The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Innocence infected by evil
intrigued by voodoo. Steinbeck and his wife appeared to be always on the move, changing homes and cities, and that’s a metaphor for this book, which skims the surface of a life. We are told about the homes in New York and Mexico, what they liked to eat and drink, and a succession of intensely dull stories.
Conger mentions Steinbeck beginning work on his novel Cannery Row, for example, but, rather than offer an insight into what inspired him, she reveals the type of coffee he liked to drink while writing and the preparation time for his favourite Mexican chilli. “John did not talk to me about Cannery Row, but of all his writing this was his great fascination. He did not have to research – he had lived there for so long.” As if we couldn’t have guessed.
What the book does, however, is prompt questions. Why did Steinbeck ask his new wife’s mother to live with them in New York when he didn’t like her? Why did he leave his new wife to enlist?
And how could he walk out the door one day in 1943, leaving her and their two sons, without so much as a kiss on the cheek?
The rat, says Conger, was a major feature in Steinbeck’s life. After it died,
she writes, “That was the only time I ever saw John Steinbeck cry. He never cried for me. He never cried for anybody.” But why was that? We are never told her thoughts, which leaves the reader feeling frustrated at a doormat of a woman. And a confusing writer. She says Steinbeck told her he had been faithful while serving in the Forces, then adds that he once wrote to her from Italy: “I was horny and slept with a woman and stole her perfume bottle and I’m sending it to you.”
She reveals he once tried to kick her down the stairs of their New York apartment and seemed only interested in sex when drunk. “But I still loved him. I always will.”
Steinbeck died in 1968, and by the end of this book it was hard to care less, so reductive had been the effect of this memoir. Sadly, there is more to be gleaned about Steinbeck from Steinbeck himself in his Letters: “What an extension of life this pen is. Once it is in my hand, like a wand, I stop being a confused, ugly and gross person.”
THIS is a remarkable first novel. With an extraordinary assurance and innate grasp of form and character, Glenn
Skwerer, a Boston psychiatrist, examines the early life of Adolf Hitler through the presumptive dictator’s friendship with an upholsterer’s son.
Inspired by The Young Hitler I Knew, the memoir by August Kubizek, The Tristan Chord is the testimony of Eugen Reczek, who befriended Hitler when both were teenagers in Linz, lives with him in a pest-ridden flat in Vienna when they were students (Reczek at the conservatoire of music, Hitler in his own mind as art school rejected him) and meets him again after an absence of 30 years when the friend has become the most dangerous man in the world.
The Tristan Chord, from the opening phrase of the prelude to Act 1 of Wagner’s opera, was considered by contemporary critics as a “descent into chaos’’. Reczek believes it creates “a powerful feeling of brooding anticipation, of suspense, of gathering doom’’. It thus in phrase and title serves as a motif for this novel. But Skwerer has done much more than conjure up a Hitler of base emotion and unalloyed evil. He also does not impose his professional parlance, beliefs or theories on a lay audience.
Instead, Hitler emerges as intensely human, severely flawed and deeply troubling but never as a cartoon figure of one-dimensional malevolence. The author knows that to examine Hitler one must admit that he was part of the human race, not separate from it. There is an awful, enduring danger that society regards such men as outside humanity when experience shows they are a regular, dreadful part of it.
“He is difficult and strange and lives in his own head,” says Hitler’s mother to Reczek, thanking him for the friendship shown to her son and warning him of the oddity of a personality that would grow into something of genuine enormity. Hitler is a brooding, frenetic pacer of rooms. An insomniac who is contemptuous of sexual relations, who finds even the most casual contact with other humans to be unsettling, even unwise. “I have myself. I always have myself,” he says in what is meant to be explanation but serves as awful warning.
Skwerer’s most notable achievement, however, is not his reconstruction of Hitler. Biographers such as Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest have done this more comprehensively, with the latter particularly brilliant at illustrating Hitler as a human being with tastes and attributes that fall outside the category of “evil monster”. Skwerer, Kershaw and Fest know the dangers of caricature, that whisper that insists that because of the uniqueness of the perpetrator such horror can never happen again. It can and does.
It is in this examination that the author excels. Subtly, but with growing power, the ability of Hitler to seduce and move an audience becomes obvious and frightening. It starts, though, with Reczek.
The boy from Linz becomes an accomplished musician in Vienna before war and its aftermath intervenes. Intelligent, from a stable family and with artistic sensibility, he is no monster. But he bows to his friend, accedes to his every wish, cowers before his every gesture or sigh. There is undoubted evil in Hitler but others, seemingly far more innocent, are complicit. The dictator’s appetite for power is insatiable but he survives because he has followers. He cannot be him without you or me.
The Tristan Chord is the memoir of Reczek as he faces “de-Nazification” in a camp after the Second World War. He was never a member of the party, he never fired a shot in anger, he was a friend of – indeed a lover of – Jews. Yet he was part of a mass of humanity that saw his friend accede to the most awful power.
Is he an innocent observer? Or can he blamed? He holds on tenaciously to the more comforting of these categories. Yet he has the growing realisation that he has been part of something dreadful. Evil can and does reside in the individual. But The Tristan Chord deftly and persuasively shows this diabolical power is contagious, infecting even those who insist on innocence because their hands are not yet blood-stained.