by John Updike
Softest, gentlest, kindest. Responsibility. Generosity. Devotion. That’s how everybody spoke of Henry. I suppose if I were Henry with his heart I wouldn’t jeopardize it, either. It probably feels very good being so good. Except when it doesn’t. And that probably feels good in the end too. Self-sacrifice.
At the climax of Zuckerman Unbound, however, this softer and gentler Zuckerman turns on Nathan and furiously tells him that his writing is what has killed their father and that the old man’s last utterance had been to call his older son a bastard. These accusations rankle throughout The Anatomy Lesson, but Henry and his family remain estranged from Nathan and scarcely appear in the book.
Now, in The Counterlife, Henry returns, as co-hero. It is he who, as a side effect of a beta-blocking medication taken to relieve his coronary disease and hypertension, is rendered impotent; it is he who, caught up in torrid liaisons with a German-Swiss patient called Maria and then with a dental assistant called Wendy, suffers the pangs of Portnoy’s Complaint, clinically defined in the novel of the same name as “a disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” The disorder, displaced onto Henry’s conventional, dutiful, family-bound existence, regains intensity and interest. Explosion requires constraint. The trouble with the other Zuckerman as an agonist was that he had become too free: a rich writer, thrice married but usually a bachelor when we see him in Roth’s fictions, Nathan is able to fly where he wants, have whom he wants, analyze and clown away whatever he doesn’t like, and concentrate entirely upon his own psyche and anatomy. If he is less than heroic, it is because the task he keeps setting himself and keeps being unable to perform—to break out of self-obsession enough to establish a family and become a father—is, for most heterosexual males, ridiculously easy.* In fact, biology and inertia usually do it for you. But for Zuckerman the writer, nothing comes, or goes, easy; he has been stewing over the mixed critical reception of his best-selling Carnovsky (1969) for nearly ten years (The Counterlife occurs in 1978) and rehashing his boyhood ever since it happened. “Tell me something,” his exasperated brother, Henry, asks him, “is it at all possible … for you to have a frame of reference slightly larger than the kitchen table in Newark?” For Zuckerman the dentist, father, and husband—“a young man still largely propelled by feelings of decorum that he had imbibed and internalized and never seriously questioned”—lust is still an unhackneyed, majestic disruption subject to no mitigating literary uses and deformations. This five-part novel’s first section, “Basel,” describing Henry’s affairs and his decision to undergo a life-threatening coronary-bypass operation that will restore his potency, has the vital freshness, the vivid minor characters, and implied communal pressure of Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Roth’s first bracing dip into the surging waters of Newark Jewishness and sexuality.
The four remaining chapters give back, I think, some of the bright life borrowed from this shift of interest onto the brother. Unlike James Joyce and Thomas Mann, to whom the theme of competitive fraternity was objectively, oppressively present, Roth conceives brotherhood as another exercise in egoism. Nathan says of brothers, “How they know each other, in my experience, is as a kind of deformation of themselves.” Indeed, almost all the characters in The Counterlife, including the women, exist as deformations of the hero, or as curved mirrors giving back an exaggerated aspect of him. As if to proclaim imaginative distortion as the heart and soul of fiction (and to plead Not Guilty to charges of indecent exposure and invaded privacy), the novel incorporates discontinuous variations of its central situation. The plot bifurcates, revises itself, cross-examines itself, tries things several ways. In the first chapter, Henry dies during the heart operation; in the second, “Judea,” Henry has survived and has fled his family and practice by going (as if in fulfillment of that “desert” quality casually ascribed in the earlier novel) to Israel and taking up with a Zionist zealot. In the fourth chapter, it is Nathan who has the heart problem, the impotence, and the mistress called Maria. In pursuing these variations, the virtuoso imaginer rarely falters; satisfying details of place and costume, astonishing diatribes, beautifully heard and knitted dialogues unfold in chapters impeccably shaped, packed, and smoothed. No other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation and even dishevelment with such depth of meditating intelligence. Nathan, pondering the Hebraized, suntanned Henry, reflects “about this swift and simple conversion of a kind that isn’t readily allowed to writers unless they wish to commit the professional blunder of being uninquiring.” Inquiring the writing certainly is; the way in which yet one more insight, one more psychological wrinkle, is visited upon an already thoroughly explicated situation (Henry’s resentment of Nathan, Nathan’s condescension to Henry) is as thrilling as, in another sort of novel, one more body discovered in the library. The narrator is always striving to surmount his feelings, pains, animosities, rages; the narrative suggests two fast-moving, slippery wrestlers constantly breaking each other’s holds, the wrestlers matched with an interminable equality because they are really one wrestler.
Israel means “he who wrestles with God.” From Genesis 32:
And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.… And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel.
Even the interchangeability of “he”s in this epochal passage seems pertinent to The Counterlife. Nathan’s Maria, who also writes fiction, in a genteel/gentile fashion, says to him, “You didn’t seem to realize that writing for me isn’t everything about my existence wrestling to be born.” In the modern absence of Jacob’s ghostly opponent, Jews wrestle now with such ghosts as the id and the superego, and with the question “What is a Jew?” Nathan asks, “What is a Jew in the first place?” The question has taken on fresh dimensions in Israel—“a whole country imagining itself, asking itself, ‘What the hell is this business of being a Jew?’ ” Here, where every cloud and tree and acre can be said to be Jewish, the pacific and pushed-around Jew of the Diaspora, at the mercy of his Christian or Islamic host nations, is superseded. Here Jews can live “a life free of Jewish cringing, deference, diplomacy, apprehension, alienation, self-pity, self-satire, self-mistrust, depression, clowning, bitterness, nervousness, inwardness, hypercriticalness, hypertouchiness, social anxiety, social assimilation—a way of life absolved, in short, of all the Jewish ‘abnormalities,’ those peculiarities of self-division whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew I knew.” Thus thinks Nathan, having gone to rescue Henry from his frontier settlement in Judea, among the West Bank Arabs. In his three-day visit, he talks with disillusioned, almost anti-Israeli Jews, with rabid expansionist Jews, with doggedly religious Jews, with Jews as crazy as those he meets in New York. He is less than enchanted; the pervasive social challengingness, the gun his brother totes, and even the terrain disturb him: “Judea … could have passed for a piece of the moon to which the Jews had been sadistically exiled by their worst enemies rather than the place they passionately maintained was theirs and no one else’s from time immemorial.” Aggressive, unapologetic Israel represents the timorous and massacred Diaspora Jew’s “construction of a counterlife.” At first, most of the non-Arab world cheered: “All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland.”† Now, with the little nation convincingly tough in its Begin-led militance, anti-Zionism has crept into respectable intellectual circles, as Nathan discovers in his adopted land of England. As he is forcibly told on the plane back, “You think it’s the Jewish superego [the goyim] hate? They hate the Jewish id! What right do these Jews have to have an id? The Holocaust should have taught them never to have an id again.”
The Israel sections are interesting but perhaps in too journalistic a w
ay; the variety of possible opinions is paraded past almost as brutally as standpoints on Communist Czechoslovakia, from anti through antic and anarchic to stolidly pro, were marshalled by Roth in “The Prague Orgy.” The conversations deteriorate into blocks of talk, one babbled essay after another. As the novel goes on, the topic of Jewishness overrides plausibility: airplane security thugs allude to T. S. Eliot’s symbolic, cigar-toting Bleistein, and sisters-in-law in church crypts give quick seminars in the anti-Semitism of John Buchan. In England, with its faded but distinctly Christian heritage, Nathan encounters anti-Semitism as if for the first time, and becomes an American patriot. “To say Jew and goy about America is to miss the point, because America simply is not that.” Affronted repeatedly, he tells Maria, “I didn’t run into this stuff there—never.” (He has evidently forgotten how, as related in “Salad Days,” his superior in the Army, the Southerner Captain Clark, would aim cotton golf balls at his most Hebraic feature, saying, when successful, “Ah, they we go, Zuckuhmun, rat on the nose.”) Zuckerman, who loves to hear his shiksas screech, finally succeeds in goading his English wife into admitting that even she sometimes asks herself, “Why do Jews make such a bloody fuss about being Jewish?” and into delivering a three-page tirade that ends by advising him: “Go back to America, please, where everybody loves Jews—you think!” Tirades, philippics, self-expositions: reading a Roth novel becomes like riding in an overheated club car, jostled this way and that by the clamorous, importunate crowd of talkers while glimpses of the outside world tantalizingly whip past the steamed-up windows. The train slackens momentum and clanks to a halt, and we press our forehead to the glass only to see that we already were in this station, an hour or two ago.
Roth’s inquiringness, the fervid delicacy of his subdividing investigations of mental and moral and emotional states, produces novels of sentiment as lacy, in their way, as a Victorian romancer’s. In this novel, the decisive events take place on operating tables and the actors are surgeons we never meet. Otherwise, all is thought, feeling, second thought, and speech. And like a Victorian the author takes us into his confidence with a flattering concern for our good opinion. Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly. The portrait of the English Maria is a gorgeous, long-limbed, indolent Gainsborough, complete with horses and towpaths and gray stone walls in the background. The English in-laws are as perfectly “done” as bit parts in Masterpiece Theatre. Henry’s final revenge on his brother stirs up a stunning anthropological metaphor: “Henry, like a cannibal who out of respect for his victim, to gain whatever history and power is there, eats the brain and learns that raw it tastes like poison.” Henry not only eats Nathan’s brain but has his number; he is the writer’s sharpest critic—the writer as social animal and devious psyche—and an entire anthology of scathing and penetrating remarks about writing and writers could be extracted from their fraternal by-play. The novel as a whole is a performance to cap performances, a defiant round-up and topping-up of the hang-ups and obsessions that wearisome critics like the undersigned have been shyly suggesting Roth has perhaps sufficiently exploited. Nathan himself claims, “As a writer I’d mined my past to its limits, exhausted my private culture and personal memories, and could no longer even warm to squabbling over my work.” But, going to the same old well with a vengeance (and with some new geography), Roth shows that more can be still more; this is Zuckerman’s most rousing outing since The Ghost Writer, and one in which the inspirational value of personal resentment seems blessedly reduced. Do we dare hope it will be Zuckerman’s last ride? As Henry might ask, Who cares what it’s like to be a writer? Having now pushed confessional fiction into meta-fiction, Roth might trust himself as a simple realist, a superbly alert witness of what is; the fringe characters—landladies and taxi-drivers miles removed from the claustral travail of a writer’s self-impersonations—have a blunt humorous actuality that patiently waits for Prospero’s undivided attention.
I wish I had liked the ending better. It seemed inflated and coyly Pirandelloian. And Zuckerman’s concluding vow to have his son, if any, circumcised moved me as much as would a richly nuanced plea, in a novel by a Kikuyu, in favor of tribal scars and clitoridectomy, or an old Chinese poem hymning the symbolic beauty of bound feet. That a narrator so scornful of church and synagogue ends by praising ritual mutilation is a strange twist, in a tale of strange twists. Perhaps the author, who has repeatedly managed to offend Jewish sensibilities, set out in his last chapter, “Christendom,” to give gentiles a rub of his abrasive satire. British anti-Semitism certainly exists—British anti-everything-un-British exists—but here it appears too bald and savage; it primarily testifies, as Maria observes (the characters get to read the book and complain about it), to Zuckerman’s own “great verbal violence” and “aggression.” At one point in his concluding stream of self-awareness he expresses dread and revulsion during an Anglican service of Christmas carols. Christmas carols! Christianity at its absolute sweetest!! No, that Nathan Zuckerman is definitely not a nice boy.
And Nothing But
THE FACTS: A Novelist’s Autobiography, by Philip Roth. 195 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988.
The creator of Neil Klugman, Gabe Wallach, Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol, and Nathan Zuckerman here bares the actual life behind these variously animated and anguished alter egos. The younger of two sons of a Newark insurance agent, Roth attended Weequahic High School, Newark Colleges of Rutgers, and Bucknell University; baseball, literature, and sex concerned him, each in its season. While studying for his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, he met and married a gentile divorcée with two small children; he is still licking the psychic wounds left by their unhappy relationship. Another wound has been inflicted by critics, amateur and professional, who absurdly find his exuberant portrayals of Jewish-American life anti-Semitic. The autobiography would seem merely a thinner version, simultaneously dry and watered-down, of the author’s droll, explosive, and fearless novels did not one of his characters, Nathan Zuckerman, contribute a long epistolary epilogue that lifts The Facts into the liberating uncertainties and revisionary cross-references of fiction. “Sure,” Zuckerman portrays himself telling his charming English wife, Maria, “he [Roth, his creator] talks so freely about all his soft spots, but only after choosing awfully carefully which soft spots to talk about.” Not so brilliantly convolute and argumentative as the author’s last novel, The Counterlife, this new raid on Roth’s private reality shows, once more, that what interests a good enough writer will interest us. “You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation,” he told The Paris Review in 1983. He also told it, “Writing for me isn’t a natural thing that I just keep doing, the way fish swim and birds fly. It’s something that’s done under a certain kind of provocation, a particular urgency. It’s the transformation, through an elaborate impersonation, of a personal emergency into a public act.”
* This impasse is more painfully illustrated, because less obscured by writer-consciousness and intellectual slapstick, by David Kepesh, the hero of The Breast and its prequel The Professor of Desire. Perhaps Portnoy’s Complaint—the disease—is merely a contemporary form of the Victorian pathology, pondered by Freud, that prevented men from loving their sexual partners. “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life” is both a paper by Freud and a chapter title from Portnoy. Roth’s women, like Hemingway’s, tend to be virgins or whores: solid, cool, boringly sensible Wasp women or devilish wet dreams, the Monkeys and Sharon Shatskys of the world, who, incredibly, “do it” as perversely and avidly as the hero’s dark side desires. For this they win small thanks. Their lovers are, from the neck up, high-minded, public-spirited, squeamish. Altruism, of course, is a method of loving without contamination by sexual contact and its concomitant disgust: the Monkey accurately tells Portnoy, “You mean, miserable hard-on you, you care more about the niggers in Harlem that you don’t even know, than you do about me, w
ho’s been sucking you off for a solid year!”
† Bernard Berenson at the time of Israel’s first war for survival in 1948 wrote to the Baroness Liliane de Rothschild, “The complaint made by even the most friendly disposed gentiles has been that Jews would neither till the soil nor fight. The proof to the contrary, given by the Israelis, is perhaps the most important revaluation of Jewry that has happened in my time. It is the prime reason why we should not only be proud of Israel but give it support.” Berenson would have preferred to ignore his own Jewishness; he converted to Episcopalianism in Boston at the age of twenty and, five years later, to Catholicism in Italy. But in the years after the Holocaust, the aesthete, in his letters, made observations not unlike some made in The Counterlife. Pondering his own narcissism, and the works of Kafka, Bergson, and Proust, Berenson reflected, “Hunted, always insecure, our ancestors must have developed unusual gifts of inner as well as outer observation, which nowadays turns us into psychologists, scientists, novelists, critics.” In his nineties, he wrote, “I am more and more amazed to discover how seldom I meet an interesting thinker, scholar, or writer who does not turn out to be a Jew, half-Jew, or quarter-Jew.… How easy and warm the atmosphere between born Jews like Isaiah Berlin, Lewis Namier, myself, Bela Horowitz, when we drop the mask of being goyim and return to Yiddish reminiscences, and Yiddish stories and witticisms.”