The Anatomy Lesson

by Philip Roth

  Zuckerman felt no bigger than his topmost bald spot as he was led along a narrow white corridor into the clinic—a dozen curtained cubicles with plumbing, each just large enough to hold a trained trichological technician and a man losing his hair. Zuckerman was introduced to a small, delicate young woman in a white unbelted smock reaching to below her knees and a white bandanna that gave her the look of a stem and dedicated nun, a novice in a nursing order. Jaga was from Poland; her name, explained Anton, was pronounced with a “Y” but spelled with an initial “J.” Mr. Zuckerman, he told Jaga—”the well-known American writer”—was suffering premature hair loss.

  Zuckerman sat down before the mirror and contemplated his hair loss, while Anton elaborated on the treatment: white menthol ointment to strengthen the follicles, dark tar ointment to cleanse and disinfect, steamer to stimulate circulation, then fingertip massage, followed by Swedish electric massage and two minutes under the ultraviolet rays. To finish off, No. 7 dressing and fifteen drops of the special hormone solution, five to the hairline at each of the temples, five where it was thinnest at the crown. Zuckerman was to apply the drops himself every morning at home: the drops to promote growth and then, sparingly, the pink dressing to prevent splitting and breaking of the hair ends he had left. Jaga nodded, Anton bounded off to the lab with his pile of specimens, and in the cubicle his treatment began, recalling to Zuckerman a second Mann protagonist with whom he now shared a dubious affinity: Herr von Aschenbach, tinting his locks and rouging his cheeks in a Venetian barbershop.

  At the end of the hour session, Anton returned to guide Zuckerman back to the office. Facing each other across Anton’s desk, they discussed the laboratory results.

  “I have completed the microscopical examination of your hair and scalp scrapings. There is a condition which we call folliculitis simplex, which means there is clogging of the hair follicles. Over a period of time it has led to some loss of hair. Also, by robbing the hair of its natural sebum flow it has created dryness of the hair, with consequent breakage and splitting—which could lead to further loss of hair. I am afraid,” said Anton, attempting in no way to soften the blow, “that there are quite a lot of follicles of the scalp which are devoid of hair. I am hoping that with some at least the papilla is only impaired and not destroyed. In this case regrowth can take place to some extent, in those areas. But only time will give us the answer to this. However, apart from the empty follicles, I feel that the prognosis in your case is good and that, with correct regular treatment and your help, your hair and scalp should respond and be restored to a healthy condition. We should be able to stop the clogging, obtain a freer flow of sebum, and restore the elasticity to the hair; then it will grow strong once again, making the overall appearance quite a bit thicker. The most important thing is that the loss of hair must not be allowed to continue.”

  It was the longest, most serious, most detailed and thoughtful diagnosis that Zuckerman had ever got from anyone for anything he had suffered in his life. Certainly the most optimistic he had heard in the last eighteen months. He couldn’t remember ever having had a book reviewer who’d given a novel of his as full, precise, and accurate a reading as Anton had given his scalp. “Thank you, Anton,” Zuckerman said.

  “But.”

  “Yes?”

  “There is a but,” said Anton gravely.

  “What is it?”

  “What you do at home is just as important as what we do when you attend here for treatment. Number one, you must not drink to excess. You must stop this immediately. Number two, whatever is causing you undue pressure you must come to terms with. That there is undue pressure, I need no microscope to discover; Ihave only to look at you with my two eyes. Whatever it may be, you must eliminate it from your life. And quickly. Otherwise, Mr. Zuckerman, I must be honest with you: we are fighting a losing battle.”

  In the full-length mirror on his bathroom door, he saw at the start of each day a skinny old man holding Nathan’s pajamas: denuded scalp, fleshy hips, bony frame, softening belly. Eighteen months without his regular morning exercises and his long after-noon walks and his body had aged twenty years. Awakening as always promptly at eight, he worked now—worked with the same stubborn resolve with which formerly he could mount a morning-long assault on a single recalcitrant page—to fail back to sleep until noon. Steady, dogged, driven Zuckerman, unable ordinarily to go half an hour without reaching for a pad to write on or a book to underline, now with a bed sheet pulled over his head to shorten the time until evening, when he could hit the bottle. Self-regulating Zuckerman emptying another fifth, self-controlled Zuckerman sucking the last of a roach, self-sufficient Zuckerman helplessly clinging to his harem (enlarged to include his trichological technician). Anything to cheer him up or put him out.

  His comforters told him it was only tension and he should learn to relax. It was only loneliness and would disappear once he was back reading after dinner across from another worthy wife. They suggested that he was always finding new ways to be unhappy and didn’t know how to enjoy himself unless he was suffering. They agreed with the psychoanalyst that the pain was self-inflicted: penance for the popularity of Carnovsky, comeuppance for the financial bonanza—the enviable, comfortable American success story wrecked by the wrathful cells. Zuckerman was taking “pain” back to its root in poena, the Latin word for punishment: poena for the family portrait the whole country had assumed to be his, for the tastelessness that had affronted millions and the shamelessness that had enraged his tribe. The crippling of his upper torso was, transparently, the punishment called forth by his crime: mutilation as primitive justice. If the writing arm offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee. Beneath the ironic carapace of a tolerant soul, he was the most unforgiving Yahweh of them all. Who else could have written so blasphemously of Jewish moral suffocation but a self-suffocating Jew like Nathan? Yes, your illness is your necessity—that was the gist of it—and what prevents your recovery is you, you choosing to be incurable, you bullying into submission your own inbuilt will to be well. Unconsciously, Zuckerman was frightened of everything—another assumption generally accepted among his diagnosticians: frightened of success and frightened of failure: frightened of being known and frightened of being forgotten: frightened of being bizarre and frightened of being ordinary; frightened of being admired and frightened of being despised; frightened of being alone and frightened of being among people; frightened, after Carnovsky. of himself and his instincts, and frightened of being frightened. Cowardly betrayer of his verbal life—collaborator with the enemies of his filthy mouth. Unconsciously suppressing his talent for fear of what it’d do next.

  But Zuckerman wasn’t buying it. His unconscious wasn’t that unconscious. Wasn’t that conventional. His unconscious, living with a published writer since 1953, understood what the job entailed. He had great faith in his unconscious—he could never have come this far without it. If anything, it was tougher and smarter than he was, probably what protected him against the envy of rivals, or the contempt of mandarins, or the outrage of Jews, or the charge by his brother Henry that what had shocked their ailing father into his fatal coronary in 1969 was Zuckerman’s hate-filled, mocking best-seller. If the Morse code of the psyche was indeed being tapped out along the wires of physical pain, the message had to be more original than “Don’t ever write that stuff again.”

  Of course one could always interpret a difficulty like this as a test of character. But what was twenty years of writing fiction? He didn’t need his character tested. He already had enough obstinacy to last a lifetime. Artistic principles? Up to his ears in them. If the idea was to marshal still more grim determination in the face of prolonged literary labors, then his pain was sadly misinformed. He could accomplish that on his own. Doomed to it by the mere passage of mine. The resolute patience he already possessed made life more excruciating by the year. Another twenty like the last twenty and there’d be no frustration to challenge him.

  No, if the pain intended to accomplis
h something truly worthwhile, it would not be to strengthen his adamancy but to undo the stranglehold. Suppose there was the message flashing forth from a buried Nathan along the fibers of his nerves: Let the others write the books. Leave the fate of literature in their good hands and relinquish life alone in your room. It isn’t life and it isn’t you. It’s ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters. Some animal carrying on in the zoo like that and you’d think it was horrifying. “But surely they could hang a tire for him to swing on—at least bring in a little mate to roll around with him on the floor.” If you were to watch some certified madman groaning over a table in his little cell, observe him trying to make something sensible out of QWERTYUIOP, ASDFGHJKL, and ZXCVBNM, see him engrossed to the exclusion of ail else by three such nonsensical words, you’d be appalled, you’d clutch his keeper’s arm and ask, “Is there nothing to be done? No anti-hallucinogen? No surgical procedure?” But before the keeper could even reply, “Nothing—it’s hopeless,” the lunatic would be up on his feet, out of his mind, and shrieking at you through his bars: “Stop this infernal interference! Stop this shouting in my ears! How do I complete my life’s great work with all these gaping visitors and their noise!”

  Suppose pain had come, then, not to cut him down to size like Herbert’s “Lord,” or to teach him civility like Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly, or to make him into a Jew like Job, but to rescue Zuckerman from the wrong calling. What if pain was offering Zuckerman the best deal he’d ever had, a way out of what he should never have got into? The right to be stupid. The right to be lazy. The right to be no one and nothing. Instead of solitude, company; instead of silence, voices; instead of projects, escapades; instead of twenty, thirty, forty years more of relentless doubt-ridden concentration, a future of diversity, of idleness, of abandon. To leave what is given untransformed. To capitulate to QWERTYUIOP, ASDFGHJKL, and ZXCVBNM, to let those three words say it all.

  Pain to bring Nathan purposeless pleasure. Maybe a good dose of agony is what it took to debauch him. Drink? Dope? The intellectual sin of light amusement, of senselessness self-induced? Well, if he must. And so many women? Women arriving and departing in shifts, one barely more than a child, another the wife of his financial adviser? Usually it’s the accountant who cheats the client, not the other way around. But what could he do if pain required it? He himself had been removed from command, released from all scruple by the helpless need. Zuckerman was to shut up and do what he was told—leave off rationing out the hours, stop suppressing urges and super-supervising every affair, and from here on, drift, just drift, carried along by whatever gives succor, lying beneath and watching as solace is delivered from above. Surrender to surrender, it’s the time.

  Yet if that really was the psyche’s enjoinder, to what end? To no end? To the end of ends? To escape completely the clutches of self-justification? To learn to lead a wholly indefensible, unjustified life—and to learn to like it? If so, thought Zuckerman, if that is the future that my pain has in mind, then this is going to be the character test to top them all.

  > 2 <

  GONE

  ZUCKERMAN had lost his subject. His health, his hair, and his subject. Just as well he couldn’t find a posture for writing. What he’d made his fiction from was gone—his birthplace the burnt-out landscape of a racial war and the people who’d been giants to him dead. The great Jewish struggle was with the Arab states; here it was over, the Jersey side of the Hudson, his West Bank, occupied now by an alien tribe. No new Newark was going to spring up again for Zuckerman, not like the first one: no fathers like those pioneering Jewish fathers bursting with taboos, no sons like their sons boiling with temptations, no loyalties, no ambitions, no rebellions, no capitulations, no clashes quite so convulsive again. Never again to feel such tender emotion and such a desire to escape. Without a father and a mother and a homeland, he was no longer a novelist. No longer a son. no longer a writer. Everything that galvanized him had been extinguished, leaving nothing unmistakably his and nobody else’s to claim, exploit, enlarge, and reconstruct.

  These were his distressing thoughts, reclining on the playmat unemployed.

  His brother’s charge—that Carnovsky had precipitated their father’s fatal coronary—hadn’t been easy to forget. Memories of his father’s 4ast years, of the strain between them, the bitterness, the bewildering estrangement, gnawed away at him along with Henry’s dubious accusation; so did the curse his father had fastened upon him with his dying breath; so did the idea that he had written what he had, as he had, simply to be odious, that his work embodied little more than stubborn defiance toward a respectable chiropodist. Having completed not a page worth keeping since that deathbed rebuke, he had half begun to believe that if it hadn’t been for his father’s frazzled nerves and rigid principles and narrow understanding he’d never have been a writer at all. A first-generation American father possessed by the Jewish demons, a second-generation American son possessed by their exorcism: that was his whole story.

  Zuckerman’s mother, a quiet, simple woman, dutiful and inoffensive though she was, always seemed to him a slightly more carefree and emancipated spirit. Redressing historical grievances, righting intolerable wrongs, changing the tragic course of Jewish history—all this she gladly left for her husband to accomplish during dinner. He made the noise and had the opinions, she contented herself with preparing their meal and feeding the children and enjoying, while it lasted, the harmonious family life. A year after his death she developed a brain tumor. For months she’d been complaining of episodes of dizziness, a headache, of little memory lapses. 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 was in Miami Beach in 1970, inscribed by a woman whose writings otherwise consisted of recipes on index cards, several thousand thank-you notes, and a voluminous file of knitting instructions. Zuckerman was pretty sure that before that morning she’d never even spoken the word aloud. Her responsibility wasn’t brooding on horrors but sitting at night getting the knitting done and planning the next day’s chores. 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. That it couldn’t dislodge. It must have been there all the time without their even knowing.

  Three years this month. December 21. In 1970 it had been a Monday. The neurologist told him on the phone that the brain tumor could take anywhere from two to four weeks to kill her, but when Zuckerman reached her room from the airport the bed was already empty. His brother, who’d arrived separately by plane an hour before, was in a chair by the window, jaw fixed, face a blank, looking, for all his size and strength, as though he were made of plaster. One good whack and he’d just be pieces on the floor. “Mother’s gone.” he said.

  Of all the words that Zuckerman had read, written, spoken, or heard, there were none he could think of whose rhetorical effectiveness could ever measure up to those two. Not she’s going, not she will go, but she’s gone.

  Zuckerman hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue since the early sixties, when he used to ride forth each month to defend Higher Education on the temple lecture trail. The nonbeliever wondered nonetheless if his mother oughtn’t to be buried in the Orthodox manner—washed with water, wrapped in a shroud, and laid in a plain wood box. Even before she’d begun to be troubled by the first disabling signs of her fatal illness, four years of tending to an invalid husband had already reduced her to a replica of her own late mother in advanced old age, and it was in the hospital morgue, blankly staring at the prominent ancestral nose set in the small, childlike family skull, that curving sickle from which the sloping wedge of the careworn face sharply dropped away, that he thought of an Orthodox burial. But Henry wanted her wearing the soft gray
crepe dress she’d looked so pretty in the night he and Carol had taken her over to Lincoln Center to hear Theodore Bikel, and Zuckerman saw no reason to argue. He was trying really to place this corpse, to connect what had happened to his mother with what had happened to her mother, whose funeral he’d witnessed as a child. He was trying to figure out where, in life, they were. As for the attire in which she should molder away, let Henry have what he wished. All that mattered was to get this last job done as unbruisingly as possible: then he and Henry needn’t agree on anything or speak to each other ever again. Her welfare was all that had kept them in touch anyway; over her empty hospital bed they’d met for the first time since their father’s Florida funeral the year before.

  Yes. she was all Henry’s now. The angry edge to his organizational efficiency made it unmistakable to everyone that inquiries relating to her burial were to be addressed to the younger son. When the rabbi came around to their mother’s apartment to plan the chapel service—the same softly bearded young rabbi who’d officiated at their father’s graveside—Nathan sat off by himself saying nothing, while Henry, who’d just gotten back from the mortician’s, questioned the rabbi about the arrangements. “Ithought I’d read a little poetry,” the rabbi told him, “something about growing things. I know how she loved her plants.” They all looked over at the plants as though they were Mrs. Zuckerman’s orphaned babies. It was far too soon to see anything straight—not the plants on the windowsill, or the noodle casserole in the refrigerator, or the dry-cleaning ticket in her purse. “Then I’ll read some psalms,” the rabbi said. “I’d like to conclude, if you wouldn’t mind, with some personal observations of my own. I knew your parents from the Temple. I knew them well. I know how much they enjoyed together as a husband and wife. I know how they loved their family.” “Good,” said Henry. “And you, Mr. Zuckerman?” the rabbi asked Nathan. “Any memories you’d like to share? I’ll be glad to include them in my remarks.” He took a pad and pencil from his jacket to note down whatever the writer had to tell him, but Nathan merely shook his head. “The memories,” said Zuckerman, “come in their own time.” “Rabbi,” said Henry, “I’ll deliver the eulogy.” Earlier he’d said that he didn’t think he’d have the emotional wherewithal to get through it. “If you could,” said the rabbi, “despite your grief, that would be wonderful.” “And if I cry,” replied Henry, “that won’t hurt either. She was the best mother in the world.”