The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  “Bad Jews,” said Daphna, “make better copy. But I don’t have to tell that to Nathan Zuckerman and Norman Mailer. Bad Jews sell newspapers just the way they sell books.”

  She’s a honey, I thought, but ignored her, leaving Mailer to protect Mailer and figuring that I’d already sufficiently defended myself on that issue elsewhere.

  “Tell me,” Lippman said, “can the Jew do anything that doesn’t stink to high heaven of his Jewishness? There are the goyim to whom we stink because they look down on us, and there are the goyim to whom we stink because they look up to us. Then there are the goyim who look both down and up at us—they are really angry. There is no end to it. First it was Jewish clannishness that was repellent, then what was preposterous was the ridiculous phenomenon of Jewish assimilation, now it is Jewish independence that is unacceptable and unjustified. First it was Jewish passivity that was disgusting, the meek Jew, the accommodating Jew, the Jew who walked like a sheep to his own slaughter—now what is worse than disgusting, outright wicked, is Jewish strength and militancy. First it was the Jewish sickliness that was abhorrent to all the robust Aryans, frail Jewish men with weak Jewish bodies lending money and studying books—now what is disgusting are strong Jewish men who know how to use force and are not afraid of power. First it was homeless Jewish cosmopolites that were strange and alien and not to be trusted—now what is alien are Jews with the arrogance to believe that they can determine their destiny like anybody else in a homeland of their own. Look, the Arab can remain here and I can remain here and together we can live in harmony. He can have any experience he likes, live here however he chooses and have everything he desires—except for the experience of statehood. If he wants that, if he cannot endure without that, then he can move to an Arab state and have the experience of statehood there. There are fifteen Arab states for him to pick from, most of them not even an hour away by car. The Arab homeland is vast, it is enormous, while the State of Israel is no more than a speck on the map of the world. You can put the State of Israel seven times into the state of Illinois, but it is the only place on this entire planet where a Jew can have the experience of statehood, and that is why we do not give ground!”

  Dinner was over.

  * * *

  Henry guided me along one of their two long residential streets to where I was to sleep, the house of a settlement couple who had gone to spend the Sabbath in Jerusalem with family. Down in the Arab village a few lights were still burning, and on a distant hill, like an unblinking red eye, something that would once have been understood here as auguring the wrath of Almighty God, was the steady radar beacon of a missile-launching site. One of the missiles, heroically angled in firing position, was undisguised and plainly visible when we’d driven by on our way to Hebron. “The next war,” Henry had said, pointing to the base up on the hilltop, “will take five minutes.” The Israeli missile we saw was aimed at downtown Damascus to dissuade the Syrians, he told me, from launching their missile targeted for downtown Haifa. Except for that red omen, the distant blackness was so vast that I thought of Agor as a minute, floodlit earth-colony, the vanguard of a brave new Jewish civilization evolving in outer space, with Tel Aviv and all the decadent niceys and goodies as far off as the dimmest star.

  If I had nothing to say to Henry right off it was because, following Lippman’s seminar, language didn’t really seem my domain any longer. I wasn’t exactly a stranger to disputation, but never in my life had I felt so enclosed by a world so contentious, where the argument is enormous and constant and everything turns out to be pro or con, positions taken, positions argued, and everything italicized by indignation and rage.

  Nor had my word-whipping ended with dinner. For two hours more, while I sat squeezed in beside Lippman’s German editions of the European masterpieces and was graciously served tea and cake by contented Ronit, Lippman continued to flog away. I tried to ascertain whether his rhetoric wasn’t perhaps being fomented a little by my questionable position among the Jews—by my reputedly equivocal position about Jews, which Daphna had indignantly alluded to—or whether he was deliberately playing it a bit broader at this performance to give me a taste of what had confounded my brother, particularly if I had any idea of abducting back into the Diaspora his prize dental surgeon, a paragon of worldly, assimilationist success, for whom he and the Deity had other plans. From time to time I’d thought, “Fuck it, Zuckerman, why don’t you say what you think—all these bastards are saying what they think.” But my way of handling Lippman had been by being practically mute. If that’s handling. After dinner I may have looked to him as though I was sitting there in his living room saving myself up like some noble silent person, but the simple truth is I was outclassed.

  Henry had nothing to say either. At first I thought it was because Lippman, along with Buki and Daphna, had left him feeling vindicated and without any inclination to soften the blow. But then I wondered if my presence might not have forced him, maybe for the first time since succumbing to Lippman’s conviction, to evaluate his bulldozing mentor from a perspective somewhat alien to Agor’s ethos. That might even have been why he’d clammed up like a child when I’d turned to ask if he had been living under a volcano in the U.S.A. Perhaps by then he was quietly wondering about what Muhammad Ali confessed had crossed the mind of even a man as courageous as he in the thirteenth round of that terrible third fight with Frazier: “What am I doing here?”

  While we walked the unpaved settlement street, as alone together as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin up there planting their toy flag in the lunar dust, it occurred to me that Henry might have been wanting me to take him home from the moment I’d phoned from Jerusalem, that he had seriously lost his way but couldn’t face the humiliation of admitting that to someone whose admiration had meant nearly as much to him once as the blessing he’d struggled to extract from our father. Instead (perhaps) he’d had to buck himself up by bravely thinking something along these lines: “Let it be this way then, the lost way. Life is the adventure of losing your way—and it’s about time I found out!”

  Not that I thought of that as contemplating one’s burden over-dramatically; certainly a life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way. Losing his way may actually have been the vital need that Henry had been fumbling toward during his recuperation, when he’d spoken tearfully of something unnameable, some unmistakable choice to which he was maddeningly blind, an act both wrenching and utterly self-apparent that, once he’d discovered it, would deliver him from his baffling depression. If so, then it wasn’t roots that he had unearthed sitting on the sunlit windowsill of that cheder in Mea She’arim; it wasn’t his unbreakable bond to a traditional European Jewish life that he’d heard in the chanting of those Orthodox children clamorously memorizing their lessons—it was his opportunity to be uprooted, to depart from the path that had been posted with his name the day he was born, and in the disguise of a Jew to cunningly defect. Israel instead of Jersey, Zionism instead of Wendy, assuring that he’d never again be bound to the actual in the old, suffocating, self-strangulating way.

  What if Carol had it right and Henry was crazy? No crazier than Ben-Joseph, the author of the Five Books of Jimmy, but not significantly less so either. If his decision was to be seen from all sides, then the possibility that he had, in Carol’s phrase, “flipped out” also had to be considered. Perhaps he’d never entirely recovered from the hysterical collapse precipitated by the prospect of a lifetime of drug-induced impotence. It might even be the resuscitated potency that he was really escaping, fearful of some punishing new calamity that might succeed this time in destroying him completely were he to dare ever again to look for salvation in something so antisocial as his own erection. He’s in crazy flight, I thought, from the folly of sex, from the intolerable disorder of virile pursuits and the indignities of secrecy and betrayal, from the enlivening anarchy that overtakes anyone who even sparingly abandons himself to uncensored desire. Here in Ab
raham’s bosom, far away from his wife and kids, he can be a model husband again, or maybe just a model boy.

  The truth is that despite my persistent effort I still didn’t know, at the end of the day, how to understand my brother’s relationship to Agor and to his friends there, ideologically wired to see every Jew not merely as a potential Israeli but as the foreordained victim of a horrendous, impending anti-Semitic catastrophe should they try living normally anywhere else. Momentarily I gave up searching for some appropriate set of motives that would make this metamorphosis look to me less implausible and like something other than self-travesty. Instead, I began to remember the last time that we had been alone together in a place as black as Agor was at eleven o’clock at night—I was remembering way back to the early forties, before my father bought the one-family house up from the park, when we were still small boys sharing a bedroom at the back of the Lyons Avenue flat, and would lie in the dark, our bodies no farther apart than they were descending this settlement street, our only light shining from behind the dial of the Emerson radio on the small night table between the beds. I was remembering how, whenever the door creaked open at the beginning of another ghoulish episode of “Inner Sanctum,” Henry would fly out from beneath his blanket and beg to be allowed to come over with me. And when, after feigning indifference to his childish cowardice, I lifted my covers and invited him to jump in, could two kids have been closer or any more contented? “Lippman,” I should have said, when we’d shaken hands for the night at his door, “even if everything you’ve told me is a hundred percent true, the fact remains that in our family the collective memory doesn’t go back to the golden calf and the burning bush, but to ‘Duffy’s Tavern’ and ‘Can You Top This?’ Maybe the Jews begin with Judea, but Henry doesn’t and he never will. He begins with WJZ and WOR, with double features at the Roosevelt on Saturday afternoons and Sunday doubleheaders at Ruppert Stadium watching the Newark Bears. Not nearly as epical, but there you are. Why don’t you let my brother go?”

  Only what if he genuinely didn’t want to go? And did I even want him to want to? Wasn’t it just liberal sentimentality—wasn’t I really the worst nicey and goody—to prefer that I had a rational brother who had emigrated to Israel for the right reasons, and met the right people, and that I had come away from our meeting having seen him doing and thinking all the right things? If not sentimental, it was surely unprofessional. For observed solely from the novelist’s point of view, this was far and away Henry’s most provocative incarnation, if not exactly the most convincing—that is, it was the most eminently exploitable by me. My motives too must be taken into account. I wasn’t there just as his brother.

  “You haven’t mentioned the children,” I said as we were nearing the last house on the road.

  His reply was quick and defensive. “What about them?”

  “Well, you seem to have adopted a cavalier attitude toward them that’s more appropriate to my reputation than to yours.”

  “Look, don’t pull that on me—you certainly aren’t the one who’s going to talk to me about my children. They’re coming here Passover—that’s all arranged. They’re going to see this place and they’re going to love it—and then we’ll go from there.”

  “You think they’ll decide to live here too?”

  “I told you to get off my ass. You’ve had three marriages and as far as I know flushed all your children down the toilet.”

  “Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t, but you don’t have to be a father to ask the right question. When did your children cease having any meaning to you?”

  This made him still angrier. “Who said they had?”

  “You told me in Hebron about your old life—‘up to my eyeballs in meaninglessness.’ I started wondering about your kids—about how three children can be left out of the account when a father is talking about whether life is meaningful. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty—I’m only trying to find out if you really have thought this whole thing through.”

  “Of course I have—a thousand times a day! Of course I miss them! But they’re coming at Passover, and they’re going to see what I’m doing here and what it’s all about, and yes, who knows, they may even see where they belong!”

  “Ruthie phoned me before I left London,” I said.

  “She did?”

  “She knew I was coming to see you. She wanted me to tell you something.”

  “I speak to her every Sunday—what’s the matter?”

  “Her mother’s there when you speak to her on Sunday, and she feels she can’t say everything. She’s a smart girl, Henry—at thirteen she’s a grown-up and not a child. She said, ‘He’s out there to learn. He’s trying to find something out. He’s not too old to learn and I think he has the right.’”

  Henry didn’t reply at first, and when he did he was crying. “Is that what she said?”

  “She said, ‘I’m confused without my father.’”

  “Well,” he replied, desperate suddenly, and like a boy of ten, “I’m confused without them.”

  “I thought you might be. I just wanted to give you the message.”

  “Well, thanks,” he said, “thanks.”

  Henry pushed open the unlocked door and turned on the lights of a small, square, cinder-block building laid out exactly like the Lippmans’, though done up with far more religionationalistic verve. The living room of this house was dominated not by books but by a pair of outsized expressionistic paintings, portraits of two aged and, to me, unidentifiable biblical figures, either prophets or patriarchs. There was a large fabric-hanging pinned to one wall, and rows of shelves along another, jammed with tiny clay pots and bits of stone. The ancient earthenware had been collected by the husband, an archaeologist at Hebrew University, and the fabric stamped with the Oriental motif was designed by the wife, who worked for a small textile printing company in an older settlement nearby. The paintings, thickly encrusted with bright oranges and bloody reds and executed with violent brushstrokes, were the work of a well-known settlement artist, one of whose watercolors of the Jerusalem camel market Henry had bought to send home to the kids. For Henry’s sake I stood in front of the paintings for several minutes demonstrating more enthusiasm than I felt. His own enthusiasm may well have been genuine and yet the art-appreciation talk about the circular composition struck me as entirely artificial. He seemed all at once to be working much too hard to convince me that I was absolutely wrong if I suspected that the euphoria of the adventure had begun to flag.

  Only a few feet of corridor separated the living room from a bedroom smaller even than the one we’d shared as small boys. Two beds were squeezed into it, though not a “set” fitted out like ours with maple headboards and footboards whose notches and curves we used to pretend were the defensive walls of a cavalry fort besieged by Apaches—these were more like folding cots drawn up side by side. He flipped a light on to show me the toilet and then said he’d see me in the morning. He would be sleeping up the hill in a dormitory room with the young men who were his fellow students.

  “Why not a night away from the delights of communal living? Sleep here.”

  “I’ll be going back,” he replied.

  In the living room I said, “Henry, sit down.”

  “For a second,” but when he dropped onto the sofa beneath the paintings he looked as though he were a lost child—one of his own, in fact—a child waiting on a police-station bench for somebody he loved to come and claim him, while at the same time feeling four times as old and, if it was possible, twice as tormented as the impastoed sage above his head, whose own hopes for Jewish renewal and ethical transformation appeared to have been smashed by something the size of a train.

  Since I am not without affection for him, and never will be, the effect of this melancholy sight was to make me want to rush to assure him that he hadn’t made a stupid mistake—if anything the stupid mistake had been mine, thinking this was any of my business and making him vulnerable to every uncertainty. The last thing he needs,
I thought, is to be dwarfed by yet another personality bigger than his own. That’s been the story of his life. Why not lay off and give him the benefit of the doubt? He left what he couldn’t stand anymore. He understood, “The imperative is now—do it now!” and came here. That’s all there is to it. Let him call it a high moral mission if he likes the sound of that. He wants out of nowhere to have an elevated goal—so let him. Russian literature is replete with just such avid souls and their bizarre, heroic longings, probably more of them in Russian literature than in life. Fine—let him be full to the brim with Myshkin motives. And if it is all only a wild-goose chase, that’s the pathos of his situation and has nothing to do with me … Yet what if he desperately wants out of Agor and to be back with the kids, and yes, even back with his wife? What if he wants this tremendous aggression of his, released by Agor, once again walled in by the old pieties and habits? What if he realizes that Ruthie alone is probably more “meaningful” than anything he’ll ever find in Israel—what if he’s seen how hopelessly overcommitted he is to what he can’t begin to be? Even assertive, even packing that pistol, even with the best of Lippman bled into his veins, he seemed to me far more trapped than he did in New Jersey, someone utterly swamped and overcome.