The subject at hand, one more time but with culminating force, is Art versus Life, morally speaking. The confrontation begins at Nathan’s funeral, where Henry silently endures a eulogy celebrating his brother’s art and “reckless comedy.” (As though recklessness were a good thing, as though art were the be-all and end-all.) It continues with Henry discovering the manuscript of Nathan’s latest book—The Counterlife, lacking only the chapter in which Henry discovers it—and realizing just how reckless Nathan has been: here is Henry’s real name, his wife’s name, his children’s names. Appalled at what he finds, Henry is also appalled at himself for stealing the pages from his dead brother’s desk. Driving home to New Jersey from Manhattan, he is still thinking about his brother as he stops at a Howard Johnson’s to dump the pages in the trash:
He was a Zulu, he thought, a pure cannibal, murdering people, eating people, without ever quite having to pay the price. Then something putrid was stinging his nostrils and it was Henry who was leaning over and violently beginning to retch, Henry vomiting as though he had broken the primal taboo and eaten human flesh—Henry, like a cannibal who out of respect for his victim, to gain whatever history and power is there, eats the brain and learns that raw it tastes like poison.
It’s a realm of emotion that Henry has never entered before: “quaking before the savagery of what he’d finally done and had wanted to do most of his life, to his brother’s lawless, mocking brain.” It’s a realm that Roth had never fully entered, either. The new worlds he had approached were making him see things in a different way. It’s a wretched finale for the Zuckerman family, with two parents dead and two brothers cannibalizing each other’s brains. Divorce, heart disease, pistols, the deadly politics of the Middle East: still, there’s nothing more devastating in Roth’s world than art.
Nathan and Henry Zuckerman were conceived as counterlives, and there is no autobiographical basis for their deadly opposition, any more than there was for Nathan’s dying, cursing father. (“Better scene, stronger medicine.”) Sandy Roth was the older brother, an advertising man, not a dentist, and most important, he was a loving presence in Philip’s life, quickly on the scene, especially in Philip’s older years, whenever he was needed. Yet Roth’s memories undoubtedly played some part in Henry’s and Nathan’s personal divisions: chafing constraint versus determined liberty, the conventional career versus the unconventional art. If there was a grain of sand in the Roth brothers’ relationship, it did have to do with art: Philip’s success versus Sandy’s unfulfilled hopes—Sandy began painting again only after his retirement. Roth now says that Sandy rarely mentioned his books, not out of a Henry-like resentment but out of a feeling that he didn’t have the language to discuss them. (Henry declines to speak at Nathan’s funeral, because he believes that “Nathan had got the monopoly on words.”) There was a time in their young manhood, Roth writes in The Facts, when his “disdain” for the “advertising man’s point of view” must have been as clear to Sandy as Sandy’s uneasiness around intellectual types—whom he suspected of mere pretension—was to him. Philip loves classical music; Sandy hated it, Philip tells me, “because he felt they were trying to put something over on him.” There is nothing very important in these fraternal differences, except in the way that the novelist put them to use.
A memory is a living fact. The writer seizes it only to pass it on to the imagination—“the butcher, imagination,” in Roth’s words, “pitiless, brutal and cruel”—which then enacts a process that, according to Roth, is even more gruesome than that of Henry eating Nathan’s brain: “It clubs the fact over the head, quickly it slits the throat, and then, with its bare hands, it pulls out the guts.” Only then does the imagination return the fact to the mind, in “a dripping mass of eviscerated factuality.” Roth was explaining the art of writing fiction, on accepting the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife, in April 1988. Speaking about the imagination, and sounding rather like Henry, he assured the audience, “You wouldn’t want it as a friend.”
Several facts of Roth’s experiences as a Jew in London—a Jew who looked like a Jew and, increasingly, felt like a Jew—were processed for The Counterlife. (He grew an assertively rabbinical beard in these years, quite deliberately, as much as to say, “Bring it on.”) There was the way that Israel was denounced, almost as a matter of course, at literary and liberal-minded dinner parties, where Roth heard Israelis loosely compared to Nazis. There was the way that people in public places lowered their voices when they said the very word “Jew,” as though it were a kind of curse. (Roth’s immediate response, he says, was to yell “Shit!” as loudly as he could.) There were insulting clichés on television, and a newspaper cartoon he particularly remembers, showing Menachem Begin standing atop a pile of bodies with a “What, me worry?” gesture. Back in the late sixties, when he took his very blond girlfriend, Ann Mudge, to dine at the Connaught, a dowager at a nearby table had complained loudly of a bad smell while staring pointedly at him. Amazingly, there was another incident in a restaurant years later, when he was dining with Claire Bloom—she also tells the story in her book—and a woman at an adjacent table began to talk, loudly, about having bought a ring from “a little Jew” who had “naturally” cheated her. (In each instance, Roth got up and told the woman off.) Added together, such experiences suggested a connection between Israel and London that became a central vision of the book. The extremism of the Israeli settlers—who seemed half-mad to a secular American Jew—is a result of the kind of anti-Semitism that the same American Jew encounters, to his shock, in London. Roth had located something in England to hate, a most productive poison.
It wasn’t as though he hadn’t known about anti-Semitism at home. There had been no secrets during his childhood about the outspoken hatred of American giants such as Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Coughlin, whose weekly radio show used to make Roth’s father apoplectic. There had been his father’s personal handicap in climbing the corporate ladder, the attacks on Jewish kids by boys yelling “Kikes!” that Philip himself had witnessed, and a college fraternity system that he later described as “tightly segregated.” But this was distant thunder, part of a nearly historic past and nothing like the personal anti-Semitism that he experienced as an adult—“to my face” and “against my flesh,” he says—in London.
A couple of these experiences went directly into the book: the fashionable dinner party remarks about Israel and “appalling Zionism,” the woman in the restaurant complaining of the smell. No need to slit the throats of these facts to spill their guts. What Roth did not know and never claimed to know, however, was how widespread or systemic these noxious currents were. His English friends insisted that he was being overly sensitive, making too much of the remarks of a few hotheads or plainly crazy people, and that anti-Semitism was not a problem in England. Roth felt vindicated—if not, in this instance, happily so—when Martin Amis, reviewing The Counterlife in The Atlantic Monthly and “writing in my capacity as an Englishman,” stated that Roth had got it right, exposing “a phenomenon that is really there” and that remained “something like a dirty habit of privilege,” although he believed it was in retreat.
In The Counterlife, Roth makes the problem much worse for Nathan (of course) by bringing anti-Semitism into the heart of his new family. Nathan’s lovely, pregnant wife is as fragrantly English as Portnoy’s blondes were sturdily American. Languid, “deliciously civilized,” and able to quote John Donne with ease, Maria Freshfield grew up amid the mists and meadows and decaying gentlefolk of Gloucestershire. (Roth lifted the name “Freshfield” from Milton’s “Lycidas,” and if he got the line slightly wrong—it reads, “Tomorrow to fresh woods,” not fresh fields—he’s in good company; it’s been called one of the most often misquoted lines in English poetry.) Roth’s heroine was based on his secret English lover at the time, although, for understandable reasons, he claimed that she was based on a lover from the years before he had met Bloom, the American but Oxford-educated writer Jane
t Hobhouse. He shifted the locale of the affair to his New York apartment, appropriate to his time with Hobhouse, but preserved the real woman’s ensnaring seductiveness of speech—“those gently inflected English ups and downs.” Nathan has barely a word to say about his lover’s face or legs or breasts, but he’s willing to risk surgery and put his life on the line for “a finely calibrated relative clause.” Maria is the ideal English maiden, and she comes equipped with a viciously anti-Semitic sister and a mother no less biased, if better controlled.
The crisis arrives in the final chapter, titled “Christendom,” which opens with a Christmas caroling service in a West End church. Nathan, attending the service with Maria’s family, starts out by feeling like a spy, “Jewishly” suspicious of the Disneyland manger and the notion of resurrection. And he ends up being utterly stunned by a “hymn of hate” that is spewed at him by his sister-in-law: “It must be terribly worrying whether you’re going suddenly to forget yourself, bare your teeth, and cut loose with the ethnic squawk.” She concludes with a warning that he’d better not “stand in the way of a christening” for his and Maria’s as yet unborn child.
In short, London—that is, “Christendom”—makes Nathan Zuckerman more of a Jew in eight short weeks than he had ever been before:
A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
And a Jew with a sudden, imperative plan to have his future son circumcised, although he had dismissed the idea in Israel just days earlier. Now, however, it seems a necessary acknowledgment of his history, a repudiation of the demands of Christendom, and a sign of the difference he knows that he will never be allowed to forget.
But what if Nathan has made it all up? The mother’s intolerance, the sister’s anti-Semitic tirade—what if nothing unpleasant happened at that carol service? What if the service didn’t even happen in England but in some long-ago time, with another Christian wife, in New York? What if the fiction is really fiction? Maria, sneaking into Nathan’s apartment shortly after Henry leaves, reads the final chapter of The Counterlife—all that Henry has left behind—and is shocked to find her family grossly maligned. The conclusion is obvious: Nathan was brought up “ringed round by all that Jewish paranoia,” and “there was something in him that twisted everything.” The hatred was not her sister’s but his own. Or, as she comes to think by the time she writes her farewell letter to him, being a Jew had simply become too easy, and a life without horrible difficulties “is inimical to the writer you are. You actually like to take things hard. You can’t weave your stories otherwise.” He needed her family to be anti-Semitic so that he could write the hate-filled book that she is now escaping in disgust. But the book ends with something like a hymn of love, from Nathan to Maria, imploring her to return, and to recognize that all the life they can ever have is in these pages.
The Counterlife was widely greeted as a great success. In The New York Times Book Review, William Gass compared it to Haydn’s Surprise Symphony and wrote, “I hope it felt, as Mr. Roth wrote it, like a triumph, because that is certainly how it reads to me.” Martin Amis called it the fulfillment of Roth’s early promise, although he believed the achievement had less to do with structural ingenuity than with the suitably immense and contentious subject of Israel. There were objections to the book’s religious content, but for the first time in Roth’s career, they did not come from Jews. John Updike, in The New Yorker, offered a mixture of celebration and irritation, pronouncing the book a “performance to cap performances,” albeit of themes he had wearied of several books before. Zuckerman’s trouble with the carol service seemed to hit a particularly painful nerve. (“Christmas carols! Christianity at its absolute sweetest!!”) (Yes, those are two exclamation points.) And Updike reached near Rothian levels of comic dismay in comparing Zuckerman’s paean to circumcision with “a richly nuanced plea, in a novel by a Kikuyu, in favor of tribal scars and clitoridectomy, or an old Chinese poem hymning the symbolic beauty of bound feet.”
It isn’t entirely surprising to find these criticisms from the creator of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, a character for whom an implicitly mystic faith and an explicitly uncircumcised penis are life’s primary motivating forces. Rabbit’s story had extended by this time over a sequence of three books; the most recent, Rabbit Is Rich, published in 1981, had won all the major American literary prizes and had established Rabbit as an emblematic American mid-twentieth-century man. A onetime high school athlete, a car salesman, a father, a WASP, a close reader of nothing deeper than Consumer Reports, Rabbit is a man as mired in ordinary life as Zuckerman is not, and as Zuckerman imagines that he longs to be. Updike seems to agree that the root of the self-conscious singularity that makes Zuckerman less than representative—less of a Rabbit-like lens for seeing the wider culture—is that he is a writer.
“Who cares what it’s like to be a writer?” Updike asks, speaking up for Henry the dentist, the kind of plain-guy hero Updike much preferred, and urging Roth to rid himself of Nathan. Of course, Updike had also written books with a Jewish writer-hero, Henry Bech. (Why a Jewish writer? In order to be as different from Updike himself as possible, Updike said, and because “a Jewish writer is almost as inevitable as an Italian gangster.”) Bech is far less three-dimensional than Rabbit—or, for that matter, than Zuckerman—but whether this is because he is a writer is impossible to say. Oddly, Bech’s attitude toward Christendom is harsher than anything Zuckerman comes up with: “Being among the goyim frightened Bech, in truth,” Updike wrote in Bech Is Back, in 1982; “their collective chill was the chill of devils.” Bech, too, spends time in London but has no distressing experiences there. (Does this make Bech less paranoid? Updike less paranoid? Or just less likely to be picked out and insulted in restaurants?) Unlike Martin Amis, Updike concludes that Roth’s account of British anti-Semitism is “too bald and savage” and, as he notes that Maria observes, is really a testament to Nathan’s inner violence and aggression. It’s hard to know whether one is delving deeper or just going around and around to point out that Maria’s observations about Nathan’s inner violence were written by Nathan and, ultimately, by Roth.
Mary McCarthy also praised the book’s early sections and, particularly, its Israel chapter, but she, too, halted at the gates of “Christendom.” Roth had great respect for McCarthy’s opinion. (“She was a heroine to me,” he says today. “She had a terrific critical sharpness; she could be dead wrong, but she was never unclear.”) Her name appears twice in Goodbye, Columbus, and McCarthy’s on-the-couch short story, “Ghostly Father, I Confess,” published in 1942, is an interesting psychiatric predecessor to Portnoy. Roth recalls having met her at Elizabeth Hardwick’s years before; he had seen her a couple of times more recently in Paris, where she lived, and had sent her an early copy of The Counterlife. As one would expect, McCarthy states her objections straight out: “I bridle at your picture of Christianity,” she writes. (Both her letter and Roth’s response appear in Shop Talk.) Although she neither believes in God nor considers herself a Christian in anything but upbringing, McCarthy is “irritated and offended” by his London scenes. “There’s more to Christmas, that is, to the idea of the Incarnation, than Jew-hatred,” she informs him, and as for Christmas caroling, outsiders should try to get the general idea, “as I hope I would try to get the idea of the Wailing Wall, repellent as it is to me, if I were taken to it.” She closes by mentioning that she had last seen a mutual friend, Leon Botstein, at a Christmas carol sing in New York.
Thanking her graciously, Roth reminds her that Zuckerman behaves very well at the carol service—no differently from the way she would behave at the Wailing Wall—and he disputes any implication that the Incarnation is presented as being exclusively about Jew-hatred. Zuckerman is well aware, Roth writes, that his thoughts in church “are determined by his Jewishness and nothing more.” Moreover, Roth explains that he wrote the L
ondon scenes in relation to the scenes in the West Bank settlement and in reaction to the skepticism that Zuckerman feels there; if not for this desired contrast, he would not have written the scene in the church at all. Roth’s explanation to McCarthy seems a remarkable change from his literary past—a maturation? a softening? He concludes by telling her that he balanced the book this way because he did not want all of Zuckerman’s skepticism to be “focused on Jewish ritual and none of it on Christian. That would have had all the wrong implications and made him seem what he is not, and that is a self-hating Jew.”
You Mustn’t Forget Anything
By the mid-eighties, life in London was beginning to pall. Roth’s English lover had broken off their affair; unlike Maria Freshfield, the real woman chose to remain with her husband, although she telephoned Roth, after The Counterlife appeared, to say that she was displeased not with her portrait but with being unable to take proper credit for it. On another front, Roth’s friendship with Harold Pinter had deteriorated badly in the wake of Pinter’s political radicalization over U.S. actions in Nicaragua. Roth, hardly a supporter of Ronald Reagan, tells stories of Pinter yelling in his face, “Your president, Ronald Reagan,” and continuing with a string of accusations. “I told him, ‘I don’t want to argue about Reagan, I don’t represent him,’” Roth explains, but Pinter was unrelenting, and Roth is not one to back down when he feels he’s attacked unjustly. (Nor, it’s clear, was Pinter.) However much Roth may have loathed certain American policies, he says now, “I didn’t agree with him that America was the scourge of the world.” To Roth, Pinter’s anti-Americanism “wasn’t even a matter of politics; it became a theology.” There were shouting matches between the men, at dinner at the Pinters’ home and even in restaurants. Roth remembers an evening when he and Pinter were “on our feet, arguing chin to chin,” and he could see Alfred Brendel, seated nearby, holding his hands together tightly, as though in fear that “we were going to start throwing punches and someone might land on his hands.”
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 19
