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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
After graduating from Harvard with a degree in English in 1954 and a degree in law in 1959, Louis Begley began a career as a lawyer with the firm Debevoise and Plimpton in New York City, specializing in international corporate law.(1) Belatedly, Begley published his first novel, Wartime Lies, in 1991. Making up for lost time, he has completed three other novels in quick succession: The Man Who Was Late (1993), As Max Saw It (1994), and About Schmidt (1996). Lateness in starting a literary career--speech after long silence from a Polish-born writer who witnessed the arrest and deportation of European Jews--attests to the difficulty of finding the appropriate narrative form for atrocity.(2) History intersects individual lives and sunders connections to place, family, past, objects, habits, possessions. Lateness, as a symptom of neurosis, afflicts those who have shed their identities under the pressure of traumatic history and have invented alternative identities that have no reference to the past. Belatedness is itself a sign of trauma, as Sigmund Freud points out in his analysis of the "latency" period that sometimes follows an accident or an act of violence; the shock of the episode registers on the trauma victim, but the effects of trauma manifest themselves over time, as "severe psychical and motor symptoms": nightmares, repetition compulsions, or silence. Freud views the compulsion to repeat and the constant return to fresh experience of the traumatic episode as "an attempt at cure" (23: 67, 77). Repetition itself does not cure, but transmission of traumatic experience and the listener's obligation to hear can establish human connections which have otherwise been disintegrated by violence and forgetting. Trauma, as represented in The Man Who Was Late, requires a witness who can validate the story of violent occurrence by listening. Construed sometimes as the "enigmatic figure of the survivor" who develops a narrative for catastrophe (Berger 571), and sometimes as a therapeutic listener who assembles "trauma fragments" into coherence for the haunted trauma victim (Felman and Laub 85), the witness may experience trauma firsthand or at a remove. The Man Who Was Late enacts a circumstance of witnessing that is flawed, but the inadequacies of the designated witness may permit the working through of a trauma that would otherwise remain unarticulated.
Begley's novels exemplify delay. Wartime Lies, a novel unusual in its recording of an experience of the Holocaust as avoidance of the concentration camps, is narrated by an older man named Maciek who looks back as a survivor at his younger self and thus breaks the silence of his traumatized youth. A resourceful aunt narrowly avoids being sent to the concentration camps in wartime Poland by obtaining "Aryan papers" for herself and her nephew (58). Feeling "shame at being alive" and incapable of entirely calculating "the price to be paid for his sort of survival," Maciek nevertheless becomes a witness to his own past as a repetition and acknowledgment of a trauma survived and told (1, 3).(3) Although painful silences figure ominously in Wartime Lies, it is Begley's second novel that addresses belatedness as an aspect of character and contemporary culture without specific reference to the Holocaust. In The Man Who Was Late, belatedness is the postponed apprehension of the spiritual and personal dimensions of history, and not the material predicament of catching a train on time or being in the right place at the right hour. As a post-Holocaust novel that defies being one, The Man Who Was Late preserves silence about historical catastrophe. That silence is a symptom of trauma. Ben, the protagonist, tardily grasps the dilemma of fabricating an identity in which fine manners, deception, and erudition turn into pathologies that repress everything that has disappeared. Whereas Maciek in Wartime Lies suffers shame, Ben in The Man Who Was Late suffers defilement. Lacking connection to the world, Ben creates relationships that humiliate him and his partners. This defilement of human attachments--with his wife Rachel, with his Wednesday afternoon mistress Dolores, with his long-term mistress Veronique, and, to a small degree, with his friend Prudence, wife of his best friend, to whom he casually lies--results from Ben's sense of unworthiness. No one sees the remarkable transformations of Ben's character from refugee to international financier, because he wishes to disavow his Jewishness. Lacking witnesses who can verify his success, he has no sense of worth and certainly cannot conceive of himself as successful on any front, despite ostensible success on all fronts. Without witnesses, he cannot see himself and, imagining himself unworthy, devalues those who associate with him. Witnessing in The Man Who Was Late is therefore necessary to narrative, and to survival, as a possible reversal of trauma.
Delay is built into the first sentence of The Man Who Was Late, as if the syntax will never reach its final period where the meaning of lateness will be fully disclosed: "It was a paradox, of which Ben over the years became fond, that he, ostensibly the most punctual and reliable of men, should have been late in the major matters of existence, that he always somehow missed his train" (3). The sentence twists through three relative clauses before it concludes on a point of denial. Punctuality and reliability in matters of schedule are here refuted as having any consequences; Ben's lateness is existential. The syntax--the concatenation of ideas in a logical, comprehensible order--is segmented, rationalized, delayed, and almost overturned before the problem of lateness is disclosed as a problem of Ben's miscomprehension of his identity, which is a self-generated illusion. He does not understand himself. He does not understand the major matters of existence because they remain beyond his ken as transparent illusions, or because they are encoded as too traumatic to be assimilated.
If any doubt about the meaning of lateness remains ambiguous in this sentence, the narrator, Jack, clarifies throughout the initial chapter of The Man Who Was Late that Ben rigorously abides by his schedules. Keeping up the sterling American tradition established by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, and perpetuated by Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby as well as Wilbur in Charlotte's Web, Ben orders his life with meticulous attention to the division of hours and duties. The authentic American balances the demands of labor to earn money against the demands of study to enrich the mind. The schedule measures progress, or seems to, since the schedule can be held up as an indication that certain tasks have been accomplished, that the scheduler has fulfilled all self-assigned obligations. Whereas Jack's desk calendar sits accusingly "blank" from one week to the next, Ben's has so many entries that he can find time to meet for conversation and lunch only once a month (3). "When each segment of time has been taken up and accounted for, where do you find time for friendship?" Begley asks in an essay on demands imposed on his time ("Time" 158). The oversegmentation of Ben's hours justifies itself as work done. The schedule asserts itself as an American imperative to pencil in commitments pending further notice, which, for Ben, means booking appointments in order to avoid self-examination.
Paradoxically, The Man Who Was Late suspends strict adherence to a set schedule toward the end of the narrative to prove that Ben's lateness has nothing to do with the rationalization of time but everything to do with the cultural catching up that he feels he must accomplish. In negotiations, Ben prefers "to have no schedule at all" (226) in order to win concessions from clients, because the pretense of time without deadlines makes opponents believe that every point will be dully argued and time will be squandered to no purpose. It is a tactical deception. In his personal and professional life, Ben temporizes because he requires the sensation of freedom without the obligations that freedom imposes; inversely, he gives the appearance of freedom in order to deceive others about his commitments, yet multiplies his obligations for the sole reason of feeling human attachments. He "can't bear freedom," he confesses (34). Beyond the realm of contractual and scheduled necessities, the realm of freedom, like the Kantian domain that exists beyond the domain of stringent necessity, would permit self-examination and the disclosure in Ben of spiritual barrenness and loneliness.4 He acknowledges that he is "barren, dark, and desperate" and compares himself to Milton's Satan (154, 193). Cut adrift from parents, from marriage, from business contacts, Ben has no identity beyond the assertion of obligations. Freedom seems, to him, a void. Freedom threatens him because it intimates that a world without any connection whatsoever and without any exigent responsibility exists just beyond contractual obligations. Complete liberty would require that he face his intolerable, empty past. Despite his abhorrence of freedom, after he sees a picture of Willy Brandt "kneeling at the monument to the dead of the Warsaw ghetto," he scans the telephone directory for his own and other Jewish names that, in their transliteration out of Polish or other languages, become signs of Ben's connection to an identity that he has otherwise renounced (150)....
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