The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  I’d begun my visit telling myself, “Don’t pick on him where he’s vulnerable and where he’ll always be vulnerable.” But when vulnerability was everywhere, what was I to do? It was awfully late in the day to try to start shutting up. These boys are brothers, I thought, about as unlike as brothers come, but each has taken the other’s measure and been measured against the other for so long that it’s unthinkable that either could even learn to remain unconcerned by the judgment his counterpart embodies. These two men are boys who are brothers—these two boys are brothers who are men—these brothers are men who are boys—therefore the discrepancies are irreconcilable: the challenge is there merely in their being.

  “So that was your crowd,” I said, sitting down across from him.

  He answered solemnly, already protecting himself from what I might say. “Those are some of the people here, yes.”

  “His opponents must find Lippman a formidable foe.”

  “They do.”

  “What draws you to him?” I asked, wondering if he might not answer, “The man is the embodiment of potency.” Because wasn’t it precisely that?

  “What’s wrong with him?” he replied.

  “I didn’t say anything was. The question isn’t what I think of Lippman—it’s what I think of your fascination with him. I’m only asking about his hold on you.”

  “Why do I admire him? Because I believe he’s right.”

  “About what?”

  “Right in what he advocates for Israel and right in the assessment he makes of how to achieve it.”

  “That may be, for all I know, but tell me, who does he remind you of?” I asked. “Anyone we know?”

  “Oh, no, please, no—save the psychoanalysis for the great American public.” Wearily he said, “Spare me.”

  “Well, that’s the way it sticks in my mind. Strip away the aggressive bully, strip away the hambone actor and the compulsive talker, and we could have been back at the kitchen table in Newark, with Dad lecturing us on the historical struggle between the goy and the Jew.”

  “Tell me something, is it at all possible, at least outside of those books, for you to have a frame of reference slightly larger than the kitchen table in Newark?”

  “The kitchen table in Newark happens to be the source of your Jewish memories, Henry—this is the stuff we were raised on. It is Dad—though this time round without the doubts, without the hidden deference to the goy and the fear of goyish mockery. It’s Dad, but the dream-Dad, supersized, raised to the hundredth power. Best of all is the permission Lippman gives not to be so nice. That must come as a relief after all these years—to be a good Jewish son and not nice, to be a roughneck and a Jew. Now that’s having everything. We didn’t have Jews quite like that in our neighborhood. The tough Jews we used to meet at weddings and bar mitzvahs were mostly fat guys in the produce line, so I can see the appeal, but aren’t you overdoing just a bit all the justifiable aggression?”

  “Why is it that all my life you’ve trivialized everything I do? Why don’t you psychoanalyze that? I wonder why my aspirations can’t ever be as valid as yours.”

  “I’m sorry, but being skeptical of revolvers is in my nature—as skeptical of revolvers as of the ideologues who wield them.”

  “Lucky you. Fortunate you. Righteous you. Humane you. You’re skeptical of just about everything.”

  “Henry, when are you going to stop being an apprentice fanatic and start practicing dentistry again?”

  “I ought to punch you in the fucking nose for that.”

  “Why don’t you blow my brains out with your gun?” I asked, now that he was unarmed. “That shouldn’t be too hard, seeing that you’re conflict-free and untainted by doubt. Look, I’m all for authenticity, but it can’t begin to hold a candle to the human gift for playacting. That may be the only authentic thing that we ever do.”

  “I always have the sensation speaking to you that I’m becoming progressively sillier and more ridiculous—why do you think that is, Nathan?”

  “Is that so? Well, it’s fortunate then that we haven’t had to speak very often and were able to go our different ways.”

  “It would simply never occur to you, never, to praise or appreciate anything I’ve done. Why do you think that is, Nathan?”

  “But it’s not the case. I think what you’ve done is colossal. I’m not sweeping that aside. An exchange of existences like this—it’s like after a great war, the exchange of prisoners. I don’t minimize the scale of this thing. I wouldn’t be here if I did. You’ve tried like hell not to let on, but I also see what it’s costing you—of course you’re paying a steep price, particularly where the kids are concerned. It’s indisputable that you’ve registered a powerful objection against the way you once lived. I don’t make light of that, it’s all I’ve thought about since I laid eyes on you. I’ve only been asking if in order to change some things, you had to change everything. I’m talking about what the missile engineers call ‘escape velocity’—the trick is to manage to leave the atmosphere without overshooting your target.”

  “Look—” he said, and jumped up suddenly as though to go for my throat, “—you’re a very intelligent man, Nathan, you’re very subtle, but you have one large defect—the only world that exists for you is the world of psychology. That’s your revolver. Aim and fire—and you’ve been firing it at me all my life. Henry is doing this because he wants to please Momma and Poppa, Henry is doing this because he wants to please Carol—or displease Carol, or displease Momma, or displease Poppa. On and on and on it goes. It’s never Henry as an autonomous being, it’s always Henry on the brink of being a cliché—my brother the stereotype. And maybe that was once even so, maybe I was a man who kept dropping into the stereotype, maybe that accounts for a lot of the unhappiness that I felt back home. Probably you think that the ways I choose to ‘rebel’ are only stereotypical. But unfortunately for you I’m not someone who’s only his simple, silly motives. All my life you’ve been right on top, like a guy guarding me in a basketball game. Won’t let me take one lousy shot. Everything I throw up you block. There’s always the explanation that winds up belittling me. Crawling all over me with your fucking thoughts. Everything I do is predictable, everything I do lacks depth, certainly compared to what you do. ‘You’re only taking that shot, Henry, because you want to score.” Ingenious! But let me tell you something—you can’t explain away what I’ve done by motives any more than I can explain away what you’ve done. Beyond all your profundities, beyond the Freudian lock you put on every single person’s life, there is another world, a larger world, a world of ideology, of politics, of history—a world of things larger than the kitchen table! You were in it tonight; a world defined by action, by power, where how you wanted to please Momma and Poppa simply doesn’t matter! All you see is escaping Momma, escaping Poppa—why don’t you see what I’ve escaped into? Everybody escapes—our grandparents came to America, were they escaping their mothers and fathers? They were escaping history! Here they’re making history! There’s a world outside the Oedipal swamp, Nathan, where what matters isn’t what made you do it but what it is you do—not what decadent Jews like you think but what committed Jews like the people here do! Jews who aren’t in it for laughs, Jews that have something more to go on than their hilarious inner landscape! Here they have an outer landscape, a nation, a world! This isn’t a hollow intellectual game! This isn’t some exercise for the brain divorced from reality! This isn’t writing a novel, Nathan! Here people don’t jerk around like your fucking heroes worrying twenty-four hours a day about what’s going on inside their heads and whether they should see their psychiatrists—here you fight, you struggle, here you worry about what’s going on in Damascus! What matters isn’t Momma and Poppa and the kitchen table, it isn’t any of that crap you write about—it’s who runs Judea!”

  And out the door he went, furious, and before he could be talked into going home.

  3. Aloft

  SHORTLY AFTER the seat-belt sign went of
f a group of religious Jews formed a minyan up by the bulkhead. I couldn’t hear them over the noise of the engines, but in the sunlight streaming through the safety-exit window I could see the terrific clip at which they were praying. Off and running faster than a Paganini Caprice, they looked like their objective was to pray at supersonic speed—praying itself they made to seem a feat of physical endurance. It was hard to imagine another human drama as intimate and frenzied being enacted so shamelessly in a public conveyance. Had a pair of passengers thrown off their clothes and, in a fit of equally unabashed fervor, begun making love out in the aisle, watching them wouldn’t have seemed to me any more voyeuristic.

  Though numbers of Orthodox Jews were seated throughout the tourist cabin, at my side was an ordinary American Jew like myself, a smallish man in his middle thirties, clean-shaven and wearing horn-rimmed glasses, who was alternately leafing through that morning’s Jerusalem Post—the Israeli English-language paper—and looking with curiosity at the covered heads bobbing and jerking in that square blaze of sunlight up by the bulkhead. Some fifteen minutes out of Tel Aviv he turned and asked in a friendly voice, “Visiting Israel or on business?”

  “Just a visit.”

  “Well,” he said, putting aside his paper, “what are your feelings about what you saw?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Your feelings. Were you moved? Were you proud?”

  Henry was still very much on my mind, and so rather than indulge my neighbor—what he was fishing for was pretty clear—I said, “Don’t follow you,” and reached into my briefcase for a pen and a notebook. I had the urge to write my brother.

  “You’re Jewish,” he said, smiling.

  “I am.”

  “Well, didn’t you have any feelings when you saw what they’ve done?”

  “Don’t have feelings.”

  “But did you see the citrus farms? Here are the Jews, who aren’t supposed to be able to farm—and there are those miles and miles of farms. You can’t imagine my feelings when I saw those farms. And the Jewish farmers! They took me out to an Air Force base—I couldn’t believe my eyes. Weren’t you moved by anything?”

  I thought, while listening to him, that if his Galician grandfather were able to drop in on a tour from the realm of the dead upon Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York, he might well express just such sentiments, and with no less amazement: “We aren’t supposed to be Americans—and there are those millions and millions of American Jews! You can’t imagine my feelings when I saw how American they looked!” How do you explain this American-Jewish inferiority complex when faced with the bold claims of militant Zionism that they have the patent on Jewish self-transformation, if not on boldness itself? “Look,” I said to him, “I can’t answer these kinds of questions.”

  “Know what I couldn’t answer? They kept wanting me to explain why American Jews persist in living in the Diaspora—and I couldn’t answer. After everything I’d seen, I didn’t know what to say. Does anybody know? Can anyone answer?”

  Poor guy. Sounds like he must have been plagued by this thing—probably been on the defensive night and day about his artificial identity and totally alienated position. They said to him, “Where is Jewish survival, where is Jewish security, where is Jewish history? If you were really a good Jew you’d be in Israel, a Jew in a Jewish society.” They said to him, “The one place in the world that’s really Jewish and only Jewish is Israel”—and he was too cowed by the moral one-upmanship even to recognize, let alone admit, that that was one of the reasons he didn’t want to live there.

  “Why is it?” he was asking, his helplessness in the face of the question now rather touching. “Why do Jews persist in living in the Diaspora?”

  I didn’t feel like writing off with one line a man obviously in a state of serious confusion, but I didn’t want this conversation either, and wasn’t in the mood to answer in detail. That I would save for Henry. The best I could try to do was to leave him with something to think about. “Because they like it,” I replied, and got up and moved to an empty aisle seat a few rows back where I could concentrate undisturbed on what more, if anything, to say to Henry about the wonder of his new existence.

  Now in the window seat to my left was a thickly bearded young man in a dark suit and a tieless white shirt buttoned up to the neck. He was reading a Hebrew prayer book and eating a candy bar. His doing both struck me as strange, but then an unsympathetic secular mind is hardly a fit arbiter of what distinguishes piety from irreverence.

  I placed my briefcase on the floor—his was open on the seat between us—and began my letter to Henry. It didn’t just drift up on the page any more than anything ever does. It was more like using an eyedropper to extinguish a fire. I wrote and revised for nearly two hours, working consciously to constrain the big-brother caviling that persisted in coloring the early drafts. “All you want me to see are the political realities. I see them. But I also see you. You’re a reality too.” I crossed this out, and more like it, working and reworking what I’d written till finally I came as close as I could to looking at things more or less his way, not so much to achieve a reconciliation, which was both out of the question and nothing either of us needed any longer, but so that we might be able to part without my hurting his feelings and causing more damage than I had already in that final face-off. Though personally I couldn’t believe that he was there for good—the kids were to fly out to visit him at Passover, and seeing them, I thought, might well change everything—I wrote as though I assumed that his decision was irrevocable. If that’s what he wants to think, that’s what I’ll think too.

  Aloft/El Al

  Dec. 11, 1978

  Dear Henry,

  Having sifted mistrustfully through each other’s motives, having been stripped of our worth in each other’s eyes, where does this leave you and me? I’ve been wondering ever since I boarded Flight 315. You’ve become a Jewish activist, a man of political commitment, driven by ideological conviction, studying the ancient tribal tongue and living sternly apart from your family, your possessions, and your practice on a rocky hillside in biblical Judea. I’ve become (in case you’re interested) a bourgeois husband, a London homeowner, and, at forty-five, a father-to-be, married this time to a country-reared, Oxford-educated English woman, born into a superfluous caste that decreed for her an upbringing not in the remotest way like ours—as she’d tell you herself, resembling hardly anyone’s in recent centuries. You have a land, a people, a heritage, a cause, a gun, an enemy, a mentor—a powerhouse mentor. I have none of these things. I have a pregnant English wife. Traveling in opposite directions, we’ve managed in middle age to position ourselves equidistantly from where we began. The moral I derive from this, confirmed by Friday night’s conversational duel when I stupidly asked why you didn’t shoot me, is that the family is finally finished. Our little nation is torn asunder. I didn’t think I’d live to see the day.

  As much, admittedly, from writerly curiosity as from tottering old genetic obligation, I have been racking my brain for forty-eight hours, trying to understand the reason for your overturning your life, when it’s really not hard to figure out. Tired of the expectations of others, the opinions of others, as sick of being respectable as of your necessarily more hidden side, at a time of life when the old stuff is dry, there comes this rage from abroad, the color, the power, the passion of it, as well as issues that are shaking the world. All the dissension in the Jewish soul there on display every day in the Knesset. Why should you resist it? Who are you to be restrained? I agree. As for Lippman, I have a terrific weakness for these showmen too. They certainly take things out of the realm of the introspective. Lippman seems to me someone for whom centuries of distrust and antipathy and oppression and misery have become a Stradivarius on which he savagely plays like a virtuoso Jewish violinist. His tirades have an eerie reality and even while rejecting him one has to wonder if it’s because what he says is wrong or because what he says is just unsayable. I asked, with excessive impatience, i
f your identity was to be formed by the terrifying power of an imagination richer with reality than your own, and should have known the answer myself. How else does it happen? The treacherous imagination is everybody’s maker—we are all the invention of each other, everybody a conjuration conjuring up everyone else. We are all each other’s authors.

  Look at the place you now want to call home: a whole country imagining itself, asking itself, “What the hell is this business of being a Jew?”—people losing sons, losing limbs, losing this, losing that, in the act of answering. “What is a Jew in the first place?” It’s a question that’s always had to be answered: the sound “Jew” was not made like a rock in the world—some human voice once said “Djoo,” pointed to somebody, and that was the beginning of what hasn’t stopped since.

  Another place famous for inventing (or reinventing) the Jew was Germany under Hitler. Fortunately for the two of us, earlier on there’d been our grandfathers—as you rightly reminded me Friday night—incongruously wondering beneath their beards if a Jew was somebody who had necessarily to be destined for destruction in Galicia. Think of all they unpinned from our tails, in addition to saving our skin—think of the audacious, inventive genius of the unknowing greenhorns who came to America to settle. And now, marked by the dread of another Hitler and a second great Jewish slaughter, comes the virtuoso violinist of Agor, and with him a vision, ignited by the Nazi crematoria, of sweeping aside every disadvantageous moral taboo in order to restore Jewish spiritual preeminence. I have to tell you that there were moments on Friday night when it seemed to me that it was the Jews out at Agor who are really ashamed of Jewish history, who cannot abide what Jews have been, are embarrassed by what they’ve become, and display the sort of revulsion for Diaspora “abnormalities” that you can also find in the classic anti-Semite they abhor. I wonder what you would call the waxworks representing those of your friends who scornfully disparage every introspective Jew of pacific inclinations and humanistic ideals as either a coward or a traitor or an idiot, if not the Museum of Jewish Self-Hatred, Henry, do you really believe that in the struggle for the imagination of the Jews the Lippmans are the people who should win?