Anne, says my father—the Anne? Oh, how I have misunderstood my son. How mistaken we have been!
But Roth mines Anne Frank’s story—both the real story and the ghosted one—for much more than the comedy of Nathan’s predicament, despite the irresistible Jewish joke. Again and again, the searching questions of Roth’s letter are dramatically transformed in the novel. He has things to say about the developing craft of the ambitious young writer (“Suddenly she’s discovering reflection, suddenly there’s portraiture”) as well as about the nightmare that is her subject. “She’s like some impassioned little sister of Kafka’s,” Nathan tells Amy Bellette, coming out of his dream, or trying to drag her in: “What he invented, she suffered.” But it’s the lessons of the Diary that are his central, worrying concern. For all the tears that have been shed for Anne Frank, has her book really taught anybody anything?
The question may seem naive. But Nathan, in the voice of his imaginary Anne, comes to an answer about the lessons of the book that accords, perhaps unsurprisingly, with Roth’s defense of his stories years earlier. The Diary has touched so many people—and here Roth says “aloud” the most hazardous thing he felt he had to say—because there was nothing notably Jewish about this mostly secular, Dickens-reading, European family who just happened to be Jews. “A harmless Chanukah song” once a year, a few Hebrew words, a few candles, a few presents; there was hardly more to it than that. They were in no way foreign, strange, or embarrassing—and look what happened to them. They were entirely charming, in fact, especially, of course, Anne. And look what happened to her. What did it take to provoke what happened? “It took nothing—that was the horror. And that was the truth. And that was the power of her book.” As Roth had once replied to the rabbis, it is impossible to control anti-Semitism through exemplary behavior, accomplishments, or charm. Because anti-Semitism originates not in the Jews but in the anti-Semites. Repression, pretension, “putting on a good face”: all useless. Anne’s diary offered a double lesson, really. For Gentiles, a lesson in common humanity, the nightmare made real because of how familiar Anne and her family seemed. And for Jews, the fact that this familiarity had not done a thing to save them.
The Ghost Writer has a formal, almost musical structure: four sections in which the themes intertwine as tightly as in a chamber quartet. The third section, the Anne Frank section, might be called the scherzo, or even quasi una fantasia, and required much rewriting. The first draft, Roth says today, was “overdramatized, and lyric in the worst sense,” since he was intimidated by the subject. He’d written it in the third person (Nathan telling Anne’s story) but then decided to rewrite it in the first person—Anne telling her own story—in order to wash out the overstatement and the saintliness, or what he calls “all that UJA rhetoric.” (The United Jewish Appeal was not known for its literary subtlety.) The girl who wrote the diary would never write in such an elevated tone about herself. Then he translated it back into the third person, now cleansed of the problems of tone. The result is natural and vivid and disconcertingly plausible; humor is continually shadowed by the sorrow of the source. Yet even Nathan finally suspects that this new fiction will not acquit him from the charges of anti-Semitism that his earlier story had brought. Rather, it will seem to his judges “a desecration even more vile than the one they had read.”
And, to some, it did. “The chutzpa of it,” John Leonard complained in The New York Review of Books, “appropriating the Ophelia of the death camps”—a jarringly snide phrase, unlike anything in the book—“for his dark, libidinal purposes, his angry punch line.” In The New York Times, Robert Towers seemed not quite to register the degree of fantasy involved, although he reported feeling “slightly cheated, slightly offended,” when it all dissolved at breakfast. Still, overall, the book won tremendous praise. It was published in its entirety, in two parts, in The New Yorker—like Roth’s vision of a survivor’s diary—in the summer of 1979, thanks to an enterprising editor there, Veronica Geng. (“She was determined to get me into the magazine,” Roth says; this was his first appearance in its pages, then considered Updike country, since the story “Novotny’s Pain” in 1962.) Roth lost out on the Pulitzer Prize only when the board ignored the jury’s preference and gave the award to Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, a big book that played even trickier games with fact and fiction. But The Ghost Writer was the full success that had seemed out of Roth’s reach for so long. Like The Great Gatsby or Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, it is one of our literature’s rare, inevitably brief, inscrutably musical, and nearly perfect books.
What had happened to make this possible? Was it simply the passage of time, or the long-term effects of psychotherapy, that had helped him to vanquish his old grievances and his old demons and move on? All that Roth says about the internal combustion that produced The Ghost Writer is, “I think I found the right people,” meaning, primarily, Lonoff and Anne Frank: “They just widened the scope of the contemplation.” There is something uncanny in the way this widened scope fits within a story of such snowbound intimacy, like a construction snug on the outside that turns out to be vast within. It is clear how much Anne Frank meant to Roth; he walks a very fine line between history and imagination. Emanuel Isidore Lonoff—who may contain a touch of Isaac Bashevis Singer—also grows to be historically large. His famous stories, like Malamud’s or Singer’s, are built out of “everything humbling” that men like Nathan’s father have labored to escape, and yet are “shamelessly conceived.” The rejection of shame seems essential to a book that is finally about three Jewish writers differently placed in history. After the war, Nathan’s Anne conceals her camp experiences in order to avoid being pitied. When someone tells her that she needn’t be ashamed, she replies, “I’m not ashamed. That’s the point.” And Nathan—whose shamelessness as a writer needs no underlining—recalls that his discovery of Lonoff’s stories filled him with the same sort of pride that was inspired in his parents “by the establishment in 1948 of a homeland in Palestine that would gather in the unmurdered remnant of European Jewry.”
Yet this stoic pride is neither easily won nor perfectly maintained. Lonoff’s serenity is unflappable, and Nathan seems hardly to understand the fears that motivate his parents. But he must understand, because he accords his Anne a final, tortured outburst, in which she recalls the experience of rediscovering her diary—her published, celebrated Diary—and how it opened the floodgates to feelings she believed that she had sealed away. This is not the sweetly optimistic Anne Frank whose most famous words—thanks to the Broadway version of the Diary, thanks to the movie version—are “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” This is an Anne Frank who feels not only hatred but the shame that she had fervently denied, and a desire for revenge so intense that it provides her with a final reason to remain dead and thus allow the diary to live:
The package came from Amsterdam, I opened it, and there it was: my past, myself, my name, my face intact—and all I wanted was revenge. It wasn’t for the dead—it had nothing to do with bringing back the dead or scourging the living. It wasn’t corpses I was avenging—it was the motherless, fatherless, sisterless, venge-filled, hate-filled, shame-filled, half-flayed, seething thing. It was myself. I wanted tears, I wanted their Christian tears to run like Jewish blood, for me.
A surviving Anne contains all the possibilities—as the living Anne contained all possibilities—represented by the pages that are blank.
* * *
For a writer so nourished by the personal, the phrase “the right people” may also be viewed in a nearer sense. The Ghost Writer is dedicated to Milan Kundera, suggesting that Roth’s new friendships in “the other Europe” also had widened the scope of his contemplation. And then there is Claire Bloom, with whom Roth was sharing his life when, in 1977, he began the book: a small, dark, beautiful Jewish woman who was born in Europe in 1931, a year and a half after Anne Frank.
Roth had been exploring the divide bet
ween European and American experiences of the war, and particularly between European and American childhoods, for a long time. In the early story “Eli, the Fanatic,” a school of wraith-like refugee children proves too unsettling for the Jewish parents of an American suburb, whose own children are “safe in their beds.” In The Ghost Writer, Nathan has an exchange with Amy Bellette, in which, wondering at her accent and probing at her identity, he asks if she has been through the war. He missed the war himself, he tells her:
“And what did you have instead?” she asked me.
“My childhood.”
Bloom was eight and at a café in Cornwall, on vacation with her mother and brother, when a voice on the radio announced that England was at war. The three of them crouched in a ditch at the sound of an air-raid siren as they were returning to their cottage. A few months later, bombs blew half the roof off their house, in Bristol. In 1941, she went to America with her mother and brother—they stayed first with relatives in Florida, then in Forest Hills, Queens—but the little group returned to be with her father in London in late 1943. After being held up in Portugal for several months, they arrived on the very day the second London blitz began and remained for the duration of the war. On Roth’s desk throughout the time he worked on The Ghost Writer, he kept a photograph of Anne Frank and another photograph—strikingly similar in appearance—of Bloom at about the same age.
Not that it was always paradise in the house that Roth shared with Bloom in London. Bloom has written, in Leaving a Doll’s House, that her daughter, Anna, had already suffered greatly through her parents’ divorce—Bloom’s first husband and Anna’s father was the actor Rod Steiger—and then through Bloom’s disastrous second marriage to a man whom Anna loathed. More, the girl was “furious and justifiably hurt” when Bloom began to spend weeks in New York with Roth, complaining that “I had once again chosen a man over her.” Roth initially worked hard (even by Bloom’s account) to win the girl’s favor—she was seventeen when he moved in, in 1977—and there was clearly enough love and excitement between the couple to carry them forward. But the family trio did not run smoothly. It was to ease and escape these tensions that Roth rented the small, one-room writing studio in Notting Hill—it had been passed on to him by his good friend Alison Lurie—which he outfitted exactly as he had his studio in Connecticut. There, looking out onto an English garden, he patiently wrote and rewrote the story of Anne Frank, alive and well across the ocean. As for Bloom, her professional activities that year included a recording, for Caedmon Records, of excerpts from Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl.
Bloom also made a very concrete contribution to Roth’s book. It doesn’t require an intimate of Roth’s to note, as Bloom does in her memoir, that there was a great deal of Roth himself in E. I. Lonoff and the way he lived: the idyllic country house with the books, the maple trees, the solitude, and the long days devotedly spent “turning sentences around.” The months that she spent with him in Connecticut every year were invariably quiet and could be lonely. She recounts with good humor a day when Roth, working on The Ghost Writer, came out of his studio to ask her to describe, for the sake of his portrait of Lonoff’s long-suffering wife, Hope, what it was like to live with a writer in the country. As Bloom recalls, she didn’t need to be asked twice: “We don’t go anywhere! We don’t do anything! We don’t see anyone!” Her complaints fed directly into Hope Lonoff’s plight—although Bloom’s fictional counterpart, needless to say, does not spend the rest of each year in London or on the stage or making films. (Bloom actually played Hope Lonoff in a televised adaptation of The Ghost Writer in 1984.) Rather, like a Chekhov heroine, she merely longs to live in Boston someday.
Hope Lonoff knows, however, that the city’s noise and distractions would make the move impossible for her husband, the man who has exchanged life for art. Nathan knows it, too. He observes how the house and the surrounding land protect the writer from the outside world, in a passage suggesting that it may have been simply the Connecticut landscape—Roth still speaks with awe about “its open spaces, its emptiness in winter”—that brought a new magic to Roth’s work, even if the ultimate message was not new:
There was still more wind than snow, but in Lonoff’s orchard the light had all but seeped away, and the sound of what was on its way was menacing. Two dozen wild old apple trees stood as first barrier between the bleak unpaved road and the farmhouse. Next came a thick green growth of rhododendron, then a wide stone wall fallen in like a worn molar at the center, then some fifty feet of snow-crusted lawn, and finally, drawn up close to the house and protectively overhanging the shingles, three maples that looked from their size to be as old as New England. In back, the house gave way to unprotected fields, drifted over since the first December blizzards. From there the wooded hills began their impressive rise, undulating forest swells that just kept climbing into the next state. My guess was that it would take even the fiercest Hun the better part of a winter to cross the glacial waterfalls and wind-blasted woods of those mountain wilds before he was able to reach the open edge of Lonoff’s hayfields, rush the rear storm door of the house, crash through into the study, and, with spiked bludgeon wheeling high in the air above the little Olivetti, cry out in a roaring voice to the writer tapping out his twenty-seventh draft, “You must change your life!”
Eating Only Words
Fame and fortune were not so rich as subjects. Zuckerman Unbound, which continued the writer’s story, is a book about the consequences of a book—about the “counter-spell” that a work of fiction casts on its writer’s reality. Another slender novella-like volume, published in 1981, it takes Nathan forward in time thirteen years, to the watershed moment in 1969 when he has become a huge success, owing to a distinctly Portnoy-like book titled Carnovsky. Six weeks after the scandalizing book has appeared, Nathan can’t walk the New York streets without being accosted, he is getting mail addressed to “The Enemy of the Jews” (care of his publisher), and he has made a million bucks. He has also realized that success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But even Zuckerman admits that “being a poor misunderstood millionaire is not really a topic that intelligent people can discuss for very long,” and he is right. Zuckerman Unbound, a lively but undernourished book, feels like a letdown after The Ghost Writer. In part, it’s the letdown that comes with the writer’s progress from youthful idealism to the marketplace. Anne Frank? Henry James? Zuckerman is called “the Jewish Charles Dickens” by a guy who is trying to get him to endorse pickled herring on a television commercial and who offers to get an actress to play Zuckerman’s mother if she’s unable to join him for the job.
It’s a lonely book beneath the jokes, though, as Nathan is increasingly unbound from the people in his life. At thirty-six, he has obtained his third divorce. He spends most of his time alone in his new Upper East Side apartment, worrying about who’s calling and who isn’t. He is obsessed with other people’s obsession with his book. The most arresting example of the corrosive effects of fame, American style, however, is not Zuckerman, with his uncommon success, but someone with the far more common experience of failure: a highly unstable Jewish paranoiac motormouth from Newark named Alvin Pepler. This semi-brilliant onetime quiz show star has suffered a history of injustices, the latest of which, in his estimation, is the utterly arbitrary absence of talent that has kept him from writing a bestselling book like Zuckerman’s.
Alvin Pepler is a glorious fool, attempting to impress Zuckerman with knowing a big-time producer who has “an option on the Six-Day War, for a musical.” (The choice of a script writer, he assures him, is down to three: “You, Herman Wouk, and Harold Pinter.”) But the furious resentment that erupts from beneath the flattery makes Pepler more than a comic butt. He is a troubling, if hilarious, figure, a personality so overbearing that he makes Zuckerman seem recessive; he fills the pages so completely that the absence of a plot is hardly noticed. (Pepler is implicated in an uncertain scheme to kidnap Zuckerman’s mother. “Haven’t you given her enough mise
ry with that book?” the kidnapper argues.) Pepler is a promise of things to come in Roth’s work: the manic, slightly dangerous doppelgänger. (Zuckerman, sizing him up as “The Jew You Can’t Permit in the Parlor,” realizes that this is exactly “how Johnny Carson America now thinks of me.”) He is also the furious herald of contemporary, post-riot Newark, a racially torn ruin totally unlike the sentimentalized city of Zuckerman’s bestseller. “What do you know about Newark, Mama’s Boy! I read that fucking book!” he shouts. “Newark is junkies shitting in your hallway and everything burned to the ground!” But this was a reality that lay beyond Roth’s current subject and a tragedy that he did not yet see as having anything like the moral weight of Communist Prague.
A Roth hero without a moral problem is inconceivable, and Zuckerman’s lack of any serious moral difficulty in the first three-quarters of the book accounts for a sense of slackness, despite the popping comic rhythms—a sense of energies confined to the surface. The fact that Zuckerman has written a Portnoy-like book doesn’t mean that he shares Portnoy’s complaint. He may sometimes miss the wife he has just divorced, but he has no regrets about his marital failures and no major internal conflicts. He has an affair with a glamorous movie star, but it hardly registers—on him, or on us—because she’s a lifeless figure, no more credible in her “gown of veils and beads and feathers” than Roth’s earlier glamour girl, Helen Kepesh. The movie star does, however, give Roth a chance to slip in something of Bloom (if only in that she is reading Kierkegaard’s The Crisis in the Life of an Actress, a book that Bloom had introduced Roth to), a bit of his friend Edna O’Brien in her Irish charm, and a bit of his brief experience of dating Jackie Kennedy. (There’s the limo that pulls up when he has offered to take her home from a party, the utter confidence of her sequential lines, “Would you like to come up? Oh, of course you would,” and a good-night kiss that’s like “kissing a billboard.”) Yet for all the sexual fame that Zuckerman has attained, he is not particularly concerned with sex. He lives in full relation only to his parents, and it is they who provide the serious moral consequences of the book.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 15