Matters of honor

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Ehrensachen (English original title: Matters of Honor ) is a novel by the American writer Louis Begley . It was published in 2007 by the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf . In the same year the Suhrkamp Verlag published the German translation by Christa Krüger. The novel is about three young students from different families who share a student apartment in college and their further résumé.

content

Around 1950, three young men became roommates at Harvard College : The narrator Samuel "Sam" Standish came from an upper-class American family from New England . He recently found out that he was adopted by his unloved parents. Now he is looking for a connection with his older cousin George, who is already studying at Harvard and comes from the much more influential branch of the Standish family. Archibald "Archie" P. Palmer III. is the offspring of an officer dynasty and is more interested in girls and alcohol than in the subject matter. Through his fellow South American students, he tries to establish contacts with the respected student clubs. Henry White - actually Henryk Weiss - on the other hand is the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants who emigrated to the United States after persecution during the Nazi era . He not only suffers from his petty-bourgeois origins, but above all from the anti-Semitism that is always subliminal in his new homeland , and he fights against prejudices through a particular eagerness to learn and ambition.

On the very first day of college, Henry made the fateful acquaintance of a young Radcliffe student, who playfully threw him kissing hands. Margot Hornung is the daughter of a wealthy Amsterdam banker who saved his capital and art collection for America before the war and now lives in New York . Although Henry immediately falls in love with the young woman, he does not dare to face her for a long time out of inferiority complexes until his roommates arrange to meet again. Margot only reciprocates Henry's feelings platonically and keeps him at a distance, because she feels attracted to other, more dominant men. Sam, on the other hand, suffers a nervous breakdown as a result of a fight in the night district of New Orleans , where his cousin George has dragged him in search of women for sale, and has to interrupt his studies because of depression.

With the end of college, the lives of the three students separate. Sam publishes a book and becomes an acclaimed writer. Henry joins the army and, on a home vacation, argues so hard with his possessive mother that she commits suicide. Shortly afterwards, the father also dies of a stroke. Henry begins studying at Harvard Law School , but he suffers from the guilt he blames for the death of his parents. Archie has become an investment banker on Wall Street and marries a German-born South American named Alma. On the honeymoon he races to his death under the influence of alcohol. In Paris , Sam meets both Margot, who married an older French writer whom she is leaving for an American filmmaker, and Henry, who joined the law firm Wiggins & O'Reilly after completing his studies and now works in its French branch . He has a close friendship with his most important client, the wealthy Belgian banker Hubert Comte de Saint-Terre. But after Mitterrand took office and his planned nationalization of a Belgian bank, the rescue measures devised by Henry led to a rift between the lawyer and his client.

Henry uses the opportunity to finish his previous life and quit the firm. In a conversation with Sam he explains that he tried all his life to deny his Jewish identity, which brought him only shame and shame. Now he wants to start a completely new life. In fact, Henry went into hiding the very next day, and Sam failed to find his tracks for decades. It was not until he was almost 70 that Sam met Margot again, who shared the blame for himself and him for corrupting Henry and forcing him into a life that did not suit him. But she also tracked down her former suitor in moments of regret for the missed opportunities. So she can tell Sam that he now lives as Henri Leblanc in Avignon . Sam travels to France and meets his old friend again who seems to lead a happy life with a French woman named Mireille. Henry explains that he had to break all bridges behind him because he would never have succeeded at the side of his old “accomplices” in leaving his old “criminal” life behind. But just as Margot named her son after Henry, he gave his now grown son the name of his old friend Sam.

interpretation

Begley takes up a theme of his early novel The Man Who Came Too Late with points of honor : the assimilation of a Polish-Jewish immigrant in his new home America at the cost of giving up himself. The narrative perspective is also similar to the earlier work: the first-person narrator is a friend of the immigrant and observes his fate from his own, subjective perspective. Like Jack in The Man Who Was Late, Sam, a typical WASP , comes from a privileged family of the American upper class. Unlike Jack, however, he is not completely at peace with himself and his social position: he is an adopted child who feels unloved by his parents, the novel suggests his hidden homosexuality , and he is under lifelong psychotherapeutic treatment for his depression . His narrative style is not the prose of a brilliant writer, but the laconic report of an observing outsider, dispensing with psychological interpretations.

Ehrensachen is a society novel that shows the contradiction between the American dream of a meritocracy and the social reality of the rule of the money nobility through the processes at top American universities . However, it is also a Bildungsroman in which the central character Henry tries to invent himself and adapts so much to his American role models that he becomes indistinguishable from them. To do this, he has to deny his Jewish origins, which develops into a conflict of loyalty with his parents that ends dramatically. Sam and Margot both support Henry in their own way to get rid of his role as outsider and thereby drive him out of their friendship. When Henry awakens from the American dream and learns to accept himself as an outsider, he only achieves this by breaking off his previous relationships completely.

While in Begley's early novel The Man Who Came Too Late the adjustment to social norms shows a self-destructive effect that ultimately drives the protagonist Ben to suicide, Henry can save himself at the end of the novel by giving up the re-creation of himself and Emigrated once more in order to finally live openly the life of a stranger in France. Instead of himself, however, he has to destroy the friendship with Sam and Margot. The search for the true self remains in vain. The narrator Sam draws the conclusion: "I am not even sure whether a true self was ever hidden behind all my masks - unless this self was the sum of my private lies and quarrels." This statement applies to Henry as well all of Begley's protagonists expand.

expenditure

  • Louis Begley: Matters of Honor . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-307-26525-8 .
  • Louis Begley: Items of Honor . From the American by Christa Krüger. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-41870-3 .

literature

  • Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 108-113.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 108-109, 113.
  2. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 110–112.
  3. ↑ Louis Begley: Matter of Honor . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 414.
  4. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, p. 112.