Time's Arrow (19 page)
Authors: Martin Amis
I also owe a great debt to my friend Robert Jay Lifton. Two summers ago I found myself considering the idea of telling the story of a man's life backward in time. Then, one afternoon, after a typically emotional encounter on the tennis court, Lifton gave me a copy of his book
The Nazi Doctors.
My novel would not and could not have been written without it. Probably the same applies to the works of Primo Levi, in particular
If This Is a Man, The Truce, The Drowned and the Saved,
and
Moments of Reprieve.
Other writers whom I found especially helpful, for various reasons, include Martin Gilbert, Gitta Sereny, Joachim Fest, Arno Mayer, Erich Fromm, Simon Wiesenthal, Henry Orenstein, and Nora Wain. At the back of my mind I also had a ce tain short
story by Isaac Bashevis Singer and a certain paragraph—a famous one—by Kurt Vonnegut. (I won't list the authors of the medical textbooks I unenthusiastically pored over; but I am glad to thank Lawrence Shainberg for his entertaining and terrifying
Brain Surgeon.)
Then, too, one's feelings about this subject—here I mean the Holocaust—emerge and develop through conversation, over many years. I am grateful to my interlocutors, among them my wife, Antonia Phillips; my father, Kingsley Amis; my stepfather-in-law, Xan Fielding; my brother- and sister-in-law, Chaim and Susannah Tannenbaum; my brother-in-law, Matthew Spender; and Tom Maschler, Peter Foges, Piers and Emily Read, John Gross, Christopher Hitchens, James Fox, Zachary Leader, Clive James, Joseph Boothby, Sholom Globerman, Ian McEwan, Saul and Janis Bellow, Edmund and Natalia Faw-cett, Jonathan Wilson, Michael Pietsch, and David Papineau. My alternative title was
The Nature of the Offense
—a phrase of Primo Levi's. The offense was of such a nature that perhaps we can see Levi's suicide as an act of ironic heroism, an act that asserts something like: My life is mine and mine alone to take. The offense was unique, not in its cruelty, nor in its cowardice, but in its style—in its combination of the atavistic and the modern. It was, at once, reptilian and "logistical." And although the offense was not definingly German, its style was. The National Socialists found the core of the reptile brain, and built an autobahn that went there. Built for speed and safety, built to endure for a thousand years, the
Reichsautobahnen,
if you remember, were also designed to conform to the landscape, harmoniously, like a garden path.
M. A.
London
May 1991
Table of Contents
Table of Contents