Shhh Read online

  SHHH

  THE STORY OF A CHILDHOOD

  RAYMOND FEDERMAN

  For Simone

  The last Federman

  Introduction

  After the death of Raymond Federman, we always have SHHH

  Davis Schneiderman

  SHHH is a still point.

  SHHH is a silence.

  SHHH: The Story of a Childhood, Raymond Federman’s last new novel, is a silence bequeathed by his mentor Samuel Beckett—even before the creator of Molloy and Malone of Hamm and Clov changed tense in 1989. The works of the two writers, Beckett expatriated to France, and Federman, a generation later, expatriated to America, share the same absurd existential laugh, but also, in SHHH, the same emptiness. Whereas Beckett’s insularity, his cruelty, his end-of-times-in-a-jar inkblot joie de vivre (yes joy!) kept itself hidden within the entropic cylinder of Raymond’s favorite Beckett work, The Lost Ones (1971), Federman’s laughter-ature, his Joycean joco-seriousness, manifests in an alternate vision of literary stillness.

  SHHH, in this regard, is anti-manifest destiny: it’s not a movement toward the frontier, but a movement toward the story that can never be told, but now, at the end of Raymond’s career, must be attempted. From his first novel, Double or Nothing (1971) through the ”sequel” of sorts, Take if or Leave It (1976), through his science fiction, his poetry, his criticism, and his later works which dwell again explicitly on the story of his life told again and again—most recently Aunt Rachel’s Fur (2001), and Return to Manure (2006)—the multi-volume story of the writer Federman as the character Federman (and later Moinous and Namredef and the rest) suggests never the promise of continuity but rather the shock of recognition in the untellable. Federman, a character, introduces himself to us in Double or Nothing as the avant-garde writer, decades after the events of SHHH, involved in absurd typographical gambits.

  Since then, Federman’s work has largely abandoned the typographical pyrotechnics, yet has continued to reject the strain of melodramatic realism that SHHH’s questioning meta-narrative voice repeatedly worries might be attributed to SHHH by the casual reader. Rather, this is a book built on equally evasive anti-qualities—absences and omissions—an incomplete series of vignettes blown apart by the events of a history that can never be told in a straight line. Even the subtitle, “the story of a childhood,” escapes the specificity of the first article. This may be “the” story—but it is only the single story of “a” childhood—one of many possible childhoods that the reader familiar with Federman’s work knows he delights in articulating. It is (the character of) Federman’s childhood yes, but only one version:

  When they said Raymond, I heard my mother say quickly, He’s not here—Federman writes in SHHH—and I know nothing of what happened to Simon, Marguerite, Sarah, and Jacqueline Federman, after the police truck left—Federman writes in SHHH—and I know that they died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Auschwitz that fucking word—Federman writes in SHHH—and Federman... Yes? What? Nothing...—Federman also writes in SHHH.

  SHHH is not then the story of what happened to this character called Federman before his mother pushed him into the closet on July 16, 1942, the day the Gestapo took his parents and his two sisters away and they went to the camps never to return—as it is the story of the word SHHH and what this word on the page might mean when kept like a secret stillness for a lifetime lived after these events. Perhaps it took Federman so long to write this book, a book that moves backwards in time from the story that begins with Double or Nothing with the protagonist(s) in America after the war, because unlike the physical and textual manipulations of the page in that wild novel, SHHH—the word itself—is not an obviously funny word.

  Federman is not writing his way out of the story of his life or finally giving voice to the important events of his boyhood. Rather, in SHHH, Federman is stopping, quieting, creating a final swirl of mad meta-textuality just as Alice upsets the banquet table at the close of her Looking Glass adventure. The power of those two famous Lewis Carroll tales two rests not in their symbolic significance, their literary arabesques, but in their literal and visceral moments. Federman, without stopping, takes us down a rabbit hole and into a looking glass world.

  Stuffing himself on noodles in Double of Nothing, that older Federmanian narrator is like Proust—everything moves out from the tiny closet of his childhood. The world explodes from his typewriter turned at untoward angles. Every syllable speaks in an erotic openness. The Federman of SHHH, younger by decades, moving back to the moment of the closet and the unrelatable swirling cacophony of his early years, professes vignettes that cannot tell us of life before La Grande Rafle in July 1942, but rather, only how emptying a chamber pot, spending a year in Argetan, or being asked to suck his cousin’s cock become defamiliarized in reference to everything that may or may not have happened later.

  Accordingly, the typed manuscript of SHHH is punctuated by odd spaces between paragraphs—wide gulfs in meaning—sometimes even between the start and the close of sentences that seem impossible to finish. Ted Pelton, Raymond’s publisher for this book and his other Starcherone titles (The Voice in the Closet [new edition], My Body in Nine Parts, and The Twilight of the Bums), attributes this to technical glitches caused by Raymond’s word processing program; yet rather than fully “correct” these gulfs, rather than close the spaces between sentences and paragraphs and so reunite the text, we have observed these spaces in large part when they speak to this version of Federman’s story; we have respected the silences the pauses the nothing-points that mean as much in a story such as this one, as their absences, the absences of these absences, might mean in another.

  During our final correspondence, during the summer of 2009, as I began work in earnest on this manuscript, Raymond offered this direction:

  Remember one thing as you read this book

  I do not write to make the reader comfortable

  ....

  Federman writes texts that impose a state of loss that discomforts [perhaps to the point of a certain boredom], (that) unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, (and) brings to a crisis his relation with language.

  He closes the note with this additional warning that a French publisher, (not Les Editions Leo Scheer, the publisher Chut, the pre-“transacted” rather than pre-“translated” version of this edition) wanted him to remove all the pages where the meta-textual voice, rendered in italics, interpolates and criticizes and so undoes the verisimilitude of the work. The publisher’s reason: because these passages may “make the reader uncomfortable.”

  Accordingly, Federman exulted in telling me, and surely others, of many years ago standing outside the SUNY Buffalo office of visiting-writer Anthony Burgess, while the latter spoke to his New York publisher in heated tones and telephonic gesticulation. After pressing the receiver to the cradle, the author of deluded Alex looks pointedly at Federman and proclaims, I’ve done it again...I’ve compromised.

  Whether this happened or not, of course, is far from the point of a Federman story.

  Raymond never compromised. This is not to suggest that he held tight to the core values of his avant-gardism at the expense of possible fame—and that fame, when achieved in this way, entails a series of seemingly innocent but increasingly egregious concessions to mass culture. Rather, Federman’s work, in its levels of pastiche, its layers of irony, and most importantly, its obsessive retelling of the same scenes the same stories the same life over the course of decades, proclaims a anti-Romantic author-centered aesthetic more directly than the most boisterous noise of many of his peers.

  The work is contradictory because writing is always contradictory. Raymond understood that his writing trafficked in contradiction because there i
s simply no other way to tell stories.

  With his death on October 6, 2009, many of us lost a dear friend, while the world lost the most raucous possible laughter and the most eloquent silence.

  List closely to SHHH, and hear the nothingness that the character of Raymond Federman worked so long to finally unwrite.

  I don’t know why I told this story.

  I could just as well have told another.

  Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another.

  Living souls, you will see how alike they are.

  Samuel Beckett

  The Expelled

  Le vent se lève ! ... Il faut tenter de vivre !

  Paul Valéry

  Le cimetière marin

  Shhh.............................................................................................Chut

  SHHH

  I have often told that this shhh was the last word I heard from my mother, on that sad July day, when the door of the closet into which my mother hid me closed.

  Shhh, murmured my mother. And the thirteen first years of my life vanished into the darkness of that third floor closet. Me who was so afraid of the dark when I was a boy, me who did not dare go to the toilet alone in the courtyard because it was so dark, me who trembled with fear when I had to go down into the cellar of the house to get coal for our stove, frightened because of the dark and the rats that scuttled around, me I stayed in the darkness of that closet an entire day and an entire night, lost in incomprehension.

  It took many years for me to understand what my mother meant with her shhh. I can still hear that word in my ear. But I always hear it in French: chut.

  To write shhh falsifies what my mother meant. But since I am writing this version of my childhood in English, I have to practice hearing shhh.

  With that shhh my mother was saying to me: If you keep quiet. If you say nothing. If you remain silent. You will survive.

  Me, at 5:30 in the morning of July 16, 1942, when the French police who were doing the dirty work of the Gestapo came to arrest us because we were Jewish, therefore undesirable, my eyes still full of sleep, I did not comprehend why my mother pushed her half-naked son into the darkness of that closet after having shoved his shorts, his shirt, and his sandals into his arms.

  And this shhh into my ear. Into my head where it has been resonating ever since.

  Why me? Why not my sister Sarah, who was two years older than me, and who could have managed so much better? She was already working. In a factory. She was stronger. She was independent. Yes, why not my sister Sarah?

  Me, I was just a school boy, even though I couldn’t go to school and other public places any more because of the yellow star I had to wear on all my clothes. I was such a shy frightened schoolboy. And rickety on top of that.

  Yes, I have often wondered why me?

  Because I was the boy of the family. Because our name should be preserved. Because my mother adored me and knew that in spite of my shyness and my fear, I was stubborn enough, and enough of a dreamer, to manage alone.

  Stubborn like a mule, my mother always said when she spoke of me, and always his head in the stars my poor son. My mother knew that I would survive one way or another. My mother knew.

  Still, all my life I’ve asked myself, without ever being able to find an answer, why me, and not my sister Sarah, or both my sisters? Why me alone?

  If you say nothing, if you remain quiet and silent, if you don’t move, you will escape and survive, and one day you will tell what happened here. I think that’s what my mother’s shhh meant.

  And it is true that the ten years that followed my stay in the closet were years of silence and solitude.

  Silence and solitude during the three miserable years I spent slaving on a farm in Southern France during the German occupation. I told all that in Return to Manure.

  And again in silence and solitude in America—no, in loneliness, which is worse than solitude—during the first years of my exile when my native tongue was slowly fading in me, while another strange tongue was painfully taking shape in my mouth.

  I once wrote a poem about this exile into silence and solitude.

  Tongue

  ex-

  pelled

  from mother

  tongue

  ex-

  iled

  in foreign

  tongue

  tongue-

  less

  he

  ex-

  tracts

  words

  from other

  tongues

  to

  ex-

  press

  his speech-

  lessness

  I told about that exile in America in Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It. No need to repeat all that. It’s what happened before the closet that I want to relate now.

  That shhh was not my mother’s last word. It was the first word of the book my mother knew I would write some day. Yes, my mother knew who I was and what I would become.

  But she also knew that before arriving where I was supposed to go, before arriving at the book, I would have to endure much, suffer much, even if I did not understand why.

  That is why, after my mother closed the door on me, I heard her sob quietly.

  What name to give to that terrible moment? Was it a day of separation? A day of birth? A day of salvation? Or should it be called the beginning of a long absence from myself?

  That day, in the dark, I became a mythical being, like Orpheus. Not the Orpheus who sang love songs in the tunnel of death, but an Orpheus who succeeded in pulling himself out of the stone block in which he was buried alive. Later, when I came out of that hole, as I was descending the stairs on tip toes, I understood that if I turned around something inexpressible would happen. My excess of life would be unmasked as a false resurrection.

  Now I realize that I have spent most of my life fearing the light that emanates from human skin. And yet, I know that death is not something that can be resolved. Death is a place you enter, like a closet. Perhaps that shriveled fetus that I was should have remained palpitating in the dark so as to bypass mortality. But that fetus had to emerge from that tomb-womb, otherwise it would never have gained the energy that comes from despair, and the ingenuity that necessity engenders.

  Often afterwards, to calm the furor of my mind, I would try to go back in time and replay what took place before the closet. I tried to replay my childhood, but I could not.

  I could not.

  It was as though I was watching a movie playing backwards. I wanted to retrace my steps with this movie. Get back to the beginning. To the beginning of my adventure. To be a little boy again. I wanted to exorcize the meaning of absence. I wanted my life to be the reverse of resignation and acceptation. But the movie always became blurred and incoherent.

  I know it’s impossible to go back into the past, but I wanted to feel again what I had felt before.

  Before! What a strange word. My before was something so vague, so difficult to find again, so unattainable. So …

  Phew, Federman, what’s going on? This is so serious. Your readers are going to find it boring. They’re going to wonder what’s happening to you. If you’re not starting to cultivate senility.

  What! No more mad laughter, no more sexual effrontery. What’s wrong with you? No more exuberant typographical gimmicks. No more scatology. No more self-reflexiveness. It’s not possible. Federman is now writing agonizing realism. That’s what people are going to say.

  It’s true that I’m on the edge of the imposture of realism in this story, and that I could easily tumble into it. But when one tells the story of one’s childhood one is always on the edge of the precipice of sentimentality that makes you crumble into whining realism. That’s the risk to take while telling what happened in Montrouge during my childhood.

  Well, I’ll go on anyway

  Standing naked in the dark, holding my clothes tightly against my chest, trembling not of cold but of fear, I listened t
o the sound of the policemen’s boots as they came up the stairs to the third floor.

  The door of our apartment remained open as the policemen went in, so I heard what they said. They called out the names of the people they came to arrest: Simon Federman, Marguerite Federman, Sarah Federman, Raymond Federman, Jacqueline Federman. In that order.

  When they said, Raymond, I heard my mother say quickly, He’s not here. He’s in the country on vacation. The policemen didn’t say anything.

  Then I heard the policemen tell my parents to take some warm clothes because they didn’t know where they were going to be taken and that the journey could be long, and that it could be cold there. The policemen didn’t sound mean. They weren’t speaking loudly. They were just doing their job.

  In the darkness of the closet on the third floor of our building, 4 Rue Louis Rolland in Montrouge, I heard all this, but I could not comprehend why my mother had locked me in the dark. It was as though I was playing hide-and-seek, but I didn’t know how long I had to remain hidden before being discovered.

  During the long frightening hours I spent in that darkness, not daring to open the door, slowly sinking into oblivion, I felt that my childhood was being erased. That my childhood was tumbling into ...

  Federman, watch out. Control your emotions and the tone of your sentences or you’re going to end up writing decadent lyricism. And you’re not going to start making metaphors, you who abhor metaphors.

  I’m trying, I’m trying to control myself, but it’s not easy when you tell something traumatic. Something which has remained in you all your life like a hole in your stomach. Or rather a hole in your memory, since my childhood was in the process of disappearing.