Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

  "My grandmother came from Lithuania. On my father's side they came from Poland."

  "What got them to Oslo, of all places?"

  "My grandparents were on their way to America from Lithuania. When they came to Oslo they were stopped, and my grandfather was forced to stay there. American officials stopped him, and he didn't get the papers. My mother and my uncle were born in Oslo. My father had been in America, almost as a youthful adventure. He was on his way back to Poland when the First World War broke out. He was in England at that time, and he didn't want to go back and go into the army. So he stopped in Norway. 1915. And he met my mother. Jews hadn't been allowed in Norway. But there was a well-known Norwegian writer, and he campaigned for the Jews, and in 1905 Jews began to be admitted. My parents married in 1915. We were five, four brothers and me."

  "And everybody was saved," I asked, making the hopeful assumption, "mother, father, your four brothers?"

  "Not my mother and not my father and not my oldest brother."

  And so I asked, "What happened?"

  "In 1940, when the Germans came, they didn't do anything. Everything was normal-seeming. But in October 1942 they arrested all the Jewish men eighteen and up."

  "The Germans or the Norwegians?"

  "The Germans gave the orders, but it was Norwegian Nazis, the Quislings. Five o'clock in the morning they appeared at the door. My mother said, 'Oh, I thought you were the ambulance coming. I just called the doctor. My husband had a heart attack. He's in bed. You can't touch him.' And we younger children were crying."

  "She made this story up?" I asked.

  "Yes. My mother was very smart. She begged them and she begged them, and so they said okay, we'll be back at ten and see if he's gone. So she called the doctor, and my father was taken to the hospital. In the hospital he planned his escape to Sweden. But he was afraid that when they found out he'd escaped, they would come and take us. So he waited almost a month, and one morning the hospital called us and said the Gestapo was there. There was shouting that you could hear even over the phone. We didn't live far from the hospital, so my mother and my brothers and I ran to the hospital. I was thirteen. My father was lying on a stretcher. We begged them not to take him."

  "Was he ill?"

  "No, he wasn't ill. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. They took him away. We went home, and it was November, and we got warm clothes for him and went back to Nazi headquarters. We tried to talk to people and we cried, we told them he was sick, he had nothing to wear but his hospital gown, but nothing helped. We said we would go home and would come back again tomorrow, but they told us, 'You can't go home, you're arrested.' My mother said no. My mother was strong and said, 'We are Norwegians like everyone else, and we are not going to be arrested.' There was a great argument but after a while they let us go home. Outside it was dark. Everything was black. My mother said we could not go home—she was sure that if we went home they would come for us in the morning.

  "So there we were, out in the dark street, and just then there was an air raid. In the confusion of the air raid one of my older brothers disappeared, and my oldest brother, who had just got married, went into hiding with his wife's family. That left my mother, two younger brothers, and me. When the air raid was over, I said to my mother, 'The lady in the flower store is nice to me. I know she's not a Nazi sympathizer.' My mother said to call her. So we found a phone and I called her, and I said, 'Can we come up and have a party?' She understood, and she said yes. 'Try to be careful when you come,' she said. And so we went there and she let us stay. But we couldn't walk on the floors—we all had to sit squeezed together on the couch. She was friendly with her neighbors across the hall, and the next morning she went to see them. They had a connection with the Resistance. They were non-Jewish Norwegians, he was a taxi driver, and he told us that they were rounding up all the Jews and taking them away. That night he came back with two other men, and they took my two younger brothers, twelve and eleven. They said the rest of us would have to wait. They would come back for us. That was my mother and me. But when they came back, they said they could take only one of us at a time. I said to my mother, 'If I go, will you come?' 'Absolutely,' she said. 'I would never let you down.' I learned afterward that later that evening, she was picked up in a taxi, men with guns, Resistance fighters who, on the way out of Oslo, picked up another woman and a boy, a mother with her son, whom my mother knew by name. Oslo was a small community. Most Jews knew one another. Anyway, they drove out of Oslo and were never seen again. Meanwhile, they had taken me and put me on a train. There was a Nazi officer on the train with a swastika armband. I was told that when he got off, he would give me a wink, and I should follow him. I was sure that I was falling into a trap. He got off close to the border with Sweden, and I got off, and then another man took over and we began to walk. Through the woods. We walked and we walked. The one who takes you knows the markings on the trees. It's a long walk, five, six miles. We walked to Sweden. Through the woods to the farmlands. And my brother who got lost the night of the air raid—he was the one who met me. He thought he had lost his whole family. Then my two younger brothers turned up, and after them, me. But that was all. We waited for my mother and my married brother, but they never came."

  When she finished, I said, "Now I understand."

  "Tell me, please. You understand what?"

  "For most people, to say I've stayed in my childhood my whole life would mean I've stayed innocent and it's all been pretty. For you to say I stayed in my childhood my whole life means I stayed in this terrible story—life remained a terrible story. It means that I had so much pain in my youth that, one way or another, I stayed in it forever."

  "More or less," she replied.

  Late as it was when I got back to the hotel, I immediately set to work to record all I could manage to remember Amy's having told me about her escape from occupied Norway to neutral Sweden and about the years with Lonoff and about the novel he'd failed to finish while they lived together in Cambridge, then Oslo, then back in Cambridge, where he died. Three or four years back, I could still have carried the bulk of her monologue in my head for days on end—my memory had been a strong resource since earliest childhood and gave ballast to one who, for professional reasons, always had to write everything down. But now, less than an hour after leaving Amy, I had to wait patiently on my recollections in order to piece together as best I could what she'd confided in me. It was a struggle at first, and I often felt helpless and wondered why I persisted in attempting what I clearly could no longer do. Yet I was too stimulated by her and her predicament not to, and too habituated to free myself from the task, too dependent on the force that guided my mind and made my mind mine. By three a.m. I had filled fifteen pages of hotel stationery, front and back, with all I could manage to recall of Amy's ordeal, wondering, as I wrote, which of these stories she had told to Kliman and how, full of his own intentions, he would transform them, garble them, distort them, misinterpret and misunderstand them, wondering what could be done to deliver her from him before he made use of her to turn everything into a sham and a shambles. I wondered which of these stories she had herself transformed, garbled, distorted, misinterpreted, and misunderstood.

  "He began to write totally unlike himself," she had told me. "Before, he'd tried to see how much he could leave out. Now it was how much he could put in. He saw his laconic style as a barrier, and yet he hated what he was doing instead. He said, 'It's boring. It's endless. It has no shape. No design.' I said, 'None that you can impose. It will impose its own design.' 'When? When I'm dead?' He became so bitter and cutting—the man and the writer both, so completely changed. But he had to give some meaning to the upheaval in his life, and so he wrote his novel and got stuck for weeks, and he said, 'I can't ever publish this. Nobody needs this from me. My children hate me enough without this.' And always I was sure he regretted going off with me. Hope had shown him the door because of me. His children had turned on him because of me. I should never have stayed. Yet how
could I go when this was what I'd wanted for so long? He even told me to go. But I couldn't. He could never have survived alone. And then he didn't anyway."

  The evening's climax came with the plea Amy made to me when I was at the door, ready to leave. Earlier, I had asked her for an envelope, a mailing envelope, and into it I had put all my cash, except for what I'd need for a taxi to the hotel. I thought it would be easier for her to accept the money that way. I handed her the envelope and said, "Take this. In a few days I'll send you a check. I want you to cash it." I had written my Berkshires address and phone number on the face of the envelope. "I don't know what I can do about Kliman, but I am able to help you financially, and I want to. Manny Lonoff treated me like a man when I was nothing but a boy with a couple of published short stories. That invitation to his house was worth a thousand times what's in this envelope."

  She did not offer the resistance I was prepared for but simply reached out and accepted the envelope, and then, for the first time, began to cry. "Nathan," she said, "won't you be Manny's biographer?"

  "Oh, Amy, I wouldn't know where to begin. I'm not a biographer. I'm a novelist."

  "But is that terrible Kliman a biographer? He's an impostor. He'll blemish everything and everyone, and pass it off as the truth. It's Manny's integrity he wants to destroy—and he doesn't even want that. It's just the way it's done now—to expose the writer to censure. To compose the definitive reckoning of every last misdoing. Destroying reputations is how these little nobodies make their little mark. People's values and obligations and virtues and rules are nothing but a cover, camouflage only to hide the disgusting slime underneath. Is it because of their powers that everyone's so fascinated by their faults? Is it some sort of hypocrisy on their part that they're made of flesh and blood? Oh, Nathan, I had that damn tumor, and I made mistakes in judgment. I made mistakes with him that were unforgivable even with the tumor. And now I can't get rid of him. Manny can't get rid of him. It won't be that there was once a free and unique imagination loosed upon the world that went by the name of E. I. Lonoff—everything will be seen through the lens of the incest. With that he'll dispose of Manny's every book, of every wonderful word he wrote, and no one will ever have the faintest idea of all this man was and how hard he worked and with what precise workmanship he worked and what he worked for and why. Instead he will turn a man who was upright and dutiful and self-supervising to a fault, who wanted only to produce strong works of enduring fiction, into nothing more than a pariah. That will be the sum of Manny's achievement on earth—the sole fragment of him to be remembered! To be reviled! Everything will be crushed beneath that!"

  "That" being incest.

  "Shall I stay a while longer?" I asked. "May I come back in?" And we returned to her study, where she sat back down at her desk and stunned me by saying right off—and now without a single tear being shed—"Manny had an incestuous affair with his sister."

  "Lasting how long?"

  "Three years."

  "How did they conceal it for three years?"

  "I don't know. With the cunning that lovers have. With luck. They concealed it with the same excitement that they pulled it off. It was not accompanied by any torment. I fell in love with him—why shouldn't she? I was his student, less than half his age—he let that happen. Well, he let this happen too."

  So there was the subject of the novel he couldn't write and the reason he couldn't write it and why he said he could never publish it. So long as he was married to Hope, Amy told me, he never mentioned to anyone having had a sister, let alone written a word about their illicit adolescent lust. After they were discovered together by a family friend and the scandal was revealed to their Roxbury neighbors, Frieda was spirited away by their parents to begin life anew with them in the morally pure atmosphere of pioneering Zionist Palestine. Manny was judged the guilty party, denounced as a demon, the corrupter of his older sister and author of the family's disgrace, and purged—left behind in Boston to fend for himself at seventeen. Had he stayed in his marriage to Hope, he would have kept writing his brilliant, elliptical short stories and never have had to come anywhere near exposing the hidden shame. "But when he became an outcast to his family again by living with a younger woman," Amy explained, "when chaos struck Manny's discipline for the second time, everything came undone. When he was abandoned by his family in Boston he was only seventeen, penniless and an anathema. Yet cruel as that expulsion was, he was strong and he survived and he made himself into everything that wasn't an anathema. But the second time, when it was he who abandoned his family, he was over fifty and he never recovered."

  "Now this is what he wrote about his being seventeen," I said to her, "but this is not what he told you about his life at seventeen."

  My assertion flustered her. "Why would I lie to you?"

  "I only wonder if you're confused. You're telling me that he told you this about himself and that you knew about it before he began writing the book."

  "I only knew about it when the book began to drive him crazy. No, I never knew about it before. No one in his adult life knew."

  "I don't understand, then, why he told you, why he didn't just say to you, 'It's driving me crazy because it's something I cannot fathom. It's driving me crazy because I have set myself to imagining what I cannot imagine.' He tried to be equal to a task he could not perform. He was imagining not what he did do but what he could never do. He wasn't the first."

  "I know what he said to me, Nathan."

  "Do you? Describe to me the circumstances in which Manny told you that the book he was writing, unlike anything he had ever written before, was drawn wholly from his personal history. Remember for me the time and the place. Remember the words that were spoken."

  "This was all a hundred years ago. How can I possibly remember those things?"

  "But if this was his biggest secret, and if it had preyed on his mind for so long—or even if it had been repressed for so long—then the articulation of it would have been like Raskolnikov's making his confession to Sonia. After all those years of his muffling the family explosion, his confession would have been unforgettable. Tell me, then. Tell me what his confession was like."

  "Why do you attack me like this?"

  "Amy, you're not under attack, certainly not by me. Listen, please," and this time when I sat, I chose deliberately to settle into Lonoff's easy chair ("What! Are you here?") and speak to her from it. "The source for Manny's tale of incest wasn't his life. It couldn't have been. The source was the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne."

  "What?" she said loudly, as though I'd startled her from sleep. "Have I missed something? Who's talking about Hawthorne?"

  "I am. With good reason."

  "You're confusing me hopelessly."

  "I don't mean to. Listen to me. You won't be confused. I mean to make everything clear to you."

  "Oh, would my tumor love that."

  "Listen, please," I said. "I cannot write Manny's biography, but I can write the biography of that book. So can you. And that's what we're going to do. You know the fluctuations of a novelist's mind. He puts everything in motion. He makes everything shift and slide. It couldn't be clearer how this book came about. Manny was deeply read in the lives of writers, of the New England writers, particularly, on whose terrain he'd lived with Hope for over thirty years. Had he been born and reared in the Berkshires a hundred years earlier, Hawthorne and Melville would have been his neighbors. He was a student of their work. He read their correspondence so often, he knew portions by heart. Of course he knew what Melville had said of his friend Hawthorne. That Hawthorne had lived with a 'great secret.' And he knew what renegade scholars had drawn from that remark, and from others made by family and friends, about Hawthorne's reticence. Manny knew the cunning, scholarly, unprovable conjectures about Hawthorne and his sister Elizabeth, and so in searching for a story to encapsulate his own improbabilities—to examine all the surprising new emotions that had transformed him, as you say, into a man so utterly unlike himself—h
e laid claim to these conjectures about Hawthorne and his beautiful, enchanting older sister. For this wholly unautobiographical writer, blessed with his genius for complete transformation, the choice was almost inevitable. It's what opened his predicament out for him and enabled him to leave the personal behind. Fiction for him was never representation. It was rumination in narrative form. He thought, I'll make this my reality." While, in fact, I was thinking in much the same vein: I'll make this reality mine, Amy's, Kliman's, everyone's. And for the next hour I proceeded to, effulgently arguing its logic until I had come to believe it myself.

  4 My Brain

  HE

  Why would a woman like you marry anyone at twenty-five or twenty-four? In my era, it went without saying that you would have had a child by twenty-four or twenty-five—or twenty-two. But now ... tell me ... I don't know anything you know. I haven't been around.

  SHE

  Well, besides the obvious of having met someone I fell in love with, and who fell crazily in love with me, and someone who ... anyway, besides all that obvious stuff, if anything for exactly the opposite reason—because nobody would do such a thing in my era. If everyone did it when you were my age, I was the only person I knew from my college class, the only person among my friends who moved to New York after Harvard who (laughing)—who got married when she was twenty-five. It seemed kind of a wild adventure we'd go on together.