BOOKS
459
helion and Vernal Equinox) offer a clue: we are to regard this narrative
as a version of natural process, a cycle, an ox'bit long since on record and,
however outrageous its demands or its gifts, inevitable.
The Left Panel consists of a notebook kept
by
the narrator and hero,
Stefan Briickmann (Bridge-man: alI the elements in Haldeman's novel
are "totally organized"; expressive occasions are observed-names of
characters, symbolic decor, parodies of individual style-that are generally
unremarked in conventional fiction). The notebook is a self-conscious,
"modem" and chronologically oblique journal of a half-Gypsy youth
forced through the hell of the German concentration camps, miraculously
surviving into post-adolescence, and adopted by a Rousseauian American
infantryman nicknamed "Moon" (for the Sun's Attendant, this should
be warning enough). This first Panel concludes with Stefan's American
wanderings-the Moonshine having been occulted by a characteristic act
of sexual violence (and suicide) to which I shalI return. Weare to under–
stand the Left Panel, I take it, as the palmists say we are to understand
our left hand-as what is
given.
The narrator says, at its end:
I've played this game long enough now. Whatever comes from
here on will have
to
put itself in my way-it's not going to
overtake me from behind.
The brief central Hinges section consists of letters, diaries, clippings,
a poem, fragments of a lecture-alI synthesizing a kind of Theory of
Germany, using crystalIizations of the narrator's experience toward a
more general philosophical understanding of his situation in the ensuing
Right Panel: study in Heidelberg, an affair with the widow of a cele–
brated young German Poet (Paul Speer=spear, an offensive weapon)
who has committed suicide the previous year (1955), a trajectory through
a hideous yet somehow funny and always real landscape of German
intellectuals, monsters and misfits all trapped in their history. For all its
horrors, Haldeman has been able to mediate the Apocalypse: we have
the sense of how young German inteIlectuals-like Hochhuth, say-have
led their spooky lives, against the grain of a society cemented together
by guilt and gullibility and great financial gains.
Symmetrical to the noble savagery of the American hegira at the
end of the Left Panel (and certainly the author marks the conclusions
of his structure spatially, not temporally) is a long, puzzling but very
beautiful third-person Gypsy narrative at the end of the Right one.
By it, Stefan finally crosses the bridge of himself back
to
his origins, the
source of his feelings in a Romansh heritage-he even recovers his (ap-
