The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  You know what it’s like being with a Jew when the subject of Jews arises? It’s like when you’re with people who are on the verge of insanity. Half the time you’re with them they’re absolutely fine, and some of the time they’re completely barking. But there are curious moments when they’re hovering, you can see them tipping over the edge. Actually what they are saying is no less reasonable than what they were saying five minutes before, but you know that they have just stepped over that little magic line.

  What I’m saying is that all the way back on page 73 I saw where you were preparing to take us, and should have got myself up and out before your plane even landed, let along rushing to the airport to catch you sky-high still on the Holy Land. It works this way (your enveloping mind, I mean) : inasmuch as it has been established by my sister that my mother is determined to make an issue of having our child symbolically sprinkled with the purifying waters of the church, you are now determined to counterattack by demanding that the child, if a boy, shall make his covenant with Yahweh through the ritual sacrifice of his foreskin. Oh, I do see through to your contrary core! We would have argued again—we who never argue. I would have said, “I think it’s a barbaric mutilation. I think it’s physically harmless in a million cases out of a million and one, so that I can’t produce any medical arguments against it, except the general one that one would rather not intervene in anyone’s body unless it’s necessary. But I nonetheless think it’s terrible, circumcising boys or girls. I just think it’s wrong.” And you would have said, “But I would find it very hard having a son who isn’t circumcised,” or something even more subtly menacing. And so it would go. And who would win? Guess. It is a barbaric mutilation, but, being reasonable and completely your creature, I would of course have given in. I’d say, “I think a child should be like a father in that way. I mean, if the father is not circumcised, then I think the child should be like his father, because I think it would puzzle a child to be different from his father and would cause all sorts of problems for him.” I’d say—be made to say is nearer the truth—“I think it’s better not to interfere with these customs when they cause so much feeling. If you are going to be incensed about anybody interfering with this link between you and your son, I don’t care if it looks to me as though an intellectual agnostic is being irrationally Jewish, I now understand the feeling and don’t propose to stand in its way. If it’s this that establishes for you the truth of your paternity—that regains for you the truth of your own paternity—so be it.” And you would have said, “And what about your paternity—what about your mother, Maria?” and then we would never have got to sleep, not for years, because the issue would have been joined and you would have been having the time of your life what with our intercontinental marriage having become so much more INTERESTING.

  No, I won’t do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this primitive drama, not even for the sake of your fiction. Oh, darling, the hell with your fiction. I remember how back in New York, when I let you read one of my stories, you immediately ran out and bought me that thick leather-bound notebook. “I’ve got something for you to write in,” you told me. “Thank you,” I replied, “but do you think I have that much to say?” You didn’t seem to realize that writing for me isn’t everything about my existence wrestling to be born but just some stories about the mists and the Gloucestershire meadows. And I didn’t realize that even a woman as passive as I has to know when to run for her life. Well, I would be just too stupid if I didn’t know by now. Admittedly, it’s no return to Paradise, but since he and I do have a great deal in common, have a deep bond of class and generation and nationality and background, when we fight like cats and dogs it really has little to do with anything, and afterwards everything goes on just as before, which is how I like it. It’s too intense, all this talk that means something. You and I argue, and twentieth-century history comes looming up, and at its most infernal. I feel pressed on every side, and it takes the stuffing out of me—but for you, it’s your métier, really. All our short-lived serenity and harmony, all our hope and happiness, was a bore to you, admit it. So was the idea of altering your ways in middle age by becoming a calmly detached observer, a bit more of a percipient spy on the agony of others, rather than, as of old, being tossed and torn apart yourself.

  You do want to be opposed again, don’t you? You may have had your fill of fighting Jews and fighting fathers and fighting literary inquisitors—the harder you fight that sort of local opposition, the more your inner conflict grows. But fighting the goyim it’s clear, there’s no uncertainty or doubt—a good, righteous, guilt-free punch-up! To be resisted, to be caught, to find yourself in the midst of a battle puts a spring in your heel. You’re just dying, after all my mildness, for a collision, a clash—anything as long as there’s enough antagonism to get the story smoking and everything exploding in the wrathful philippics you adore. To be a Jew at Grossinger’s is obviously a bit of a bore—but in England being Jewish turns out to be difficult and just what you consider fun. People tell you, There are restrictions, and you’re in your element again. You revel in restrictions. But the fact is that as far as the English are concerned, being Jewish is something you very occasionally apologize for and that’s it. It is hardly my perspective, it strikes me as coarse and insipid, but it still is nothing like the horror you have imagined. But a life without horrible difficulties (which by the way a number of Jews do manage to enjoy here—just ask Disraeli or Lord Weidenfeld) is inimical to the writer you are. You actually like to take things hard. You can’t weave your stories otherwise.

  Well, not me, I like it amiable, the amiable drift of it, the mists, the meadows, and not to reproach each other for things outside our control, and not every last thing invested with urgent meaning. I don’t usually give in to strange temptation and now I remember why. When I told you about that scene at Holly Tree Cottage when my mother said, about my Jewish friend, “They smell so funny, don’t they?” I saw exactly what you were thinking—not “How awful for someone to say such a thing!” but “Why does she write about those stupid meadows when she can sink her teeth into that? Now there’s a subject!” Perfectly true, but not a subject for me. The last thing I would ever want are the consequences of writing about that. For one thing, if I did, I wouldn’t really be telling the English anything they didn’t know but simply exposing my mother and me to incalculable distress in order to come up with something “strong.” Well, better to keep the peace by writing something weak. I don’t entirely share your superstitions about art and its strength. I take my stand for something far less important than axing everything open—it’s called tranquillity.

  But tranquillity is disquieting to you, Nathan, in writing particularly—it’s bad art to you, far too comfortable for the reader and certainly for yourself. The last thing you want is to make readers happy, with everything cozy and strifeless, and desire simply fulfilled. The pastoral is not your genre, and Zuckerman Domesticus now seems to you just that, too easy a solution, an idyll of the kind you hate, a fantasy of innocence in the perfect house in the perfect landscape on the banks of the perfect stretch of river. So long as you were winning me, getting me away from him, and we were struggling with the custody issue, so long as there was that wrestling for rights and possessions, you were engrossed, but now it begins to look to me that you’re afraid of peace, afraid of Maria and Nathan alone and quiet with their happy family in a settled life. To you, in that, there’s a suggestion of Zuckerman unburdened, too on top of it, that’s not earned—or worse, insufficiently INTERESTING. To you to live as an innocent is to live as a laughable monster. Your chosen fate, as you see it, is to be innocent of innocence at all costs, certainly not to let me, with my pastoral origins, cunningly transform you into a pastoralized Jew. I think you are embarrassed to find that even you were tempted to have a dream of simplicity as foolish and naïve as anyone’s. Scandalous. How can that be? Nothing, but nothing, is simple for Zuckerman. You constitut
ionally distrust anything that appears to you to be effortlessly gained. As if it were effortless to achieve what we had.

  Yet when I’m gone don’t think I didn’t appreciate you. Shall I tell you what I’m going to miss, despite my shyness and well-known lack of sexual assertiveness? It’s feeling your hips between my thighs. It’s not very erotic by today’s standards, and probably you don’t even know what I’m talking about. “My hips between your thighs?” you ask, dumbly rubbing your whiskers. Yes, position A. You’d hardly ever done anything so ordinary in your life before I came along, but for me that was just lovely and I won’t forget for a long time what it was like. I will also remember an afternoon down in your apartment before my enemy came home for dinner; there was an old song on the radio, you said it was a song you used to dance to in high school with your little girlfriend Linda Mandel, and so for the first and only time, there in your study, we danced the fox-trot like adolescent kids out of the forties, danced the fox-trot glued loin to loin. When I look back on all this fifteen years from now, you know what I’ll think? I’ll think, “Lucky old me.” I’ll think what we all think fifteen years later: “Wasn’t that nice.” But at twenty-eight this is no life, especially if you are going to be Maupassant and milk the irony for all its worth. You want to play reality-shift? Get yourself another girl. I’m leaving. When I see you now in the lift or down in the foyer collecting your mail, I will pretend, though it may only be the two of us who are there, that we have never been anything other than neighbors, and if we meet in public, at a party or a restaurant, and I am with my husband and our friends, I will blush, I do blush, not as much as I used to, but I always blush at a very revealing moment, I blush at the most extraordinary things, though perhaps I can get out of it by coming boldly up to you and saying, “I’d just like to tell you how profoundly I identify with the women characters in your argumentative books,” and nobody will guess, despite my blushing, that I was almost one of them.

  P.S. I think Maria is a nice enough name for other people, but not for me.

  P.P.S. At the point where “Maria” appears to be most her own woman, most resisting you, most saying I cannot live the life you have imposed upon me, not if it’s going to be a life of us quarreling about your Jewishness in England, that is impossible—at this point of greatest strength, she is least real, which is to say least her own woman, because she has become again your “character,” just one of a series of fictive propositions. This is diabolical of you.

  P.P.P.S. If this letter sounds terribly rational, I assure you it’s the last thing I feel.

  My Maria,

  When Balzac died he called out for his characters from his deathbed. Do we have to wait for that terrible hour? Besides, you are not merely a character, or even a character, but the real living tissue of my life. I understand the terror of being tyrannically suppressed, but don’t you see how it’s led to excesses of imagination that are yours and not mine? I suppose it can be said that I do sometimes desire, or even require, a certain role to be rather clearly played that other people aren’t always interested enough to want to perform. I can only say in my defense that I ask no less of myself. Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself. In fact, those who most seem to be themselves appear to me people impersonating what they think they might like to be, believe they ought to be, or wish to be taken to be by whoever is setting standards. So in earnest are they that they don’t even recognize that being in earnest is the act. For certain self-aware people, however, this is not possible: to imagine themselves being themselves, living their own real, authentic, or genuine life, has for them all the aspects of a hallucination.

  I realize that what I am describing, people divided in themselves, is said to characterize mental illness and is the absolute opposite of our idea of emotional integration. The whole Western idea of mental health runs in precisely the opposite direction: what is desirable is congruity between your self-consciousness and your natural being. But there are those whose sanity flows from the conscious separation of those two things. If there even is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation—the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate. I’m talking about recognizing that one is acutely a performer, rather than swallowing whole the guise of naturalness and pretending that it isn’t a performance but you.

  There is no you, Maria, any more than there’s a me. There is only this way that we have established over the months of performing together, and what it is congruent with isn’t “ourselves” but past performances—we’re has-beens at heart, routinely trotting out the old, old act. What is the role I demand of you? I couldn’t describe it, but I don’t have to—you are such a great intuitive actress you do it, almost with no direction at all, an extraordinarily controlled and seductive performance. Is it a role that’s foreign to you? Only if you wish to pretend that it is. It’s all impersonation—in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through. If you were to tell me that there are people, like the man upstairs to whom you now threaten to turn yourself in, who actually do have a strong sense of themselves, I would have to tell you that they are only impersonating people with a strong sense of themselves—to which you could correctly reply that since there is no way of proving whether I’m right or not, this is a circular argument from which there is no escape.

  All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. It certainly does strike me as a joke about my self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required, an ever-evolving stock of pieces and parts that forms my repertoire. But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic efforts to have one. Nor would I want one. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

  Now probably this is all true only to a point and I am characteristically trying to take it too far, “tipping over the edge,” as you say of Jews, “like people who are on the verge of insanity.” I could be altogether wrong. Obviously the whole idea of what is a self philosophers have gone on about at extraordinary lengths, and, if only from the evidence here, it is a very slippery subject. But it is INTERESTING trying to get a handle on one’s own subjectivity—something to think about, to play around with, and what’s more fun than that? Come back and we’ll play with it together. We could have great times as Homo Ludens and wife, inventing the imperfect future. We can pretend to be anything we want. All it takes is impersonation. That is like saying that it takes only courage, I know. I am saying just that. I am willing to go on impersonating a Jewish man who still adores you, if only you will return pretending to be the pregnant Gentile woman carrying our minuscule unbaptized baby-to-be. You cannot choose a man you can’t stand against the person that you love just because the unhappy life with him is easy by comparison to the paradoxically more difficult happy life with me. Or is that what all the aging husbands say when their young wives disappear in the middle of the night?

  I just can’t believe that you are serious about living upstairs. I hate to have to be the one to make the perfectly crude, predictable, feminist point, but even if you weren’t going to live with me, couldn’t you think of something else to do rather than going back to him? It seems so self-reductive of you, unless I’m reading you too literally, and the point you’re hammering home is that anything’s better than me.

  Now to what you say about pastoralization. Do you remember the Swedish film we watched on television, that microphotography of ejaculation, conception, and all that? It was quite wonderful. First was the whole sexual act leading to conception, from the point of view of the innards of the woman. They had a camera or something up the vas deferens. I still don’t know how th
ey did it—does the guy have the camera on his prick? Anyway, you saw the sperm in huge color, coming down, getting ready, and going out into the beyond, and then finding its end up somewhere else—quite beautiful. The pastoral landscape par excellence. According to one school, it’s where the pastoral genre that you speak of begins, those irrepressible yearnings by people beyond simplicity to be taken off to the perfectly safe, charmingly simple and satisfying environment that is desire’s homeland. How moving and pathetic these pastorals are that cannot admit contradiction or conflict! That that is the womb and this is the world is not as easy to grasp as one might imagine. As I discovered at Agor, not even Jews, who are to history what Eskimos are to snow, seem able, despite the arduous education to the contrary, to protect themselves against the pastoral myth of life before Cain and Abel, of life before the split began. Fleeing now, and back to day zero and the first untainted settlement—breaking history’s mold and casting off the dirty, disfiguring reality of the piled-up years: this is what Judea means to, of all people, that belligerent, unillusioned little band of Jews … also what Basel meant to claustrophobic Henry lustlessly boxed-in back in Jersey … also—let’s face it—something like what you and Gloucestershire once meant to me. Each has its own configuration, but whether set in the cratered moonscape of the Pentateuch, or the charming medieval byways of orderly old Schweiz, or the mists and the meadows of Constable’s England, at the core is the idyllic scenario of redemption through the recovery of a sanitized, confusionless life. In dead seriousness, we all create imagined worlds, often green and breastlike, where we may finally be “ourselves.” Yet another of our mythological pursuits. Think of all those Christians, hearty enough to know better, piping out their virginal vision of Momma and invoking that boring old Mother Goose manger. What’s our unborn offspring meant to me, right up to tonight in fact, but something perfectly programmed to be my little redeemer? What you say is true: the pastoral is not my genre (no more than you would think of it as Mordecai Lippman’s); it isn’t complicated enough to provide a real solution, and yet haven’t I been fueled by the most innocent (and comical) vision of fatherhood with the imagined child as the therapeutic pastoral of the middle-aged man?