The Revolt of the Pendulum

by Clive James

  As often happens, the hard road makes for the more revealing journey. There are not many appreciators of Verdi who have been Secretary of Defence. Healey’s real university was not Oxford, where he was merely brilliant, but war-time Italy, where he learned the prickly realities of making decisions that could lead to no clear result, but only, at best, to something that might have been worse. The Anzio beach-master’s bitter experience (the landing went smoothly, but Kesselring’s counter-attack almost undid the whole enterprise) was behind the easy-seeming grace of Healey’s slippered prose as old age approached: a grace – and here I switch to the present tense, because his style is still alive – that sins only in its undue fondness for semi-colons, and in the occasional dangling participle. But he isn’t being lazy. He is just breathing out. After arguing for a living all his life, now at last he can settle down to be unanswerable.

  Nevertheless he is careful to put in plenty of self-deprecation. Opponents are allowed their opinions. If it turns out, as it almost invariably does, that Healey’s opinion was better, he tries not to crow. He forgets to record that in 1945 he advised his fellow Labourites not to be panicked by evidence ‘that our comrades on the Continent are being extremist’. Annan does not forget: in Our Age he quotes chapter and verse of what Stalin was up to, while conceding that Healey changed his mind the following year. But on the whole Healey is convincing when he makes himself sound reasonable. Though he had the reputation of a bully among those he dominated, there was always evidence that the tolerance he claims in retrospect was genuinely there all along, if sometimes well shrouded. I remember that after the first televised session of the House of Lords in 1985, Healey called Lord Stockton’s speech ‘a lulu’. Since Lord Stockton had started life as Harold Macmillan, and Healey had publicly denounced Macmillan’s part in the Suez enterprise as a disgrace, unstinting admiration for a shameless piece to camera was a pretty tolerant reaction to the decrepit lurk-man’s latter-day pose as a wise old bird who had seen it all.

  Pushing tolerance to the limit, Healey even has good words for Harold Wilson. At the time, Healey’s contempt for Wilson’s opportunism matched Wilson’s fear of Healey’s competence: the multilingual Healey was uniquely qualified to be Foreign Secretary, so Wilson kept him busy with every post except that. The good words make Healey’s portrait of Wilson even more devastating. In R. H. S. Crossman’s long, detailed and hilariously self-approving parliamentary diaries, the portrait of Wilson is devastating too, but Crossman was a zany who amply merited Healey’s one-line dismissal: ‘A Machiavelli without judgment is a dangerous colleague.’ Healey is too well-mannered to argue for his own intellectual superiority over most of his coevals, but the superiority is plain. As with Roy Jenkins, you wonder about the amount of coincidence it must have taken to ensure that he did not become Prime Minister. In a presidential system Healey would have taken the top spot for certain, because he was dynamite on TV. In the British system, however, the party must be pleased before the people, and never since Gaitskell has an intellectual managed to please the Labour Party, unless, like Wilson, he is ready to wear disguise, or, like Michael Foot, to talk shapeless waffle on his feet in order to offset his scholarly precision on the page. Besides, Healey was an unequivocating advocate of nuclear deterrence, and would have had a chance at the leadership only if he had equivocated. (Foot, who was helped to the leadership by his advocacy of the opposite thing, equivocated in the opposite direction in order to win the general election, and the strain helped to ensure that he clamorously lost it.) Healey never flaunted his culture, but he could not conceal it. It was there in the way he talked, and even in the way he listened. He might demolish somebody else’s argument in a few sentences, but he took it in first.

  So Healey had the credentials to detect intolerance in Gaitskell. Our initial quoted passage is made energetic by the analysis of why the Cabinet meeting goes on too long: because agreement is not enough. But the way the passage is illustrated is what shows why Healey’s memoir is of such unusual quality. The reference to Dean Rusk is not dragged in. It just appears at the right spot with perfect naturalness. Healey works the same quick magic at least once per paragraph throughout the book. Other people’s observations decorate his. If his were not so good, the co-opted aphorisms would look like medals on a dummy. But they are not just worthy of their place, their place is worthy of them, and so everybody shines. Churchill never sounded better than when quoted by Healey. As Secretary of Defence, Healey frequently played host to Montgomery, who would drop in for a chat when he was up in London visiting the House of Lords. Montgomery was a lonely man by then, with no object in life beyond getting the rules changed so that nobody except him could be called a Field Marshal. The reminiscence is almost touching. But Churchill’s verdict on Monty is quoted to stiffen it up: ‘In defeat, indomitable; in victory, insufferable; in NATO, thank God, invisible.’ Healey had an ear for rhythm, and anyone who has that will hear rhythm wherever it occurs. He was delighted by every sharp mind he met. His reputation for brutality might have arisen among those who knew that they did not delight him. There was a sharp critical ability at the heart of his wide powers of appreciation, and his excellent book of memoirs is a reminder that we should value the kind of public figure more interested in cultivating his mind than polishing his image, even though he is likely to end up being sidelined by the man who is better at the second thing than at the first.

  Standpoint, November 2008

  Postscript

  Somebody wading through Bill Clinton’s memoirs, let alone Ronald Reagan’s, could be excused for wondering whether the experience of having held public office were not a guarantee against recalling it effectively in print: even the ghost writers sound weary. But there is a contrary tradition of being energized by memory into a captivating summation, and it goes back to Metternich at the very least. (It could be said that it goes back to Clarendon.) From his years at the coal-face of politics, Healey not only remembered the ring of the pick, he got it into his style. The same was true for Abba Eban, whose two main books (An Autobiography and Personal Witness) were much in my mind while I was reading Healey. It goes without saying that both men knew what they were talking about. What doesn’t go without saying is that they knew how to write it down.

  ZUCKERMAN UNCORKED

  Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost

  In a Moebius striptease, the disrobing stripper is always on the point of getting dressed again, and there is no resolution to the revelation. A Moebius striptease in written form, Philip Roth’s new novel Exit Ghost is purportedly his long-running character Nathan Zuckerman’s new novel, narrated in the first person. During the course of Nathan Zuckerman’s new novel, Zuckerman raises the question of just how far an author’s personal biography should be drawn into any discussion about his works of art. The answer seems to be that any reader who might want to do so must be a bit of a klutz.

  But we get that answer only if we decide that Zuckerman is speaking for Roth when he, Zuckerman, seems to endorse the opinion of Amy Bellette, now old, grey and diseased but once the young mistress, helpmeet and nurse of Zuckerman’s mentor and hero E. I. Lonoff, that there is something crassly illiterate about any attempts even by scholars, let alone journalists, to trace the inspiration of her erstwhile lover’s works to his actual life. And what if Zuckerman doesn’t endorse her opinion? He quotes her at length, but without explicitly agreeing, even though the long letter in which she expresses her objections to biographical reductionism suggests that she can write an essay nearly as well as, say, Philip Roth.

  Maybe Zuckerman is withholding judgment. He might well have reason to do so, because in Roth’s early Zuckerman works, notably The Ghost Writer (first published in 1979, and hey, there’s the ghost already), Zuckerman was probing the secrets about the connection between Lonoff’s work and his real life even as a character in this new book, Richard Kliman, is hoping, by revealing the facts about Lonoff’s real life, to win for the neglected Lonoff the fame that he has always lac
ked, and thereby get his works republished in the Library of America (the same distinguished imprint which, we alert readers will note, is currently republishing the complete works of none other than Philip Roth – no victim of neglect he). Hoping to? Insisting. There is no getting rid of Kliman. He just keeps on coming back.

  As portrayed by Zuckerman, Kliman is irredeemably obnoxious. But room is left for the possibility that the young Zuckerman might once have been a bit less altruistic – a bit more ruthlessly ambitious all round – than he once reported himself as being in the first person, or was reported to be by Roth in the third person. (If you want to go back and check this out, the early, Zuckerman Bound sequence of Zuckerman novels is now published in a single, typically sumptuous volume from, you guessed it, the Library of America: but a warning – the name Zuckerman has the word ‘sugar’ loosely buried within it, and once you give that old hunger a chance to burn again, you might not be able to stop.) What if the decaying Zuckerman, by heaping imprecations on the repellent Kliman, is simply refusing to recognize his pristine young self reborn? Complicated enough for you yet? We’re just getting started.

  If Zuckerman ever decides that he was once, under his show of Chekhov-loving sensitivity, crassly illiterate to stalk Lonoff, then we might decide that we are crassly illiterate to ask whether Zuckerman’s state of health in this new novel has any connection to Roth’s in real life. In Exit Ghost, Zuckerman, whom we have known since he was young and potent, has had prostate surgery that has left him impotent, not to mention incontinent. (We might not mention it now, but we’re going to have to soon.) There is a beautiful young woman in the novel, Jamie Logan, who is willing to be made love to by the avowedly decrepit Zuckerman, but he deliberately fails to keep the appointment, or seems to. (By then he is talking about himself as if he were a character in a play. Maybe he nailed her, but rigged the dialogue to suggest he didn’t. See my forthcoming paper How Unreal was Thereal McCoy? Strategic Female Fantasy Figures in the Disguised Biography of Philip Roth.)

  Is Roth saying, through Zuckerman, that the only reason he, Roth, might fail to show up for such a date is that he is no longer capable of going through with the consequences? Are we allowed to ask whether the real-life Roth, who once had to stave off accusations of providing the model for his character Alexander Portnoy, is no longer in thrall to his virile member, if he ever was? (After all, he never actually said he was. He said Portnoy was.) In the last rumour I heard on the subject, one of the most luxuriantly beautiful young Australian female film stars had thrown herself at Roth’s feet lightly clad – I mean she was lightly clad, not Roth’s feet – and demanded satisfaction.

  This rumour might have had no more substance than the one about the famous actor and the gerbil, but it travelled through cyberspace at the same speed, and for the same reason: it fitted the legend. Roth has been catnip for upmarket women all his life, and never not renowned for it. In London, when he lived there, Roth would enter a fashionable drawing room with Claire Bloom on his arm and you would wonder how he had got into the house without a band striking up ‘Hail to the Chief’.

  Roth might never have been Alexander Portnoy, but the inventor of Alexander Portnoy, unless he was a studious lizard from outer space with limitless powers of telepathic imagination, was a male human being well schooled in carnal relationships with women. It is true that Zuckerman, even when all the books of his saga are taken together, falls short of being a full case of Portnovian satyriasis. Zuckerman lusts after many women, but he does not get to make them all. He gets to make notes on them all. He is a writer. In just such a way, Jay McInerney might have invented an alter ego who was a dietician, and who lured all those fashion models up to his apartment in order to weigh them. How can we fail to ask whether or not Roth still has what it takes, if he presents us with a central character based on himself who has it no longer? But is the character really based on himself? Let’s go back to the beginning.

  Before we do, we should note that there is no question of abandoning the quest for clarification. Exit Ghost is just too fascinating to leave alone. It was designed that way, like the Tar Baby. Actually – leaving all questions about authorial identity aside for the moment – this book is latter-day Roth at his intricately thoughtful best, and a vivid reminder of why a dystopian satirical fantasy like The Plot Against America was comparatively weak. Roth has no business making up the world. His business is making up his mind, in the sense that his true material for inventing a pattern is self-exploration, not social satire.

  Roth, speaking in propria persona, once echoed Tom Lehrer’s remark by saying that when Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Prize for Peace it was time to give up on satire. But for Roth it was always time to give up on satire. The world is too obviously out of whack for a writer of his quality to give it the best of his attention. He should reserve that for his own psyche, which is only subtly out of whack, but still would be if he were living in paradise. Unlike the world, his mentality can’t be fixed, so a self-assertive rage is inappropriate. Only self-analysis will serve, and to pursue that without solipsism is the continuing challenge. Roth gets as close as anyone ever has to being clinically detached about spreading his own brains all over the operating table. But hold it there. We were going to start again.

  And we have to start with the absorbent pads stuffed down the shorts. Zuckerman is leaking yellow water. Doing so, he has run for harbour. To change the metaphor, he has run for cover. He is somewhere up in the Berkshires near Tanglewood, not far from where none other than E. I. Lonoff once holed up to keep the inquisitive literary world at bay. (The possibility that Amy Bellette might really have been Anne Frank would have made the literary world’s investigators no less curious, but in this volume Roth has given up on that one.) When Zuckerman comes downtown to see the doctor, he avoids Ground Zero. He no longer wants to keep up with the news, even that news. (‘I’ve served my tour.’) But he’s still not done with Lonoff.

  At the Strand bookshop, Zuckerman puts together, for depressingly few dollars, a complete spare set of Lonoff’s first editions. (There was my chance to meet Zuckerman. I could well have been in the Strand at the same time, adding to my row of Philip Roth hardbacks. If they had been first editions, they would have cost me thousands. Was that Zuckerman, the tall, grizzled patriarch in the Rare Book section on the fourth floor who was going through that stack of New Yorkers with the original Roger Angell baseball articles? But wait a second: Zuckerman is a ghost.)

  In Saul Bellow’s first post-Nobel novel, The Dean’s December, mortal fear centred on the colon: the item of anatomy, not the punctuation mark. (‘It’s serious enough for me to be wearing the bag.’) In Roth’s Exit Ghost, it centres on the prostate, or anyway on where the prostate used to be. The bearer of the wound can reach no accommodation with his loss. If I can speak for the outside world, which is where I come from, this is the thematic area where the current generation of magisterial American male writers who are now making the last preparations for their immortality – Roth, Vidal, Mailer, Updike – come closest to evincing a common national characteristic.

  This glittering crew, a Team America that not even Henry James and Edith Wharton put together could possibly have foreseen, are the most commanding bunch of representatives American literary culture has yet had, but there is something about American culture which doesn’t want to accept death as a fitting end to life. They are so incorrigibly energetic that the white light of their expectations bleaches even their pessimism. In that respect, they could all take a tip from, say, Joan Didion, who at least has never imagined that the Grim Reaper gets into the tournament only on a wild card.

  But this isn’t even a quibble. It’s just an observation from someone standing awed and stunned on the sidelines. In my own country, Australia, Portnoy’s Complaint, first published in 1969, was a banned book for the first five years of its career. Having exiled myself to London, I was able to read it, but even in London there was no mistaking that the Americans were leaving the old
British Empire looking not just superseded but mealy-mouthed.

  American English had become the dominant language of modern reality. There was still a lot to be said for a version of English that wasn’t dominant (the British and ex-colonial writers would go on to prove that post-imperial confusion was at least as fruitful as the imperial success had ever been) but you couldn’t mistake the shift of cultural power. Even today, decades later, a British professor of American Studies at a provincial university is in the position of someone with the free run of the PX at the local US Air Force base: he has access to goods whose quality is hard to match locally. As for the home-grown literati, listen to Martin Amis talking about Bellow, and Ian McEwan talking about Updike. Try to imagine the same mentor-prentice relationship in reverse. It might happen one day, but not quite yet. For my own part, I can only say this much: of the two funniest books I have ever read in my life, Lucky Jim made me laugh loudest, but Portnoy’s Complaint set me free.

  But in culture as in military strength, preponderance has its drawbacks. The big guns get a sense of mission, and their very confidence invites questions about their vision, even about their ability to gaze within. Just as Bellow, in his factual writings, never asked himself the awkward question about divisions within Israel, so in his fictional writings he stifled a question that would have multiplied his range: he never made a subject out of his succession of discarded wives, when you would have thought – must have thought – that for a writer otherwise so brilliantly introspective, there lay the essence of his subject. Similarly, Mailer, unceasingly writing advertisements for himself, never delved far enough into his own psyche to make a subject out of his complicity in the death of Jack Abbott’s victim: the great writer could face every embarrassment except the one that pierced to the centre of his responsibility as a public writer.