Zuckerman Unbound

by Philip Roth

  “You wouldn’t?”

  He shook his head.

  “Is that bad?”

  Zuckerman tried to sound thoughtful. “No, of course it’s not ‘bad’…”

  “But it’s not good. Okay. All right. What about my ideas, what I want to communicate. The writing I can polish in the next draft, when I have the time. The writing I can get Miss Diamond to fix, if you say that’s what it needs. But surely the ideas, the ideas themselves…”

  “The ideas,” said Zuckerman somberly, as the notebook was handed to him again. Across the street an elderly woman was being interviewed by J. K. Cranford instead of by Alvin Pepler. Gaunt, handsome, supported by a cane. Seratelli’s widow? Seratelli’s mother? Would that I were that old lady, thought Zuckerman. Anything but to have to discuss these “ideas.”

  Fiction, Zuckerman silently read, is not autobiography, yet all fiction, I am convinced, is in some sense rooted in autobiography, though the connection to actual events …

  “Forget the writing for now,” Pepler told him. “This time just read it through for the thoughts.”

  Zuckerman looked blindly at the page. Heard the lion saying to Hemingway, “Just read it through for the thoughts.”

  “I read it for both already.” He put a hand on Pepler’s chest and gently pushed him back. Not the best idea, he knew, but what else could he do? This enabled him to step away from the mailbox. He handed back the notebook yet again. Pepler looked as though he’d been poleaxed.

  “And?”

  “And what?” said Zuckerman.

  “The truth! This is my life we’re talking about, my chance at a second chance. I must have the truth!”

  “Well, the truth is”—but seeing the perspiration coursing down Pepler’s face, he thought better of it, and concluded—”it’s probably fine for the papers.”

  “But? There’s a big but in your voice, Nathan. But what?”

  Zuckerman counted the cops with pistols outside Frank Campbell’s. On foot, four. On horseback, two. “Well, I don’t think you have to go into the desert and stand on a pillar to come up with these ‘thoughts.’ In my opinion. Since you ask for it.”

  “Whooff.” Feverishly he began tapping the notebook against his open palm. “You shoot from the hip all right. Whew. That book of yours doesn’t come from nowhere, that’s for sure. The satire, I mean. Wow.”

  “Alvin, listen to me. Sulzberger could be crazy about it. I’m sure he and I have different criteria entirely. This shouldn’t discourage you from letting Perlmutter try him.”

  “Nah,” he said despondently. “When it comes to writing, it’s you who’s the authority.” As though plunging a knife into his chest, he shoved the notebook back in his pocket.

  “Not everybody would agree there.”

  “Nah, nah, don’t pull the little-me stuff. Don’t give me the humble crap. We know who’s tops in his field and who isn’t.” Whereupon he drew the notebook out again and began fiercely slapping at it with his free hand. “What about when I say the writer should be restrained from spilling the beans before they are digested? What about that?”

  Zuckerman the satirist remained silent.

  “That stinks too?” asked Pepler. “Don’t condescend to me, tell me!”

  “Of course it doesn’t ‘stink.’”

  “But?”

  “But it’s straining, isn’t it, for an effect?” As serious and uncondescending a man of letters as there could ever be, Zuckerman said, “I wonder if it’s worth the effort.”

  “There’s where you’re wrong. It was no strain at all. It just came to me. In those words. It’s the only line here that isn’t erased, not one word.”

  “Then maybe that’s the problem.”

  “I see.” Pepler nodded vigorously because of what he saw. “For me, if it comes easy it’s no good, and if it comes hard it’s also no good.”

  “I’m only talking about this line.”

  “I see-ee-ee-eee,” he said, ominously. “But that’s definitely the worst, the bottom, the limit, this line about spilling the beans.”

  “Sulzberger could see it differently.”

  “Fuck Sulzberger! I’m not asking Sulzberger! I’m asking you! And what you have told me is the following. One, the writing stinks. Two, the thoughts stink. Three, my best line stinks worst of all. What you have told me is that ordinary mortals like me shouldn’t even dare to write about your book to begin with. Isn’t that what it adds up to, on the basis of one paragraph of a first draft?”

  “Why, no.”

  “Why, no.” Pepler was mimicking him. He had removed his dark glasses to make a prissy face to show to Zuckerman. “Why, no.”

  “Don’t turn nasty, Alvin. You wanted the truth, after all.”

  “After all. After all.”

  “Look,” said Zuckerman, “you want the whole truth?”

  “Yes!” Eyes big, eyes bulging, eyes asizzle in a glowing red face. “Yes! But the truth unbiased, that’s what I want! Unbiased by the fact that you only wrote that book because you could! Because of having every break in life there is! While the ones who didn’t obviously couldn’t! Unbiased by the fact that those hang-ups you wrote about happen to be mine, and that you knew it—that you stole it!”

  “I did what? Stole what?”

  “From what my Aunt Lottie told your cousin Essie that she told to your mother that she told to you. About me. About my past.”

  Oh, was it time to go!

  The light was red. Would it never be green again when he needed it? With no further criticism to make or instruction to give, Zuckerman turned to leave.

  “Newark!” Pepler, behind him, delivered the word straight to the eardrum. “What do you know about Newark, Mama’s Boy! I read that fucking book! To you it’s Sunday chop suey downtown at the Chink’s! To you it’s being Leni-Lenape Indians at school in the play! To you it’s Uncle Max in his undershirt, watering the radishes at night! And Nick Etten at first for the Bears! Nick Etten! Moron! Moron! Newark is a nigger with a knife! Newark is a whore with the syph! Newark is junkies shitting in your hallway and everything burned to the ground! Newark is dago vigilantes hunting jigs with tire irons! Newark is bankruptcy! Newark is ashes! Newark is rubble and filth! Own a car in Newark and then you’ll find out what Newark’s all about! Then you can write ten books about Newark! They slit your throat for your radial tires! They cut off both balls for a Bulova watch! And your dick for the fun of it, if it’s white!”

  The light went green. Zuckerman made for the mounted policeman. “You! Whining about Mama back in Newark and how she wouldn’t wipe your ass for you three times a day! Newark is finished, idiot! Newark is barbarian hordes and the Fall of Rome! But what the hell would you know up on the hoity-toity East Side of Manhattan? You fuck up Newark and you steal my life—”

  Past the prancing horse, the gaping crowd, past J. K. Cranford and his camera crew (“Hi, there, Nathan”), past the uniformed porter, and into the funeral parlor.

  The large foyer looked like a Broadway theater at opening-night intermission: backers and burghers in their finest, and conversation bubbling, as though the first act had been a million laughs and the show on its way to being a hit.

  He made for an empty corner, and one of the young funeral directors immediately started toward him through the crowd. Zuckerman had seen the fellow around, usually outside in the afternoon, talking through the cab window of a truck with the casket deliveryman. One evening he’d caught sight of him, dragging on a cigarette and with his tie undone, holding open the side door for the arrival of a corpse. When the lead stretcher-bearer stumbled on the doorsill, the body stirred slightly in its sack and Zuckerman had thought of his father.

  For the lying-in-state of Prince Seratelli, the young funeral director wore a carnation and a morning coat. Strong jaw, athletic build, the voice a countertenor’s. “Mr. Zuckerman?”

  “Yes?”

  “Anything I can do for you, sir?”

  “No, no, thank you. Just paying
my respects.”

  He nodded. Whether he bought it was another matter. Zuckerman unshaven didn’t look that respectful.

  “If you prefer, sir, when you’re ready to leave, you can depart through the rear.”

  “No, no. Only collecting myself. I’ll be fine.”

  Eyeing the door, Zuckerman waited it out with the mobsters and the ex-cons and the other celebrities. You would think he actually was being stalked by an Oswald. That he was a Kennedy, or a Martin Luther King. But wasn’t he just that to Pepler? And what was Oswald, before he pulled the trigger and made it big in the papers? And not on the book page, either. Any less affronted, or benighted, or aggrieved? Any less batty or more impressive? Motivated any more “meaningfully”? No! Bang bang, you’re dead. There was all the meaning the act was ever meant to have. You’re you, I’m me, and for that and that alone you die. Even the professional killers with whom he now was rubbing elbows were less to be feared. Not that it was necessarily in his interest to hang around them much longer, either. Unshaven, in a worn corduroy suit and a turtleneck sweater and battered suede shoes, he could easily be taken for a nosy newsman rather than someone still studying for his final exam. Especially as he was busily taking notes on the back of a Frank E. Campbell brochure, while waiting for the coast to clear. Another writer with his urgent “thoughts.”

  Remembrance of Hits Past. My pickle his madeleine. Why isn’t P. Proust of the Pops instead of a file cabinet? The uneventfulness of writing, he couldn’t put up with it. Who can? Maniacal memory without maniacal desire for comprehension. Drowning without detachment. Memory coheres around nothing (except Dostoevskian despair over fame). With him no things past. All now. P. memory of what hasn’t happened to him, Proust of all that has. Knowledge of people out of “People” page in Time. Another contending personality for ringside at Elaine’s. But: the bullying ego, the personal audacity, the natural coarseness, the taste for exhausting encounters—what gifts! Mix with talent the unstoppable energy, the flypaper brain … but he knows that too. It’s the talentlessness that’s driving him nuts. The brute strength, the crazy tenacity, the desperate hunger—producers figured right he’d scare the country to death. The Jew You Can’t Permit in the Parlor. How Johnny Carson America now thinks of me. This Peplerian barrage is what? Zeitgeist overspill? Newark poltergeist? Tribal retribution? Secret sharer? P. as my pop self? Not far from how P. sees it. He who’s made fantasy of others now fantasy of others. Book : The Vrai’s Revenge—the forms their fascination takes, the counter-spell cast over me.

  When he spotted the young funeral director, he signaled by raising one hand. Not too high, however.

  He would take the rear exit, no matter how dark or dank the subterranean corridors he had to escape through.

  But it was only a bright carpeted hallway into which he was led, with cubicle doors on both sides. No ghoul emerged to take his measurements. It could have been an office of the I.R.S.

  His young guide pointed to the cubicle that was his. “Could you wait, sir, just one second? Something from my desk.” He returned carrying a copy of Carnovsky. “If you would … ‘For John P. Driscoll’… Oh, that’s awfully kind.”

  * * *

  On Fifth he found a taxi. “Bank Street. Step on it.” The driver, an elderly black man, was amused by the gangster locution and, for the fun of it seemingly, drove him to the Village in record time. Time enough, however, for Zuckerman to gauge what he’d be up against with Laura. I don’t want to be beaten over the head with how boring I was for three years. You weren’t boring for three years. I don’t please you anymore, Nathan. It’s as simple as that. Are we talking about sex? Let’s then. There’s nothing to say about it. I can do it and you can do it. I’m sure there are people both of us could call in to verify that. The rest I refuse to hear. Your present state has made you forget just how much I bored you. My affectless manner, as it is called, bored you. The way I tell a story bored you. My conversation and my ideas bored you. My work bored you. My friends bored you. My taste in clothes bored you. The way I make love bored you. Not making love to me bored you more. The way you make love did not bore me. Far from it. But then it did. Something did, Nathan. You have a way of making things like that very clear. When you’re dissatisfied, your manner is by no means affectless, to use the word. It was the wrong word. I’m sorry about that word. Don’t be. It’s what you meant. Nathan, stop pretending. You were bored to tears and you need a new life. I was wrong. I need you. I thrived on you. I love you. Oh, please don’t try to break me down by saying reckless things. I’ve had a rough time too. I’d like to think that the hardest part is over. It has to be. I couldn’t take those first few weeks again. Well, I couldn’t take those, I can’t take these, and the ones looming ahead I don’t intend to take. You’ll have to. I beg of you, don’t try to kiss me, don’t try to hold me, don’t ever again tell me you love me. If you try to break me down that way I’ll have to cut you out of my life completely. But that’s the answer, isn’t it? Maybe what you call “broken down,” Laura— Once is enough, thank you. Once is enough to be told you won’t do. You may finally be suffering from the fallout of leaving, but I haven’t changed. I am still the same person who won’t do. I am relentlessly reasonable and emotionally unflappable, if not seriously repressed. I still have my executive mind and my deadpan delivery and my do-good Christianity, all of which won’t do. I am still in the “virtue racket.” That was the wrong word too. I was cursing myself more than you. It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? It amounts to why I became so “boring.” And that was the wrong word. Laura, I have made a terrible mistake. The words were brutally wrong. No, they were brutally right, and you know it. After the clinging, quivering wives, I was just perfect. No tears, no fits, no euphoria, no crises in restaurants or at parties. You could get your work done with me. You could concentrate and live within yourself all you wanted. I didn’t even care about having children. I had work of my own to accomplish. I never needed to be entertained, and I didn’t have to entertain you, beyond a few minutes in the morning, playing wake-up games in bed. Which I loved. I loved being Lorelei, Nathan. I loved it all, and even longer than you did. But that’s behind us. Now you need another dramatic personality. I need no such thing. I need you. Let me finish. You bawl me out for being an affectless goody-good Pollyanna WASP, and never saying all that’s on my mind. Let me, and then it’ll never have to be said again. You want to be renewed, it’s what your work requires now. Whatever is finished for you there has finished it for you with someone like me. You don’t want our life anymore. You think you do today because nothing has come along to take its place, except all this flap about your book. But when something does, you’ll see that I’m right to refuse to let you come back. That you were perfectly right to go: having written a book like that, you had to go. That’s what writing it was all about.

  And how was he going to argue with that? Everything she would say sounded so honest and persuasive, and everything he would say sounded so disingenuous and feeble. He could only hope that she wouldn’t be able to make the case against him as well as he himself could. But knowing her, there wasn’t much chance of that. Oh, his brave, lucid, serious, good-hearted Lorelei! But he had thrown her away. By writing a book ostensibly about someone else attempting to break free from his accustomed constraints.

  At Bank Street he tipped the cabbie five dollars for valor on the West Side Highway. He could as easily have given him a hundred. He was home.

  But Laura wasn’t. He rang and rang, then ran next door and down the concrete stairwell to the basement apartment. He rapped loudly on the door. Rosemary, the retired schoolteacher, looked a long time through the peephole before she began unspringing locks.

  Laura was in Pennsylvania at Allenwood, seeing Douglas Muller about his parole. She told him this with one chain still on. Then, reluctantly, she undid that.

  Allenwood was the minimum-security prison where the federal government interned nonviolent criminals. Douglas, one of Laura’
s clients, was a young Jesuit who had left the priesthood to oppose the draft without the shield of clerical status. The year before, when Zuckerman went down with Laura to visit him at the prison, Douglas confided to Nathan another reason for leaving: at Harvard, where the order had sent him to study Middle Eastern languages, he had lost his virginity. “That can happen,” he said, “when you walk around Cambridge without your collar.” Douglas wore the collar only when he was demonstrating for Cesar Chavez or against the war; otherwise he dressed in work shirts and jeans. He was a shy, thoughtful Midwesterner in his mid-twenties, the magnitude of whose devotion to the large self-denying cause was all in the ice-like clarity of his pale blue eyes.

  Douglas knew something from Laura about the novel Zuckerman was finishing and had amused the novelist, during his visit, with anecdotes about the hapless struggle he had waged as a high-school student against the sin of self-abuse. Grinning and blushing, he recalled for Zuckerman the days in Milwaukee when, having confessed first thing in the morning to the excesses of the night before, he was back in an hour to confess again. There was nothing in this world or the other that could help him, either; not the contemplation of Christ’s passion, or the promise of the Resurrection, or the sympathetic priest at the Jesuit school who had in the end to refuse to give him absolution more than once every twenty-four hours. Recycled and fused with Nathan’s own recollections, some of Douglas’s best stories made their way into the life of Carnovsky, a budding soul no less bedeviled by onanism in Jewish New Jersey than Douglas growing up in Catholic Wisconsin. The inscribed first-edition copy of the book that the author sent to Allenwood had been acknowledged by the prisoner with a brief, compassionate note: “Tell poor Carnovsky that I pray for his strength. Fr. Douglas Muller.”

  “She’ll be back tomorrow,” Rosemary said and waited by the door for Nathan to leave. She was acting as if he had bullied his way as far as the foyer and she intended him to trespass no farther.

  In Rosemary’s hall closet Laura kept her correspondence files. Guarding them from an F.B.I. break-in had given the lonely woman something to live for. So had Laura. For three years Laura had been mothering Rosemary like a daughter: accompanied her to the optometrist, took her to the hairdresser, weaned her from sleeping pills, baked the big cake for her seventieth birthday …