Shhh

S
HHH

THE STORY OF A CHILDHOOD

R
AYMOND
F
EDERMAN

 

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:

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 is 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

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.