The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  “Where are you?” Carol asked when she answered the phone. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I’m in a coffee shop. There’s no burial service—he’s being cremated. There was just the eulogy at the funeral home. The casket was there. And that was it. I ran into Laura. She’s remarried. She seemed pretty shaken.”

  “How do you feel?”

  He lied, or maybe he was telling the precise truth. “I feel as though my brother died.”

  “Who gave the eulogy?”

  “Some pompous ass. His editor. I probably should have said something myself. I wish I had.”

  “You said it yesterday, you said it all to me. Henry, don’t wander around New York feeling guilty. He could have called you when he was ill. Nobody has to be alone if he doesn’t want it. He died without anyone because that’s how he lived. It’s how he wanted to live.”

  “There was probably a woman around,” said Henry, parroting Laura.

  “Yes? Was she there?”

  “I didn’t look, but he always had girls around. He was never alone for long.”

  “You’ve done all you can. There’s nothing more to do. Henry, come home—you sound awful.”

  But there was more to do, and it was another three hours before he left for Jersey. In the study, at the center of Nathan’s desk, otherwise tidy and clear of papers, was a cardboard stationery box marked “Draft #2.” In it were several hundred pages of typewritten manuscript. This second draft of a book, if that’s what it was, appeared to be untitled. Not the chapters themselves, however—each, at the top of the first page, had as a title the name of a place. He sat down at the desk and began to read. The first chapter, “Basel,” was purportedly about him.

  Despite everything he thought he knew about his brother, he couldn’t believe that what he was reading could have been written even by Nathan. All day long he had been distrusting his resentment, chastising himself for that resentment, feeling wretched for feeling nothing and lacerating himself for his incapacity to forgive, and here were these pages in which he was not only exposed to the worst sort of ridicule but identified by his own real name. Everyone was identified by name, Carol, the children, even Wendy Casselman, the little blonde who before she’d married had briefly worked as his assistant; even Nathan, who had never before written about himself as himself, appeared as Nathan, as “Zuckerman,” though nearly everything in the story was either an outright lie or a ridiculous travesty of the facts. Of all the classics of irresponsible exaggeration, this was the filthiest, most recklessly irresponsible of all.

  “Basel” was about his, Henry’s, death from a bypass operation; about his, Henry’s, adulterous love affairs; about his, Henry’s, heart problem—not Nathan’s, his. All the while Nathan had been ill, his diversion, his distraction, his entertainment, his amusement, his art, had been the violent disfiguring of me. Writing my eulogy! This was even worse than Carnovsky. At least there he’d had the decency, if that was the word, to shake up a little the lives of real people and change a few things around (for all the camouflage that had provided the family), but this exceeded everything, the worst imaginable abuse of “artistic” liberty.

  In the midst of all that was sheer sadistic, punitive, spiteful invention, sheer sadistic sorcery, there, copied verbatim from the notebooks, were half the journal entries that Henry had torn out to destroy.

  He was a man utterly without a sense of consequence. Forget morality, forget ethics, forget feelings—didn’t he know the law? Didn’t he know that I could sue for libel and invasion of privacy? Or was that precisely what he wanted, a legal battle with his bourgeois brother over “censorship”? What is most disgusting, Henry thought, the greatest infringement and violation, is that this is not me, not in any way. I am not a dentist who seduces his assistants—there is a line of separation that I do not cross. My job isn’t fucking my assistants—my job is getting my patients to trust me, making them comfortable, completing my work as painlessly and cheaply as possible for them, and just as well as it can be done. What I do in my office is that. His Henry is, if anyone, him—it’s Nathan, using me to conceal himself while simultaneously disguising himself as himself, as responsible, as sane, disguising himself as a reasonable man while I am revealed as the absolute dope. The son of a bitch seemingly abandons the disguise at the very moment he’s lying most! Here is Nathan who knows everything and here is Henry with his little life; here is Henry who just wanted to be accepted and to get away with his little tawdry affairs, Henry the shlub who buys his potency with his death as a way of trying to free himself from being a good husband, and here am I, Nathan the artist, seeing through him completely! Even here, thought Henry, ill with heart disease and facing serious surgery, he continued to persist with the lifelong domination, forcing me into his sexual obsessions, his family obsessions, controlling and manipulating my freedom, seeking to overpower me with satirical words, making of everyone a completely manageable adversary for Nathan. Yet all the while it was he still hallucinating about the very things that are laughed at in this straw-brother who’s supposed to be me! I was right: the driving force of his imagination was revenge, domination and revenge. Nathan always wins. Fratricide without pain—a free ride.

  He must have been made impotent by heart medication and then chosen, like “Henry,” to have an operation that killed him. He, not me, would never accept the limits—he, not me, was the fool who died for a fuck. Not the dopey dentist but the all-seeing artist was the ridiculous Zuckerman who died the idiotic death of a fifteen-year-old, trying to get laid. Dying to get laid. There’s his eulogy, shmuck: Carnovsky wasn’t fiction, it was never fiction—the fiction and the man were one! Calling it fiction was the biggest fiction of all!

  The second chapter he’d titled “Judea.” Me again, back from the dead for a second drubbing. Once around was never enough for Nathan. He could not wish upon me enough misfortune.

  He read—he who had never gone to Israel or had any desire to visit the place, a Jew who didn’t think twice about Israel or about being a Jew, who simply took it for granted that Jews were what he and his wife and children were and then went on about his business—he read of himself learning Hebrew in Israel, on some kind of Jewish settlement, under the tutelage of some political hothead, and of course in unthinking flight from the banal strictures of his conventional life … Yet another troubled, volatile “Henry,” again in need of rescue, again behaving like a boy—and as unlike him as a man could be—and yet another superior “Nathan,” detached and wise, who sees right through to “Henry’s” middle-class dissatisfaction. Well, I see right through his cliché of domestic claustrophobia! Another dream of domination, fastening upon me another obsession from which he was the one who could never be rescued. The poor bastard had Jew on the brain. Why can’t Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems? Why is it always Jews after shiksas, or Jewish sons with their Jewish fathers? Why can’t it ever be sons and fathers, men and women? He protests ad nauseam that I’m the son strangling on his father’s prohibitions and succumbing helplessly to his father’s preferences, while he’s the one unable ever to grasp that I behaved as I did not because I was bugged by our father but because I chose to. Not everyone is fighting his father or fighting his life—the one unnaturally bugged by our father was him. What’s proven here in every word, what’s crying out from every line, is that the father’s son who never grew up to make a family of his own, who no matter how far he traveled and how many stars he fucked and how much money he made could never escape the Newark house and the Newark family and the Newark neighborhood, the father’s clone who went to his death with JewJewJew on his brain, was him, the superior artist! You’d have to be blind not to see it.

  The last chapter, called “Christendom,” appeared to be his dream of escape from all that, a pure magical dream of flight—from the father, the fatherland, the disease, flight from the pathetically uninhabited world of his inescapable character. Except for two pages—which H
enry removed—nowhere was there any mention of a childish younger brother. Here Nathan was dreaming about only himself—another self—and once Henry had realized that, he didn’t take the time to examine every paragraph. He’d taken too much time already—outside the study window the courtyard was growing dark.

  “Christendom”’s “Nathan” lived in London with a pretty, pregnant young Gentile wife. He’d given her Maria’s name! Yet when Henry double-checked, looking quickly back and then ahead, he found that none of it had anything to do with his Swiss mistress. Nathan called all shiksas Maria—the explanation seemed as ludicrously simple as that. As far as Henry could tell, reading now like an examination student racing to beat the clock, it was a dream of everything that an isolate like his brother could never hope to achieve, a dream fueled by deprivations that went far beyond the story—a story about becoming a daddy, of all things. How delicious—a daddy with enough money, enough social connections to amuse him, a lovely place to live, a wonderful intelligent wife to live with, all the paraphernalia to make it like not having a child. So full of meaning and thought, this fatherhood of his—and missing the point completely! Entirely failing to understand that a child isn’t an ideological convenience but what you have when you are young and stupid, when you’re struggling to forge an identity and make a career—having babies is tied up with all that! But, no, Nathan was utterly unable to involve himself in anything not entirely of his own making. The closest Nathan could ever come to life’s real confusion was in these fictions he created about it—otherwise he’d lived as he died, died as he’d lived, constructing fantasies of loved ones, fantasies of adversaries, fantasies of conflict and disorder, alone day after day in this peopleless room, continuously seeking through solitary literary contrivance to dominate what, in real life, he was too fearful to confront. Namely: the past, the present, and the future.

  It was not Henry’s intention to take away with him any more than what he had to, yet he wondered if leaving the box half full and the manuscript beginning on page 255 might not arouse suspicion, especially if the superintendent were to mention his visit to the executors when they arrived to assume custody of Nathan’s estate. Taking it all, however, would have seemed like thievery, if not something even more gravely offensive to his sense of himself. What he’d already done was indecent enough—totally necessary, deeply in his interest, but hardly to his liking. Despite the sadism of Nathan’s “Basel,” he refused to be gratuitously vengeful—except for two pages, “Christendom” had nothing to do with him or his family, and so he left it where it was. Culling from the manuscript only what could be compromising, he removed in their entirety the chapters “Basel” and “Judea” and the opening of a chapter about an attempted skyjacking, with Nathan on board as the innocent victim and, on the evidence of a cursory reading, having as little relation to the real world as everything else in the book. These pages consisted of a letter about Jews from Nathan to Henry, and then a phone conversation about Jews between Nathan and a woman bearing no relationship to Henry’s wife and of course called “Carol”—fifteen Jew-engrossed, Jew-engorged pages mirroring, purportedly, Henry’s obsessions. Reading through them, it occurred to Henry that Nathan’s deepest satisfaction as a writer must have derived from just these perverse distortions of the truth, as though he wrote to distort, for that pleasure primarily, and only incidentally to malign. No mind on earth could have been more alien than the mind revealed to him by this book.

  I’d tried repeatedly while I was with him to invest this escape he’d made from his life’s narrow boundaries with some heightened meaning, but in the end he had seemed to me, despite his determination to be something new, just as naïve and uninteresting as he’d always been.

  He had to be supreme always, unquenchably superior, and I, thought Henry, was the perpetual inferior, the boy upon whom he learned to sharpen his sense of supremacy, the live-in subordinate, the junior conveniently there from the day of my birth to be overshadowed and outperformed. Why did he have to belittle me and show me up even here? Was it just gratuitous enmity, the behavior of an antisocial delinquent who chooses anybody, like a plaything, to shove in front of the subway car? Or was I simply the last in the family left to attack and betray? That he had to outrival me right to the end! As if the world didn’t know already which was the incomparable Zuckerman boy!

  If Henry was ever going to turn out to be interesting, I was going to have to do it.

  Thank you, thank you, Nathan, for redeeming me from my pathological ordinariness, for assisting in my escape from my life’s narrow boundaries. What the hell was wrong with him, why did he have to go on like this, why, even at the end of his life, could he leave nothing and no one alone!

  Eager though he was to be gone, he spent yet another hour in search of copies of “Draft #2” and looking to locate a “Draft #1.” All he came up with, in a drawer of one of the file cabinets, was a diary Nathan had kept during a lecture stint in Jerusalem two years before and a packet of clippings from a tabloid called The Jewish Press. The diary looked to be so much unembellished reporting—scribbled impressions of people and places, snippets of conversation, names of streets and lists of names; as far as Henry could tell, all of it fact, with himself nowhere to be seen. In a file folder in the drawer below, he found a yellow pad whose first pages were covered with fragments of sentences that sounded oddly familiar. More Old Testament than that—compliance vs. retribution. The betrayal of mother love. Conjecture run wild. It was the notes for the eulogy that he’d heard delivered that morning. Inside the pad were three successive revisions of the eulogy itself; in each version were marginal emendations and insertions, lines crossed out and rewritten, and all of it, text and corrections, in no one’s hand but Nathan’s.

  He had written his eulogy himself. For delivery in the event he didn’t survive the surgery, his own appraisal of himself, disguised as someone else’s!

  For all the seeming self-exposure of the novels, he was a great defender of his solitude, not because he particularly liked or valued solitude but because swarming emotional anarchy and self-exposure were possible for him only in isolation—

  Swarming all right—his version, his interpretation, his picture refuting and impugning everyone else’s and swarming over everything! And where was his authority? Where? If I couldn’t breathe around him, it’s no wonder—lashing out from behind a fortress of fiction, exerting his mind-control right down to the end over every ego-threatening challenge! Could not even entrust his eulogy to somebody else, couldn’t extend that much trust to a faithful friend, but intrigued to contrive even his own memorial, secretly supervising those sentiments too, controlling exactly how he was to be judged! Everyone speaking that bastard’s words, everyone a dummy up on his knee ventriloquizing his mouthful! My life dedicated to repairing mouths, his spent stopping them up—his spent thrusting those words down everybody’s throat! In his words was our fate—in our mouths were his words! Everyone buried and mummified in that verbal lava, including finally himself—nothing straightforward, unvarnished, directly alive, nothing faced up to as it actually is. In his mind it never mattered what actually happened or what anyone actually was—instead everything important distorted, disguised, wrenched ridiculously out of proportion, determined by those endless, calculated illusions cunningly cooked up in this terrible solitude, everything self-calculation, deliberate deception, always this unremittingly dreadful conversion of the facts into something else …

  It was the funeral oration that Henry had been unable to compose the night before, the unsayable at last dredged up out of his unlived existence and ready now to be delivered over the file cabinets and the folders and the notepads and the composition books and the stacks of three-ring binders. Unheard but eloquent, Henry at last recited his uncensored assessment of a life spent hiding from the flux of disorderly life, from its trials, its judgments, its assailability, a life lived out behind a life-proof shield of well-prepared discourse—of cunningly selected, self-protecting w
ords.

  “Thanks for letting me in,” he told the superintendent when he knocked to say he was going. “You saved me a trip over tomorrow.”

  She kept the door of her street-floor apartment three-quarters shut on its little chain, showing through the opening only a narrow slice of face.

  “Do yourself a favor,” he said, “don’t tell anyone I was here. They might try making trouble for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The lawyers. With lawyers every little thing’s a production. You know lawyers.” He opened his wallet and offered her two more twenties, this time very calmly, with no palpitations of the heart.

  “I got troubles enough,” she said, and with two fingers plucked the money from his hand.

  “Then forget you ever saw me.” But she had already shut the door and was turning the lock as though he had been forgotten long ago. He probably hadn’t even had to ice the cake and indeed he wondered, out in the street, if the forty bucks more might not lead her to suspect that something was up. But as far as she knew he’d done nothing wrong. The large manila envelope he had carried away with him was nicely concealed beneath an old raincoat of Nathan’s that he’d found in the hall closet on the way out. Before opening the closet door, he’d once again been overtaken by the utterly ridiculous fear that Nathan would be hiding there among the coats. He wasn’t, and in the elevator Henry just casually draped the raincoat over his arm—and over the envelope stuffed with Nathan’s papers—as though it were his own. It could have been. The minds may have been alien but the men were pretty much the same size.

  All the way up Madison Avenue there were city trash baskets into which he could easily have dispatched the envelope, but drop these pages into the Manhattan trash, he thought, and they’ll wind up serialized in the New York Post. He had no intention, however, of bringing this stuff home for Carol to read or for her to come upon inadvertently among his papers; the objective was to spare Carol no less than himself. Ten years, even five years back, he had indeed done what married men do and tried to fuck his way out of his life. Young men fuck their way into their lives with the girls who become their wives, then they are married and someone new comes along and they try to fuck their way out. And then, like Henry, if they haven’t already ruined everything, they discover that if they’re sensible and discreet, they can manage to be both in and out at the same time. A lot of the emptiness that he had once attempted to fill fucking other women no longer panicked him; he’d discovered that if you’re not afraid of it or angry with it, and don’t overvalue it, that emptiness passes. If you just sit tight—even alone with someone you are supposed to love, feeling utterly empty with her—it goes away; if you don’t fight it or rush off to fuck somebody else, and if you both have something else important to do, it does go away and you can recover some of the old meaning and substance, even for a time the vitality. Then that goes too, of course, but if you will just sit tight, it comes back again … and so it goes and comes, comes and goes, and that’s more or less what had happened with Carol and how they had preserved, without ugly warfare or unbearable frustration, their marriage, the children’s happiness, and the orderly satisfactions of a stable home.