Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

  "There are noises?"

  "No. I should have said 'a cloud.' It's a cloud. In your head you have a thundercloud."

  "What was the terribly stupid politically correct crap?"

  She laughed, the face, finely wrinkled and without a vestige of the beauty once inscribed there—the face laughed, but because of the half-shaved skull with the new-grown fuzz and that demonic scar, the laugh itself was shot through with all the wrong meanings. "You can guess. They had Gertrude Stein in the exhibit but not Ernest Hemingway. They had Edna St. Vincent Millay but not William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens or Robert Lowell. Just nonsense. It started in the colleges and now it's everywhere. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, but not Faulkner."

  "What did you shout?" I asked.

  "I shouted, 'Where is E. I. Lonoff? How dare you leave out E. I. Lonoff!' I'd intended to say, 'How dare you leave out William Faulkner!' but Manny's was the name that came out. I drew quite a crowd."

  "And how did you discover the tumor was there?"

  "I was getting headaches. Headaches so terrible they made me vomit. You'll help me get rid of this Kliman, won't you?"

  "I will try."

  "The thing's come back. Did I tell you that?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Somebody has to protect Manny from this man. Any biography he writes will be the resentment of an inferior person writ large. The Nietzschean prophecy come true: art killed by resentment. Before I knew I had the tumor, he paid me a visit. It was just after the library fiasco. I was already talking a mile a minute. I served him tea and he was so proper and he seemed, to my tumor, to speak so brilliantly about Manny's stories—to my tumor, he seemed a purely literary being, an earnest, Harvard-educated young man who wanted nothing more than to restore Manny's reputation. My tumor found Kliman winning."

  "Well, you should have found the dog winning and kicked Kliman. How did you get a diagnosis?" I asked.

  "I passed out. I was putting the kettle on the stove one day, and I switched on the gas, and the next thing I knew there were two policemen standing over me in the emergency room of Lenox Hill Hospital. The super smelled the gas, and he found me there"—she pointed behind us to the kitchen with the bathtub in it—"on the floor, and they thought I'd tried to kill myself. That made me angry. Everything made me angry. I was once a nice, sweet girl, was I not?"

  "You seemed well behaved to me."

  "Well, I really gave it to those cops."

  It occurred to me for the first time since I'd been waiting for her at Pierluigi's that it wasn't I who had gone to the wrong restaurant; it was Amy. The tumor that had come back was turning her inside out again—the tumor that had come back that had induced a state of mind that did not seem to allow for her to be terrified by its return. Twice she had told me it was back, and not as though she had come to this evening off of this momentous day, but each time as though she were talking about little more than a check that had not cleared because she'd overdrawn her account.

  Out of the silence we'd been sitting through for several minutes, she said, "I have his shoes."

  "I don't follow you."

  "Eventually I got rid of all his clothes, but I couldn't part with his shoes."

  "Where are they?"

  "In my bedroom closet."

  "May I see them?" I asked only because it seemed that she wanted me to ask.

  "Would you like to?"

  "Sure."

  The bedroom was tiny and the door to the closet opened only partway before bumping into one side of the bed. A string with a frayed end hung down inside the closet, and when she pulled it a low-wattage bulb went on. The first thing I noticed hanging amid the dozen or so garments there was the dress she'd made of a hospital gown. Then, lined up on the floor, I saw Lonoff's shoes. Four pairs, all pointed forward, all black, all well worn. Four pairs of a dead man's shoes.

  "They're just as he left them," she told me.

  "You see them every day," I said.

  "Every morning. Every night. Sometimes more."

  "Is it ever eerie to see them there?"

  "To the contrary, no. What could be more comforting than his shoes?"

  "He had no brown shoes?" I asked.

  "He never wore brown shoes."

  "Do you ever put them on?" I asked. "Do you ever stand in them?"

  "How did you know?"

  "It's only human. That's human life."

  "They are my treasures," she said.

  "I would treasure them too."

  "Would you like a pair, Nathan?"

  "You've had them a long time. You shouldn't give them up."

  "I wouldn't be giving them up. I'd be passing them on. If I should die of this tumor, I don't want everything to be lost."

  "I think you should keep them. You never know how things are going to turn out. You may have them here to look at for years to come."

  "I will probably die, Nathan, this time round."

  "You keep all the shoes, Amy. Keep them for him right where they are."

  She pulled the string that turned off the light and closed the closet door, and we passed through the kitchen and returned to her study. I felt the fatigue of one who'd just run ten miles at top speed.

  "Do you remember what you talked about with Kliman?" I asked her, now that I had seen the shoes. "Do you remember what you told him, the time you met?"

  "I don't think I told him anything."

  "Nothing about Manny, nothing about you?"

  "I don't know. I don't positively know."

  "Did you give him anything?"

  "Why? Does he say I did?"

  "He says he has a photocopy of half the manuscript of Manny's novel. He says you promised him the rest."

  "I never would have done that. I couldn't have."

  "Might the tumor have done it?"

  "Oh, dear. Oh, God. Oh, no."

  There were some loose pages atop the table, and in her agitation she began to fiddle with them. "Are those from the novel?" I asked.

  "No."

  "Is the novel here?"

  "I have the original in a safe-deposit box in Boston. I have a copy here, yes."

  "He couldn't write it because of the subject."

  She looked alarmed. "How do you know that?"

  "You said so."

  "Did I? I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what's going on. I wish everyone would let me be about that book." Then she looked at the pages in her hand and, laughing brightly, she said, "This is a brilliant letter to the Times. It's so brilliant they never printed it. Oh, I don't care."

  "When did you write it?" I asked.

  "A few days ago. A week ago. They had an article about Hemingway. Maybe it was a year ago. Maybe five years ago. I don't know. The article is around somewhere. I clipped it out, and the other night I found it, and it got me so worked up I sat down and wrote the letter. A reporter went to Michigan to try to hunt down the real-life models for Hemingway's Upper Peninsula stories. So I wrote and told them what I thought about that."

  "Looks long for a letter to a paper."

  "I've got them even longer."

  "May I read it?" I asked her.

  "Oh, it's just a nutty old woman rambling on. The excrescence of the excrescence." Abruptly she went into the kitchen to turn on the kettle and make something for us to eat, leaving me alone with the letter. It was written with a ballpoint pen. At first I thought it must have been composed not in one night but bit by bit over a period of days, weeks, or months because the color of the ink changed a couple of times at least on every page. Then I thought she had written it in a single sitting—a response to an article perhaps five years old—and the various colors of ink attested only to the pervasiveness of her confusion. Yet the sentences themselves were coherent, and the way of thinking was anything but the excrescence of her brain's excrescence.

  To the Editor:

  There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think. That time is coming to an end. During t
he decades of the Cold War, in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, it was the serious writers who were expelled from literature; now, in America, it is literature that has been expelled as a serious influence on how life is perceived. The predominant uses to which literature is now put in the culture pages of the enlightened newspapers and in university English departments are so destructively at odds with the aims of imaginative writing, as well as with the rewards that literature affords an open-minded reader, that it would be better if literature were no longer put to any public use.

  Your paper's cultural journalism—the more of it there is, the worse it gets. As soon as one enters into the ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism of cultural journalism, the essence of the artifact is lost. Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in "the arts," and everything that it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet? Without the least idea of what is innately transgressive about the literary imagination, cultural journalism is ever mindful of phony ethical issues: "Does the writer have the right to blah-blah-blah?" It is hypersensitive to the invasion of privacy perpetrated by literature over the millennia, while maniacally dedicated to exposing in print, unfictionalized, whose privacy has been invaded and how. One is struck by the regard cultural journalists have for the barriers of privacy when it comes to the novel.

  Hemingway's early stories are set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so your cultural journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories. Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway. These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they're easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than the fiction. The integrity of the journalist's informant is never questioned—only the integrity of the writer. The writer works alone for years on end, stakes his or her everything on the writing, pores over every sentence sixty-two times, and yet is without any sort of overriding literary consciousness, understanding, or goal. Everything the writer builds, meticulously, phrase by phrase and detail by detail, is a ruse and a lie. The writer is without literary motive. Any interest in depicting reality is nil. The writer's guiding motives are always personal and generally low.

  And this knowledge comes as a comfort, for it turns out that not only are these writers not superior to the rest of us, as they pretend to be—they are worse than the rest of us. Those terrible geniuses!

  The way in which serious fiction eludes paraphrase and description—hence requiring thought—is a nuisance to your cultural journalist. Only its imagined sources are to be taken seriously, only that fiction, the lazy journalist's fiction. The original nature of the imagination in those early Hemingway stories (an imagination that in a handful of pages transformed the short story and American prose) is incomprehensible to your cultural journalist, whose own writing turns our honest English words into nonsense. If you told a cultural journalist, "Look inward at the story only," he wouldn't have a thing to say. Imagination? There is no imagination. Literature? There is no literature. All the exquisite parts—even the not so exquisite parts—disappear, and there are only these people whose feelings are hurt because of what Hemingway did to them. Did Hemingway have the right...? Does any author have the right...? Sensationalist cultural vandalism masquerading as a responsible newspaper's devotion to "the arts."

  If I had something like Stalin's power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I'd forbid all public discussion of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals. I'd forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college, and university in the country. I'd outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare to speak to one another. I'd leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own. I'd do this for as many centuries as are required to detoxify the society of your poisonous nonsense.

  Amy Bellette

  Had I read these pages without knowing Amy, I would have taken the argument at face value and received the outburst not without some sympathy, though my putting myself out of range of what Amy called "cultural journalism" relieved me of ever having to think about it or to speak of it as she did, which was no small boon. Under the circumstances, however, the key to the letter's intention and its interest for me seemed to lie in a couple of sentences in the second paragraph, which I reread while Amy continued in the kitchen to prepare our snack of toast and jam and tea. "What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet?" Could it be that "half-sister" didn't appear in the list of those transgressed against because she was not fully aware of what was driving her indignation, or was it because she knew very well and monitored her own composition, line by line, to be certain "half-sister" wasn't furtively smuggled in by the tumor?

  It seemed to me that the letter to the Times had mainly to do with Richard Kliman.

  When she came out of the kitchen, carrying our food on a tray, I said, "And what grade did Manny give you for sentences so cogent and biting?"

  "He didn't give me a grade."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I didn't write it."

  "Who did?"

  "He did."

  "Did he? You told me before these were the words of a nutty old woman rambling on."

  "That wasn't entirely true."

  "How so?"

  "He dictated it. They're his words. He said, 'Reading/ writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era—take this down.' I did as he told me."

  I was there listening to her until well after midnight. I said hardly anything, heard a lot, and tended to believe most of it and to be able to make sense of it. There was never a deliberate attempt to mislead, as far as I could tell. Rather the rapid divulging of a massive backlog of information caused the particulars of her many stories to become so intertwined that at times it appeared that she was wholly at the mercy of the tumor. Or that the tumor simply overturned the obstacles ordinarily established by inhibition and convention. Or that she was just a desperately ill and lonely woman drinking in a man's interest after all the years of doing without, a woman who, five decades earlier, had lived for four precious years with a brilliant loved one whose integrity, which to her was the key to his majesty as both a writer and a man, was now threatened with demolition by the inexplicable "resentment of an inferior person" who'd anointed himself the loved one's biographer. Maybe the flood of words revealed nothing more than how old and deep her suffering was and how long she'd been without him.

  It was curious to watch a mind being compressed and distended all at once. And sometimes alarmingly misfiring, as when, after several hours of holding forth, she looked at me wearily and, perhaps with more wit than I could discern, asked, "Was I ever married to you?"

  I laughed and said, "I don't think so. I thought about it, however."

  "Our being married?"

  "Yes, when I was a boy, when we first met at the Lonoffs'. I thought it would be marvelous to be married to you. You were something to behold."

  "I was, was I?"

  "Yes, you looked tamed and well behaved, but obviously you were unusual."

  "I had no idea what I was doing."

  "Then?"

  "Then, now, always. I had no idea of the risk I was taking with this man so much older than me. But he was irresistible. He was something
. I was so proud of myself for inspiring his love. How had I done it? I was so proud of not being afraid of him. And all the while I was terrified: terrified of Hope and what she'd do, and terrified of what I was doing to her. And I hadn't any idea of the wound that I was marking him with. I should have married you. But Hope undid the marriage, and I ran off with E. I. Lonoff. Too naive to understand anything, thinking I was taking a great, bold womanly risk, I returned to my childhood, Nathan. The truth is, I've never left it. I'll die a child."

  A child because she was with someone who was so much older? Because she stayed in his shadow, always looking up adoringly at him? Why was this harrowing union that must have destroyed many of her illusions a force that kept her in her childhood? "Which isn't to say that you were childish," I said.

  "It isn't, no."

  "I don't understand, then, about your being a child."

  "Then tell you I must, mustn't I?"

  And here the legendary biography with which I had invested her in 1956 was replaced by the genuine biography, which, if less inflated with the moral significance my own invention held for me back then, was factually contiguous with what I'd come up with. It had to be, for everything had happened on the same doomed continent to a member of the same doomed generation of the same doomed enemy of the master race. Transforming herself out of what I'd transformed her into did not permit erasing the fate by which her family had been no less besieged than the Franks. That was a disaster whose dimensions no mind could rewrite and no imagination undo and whose memory even the tumor wouldn't displace, until it had killed her.

  This was how I learned Amy was not from the Netherlands, where I had hidden her in the sealed-off attic above a warehouse on an Amsterdam canal that would later become a martyr's shrine, but from Norway—from Norway, from Sweden, from New England, from New York—which is to say, by now from nowhere, like any number of other Jewish children of her era born in Europe instead of in America, who'd miraculously escaped death during World War Two, though their youths had coincided with Hitler's maturity. This was how I learned of the circumstances of that suffering whose reality never ceases to arouse, along with rage, incredulity. In the listener. In the narrator there was no heat. And certainly no disbelief. The deeper into her misfortune she proceeded, the more deceptively matter-of-fact she became. As if all this loss could ever lose its hold.