Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  “You are a bastard. A heartless conscienceless bastard. What does loyalty mean to you? What does responsibility mean to you? What does self-denial mean, restraint—anything at all? To you everything is disposable! Everything is exposable! Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families—everything is grist for your fun-machine. Even your shiksas go down the drain when they don’t tickle your fancy anymore. Love, marriage, children, what the hell do you care? To you it’s all fun and games. But that isn’t the way it is to the rest of us.”

  The Anatomy Lesson finds Zuckerman mired ever deeper in his ill-gotten gains and the problems of conscience posed by Judge Wapter’s questions and Henry’s accusations. The time is 1973, Watergate time, and Zuckerman watches Nixon on television—“the dummy gestures, the satanic sweating, the screwy dazzling lies”—with fellow-feeling, for the President is “the only other American he saw daily who seemed to be in as much trouble as he was.” Watches him, it should be explained, through prism glasses, for Zuckerman is flat on his back with excruciating, mysterious, undiagnosed, and uncured neck and shoulder pains. “Just having a neck, arms, and shoulders was like carrying another person around.” He cannot walk more than a few blocks at a time, lift grocery bags or open windows, cook or make his bed or write. He has three ex-wives, four mistresses, and is furious with a critic, Milton Appel, who has spoken and written unkindly of his work. To kill the pain he takes Percodan, drinks vodka, and smokes marijuana, all in increasing quantities. He gradually comes to think that what he really wants, at the age of forty, is to be a doctor; in order to enroll in medical school he travels, heavily self-medicated, to Chicago, where he was once a happy student. But happiness is not so easily come by for Nathan Zuckerman now. With the help of Percodan he attains new heights of self-analysis and self-abasement, as his spirit apparently craves.

  The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heartfelt book. Materials one might have thought exhausted by Roth’s previous novelistic explorations, inflammations one might have thought long soothed burn hotter than ever; the central howl unrolls with a meditated savagery both fascinating and repellent, self-indulgent yet somehow sterling, adamant, pure in the style of high modernism, that bewitchment to all the art-stricken young of the Fifties. Zuckerman’s admonition to himself, “Drive pain out with your battering heart the way a clapper knocks sound from a bell,” could come straight from Kafka. Beckett also figures in: “Percodan was to Zuckerman what sucking stones were to Molloy.” Writing has been his life and religion: “He used to wonder how all the billions who didn’t write could take the daily blizzard—all 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 this cultivation of hypothetical selves has become an endgame:

  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 anybody else, and as a medium for his books he had ceased to be.

  Zuckerman wants out of his weary, overannotated, aching self; but, “if Zuckerman wrote about what he didn’t know, who then would write about what he did know?” The postmodernist writer’s bind is expressed in flat authoritative accents reminiscent of Hemingway’s unbuttoned late-night letters: “If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any longer you’ll disappear right up your asshole.” Zuckerman is willing to sacrifice his writerly vocation; to be a harried emergency-room doctor promises “an end to the search for the release from self.” He thinks, “Other people. Somebody should have told me about them a long time ago.” Ministering to the pain of others promises release from personal discomfort. “Had he kept a pain diary, the only entry would have been one word: Myself.”

  A text so self-aware and self-referential suggests the torture-machine of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” which inscribed, over and over, an unintelligible lesson upon the victim’s skin. As well as tireless superscription a constant flanking motion seems in progress; the repeated self-indictments leave the critic little to say. One can scarcely complain of the novel’s frenzied solipsism when frenzied solipsism is its chosen and announced topic. One should certainly not confuse Zuckerman’s creator—the gracious and generous-spirited editor of a Penguin series devoted to the undervalued writers of Eastern Europe, a man who wears with an exemplary dignity and reserve the American writer’s motley—with the abject Zuckerman himself, who differs from Philip Roth in as many biographical particulars as he happens to share. (Zuckerman has in twenty years of work produced a meagre four books, as contrasted with Roth’s baker’s dozen. Zuckerman has had three wives, Roth only one. Zuckerman’s father has died; Roth’s, as of 1983, flourishes.) One might venture to say that, like a goodly number of Roth’s previous works, The Anatomy Lesson revolves around the paradox of incarnation—the astonishing coexistence in one life of infantilism and intelligence, of selfishness and altruism, of sexual appetite and social conscience—and has the form and manner of a monologue conducted under psychoanalysis, whose termination in this case seems premature.

  Portnoy, at least, in arriving by way of strenuous sexual pilgrimage at a state of impotence in Israel, brought his complaint to a climax from which, as the intruding psychiatric voice at the end proclaimed, we might begin. Zuckerman, at the end of his trilogy, seems, though battered by some circumstances, still unimpaired in his basic mechanisms; his basic astonishment at being a person, once he gets his breath back, will continue to feed his indignation and ravenous rage of discourse, of “self-conscious self-miming.” He is free from neither his pain nor his vocation, if I read correctly the novel’s last, rather Jamesian sentence. Nothing, amid all the verbal fury, has happened, any more than David Kepesh, at the end of The Breast, ceased to be a breast. This unforgettable novella was published in 1972, in the era when The Anatomy Lesson takes place. Like the present work, The Breast begins with an inexplicable somatic assault—not incapacitating neck pains but a “massive hormonal influx” that in a night of “agony” (“as though I were being repeatedly shot from a cannon into a brick wall”) transformed a young professor of English into a six-foot-long breast with the end without a nipple “rounded off like a watermelon.” Both works seek resolution in an orgiastic vision: the giant breast intends to be constantly caressed by naked twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls, “greedy wicked little girls, licking me and sucking me to my heart’s content,” and Zuckerman in Chicago reels off to his female chauffeur an extensive Dionysian fantasy about being a pornography king named, by a weird blow of his drug-loosened mind, Milton Appel. The Breast, following upon the best-selling Portnoy, baffled many readers, but has improved with age, and was honored by its author, in 1980, with a revision of its text. Comparing the two Breasts, this reader detected little improvement—just rearrangements of elements within paragraphs, a diminishing of academic satire in connection with the character named Arthur Schonbrunn, and a subtle overlay of commas and dashes, producing a slightly more professorial tone. The fable’s inner meaning has been softened and blurred at spots; in the first version, Kepesh cries out in his agony of immobility and blindness,

  “What do any of you know about grotesque! What is more grotesque anyway, but to be denied my little pleasure in the midst of this relentless nightmare! Why shouldn’t I be rubbed and oiled and massaged and sucked and licked and fucked, too, if I want it! Why shouldn’t I have anything and everything I can think of every single minute of the day if that can transport me from this miserable hell!”

  This cri de sein was much shortened in the later version, and on the next page the descriptive phrase “spasms of illogic or infantilism” deleted. But infantilism is
certainly what it is all about; Roth’s message, driven home in book after book, is what infants men are. The infant, Freud has told us, is the prototypical human being, the fundamental stewpot: a “cocky little ogre,” according to Auden (in “Mundus et Infans”), and, according to Wordsworth, heavenly spirit freshly planted in the flesh. Habituation dulls us to the “relentless nightmare” of our embodiment; but essentially it is no more grotesque to be conscious within an enormous breast than within the body one does have, with its hair and fingernails and teeth, its symmetrical limbs and asymmetrical internal organs. The helpless infant in his deep discomfiture limitlessly wants, as David Kepesh slung in his hammock wants, as Nathan Zuckerman wants while he lies immobilized on a playmat he has bought “in a children’s furniture store on Fifty-seventh Street.” As our hero lies on his playmat, his head supported by a thesaurus his father had given him with the inscription “From Dad—You have my every confidence,” his four mistresses come and lower their orifices upon him. Kepesh’s dream of attentive “greedy wicked little girls” has come true, with some unforeseen wrinkles; but still Zuckerman, sucking and sucked, is not satisfied; he wants the real thing, the original mother lowering her breasts upon him. “Zuckerman finally realized that his mother had been his only love.” When she dies, in Florida, he takes away from her effects an old book of hers called Your Baby’s Care; on the page headed “Feeding,” which prescribes emptying the breast by hand every twenty-four hours, he finds a stain that he believes to have been left by a drop of her milk, expressed in 1933, and he closes his eyes and puts his tongue to the dry page. Adult infantilism can go no further.

  It is the familial milieu of those early infantile gratifications that Zuckerman and his predecessors in Roth’s fiction unforgivably violate, first by masturbation and then by sexual traffic with the dirty girls of the goyim and finally by the production of a “hate-filled, mocking best-seller” that, poisonous with “the tastelessness that had affronted millions, and the shamelessness that had enraged his tribe,” kills the father and brings down his curse. The curse is reinforced by the adverse literary verdict of Milton Appel, against whom Zuckerman rages with an obsessive passion that amazes and bores his sensible Wasp girlfriend Diana. He explains, “I’m a petty, raging, vengeful, unforgiving Jew, and I have been insulted one time too many by another petty, raging, vengeful, unforgiving Jew.” Roth, though accused, like Zuckerman, of writing anti-Semitically or at least in mockery of middle-class American Jewry, seems in this book the most Jewish of Jewish-American writers; Bellow can take pleasure in contemplating the gentile bohunks of Chicago, and Malamud can enjoy a Thoreauvian jog in the woods, and Mailer can get turned on by astronauts and Marilyn Monroe and Utah low life, but for Zuckerman as Roth has imagined him there is no authenticity away from the bosom of Abraham. If Milton Appel weren’t Jewish, who would care what he says? Zuckerman’s shiksas are so much nicely designed wallpaper on the walls of his cell; blacks have moved into his old Newark neighborhood and he feels as thoroughly exiled as Nabokov from Russia.

  Jewishness figures as the one conceptual thread woven into the primal Newark nest, and The Anatomy Lesson contains a number of sociological reflections upon it, from “Jewish mothers know how to own their suffering boys” to “The disputatious stance, the aggressively marginal sensibility, the disavowal of community ties, the taste for scrutinizing a social event as though it were a dream or a work of art—to Zuckerman this was the very mark of the intellectual Jews … on whom he was modeling his own style of thought.” More instinctively and symptomatically, the tenderness that bestows liveliness breaks into the narrator’s monologue whenever an elderly Jewish male—Dr. Kotler, Mr. Freytag—makes an appearance; these are really the only characters, as distinguished from apparitions and interlocutors, that this novel has, the only bringers of life separate from the hero’s tortured vitality. Roth has been preëminently a celebrant of a son’s world. Who else has given us so many vivid, comical, shrewdly seen but above all lovingly preserved mothers and fathers in fiction? Or has so faithfully kept fresh as moral referent the sensations of childhood? Rousing from a doped stupor, Zuckerman sees from his limousine windows that it has begun to snow, and thinks, “There was nothing that could ever equal coming home through the snow in late afternoon from Chancellor Avenue School.” “I am not an authority on Israel,” he protests when approached to write a Times Op-Ed column in defense of the Jewish State, “I’m an authority on Newark. Not even on Newark. On the Weequahic section of Newark. If the truth be known, not even on the whole of the Weequahic section. I don’t even go below Bergen Street.”

  John O’Hara was equally localized by the streets of Pottsville, but showed no disposition to linger; indeed, he once advised an old friend to “write something that automatically will sever your connection with the town.” Nothing in Irish tribal sense asked the torment that Zuckerman visits upon himself. A diagnosis of his complaint comes early in The Anatomy Lesson and is not improved upon by his medical researches later on. “The crippling of his upper torso was, transparently, the punishment called forth by his crime: mutilation as primitive justice. If the writing arm offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee. Beneath the ironic carapace of a tolerant soul, he [Nathan Zuckerman] was the most unforgiving Yahweh of them all.” Zuckerman does not forgive himself, either, for spilling his seed upon the ground; he has had three childless marriages and, in his fantasy life as Milton Appel the messianic pornographer, assigns himself a fourth wife and a seven-year-old son—whom he names Nathan! His rage and pain peak in a scene, fabulous as a holy crisis out of Malamud or Singer, wherein the hallucinating author, chanting the praises of the Lord “who bringeth forth from the earth the urge to spurt that maketh monkeys of us all,” attempts to strangle one more tenderly, comically rendered Jewish father, and comes up against the “Gestapo boots” of his female, pigtailed, Lutheran chauffeur. And the author, no mean Yahweh himself, contrives to smash Zuckerman on his offending part, his babbling, mocking, pleading mouth.

  The Chicago scenes are visionary, and stay with the reader. Throughout, a beautiful passion to be honest propels the grinding, whining paragraphs. Yet, though lavish with laughs and flamboyant invention, The Anatomy Lesson seemed to this Roth fan the least successful of the Zuckerman trio, the least objectified and coherent. The pages devoted to Zuckerman’s mental, epistolary, and finally telephonic quarrel with Milton Appel especially manifested a disproportion between the energy expended and the area of expenditure. True, there are shrewd, intelligent negative reviews which an author has to fight against as if fighting for his life; but by the age of forty a writer should be rising above the home-town beefs and metropolitan bad notices that go with the job, and perhaps by the age of fifty a writer should have settled his old scores. Zuckerman’s babyish reduction of all women to mere suppliers eclipses much of Roth’s engaging characterization of the mistresses, who are each set before us never to appear again. The book is elegant action writing, a hyperaware churning full of observations but thin (unlike The Ghost Writer) on characters the author respects; instead of characters The Anatomy Lesson has demons, and these are powerfully agitated but not exorcised. Neither Zuckerman nor his creator seems quite to realize that by aspiring to become a nice good-doing doctor the author of Carnovsky is at last knuckling under to Judge Wapter.

  Bound to Please

  ZUCKERMAN BOUND: A Trilogy and Epilogue, by Philip Roth. 784 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985.

  To the previously published short novels The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson Mr. Roth has added an epilogue, “The Prague Orgy,” which shows his protagonist, the American literary man Nathan Zuckerman, involved with some raffish Czech counterparts in an attempt to smuggle out of Prague a manuscript of short stories by an unknown Yiddish writer slain by the Nazis. The painful contortions of human art and spirit under Communism are sketched with a bleak abruptness, in a strange mood of wistful farce; here, as for the perennially homeless Jews, the chief activity
is “the construction of narrative art out of the exertions of survival.” In toto, Zuckerman Bound shows the author’s always ebullient invention and artful prose at their most polished and concentrated, the topic of authorship clearly being, to this author, a noble one. His repeated hints that his hero’s misadventures connect with wider historical sufferings fail to persuade us, however, that they amount to significantly more than those of a gifted male child oppressed first by his fond parents and then by other admirers. Described as “the American authority on Jewish demons,” Zuckerman counters the pangs of apprenticeship, success, and writer’s block with a mounting irritability and a frantic, hilarious, anguished eloquence that leaves little air for any other characters to breathe; indeed, except as irritants and as display windows for Mr. Roth’s great powers of mimicry, characters other than Zuckerman scarcely exist. Though a number of biologically complete females add to the hero’s embarrassments, the nearest approach to a heroine, in nearly eight hundred pages, is Anne Frank’s ghost. Proust, the author of another epic of the self striving to bear fruit, by comparison gave us Albertine, Odette, and Marcel’s grandmother. But perhaps an analogue closer than Remembrance of Things Past would be Melville’s Pierre, in which another driven young writer tortuously struggles with the besieging shadows of a feminized, claustrophobic America.

  Wrestling to Be Born

  THE COUNTERLIFE, by Philip Roth. 324 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

  Philip Roth’s new novel takes many turns and treats of many topics, including, for some especially fine pages, that of impassioned dentistry; but it is mostly about Israel, erections, and writing fiction. In this it resembles much of the author’s post-Portnoy fiction—and one of Portnoy’s complaints, you may remember, was that he became impotent in the state of Israel. Impotence is the starting point of the present novel of surging self-explanation, -exploration, -excoriation, and -justification, this time voiced by Nathan Zuckerman, whom we have met before. The Zuckerman trilogy-plus was preceded by the appearance of Zuckerman in the first third of My Life as a Man (1974), as the hero of two “Useful Fictions” written by the novel’s real (whatever that means) hero, Peter Tarnopol. In the first of these stories, “Salad Days,” the twice-fictional Zuckerman has an older brother, Sherman—a pianist who runs a highschool band, goes off to the Navy in 1945, and returns to marry “some skinny Jewish girl from Bala-Cynwyd who talked in baby talk and worked as a dental technician somewhere” and to become an orthodontist. The brother is absent from the second useful fiction, “Courting Disaster,” and from The Ghost Writer, but in Zuckerman Unbound he reappears as a younger brother, named Henry, a dentist with a wife, Carol, and three children in New Jersey—“the good son,” flawed only by a weak heart and an occasional extramarital affair. He is “the tallest, darkest, and handsomest by far of all the Zuckerman men, a swarthy, virile, desert Zuckerman whose genes, uniquely for their clan, seemed to have traveled straight from Judea to New Jersey without the Diaspora detour.” Nathan looks at Henry over their father’s deathbed and thinks: