by Philip Roth
“Can’t be reached.”
Disciple, undoubtedly, holding sacred all of the Distinguished Professor’s opinions, including those on me.
“This is Nathan Zuckerman.”
Zuckerman imagined the smirking disciple passing a cryptic comic note to another smirking disciple. Must have them up there by the dozens. Used to be one myself.
“It’s about a piece Appel asked me to write. I’m calling from New York.”
“He hasn’t been well,” the disciple offered. “You’ll have to wait until he gets back.”
“Can’t,” Zuckerman told him. “Haven’t been well either,” and promptly called Boston information. While the operator searched the suburbs for a listing, Zuckerman spread the contents of Appel’s file folder on the bed. He pushed his medical books onto the carpet, and arranged on the bedside table all the unfinished draft letters that he’d eked out in longhand. He couldn’t trust himself to extemporize, not while worked up like this; yet if he waited till he could think straight and talk sensibly, he wouldn’t make the call.
A woman answered at the Appel residence in Newton. The pretty dark wife from the Barnes Hole beach? She must be white-hatred by now. Everybody moving on to wisdom but me. All you do on the phone is document his original insight. All you are doing on the phone is becoming one of the crazies of the kind who phone you. When you saw him strolling by you on the beach, were you that impressed by his narrow shoulders and his soft white waist? Of course he hates your work. All that semen underfoot is no longer to his taste. Never was—not in books at least. You two are a perfect mismatch. You draw stories from your vices, dream up doubles for your demons—he finds criticism a voice for virtue, the pulpit to berate us for our failings. Virtue comes with the franchise. Virtue is the goal. He teaches, he judges, he corrects—rightness is all. And to rightness you are acting out indefensible desires by spurious pseudo-literary means, committing the culture crime of desublimation. There’s the quarrel, as banal as that: you shouldn’t make a Jewish comedy out of genital life. Leave the spurting hard-on to goyim like Genet. Sublimate, my child, sublimate, like the physicists who gave us the atomic bomb.
“This is Nathan Zuckerman. May I speak with Milton Appel?”
“He’s resting right now.”
“It’s pretty urgent business.” She didn’t answer, and so somberly he added, “About Israel.”
He was shuffling meanwhile through the letters on the table, looking for an opening shot. He chose (for their adversarial pithiness), then rejected (for lack of tact and want of respect), then reconsidered (for just the sake of those deficiencies) three sentences written the night before, after he’d given up on writing about Jaga; about Jaga he’d been unable to write even three words. Professor Appel. I am convinced that the quality about a man or a group that most invites the violence of neurotic guilt is public righteousness and innocence. The roots of anti-Semitism are deep and twisted and not easily sterilized. However, to the extent that published statements by Jews have any effect at all. one way or another, on Gentile opinion and prejudice, the words “Jews jerk off daily” on lavatory walls would do us all more good than what you want me to write on the Op Ed page.
“This is Milton Appel.”
“This is Nathan Zuckerman. I’m sorry to bother you when you’re resting.”
“What is it you want?”
“Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
“Please, what is it?”
How sick is he? Sicker than I am? Sounds strained. Burdened. Maybe he always does, or maybe there’s something worse in his kidneys than stones. Maybe the evil eye works both ways and I’ve given him a malignancy, i can’t say the hatred hasn’t been on that scale.
“My friend Ivan Felt has sent on to me your letter requesting him to ask me to write a piece on Israel.”
“Felt sent that letter on to you? He had no right to do that,”
“Well, he did it. Xeroxed your paragraph about his friend Nate Zuckerman. I have it in front of me. ‘Why don’t you ask your friend Nate Zuckerman to write, etc…. unless he feels the Jews can stick their historical suffering up their ass.’ Odd request. Very odd. To me in that context, infuriatingly odd.” Zuckerman had begun to read now from one of his unfinished letters. “Though since you so regularly change your opinion about my ‘case,’ for all I know you’ve had yet another flexibility spasm since you distinguished in Inquiry between anti-Semites like Goebbels and people like Zuckerman who “just don’t like us.’”
His voice was already out of control, quivering so with rage that he even thought to tum on the tape from the night before and let that double for him over the phone until he recovered the modulations of a mature, confident, reasonable, authoritative adult. But no—purgation requires more turbulence than that, otherwise you might as well lie back on Dr. Kotler’s pillow to take your bottle. No—drive pain out with your battering heart the way a clapper knocks sound from a bell. He tried to envision how this would happen. Pain waves springing longitudinally from his silhouetted torso, snaking along the floor, spreading over the furniture, slithering through the blinds, and then throughout his apartment, throughout the whole building, rattling every window in its frame—the roar of his discharged affliction echoing out over all Manhattan, and the evening Post hitting the street headlined: ZUCKERMAN PAIN-FREE AT LAST. 18 Month Ordeal Ends with Sonic Boom. “If I correctly understand your letter to Felt asking him to ask me what apparently you’d rather not ask me directly yourself, you seem to suspect (privately, of course, and not in print or on the lecture circuit) that far from disliking Jews ‘for being Jews,’ and pathologically reviling them in my work, there’s a possibility that I might actually be troubled by their troubles—”
“Look, hold on. You have every right to be angry, but not primarily with me. This paragraph that Felt so kindly sent to you was written in a letter privately addressed to him. He never asked me whether it was okay to forward it. When he did so he must surely have known it could only inflame your feelings, since what I wrote was certainly not civil and obviously represented an eruption of personal feelings. But that seems to me just the sort of thing that would be done by that character in that book he’s written with his two club feet. I regard it as hostile, provocative, and nasty—toward both of us. Whatever you may think of my essay on your work or my general opinions, you probably will grant that if I were writing directly to you and asking you to do a piece on Israel for the Op Ed page, I’d be more civil about it and not do it so as to enrage you, rightly or wrongly.”
“Because you would be more ‘civil” in a letter written directly to me, despite having written about my work as you did in that piece—” Feeble quibbling. Pedantry. Must not extemporize and lose your way.
He looked everywhere on the bed for his three stinging lines from the night before. The page must have slipped to the floor. He reached to retrieve it without bending his neck or turning his head and, only after rushing to resume the attack, discovered that he was reading Appel the wrong page. “It’s one thing to think you’re pretending to your students when you tell them there’s a difference between characters and the author, if that’s the way you see it these days—but to strip the book of its tone, the plot of its circumstances, the action of its momentum, to disregard totally the context that gives to a theme its spirit, its flavor, its life—”
“Look, I haven’t the energy for Literature 101.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, i was talking about Remedial Reading. And don’t hang up—I have more to say.”
“I’m sorry but I can’t listen to much more. I didn’t expect that you’d like what I wrote about your work any more than I like bad reviews of what I write. In these situations, strain is unavoidable. Bui I really do feel that both of us might have been spared this exacerbation had Felt shown some manners. I wrote him a personal letter in response to a visit he paid. I had a right to assume that a personal letter wouldn’t be circulated unless I gave permission. He never asked for it.
”
“First you scold me, now you scold Felt.” And that’s why he’s sick, Zuckerman realized. The addiction to scolding. He’s overdosed on scolding. All the verdicts, all the judgments—what’s good for the culture, what’s bad for the culture—and finally it’s poisoning him to death. Let’s hope.
“Let me finish,” said Appel. “I was given reason by Felt to suppose that you did indeed feel some strong concern about Israel. It won’t strike you as any less irritating if you know why I wrote it, but at least you should understand that my suggestion wasn’t a mere gratuitous provocation. That I leave to our friend Ivan, whose talent as far as I can tell lies solely in that direction. My letter was for his eyes. If he had behaved decently—”
“Like you. Of course. Mannerly, decently, courteously, decorously, uprightly, civil—oh, what a gorgeous Torah cloth you throw over your meat hooks! How clean you are!”
“And your Torah cloth? No more abuse, please. What is this phone call about, except your Torah cloth? If Felt had behaved decently, he’d have written you: ‘Appel thinks it would be useful if you did a piece for Op Ed on Israel, since things look black and since he feels you, Zuckerman, would reach kinds of people that he can’t.’”
“And what kinds of people are they? People like me who don’t like Jews? Or people like Goebbels who gas them? Or the kind of people I pander to by choosing—as you put it so civilly and decently and decorously in Inquiry—by choosing an ‘audience’ instead of choosing readers the way you and Flaubert do. My calculating sub-literary shenanigans and your unsullied critical heart! And you call Felt hostile and nasty! What’s disgusting in Felt, in Appel is virtue—in you it’s all virtue, even the ascribing of dishonorable motives. Then in that bloodthirsty essay you have the fucking gall to call my moral stance ‘superior’! You call my sin ‘distortion,’ then distort my book to show how distorted it is! You pervert my intentions, then call me perverse! You lay hold of my comedy with your ten-ton gravity and turn it into a travesty! My coarse, vindictive fantasies, your honorable, idealistic humanist concerns! I’m a sellout to the pop-pomo culture, you’re the Defender of the Faith! Western Civilization! The Great Tradition! The Serious Viewpoint! As though seriousness can’t be as stupid as anything else! You sententious bastard, have you ever in your life taken a mental position that isn’t a moral judgment? I doubt you’d even know how. All you unstained, undegenerate, unselfish, loyal, responsible, high-minded Jews, good responsible citizen Jews, taking on the burdens of the Jewish people and worrying about the future of the State of Israel—and chinning yourselves like muscle-builders on your virtue! Milton Appel, the Charles Atlas of Goodness! Oh, the comforts of that difficult role! And how you play it! Even a mask of modesty to throw us dodos off the track! I’m ‘fashionable.’ you’re for the ages. I fuck around, you think. My shitty books are cast in concrete, you make judicious reappraisals. I’m a ‘case.’ I have a ‘career,’ you of course have a calling. Oh, I’ll tell you your calling—President of the Rabbinical Society for the Suppression of Laughter in the Interest of Loftier Values! Minister of the Official Style for Jewish Books Other than the Manual for Circumcision. Regulation number one: Do not mention your cock. You dumb prick! What if I trotted out your youthful essay about being insufficiently Jewish for Poppa and the Jews—written before you got frozen stiff in your militant grown-upism! I wonder what the kosher butchers over at Inquisition would have to say about that. Awfully strange to me that you should no longer care to remember your great cri de coeur, written before your self became so legitimate and your heart so pure, while my first stories you can’t forget!”
“Mr. Zuckerman. you’re entitled to think anything you want of me, and I’ll have to try to live with that, as you’ve managed obviously to live with what I said about your books. What is strange to me is that you don’t seem to have anything to say about the suggestion itself, regardless of your anger against the person who made it. But what may lie in store for the Jews is a much larger matter than what I think of your books, early or late, or what you think of my thinking.”
Oh, if only he were fourteen and Gilbert Carnovsky, he’d tell him to take what may lie in store for the Jews and stick it up his ass. But he was forty and Zuckerman. and so, demonstrating to himself if to no one else the difference between character and author, he hung up the receiver, and found of course that he wasn’t anything like pain-free. Standing atop the paper-strewn bed, his hands clutched into fists and raised to the ceiling of that dark tiny room, he cried out, he screamed, to find that from phoning Appel and venting his rage, he was only worse.
> 4 <
BURNING
A double vodka on takeoff, then over some waterway in Pennsylvania three drags on a joint in the airplane toilet, and Zuckerman was managing well enough. Not much more pain than he would have felt at home doing nothing but tending pain. And every time his determination began to crumble and he told himself that he was running away on a ridiculous impulse, running away to nothing that made sense or promised relief, running away from what it was impossible to escape, he opened the medical-school catalogue and reread the chart on page 42 that laid out the daily course load for a medical student’s first year. You start at eight-thirty, five mornings a week, with Biology 310/311. From nine-thirty to noon. Clinics 300 and 390. An hour for lunch, and from one to five every afternoon. Anatomy 301. Then the evening’s homework. Days and nights, filled not by him with what little he knew but by them with all he didn’t. He turned to the description of Clinics 390.
INTRODUCTION TO THE PATIENT. This course is offered in the first year of training … Each student will interview a patient before the group, focusing on the present complaint, the illness onset, reaction to the illness and hospitalization, life changes related, personality characteristics. coping styles, etc….
Sounds familiar. Sounds like the art of fiction, except that the coping style and the personality characteristics belong to a patient in off the street. Other people. Somebody should have told me about them a long time ago.
360. FETAL-MATERNAL MEDICINE. The student will work full-time in the labor-delivery floor. He will be required to review the bibliography related to methods and techniques of recording maternal and fetal physiologic parameters during labor and delivery…
361.OBSTETRICS: BIRTH ROOMS . This elective will primarily encompass inpatient obstetrics, especially birth-room experience. Some continuity of care can be achieved by post-partum follow-up on selected patients…
Not until Michigan did Zuckerman discover that if you take obstetrics as your specialty you specialize in gynecology too. Tumor formations. Infected reproductive organs. Well, it’d bestow a new perspective on an old obsession. What’s more, he owed it to women after Carnovsky. From what he’d read of the reviews in the feminist press, he could expect a picture of himself up in the post office, alongside the mug shot of the Marquis de Sade. once the militants took Washington and began guillotining the thousand top misogynists in the arts. He came off no better there than with the disapproving Jews. Worse. They had put him on the cover of one of their magazines, WHY DOES THIS MAN HATE WOMEN? Those girls meant business—wanted blood. Well, he’d tum the tables and tend to abnormalities in the discharge of theirs. Relieving menstrual disorders beats he said she said I said you said on anyone’s scale of values. In memory of the mother to whom he’d intended no harm. In the name of ex-wives who had done their damnedest. For his ministering harem. Where I have fornicated, there shall I diagnose, prescribe, operate. and cure. Up with colposcopy, down with Carnovsky.
Going to medical school is nuts, a sick mart’s delusion about heating himself. And Jenny saw it coming: I should have gone to Bearsvitle.
But he was not a sick man—he was fighting the idea of himself as sick. Every thought and feeling ensnared by the self-ness of pain, pain endlessly circling back on itself, diminishing everything except isolation—first it’s the pain that empties the world, then it’s the effort to overcome it. He refused to endure one
day more.
Other people. So busy diagnosing everybody else there’s no time to over-diagnose yourself. The unexamined life—the only one worth living.
The man beside him in the aisle seat was filing into his attache case the papers that had been absorbing his attention since they’d come on board. As the plane began its descent, he turned to Zuckerman and. in a neighborly way, he asked, “Going out on business?”
“That’s right.”
“What line you in?”
“Pornography,” Zuckerman said.
He looked to be amused by the novel reply. “Selling it or buying it?”
“Publish it. Out to Chicago to see Hefner. Hugh Hefner. Playboy “
“Oh, everyone knows who Hefner is. I read the other day in The Wall Street Journal where he grosses a hundred and fifty million a year.”
“Don’t rub it in,” Zuckerman said.
The man laughed amiably and seemed ready to leave it at that. Until curiosity got the better of him. “What exactly do you publish?”
“Lickety Split,” said Zuckerman.
“That’s the publication?”
“You never see Lickety Split? On your newsstand?”
“No, afraid I haven’t.”
“But you see Playboy, don’t you?”
“I see it occasionally.”
“Open it up to look at, right?”
“From time to time.”
“Well, personally I find Playboy boring. That’s why I don’t gross a hundred and fifty million: my magazine isn’t as boring as his. Okay, I admit it, I’m extremely envious of Hefner’s money. He has much more respectability, he has entree, he has national distribution, and Lickety Split is still in the porno ghetto, I’m not surprised you haven’t seen it. Lickety Split is not a mass-distribution publication because it’s too dirty. It doesn’t have Jean-Paul Sartre in it to make it kosher for a guy like you to buy at a newsstand and go home and jerk off to the tits, i don’t believe in that. Hefner is basically a businessman. I don’t think that describes me. Sure it’s a high-profit business—but with me money is not the paramount issue.”