by Philip Roth
He picked up the bedside phone but couldn’t dial even a single digit of the area code, so overtaken was he by fatigue. This had happened before on the brink of phoning Henry. As weary of his sentimentality as of their righteousness. He could not have both that brother and that book.
The number he dialed was Jenny’s. Somebody to whom, as yet, he owed no explanations.
He let it ring. She would be out back with her pad. drawing snowdrifts in the orchard, or in the shed with her ax, splitting wood. He’d received a long letter from Bearsville only the day before, a long, captivating letter in which she’d written, “I feel you’re on the verge of something nuts,” and he’d kept picking it up and looking to be sure she’d said on the verge of something nuts and not already going nuts. Fighting back from a real breakdown would be terrible. It could take as long as medical school. Longer. Even after the dissolution of his marriages—wreckage he still couldn’t square with an orderly personality like his—he’d neither gone nuts nor gone under. However bad it was, always he’d pushed sanely on until a new alliance came along to help restore the old proportions. Only during the last half year had gloomy, frightening bouts of confusion seriously begun to erode the talent for steady living, and that wasn’t from the pain alone: it was also from living without nursing a book that nursed him. In his former life he could never have imagined lasting a week without writing. He used to wonder how all the billions who didn’t write could take the daily blizzard—alt that beset them, such a saturation of the brain, and so little of it known or named. If he wasn’t cultivating hypothetical Zuckermans he really had no more means than a fire hydrant to decipher his existence. But either there was no existence left to decipher or he was without sufficient imaginative power to convert into his fiction of seeming self-exposure what existence had now become. There was no rhetorical overlay left: he was bound and gagged by the real raw thing, ground down to his own unhypothetical nub. He could no longer pretend to be anyone else, and as a medium for his books he had ceased to be.
Breathless from running, Jenny answered the phone on the fifteenth ring and Zuckerman immediately hung up. If he told her where he was going she’d try like Diana to stop him. They would all try to stop him, just as lucidity was breaking through. Jaga in her murky accent would shower him with Polish despair: “You want to be like people with real hot ordinary pursuits inside. You want to have fine feelings like the middle class. You want to be a doctor the way some people admit to uncommitted crimes. Hallo Dostoevsky. Don’t be so banal.” Gloria would laugh and say something ludicrous: “Maybe you need a child. I’ll become a bigamist and we’ll have one. Marvin wouldn’t mind—he loves you more than I do.” But Jenny’s real wisdom would stop him. He didn’t even understand why she continued to bother with him. Why any of them did. For Gloria, he supposed, coming to his place to loll around in her G-string was something to do a couple afternoons a week; Diana, the budding matador, would try anything once; and Jaga needed a haven somewhere between the home that was no-home and Anton’s clinic, and his playmat, alas, was the best she could do. But why did Jenny bother? Jenny was in the long line of levelheaded wives, writers’ wives as skillful as explosive experts at defusing a writer’s dreadful paranoia and brooding indignation, at regularly hacking back the incompatible desires that burgeon in the study, lovely women not likely to bite your balls off, lovely, clear-headed, dependable women, the dutiful daughters of their own troubled families, perfect women whom in the end he divorced. What do you prove by going it alone when there’s Jenny’s colossal willingness and her undespairing heart?
Bearsville, N.Y.
Early Pleistocene Epoch
Dear Nathan,
I’m feeling strong and optimistic and whistling marching tunes as I often do when I feel this way, and you are getting more desperate. There is something across your face these days that disappears only after sex and then only for about five minutes. Lately I feel you’re on the verge of something nuts. I know this because there is something in me that is bent to your shape (which sounds more obscene than it is). There’s a great deal that you don’t have to do to please me. My grandmother (who asks me to tell you she wears a size 16 coat) used to say. “All I want is for you to be happy” and it used to gall me. Happiness wasn’t all I wanted. How stupid! Eventually I’ve come to see more depth in that and in simple good nature generally. You have found a girl you could make happy. I am that kind, if that interests you.
I never told you that I went to a psychoanalyst when I came back so confused from France. He told me that men and women whose sexual instincts are particularly unruly are often drawn to styles of extreme repression; with weaker instincts, they might feel free to let the beast in them free. By way of explaining further what [ mean about something in me that is bent to your shape. (Erotically speaking, we—women—decide very young that we’ll be either priestesses or sacrifices. And we stick to it. And then midway into your career you long to switch and that is just the opportunity you gave me with the grand that I blew at Bergdorf’s. By way of explaining still further.)
Snowed in. 10 inches fell atop 12 from the night before. Expected high today on this mountain: zero. There is a nice new ice age on the way. I’m painting it. Strange and lunar. Expect to look in the mirror and see I’ve grown saber-teeth. Are you alive and well and still living in New York? I didn’t think so when we spoke on Monday. I hung up and began thinking of you as someone I used to know. Is Milton Appel’s really the final word? Let us name him Tevye and see if you are still upset. He thinks you do what you do for the sadistic joy of it? I thought your book was one genial trick after another. I’m astonished at your doubt. In my view a good novelist is less like a high priest of secular culture than he is like an intelligent dog. Extraordinary sensitivity to some stimuli, like a dog’s sense of smell, and selective impoverishment in the communication of them. The combination produces not talking but barking, whining, frantic burrowing. pointing, howling, groveling, anything. Good dog good book. And you are a good dog. Isn’t that enough? You once wrote a novel called Mixed Emotions. Why don’t you read it? At least read the title. In someone who has made his work and his destiny out of mined emotions, toward his family, toward his country, toward his religion and his education and even his own sex—skip it. To my point. I can’t say nothing and saying it to myself isn’t the same. There’s a little house for rent up here that you would like. Not primitive like mine but warm and cozy. And nearby. I could see that you were all right. I could introduce you to the people around to talk to. I could introduce you to nature. There’s no beating nature: the most abstract art uses colors that occur in nature. You are forty, the halfway point. and you are exhausted. No punning diagnosis intended, but you are sick of yourself, sick of serving your imagination’s purposes, sick of fighting the alien purposes of the Jewish Appels. Up here you can get past all that. If you won’t get past your pain, maybe you’ll at least lay down the burden of your fiendish dignity and the search for motives, good or bad. I’m not proposing my magic white mountain for the Castorpian seven-year cure. But why not see what happens in seven months? I can’t imagine anyone thinking of New York as home. I don’t think you do or did, ever. You certainly don’t live there that way. You don’t live there at all. You’re locked up on a closed ward. Here in the woods it’s only rarely crushing isolation. Mostly it’s useful solitude. Out here it makes sense living apart from people. And I live here. If worst comes to worst, you can talk to me. It’s beginning to throw me off balance to have only myself and a cat to care about.
More quotations for your outlook. (Intelligent people are corny too.)
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.
—Dante
It is a good thing in the winter to be deep in the snow, in the autumn deep in the yellow leaves, in the summer among the ripe com. in spring amid the grass: it is a good thing to be always with the mowers and
the peasant girls, in summer with a big sky overhead, in winter by the fireside, and to feel that it always has been and always will be so. One may sleep on straw, eat black bread, well, one will only be the healthier for it.
—Van Gogh
Love,
A Peasant Girt
P.S. I am sorry that your shoulder is still bad, but I don’t think it’s going lo stop you. If I were a devil, plotting with my minions how lo shut Zuckerman up, and some minion said, “How about plaguing shoulder pain?” I would say, “No. sorry, I just don’t think that wilt do it.” I hope the pain subsides, and think that if you came up here, in time you’d feel the inner clench loosening. But if it didn’t, you would just live with it and write with it. Life really is stronger than death. If you don’t believe me, come look at my fat new picture book (32 smackers) of seventeenth-century Dutch realism. Jan Steen couldn’t paint an upholstery tack without proclaiming just that.
No, he wouldn’t tell her what he was planning and he wouldn’t rent the house nearby. It’s my vitality I long for, not a deeper retreat; the job is to make sense back among people, not to take a higher degree in surviving alone. Even with you to talk to, winter by the fireside and the big summer sky overhead are not going to produce a potent new man—they’re going to give us a little boy. Our son will be me. No, I cannot be mothered in that warm cozy house. I will not abet that analyst’s inanities about “returning to the infantile mode.” Now to renounce renunciation—to reunite with the race!
Yet what if Jenny’s black bread is my cure? There’s a great deal that you don’t have to do to please me. You have found a girl you could make happy. It’s beginning to throw me off balance to have only myself and a cat to care about. You’d feet the inner clench unloosening.
Yes, and after the novelty of healing me wore off? No doubt Gloria is right and the suffering male (who is otherwise well) is to some women the great temptation, but what happens when the slow curing fails to take place and the tender rewards are not forthcoming? Every morning, nine on the button, she’s off to the studio and shows up next only for lunch—stained with paint and full of painting problems, anxious to bolt a sandwich and get back to work. I know that absorption. So do my ex-wives. If I were healthy and nailed to a book, I might go ahead and make the move, buy a parka and snow boots and turn peasant with Jennifer. Separate by day for deep concentration, toil alone like slaves of the earth over the obstinate brainchild, then coming uncoiled together at night to share food and wine and talk and feeling and sex. But it’s easier to share sex than to share pain. That would dawn on her soon enough, and I’d wind up reading ARTnews from under my ice bag and learning to hate Hilton Kramer, while nights as well as days she slugged it out in the studio with Van Gogh. No, he couldn’t go from being an artist to being an artist’s chick. He had to be rid of all the women. If there wasn’t something suspect about someone hanging around somebody like him, it was surely wrong for him to be hanging on to all of them. They all, with their benevolence, with their indulgence, with their compliance to my need, make off with what I most need to climb out of this pit. Diana is smarter, Jenny’s the artist, and Jaga really suffers. And with Gloria I mostly feel like Gregor Samsa waiting on the floor beneath the cupboard for his sister to bring him his bowl of slops. All these voices, this insistent chorus, reminding me, as though I could forget, how unreasonable I am, how idle and helpless and overprivileged. how fortunate even in my misfortune. If one more woman preaches to me, I’ll be ready for the padded cell.
He phoned Dr. Kotler.
“This is Nathan Zuckerman. What do you mean by ‘dolorologist’?”
“Hello there, Nathan. So my pillow arrived. You’re on your way.”
“It’s here, yes, thank you. You sign yourself ‘dolorologist.’ I’m lying on the pillow at this very moment and thought I’d phone for a definition.”
But he’d phoned to find out about the hypnotic procedures employed in recalcitrant cases; he’d phoned because the orthodox techniques of the highly esteemed doctors had alleviated nothing, because he could hardly afford to reject the prospect of a cure on account of the age or eccentricity of the physician, or because the physician happened to be a nostalgic exile from the same pile of rubble as himself. Everybody comes from somewhere, reaches an age, and speaks with some accent or other. Cure was not going to come either from God or from Mount Sinai Hospital, that much was clear by now. Hypnosis seemed a terrible comedown after years of making the hypnotic phenomena himself, yet if someone actually could talk to the pain directly, without his looking for meaning, without all the interfering ego static…
“Is dolorology a coinage of Kotler’s or a real medical specialty you can study?”
“It’s something every doctor studies every day when the patient walks in and says, ‘Doctor, it hurts.’ But I happen to consider dolorology my particular specialty because of my approach: anti-prescription, anti-machine. I date back to the stethoscope, the thermometer, and the forceps. For the rest you had two eyes, two ears, two hands, a mouth, and the instrument most important of all, clinical intuition. Pain is like a baby crying. What it wants it can’t name. The dolorologist unearths what that is. Chronic pain is a puzzle for which few of my colleagues have lime. Most of them are frightened by it. Most doctors are frightened of death and the dying. People need an incredible amount of support when they die. And the doctor who is frightened can’t give it to them.”
“Are you free this afternoon?”
“For Nathan Zuckerman I am free day and night.”
“I’d like to come by, I’d like to talk about what we’ll do if the pillow doesn’t help.”
“You sound distraught, my boy. Come first and have lunch. I overlook the East River. When I moved in I thought I would stand staring at the river four and five hours a day. Now I’m so busy weeks go by and I don’t even know the river is here.”
“I’m interested in discussing hypnosis. Hypnosis, you say in your note, is sometimes useful for what I have,”
“Without minimizing what you have, for far worse than you have. Asthma, migraines, colitis, dermatitis—I have seen a man suicidal from trigeminal neuralgia, a most nightmarish pain that attacks the face, reclaim his life through hypnosis. I’ve seen the people in my practice that everybody else has written off, and now I can’t answer my mail from these patients, given up as incurable, whom I have hypnotized back to health. My secretary needs a secretary, that’s how heavy my mail runs.”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
But an hour later he was on the unmade bed in the little room dialing Cambridge, Mass. Enough cowering before the attack. But I’m not cowering and it’s not the first attack. And will he sit up and listen, no matter how generous the amplitude with which I patiently spell out his hundred mistakes? You expect him to suffer remorse? You figure you’ll win his blessing by phoning long distance to tell him he can’t read? He expresses the right thoughts about Jews and you express the wrong thoughts about Jews, and nothing you shout is going to change that. But it’s these Appels who’ve whammied my muscles with their Jewish evil eye. They push in the pins and I yell ouch and swallow a dozen Percodans. But what you do with the evil eye is poke it out with a burning stick! But he is not my father’s deputy, let alone the great warrior chieftain that young Nathan longed to please and couldn’t help antagonizing. I am not young Nathan. I am a forty-year-old client at Anton’s Trichological Clinic. To be “understood” is no longer necessary once you seriously begin losing your hair. The father who called you a bastard from his deathbed is dead, and the allegiance known as “Jewishness” beyond their moralizing judgment. It’s from Milton Appel that I found that out, in one of his own incarnations. And you needn’t bother to tell him.
Too late for reason: he had Harvard on the phone and was waiting to be connected to the English Department. The real shitside of literature, these inspired exchanges, but into the bitter shit I go if churning up shit is what it takes to get better. Nothing to lose but my pain.
Only Appel has nothing to do with the pain. The pain pre-dates that essay by a year. There are no Jewish evil eyes or double Jewish whammies. Illness is an organic condition. Illness is as natural as health. The motive is not revenge. There is no motive. There are only nerve cells, twelve thousand million nerve cells, any one of which can drive you mad without the help of a book review. Go get hypnotized. Even that’s less primitive than this. Let the oracular little dolorologist be your fairy godfather, if it’s a regressive solution you’re after. Go and let him feed you lunch. Tell Gloria to come over and you can blindfold each other. Move to the mountains. Marry Jenny. But no further appeals to the Court of Appels.
The English Department secretary rang through to Appel’s office, where a graduate student came on the line to tell him that the Distinguished Professor wasn’t there.
“Is he home?”
“Can’t say.”
“Have you his home number?”