Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Ferraro and Hussey have told their story to the social critic Jane O’Reilly. O’Reilly, who wrote a wonderful account of her own Catholic girlhood and subsequent feminist discoveries, The Girl I Left Behind, so skillfully weaves the personal and the political that what we get is a unicorn tapestry. Here are convent days of passionate vows and mortification; consciousness-raising nights of High and Low Christology; the assembly line, the pregnant teenagers, the disturbed children; worker priests, liberation theology, and the Sanctuary movement; Boston and Charleston, Rome and Managua. But besides meeting these two remarkable women, through their eyes we are made to see a Church that refuses to listen to its congregation, to hear the witness of its own believers. The overwhelming majority of American Catholics are in favor of birth control; a solid majority disagrees with Rome on divorce and abortion; enrollment in Catholic schools and colleges steadily declines; there aren’t enough priests to go around; and still, like Galileo all over again, the Church would punish its dissidents and those Sisters of Mercy out there in a burning world, bringing the Cross to the poor and the speechless, living the Gospel and the Sermon on the Mount, forming a circle to listen and to heed. How very sad.

  Philip Roth’s Patrimony

  THREE YEARS AGO in The Facts, which he called “A Novelist’s Autobiography,” Philip Roth let us know he wasn’t really Zuckerman, or Tarnopol or Kepesh or Portnoy or any other character in any of his novels, no matter how closely those novels seemed to resemble his own life. What he had always done as a writer, he said, was to “set out spontaneously to improve on actuality in the interest of being more interesting.” Thus, according to Facts, Philip was really a good boy, who wrote bad-boy books to keep his creative edge and save himself from being “desexualized.” And there were passages in Facts where he made us believe him, especially when he wrote about his mother, into whose sleek black coat he’d wormed his way as a child, a “privileged pampered papoose… the unnameable animal-me bearing her dead father’s name, the protoplasm-me, boy-baby, and body-burrower-in-training, joined by every nerve ending to her smile and her sealskin coat…. To be at all was to be her Philip.” Of course, Roth almost spoiled it all by dragging in Zuckerman to criticize the manuscript of Facts, but I liked that mother.

  She died in 1981. Philip’s father, Herman, blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, started to die eight years later, of a tumor on the brain, and the good boy stopped writing novels, though he did take notes, to think about and care for him. Patrimony is his splendid account of that custodianship and its baffling emotions. Herman was difficult, but we don’t choose our fathers. And unlike Zuckerman’s father, he was fiercely proud of his novelist son. And the son discovers in this stubborn, brusque, and grudging old man surprising aspects of himself. There are several patrimonies—the old shaving mug handed down by generations of Jewish immigrants; his incontinent father’s own excrement, which Philip must clean up as once he was cleaned up after as a baby; an obsession with memory, with never forgetting anything; and equally important to a writer, a distinctive voice: “He taught me the vernacular,” says Philip; “He was the vernacular, unpoetic and expressive and point-blank, with all the vernacular’s glaring limitations and all its durable force.” Patrimony, the book, sticks mostly to this vernacular. Neither ironic nor sentimental, it finds its effects in the perfect detail. Herman remembers relatives, neighbors, and bygone Jewish boxing champs. For him, says his son. “To be alive… is to be made of memory—to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing.” They joke together about a survivor who has written “a pornographic besteseller about the Holocaust.” There is a scene in which Philip sleeps with his father, as if a poultice to the wound. Zuckerman would have worried this bed with every imaginable ambiguity and embarrassment. The good son merely reports it. “He wasn’t just any father,” he says; “he was the father, with everything there is to hate in a father and everything there is to love.” There’s that word, so rare in Roth. He imagines his father’s tumor, “the fingernail that had been aggrandizing the hollows of his skull for a decade, the material as obdurate and gristly as he was, that had cracked open the bone behind his nose and with a stubborn, unrelenting force just like his, had pushed tusklike through the cavities of his face.” Love is just as hard, just as inexorable, like this book. His father dies, age eighty-six. Philip, at last, is all grown up.

  Milan Kundera’s Immortality

  WE ARE AT the end of Europe, the end of history, the end of culture, and the end of this novel, in deck chairs at a health club with a swimming pool. We can look at ourselves in twenty-seven mirrors on three sides of the rooftop club, or we can look through the fourth wall at a panoramic view of Paris. Milan Kundera is talking to one of his characters in Immortality, the accused rapist and guerrilla tire-slasher Professor Avenarius. He seeks a metaphor. To Avenarius, he says, “You play with the world like a melancholy child who has no little brother.” Avenarius smiles, very much like a melancholy child, and then remarks: “I don’t have a little brother, but I have you.”

  And we have Kundera, a sixty-two-year-old melancholy child, a little brother of the bloody borders and the lost faith. He has written this novel in front of our eyes, out of chance encounters with enigmatic strangers, and radio news reports of anomalous events, and imaginary conversations among the lofty likes of Goethe and Hemingway, and snippets of books, and shards of memory. He has interpolated little essays—on journalism, sentimentality, coincidence, astrology, and the phases of the erotic moon—that turn out, of course, not to have been digressions at all. Everything fits inside with a satisfying snap, like the hasp on a jewel box or the folding of a fan. Left in the air, like smoke, are ghosts and grace notes.

  I’m sure there’s a musical analogue; there usually is in Kundera’s fiction: Mozart’s Don Giovanni or Beethoven’s last quartet or any one of sixteen fugues by Bach. “Our lives are composed like music,” Kundera told us in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “and if we listen well, they will speak to us in the heightened language of secret motifs, which are really the accidents of our becoming, transformed into significance by a roused imagination.”

  Certainly, in Immortality, there’s a lot of Mahler.

  But along with linear time, Romantic poetry, modern art, the idea of progress, the ardor of revolution, and the consolations of nostalgia, he has also given up on music. “Music,” we’re told, “can be heard every time some statesman is murdered or war is declared, every time it’s necessary to stuff people’s heads with glory to make them die more willingly. Nations that tried to annihilate each other were filled with the identical fraternal emotion when they heard the thunder of Chopin’s Funeral March or Beethoven’s Eroica.” Kundera himself explains that “music taught the European not only a richness of feeling but also the worship of his feelings and his feeling self…. Music: a pump for inflating the soul. Hypertrophic souls turned into huge balloons rise to the ceiling of the concert hall and jostle each other in unbelievable congestion.”

  Whether this constitutes a symbolic parricide—Kundera’s father, mourned so lovingly in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, was a musicologist—I can’t say. But it leaves us lonelier in Paris than we were before we ever met Agnes (a computer expert and “the clear-minded observer of ambiguity”) or her sister. Laura (an haute couture shopkeeper and “the addict of ambiguity”) or Agnes’s husband, Paul (a clever lawyer and “the simpleton of ambiguity”).

  Laura, because she thinks she loves Paul, plays Mahler on a white piano and collects money for African lepers in the Paris Metro system. Agnes, because she decides she doesn’t love Paul anymore or not enough, leaves Paris for Switzerland, where her father and her money are both stashed. Paul, who’s come to deplore Mahler as much as rock ’n’ roll, and to despair of Western civilization, drinks too much. Professor Avenarius meets Laura in the Metro when she’s humiliated by clochards, seems never to have heard of Agnes, and hires Paul to defend him against the charge of rape. (Though there’s always
a lot of rape in Kundera novels, this one didn’t happen.)

  I neglect Rubens, who renounced art in favor of erotomania, because he is one of Kundera’s several wicked surprises. So I won’t tell you about his affair with the Lute Player, also known as the Gothic Maiden, and their stroll among “the severed heads of the famous dead.” Besides, you’ve met him before. Like Zemanek in The Joke, Jaromil in Life Is Elsewhere, Klima in The Farewell Party, and Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he’s a compulsive womanizer. There are signs here that Kundera is at last as weary of Don Juan and his roundelay of one-night stands as he wearied earlier of Don Quixote. But there are signs here that Kundera has wearied of everything else, too, even laughter. “Humor,” says Avenarius, “can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some borders between the important and the unimportant.”

  These people are unhappy because God is dead, and neither sex nor politics will guarantee them a life ever after. They’re short on meaning and being. In all of European culture there are only fifty or so geniuses (fifty-one, counting Kundera) who deserve remembering after they have gone. Laura, Agnes, Paul, Rubens, and Avenarius are not among these happy few. (“Class inequality is but an insigificant shortcoming compared to this insulting metaphysical inequality.”) Kundera plays them on his fiddle. Or, to stick to his own quite wonderful conceit of the clock in Old Town Square in Prague, with the twelve apostles and the bell-ringing skeleton, he pops them in and out of his narrative like marionettes. In a world of “many people, few ideas,” not even their unhappiness is original. They’ve borrowed it like their gestures, from Goethe, Beethoven, and Napoleon; from Tycho Brahe and Robert Musil; from Marx and Rimbaud. In one thirty-page section midway through Immortality Kundera mentions Lacan, Apollinaire, Rilke, Romain Rolland, Paul Eluard, Knut Hamsun, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky. In spite of all this culture, Europe got Auschwitz and the gulag. Somebody must be doing something wrong, so everybody’s punished.

  According to Paul, who is about to be fired from a radio station where he has a commentary program,

  High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations as a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they’re all runners in the relay race, they all belong in the same stadium.

  To which the man who will fire him replies:

  If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or Communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought. I experienced it with my own eyes and ears after the war, when intellectuals and artists ran like a herd of cattle into the Communist Party, which soon proceeded to liquidate them systematically and with great pleasure. You are doing the same. You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers.

  This, of course, is Kundera’s right brain talking to his left. Indeed the novelist, eavesdropping on this exchange as if he hadn’t made the whole thing up himself, is reminded of another of his characters in another of his novels, Jaromil in Life Is Elsewhere. Like Paul (and Rimbaud), Jaromil felt it necessary “to be absolutely modern.” He, too, was “the ally of his gravediggers.” Kundera counts on us to remember on our own that Jaromil—an amalgam of Rimbaud, Lermontov, and the Czech “proletarian” poet Jiri Wolker—was everything the novelist despises about Modernism: its confusion of Youth, Poetry, and Revolution; its muddling of the vanguard and the avant-garde. Since Jaromil, in the storied Czech tradition of the Bohemian Catholic governors in 1618 and of Masaryk in 1948, was defenestrated, I’m somewhat surprised Paul doesn’t take a header out the panoramic window of the Paris penthouse. But the surprise death in Immortality is reserved for someone else. Paul, instead, declares it is time “at last to end the terror of the immortals. To overthrow the arrogant power of the Ninth Symphonies and the Fausts!”

  Clever yes? Yes. And so are Kundera’s “existential mathematics,” his listing of the varieties of coincidence—mute, poetic, contrapuntal, story-producing, and maybe even morbid—he has employed to keep us turning his pages. Equally clever is Goethe’s reminding Hemingway, in the middle of a chat in the afterlife, that they are both “but the frivolous fantasy of a novelist who lets us say things we would probably never say on our own.”

  The trouble with this cleverness is that it also reminds us we’ve been here before, with the send-up of Pavel Kohout in The Joke; with the send-up of Dostoyevsky and Gide in Farewell Party; with the send-up of Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Sophocles in Unbearable; with the send-up of Milan himself as the misogynist Boccaccio in Forgetting. The essay in Immortality on Imagology (ad agencies, public opinion polls) is inferior to the essay in Unbearable on “Kitsch” (“kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human nature”; “a folding screen set up to curtain off death,” to “deny shit”). Just as the meditation on Grund (a German word for reason in the sense of a cause, “a code determining the essence of our fate”) is inferior to the meditations in Forgetting on litost (a Czech word meaning “upsurge of feeling”) and in Unbearable on soucit (a Czech word meaning “human co-feeling”).

  It’s not as though he hadn’t already told us in Laughable Loves that sex is powerless against socialism; or in Elsewhere that poets will always sacrifice shopgirls for the good opinion of the Revolution; or in Farewell that “Western culture as it was conceived at the dawn of the modern age, based on the individual and his reason, on pluralism of thought, and on tolerance,” has come to a violent end; or in Forgetting that cultural progress is no longer possible; or in Unbearable that “Einmal ist keinmal”: The horror of history signifies nothing.

  We’ve even been with him into swimming pools before, maybe for lightness of being.

  Nor, really, do we need Laura’s skirt flying over her head in the Paris Metro, among rioting clochards, to remind us of the humiliation of other women in other Kundera novels: Helena and laxatives; sex-starved Alzhbeta and sleeping pills; pregnant Ruzena and the poison capsules; the spinster, in “Edward and God,” on her knees, and Tereza, in shame, on the toilet. Avenarius may be innocent of rape, but Lucie in The Joke was a victim of its viciousness, and we were encouraged to believe that Sabina, with her bowler hat, dreamt about it, and we can be pretty sure that Kundera does. About all his eros there is a sado- and a masochistic edge: the whistle of the whip. Even mothers tend to be monsters. Jakub in Farewell pictures his own birth: “He imagined his tiny body sliding through a narrow, damp tunnel, his nose and mouth full of slime.”

  Even women with whom we are expected to identify, like Tamina in Forgetting, like Agnes in Immortality, belong to men in the molecules of their memory: Tamina to her dead husband, Agnes to her dead father—although there’s an indication here that Kundera may have briefly entertained another role for his women to play besides the pathetic, one that’s not so metaphysically insulting. I’ll make fun of that in a minute.

  If there is much that’s familiar in Immortality from the other novels, there is also a great absence. That absence, except for the clock in Old Town Square, is Czechoslovakia, particularly Prague, the capital of Kafka and forgetting. We’re in Paris, to which Kundera fled in 1970, but we might as well be anywhere. Place is irrelevant to Immortality, a deracinated novel, a sacred monster-ego, one of those severed heads of the famous dead by which Rubens and his Gothic Maiden stroll. This head makes witty remarks (“Napoleon was a true Frenchman in that he was not satisfied with sending hundreds of thousands to their death, but wanted in addition to be admired
by writers”), but it floats, on the water, in the air, trailing its nerve-strings like cut cables.

  There’s no hint here of the intersection of the personal and political that made Forgetting a masterwork: the magic circle of Young Communists, levitating angels in “a giant wreath,” from which Kundera fell; the slit throats of six ostriches and six poets; the passage of the totalitarian state from a Bach fugue to a twelve-tone “single empire” to the abolition of notes and keys; the statues of Lenin growing “like weeds on the ruins, the melancholy flowers of forgetting.” This same intersection was also the key to Unbearable. Not all the violence belonged to the Russians; there was a lot of it in Tomas before the tanks came to Prague in 1968.

  (Oddly, it was this personal violence that was omitted from the overpraised movie version of the novel. Yes, Lena Olin, as Sabina, did for bowler hats what Pythagoras did for triangles and Melville did for whales: She gave them a whole new meaning. But the old meanings got lost. In the novel, the bowler is a sex-games prop, a memento of her father, “a sign of her originality,” and something else. When Tomas and Sabina look at each other in the mirror, at first it’s comic. But, suddenly, “the bowler hat no longer signified a joke; it signified violence, violence against Sabina, against her dignity as a woman…. The fact that Tomas stood beside her fully dressed meant that the essence of what they both saw was far from good clean fun… it was humiliation. But instead of spurning it, she proudly, provocatively played it for all it was worth, as if submitting of her own will to public rape.” Likewise, the movie lets Tereza swim in one of Milan’s pools with other naked women, but leaves out her dreams about it, in which “Tomas stood over them in a basket hanging from the pool’s arched roof, shouting at them, making them sing and do kneebends. The moment one of them did a faulty kneebend, he would shoot her.”)