Book Description

"The eerie feeling one gets on reading this, sad, self-lacerating journal of a lonely young man's cockroach's existence in a New York room, is that if he had not killed himself no publisher would have touched his book with a bargepole. Publication might have saved him. He felt he was a failure. An early entry goes: "Today for the first time in my life I smelled gas. For suicide. It does not smell bad." But in a world that hankers for proof of the truly tragic, only death convinces us of sincerity: we are willing to find magic in an obituary while we deny it to a life. That logic is made explicit in Thomas Hardy's story, "The Withered Arm," where a hangman's rope is sold in Dorchester the inch. Andrew Bihaly found writing "therapeutic," and after what seems to have been a number of unsuccessful bouts with psychiatrists he began confiding his undated experiences to a journal, Which has just appeared, mysteriously "edited" (excisions are not marked) by Anthony Tuttle. Bihaly did this for two years. In the beginning he was working as a busboy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. restaurant. He was a broody, hard-working person, thin-skinned, easy to meet, and possessing a generosity that amounted almost to martyrdom. In the process of describing the disappointments in his work, he remembers his past, and slowly on the balance sheet of this journal his memory scourges him: he recalls his childhood in Budapest; in a monastery, Visegrad, where he was placed by his mother (who was put into several concentration camps) only to be tormented by the ambiguous menace of the Nazis; he recalls the uprooted existence he led after the war, a succession of cities and camps, until his arrival in the United States in 1950 at the age of 9. He was educated in Philadelphia (one of his school essays is reprinted here with grotesque irony, "What the Flag Means to Me"); he was in the Air Force; he went to Queens College for a while; he refers to a nervous breakdown, to plans for writing and photography. In its superficial details it is not an unusual story. But there is more. His birth certificate was forged to prove he was not a Jew; his father was killed in Eichmann's death march; his mother, for reasons he does not disclose, kept apart from him at crucial periods, and he had a crippling dependency on her. So, again and again, we read sentences like these: "I am trying to be free of the vicious spasm of anxiety ... whenever I remember that I am Jewish," "... I look up at a woman and, no matter how young she is ... I feel she is my mother, she reminds me of my mother." "Can a Jewish refugee become a healthy lover?", "I need a doctor," "Who am I?" "What am I doing?" And there are fantasies: he dreams of having a harem, being craved by all the women he meets, being a writer, having expensive clothes, a fancy hi-fi set ("The thing for me is to get my teeth fixed, get a nice set of fashionable winter clothes."), glamour, happiness, money. He feared anonymity and failure"--Taken from The New York Times Archives.