Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  In The Ghost Writer, Nathan Zuckerman, aged twenty-three, arrives at the country home of the great writer E. I. Lonoff, takes the measure of the place—the books, the piano, the solitude, the big maple trees, the snowy fields—and promptly decides: “This is how I will live.” Most important to this decision is Lonoff himself: his full-souled devotion to the literary calling, his modesty, and, not least, his admiration for Zuckerman’s own work, which consists at the time of just four published stories. Zuckerman has sent these stories to the older man, seeking not merely the approval of a master but the blessing of a father. Because Zuckerman is troubled. For the past five weeks he has not been on speaking terms with his own beloved father. Their argument, which is all he can think about, is the result of his latest story, still unpublished, which he sent to his parents for their usual approval. And which, for the first time in his life, he has not received.

  Zuckerman’s story—think of “Epstein,” think of “Defender of the Faith”—is based on a dispute over money that took place within the extended Zuckerman family. It has so upset his father that he has tried to talk Nathan out of publishing it. (“Your story, as far as Gentiles are concerned, is about one thing and one thing only,” he says: “Kikes and their love of money.”) Failing that, Mr. Zuckerman has sent the story to Newark’s most revered Jewish leader, one Judge Wapter, who in turn has written Nathan a lengthy letter, asking him to consider a series of questions, beginning with: “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?” The judge concludes by advising Nathan to see the current Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank—he and Mrs. Wapter were there on opening night. It’s an experience that might teach him something about the Jews.

  Lapidary, without a word to spare, The Ghost Writer is not much longer than Goodbye, Columbus. The action takes place during a period of some eighteen hours, in the Lonoffs’ house, where Nathan spies a mysterious girl sitting on the floor in an adjacent room, going through Lonoff’s manuscripts. (She looks to him like a Velázquez infanta rather than a Vermeer.) She is a refugee, it turns out—from where, it is not clear—and speaks with a strange and fetching accent. With heavy snow starting to come down, both of the young guests spend the night. It’s a setup as simple as that of a mystery novel, yet this slender book has historic reach as well as dramatic depth. From the opening paragraph, one feels a new calm and lucid power in the writing:

  It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago—I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman—when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man. The clapboard farmhouse was at the end of an unpaved road twelve hundred feet up in the Berkshires, yet the figure who emerged from the study to bestow a ceremonious greeting wore a gabardine suit, a knitted blue tie clipped to a white shirt by an unadorned silver clasp, and well-brushed ministerial black shoes that made me think of him stepping down from a shoeshine stand rather than from the high altar of art.

  It is a book of memory, then: we are looking back a long way. The year is 1956. Lonoff, we soon learn, died five years later, in 1961. Zuckerman’s own fortunes after this visit are unknown. The snow and the fading light and the closely attentive prose give the atmosphere, throughout, a Chekhovian glow that has its precedent in the final scene of The Professor of Desire. But where that book ended, Roth is just beginning.

  At least part of this breakthrough must be credited to a new protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman. Although Roth has the reputation of a confessional writer, no one is more aware of the importance, for literary freedom, of self-disguise. In an obituary essay on Malamud, published in The New York Times Book Review in 1986 and republished in Roth’s 2001 collection, Shop Talk, Roth points to the contrast between that tightly constrained man and his richly unconstrained art and invokes a German term from Heine, Maskenfreiheit: “the freedom conferred by masks.” One might more accurately refer to Nathan Zuckerman as a new mask. For, although a character of the same name appears in My Life as a Man, the new Zuckerman is entirely different from that maritally entrapped and often enraged figure, as he is different from Peter Tarnopol and David Kepesh, who have also been maritally entrapped and enraged—just like Philip Roth.

  True, this Zuckerman has many biographical similarities with Roth. Born in 1933 in Newark to a doting Jewish family, Zuckerman went to college, spent some time in the army, and is now an aspiring writer. The facts that his father is a chiropodist rather than an insurance salesman, that he has a younger brother rather than an older one, and that he went to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate make no real difference. The fact that he moved to New York rather than return to Chicago when he got out of the army, and so never crossed paths with Maggie—or Maureen, or Lucy, or any of the various other names she has borne—is more pertinent. Up until recently, Nathan had a pretty girlfriend, but she smashed all the dishes and threw him out when he confessed (rather nobly, he’d thought) to his susceptibility to her equally pretty friends. A bit disheartened, he went off to a writers’ colony, where he easily recovered during the weeks before he arrived, in December 1956, at Lonoff’s door. Not maritally entrapped, or about to be entrapped. Not enraged, except perhaps by Judge Wapter. And fully able, at twenty-three—the age at which Roth cornered Maggie in the doorway of a Chicago bookshop—to carry on with being twenty-three, a writer, and free. What Maskenfreiheit!

  But if Nathan Zuckerman allowed Roth to return to the time of his most disastrous decision and take another path—up a snowy hill to a writer’s country house—he was not without a struggle of his own. It first appeared, in less than fatal form, with his job as a door-to-door magazine salesman, potentially distracted by lascivious housewives (“Either get laid,” says his boss, “or sell Silver Screen”) who are never lascivious enough: “I of necessity,” Zuckerman concludes, “chose perfection in the work rather than the life.” The choice becomes tougher, however, when the work becomes Art and he is confronted, at the Lonoffs’, with the master whose only, self-confessed purpose and pleasure in life is to sit at his desk all day, every day, and “turn sentences around.” And confronted, too, with the angry voice of Lonoff’s lonely, worn-out wife: “Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of!”

  Art versus Life: Nathan, at the youthful crossroads, is befuddled. It’s not just that he might have gone the other way if one of those housewives had given him the chance. He might never have approached Lonoff at all had he succeeded in getting through to Lonoff’s worldly counterpart, Felix Abravanel—Roth’s marvelous portrait of the artist as a writer whose outsized life includes “beautiful wives, beautiful mistresses, alimony the size of the national debt, polar expeditions, war-front reportage, famous friends,” and so forth. Abravanel is a mocking mix of Mailer and Bellow, with the emphasis falling squarely on Bellow in Roth’s telling of Abravanel’s visit to a Chicago classroom where a story by Zuckerman is being read, just as Bellow once attended a Chicago class in which Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” was discussed. Bellow admired Roth’s story, but, as Roth remembers it, he certainly wasn’t interested in pursuing an acquaintance. And Abravanel admires Zuckerman’s story, while making it clear, in his cashmere sports coat and his self-involvement and his devastating, condescending charm, that he is not in the habit of offering help to younger writers, much less in the market for a twenty-something son. (One of the most beautifully Jamesian phrases in this James-haunted book is Roth’s assessment of Abravanel’s charm, “like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect.”) Although Roth and Bellow had developed a friendly rapport by the time of The Ghost Writer, it was widely rumored that the portrait of Abravanel did not bring them any closer.

  Fathers versus Art: an even bigger problem or, at least, a more immediate one. And the choice, for Nathan, is unbearable. In his Paris Review int
erview, published a few years after the book appeared, Roth described the subject of The Ghost Writer as “the difficulties of telling a Jewish story.” (“In what tone? To whom should it be told? To what end? Should it be told at all?”) Even back in 1971, in an article he wrote for The New York Times, he had recognized that it would have been “asking the impossible” of many Jews to react to his early stories without anger and fear, “only five thousand days after Buchenwald and Auschwitz.” But in this book he brings the problem home. Nathan is haunted by the image of his bewildered father, standing alone on a darkening street corner after Nathan has refused to repudiate his story, “thinking himself and all of Jewry gratuitously disgraced and jeopardized by my inexplicable betrayal.” Still, he can’t back down.

  That night, in the makeshift bedroom of Lonoff’s study, he sits in his undershorts at the great man’s desk. Beside the desk, on index cards pinned to a bulletin board, are two quotations, one ascribed to Robert Schumann, about Chopin, and one by Henry James: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” The final phrase confuses him. Isn’t it art that is sanity, against the madness of everything else? Yet these are the words that hang over Lonoff’s head every day while he turns his sentences around. Nathan pulls out a pad and begins to write, first a reading list from the books on Lonoff’s shelves, then an account of the remarkable day, featuring Lonoff’s praise of Nathan’s own distinctive literary voice—“I don’t mean style,” Lonoff said, “I mean voice”—and, inevitably, a letter to his father about his art and his voice and his family bonds that will explain everything. But he cannot finish it because he cannot find the right words.

  And also because he is distracted by the voices of Lonoff and the mysterious young woman arguing in the room overhead. By the simple act of standing on Lonoff’s desk, with his ear to the ceiling—and a volume of Henry James under his feet, for literary support—he learns that the two have been lovers. He is astounded. The great ascetic! (Roth was as astounded as everyone else when Malamud’s biography, published in 2007—twenty-eight years after The Ghost Writer and twenty-one years after Malamud’s death—revealed that Malamud had indeed had a serious love affair with a nineteen-year-old student, in the early sixties. “People started asking me,” Roth says, “how did you know?”) Nathan is upset, however, mostly because the unimaginable scene has exposed the limits of his imagination. If only he could invent something equally presumptuous!

  Enter Anne Frank. She has gone by the name of Amy Bellette since waking up in a British Army field hospital. She hadn’t meant to conceal her identity—there was no reason to, since no one knew who she was. She simply wanted to forget. As a foster child, she had gone to England (where she burned the number off her arm while ironing a blouse), and then, through Lonoff’s sponsorship, she had come to America, to the Berkshires and Athene College, where Lonoff still teaches two classes a year. He vouches for her exceptional prose style. She told him who she really was only years after she arrived—after she went to see The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway, in 1955, and couldn’t bear her secret anymore. Of course, he didn’t believe her story, at first. Who would? Her greatest pain, however, was keeping the fact that she was still alive from her beloved father. The cost of telling him now was just too great. Because of her book and because of the lessons it taught. She went back and forth in her mind, continually: her father, her book, her father, her book. People went every day not only to see the play in New York, but, in Amsterdam, to the family’s secret hideaway, as though it were a shrine. They pitied her, they cried for her, and not only for her. “I was the incarnation of the millions of unlived years robbed from the murdered Jews. It was too late to be alive now,” she concludes. “I was a saint.”

  That Anne Frank was indeed a saint presented a tremendous problem for Roth. For a time, his desire to write about her was nearly outmatched by his fear of appearing “blasphemous,” as he confided in a letter to his friend Jack Miles, a former Jesuit seminarian and a historian of religion who was then working as an editor at Doubleday. Roth had spent weeks wrestling with the issue, writing no more than a sentence or two a day, and he and Miles decided to reread the Diary simultaneously and exchange their thoughts. On December 2, 1977—nearly two years before the publication of The Ghost Writer (and nearly twenty years before the publication of Miles’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, God: A Biography)—Roth fulfilled his side of the agreement, writing Miles a seven-page, closely typed letter, fiercely analytic yet deeply tender, detailing his ideas about the famous book and its author: a winning girl, a writer by nature, a Jewish European (as opposed to a European Jew) who dreamed of studying in Paris, an adolescent who adored her father and disliked her mother and who was already something of a genius, but not yet a saint. The diary answered her immediate needs: to confide the unsayable (“particularly about her mother”); to give way to occasional despair; and to write. She began to imagine that she would publish a book based on the diary only with the dawn of her understanding that “what began as a personal record has a historical dimension”—that is, when her sense of the experience had changed from “this is what I had to do, to this is what a Jewish family had to do, in order to survive the war.”

  The central question of Roth’s letter is: What gave her book its vast appeal? In strictly literary terms, Roth compares Anne Frank’s hold on readers with that of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield: “Can you think of any other adolescents able to hold our interest?” Of course, her voice is not as stylized or as “distinctively ‘adolescent’” as theirs, but then she is not an adult pretending to be an adolescent but a real one, and one whose attitude toward society was necessarily wholly different: “She is locked out and wants more than anything to be let back in: her dream is to go back to school.” Then, too, she presents her terrible confinement as a kind of adventure story. (He quotes: “I am young and strong and am living a great adventure”—May 3, 1944.) The Diary has similarities with Robinson Crusoe in its “testing of civilized ingenuity,” in the way it faces the problems of “how to get on with life, how to get on with the development of the self, under the pressures of confinement and in the shadow of death.” And, there is her personality: not too perfect (Anne claimed that her more serene and submissive sister, Margot, was perfect), not too flawed, a girl with whom adolescents could identify yet whose “mercurial and spirited” nature made her everybody else’s ideal daughter. “She was, in the simplest and most attractive sense of the word, alive. And that is what is so crushing, and so representative, about her death.”

  And what might have made the book less appealing? “Had she survived the war,” Roth writes, “I wonder how many readers it would have had, if any.” As “his” Anne surmises in The Ghost Writer, for her to be among the survivors rather than among the murdered six million would have drastically changed readers’ perception of the book. Roth suggests to Miles that, rather like Lore Segal’s autobiographical novel Other People’s Houses, about her family’s escape from Austria, The Diary of a Young Girl “might have run in sections in The New Yorker—and that would have been that.” He wonders, too, whether people would have been so affected if she had continued writing in the camps. “There is something so strong about the way that it breaks off—I suppose it says something about the writing itself, or about how this girl seems to us to live most passionately through writing. The silence, the blankness, that follows the last page stands for the undescribable horror.”

  Finally, had Anne Frank been more overtly or stereotypically Jewish—“a shtetl or ghetto child,” Roth suggests, “with Isaac Singer’s childhood”—“I doubt that her diary would have meant so much to Christians, or for that matter, even to Jews in great numbers.” Her fate would have been considered unjust but somehow understandable. The arrest of this particular girl, however, is “beyond understanding.” Not just a Jewish tragedy but an absurdist tragedy, something out of Kafka. (“Someone
must have traduced Anne F.,” he writes, “for one morning, the police, etc.…”) Without her confinement, Roth went on, this girl—who had gone to a Montessori school until the Nazis ordered her into the Jewish Lyceum, whose “languages to be learned” are French and English, whose “‘pet’ subject is Greek and Roman mythology”—would have had little reason to think of herself as a Jew. Ironically, “she is far more Jewish to us than she was to herself.” And then Roth asks the question that is looming over him: “What do you think would happen if I said aloud (that is, in print) that the least Jewish of Jewish children is our Jewish saint?”

  Anne Frank is the ghost of The Ghost Writer, but Nathan Zuckerman is the ghost writer, creating a new story for her in her stead. In the morning light, it’s a story that Nathan recognizes as the product of his own fevered, fiction-making, father-obsessed brain. This sleight-of-hand solution to the problem of portraying Anne Frank is ingenious. The threats of both blasphemy and kitsch are dissolved—this is not really Anne Frank, after all. Yet Roth has it both ways. We are deeply drawn into her postwar story, before Nathan’s authorship is exposed, and cannot readily step back. We can dismiss the specter of her presence, intellectually; emotionally, however, it is harder to shake. (This may be Roth’s greatest lesson from Kafka: the more fantastical the imaginative plan, the more realistically detailed the execution.) Nathan’s fantasy serves his own purposes so well that he himself has a hard time letting it go. The next morning at breakfast—where Lonoff requests half an egg—Nathan begins to imagine that he will marry Anne and bring her to meet his parents in New Jersey. (“‘Married? But so fast? Nathan, is she Jewish?’”) When he introduces her to them, they will see at last what he really is, more clearly than he could express in any letter: