He said he was certain that I was such a survivor because only a survivor could write such a story. The second was a very angry letter from a Holocaust survivor. She found my use of imagination utterly out of place and considered it both emotionally and morally disruptive. I sided with the survivor and thought the psychiatrist foolish. I finally assauged the survivor by convincing her that I was not an enemy of her unreplicatable experience.
History is the ground of our being, and together with imagination, that is what makes writing.
Writing without history has been epidemic for some time now. It's a very strange American amnesiac development to put all experience in the present tense, without memory, or history, or a past. One damn thing after another. Judgment and interpretation. In one of his last books Lionel Trilling speaks of the alternative culture's having become mainstream culture.