‘Everything I Possess I Carry With Me’ (2009) portrays the deportation of German speaking Romanians to Russia during the Soviet occupation of Romania for use as forced labor. Müller describes the journey of the seventeen years old boy Leo to a gulag in the Soviet Union in 1945. He is forced to stay in this labour camp until 1950.

This story is inspired by the memories of a poet (Oskar Pastior) but also by what happened to Müller’s own mother who was sent to such a camp when she was seventeen.

It is a grim story, about hunger and violence and indifference. When there’s hardly anything to eat, except some bread of a bad quality and soup with cabbage shreds, while you are doing hard physical labour, like digging coal and pitch, gradually men become ‘egotistical’. They can’t afford any sentimental feelings if they want to survive.

So we could ask ourselves, if people have survived such horrors, what have they been doing for trying to survive? Are they, in one way or another, guilty? Or, is this an inappropriate question…

Back in 1917 Bobby Pettit wore the same look that Harry wears so well. Pettit was a skinny kid from Crosby, Vermont, which is in the United States too. Some of the boys in the company figured Pettit had spent his tender years letting that Vermont maple syrup drip slowly on his forehead.

Also one of the dancing girls in that 1917 company was Sergeant Grogan. The boys in camp had all kinds of ideas about the sarge’s origin; good, sound, censorable ideas that I won’t bother to repeat.

Well, on Pettit’s first day in the ranks the sarge was drilling the platoon in the manual of arms. Pettit had a clever, original way of handling his rifle. When the sarge hollered “Right shoulder arms!” Bobby Pettit did left shoulder arms. When the sarge requested “Port arms!” Pettit complied with present arms. It was a sure way of attracting the sarge’s attention, and he came over to Pettit smiling.

“Well, dumb guy,” greeted the sarge, “what’s the matter with you?”

Pettit laughed. “I get a little mixed up at times,” he explained briefly.

“What’s your name, Bud?” asked the sarge.

“Bobby. Bobby Pettit.”

“Well, Bobby Pettit,” said the sarge, “I’ll just call ya Bobby. I always call them by their first names. And they all call me Mother. Just like they was at home.”

“Oh,” said Pettit.

Then it went off. Every fuse has two ends: the one that’s lighted and the one that’s clubby with T.N.T.

“Listen, Pettit!” boomed the sarge. “I ain’t running no fifth grade. You’re in the Army, dumb guy. You’re supposed t’know ya ain’t got two left shoulders and that port arms ain’t present arms. Wutsa matter with ya? Ain’tcha got no brains?”

“I’ll get the hang of it,” Pettit predicted.

The next day we had practice in tent pitching and pack making. When the sarge came around to inspect, it developed that Pettit hadn’t bothered to hammer the tent pegs slightly below the surface of the ground. Observing the subtle flaw, the sarge, with one yank of his hand, collapsed entirely Bobby Pettit’s little canvas home.

“Pettit,” cooed the sarge. “You are…without a doubt…the dumbest…the stoopidest…the clumsiest gink I ever seen. Are ya nuts, Pettit? Wutsa matter with ya? Ain’tcha got no brains?”

Pettit predicted, “I’ll get the hang of it.”

Then everybody made up full packs. Pettit made up his like a veteran – just like one of the Boys in the Blue. Then the sarge came around to inspect. It was his cheery custom to pass in the rear of the men, and with a short, blugeon-like stroke or his forearm slam down on the regulation burden on the back of every mother’s son.

He came to Pettit’s pack. I’ll spare the details. I’ll just say that everything came apart save the last five segments in Bobby Pettit’s vertebrae. It was a sickening sound. The sarge came around to face Pettit, what was left of him.

“Pettit. I met lotsa dumb guys in my time,” related the sarge. “Lots of ‘em. But you, Pettit, you’re in a class by yourself. Because you’re the dumbest!”

Pettit stood there on his three feet.

“I’ll get the hang of it,” he manage to predict.

First day of target practice, six men at a time fired at six targets, prone position exclusively. The sarge passed up and down, examining firing positions.

“Hey, Pettit. Which eye are you lookin’ through?”

“I don’t know,” said Pettit. “The left, I guess.”

“Look through the right!” bellowed the sarge. “Pettit, you’re takin’ twenty years offa my life. Wutsa matter with ya? Ain’tcha got no brains?”

That was nothing. When, after the men had fired, the targets were rolled in, there was a gay surprise for all. Pettit had fired all his shots at the target of the man on his right.

The sarge almost had an attack of apoplexy. “Pettit,” he said, “you got no place in this man’s army. You got six feet. You got six hands. Everybody else only got two!”

“I’ll get the hang of it,” said Pettit.

“Don’t say that to me again. Or I’ll kill ya. I’ll akchally kill ya, Pettit. Because I hatecha, Pettit. You hear me? I hatecha!”

“Gee,” said Pettit. “No kidding?”

“No kidding, brother,” said the sarge.

“Wait’ll I get the hang of it,” said Pettit. “You’ll see. No kidding. Boy, I like the Army. Someday I’ll be a colonel or something. No kidding.”

Naturally I didn’t tell my wife that our son, Harry, reminds me of Bob Pettit back in ‘17. But he does nevertheless. In fact, the boy is even having sergeant trouble at Fort Iroquois. It seems, according to my wife, that Fort Iroquois nurses to its bosom one of the toughest, meanest first sergeants in the country. There is no necessity, declares my wife, in being mean to the boys. Not that Harry’s complained. He likes the Army, only he just can’t seem to please this terrible first sergeant. Just because he hasn’t got the hang of it yet.

And the colonel of this regiment. He’s no help at all, my wife feels. All he does is walk around and look important. A colonel should help the boys, see to it that mean first sergeants don’t take advantage of the boys, destroy their spirit. A colonel, my wife feels, should do more than just walk around the place.

Well, a few Sundays ago the boys at Fort Iroquois put on their first spring parade. My wife and I were there in the reviewing stand, and with a yelp that nearly took my hat off she picked out our Harry as he marched along.

“He’s out of step,” I told my wife.

“Oh, don’t be that way,” said she.

“But he is out of step,” I said.

“I suppose that’s a crime. I suppose he’ll be shot for that. See! He’s in step again. He was only out for a minute.”

Then, when the parade was over and the men had been dismissed, First Sergeant Grogan came over to say hello. “How do, Mrs. Pettit.”

“How do you do,” said my wife, very chilly.

“Think there’s hope for our boy, sergeant?” I asked.

“Not a chance,” he said. “Not a chance, colonel.”

Collier’s, July 12, 1941

‘Go on,’ I said, ‘let us hear your brief philosophy.’

‘What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes out of Plato, modified. Before true learning can occur, I believe, there must be in the student’s heart a certain yearning for the truth, a certain fire. The true student burns to know. In the teacher she recognizes, or apprehends, the one who has come closer than herself to the truth. So much does she desire the truth embodied in the teacher that she is prepared to burn her old self up to attain it. For his part, the teacher recognizes and encourages the fire in the student, and responds to it by burning with an intenser light. Thus together the two of them rise to a higher realm. So to speak’. 

J.M.Coetzee, Summertime, Scenes from Provincial Life (2009) p. 163 London: Harvill Secker

I want to add something to this well-known story and tell you about some discoveries I have made in the Bibliothèque National in Paris. Much has been written about Diderot’s nephew and Goethe’s translation. Although the existence of 1821’s publication by de Saur and de Saint-Geniès is known, there has been hardly anyone who has done some serious research about  the results. Because the so-called original appeared to be a fake and because afterwards the original text became available, no one was really interested in the text composed by the two aristocrats.  Scholars like Rudolf Schlösser in 1900 and Jean Fabre in 1950 consecrated only a few pages to the retranslation, but I suspect them of having done this just to demonstrate the immorality of the deed itself. They did not pay any attention to the content and it might be possible that later researchers have  followed  in their steps, just out of laziness. 

Differences

When I had a look at the translation of de Saur and de Saint-Geniès to compare their text with the German version I found some interesting facts: these men have been extremely creative. They have invented a substantial part of the novel.  Some stories in the dialogue appear to be made up by them. They even changed the end of the story: while in the text of Goethe – who did a proper translation – the protagonists Moi and Lui separate in the end and say goodbye to each other, de Saur and de Saint-Geniès decide to let them have dinner together, as if they wanted to indicate the social character of the French! But there is more. There are differences to be found in the passages about music; when it comes to telling naughty stories about women and in the descriptions of French behaviour. 

Now I would like to show some of the conduct of the couple in their translation. The following example is the moment when Moi and Lui discuss the definition of happiness, in the German text as follows:

ER: Nichts ist beständig auf der Welt. Am Glücksrade heute oben, morgen unten. Verfluchte Zufälle führen uns und führen uns sehr schlecht (Neffe, 745).  

In the big wheel of fortune, it says, you’re sometimes up but just as often down. The French text however states that the nephew is completely bound up in the subject. He addresses fortune direct and illustrates the subject with a metaphor: 

Rien de stable ici-bas que l’instabilité, je vous l’ai déjà dit : l’instabilité est donc mon unique espérance. Aujourd’hui la roue de la Fortune nous élève plus au moins vite, demain plus ou moins vite nous redescendons sous la roue qui finit toujours par nous écraser, quand elle est lasse de son jeu: comme un chat joue avec une souris souvent dans la farine même ; d’abord feint de la caresser, la pince et la mord après, et finit toujours par la manger. Nécessité, hasard ou destinée, tu nous entraînes, tu conduis tout…Tu conduis tout bien mal ! (Neveu,  241).

 (Translation: “Nothing down here is as stable as instability, as I’ve already told you, so instability is my only hope. Today the wheel of fortune lifts us up, but tomorrow we are going down to the point where we will get crashed as soon as fortune is bored with the game: like a cat she’s playing with a mouse; at first she pretends to caress it, then she grabs it and kills it, and finally she will devore it. Necessity, be it coincidence or predestination, you are toying with us, you direct all… You direct all pretty bad!”)

 It has occurred to me that the French translators unfold the events over and over again in a very extended way. The second example of their skills is how they handle with an ordinary gossip, Goethe had made this translation:

 Madam die und die hat auf einmal zwei Kinder gekriegt. So kann doch jeder Vater zu dem seinigen greifen…(Neffe, 641)  (Translation: “Mrs so and so got two children at once. Thus each father could grab his own…”)

The story becomes in the view of the couple a roaring farce:

Madame … que vous connaissez, est accouchée de deux enfans à la fois, garçon et fille. Je les ai vus ; et, chose singulière, le garçon est noir comme son nègre, et la fille blanche et blonde comme le petit commis de son mari… (Neveu, 230).  (Translation: “Mrs… you know her, has given birth to two children at once, a boy and a girl. I have seen them, and a curious thing, the boy is just as black as their negro servant, and the girl is just as white and blonde as their husbands clerical assistant…) 

In asking myself how to consider their translation, I searched in the Parisian library for other novels which they might have had “fabricated” together - and I found about twenty titles, written within a period of seven years. Every title tells a comparable story: their oeuvre consists out of fakes, plagiarism and imitations.

Expansion

The most striking example is their translation of a novel by Friedrich Maximillian Klinger (whom we already met at the start when he discovered at the Hermitage the unknown manuscript of Rameau’s Nephew), titled Faust’s Leben, Thaten und Höllenfahrt (1791), into Les aventures de Faust et sa descente aux Enfers (1825), (The adventures of Faust and his descént in Hell). In the preface de Saur and de Saint-Geniès boast about their own efforts. While Goethe did some nice work – so the couple says – and writers like for instance Klinger have produced some nice work as well in this field, it’s only thanks to de Saur and de Saint-Geniès that the French people will learn the Faust legend properly. While Klinger’s original narrative counts 195 pages, the translation expands into 836 pages. So here as well the notorious couple made use of their imagination…

A forgerie?

I would like to end with some considerations about the phenomena of the literary forgery. Does the retranslation of Le Neveu fall under the chapter of Monkey Tricks or should we consider the whole issue as a foul play? As long as literature has existed, there have been forgeries. The components that can be forged, are the legend of the work, the handwritten manuscript, the names of the author and the publisher and the translation. De Saur and de Saint-Geniès forged the legend of Le Neveu by pretending that they had found the original that was said to come from the estate of Diderot. But they also faked the translation by expanding the text with their own stories and ideas, pretending that those ideas were the mental legacy of Diderot.

In general there are several reasons why a forger takes all the trouble to create his forgery.  Most forgers are eccentric figures with antagonistic features. There is a kind of implicit criticism hidden in their acts. They think they can do better than the creator of the work of art, or they think that the original lacks something. In the case of Le Neveu the two aristocrats have done their utmost – so they claim – to translate and create a novel in the style of Diderot, one of the greatest writers France ever had. They meant they could do this better than Goethe, who, after all, was not a Frenchman…

It could have been the reason why they kept silent about their names as translators. Maybe it has been rather a practical joke with a slight serious intention, than real, foul play.

Introduction

The first time I became aware of Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew), was during my student years. In a Close Reading Course we students had to read the main work of Hegel, the Phänomenologie des Geistes, (Phenomenology of Spirit). In this work Hegel referred without mentioning names to the novel of Diderot. He described the character of the nephew as a typical example of a parasite in society, and what’s more, as someone who struggles with a consciousness which is torn apart by contradictory feelings.

 Well, I don’t want to talk about Hegel here. I just want to tell you how Rameau’s nephew and I first met.  The novel Le Neveu de Rameau is a dialogue between two men, the first-person narrator Moi, ( I ), the philosopher and his conversation partner Lui, ( he ), the nephew. They meet in a French pub and talk about all kinds of things like  genius, morality, education, women, philosophy and music.

 During Diderot’s lifetime nobody knew about the existence of this novel. Diderot didn’t speak about it either with friends nor relatives; nor is there any evidence in his correspondence to be found. He just kept the work in a drawer.

Dowry 

It is worth noting that Diderot had a daughter. He wanted to give her a nice dowry, but unfortunately he was not a wealthy man, he had to work for a living. So Diderot had to make up a creative solution. In my opinion he succeeded very well in doing so: he made an agreement with no one less than the empress Catherine II, tsarina of Russia. The agreement implied that she bought his entire library, under the condition that he could use his books during his lifetime, and at the moment that he would die, his books had to be sent to St. Petersburg.

 This deal yielded Diderot a considerable sum of money at once and furthermore he received a yearly allowance because the empress appointed him as librarian of his own library.

 When Diderot died in 1784  indeed his entire library – except a small part that remained in the possession of his daughter - was moved from Paris to St. Petersburg, including several manuscripts, and among them Le Neveu de Rameau.

The unknown manuscript

 In these days a German young man, called Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, was head of the school for officers in the Russian army. Klinger had a free entrance to the court and to the Hermitage. He was able to sniff around in Diderot’s work and he discovered the manuscript of  Le Neveu. Immediately he realized the value of this yet unknown story. So he smuggled the text out of the country, handed it over to his friend Friedrich Schiller in Germany, who in turn gave it to Wolfgang Goethe.

 Goethe was very enthusiastic too. So enthusiastic that he translated the French text into the German language. So, here we have the most peculiar situation of having Le Neveu de Rameau published for the first time ever, in German, titled Rameau’s Neffe, ein Dialog von Diderot, (Rameau’s Nephew, a Dialogue by Diderot ), while the French public had even never heard of its existence.

Lost 

However, in 1805 the work did not attract much attention. It is the  time when Napoleon entered Germany and understandably the German people didn’t have much interest in books  coming from French writers. This lack of interest endured until 1818, when the publisher Belin in Paris decided to edit a new publication of the collected works of Diderot. In the supplement the publisher added  a remark about the disappearance of the French manuscript of Rameau’s Nephew, because you should know that after Goethe had made the translation, he had sent the original back to St. Petersburg and unfortunately on the way back the manuscript disappeared. It has never been found back… 

 So, in 1818 only a German text of Le Neveu existed and  no French text was available.  In those years the gossip circulated that Goethe made up the story himself and that there wasn’t a French version at all; but of course Goethe refuted these rumours with great indignation.

Found?

 In 1821 two young French aristocrats, Joseph-Henri de Saur and Léonce de Saint-Geniès, revealed a sensational fact: by a coincidence they had discovered the original manuscript of Le Neveu. They published the work in the same year, under the title  Le Neveu de Rameau, by Diderot, never published before. The work got a very warm reception in the press, it received some favourable reviews.

 Nevertheless, the euphoric mood lasted not very long. In 1823 the two aristocrats were forced to confess that they had not found the original manuscript at all: they simply had made a translation of the German text themselves. They were forced to make this confession because someone else claimed that he was the owner of the original manuscript: the publisher Brière, who asserted that he had received the original personally out off the hands of Diderot’s daughter. Unfortunately Brière was not able to show his copy because this copy too had mysteriously disappeared…

 Both sides got engaged in a controversy which was fought out in the media; at last Brière wrote to Goethe with the request to speak out a judgement of Solomon: could Goethe please tell the world which version was the authentic one, the one that Goethe had used  some twenty years before for making his translation? The world had to wait a year before Goethe answered: according to him the version of Brière was the original. So the two gentlemen lost the battle and for at least seventy years the version of Brière has been considered  as the authentic one.

 Not until in 1891 the entire case became finally clear, when the French librarian Georges Monval discovered by accident at a little bookstall along the Seine a manuscript that was unmistakably in the handwriting of Diderot,  entitled ‘Satyre 2e’. It was shown to be the most original version of Le Neveu.  Scholars consider this publication as the basic version of the work.

In the meanwhile, the so-called original Le Neveu de Rameau the fake version, has provided some interesting results…

The boy raised his dirty, stinking, tired upper body, and from a sitting position, without looking at anything, he got to his feet. Groggily he bent over, picked up and put on his helmet. He walked unsteadily back to the blanket truck, and from a stack of muddy blanket rolls he pulled out his own. Carrying the slight, unwarm bundle under his left arm, he began to walk along the bushy perimeter of the field. He passed by Hurkin, who was sweatily digging a foxhole, and neither he nor Hurkin glanced with any interest at the other. He stopped where Eeves was digging in, and he said to Eeves, “You on tonight, Eeves?”

Eeves looked up and said, “Yeah,” and a drop of sweat glistened and disengaged itself from the end of his long Vermont nose.

The boy said to Eeves, “Wake me up if anything gets hot or anything,” and Eeves replied, “How’ll I know where you’re gonna be at?” and the boy told him, “I’ll holler when I get there.”

I won’t dig in tonight, the boy thought, walking on. I won’t struggle and dig and chop with that damn little entrenching tool tonight. I won’t get hit. Don’t let me get hit, Somebody. Tomorrow night I’ll dig a swell hole, I swear I will. But for tonight, for just now, when everything hurts, let me just find someplace to drop. All of a sudden the boy saw a foxhole, a German one, unmistakably vacated by some Kraut during the afternoon, during the long, rotten afternoon.

The boy moved his aching legs a little faster, going toward it. When he got there he looked down into it, and his whole mind and body almost whimpered when he saw some G.I.’s dirty field jacket neatly folded and placed on the bottom of the hole, in the accepted claim. The boy moved on.

He saw another Kraut hole. He hurried awkwardly toward it. Looking down into it, he saw a gray woolen Kraut blanket, half spread, half bunched on the damp floor of the hole. It was a terrible blanket on which some German and recently lain and bled and probably died.

The boy dropped his blanket roll on the ground beside the hole, and then he removed his rifle, his gas mask, his pack and helmet. Then he stooped beside the hole, dropped the little distance to his knees, reached down into the hole and lifted out the heavy, bloody, unlamented Kraut blanket. Outside the hole, he rolled the thing into an absurd lump, picked it up and threw it into the dense hedgerow behind the hole. He looked down into the hole again. The dirt floor, he saw, was messy with what had permeated two folds of the heavy Kraut blanket. The boy took his entrenching tool from his pack, stepped into the hole and leadenly began to dig out the bad places.

When he was finished he stepped out of the hole, undid his blanket roll and laid the blankets out flat, one on top of the other. As if they were one, he folded the blankets in half the long way, and then he lifted this bed thing, as though it had some sort of spine to it, over to the hole and lowered it carefully out of sight.

He watched the pebbles of dirt tumble into the folds of his blankets. Then he picked up his rifle, gas mask and helmet, and laid them carefully on the natural surface of the ground at the head of the hole.

The boy lifted up the two top folds of his blankets, placed them aside slightly, and then he stepped with his muddy shoes into his bed. Standing up, he took off his field jacket, bunched it up into a ball, and then he lowered himself into position for the night. The hole was too short. He could not stretch out without bending his legs sharply at the knees. Covering himself with the top folds of his blankets, he laid his filthy head back on his filthier field jacket. He looked up into the darkening sky and felt a few mean little lumps of dirt trickle into his shirt collar, some lodging there, some continuing down his back. He did nothing about it.

Suddenly a red ant bit him nastily, uncompromisingly, on the leg, just above his leggings. He jammed a hand under the covers to kill the thing, but the movement caught itself short, as the boy hissed in pain, refeeling and remembering where that morning he had lost a whole fingernail.

Quickly he drew the hurting, throbbing finger up to the line if his eye and examined it in the fading light. Then he placed the whole hand under the folds of the blankets, with the care more like that proffered a sick person than a sore finger, and let himself work the kind of abracadabra familiar to and special for G.I.’s in combat.

“When I take my hand out of this blanket,” he thought, “my nail will be grown back, my hands will be clean. My body will be clean. I’ll have on clean shorts, clean undershirt, a white shirt. A blue polka-dot tie. A gray suit with a stripe, and I’ll be home, and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll put some coffee on the stove, some records on the phonograph, and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll open the window, I’ll let in a nice, quiet girl–not Frances, not anyone I’ve ever known–and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me–that one about being chartless–and I’ll ask her to read some William Blake to me–that one about the little lamb that made thee–and I’ll bolt the door. She’ll have an American voice, and she won’t ask me if I have any chewing gum or bonbons, and I’ll bolt the door.”

The boy took his hurting hand out of the blankets suddenly, expecting and getting no change, no magic. Then he unbuttoned the flap of his sweat-stained, mud-crumbly shirt pocket, and took out a soggy lump of newspaper clippings. He laid the clippings on his chest, took off the top one and brought it up to eye level. It was a syndicated Broadway column, and he began to read in the dim light:

Last night–and step up and touch me, brother–I dropped in at the Waldorf to see Jeanie Powers, the lovely starlet, who is here to attend the premiere of her new picture, The Rockets’ Red Glare. (And don’t miss it, folks. It’s grand.) We asked the corn-fed Iowa beauty, who is in the big town for the first time in her lovely lifetime, what she wanted to do most while she was here. “Well,” said the Beauty to the Beast, “when I was on the train, I decided that all I really wanted in New York was a date with a real, honest-to-goodness G.I.! And what do you suppose happened? The very first afternoon I was here, right in the lobby of the Waldorf. I bumped square into Bubby Beamis! He’s a major in public relations now, and he’s stationed right in New York! How’s that for luck?”…Well, your correspondent didn’t say much. But lucky Beamis, I thought to my– 

The boy in the hole crumpled the clipping into a soggy ball, lifted the rest of the clippings from his chest, and dropped them all, on the natural ground to the side of the hole.

He stared up into the sky again, the French sky, the unmistakably French, not American sky. And he said aloud to himself, half snickering, half weeping, “Oo la-la!”

All of a sudden, and hurriedly, the boy took a soiled, unrecent envelope from his pocket. Quickly he extracted the letter from inside it and began to reread to for the thirty-oddth time: 

MANASQUAN, NEW JERSEY
July 5, 1944

Dear Babe,

Mama thinks you are still in England, but I think you are in France. Are you in France? Daddy tells mama that he thinks you are in England still, but I think he thinks you are in France also. Are you in France?

The Bensons cane down to the shore early this summer and Jackie is over at the house all the time. Mama brought your books with us because she thinks you will be home this summer. Jackie asked if she could borrow the one about the Russian lady and one of the ones you used to keep on your desk. I gave them to her because she said she would not bend the pages or anything. Mama told her she smokes too much, and she is going to quit. She got poisoned from sunburn before we came down. She likes you a lot. She may go in the Wacks.

I saw Frances on my bike before we left home. I yelled at her, but she did not hear me. She is very stuck up and Jackie is not. Jackie’s hair is prettier also.

There are more girls than boys on the beach this year. You never see any boys. The girls play cards a lot and put a lot of sun tan oil on each other’s back and lay in the sun, but go in the water more than they used to. Virginia Hope and Barbara Geezer had a fight about something and don’t sit next to each other on the beach anymore. Lester Brogan was killed in the army where the Japs are. Mrs. Brogan does not come to the beach anymore except on Sundays with Mr. Brogan. Mr. Brogan just sits on the beach with Mrs. Brogan, and he does not go in the water, and you know what a good swimmer he is. I remember when you and Lester took me out to the float once. I go out to the float myself now. Diana Schults married a soldier that was at Sea Girt and she went back to California with him for a week, but he is gone now and she is back. Diana lays on the beach by herself.

Before we left home, Mr. Ollinger died. Brother Teemers went into the store to get Mr. Ollinger to fix his bike and Mr. Ollinger was dead behind the counter. Brother Teemers ran crying all the way to the courthouse and Mr. Teemers was busy talking to the jury and everything. Brother Teemers ran right in anyway and yelled “Daddy! Daddy! Mr. Ollinger is dead!”

I cleaned out your car for you before we left for the shore. There was a lot of maps behind the front seat from your trip to Canada. I put them in your desk. There was also a girls comb. I think it was Frances’. I put it in your desk also. Are you in France?

Love,

MATILDA
P.S.: Can I go to Canada with you next time you go? I won’t talk much and I’ll light your cigarettes for you without really smoking them.

Sincerely yours,

MATILDA

I miss you. Please come home soon.
Love and kisses,
MATILDA

The boy in the hole carefully put the letter back inside the dirty, worn envelope, and put the envelope back into his shirt pocket.

Then he raised himself slightly in the hole and shouted, “Hey, Eeves! I’m over here!”

And across the field Eeves saw him and nodded back.

A Boy in France

published in The Saturday Evening Post,  31st of March, 1945

The Laureates from 2009 – 1979:

         2009 – Herta Müller 1953- Germany

• 2008 – Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio 1940- France
• 2007 – Doris Lessing 1919- United Kingdom
• 2006 – Orhan Pamuk 1952- Turkey
• 2005 – Harold Pinter 1930-2008 United Kingdom
• 2004 – Elfriede Jelinek 1946- Austria
• 2003 – J. M. Coetzee 1940- South Africa
• 2002 – Imre Kertész 1929- Hungary
• 2001 – V. S. Naipaul 1932- United Kingdom
• 2000 – Gao Xingjian 1940- France
• 1999 – Günter Grass 1927- Germany
• 1998 – José Saramago 1922- Portugal
• 1997 – Dario Fo 1926- Italy
• 1996 – Wislawa Szymborska 1923- Poland
• 1995 – Seamus Heaney 1939- Ireland
• 1994 – Kenzaburo Oe 1935- Japan
• 1993 – Toni Morrison 1931- USA
• 1992 – Derek Walcott 1930- Saint Lucia
• 1991 – Nadine Gordimer 1923- South Africa
• 1990 – Octavio Paz 1914-1998 Mexico
•  
• 1989 – Camilo José Cela 1916-2002 Spain
• 1988 – Naguib Mahfouz 1911-2006 Egypt
• 1987 – Joseph Brodsky 1940-1996 USA
• 1986 – Wole Soyinka 1934- Nigeria
• 1985 – Claude Simon 1913-2005 France
• 1984 – Jaroslav Seifert 1901-1986 Czechoslovakia
• 1983 – William Golding 1911-1993 United Kingdom
• 1982 – Gabriel García Márquez 1928- Colombia
• 1981 – Elias Canetti 1905-1994 United Kingdom
• 1980 – Czeslaw Milosz 1911-2004 Poland and USA
• 1979 – Odysseus Elytis 1911-1996 Greece

 United Kingdom (4); France, USA (3); Germany, South Africa, Poland (2);

Turkey, Austria, Hungary, Portugal, Italy, Ireland Japan, Saint-Lucia, Mexico, Spain, Egypt, Nigeria, Czechoslovakia, Colombia, Greece (1)

Nineteen Laureates are still alive (at 13th November 2009)

Sometimes we need a little help to start this ability, or some stimulation to keep our imagination going.

Surely fiction can go beyond the borders of reason. But fiction may show us also, with delicacy and depth, Life as it is:  honest, painful and sweet.

Besides all the pleasures that fiction gives us, it has a great influence on all our moral ideas. Fiction makes use of passions, good or bad. There are no limits.