In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Stephen O’Connor’s novel We Want So Much to Be Ourselves powerfully explores the personal price of fascism.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“O’Connor offers a lucid and chilling view into the rise of fascism. . . . It’s a knockout.”
In his own words, here is Stephen O’Connor’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel We Want So Much to Be Ourselves:
When I was in middle school, my mother, distressed that I read almost nothing but science fiction and comic books, handed me the Modern Library edition of Selected Stories of Franz Kafka, published in 1952, the year of my birth. She recommended I start with “The Metamorphosis,” presumably because she thought a story about a young man who has turned into an insect would be close enough to science fiction to hook me. While I was definitely intrigued, I lacked sufficient confidence in my mother’s opinion to commit to the novella-length “The Metamorphosis,” and so I started with the much shorter “A Country Doctor.” That story hit me like a hurricane, its every image so fantastically unexpected, evocative, and resistant to interpretation that I hardly knew what to make of anything that happened, yet felt I was constantly discovering crucial truths. It is possible that, even before I reached the story’s deeply resonant and eternally mysterious final image, I had conceived the desire to write stories myself that would astound and perplex readers as a means of enabling them to engage more deeply with their own lives.
I am not sure why this back-alley route to enlightenment instantly became so central to my literary aesthetics—although it is true that I find any story that leaves me knowing exactly what happened and how to interpret it dull and forgettable. I vastly prefer fiction that doesn’t surrender its mysteries, and so serves as a springboard to ever multiplying revelations. There is, I am sure, a chicken-or-the-egg relationship between my love for “A Country Doctor” and these aesthetic predilections, but, in the final analysis, they don’t explain why I felt so deeply at home in an imaginative space where nothing is definite or fully explicable, and everything is ominous. Only recently, as I have been considering another tendency in my writing, have I come to a possible explanation for why I find this weird space so much like real life.
The protagonists in both my fiction and nonfiction narratives—including my memoir—are almost always people who try to do the right thing and fail. Many of these characters are well-meaning idiots, or the perpetrators of only minor failures, but some, like Thomas Jefferson, the co-protagonist of my last novel, are capable of unforgivable wrongdoing, even as they also have compelling virtues. I have long known I am drawn to such characters because of my father, whom I loved and respected, even though he was an alcoholic and perversely committed to his own destruction—which is to say that he was someone I could never make sense of, someone who seemed exactly as deserving of my contempt as of my love, and thus that I had been born into a world in which the abiding “truth” was an ominous indefiniteness, to which perplexity was the most honest and realistic response.
Günter Zeitz, the protagonist of my new novel, We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, is a psychoanalyst, as was my father, but the ambiguity of his moral nature is more a matter of context than character. He is compassionate and tolerant; he wants to help his patients; he tries hard to understand their points of view and remain unjudgmental. In ordinary circumstances, such traits would make Günter a good man, but because he lives in Nazi Germany, these virtues are the road to hell. The only way he or any Aryan German could survive the Third Reich with their decency intact was to oppose fascism with such ferocity as to make their death all but certain—a degree of moral fortitude that Günter, only an ordinarily brave man, finds all but impossible to summon up.
1. “Wiegala,” written by Ilse Weber, sung by Anne Sofie von Otter
Ilse Weber, a Czech musician and children’s book writer, was sent to Theresienstadt with her husband Willi and their son Tommy in 1942, and reportedly composed this lullaby to sing to Tommy and the children in the camp’s hospital, where she worked. After Willi was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, Weber became so unhappy that she asked if she and her son might also be sent to the camp. Her request was granted and, minutes after they descended from the train at Auschwitz, she and Tommy were herded into the gas chamber, without ever even glimpsing Willi. I have decided to start my playlist with this song partly because I feel it conveys the moral foundation of my novel: that tender and hopeful optimism so essential to trust, love, and kindness. But I have also chosen it because Weber’s adherence to that very optimism made her unable to comprehend, despite her having endured eleven years of brutal antisemitism and two years in a concentration camp, that the industrial-scale atrocity we now call the Holocaust was even possible. Although a grotesque proportion of the German populace were more than happy to abide by the Final Solution, a great many people shared Weber’s incapacity to grasp what was happening before their eyes, an incapacity partly due to pure innocence, but mostly, I believe, to self-deception, a phenomenon explored at length in my novel.
2. “Daydreaming,” written and performed by Radiohead
There is an absurd aspect to the aspiration expressed in my book’s title, for how can it possibly make sense to want to be the person you already are? But the “self” referred to in the title is not so much the person one is, as the entity referred to in the phrase “my true self,” or in the declaration, “that’s not who I really am.” These are idealized selves—versions of who we are minus a few of our weaknesses. Despite Günter’s only ordinary courage, a moment comes when he thoughtlessly takes an action that causes many people to think him heroic, and for the remainder of the novel, he is torn between the desire to become that heroic self and his conviction that it would be wrong to take credit for virtues he does not possess. Günter, like all of my morally compromised protagonists, does not arise solely out of my inability to arrive at an unequivocal moral judgment of my father (or myself), but also out of my uncertainty about idealism, a mode of thought that can be both an inspiration to do the right thing and a means of concealing one’s moral failures, even from oneself. The minimalist lyrics of Radiohead’s “Daydreaming” present idealism as inherently sorrowful and dangerous. “Dreamers…never learn,” we are told. They go “Beyond the point/Of no return,” until “it’s too late/The damage is done.”
3. “Lili Marleen,” written by Hans Leip and Norbert Schultze, performed by Marlene Dietrich
Although the struggle against authoritarianism looms large in We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, much of the novel concerns the passionate but tortured and ultimately doomed love of Günter and his wife Josine. While he is a gentile and she Jewish, they are both atheists, entirely detached from the religions they were born into. So, in 1924, when they meet in Sigmund Freud’s waiting room (Günter being Freud’s student, Josine his patient), it is possible for them both to think that they are, in Josine’s words “the same.” History, of course, will dramatically invalidate that assessment, though the problems that arise within their marriage have more to do with Josine’s troubled past than the poisonous antisemitism that engulfs them. Late in the novel, Hannah, Günter and Josine’s daughter, is sitting on a mountainside in the Bavarian Alps and hears the melody of “Lili Marleen” played on an accordion, drifting up from a valley. To my mind, Marlene Dietrich’s classic rendition of this soldier’s lament for a lost love evokes the most beautiful elements of Günter and Josine’s tragic relationship.
4. “Song of the Insufficiency of Human Endeavor,” &
5. “Pirate Jenny,” both by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, translated by Ralph Manheim and John Willett, and sung, respectively, by C.K. Alexander and Ellen Greene
At a party following the January 1928 debut in Berlin of the theatrical adaptation of The Good Soldier Švejk, Günter falls into an awkward conversation with a solitary and depressed-looking man, about his own age, who turns out to be Bertolt Brecht. Perhaps only days later, Brecht and Kurt Weill begin writing The Threepenny Opera from which these two songs are taken. Both songs, the first comical, the second fiercely grim, render the nihilistic bitterness and despair that characterized so much of Weimar culture, and that, alas, not only inspired revolutionary art and music, but also the reactionary nationalism, bigotry, and violence of the Nazi Party. These songs are from the Public Theater’s 1977 production of the play that I saw at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which, as it happens, is not more than a three-minute walk from the Rambles, where, in the novel’s final pages, Günter and his dear friend and colleague, Edith Jacobson, come to an understanding of the deep trauma they share.
6. “Streets of Minneapolis,” written and performed by Bruce Springsteen
I started this novel the summer before Donald Trump was elected to his first term and finished it the summer before he was elected to his second. Maybe I too suffered a blend of innocence and self-deception, but during both summers, I found it impossible to believe that someone so manifestly cruel, ignorant, and out of control as Trump could be elected president. And so, twice over, this novel, like its protagonist, has been transformed by a shift of historical context. The transformation is not radical, however. I always intended that this book make clear the ways in which authoritarians exploit credulity, racism, and fear to seize control of a nation and enslave the very people they claim to be liberating. But originally, I saw that dynamic as part of a larger argument about the many ways human beings fail to recognize the true nature of their own lives, ideas, actions and loves. I hope that it will not be long before this is the primary way my readers and I again see my novel. But right now, I am deeply worried that this country is slipping into Nazi-style fascism, and so I am letting Bruce Springsteen give voice to my own fear and anger. But the presence of this song on my playlist also represents hope, as it wouldn’t have been possible in Nazi Germany for such a song to have been performed so frequently and heard by so many people.
7. “Peace Piece,” written and performed by Bill Evans
I learned so much as I wrote this book, especially as I went ever deeper into the hearts and minds of Günter, Josine, Hannah, and the novel’s two other important characters, Elke Havekost and Max Pfeiffer, and as I wrestled with the ideas of Sigmund Freud, and tried to figure out how they contributed to and diverged from this book’s most essential themes. It was also endlessly fascinating to think about and render so many modes of feeling: curiosity, love, sexual desire, and parental joy, but also loneliness, fear, guilt, fury, and disgust. And maybe more than anything else, I loved the pops, sparkles, and hums that occurred between the words in every new sentence throughout the eight years of the novel’s surprising raveling, unraveling, and re-raveling. But there were also many times, often amid the book’s most crucial scenes and meditations, when writing became a torture, when I had to get up every fifteen minutes and walk around my apartment until my head and heart were clear enough of revulsion and despair that I might sit back down and continue. And so, I am ending this playlist with one of my favorite pieces of music: Bill Evans’s consummately sensitive and expansive improvisation. Listen to it in the dark, ideally lying down. Let Evans lead you into the vast and gentle interstices of his sensibility, his mind, his music, and this incomprehensible universe, which, despite its absolute indifference to every human wish, remains, essentially and always, astoundingly beautiful.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Stephen O’Connor’s playlist for his novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings
Stephen O’Connor is the author of seven books including two novels, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings and We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, and the short story collection Here Comes Another Lesson. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and his nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, Nation, Boston Globe, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Manhattan.