Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  The most I can offer is this: what he couldn’t write I’ll ghostwrite for him and publish under his name. I’ll do my best to be no less paranoid than he would have been and to do everything I can to make people believe that it was written by him, his way, a treatise on Diasporism that he would have been proud of. “We could be partners,” he told me, “copersonalities who work in tandem rather than stupidly divided in two.” Well, so we shall be. “All you do,” he protested, “is resist me.” That’s true. While he lived and raged I couldn’t do otherwise. I had to surmount him. But in death I embrace him and see him for the achievement that he was—I’d be a very foolish writer, now that he’s gone, not to be my impostor’s creature and, in my workshop, partake of his treasure (by which I no longer mean you). Your other P.R. assures you that the impostor’s voice will not be stifled by him (meaning me).

  This letter remained unanswered.

  ___

  It was only a week after I’d sent a copy of my final manuscript to his office that Smilesburger phoned from Kennedy Airport. He had received the book and read it. Should he come to Connecticut for us to talk it over, or would I prefer to meet in Manhattan? He was staying with his son and his daughter-in-law on the Upper West Side.

  The moment I heard the resonating deep rumble of that Old Country voice—or rather, heard in response the note of respectful compliance in my own, disquieted though I was by his abrupt and irritating materialization—I realized how specious were my reasons for getting myself to do as he’d asked. What with the journals I’d kept and the imprint of the experience on my memory, it was transparently ridiculous to have convinced myself that I needed Smilesburger to corroborate my facts or to confirm the accuracy of what I’d written, as ridiculous as it was to believe that I had undertaken that operation for him solely to serve my own professional interests. I had done what I’d done because he had wanted me to do it; I’d obeyed him just as any other of his subordinates would have—I might as well have been Uri, and I couldn’t explain to myself why.

  Never in my life had I submitted a manuscript to any inspector anywhere for this sort of scrutiny. To do so ran counter to all the inclinations of one whose independence as a writer, whose counter- suggestiveness as a writer, was simply second nature and had contributed as much to his limitations and his miscalculations as to his durability. To be degenerating into an acquiescent Jewish boy pleasing his law-giving elders when, whether I liked it or not, I had myself acquired all the markings of a Jewish elder was more than a little regressive. Jews who found me guilty of the crime of “informing” had been calling for me to be “responsible” from the time I began publishing in my middle twenties, but my youthful scorn had been plentiful and so were my untested artistic convictions, and, though not as untrammeled by the assault as I pretended, I had been able to hold my ground. I hadn’t chosen to be a writer, I announced, only to be told by others what was permissible to write. The writer redefined the permissible. That was the responsibility. Nothing need hide itself in fiction. And so on.

  And yet there I was, more than twice the age of the redefining young writer who’d spontaneously taken “Stand Alone!” as his defiant credo, driving the hundred miles down to New York early the next morning to learn from Smilesburger what he wanted removed from my book. Nothing need hide itself in fiction but are there no limits where there’s no disguise? The Mossad was going to tell me.

  Why am I a sucker for him? Is it just what happens between two men, one being susceptible to the manipulations of the other who feels to him more powerful? Is his that brand of authoritative manhood that is able to persuade me to do its bidding? Or is there something in my sense of his worldliness that I just don’t feel I measure up to, because he’s swimming in the abrasive tragedies of life and I’m only swimming in art? Is there something in that big, tough—almost romantically tough—mind at work that I am intellectually vulnerable to and that makes me trust in his judgment more than in my own, something perhaps about his moving the pieces on the chessboard the way Jews always wished their fathers could so no one would pull those emblematic beards? There’s something in Smilesburger that evokes not my real father but my fantastic one—that takes over, that takes charge of me. I vanquish the bogus Philip Roth and Smilesburger vanquishes the real one! I push against him, I argue against him, and always in the end I do what he wants—in the end I give in and do everything he says!

  Well, not this time. This time the terms are mine.

  Smilesburger had chosen as the site for our editorial meeting a Jewish food store on Amsterdam Avenue, specializing in smoked fish, that served breakfast and lunch on a dozen Formica-topped tables in a room adjacent to the bagel and bialy counter and that looked as though, years back, when someone got the bright idea to “modernize,” the attempt at redecoration had been sensibly curtailed halfway through. The place reminded me of the humble street-level living quarters of some of my boyhood friends, whose parents would hurriedly eat their meals in a closet-sized storeroom just behind the shop to keep an eye on the register and the help. In Newark, back in the forties, we used to buy, for our household’s special Sunday breakfasts, silky slices of precious lox, shining fat little chubs, chunks of pale, meaty carp and paprikaed sable, all double-wrapped in heavy wax paper, at a family-run store around the corner that looked and smelled pretty much as this one did—the tiled floor sprinkled with sawdust, the shelves stacked with fish canned in sauces and oils, up by the cash register a prodigious loaf of halvah soon to be sawed into crumbly slabs, and, wafting up from behind the showcase running the length of the serving counter, the bitter fragrance of vinegar, of onions, of whitefish and red herring, of everything pickled, peppered, salted, smoked, soaked, stewed, marinated, and dried, smells with a lineage that, like these stores themselves, more than likely led straight back through the shtetl to the medieval ghetto and the nutrients of those who lived frugally and could not afford to dine à la mode, the diet of sailors and common folk, for whom the flavor of the ancient preservatives was life. And the neighborhood delicatessen restaurants where we extravagantly ate “out” as a treat once a month bore the same stamp of provisional homeliness, that hallmark look of something that hadn’t quite been transformed out of the eyesore it used to be into the eyesore it aspired to become. Nothing distracted the eye, the mind, or the ear from what was sitting on the plate. Satisfying folk cuisine eaten in simple surroundings, on tables, to be sure, and without people spitting in their plates, but otherwise earthly sustenance partaken in an environment just about as unsumptuous as a feasting place can get, gourmandizing at its most commonplace, the other end of the spectrum of Jewish culinary establishments from the commodiously chandeliered dining salon at Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau. Barley, eggs, onions, soups of cabbage, of beets, inexpensive everyday dishes prepared in the old style and devoured happily, without much fuss, off of bargain-basement crockery.

  By now, of course, what was once the ordinary fare of the Jewish masses had become an exotic stimulant for Upper West Siders two and three generations removed from the great immigration and just getting by as professionals in Manhattan on annual salaries that, a century earlier, would have provided daily banquets all year long for every last Jew in Galicia. I’d see these people—among them, sometimes, lawyers, journalists, or editors I knew—taking pleasure, mouthful by mouthful, in their kasha varnishkas and their gefilte fish (and riveted, all the while they unstintingly ate, to the pages of one, two, or even three daily papers) on those occasions when I came down to Manhattan from Connecticut and took an hour off from whatever else I was doing to satisfy my own inextinguishable appetite for the chopped-herring salad as it was unceremoniously served up (that was the ceremony) at one of those very same tables, facing onto the trucks, taxis, and fire engines streaming north, where Smilesburger had suggested that we meet for breakfast at ten a.m. to discuss my book.

  After shaking Smilesburger’s hand and sitting down directly across from him and the coatrack against which his forearm cr
utches were leaning, I told him how I rarely came to New York without stopping off here for either a breakfast or a lunch, and he answered that he knew all about that. “My daughter-in-law spotted you a couple of times. She lives just around the corner.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Art historian. Tenured professor.”

  “And your son?”

  “International entrepreneur.”

  “And his name?”

  “Definitely not ‘Smilesburger,’” he said, smiling kindly. And then, with an open, appealing, spirited warmth that I was unprepared for from this master of derisive artifice and that, despite its disarming depth of realness, couldn’t possibly have been purged of all his callous shrewdness, he carried me almost to the edge of gullibility by saying, “And so how are you, Philip? You had heart surgery. Your father died. I read Patrimony. Warmhearted but tough. You’ve been through the wringer. Yet you look wonderful. Younger even than when I saw you last.”

  “You too,” I said.

  He clapped his hands together with relish. “Retired,” he replied. “Eighteen months ago, freed of it all, of everything vile and sinister. Deceptions. Disinformation. Fakery. ‘Our revels now are ended, … melted into air, into thin air.’”

  This was strange news in the light of why we were meeting, and I wondered if he wasn’t simply attempting to gain his customary inquisitorial upper hand here at the very outset, by misleading me once again, this time, for a change, by encouraging me to believe that my situation was in no way threatening and that I couldn’t possibly be shanghaied into anything but a game of checkers by a happy-go-lucky senior citizen like him, a pensioner wittily quoting Prospero, wandless old Prospero, bereft of magical power and casting a gentle sunset glow over a career of godlike treachery. Of course, I told myself, there’s no apartment just around the corner where he’s staying with a daughter-in-law who’d spotted me eating here before; and the chocolaty tan that had led to a dramatic improvement of his skin condition and that gave an embalmed-looking glow of life to that heavily lined, cadaverous face stemmed, more than likely, from a round of ultraviolet therapy administered by a dermatologist rather than from retirement to the Negev. But the story I got was that, in a desert development community, he and his wife were now happily gardening together only a mile down the road from where his daughter, her husband, and their three adolescent children had been living since the son-in-law had moved his textile business to Beersheba. The decision to fly to America to see me, and, while here, to spend a few days with his two American grandchildren, had been made wholly on his own. My manuscript had been forwarded to him from his old office, where he hadn’t set foot since his retirement; as far as he could tell, no one had opened the sealed envelope and read the manuscript, although it wouldn’t be difficult for either of us, he said, to imagine the response there if anyone had.

  “Same as yours,” I offered.

  “No. Not so considered as mine.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about that. And nothing they can do about it.”

  “And, on your part, no responsibility.”

  “Look, I’ve been around this track as a writer before. My failed ‘responsibility’ has been the leitmotif of my career with the Jews. We signed no contract. I made no promises. I performed a service for you—I believe I performed it adequately.”

  “More than adequately. Your modesty is glaring. You performed it expertly. It’s one thing to be an extremist with your mouth. And even that is risky for writers. To then go and do what you did—there was nothing in your life to prepare you for this, nothing. I knew you could think. I knew you could write. I knew you could do things in your head. I didn’t know you could do something as large in reality. I don’t imagine that you knew it either. Of course you feel proud of your accomplishment. Of course you want to broadcast your daring to the whole world. I would too if I were you.”

  When I looked up at the young waiter who was pouring coffee into our cups, I saw, as did Smilesburger, that he was either Indian or Pakistani.

  After he moved off, having left behind our menus, Smilesburger asked, “Who will fall captive to whom in this city? The Indian to the Jew, the Jew to the Indian, or both to the Latino? Yesterday I made my way to Seventy-second Street. All along Broadway blacks eating bagels baked by Puerto Ricans, sold by Koreans. … You know the old joke about a Jewish restaurant like this one?”

  “Do I? Probably.”

  “About the Chinese waiter in the Jewish restaurant. Who speaks perfect Yiddish.”

  “I was sufficiently entertained in Jerusalem with the Chofetz Chaim—you don’t have to tell me Jewish jokes in New York. We’re talking about my book. Nothing was said beforehand, not one word, about what I might or might not write afterward. You yourself drew my attention to the professional possibilities the operation offered. As an enticement, if you recall. ‘I see quite a book coming out of this,’ you told me. An even better book if I went on to Athens for you than if I didn’t. And that was before the book had even entered my mind.”

  “Hard to believe,” he responded mildly, “but if you say so.”

  “It was what you said that put it into my mind. And now that I’ve written that book you’ve changed your mind and decided that what would truly make it a better book, for your purposes if not mine, would be if I were to leave Athens out entirely.”

  “I haven’t said that or anything like it.”

  “Mr. Smilesburger, there’s no advantage to be gained by the old- geezer act.”

  “Well”—shrugging his shoulders, grinning, offering it for whatever an old geezer’s opinion was worth—“if you fictionalized a little, well, no, I suppose it might not hurt.”

  “But it’s not a book of fiction. And ‘a little’ fictionalization isn’t what you’re talking about. You want me to invent another operation entirely.”

  “I want?” he said. “I want only what is best for you.”

  The Indian waiter was back and waiting to take the order.

  “What do you eat here?” Smilesburger asked me. “What do you like?” So insipid a man in retirement that he wouldn’t dare order without my help.

  “The chopped-herring salad on a lightly toasted onion bagel,” I said to the waiter. “Tomato on the side. And bring me a glass of orange juice.”

  “Me too,” said Smilesburger. “The same exactly.”

  “You are here,” I said to Smilesburger, “to give me a hundred other ideas, just as good and just as true to life. You can find me a story even more wonderful than this one. Together we can come up with something even more exciting and interesting for my readers than what happened to have happened that weekend in Athens. Only I don’t want something else. Is that clear?”

  “Of course you don’t. This is the richest material you have ever gotten firsthand. You couldn’t be clearer or more disagreeable.”

  “Good,” I said. “I went where I went, did what I did, met whom I met, saw what I saw, learned what I learned—and nothing that occurred in Athens, absolutely nothing, is interchangeable with something else. The implications of these events are intrinsic to these events and to none other.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “I didn’t go looking for this job. This job came looking for me, and with a vengeance. I have adhered to every condition agreed on between us, including sending a copy of the manuscript to you well before publication. In fact, you’re the first person to have read it. Nothing was forcing me to do this. I am back in America. I’m no longer recovering from that Halcion madness. This is the fourth book I’ve written since then. I’m myself again, solidly back on my own ground. Yet I did do it: you asked to see it, and you’ve seen it.”

  “And it was a good idea to show it. Better me now than someone less well disposed to you later.”

  “Yes? What are you trying to tell me? Will the Mossad put a contract out on me the way the Ayatollah did with Rushdie?”

  “I can only tell you that this last chapter will not go unnoticed.�
�

  “Well, if anyone should come complaining to me, I’ll direct them to your garden in the Negev.”

  “It won’t help. They’ll assume that, no matter what ‘enticement’ I offered back then, no matter how irresistible an adventure it may be for you to write about and to crow about, you should know by now how detrimental your publishing this could be to the interests of the state. They’ll maintain that confidence was placed in your loyalty and that with this chapter you have betrayed that confidence.”

  “I am not now, nor was I ever, an employee of yours.”

  “Theirs.”

  “I was offered no compensation, and I asked for none.”

  “No more or less than Jews all around the world who volunteer their services where their expertise can make a difference. Diaspora Jews constitute a pool of foreign nationals such as no other intelligence agency in the world can call on for loyal service. This is an immeasurable asset. The security demands of this tiny state are so great that, without these Jews to help, it would be in a very bad way. People who do work of the kind you did find compensation not in financial payment and not in exploiting their knowledge elsewhere for personal gain but in fostering the security and welfare of the Jewish state. They find their compensation, all of it, in having fulfilled a Jewish duty.”