Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  For those who are wondering, Roth and Howe never had such a conversation, although Howe had indeed suggested that Roth write something about Israel, in 1973, just a year after his critical attack, and Roth had responded by writing Howe a letter that was less than cheerfully compliant. In the late seventies, in an interview in The New York Times Book Review, Roth was still lamenting the critic’s original change of heart. (“He was a real reader.”) He couldn’t know that, in the same years, Howe was thinking about writing a “fresh and affirmative” new essay on Roth’s work—in the words of Howe’s biographer, Gerald Sorin, based on information originating with Howe’s wife. (Sorin wonders if Roth’s Kafka story, with its loving Jewish family, played a part in Howe’s desire to recant his charges. In any case, Howe never wrote the essay.) In 1983, the year of The Anatomy Lesson, the two men spoke briefly—with perfect civility, Roth emphasizes—as members of a jury at the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a few years later, Roth asked Howe to write an introduction to one of his Writers from the Other Europe volumes (George Konrád’s The Case Worker). They never discussed their earlier conflict. Yet Roth reports, with unmistakable satisfaction, that a mutual friend, Bernard Avishai, told him that when Howe was dying, in the early nineties, he said to Avishai, “I was wrong about your friend Roth.”

  As for Updike, he noted in his review that it was unfair to complain about the book’s “frenzied solipsism”—however much it irked—since “frenzied solipsism” is what the book is all about. At bottom, indeed, this is the essence of Nathan’s illness, as Nathan himself comes to see it: the source of the pain. It’s the pain of being a writer. Sick of everything about his vocation—the hours and years alone, the use of people as material, the long habit of “starving myself of experience and eating only words”—Nathan is sick of himself. But, of course, it isn’t only writers who get caught in the trap of the self; there’s something here for everyone. And, as Nathan shows, the tighter the lid of the self is fastened—and Nathan’s lid is screwed down very tight—the more crazily exhilarating is the prospect of release.

  Seeking escape from his pain with the aid of Percodan and vodka and a little pot, he decides to apply to medical school and become a doctor. It was Nathan Zuckerman, after all, who heard the roaring voice of the Hun battering across the snowy fields to tell E. I. Lonoff, tapping out a twenty-seventh draft, that he must change his life. Lonoff was deaf to the voice, but Zuckerman will heed it. He will give up writing. He will help other people. (“Other people. Somebody should have told me about them a long time ago.”) He’s spent enough time in doctors’ waiting rooms; how hard could it be?

  Nathan flies to Chicago to consult an old college friend about medical school, while continuing to self-medicate and self-obsess. And The Anatomy Lesson hurtles inward with him at breathtaking speed. On the plane, flying at even higher personal altitudes, he convinces the man in the adjacent seat that he’s a professional pornographer named Milton Appel. (As a career alternative, it makes a good deal more sense than medical school.) The irrationality of his plan is something that Nathan is forced to confront when he sees his friend, who is now an anesthesiologist at the university hospital and the kind of solid and beneficent presence that Nathan longs to be. It’s a relief to have this calmly authoritative voice challenge Nathan’s brilliant lunacy; it’s a relief to feel the book crack open to admit any other meaningful voice. But there’s no stopping Nathan’s trajectory toward implosion—even as the voices from outside multiply, and it starts to snow.

  The most stirring voice turns out to be, not surprisingly, an elderly Jewish man of the sort who often walks away with Roth’s books—although this one, Mr. Freytag, is a far more fragile figure than the various incarnations of Herman Roth. The father of Nathan’s friend and a recent widower, he cannot get over the loss of his wife. From the moment Nathan lays eyes on him, we enter a world that is part Marx Brothers and part Beckett:

  On the front steps, in fur hat, storm coat, and buckled black galoshes, an old man was trying to sweep away the snow. It was falling heavily now, and as soon as he got to the bottom step, he had to start again at the top. There were four steps and the old man kept going up and down them with his broom.

  For Nathan, downing his third Percodan of the day and emptying his Tiffany flask, snow recalls childhood and coming home from school. Snow means being protected, loved, and obedient—all the lost feelings that preceded the onset of audacity, doubt, and pain. Snow, which returns the reader to the lyric world of The Ghost Writer, is also the reason that Nathan is visiting Mr. Freytag: he has come to take him to visit his wife’s grave before the storm buries her a second time.

  In the old man’s empty house and then in a long black rented hearse-like limo, the sorrowing widower and the motherless son carry on a quiet duet about the woman each has lost, the old man supplying the keening lines and Nathan the steady refrain:

  “A woman who for herself wanted nothing.”

  “Mine too.” …

  “She was my memory.”

  “Mine too.”

  Then through the cemetery gates, to a Jewish burial ground backed by a sinisterly smoking building—it’s only a factory, but the oncoming storm gives it the look of something much worse—where the two men walk out on the whitening path together. And where all hell breaks loose, as the old man launches into a tirade about his delinquent grandson, and Nathan’s mind gives way completely. Furiously attacking “the last of the fathers demanding to be pleased,” he struggles in his stupor to get his hands around the old man’s throat—“Freytag! Forbidder! Now I murder you!”—sliding after him through a world obliterated by whirling snow, and finally keels over headfirst onto a tombstone.

  The scene is a phantasmagorical tour de force, the underlying tragedy entirely unimpeded by the slapstick. It gives way to a sudden and equally disturbing calm: a quiet and exacting coda in which Zuckerman, waking in the hospital, is unable to speak a word. He has fractured his jaw; a doctor comes to wire it shut. In an interview in The Nation in 1985, Roth was asked about the curiously metaphorical state in which his hero finds himself, and he began by shrugging off the question: “He breaks his jaw falling on a tombstone in a Jewish cemetery, after overdosing on painkillers and booze. What’s so metaphorical about that? Happens all the time.” But on reconsideration, he admitted that he had been thinking of the rabbi who, back in the fifties, had written to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, demanding, “What is being done to silence this man?” He’d remembered that line while he was finishing the book. “And that’s why I broke Zuckerman’s jaw,” Roth concluded. “I did it for the rabbi.”

  Nathan can no longer talk; but, more important, he no longer feels the need. Wandering through the hospital in his robe and slippers, trailing the doctors on their rounds like a kind of mascot, he needs only to listen and to look—at suffering such as he has never seen or heard before. The surgeries. The cancers. (“You look green, Doctor,” a doctor tells him, laughing. “Maybe you’re better off sticking to books.”) The resurgent hopes that are quickly followed by death. The pain. “And always the enemy was wicked and real,” he thinks. He is humbled and abashed, perhaps even ennobled. Yet that doesn’t mean that he can escape his own particular and solitary fate: his “future as a man apart,” as he puts it, or—in a brilliant double entendre, which closes the book with the precision of a jeweler’s clasp—“the corpus that was his.”

  * * *

  The Prague Orgy brings Nathan, at last, to the story that Roth originally wanted to tell: a wealthy and celebrated American writer, the beneficiary of all that the rather tawdry system offers, comes face-to-face with the poverty and persecution of his Czech contemporaries. But Nathan has not come to Prague to help the writers. In a new Jamesian turn, he is trying to get hold of a manuscript, the unpublished stories of a Czech Jew who wrote in Yiddish and was killed under the Nazis, and who is said to have been (here James verges on Borges) the Yiddish Flaubert. As in The Aspern Papers, the manu
script is in the possession of a woman who doesn’t wish to give it up. But this woman, named Olga, is unlike anyone in Henry James: “All the great international figures come to Prague to see our oppression, but none of them will ever fuck me,” she complains. “What will save Czechoslovakia would be to fuck Olga.”

  Roth’s knowledge of the city had deepened since The Professor of Desire. He’s not a tourist anymore. Prague is a great deal more than Kafka. The Czech writers whom Nathan meets in his bugged hotel room or in their squalid quarters are sardonic, desperate, and full of stories. (“They, silenced, are all mouth,” Nathan thinks, “I am only ears—and plans.”) Roth draws on his personal experiences: Ivan Klíma’s explanation to the police that Roth came to Prague “for the girls” is the same one prepared by a Czech ally in case Zuckerman gets into trouble. And Roth attended parties of just the sort that give the book its title—if not quite the orgies that the participants liked to pretend, flouting their reputation for “virtuous political suffering,” then wild enough. As the persistent Olga points out, “To be fucked is the only freedom left in this country.” It should be noted that Zuckerman, to her frustration, keeps his pants on throughout.

  Roth also knew from experience the often voiced sensation that half the citizens of Prague were employed in spying on the other half. He was used to being followed, much of the time, by the obvious plainclothesmen, but it took him a while to realize that he was also being followed by an acquaintance, the well-known double agent Jiří Mucha—the son of the famous Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha and the host of the city’s biggest parties. Roth recalls that when they ran into each other on the far side of town one day, where Roth had gone—really, for once—to see a girl, he automatically exclaimed, “How strange to see you here!” And Mucha replied, “Not strange at all!” The fiction takes the relationship between spy and spied-upon one madcap step further: when a government-sanctioned hack is threatened with dismissal because his reports on a dissident writer are so ill-observed that they are useless, the dissident offers to write the reports himself. “I know what I do all day better than you,” he tells him. “And I can be rid of your company, you shitface.” The lesson, lost on no one, is that a good writer and a good spy require similar gifts.

  Roth’s accounts of life in Prague are piquant—like Olga, the city has a striking cynical pathos—although they amount to hardly more than a series of vignettes. The Prague Orgy is the briefest of the Zuckerman tales; it was published not independently but as an epilogue when the books were released in a single volume, Zuckerman Bound, in 1985. Although it was the initial impetus for these hundreds of pages, it came off merely as an afterthought, earning hardly any critical attention at all. Roth says that he sometimes wonders if he should have put the Prague section at the start of the Zuckerman volumes, where it might have had an impact and would have set the story of Zuckerman’s fame in a different light. “Conrad might have done it that way, set it on a freighter where he runs into someone telling him a story about Prague, before his own story begins.” But, even aside from the freighter, he says, “That’s not for me.” It may be significant that The Prague Orgy takes place in 1976, the last year that Roth was allowed into Czechoslovakia. By the time he got around to writing it, he’d been out of touch with the city for nine years, and his interests had moved elsewhere.

  The most affecting part of Roth’s account of Prague required hardly any experience at all, since it explains how the city evoked “the Jewish Atlantis” of Zuckerman’s childhood, when, during the worst years of the war, he collected nickels for the Jewish National Fund, to help establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It wasn’t Palestine, however, but Prague, with its old-time streetcars and blackened bridges and barren shops and medieval streets, that Zuckerman envisioned as the sort of place the Jews would buy with all those nickels: “a broken city, a city so worn and grim that nobody else would even put in a bid.” It’s a city where stories are always being told, on park benches and on line at the grocery, a city where everywhere people are telling “anxious tales of harassment and flight, stories of fantastic endurance and pitiful collapse.” Because stories—jokes, too—are “the form their resistance has taken,” just as they are “the national industry of the Jewish homeland.” Stories are what the Jewish people had, like the people in Prague today, “instead of life”; stories are what the people themselves become, “in lieu of being permitted to be anything else.” Small wonder that Roth can’t pry his storytelling and his Jewishness apart.

  It is ironic but hardly unexpected that when the American Jewish would-be savior of the works of the Yiddish Flaubert finally gets his hands on the stories, he cannot read a word of them. Even the triumph of obtaining them turns immediately to defeat when the Czech police seize the manuscript and force Zuckerman, ignominiously, to leave the country. “Another assault upon a world of significance degenerating into a personal fiasco,” he notes. Exit Zuckerman as a serious person, with accomplishments and sufferings that are serious, too. “No, one’s story isn’t a skin to be shed—it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood,” he reflects. “You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life.” If Roth seemed to be admitting the limitations that his critics had been chiding him for, he was also refusing to give ground.

  This is not the first time that Zuckerman has been thrown back upon himself, after all, in the pages of Zuckerman Bound. Bound indeed. Restrained, tied up, cramped, forced into ever deeper recesses of the self. Until, at last, there is a liberating explosion in Roth’s work, in which bits and pieces of Zuckerman—alive, for the most part, and fairly well—are scattered from chapter to chapter, life to life, fate to fate. Roth thought of calling this explosion The Metamorphosis, but the title was already taken. Instead, he went with The Counterlife.

  Cain to Your Abel, Esau to Your Jacob

  “You in England? The Jersey boy with the dirty mouth who writes the books Jews love to hate—how do you survive there? How can you stand the silence?” Nathan Zuckerman is visiting Israel when he is asked this series of questions by an old friend, an Israeli journalist who is shocked to hear that Nathan has moved to London. In terms of decorum—just for starters—Nathan is assured that Israel could not be more different from England. In this still new and much contested country, “it’s enough to live,” his Israeli friend explains; “you don’t have to do anything else and you go to bed exhausted.” Even in the outright matter of decibels, he adds, “Have you ever noticed that Jews shout? Even one ear is more than you need.” England and Israel in the late seventies are the immediately juxtaposed worlds of The Counterlife, which presents itself as a book about places—the chapter titles include “Gloucestershire” and “Judea”—although it is really about the ways that places affect people. As a novelist, Roth is more psychologist than poet, and by the mid-eighties he had put in decades as a kind of Kafka Domesticus, examining the traps that people build to live in. The Counterlife, published at the end of 1986, is an exhilarating culmination of the theme: a book about transformation, about what happens when people finally break free.

  Roth knew what that felt like. By the time he was writing The Counterlife, he was deep into his London life with Bloom—he usually remained in London through the winter months and returned to Connecticut in summer, when Bloom would come and go, depending on her professional commitments and her desire to be in London with her daughter. Roth, who tells me that he imagined E. I. Lonoff as the kind of wholly isolated man that he inevitably would have become had he stayed in Connecticut year-round, gives Bloom full credit for his deliverance from that fate. “Claire came along to take me out of that,” he says. “I don’t know whether it’s right to say she saved me, but she certainly changed things.” He adds with a smile, “You must change your life.” The most exciting of the changes, aside from the feeling that he had finally shed his identity as the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, was entering Bloom’s theatrical world.

  Now he was not only writing a
bout Chekhov or teaching Chekhov but getting his hands into the work, adapting a translation of The Cherry Orchard for a production at the Chichester Festival, in which Bloom played Madame Ranevskaya. He also wrote two more television plays for Bloom, one based on the Russian Jewish writer Eugenia Ginzburg’s memoir of her years in the Gulag, the other about the Dominica-born Welsh-Creole novelist Jean Rhys: two fascinatingly ethnic choices for “the English Rose,” about which Roth was extremely enthusiastic, although neither was produced. Roth, who speaks of his talent in terms of “the ability to perform, to dramatize,” loved being part of the process by which Bloom developed a role. Whether attending rehearsals—as he did for The Cherry Orchard—or going over lines, he was “as capable of getting worked up over her performances,” he reports, “as over my own writing.” He proudly recalls giving Bloom a key to her celebrated performance as Lady Marchmain in the 1981 British television film Brideshead Revisited: remembering a letter in which Chekhov tells his actress-wife (the original Madame Ranevskaya) that finding “a certain smile” will unlock a difficult role, Roth suggested that Bloom assume the enigmatic smile of their friend Antonia Fraser—Harold Pinter’s aristocratic wife, who also bore the honorific “Lady.” For him, this was a world of experiences to be relished: in her memoir, Bloom writes of Roth visiting her during the Brideshead filming, at Castle Howard, and joking about “this nice Jewish couple” staying in the enormous baroque palace. “Try not to feel the curtain fabric,” he told her, “and don’t ask how much per yard.”