost in this meaningless world. They would drive into New York to go to theater and concerts, and I would go with them; it was all so forlorn, and it felt so hopeless. The meaninglessness of the activity and its isolation from what they might have had as a life had their lives progressed warless. This sense of being lost in a sea of strangeness and difference, the absence of real affective links to anybody except me."

He never spoke about his wartime experiences. "I began by writing little stories about my experiences in Poland"— some were published in the school magazine—"but I got very sick of it. It was a dead world, I thought, a dead experience, and I wasn't interested in that.

. . .1 saw there were people here who were making a profession out of those years. I saw people continuing their refugee, displaced-person existences; that was their occupation. I wanted to go forward." He applied to Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. The interview at Princeton, with a dean who was deaf, was a disaster; the soft Begley voice was below the man's register. Columbia was local and therefore not desirable. Harvard came through with a scholarship.

i was consumed by sexual longings and stifled by my parents and their constant obsessive need for my presence, for my affection "

Begley arrived at Harvard in "a Rogers Peet costume" and bonded with his roommate, who, like him, was younger than the rest of the class. He published three or four short stories in The Harvard Advocate, and in his sophomore year took his last creative-writing course. "I read a story in class, and quit. I came to the conclusion that I had nothing to say. I felt I didn't know anything beyond my Polish experience well enough to write about it. I didn't know what a family was in this country, or about how they lived, or anything about the New World. ... I felt I needed to have an experience that was like everybody else's; I felt there was nothing that came before that was useful, usable. ... I stopped writing and soon constructed a life for myself in which there was no time for anything except life. I thought if I could just soak up enough experiences, if I could spend enough long nights doing this or that, enough time with the people I most wanted to resemble, somehow whatever was in me that was immutably wrong, wrong and disgraceful, would be changed into this happier, more sunlit, more acceptable material."

Begley's self-consciousness about fitting in forms the subtext of The Man Who Was Late. Ben, the main character, is known only by scattered notes and letters, and is seen principally through the eyes of a writer friend named Jack. Another, vaporous narrative voice says of Ben, "His accent had an overlay of strangeness of which he was always aware; it would glide out of control until, dry mouthed, he listened to his own words with panic, waiting for their end." A little later: "After all, was he not, although perhaps the youngest and least well prepared, at the head of his college class, and had not he won his place effortlessly, without care or plan, while the struggles of those happier classmates, rich with memories of golden summers, purchased mediocrity?. . .The storehouse of all the shame and vulnerability in his life would be locked; a private museum of curios with but one visitor, himself, to stare at the degraded and rejected lares and penates. Only new acquisitions and artful forgeries would be on show. Clothes make a man and, with even greater power, so do lessons learned in the right sort of childhood. Within the limits of verisimilitude, he would have both; to his own skill he foresaw no limit."

Begley's focus as a writer has moved from a time and a place that have become a standard model for tragedy to the subtler tragedies of an outsider with a past, trying, and failing, to fit in. Ben, an international banker, whose story takes place in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Rio, is a dandy. He has a fractious tailor and a constant awareness of what he is wearing. Two cashmere sweaters have a particular significance in the narrative. Clothes are costume.

Louis Begley is so exceptionally softspoken that you have to strain to hear his words, which come out in perfectly composed sentences. The occasional French word surfaces; it is not his first or even his second language, but he speaks it at home with Anka, and much of his mode of thought and expression seems informed by French precision. Only when speaking about his children does he ramble a touch, discipline derailed by affection. Neat, compact, thin, he describes himself as a faux maigre, and insists he was a plump child. He is courtly and deferential in the way that only exiles from a better world bother to be; his pace is measured, calm. The single conflict he exhibits is in the contrast between his gray business suits and the alarmed ice blue of his eyes, in which the pupils are very small. There are many survivors of the Holocaust leading ordinary and successful lives in America, but for most the prime identification is with their Jewishness. Louis Begley says, "It would have been more difficult for me to become an American Jew than to say to hell with it, which is what I did. I wasn't terrifically connected to the Jewish aspect. The moving force, for me, was that I could substitute something for the black hole of the past.''

He tried hard to catch up, and succeeded on every level, at the cost, he now says, of "selling my birthright.'' With cool candor, he elaborates: "It's really very hard on a person that age—a child—to be told that actually you are someone who should be exterminated. If you take things seriously, it's not light to be told you should be done away with. That anybody who turns you in is doing a good thing. That you should disappear for reasons that go from 1 to 100. It's an appalling judgment on you, one that has been carried out all around you. Of what value, in contradistinction, were these little memories of Stryj [which is called T. in Wartime Lies], and what did those memories mean when that world had disappeared?

"There is an immense difference in Louis since Anka," says the novelist Francois Nourissier. "I think she gave him back his Jewishness."

"What, culturally, was I? Was I a Jew? Yes, I was a Jew. Why was I a Jew? Because I happened to be bom a Jew, and therefore I was proscribed. I was a Jew because I could be identified as such in a physical examination. Did being a Jew bring me something that was comforting or strengthening? No. It meant nothing to me. First danger, then a sense of being honor-bound to state it. In the most elemental fashion, if someone asks, I say I'm a Jew. Now, that's not a very fantastic thing to build a life upon, right?"

At Harvard, he says, he "discovered a world of subtle pleasures and subtle skills. People who knew how to do all sorts of things, from really knowing history, really knowing Latin, to really knowing music. They had memories that were a continuum, parents who continued to see all sorts of old friends. They had childhoods rich with continuing experiences. At Harvard, I had a happy life of uninterrupted satisfaction at what was happening to me. I had a ball." He talked his way into a class for graduate students on Proust, Joyce, and Mann. He drank too much, played bridge, smoked cigars. He never spoke about his childhood, but derived a secret satisfaction from having as a classmate one Stas Potocki, a member of one of Poland's most aristocratic families. That would never have happened at home, even if there had been no war. Although his father wanted him to be a doctor, the war had left him with an "absolute loathing" for sick people. "I cannot stand feeling pity, and around sick people I feel that pity very strongly; it's too much. I cannot take people's sorrow lightly. It makes me very nervous." Medicine was therefore out. In his senior year he directed three plays by Yeats, which he describes as "really quite a splendid event."

Professor James Chace remembers the Harvard Louis Begley, who was a year behind him, as "very quiet and watchful. He was deliberate in his speech, weighing things carefully. Sixty percent of the students still came from private schools; there was a dominant preppy ethos. There are two parts to Louis: the aesthete and the person who wants to be accepted. He's very brilliant, but what is most remarkable is the degree to which he succeeded in fitting in."

From The Man Who Was Late: "One surmised that he had quietly put himself through a crash course in living the good life—good above all in its difference from the one in which he had feared he might be confined." The dread with which Begley viewed his parents' lives in Brooklyn has an echo in the book, where Ben's parents have "thin days dragging on in that decaying place until some final bad end, ' ' but the place is Jersey City instead of Brooklyn. While he was at Harvard, Begley participated in a drug experiment at Massachusetts General to earn some cash. During the experiment, he found himself unable to free-associate on the word "trap." It's a little facile to think of the trap as the cage of diminished circumstances; it might also be the trap of common mortality, from which glamour is one of the escapes.

Begley was one of two summa cum laude English majors to graduate from Harvard in 1954. The other was John Updike. Begley was interested in literary theory, but did not get the Rhodes scholarship he wanted. Instead he volunteered for the draft and went ' 'to occupy Germany." He proceeded in the manner of a 19th-century cavalry officer: he took riding lessons at an old-fashioned riding school and hired a tutor to teach him German. He enjoyed "tearing through German towns at great speed in my jeep with my helmet on, fantasizing about being a conqueror. But the main feeling was a sense of great detachment."

The tutor taught him German by reading Goethe's Faust. "He was a man with a missing arm who always told me he'd spent his time on the Eastern Front. I didn't tell him I'd also spent my time on the Eastern Front."

He didn't tell him that he was Polish, either. "Just an American." Nor did he visit Poland, despite the geographical proximity. In all his travels in subsequent years, he has never returned to Poland. His time in the army was "an unreal life. We were in a place called Goppingen; I became friends with a charming young woman who was head librarian there. She was very musical, and we went to chamber-music concerts. I learned to sail on Lake Constance, where I'd stay in a hotel converted from a villa built for the mistress of a Swedish prince. Each room was named after a composer; I stayed in 'Beethoven.' I skimmed along the surface of things; I did not consider it a time for an excessive introspection. I'd had enough of being locked up with myself over the war years. . . . All I wanted at the end of the war was to sleep, to rest. The fatigue factor was incredibly important. That, and the fear. Four years of playacting: I wanted to be left alone. And the desire I had was to re-create myself."

While he was in Germany, he went to Paris to see a young American woman whom he had known while he was at Harvard. Here his locutions grow even more formal: ''I undertook to propose marriage to her. I was astonished—she accepted." Louis Begley and Sally Higginson were married in February 1956, toward the end of his last year in the army. ''This concentrated my mind on what to do next. I had no prospects. She thought well of lawyers and did not think well of college professors, so graduate school and then teaching comparative literature was not good. I applied to Harvard Law School, where I was accepted.

''Harvard Law School was terrifying. I had loved Harvard College and liked my classmates. At the law school they seemed to know everything about bonds and stocks. I was unsettled there at first, and then discovered that it was interesting to find out how people are bound by obligations: What creates those obligations? What is their nature? What are their limits? What are the mechanical aspects of society? How is it that one is allowed to do some things and not allowed to do others?' '

He soon had two children; asked how he lived then, he says that he had a small scholarship and the G.I. Bill, and that his first wife had "a fair amount of money." He joined Debevoise & Plimpton after Harvard Law School, and was sent to Paris to represent it there in 1965. He stayed three years. By then he was separated from his wife, and was delighted to find that his office was at 5 Place du Palais Bourbon—above the Vogue photographic studios. Like any other man, he was in heaven hanging out at the corner cafe, Le Bourbon, scoping the models. Directly after the war, when he was 13, his family had lived briefly in Paris. It was the first place he had ever been allowed to be alone, and he had wandered around the city, deliriously happy, peering through magnifying glasses in Pigalle booths at pictures of naked ladies and also at flea circuses. ''My parents paid no attention to me, and for the first time in my life I had no one to tell me what to do every moment. I'd been watched always, always, always—as a child I had nursemaids coming out of my ears, and parents and grandparents. That didn't let up until the Germans came, and then it continued in a slightly lowerclass fashion: no more nursemaids, just my mother. The only thing that could give me away was my circumcision. The whole thing was monstrous—we were together, my mother and I, every day all the time through those years. And my mother is a very powerful woman."

"It would have been more difficult for me to become an American Jew than to say to hell with it, which is what I did," says Begley.

A friend of his says, ''When anyone spoke about the Holocaust, he'd turn pale and change the subject. We knew he'd had a childhood like Anne Frank's. It was too powerful for him to speak about."

The novelist Francois Nourissier met him in Paris in 1956; Sally Higginson had taken him to meet the Nourissiers. Whereas those who know Begley in New York tend to comment only on his brilliance, erudition, and good manners, seeing him as a generic Old Worlder, Nourissier sees him in greater depth. "He has stayed completely a Central European—there's a certain form of complication. He's without the lightness and frivolity of the French. He's serious, and has a lenteur basse—a low slowness—in the way he expresses himself. His character is one of the roughest and toughest that I know. He can say brutal things. He's got a very difficult personality, touchy, somber, silent. We've had periods of coldness and difficulty."

Over their 36-year friendship, Nourissier has heard him talk about the war only once or twice: "He wasn't the kind of man to whom you said, 'You have to write your story.' The most I knew was from what his mother said, one summer at their house on Long Island, 10 years ago. She was reading Sophie's Choice, and I asked her what she thought of it. 'It doesn't interest me—the author didn't know any of that, ' she said, and then she talked for two hours. Louis was in the city that day, and when he came back I made a point of telling him that his mother had opened up to me about the war. He had trouble talking to me until the end of the holiday."

The Man Who Was Late gives a skimming description of this revulsion: "Telling the story of his life at parties was not Ben's preferred occupation. He decided that the abridged, ironic version would do. As always, it was like hearing another man speak. They said he must write a book; had he read The Painted Birdl Ben replied he had, as soon as it was published; it was one of the reasons why he was proof against literary temptations that might distract him from making money."

Begley read Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird when it came out; a mention of the book immediately leads to his describing how much more Capote's In Cold Blood frightened him, until he is asked for his reaction to Kosinski's autobiographical tale about a Jewish boy in wartime Poland. "I felt, This is overpoweringly good; how did he manage it? I felt I should have made a stab at writing earlier, always earlier. I began to understand myself better as I grew older, and understood how unwilling I had been to risk everything. How unwilling to venture trying to write or to direct theater. I did feel that if I had been situated differently and differently made I would have taken the risk as to whether I had talent. But I was not willing to take any risks."

He was 55 years old when he took a three-month sabbatical from Debevoise & Plimpton. He started the book at his house on Long Island, continued on his Toshiba T1200 word processor at La Fenice hotel in Venice, and completed the manuscript at the Alfonso XIII in Seville. In Paris, he revised the first draft. "I always told him a book took three years to write," says his wife, Anka, who has written six. "I was wrong. It seems it takes three months." Nourissier knew he was writing a book about his childhood, no more. "Everyone said, 'Louis is putting himself through something very rough.' It would not have been right to ask questions." During those three months, Begley was apparently difficult and withdrawn.

Begley says that writing was for him ''the most appeasing thing possible. It's the least sordid occupation in the world, more pleasant than any I have ever encountered. When one thinks about something one is going to write, one operates on a fairly elevated plane of existence; one is concerned with characters, narrative, words. As opposed to wondering whether one was seated appropriately at dinner the night before. It's a magical, elevated activity which calls things forth from inside one that other forms of intellectual activity don't." He contrasts it with the exaltation he has sometimes ''in the practice of law, when one really hits the nail on the head while preparing a brief or a memorandum, when one figures out a contract just right." But as for the effect of stirring up the old darkness, he lets only one or two details through. He says that he made the story up based on what he'd lived so as to have more freedom in the telling, with the result, known to many writers, that he can no longer go back to his past in his head and know what is true and what he made up. The character of the aunt who saves herself and her nephew from capture through guts, guile, and large amounts of cash strapped to her body was based mostly on his mother. ''If you were to take the skeleton of what happens in Wartime Lies—where one goes, how one lives— it would not be an unfair description of what happened to me," he says with full judiciousness. ''We did live in Lvov, and Warsaw, in a succession of rooming houses. As to whether my mother taped money to herself, she probably didn't tell me where she really kept it, and I didn't ask her, because I didn't want to ask her. I didn't want to get into too much reality. I felt if I stuck my finger into historical truth, there would be no end to it. I was truly not interested in writing my souvenirs, so what difference did it make where she kept her money or what street we lived on? That was irrelevant. What was relevant was the truthfulness of my own emotions."

I asked him if he, like Maciek in the book, had a vial of cyanide to take in case of capture. "I will not answer that question," he said firmly.

Wartime Lies ends with these sentences: ''And where is Maciek now? He became an embarrassment and slowly died. A man who bears one of the names Maciek used has replaced him. Is there much of Maciek in that man? No: Maciek was a child, and our man has no childhood that he can bear to remember; he has had to invent one. And the old song is a lie. No matter how long or gaily the music plays, Maciek will not rise to dance again. Nomen et cineres una cum vanitate sepulta. [Name, ashes, and vanity buried together.]"

Asked whether the book changed his life, Begley chooses to respond on an impersonal level. ''It made me some money, not enough to make a real difference, but enough to make me feel better about a few of my habitual extravagances. Presents to my family, things like that. I have a very pleasant standard of living, but no particularly expensive vices. I don't collect things, bet on horses. I don't ski. I go to the tailor just enough to get clothed."

He started The Man Who Was Late before Wartime Lies came out; it took, by his wife's estimation, 50 weekends to write. Ben, his hero, is ''a sort of amputee emotionally. He's very lucid, and his lucidity neutralizes his self-pity." The international investment banker has a beautiful apartment in Paris, a rich Wasp ex-wife, good clothes, and a core that eventually destroys him. His relationship to his background is furtive. In Brazil, Ben goes through the Rio phone book looking for Jewish names. He is, tellingly, sterile. The woman he loves wants to leave her husband for him, and he cannot act on that, but disappears instead to a jungle resort in Brazil with a young blonde prostitute. His final act is to throw himself off the Pont de la Machine into that part of the Rhone River where the water is "an opaque hell."

Begley says that he approves of suicide only "as a way of escaping a fatal and unpleasant illness, or dishonor," but has never felt so wretched that he would contemplate it. "I'd rather have a glass of whiskey," he says. However, he admits to black moods. "Whenever I'm unoccupied I have black thoughts. I see everything that's wrong, every fingerprint on the door, every stain on the wallpaper." He says this in the plain white study of his apartment, where the pencils by the phone are kept in a plain glass tumbler, the shelves are built to hold books and not objects, and a painting by his son dominates the fireplace. His eyes rise to a patch of paint peeling from the ceiling in a comer, right above a tall tuberose plant that fills the room with insistent sweetness.

"Young Louis was more impenetrable," says James Chace. "He's less disguised as he's grown older and more comfortable. The more comfortable he became since his marriage to Anka, the more open and secure he became. His literary success is probably the greatest thing that made him happy, but it doesn't take the place of a private life, just as a rich and full private life doesn't take the place of literary success. He has a genuine achievement in both books. One of the most interesting things about Wartime Lies is its control; he has the power to describe horrifying events with coolness. The Man Who Was Late has enormous control too, exerted by having a transparent narrator. There are almost pornographic descriptions in it, but the eroticism comes from the distancing from his obsession."

"He's not the man that you see," says the writer Linda Wolfe, a highschool friend. "That's what he writes about in both books, and in the short stories he wrote at Erasmus Hall when he was 15. He was already a writer then. The character of Ben, his not being able to feel, made me wonder about Louis's perception of his own ability to feel."

Martha Duffy, the Time writer, who has known him since 1968 and still marvels at how he'd work away at a Polish paperback, determined to keep up with his mother tongue, calls him "not bright, not quick, not clever, but truly brilliant."

Robert Fizdale, the musician and biographer (Misia and The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt, both with his late companion, Arthur Gold), met Begley at Ivan Nabokov's in Paris. "He had such erudition, such a grasp of poetry in all kinds of literatures, that it was dazzling! To my delight I was then introduced to Anka, and realized this was a couple I really wanted to get to know."

Gregor von Rezzori, the Bukovinabom author, met Begley after the latter had read and admired his Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, and became a friend; it was he who handed the manuscript of Wartime Lies to his own editor at Knopf, Elisabeth Sifton. Von Rezzori has a rather more down-home view of him: "We're just two chaps from the neighborhood of Zaleshchiki—though on my side of the border it was called Grigore Ghica-voda."

Anka Muhlstein is an attractive woman with the open face of an intelligent and energetic jeunefille. As contrived as Begley makes Ben's life, as composed as he makes his own seem, she appears spontaneous, studious, and warm. She studied history and geography at the Sorbonne, thought of becoming a librarian but balked at the extra four years of study, and went into publishing. She began writing when she moved to New York, having married Begley in 1974. Francois Nourissier brought them together; he is married to her sister. Their father, Anatole Muhlstein, was bom in the Warsaw ghetto, and became number two at the Polish Embassy in Paris. Which suggests that the Poles were better disposed toward Jews than one imagines, until you learn that the Polish government in exile in Paris in 1940 didn't want him, because he was a Jew. "Neither my father nor my husband ever went back to Poland, and I have never been there," says Anka, who spent the war in New York with her family.

"There is an immense difference in Louis since Anka," says Francois Nourissier. "I think she gave him back his Jewishness. He's different than when he was married to Sally Higginson. Instead of a Wasp, he found himself with a woman who jovially said, 'We're Polish Jews, and that's that.' "

It's hard to reconcile the contented man, secure in his professional success, one half of a happy couple, with the dark introvert of his sometimes convoluted prose. "All serious fiction in this century has elements of self-portrait and elements of confession," he says. His 46 years in America have gone to creating a new man; the effort to reach back below the achievements and the blond veneers of his new life and tell the horrors, the fear, and the compromises he lived as a child was heroic. But one imagines that somewhere the scale of the pain in his first book must have repelled him by its boldness, and that he wanted to create something of a subtler texture, about the tragedy of chilled feelings. In The Man Who Was Late, the hero is at a remove from the reader, described by the Wasp Jack, who says, as he goes through Ben's fragmentary notes, "I cannot dismiss the possibility that, whenever the text was written, he was striking a pose, as he did in so many circumstances, not because he was a poseur but out of discouragement. Ben liked to joke that he was his own invention and therefore never could be certain how he really felt about anything or anybody."