English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

How Abish Is It  

Walter Abish. Double Vision: A Memoir.  Knopf, 2004. 213 pp. $24.00.

By Joseph Dewey, University of Pittsburgh—Johnstown         

            It is no surprise that Walter Abish would write a memoir. His fictions have courageously explored how cultures define themselves. Inevitably he would explore the art of self-construction, would make intensely personal the implications of his/story itself, those slippery constructs that reveal the clumsy editing that goes into any act of perception. Double Vision is signature Abish. Audaciously, he skewers the genre, upends its complacent confidence in its own author-ity and thus reinvigorates its entire premise.  Before the text even begins, we confront the familiar publicity photo of Abish—staring straight at us with that unsettling eyepatch—a photo that metaphorically unsettles the foundation of autobiography itself: the assumption that experience amply considered will engender insight and recover meaningful pattern. The one-eyed Abish underscores the dilemma of vision, the stubborn inaccessibility of revelation, the struggle with perception. Indeed, Abish quickly discourages expectations of a traditional memoir, one of those tidy summing-ups of a writer at late middle age casting an eye toward posterity, expectations that for the sake of nostalgia Abish might let his avant-garde down, might abandon his stubborn insistence on interrogating his own medium.

The title itself indicates Abish’s strategy of both endorsing and undercutting introspection: does double vision suggest the notion that life’s events are witnessed first as they happen only to be enriched in re-seeing them, coaxed into clarity as part of the intricate process of looking-back. Or does double vision refer to blurred vision, the optical catastrophe that dooms even the most accessible objects to inaccessibility, that makes ironic even the premise of understanding. Not surprisingly, Abish insists on both: revelation and mystery, depth and surface, thus empowering vision while simultaneously discounting it.  Abish’s goal is evident: he tells us that early on he was compelled by the German concept of Geschichte, which translates as the intelligence able to connect events into convincing intricacy. It is Abish’s particular contribution to the memoir genre to insist on the persuasiveness of that illusion even as he exposes its unreliability.

Abish alternates between two narratives. Sections headed “The Writer-to-Be” begin in 1938. Abish recalls his Austrian family, comfortably bourgeois and comfortably Jewish (for instance, they decorate for Christmas), who must accept the perilous reality of flight just ahead of the onrush of Nazism, a global odyssey that will eventually include stays in Italy, southern France, and Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The immensity of the threat is never clear to the young boy. These sections go on to recount Abish’s formative adult years when he settles in the newly-formed state of Israel. There, after a series of dead-end relationships and uninspiring jobs, after discovering the passionate excavations of Proust, the shattering absurdities of Kafka, and the moral anxieties of Dostoyevsky, he comes to embrace the self-sufficiency, intellectual dedication, and inevitable solitude of being a writer.

In alternating chapters, headed “The Writer,”Abish visits Germany for the first time in the 1980s as part of a publicity tour for the German edition of How German Is It. The trip proves a difficult confrontation in which Abish encounters ugly hostility, stubborn historical shortsightedness, and a shallow sense of moral relativism. The promotional tour includes a particularly wrenching visit to Dachau, now sterilized into a depthless tourist spot, that testifies to the re-engineering of the Holocaust, its disquieting reprocessing into history without the horror. Double vision, the tension between surface and depth, links the two narratives.  As a child, the young Abish observes his world with the keen eye of a nascent writer but cannot understand it, even resists the disquieting implications of what he observes (reality provides splendid commentary: the young Abish attends the Peter Pan School in Shanghai). As an adult, a writer of uncommonly astringent social commentary, Abish is stung by evidence, despite the considerable rebuilding of the German state, of the persistent realities that defined the Third Reich, stung but, like the child, still unable to reason his way to any persuasive explanation for the virulence of ethnic hate, the curious logic of brutality, the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism, and the complacency and shallowness of the most cultured people.

The sections that deal with Abish’s adolescence are by far the more arresting. They are unexpectedly candid and intimate. The vivid portraits of his emotionally-demonstrative father, a successful perfumer, and his distant mother refuse gimmicky sentimentality. An only child, a socially retarded but intellectually gifted boy easily bored by the domestic drudgery of his homelife but enthralled by the world of the theater, Abish discovered early on the defining traits of any writer: a gift for the vividly visual and a love of architecture, of splendid edifices called into being by the imagination. These sections are cool, precise recollections that are deceptively simple, that allow the irony of double vision to emerge with chilling immediacy. In a particularly telling moment, for instance, the young Abish watches a gun club in a Nice park gaily release pigeons for shooting practice. The young boy’s heart goes out to the trapped pigeons released from their little wire cages only to be shot. When one pigeon survives the shooting and receives medical attention, the young Abish happily concludes at least one bird has lived—he is not told what Abish-as-author(ity) tells us without emotion: the bird would be patched up only to be used for target practice later. Time and again, Abish manipulates the tension between what Abish-the-boy witnesses and what he is able to understand: the stacks of charred bodies along the crater of a bomb site after an air raid in Shanghai, the mysterious disappearance of his Uncle Oskar into the “relocation” camps in Austria, why his best friend (really his only friend) would shoot him assassination-style with a pellet gun, or why two Chinese police would so casually kick a bulky package down the street, a package that contains a dead infant wrapped in newspaper. The same tensions applies, of course, to how unaware the young Abish is of the long humiliation of the Jewish people, the insidious implications of the swastikas, and the panic behind the frenzy of his family packing everything they could into what they can carry—he pretends for some time that they are vacationing.

In the sections on the book tour, the tension persists. Abish is accosted again and again for dwelling on the past, for spitefully stereotyping Germans and for simplifying German cultural history by focusing on the slender dozen years of the Third Reich. The implications of his extravagant literary experiment How German Is It—that is, using Germany itself as a Rorschach test for the contemporary moral imagination to understand its propensity for barbarity and self-deception—are lost on those who simply vilify Abish for distortion. At book parties and readings, he meets former Nazis, their families, those who find in the Nazi agenda a justification for new German nationalism and those who have had enough with guilt, who point to history books that dismiss as footnote the Final Solution. Abish leaves the irony to us: he describes, for instance, a splendid sunset outside Wurzburg, testimony to the eternal beauty of a changeless natural world, but then closes the description noting almost parenthetically how the city was a stronghold of Nazi atrocities. Like the young Abish so relieved by the illusion that one bird has been saved, we can indulge the illusion that the virulence that Nazism represented has somehow been excised. Such naiveté, however, is too pricey for Abish. He closes this narrative during a visit to the Mayan pyramids in the lush jungles of Mexico where he struggles to square the gorgeous layout of the temple with the reality that it was the backdrop for state-sanctioned torture. 

In an Afterword, Abish ponders the implications of some black and white photos from his parents’ last visit just before they died. Specifically Abish speculates on how photographs can appear to reveal so much and yet taunt us with the ultimate inaccessibility of their subjects, with the nearness of distance. Abish closes with a dream in which he is walking with his dead father, who stays next to him even as the son heads for home. Uncertain, he asks the specter-father his destination, and the vision answers cryptically, “Why, to you, of course” (213). Thus we close reminded how accessible is a past that will nevertheless frustrate understanding, how near are the ghosts we cannot see, how deniable their shadows yet how deep their impress: it is a summary parable that reminds us how sons—and nations—can be haunted.