Read Online The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Thomas H. Cook
Ads: Link
there in an effort to track down and interview some of the surviving German soldiers who had massacred the villagers of Oradour-sur-Glane in June of 1944. He had decided to write an account of this atrocity, and on the train from Paris to Berlin, he’d gone through its terrible details.
He was twenty-seven at the time, and although we had regularly exchanged letters, it had been well over a year since I’d seen him. By then, a certain texture had been added to him by his travels and his studies, and his voice bore a gravity that I associated with the knowledge and experiences he had accumulated since last we’d met.
“So, how is the new book coming?” I asked him.
“Oradour is hard to write about,” he said.
His eyes were still blue, but their shade seemed deeper, though I doubt their color had actually changed. Still, there was an incontestable depth in those eyes, something that spoke of the charred village whose tragedy he had chosen as the subject of his next book.
“Yes, it was terrible what happened at Oradour,” I said.
“I don’t mean that it’s hard to write about in that way,” Julian said. “It’s that there’s a kind of voyeurism involved, a peep-show quality.”
I looked at him, puzzled, and at that instant, the train entered a tunnel that threw us into shadow, so that we sat in silence, rumbling on, until the train passed out of the darkness and we were bathed in light again.
Something in Julian’s face had changed. It was as if, during the brief darkness of the tunnel, some other, deeper darkness had fallen upon him.
“The pain of others should not be made thrilling,” he said softly. “There should be no intellectual sadism in reading about Oradour.”
Had that been the moment when it first occurred to him to write his book as he’d later written it? I wondered now.
One thing was clear: In The Eyes of Oradour, Julian had focused exclusively on the victims, all 642 of them, each given a single page to bear witness, a kind of Spoon River Anthology for the members of that murdered village. That was the magisterial oddity of the book, the way Julian had managed to see the massacre through the eyes of those who’d suffered it. To write of the atrocity at Oradour in so strange a way had been a brave choice, and at times—when a little girl used her own body to shield her doll from the attack, for example—he had brought a heartrending vividness to the victims’ deaths.
But in that same narrative, he’d refused to name either the men who ordered the massacre or those who carried it out. Even as unnamed figures, the Germans are glimpsed only at quick moments when the crowd breaks and the back of a soldier, or perhaps only a boot or uniformed leg, is glimpsed in what amounts to a photo flash. At other times the soldiers are disembodied voices, shouting commands or gently deceiving the villagers of Oradour as to their real intent. In other instances, they appear only as the blurry hint of a figure, a brushstroke of helmeted gray.
On the whole, I thought the book extraordinarily accomplished, worthy of the many years it had taken Julian to write it, though a few reviewers had complained that he had concealed the methodical human agency behind the massacre too much, making the innocent of Oradour seem less like the victims of actual cruelty than of the touching down of a storm.
At the time, even though I greatly admired the book, I also thought this criticism not altogether unfair. It was a monumental crime, after all, and Julian had determinedly concealed the men who had carried it out.
Why had he done that?
We were sitting on a bench behind the great library on Fifth Avenue when I posed that very question. It was winter, and we were both wrapped in our overcoats. It had snowed the day before, and the bare limbs of the trees were laced in white. Julian remained silent for a long time before explaining why he hadn’t identified any of the German soldiers. “They deserve to be
He was twenty-seven at the time, and although we had regularly exchanged letters, it had been well over a year since I’d seen him. By then, a certain texture had been added to him by his travels and his studies, and his voice bore a gravity that I associated with the knowledge and experiences he had accumulated since last we’d met.
“So, how is the new book coming?” I asked him.
“Oradour is hard to write about,” he said.
His eyes were still blue, but their shade seemed deeper, though I doubt their color had actually changed. Still, there was an incontestable depth in those eyes, something that spoke of the charred village whose tragedy he had chosen as the subject of his next book.
“Yes, it was terrible what happened at Oradour,” I said.
“I don’t mean that it’s hard to write about in that way,” Julian said. “It’s that there’s a kind of voyeurism involved, a peep-show quality.”
I looked at him, puzzled, and at that instant, the train entered a tunnel that threw us into shadow, so that we sat in silence, rumbling on, until the train passed out of the darkness and we were bathed in light again.
Something in Julian’s face had changed. It was as if, during the brief darkness of the tunnel, some other, deeper darkness had fallen upon him.
“The pain of others should not be made thrilling,” he said softly. “There should be no intellectual sadism in reading about Oradour.”
Had that been the moment when it first occurred to him to write his book as he’d later written it? I wondered now.
One thing was clear: In The Eyes of Oradour, Julian had focused exclusively on the victims, all 642 of them, each given a single page to bear witness, a kind of Spoon River Anthology for the members of that murdered village. That was the magisterial oddity of the book, the way Julian had managed to see the massacre through the eyes of those who’d suffered it. To write of the atrocity at Oradour in so strange a way had been a brave choice, and at times—when a little girl used her own body to shield her doll from the attack, for example—he had brought a heartrending vividness to the victims’ deaths.
But in that same narrative, he’d refused to name either the men who ordered the massacre or those who carried it out. Even as unnamed figures, the Germans are glimpsed only at quick moments when the crowd breaks and the back of a soldier, or perhaps only a boot or uniformed leg, is glimpsed in what amounts to a photo flash. At other times the soldiers are disembodied voices, shouting commands or gently deceiving the villagers of Oradour as to their real intent. In other instances, they appear only as the blurry hint of a figure, a brushstroke of helmeted gray.
On the whole, I thought the book extraordinarily accomplished, worthy of the many years it had taken Julian to write it, though a few reviewers had complained that he had concealed the methodical human agency behind the massacre too much, making the innocent of Oradour seem less like the victims of actual cruelty than of the touching down of a storm.
At the time, even though I greatly admired the book, I also thought this criticism not altogether unfair. It was a monumental crime, after all, and Julian had determinedly concealed the men who had carried it out.
Why had he done that?
We were sitting on a bench behind the great library on Fifth Avenue when I posed that very question. It was winter, and we were both wrapped in our overcoats. It had snowed the day before, and the bare limbs of the trees were laced in white. Julian remained silent for a long time before explaining why he hadn’t identified any of the German soldiers. “They deserve to be
Similar Books
