Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  If Roth spared Zuckerman the burden of his own marital history, he gave him a burden that Roth had never known, in a father who disapproves of his work. The elder Zuckerman, we learn, eventually forgave his son for the story that caused all the trouble in The Ghost Writer, and even developed some pride in his books. By the time Carnovsky appears, however—it is Zuckerman’s fourth novel, as Portnoy was Roth’s—Nathan is almost relieved to know that his father, who has suffered a series of strokes, won’t be able to read it. (Zuckerman’s mother is too gentle a soul to complain, even when people say to her, straight out, “I didn’t know you were crazy like that, Selma.” She merely needs to have her son assure her that “you are yourself and not Mrs. Carnovsky” and that his childhood was “very nearly heaven.”) But, alas, a neighbor, coming regularly to the nursing home, has obligingly read the offending book to the old man, as a result of which he has a sudden, massive heart attack. He is rushed to a hospital, where, lying on his deathbed with the entire family gathered around, Mr. Zuckerman looks into the eyes of his elder son and pronounces his last word on earth: “Bastard.”

  At first, Nathan wonders if the writer in him has made him hear things. Maybe his father merely said “faster.” Or “better.” Or “vaster.” Who knows why? Hearing “bastard” was just a writer’s wishful thinking: “Better scene, stronger medicine, a final repudiation by Father.” He notes approvingly that Kafka once wrote, “We should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?” And what more rousing blow to the head than this? For Nathan, the unwritten world is an uncertain place, and reality has become an elusive, exotic phenomenon—he can refer to it only in French, quoting Flaubert pining for “le vrai.” But the demands of art may have finally taken him too far.

  Nothing was wrong with his hearing. His brother, Henry, lets him know with certainty: “Of course he said ‘Bastard.’” And more: “You killed him, Nathan,” Henry cries, furious and weeping. “He’d seen what you had done to him and Mother in that book!” To make his conundrum worse, Nathan admits that he knew what his father would feel, even while he was writing the book, “but he’d written it anyway.” And now he no longer has a father, and his brother will not speak to him. Except for his half-crushed mother, he has lost his closest human ties. It’s a harrowing ending for a comedy, and so credibly related to Roth’s own experience that one interviewer, walking into the trap, asked Roth to discuss the deathbed scene in relation to the death of his own father. Roth pounced, replying that “the best person to ask about the autobiographical relevance of the climactic death of the father in ‘Zuckerman Unbound’” would be none other than his father, Herman Roth, then alive and prospering in Elizabeth, New Jersey. (And, he might have added, still handing out self-signed copies of Roth’s books.) Roth concluded helpfully, “I’ll give you his phone number.”

  In the spring of 1981, just as Zuckerman Unbound was released, to lukewarm reviews—in The New York Times, Anatole Broyard found it “reasonably funny, reasonably sad, reasonably interesting”—Bess Roth died suddenly of a heart attack. Roth was in London at the time. He had talked to his mother that morning; it was a Sunday, and he called his parents every Sunday morning. She had been in good spirits if not in the best health, and he had told her teasingly that he expected to take her on a mile-long walk with him in the Connecticut countryside that summer, when his parents came for their usual visit. In fact, she died at dinnertime, after taking a long and tiring walk with his father. Writing about her death a few years later (in Patrimony), Roth speculated rather touchingly that she might well “have gone off that afternoon hoping to begin to prepare herself for our summer stroll.” The words convey not guilt but his desire to be a presence in her final acts—to have provided her with some happy anticipation. He got the news that night and flew back the next day. But he had missed his chance to be with her at the end, and it remained a vivid loss.

  * * *

  “When he is sick, every man wants his mother” are the first words of The Anatomy Lesson, published in 1983. And Nathan Zuckerman was now very sick. Just the year before, Roth himself had received a diagnosis of “significant” coronary artery disease. He was forty-nine years old and had no history—or symptoms—of heart problems. The blockages were found on a routine exam. He had experienced a number of physical troubles over the years: the back injury that still flared up from time to time; the appendicitis that had almost killed him in his thirties; and, more recently, a long bout of neck and shoulder pain that had never been successfully diagnosed. Such experiences had forced him into an acute awareness of his body and how to care for it. He was thin, he exercised regularly, he didn’t smoke. But because his doctors insisted that surgery was too dangerous, and the medication they prescribed caused impotence as an immediate side effect, he decided to try a less effective medication, work even harder at keeping himself fit, and take his chances. He told almost no one about the diagnosis, aside from Bloom and his brother and the executors of his will. But he began to say to friends that he did not expect to live long.

  The Anatomy Lesson is about pain. Pain and writing. Pain and not writing. Real physical pain that has taken over your life and that has no explanation and no apparent remedy. Also about the pain of having written a book that killed your father and made your innocent mother’s life a hell, until she—Mrs. Zuckerman, that is—died, too, just a year after Zuckerman’s father, in 1970. It is now 1973, the Watergate hearings are on TV, and Nixon is the only other man in the country in as much trouble as Zuckerman. Four years have passed since his father’s curse, and he hasn’t written a thing. Three years since his mother’s death. For a year and a half now, he has had excruciating pain in his neck and shoulders and arms, starting behind his right ear and branching downward from the scapula like a menorah held upside down. The pain is so bad that he cannot sit at a desk, or carry groceries, or think about anything much except the pain. He’s made the round of doctors. One of the orthopedists says that it is the result of twenty years of hammering away at a manual portable typewriter—his beloved Olivetti—but his new IBM Selectric doesn’t help. An osteopath says that he’s been warping his spinal column ever since he learned to write, left-handed and twisting around to keep from smearing the ink, when he was seven years old. A psychiatrist, whom he walks out on, says it is clearly a result of guilt—from that book. Holding any physical position that allows him to write is excruciating (and dictation is impossible; he needs to see his sentences). The pain abates somewhat when he stops trying to write, but the simple fact is that without writing Zuckerman has no reason to exist.

  The Anatomy Lesson begins as a comedy, and even as it grows dark and devastatingly sad, you can’t stop laughing. The conclusion of the opening sentence, about how a sick man wants his mother, is “if she’s not around, other women must do.” In his illness, Zuckerman has four women, arriving and departing in shifts, bringing him food and servicing him sexually or saving time by doing both at once. This is the first of the Zuckerman books to show him sexually engaged, although he is far from active in the process, lying on his back on the floor on a plastic mat, with a thesaurus carefully placed beneath his head for support and relief. (The thesaurus makes an especially dispiriting contrast with the volume of Henry James that he placed beneath his feet back at the Lonoffs’, in the heedless youth of his own volume one.) He is hardly more capable of motion than Roth’s earlier unmanned hero, the six-foot breast. Yet he’s been reduced so far that sex, at the start of the book, is all he has. Another cause for ironic despair: the pain has erased the crucial distinction that Zuckerman has been struggling to make, since the publication of his book, between his sex-obsessed hero and himself.

  Sometimes he thinks that the pain is a result of the loss of his mother, even though she didn’t have the impact on him that his forceful father had, and his memories of her have become principally—in a lovely phrase—“a breast, then a lap, then a fading voice ca
lling after him, ‘Be careful.’” Selma Zuckerman lived quietly and died that way, of a brain tumor, misdiagnosed until it offered an unmistakable manifestation, in her own single parting word:

  Her first time in the hospital, the doctors diagnosed a minor stroke, nothing to leave her seriously impaired; four months later, when they admitted her again, she was able to recognize her neurologist when he came by the room, but when he asked if she would write her name for him on a piece of paper, she took the pen from his hand and instead of “Selma” wrote the word “Holocaust,” perfectly spelled.

  This incident takes place in 1970 in Miami Beach, the word “Holocaust” inscribed by a woman who almost certainly never spoke it aloud, and whose previous writings consisted of thank-you notes, recipe cards, and knitting instructions. “But she had a tumor in her head the size of a lemon, and it seemed to have forced out everything except the one word,” Zuckerman notes. “It must have been there all the time without their even knowing.”

  This inventive little parable was not invented. Roth tells me that he heard the story from his longtime editor and friend Aaron Asher. It had happened during the hospitalization of Asher’s mother, a European Jew who had immigrated to America in the late thirties—unlike the fictional Mrs. Zuckerman, who had grown up safe and unthreatened in New Jersey. But the moral of the tale applies to both women; in fact, that is the moral of the tale. Roth, when questioned about this scene in an interview in the London Times after the book’s release in England, explained that for American Jews the Holocaust is “simply there, hidden, submerged, emerging, disappearing, unforgotten.” Without this word, he said—that is, without the event it represents—“there would be no Nathan Zuckerman, not in Zuckerman’s fix,” nor would there be a “father and his deathbed curse.” If one could somehow obliterate this history, “none of these Zuckerman books would exist.” Nathan takes the piece of paper from the doctor, folds it up, and puts it in his wallet. When the interviewer asked Roth why Nathan doesn’t throw it away, he replied, “Who can? Who has?”

  Yet Zuckerman does not believe that he has anything to write about. His parents are gone, Newark is gone. Even his wives are gone. Not that any of these things appeal to him as subject matter anymore; not that any of them seem important. He has been trying to write, instead, about the life of one of his girlfriends, an acerbic Polish émigrée who stops by to drink his wine and have a little sex and complain about the fact that he considers her a “subject,” which he does, although without success. As he explains this literary failure to himself:

  You don’t want to represent her Warsaw—it’s what her Warsaw represents that you want: suffering that isn’t semi-comical, the world of massive historical pain instead of this pain in the neck. War, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, literature on which the fate of a culture hinges, writing at the very heart of the upheaval, a martyrdom more to the point—some point, any point—than bearing the cocktail-party chitchat as a guest on Dick Cavett. Chained to self-consciousness. Chained to retrospection. Chained to my dwarf drama till I die.

  Tempting as it is to impute these feelings to the author, it should be noted that Roth, in his Paris Review interview, in 1984, made exactly the opposite point, deriding the presumed literary advantages of writers in the kind of oppressive system that he had seen up close in Czechoslovakia: “That system doesn’t make masterpieces; it makes coronaries, ulcers, and asthma, it makes alcoholics, it makes depressives, it makes bitterness and desperation and insanity.” He expressed no doubt about his preference for “our extensive, lively, national literature,” even with its trivializing problems. But this rational and hard-won view, voiced by a fifty-year-old writer with real experience of both systems, lacks the exasperated comedy, the wild solipsism, and the sheer self-satire that are the essence of Zuckerman. Roth’s enduringly provocative creature—a protagonist, after all, as well as a writer—has never been to Warsaw (or to Prague), doesn’t know what he is talking about, is hopped up on pain medication, and is increasingly delusional as he works himself into a tailspin.

  The Anatomy Lesson won high critical praise. In The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it a “rich, satisfyingly complex conclusion” to the Zuckerman trilogy, and John Updike, in a detailed review in The New Yorker, called it “a ferocious, heartfelt book” in which “the central howl unrolls with a meditated savagery both fascinating and repellent, self-indulgent yet somehow sterling, adamant, pure in the style of high modernism.” Yet the book was also criticized, even by its admirers—like Updike, with his “self-indulgent”—for what Lehmann-Haupt termed Zuckerman’s “endless self-absorption and scab-picking.” The outstanding evidence of these unpleasant traits was generally found in Zuckerman’s unrelenting rage against a literary critic who has attacked his work. (“Someone said that a friend had seen him walking in Cambridge with a cane. From kidney stones? Hooray.”) When Zuckerman isn’t focused on his pain or his harem, it is this critic—whose offending article he has nearly memorized, as in school he memorized “Annabel Lee”—who occupies his thoughts.

  Although Roth gave this eminent Jewish critic the name Milton Appel, his real-world identity as Irving Howe was, in the words of William Gass, “hidden like a lamppost in the living room.” Biographically, Appel was virtually identical with Howe: the son of impoverished Yiddish-speaking parents and a member of the old Partisan Review group, Appel had lavishly praised Zuckerman’s Goodbye, Columbus–like first book, finding his portrait of materialistic American Jews almost too documentarily exact. But he had turned against Zuckerman after Carnovsky, claiming to find the very same figures an offensive caricature, “twisted out of human recognition” by Zuckerman’s hostility to Jews. According to Zuckerman, Appel’s attack upon his career “made Macduff’s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical.” Appel did not merely decapitate him—“a head wasn’t enough for Appel”—but tore him “limb from limb.”

  There may be other aspects of Roth’s relation to Howe that were less recognizable. Appel has edited an anthology of Yiddish fiction—very like Howe’s landmark 1954 anthology, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg)—that Zuckerman, in his early twenties, had found exhilarating, as a rebellious act and a stand against “the snobbish condescension of those famous departments of English literature from whose impeccable Christian ranks the literary Jew, with his mongrelized speech and caterwauling inflections, had until just yesterday been pointedly excluded.” Zuckerman had even been inspired to attempt to learn Yiddish, if only for about six weeks. During Roth’s first year in Chicago, in 1954, he too spent a number of weeks bent over a Yiddish grammar book and English–Yiddish dictionary, bought secondhand, equally inspired if no more tenacious than his hero. Roth, learning Yiddish?

  Clearly, the critic’s attack had been a terrific blow because he was so important to the writer. Zuckerman frequently rereads one of Appel’s old Partisan Review essays, about the inevitable conflict between coarse-grained old-style Jewish fathers and their bookish American sons, to console himself for his fights with his own father. But if there is any instigating reality behind Roth’s depiction of a father repudiating his son because of what he has written, it came not from Herman Roth but from Irving Howe.

  Still, Zuckerman’s tirades about Appel were intensely annoying to many critics, particularly since the Howe connection made the anger seem not merely Zuckerman’s but Roth’s. (Roth was not known for silently enduring critical malfeasance. Nearly a decade earlier, in 1974, he had excoriated Lehmann-Haupt, not because of a bad review—the Times critic loved Portnoy’s Complaint—but because of what Roth described, in The New York Review of Books, as a lack of “any critical standards, criteria, or position that it is possible to take seriously,” a prose style “no longer even acceptable in high school book reports,” and a general level of consideration that was “an insult to the community of American writers.” Heckling the reigning Times critic would become something of a Roth specialty.) Even Updike
was now advising that, by the age of fifty—Updike was fifty-one, a year older than Roth—“a writer should have settled his old scores.” Others complained of Roth’s vengefulness and even of “blood on the page.”

  In conversation, Roth defends himself by pointing out that “I was depicting a writer—and what is more characteristic than rage against a critic?” What is more characteristic of any artist? The painter Philip Guston, Roth reports, “was enraged for life by Hilton Kramer.” Updike, in his own series of books about a writer, Henry Bech, giddily abandoned his superior indifference to critics. In the satire Bech Noir, written in 1998, Updike’s seventy-four-year-old alter ego murders four of the offending creatures, whose decades-old attacks he remembers word for word. (“The thought of him dead,” Updike writes of one critic, “filled Bech with creamy ease.”) The striking fact about Roth’s equally satirical hero is that he is not nearly as successful against his foes.

  Zuckerman’s deathless fury has been reignited by Appel’s suggestion that he write an op-ed essay for the Times in support of Israel, since 1973 was the year not only of Watergate but of the Yom Kippur War. Appel, deeply worried about Israel’s future, feels that Zuckerman can reach people beyond his own more limited sphere. “And what kinds of people are they?” Zuckerman shoots back, having telephoned Appel precisely to release his rage and so perhaps to ease his pain. “People like me who don’t like Jews? Or people like Goebbels who gas them?” The great surprise of the scene is that Appel, whom we have been prepared to think a curmudgeon, turns out to be reasonable, intelligent, and willing to put all differences aside for the larger cause. Zuckerman, on the other hand, is irrational, insulting, and—while extremely funny—barely capable of recognizing the existence of a cause larger than himself. The figure being mocked by the author is not Appel but Zuckerman, who, slamming down the phone, is in even more pain than before.