The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  The person speaking should have been Henry himself. He by all rights should have been the intimate of his brother to whom everyone was listening. Who was closer? But the night before, when he’d been asked on the phone by the publisher if he’d speak at the funeral, he knew he couldn’t, knew he would never be able to find the words to make all those happy memories—of the father-and-son softball games, of the two of them skating on the Weequahic Park lake, of those summers with the folks down at the shore—mean anything to anyone other than himself. He spent two hours trying to write at his desk, remembering all the while the big, inspiring older brother he’d trailed behind as a child, the truly heroic figure Nathan had been until at sixteen he’d gone off to college to become remote and critical; yet all he was able to put down on his pad was “1933–1978.” It was as though Nathan were still alive, rendering him speechless.

  Henry wasn’t speaking the eulogy because Henry didn’t have the words, and the reason he didn’t have the words wasn’t because he was stupid or uneducated but because if he had chosen to contend, he would have been obliterated; he who wasn’t at all inarticulate, with his patients, with his wife, with his friends—certainly not with his mistresses—certainly not in his mind—had taken on, within the family, the role of the boy good with his hands, good at sports, decent, reliable, easy to get along with, while Nathan had got the monopoly on words, and the power and prestige that went with it. In every family somebody has to do it—you can’t all line up to turn on Dad and clobber him to death—and so Henry had become loyal Defender of Father, while Nathan had turned into the family assassin, murdering their parents under the guise of art.

  How he wished, listening to that eulogy, that he was a person who could just jump up and shout, “Lies! All lies! That is what drove us apart!,” the kind of person who could seize the moment and, standing on his feet, say anything. But Henry’s fate was to have no language—that was what had saved him from having to compete with somebody who had been made out of words … made himself out of words.

  Here is the eulogy that drove him nuts:

  “I was lying on the beach of a resort in the Bahamas yesterday, of all things rereading Carnovsky for the first time since it was published, when I received a phone call telling me that Nathan was dead. As there was no flight off the island till late afternoon, I went back to the beach to finish the book, which is what Nathan would have told me to do. I remembered an astonishing amount of the novel—it’s one of those books that stain your memory—although I had also distorted scenes in a revealing (to me) way. It’s still diabolically funny, but what was new to me was a sense of how sad the book is, and emotionally exhausting. Nathan does nothing better than to reproduce for the reader, in his style, the hysterical claustrophobia of Carnovsky’s childhood. Perhaps that’s one reason why people kept asking, ‘Is it fiction?’ Some novelists use style to define the distance between them, the reader, and the material. In Carnovsky Nathan used it to collapse the distance. At the same time, inasmuch as he ‘used’ his life, he used it as if it belonged to someone else, plundering his history and his verbal memory like a vicious thief.

  “Religious analogies—ludicrous analogies, he would be the first to tell me—kept recurring to me as I sat on the beach, knowing he was dead and thinking about him and his work. The meticulous verisimilitude of Carnovsky made me think of those medieval monks who flagellated themselves with their own perfectionism, carving infinitely detailed sacred images on bits of ivory. Nathan’s is the profane vision, of course, but how he must have whipped himself for that detail! The parents are marvelous works of the grotesque, maniacally embodied in every particular, as Carnovsky is as well, the eternal son holding to the belief that he was loved by them, holding to it first with his rage and, when that subsides, with tender reminiscence.

  “The book, which I, like most people, believed to be about rebellion is actually a lot more Old Testament than that: at the core is a primitive drama of compliance versus retribution. The real ethical life has, for all its sacrifices, its authentic spiritual rewards. Carnovsky never tastes them and Carnovsky yearns for them. Judaism at a higher level than he has access to does offer real ethical rewards to its students, and I think that’s part of what so upset believing Jews as opposed to mere prigs. Carnovsky is always complying more than rebelling, complying not out of ethical motives, as perhaps even Nathan believed, but with profound unwillingness and in the face of fear. What is scandalous isn’t the man’s phallicism but, what’s not entirely unrelated, yet far more censurable, the betrayal of mother love.

  “So much is about debasement. I hadn’t realized that before. He is so clear on the various forms it can take, so accurate about the caveman mentality of those urban peasant Jews, whom I happen to know a thing or two about myself, sacrificing their fruits on the altar of a vengeful god and partaking of his omnipotence—through the conviction of Jewish superiority—without understanding the exchange. On the evidence of Carnovsky, he would have made a good anthropologist; perhaps that’s what he was. He lets the experience of the little tribe, the suffering, isolated, primitive but warmhearted savages that he is studying, emerge in the description of their rituals and their artifacts and their conversations, and he manages, at the same time, to put his own ‘civilization,’ his own bias as a reporter—and his readers’—into relief against them.

  “Why, reading Carnovsky, did so many people keep wanting to know, ‘Is it fiction?’ I have my hunches, and let me run them past you.

  “First, as I’ve said, because he camouflages his writerliness and the style reproduces accurately the emotional distress. Second, he breaks fresh ground in the territory of transgression by writing so explicitly about the sexuality of family life; the illicit erotic affair that we all are born to get enmeshed in is not elevated to another sphere, it is undisguised and has the shocking impact of confession. Not only that—it reads as though the confessor’s having fun.

  “Now Sentimental Education doesn’t read as if Flaubert was having fun; Letter to His Father doesn’t read as if Kafka was having fun; The Sorrows of Young Werther sure as hell doesn’t read as if Goethe was having fun. Sure, Henry Miller seems like he’s having fun, but he had to cross three thousand miles of Atlantic before saying ‘cunt.’ Until Carnovsky, most everybody I can think of who had tackled ‘cunt’ and that particular mess of feelings it excites had done it exogamously, as the Freudians would say, at a safe distance, metaphorically or geographically, from the domestic scene. Not Nathan—he was not too noble to exploit the home and to have a good time while doing it. People wondered if it was not guts but madness that propelled him. In short, they thought it was about him and that he had to be crazy—because for them to have done it they would have had to be crazy.

  “What people envy in the novelist aren’t the things that the novelists think are so enviable but the performing selves that the author indulges, the slipping irresponsibly in and out of his skin, the reveling not in ‘I’ but in escaping ‘I,’ even if it involves—especially if it involves—piling imaginary afflictions upon himself. What’s envied is the gift for theatrical self-transformation, the way they are able to loosen and make ambiguous their connection to a real life through the imposition of talent. The exhibitionism of the superior artist is connected to his imagination; fiction is for him at once playful hypothesis and serious supposition, an imaginative form of inquiry—everything that exhibitionism is not. It is, if anything, closet exhibitionism, exhibitionism in hiding. Isn’t it true that, contrary to the general belief, it is the distance between the writer’s life and his novel that is the most intriguing aspect of his imagination?

  “As I say, these are just a few hunches, clues to answering the question that has to be answered since it’s the question that hounded Nathan at every turn. He could never figure out why people were so eager to prove that he couldn’t write fiction. To his embarrassment, the furor over the novel seemed to have as much to do with ‘Is it fiction?’ as with the question asked b
y those still struggling to separate from mothers, fathers, or both, or from the stream of mothers and fathers projected onto sexual partners, and that is, ‘Is this my fiction?’ But the less attached one is to that umbilicus, the less horrible fascination the novel has, at which point it is just what it seemed to me yesterday, and what it is: a classic of irresponsible exaggeration, reckless comedy on a strangely human scale, animated by the impudence of a writer exaggerating his faults and proposing for himself the most hilarious sense of wrongdoing—conjecture run wild.

  “I’ve talked about Carnovsky and not about Nathan, and that’s all I intend to do. If there were time and we had the whole day to be here together, I’d talk about the books in turn, each at great length, because that’s the kind of funeral oration Nathan would have enjoyed—or that would have least displeased him. It would have seemed to him the best safeguard against too much transient, eulogistic cant. The book—I could almost hear him telling me this on that beach—talk about the book, because that is least likely to make asses of us both. For all the seeming self-exposure of the novels, he was a great defender of his solitude, not because he particularly liked or valued solitude but because swarming emotional anarchy and self-exposure were possible for him only in isolation. That’s where he lived an unlimited life. Nathan as an artist, as the author paradoxically of the most reckless comedy, tried, in fact, to lead the ethical life, and he both reaped its rewards and paid its price. But not Carnovsky, who is to some degree his author’s brutish, beastly shadow, a de-idealized, travestied apparition of himself and, as Nathan would be the first to agree, the most suitable subject for the entertainment of his friends, especially in our grief.”

  * * *

  When the service was over, the mourners filed into the street, where groups of them lingered together, seemingly reluctant to return too soon to the ordinary business of an October Tuesday. Occasionally somebody laughed, not raucously, just from the kind of joking that goes on after a funeral. At a funeral you can see a lot of someone’s life, but Henry wasn’t looking. People who had noticed his strong resemblance to the late novelist looked his way from time to time, but he chose not to look back. He had no desire to hear yet more from the young editor about Carnovsky’s wizardry, and it unnerved him to contemplate meeting and talking with Nathan’s publisher, who he believed to have been the elderly bald man looking so sad in the first row just beside the casket. He wanted simply to disappear without having to speak to anyone, to return to real society, where physicians are admired, where dentists are admired, where, if the truth be known, no one gives a fuck about a writer like his brother. What these people didn’t seem to understand was that when most people think of a writer, it isn’t for the reasons that the editor suggested but because of how many bucks he made on his paperback rights. That, and not the gift for “theatrical self-transformation,” was what was really enviable: what prize has he won, who’s he fucking, and how much money did the “superior artist” make in his little workshop. Period. End of eulogy.

  But instead of leaving he stood glancing down at his watch and pretending that he was expecting to be met by someone. If he left now, then nothing that he’d wanted would have happened. Shutting down the office and making this trip hadn’t to do with doing “the right thing”—it wasn’t a matter of what others thought he should feel, it was what he himself wanted to feel, despite that seven-year estrangement. My older brother, my only brother, and yet he’d realized the day before that it was entirely possible for him, after he’d learned from the publisher of Nathan’s death, to hang up the office phone and go back to work. It had been alarming to discover just how easy it would have been to wait and read the obituary in the next day’s paper, professing to the family that he had not been told or invited to the funeral, let alone asked if he wanted to speak. Yet he couldn’t do it—he might not be able to make the speech, he might not be able to feel the feelings, but out of love for his parents and what they would have wished, out of all those memories of what he and Nathan had shared as youngsters, he could at least be there and, in the presence of the body, effect something like a reconciliation.

  Henry had been more than prepared to shed his hatred and forgive, but as a result of that eulogy, the bitterest feelings had been reactivated instead: the elevation of Carnovsky to the status of a classic—a classic of irresponsible exaggeration—made him glad that Nathan was dead and that he was there to be sure it was true.

  I should have been the speaker—the cottage at the shore, the Memorial Day picnics, the Scout outings, the car trips, I should have told them all I remember and the hell with whether they thought it was badly written, sentimental crap. I would have given the eulogy and our reconciliation would have been that. I was intimidated, intimidated by all those people, as though they were an extension of him. So, he thought, today is just more of the same goddamn thing. It was never going to work, because I was always intimidated. And with that quarrel I only reinforced it—quarreling just because I couldn’t stand any more of his intimidation! How did I get stuck there, when it wasn’t ever what I wanted?

  It was an awful day, but for all the wrong reasons. Here he wanted to be able to mourn his brother like everyone else and was having instead to contend with the stinkiness of the worst feelings.

  When he heard his name called, he felt like a criminal, not from guilt but for having allowed himself to be trapped. It was as though outside a bank he’d just robbed, he’d committed some humane and utterly gratuitous act, like helping a blind man across the street, thereby delaying his getaway and allowing the police to close in. He felt ridiculously caught.

  Coming toward him was the last of the three wives Nathan had left, Laura, looking not a day older or any less amiable than when they’d all been in-laws eight years back. Laura had been Nathan’s “proper” wife, plainly pretty, if pretty at all, reliable, good-hearted, studiously without flair, back in the sixties a young lawyer with high ideals about justice for the poor and oppressed. Nathan had left her at about the time that Carnovsky was published and celebrity seemed to promise more tantalizing rewards. That, at any rate, was what Carol had surmised when they first heard about the separation. Henry wasn’t so sure that success was the only motive: he saw what was admirable about Laura, but that may have been more or less all there was—her colorless Wasp uprightness, whose appeal for Nathan Henry could never fathom, was all too unmistakable. Ever since adolescence, he had been expecting Nathan to marry someone both very smart and very sultry, a kind of intellectual bar girl, and Nathan never came close. Neither of them did. Even the two women with whom Henry had had his most torrid affairs turned out to be as temperate as his wife, and no less trustworthy and decent. In the end it was like having an affair with his wife, for him if not for Carol.

  While they embraced he tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t immediately reveal to Laura that he was not deeply grieving. “Where did you come from?”—the wrong words entirely. “Where do you live? New York?”

  “Same place,” she said, stepping back but holding on momentarily to his hand.

  “Still in the Village? By yourself?”

  “Not by myself—no. I’m married. Two children. Oh, Henry, what a terrible day. How long did he know he was going to have this operation?”

  “I don’t know. We had a falling-out. Over that book. I didn’t know anything either. I’m as stunned as you are.”

  She gave no indication that it was apparent to everyone that he wasn’t stunned at all. “But who was with him?” she asked. “Was he living with someone?”

  “Is there a woman? I don’t know.”

  “You literally know nothing about your brother?”

  “Well, maybe it’s shameful,” he said, hoping to make it less so by saying it.

  “I don’t know,” Laura said, “but I can’t bear to think that he was alone when he went in to have that operation.”

  “That editor who gave the eulogy—he seems to have been close to him.”

&nb
sp; “Yes, but he just got back last night—he was in the Bahamas. Mind you, he always had girls around. Nathan was never alone for long. I’ll bet there’s some poor girl at this moment—she may even have been inside. There were a lot of people there. I hope so, for his sake. The thought of him alone … Oh, it’s so sad. For you too.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to lie outright and agree.

  “He had a lot more books to write,” Laura said. “Still, he’d accomplished a lot of what he wanted to do. It wasn’t a wasted life. But he had much more coming.”

  “As I say, I don’t know what to make of it myself. But we had a serious quarrel, a falling-out—it was probably stupid on both sides.” Everything he was saying sounded senseless. More than likely their falling-out was what was meant to be, the result of irreconcilable differences for which he, for one, had no need to apologize. He had spoken his mind about that book as he had every right to, and what ensued ensued. Why should writers alone get to say the unsayable?

  “Because of Carnovsky?” Laura asked. “Yes, well, when I read it, I thought this was not going to go down very well with you or your folks. I understand it, but of course he had to use the life around him, the people he knew best.”

  It wasn’t the “using,” it was the distortion, the deliberate distortion—couldn’t these people understand that? “Which sexes are your children?” he asked, again sounding to himself as insipid as he felt, as though he were speaking a language he barely knew. The ex-wife, Henry thought, so obviously distraught over Nathan’s death, was utterly in control, while the brother who was not distressed was unable to say anything right.

  “A boy and a girl,” she said. “Perfect arrangement.”

  “Who is your husband?” That didn’t come out like English spoken by an English-speaking person, either. He was speaking no known language. Perhaps the only English that would have sounded right was the truth. He’s dead and I don’t give a shit. I wish I did but I don’t.