Reality and imagination revisited, &c.

Benjamin Labatut's blurred lines.

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Last week, out of the blue, I got a very nice email from a stranger who said he planned to feature a paragraph from an essay I’d written for The New Yorker on his website, The Humble Essayist. “I was impressed,” he wrote, “by the way you navigated the tricky mixing of truth and fact seeing both its power to reinvigorate literature and its danger to distort truth at a time when truth is under threat.” At first I thought he must be referring to my recent piece about Peter Handke, in which I worried about Handke’s propensity to do precisely that. But when I looked more closely, I realized the writer meant my essay on Benjamín Labatut’s When We Seek to Understand the World, a fever-dream hybrid of biography and fiction that was a finalist for the National Book Award. When the piece came out, last September, I was preoccupied with a family member’s health crisis and didn’t send a newsletter about it, so I’ll now share a little of what I was thinking as I wrote it.

When my editor sent me an advance copy of Labatut’s book (translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West), a slim paperback heralded as using “the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible,” I was initially puzzled: why this one for me? I don’t usually write about Spanish-language literature and am not exactly a math/science person. Then I opened it. The first chapter, narrated in a melancholic but lucid voice that reads like a cross between W.G. Sebald and Jared Diamond, is a twenty-some-page meditation on the origins of cyanide that flashes from the poison capsules the Hitler Youth distributed at the last performance of the Berlin Philharmonic in spring 1945 back to the grotesque experiments of eighteenth-century alchemists and forward to the creation of Zyklon B. Apparently my editor knows me pretty well.

Blues: Prussian, Phthalo, Indanthrone, Cobalt, Ultramarine. (From The Artist's Magazine, October 2013)

Many readers have wondered about a cryptic comment Labatut makes about that first section. Explaining his methods, he writes:

This is a work of fiction based on real events. The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book; whereas “Prussian Blue” contains only one fictional paragraph, I have taken greater liberties in the subsequent texts, while still trying to remain faithful to the scientific concepts discussed in each of them.

I’m a biographer; nothing could be calculated to drive me crazier than the suggestion that fiction, unmarked, is intermingled with facts in a work, like counterfeit coins among real gold. And yet some of the writers I love most, among them Sebald, use precisely this technique. I started Googling the facts and stories in “Prussian Blue,” each more implausible than the last. And for each I found a source. Those cyanide capsules given out by the Hitler Youth? The SS receiving amphetamines along with their rations? The Swiss dyer named Johann Jacob Diesbach who creates Prussian blue by accident while trying to emulate a ruby red made from crushing insects by pouring potash over “a distillation of animal parts”? Diesbach’s partner in chem, Johann Conrad Dippel, a theologian, philosopher and doctor who was born in the Frankenstein Castle, spent 7 years in prison for heresy and then “renounced all pretense to humanity,” experimented on animals both alive and dead, and claimed to have discovered the Elixir of Life? The tragic figure of Fritz Haber, the Jewish chemist whose discovery of how to synthesize nitrogen from the air paved the way for the creation of poison gas and, eventually, Zyklon B? Check, check, check, check, check.

Frankenstein Castle, outside Darmstadt, Germany. It’s a tourist attraction.

So which is the fictional paragraph? I realized it had to be the last one, which is set off from the rest of the text with a section break and ventures into new territory:

Among the few possessions Fritz Haber had with him when he died was a letter written to his wife. In it, he confessed that he felt an unbearable guilt; not for the part he had played, directly or indirectly, in the death of untold human beings, but because his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium of the planet that he feared the world’s future belonged not to mankind but to plants, as all that was needed was a drop in population to pre-modern levels for just a few decades to allow them to grow without limit, taking advantage of the excess nutrients humanity had bestowed upon them to spread out across the earth and cover it completely, suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure.

The connection between genius and disaster is the tortured through-line with which Labatut connects these great minds. What happens, he asks, once we become aware of the enormity of the destruction that humankind is capable of inflicting on the world? Are our brains wired to cope with that fatal understanding?

It’s not at all clear that the figures whom Labatut examines—in addition to Haber, they include mathematicians Alexander Groethendinck and Shinichi Mochizuki, and physicists Karl Schwarzschild and Werner Heisenberg—contemplated these questions, at least not in the way he describes. As Sebald once said about his own forays into fiction, the facts just need a little nudge to take on the meaning the text requires. Heisenberg’s own uncertainty principle functions as a metaphor for the inability of the writer—novelist or biographer—to grasp with any certainty the facts of the past. And if that’s the case, then isn’t fiction as plausible a method as history (so Labatut seems to be arguing) for describing people’s lives? As I wrote:

There is liberation in the vision of fiction’s capabilities that emerges here—the sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men. But there is also something questionable, even nightmarish, about it. If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true? In the era of fake news, more and more people feel entitled to “make our own reality,” as Karl Rove put it. In the current American political climate, even scientific fact—the very material with which Labatut spins his web—is subject to grossly counter-rational denial. Is it responsible for a fiction writer, or a writer of history, to pay so little attention to the line between the two?

As faithful readers will recall, I’ve been preoccupied with this problem as a literary critic since A Thousand Darknesses, my book about Holocaust literature, which came out in 2010. Writing biography seems to have made me only less certain about where, if anywhere, to draw those lines.

What I’m reading

It’s not up yet, but I’ve got a piece in the next issue of The New York Review of Books about The Betrayal of Anne Frank, the book about the “cold case” investigation that purports to have determined the identity of the person who alerted the SS to the presence of people hiding in the Secret Annex. Like a number of others—the Dutch publisher pulled the book, although it’s still available in the U.S. and Germany—I have my doubts.

Where I’ll be

On May 12, at the Leo Baeck Institute (virtually), I’m moderating a conversation on family Holocaust memoir with Helen Epstein and Ariana Neumann. Sign up here.

For those who haven’t gotten to The Books of Jacob yet: on May 15, I’ll be leading a discussion group as part of Portland State University’s “Everybody Reads” event. Sign up here.

From the Shirley Jackson files

A house with supernatural powers; a troubled family; a generational curse. The Haunting of Hill House or Encanto? If you’re a horror fan whose child, like mine, can’t stop singing “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” you might enjoy this.

As ever,

Ruth

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream.”—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House