Room for Doubt

by Wendy Lesser

  I had been carrying around Lenny's death in a locked package up till then, a locked, frozen package that I couldn't get at but couldn't throw away, either. As long as I was afraid to look inside the package, it maintained its terrifying hold over me: it frightened and depressed me, or would have done, if I had allowed myself to have even those feelings instead of their shadowy half-versions. It wasn't just Lenny that had been frozen; I had, too. But as I sat in the Berlin Philharmonic hall and listened to the choral voices singing their incomprehensible words, something warmed and softened in me. I became, for the first time in months, able to feel strongly again.

  Later, when I looked at the words in the program, I saw that the choral voices had been singing about the triumph of God over death. This is what I mean about the importance of not understanding. If I had known this at the time, I might have stiffened my atheist spine and resisted. But instead of taking in what the German words meant, I just allowed them to echo through my body: I felt them, quite literally, instead of understanding them. And the reverie I fell into as I listened to Brahms's music was not about God triumphing over death, but about music and death grappling with each other. Death was chasing me, and I was fleeing from it, and it was pounding toward me; it was pounding in the music, but the music was also what was helping me to flee. And, as in a myth or a fairy tale, I sensed that what would enable me to escape—not forever, because all such escapes are temporary, but to escape just this once—would be if I looked death, Lenny's death, in the face: if I turned back and looked at it as clearly and sustainedly as I could bear.

  But then it seemed that this was not enough. I could not just settle with Lenny—or rather, in order to settle with him, I had to work my way back through that transitional moment, through Berlin and through David Hume. And then, having let go of all three of them (there are always three, in fairy tales), I could rest.

  Part Three

  DIFFICULT

  FRIENDS

  I.

  “His love of Ravelstein had a dark side. It would

  not be love otherwise…”

  —“On Ravelstein”

  I have never watched anyone else die. I am not going to say much about the details of Lenny's dying, mainly because I promised not to. Or at least I made some kind of promise to him, and I am keeping it in my own way.

  One afternoon, when he was still quite coherent and I still believed he might survive, I sat with him for a few hours in the hospital. (His wife, who had been maintaining a round-the-clock vigil, had finally given in to our collective pleas and allowed some of us to substitute while she rested.) Occasionally Lenny and I would exchange a few words of conversation, and occasionally I would do some small thing for him at his request, but mostly he just lay there while I read.

  I remember that I had just turned the page when I heard Lenny say something. I got up from my chair and approached his bed (I had been sitting at a distance so as not to breathe germs on him), and I asked him to repeat what he had said. In the hoarse whisper that was all that now remained of his memorable voice, he said something that I took to be “Nobody ever writes about this.”

  “Nobody ever writes about this?” I parroted back.

  “You—you.” In his effort to make it emphatic, the word came out as “Jew,” but I knew what he meant. “You. Never write about this.”

  I was momentarily shocked by Lenny's statement, but there was also something strangely familiar about it, and later that day, after I got home from the hospital, I realized why. In Patrimony, Philip Roth's book about his father's life and death, he tells us that his father made him promise not to write about a particularly grotesque incident that took place during his final illness. Philip Roth breaks the promise—he gives us, in Patrimony, every embarrassing detail—and part of how you feel about this book of Roth's is bound to be influenced by how you feel about this violation. I am sure Lenny hated that aspect of the book, but I am equally sure he was not alluding to that passage when he made his statement to me, since it was not a moment that called for or even tolerated literary allusion.

  When Lenny said this to me, I responded by saying that of course I would never write about it. Trying to be encouraging, I said that it was his experience to write about if he wished, or not—that my only reason for being there was as his friend, and that I wasn't there as a writer or editor or any of the other roles he had known me in. Still, I knew, even as I said this, that Lenny would not write about it. “Death is not a subject,” he kept saying, with a kind of depressed, surprised horror, in the days after he first heard the diagnosis. And in his own terms, he was right. Much as he had loved and trusted the written word, it had nothing now to offer him.

  Even to describe what Lenny asked of me is, I realize, to open myself up to the charge of betrayal. But silence, which became Lenny's only alternative, does not now seem to me adequate. His death has been so important to me, in ways I am just beginning to work out, that I can't simply let it go. So I have chosen to take my promise as applying to the particulars of dying: those horrible, shameful, personal details that anyone who has spent time in a hospital knows about. These you will not hear from me. But that he died is a fact in my life, still, now.

  I would not have expected Lenny's death to affect me so strongly. This sounds colder than it is meant to. It is not that I was not extremely fond of him. I would even say I loved him, in the way one loves people whom one takes for granted and doesn't necessarily see often. Though he was not actually related to me, the bond felt familial. He was funny and smart in familiar ways, and he was annoying in familiar ways. He was like the old uncle, growing deaf and indulging in a bit too much wine, who picks fights with everyone else at the Passover dinner table. (I do not know my own uncles, and I rarely attend a seder, but this is how I imagine such a family life to be.) You could tell Lenny that he was full of shit, and he would laugh. I thought he would be around forever.

  In this, perhaps, I was borrowing his own views. Lenny was a bit of a hypochondriac, and he often talked and wrote and thought about death, but at the core of his being he did not really believe he would ever die. He was not religious—and by this I mean that, though he very much identified himself as a Jew, he did not practice any of the rituals of Judaism, or of any other religion, for that matter. But he was intensely superstitious: he thought that evil or vicious actions brought on punishments, and he considered death the most extreme of these punishments. “See!” he would say when a critic who had reviewed him badly died an agonizing and premature death. “That's what happens to all my enemies.” This was only partly a joke. And since dying was a punishment meted out for bad behavior, Lenny had no sense (except for his literary, intellectual, philosophical sense, which was profound) of the inevitability of death.

  When he lay unconscious in the hospital, technically still alive but clearly only a few hours or days away from death, I had a conversation with his daughter, Louisa, about the funeral. Lenny's mother—who, at ninety, was still very much alive—wanted a Jewish funeral, a burial in the ground within three days of the death. Lenny's half-Jewish children and non-Jewish wife would have preferred cremation, but they hesitated to push their views too hard.

  “I just wish I knew what my dad would have wanted,” Louisa said to me. “I wish he would wake up for a minute so I could ask him whether he'd rather be buried or cremated.” In her half-joking, half-serious suggestion, I heard a strong echo of her father.

  “Oh, Louisa,” I said. “You know if you had ever asked him that, he would just have rolled his eyes in that way he had. He would never have chosen, because he always thought there was some other option—some way out other than dying.”

  I suppose intense fear of death and disbelief in one's own death are two sides of the same coin. The discovery that he himself was dying was an unbearable shock for Lenny. It did not fit in with any reasonable system of rewards and punishments, even Lenny's system, in which the rewards were small and infrequent, the punishments huge and relentless (Lenn
y's God, if he existed, was definitely a jealous god).

  Certain rare people seem able to face their own deaths with equanimity. One of these, apparently, was David Hume, who wrote in his little essay “My Own Life,” shortly before his own death:

  In spring 1775, I was struck with a Disorder in my Bowels, which at first gave me no Alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a speedy Dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my Disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great Decline of my Person, never suffered a Moments Abatement of my Spirits: Insomuch, that were I to name the Period of my Life which I should most choose to pass over again I might be tempted to point to this later Period. I possess the same Ardor as ever in Study, and the same Gaiety in Company. I consider besides, that a Man of sixty five, by dying, cuts off only a few Years of Infirmities: And though I see many symptoms of my literary Reputation's breaking out at last with additional Lustre, I know, that I had but few Years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be more detached from Life than I am at present.

  To conclude historically with my own Character—I am, or rather was (for that is the Style, I must now use in speaking of myself; which emboldens me the more to speak my Sentiments) I was, I say, a man of mild Dispositions, of Command of Temper, of an open, social, and cheerful Humour, capable of Attachment, but little susceptible of Enmity, and of great Moderation in all my Passions.

  Nothing could sound less like Lenny. And now, reading over that Hume quotation once again, I realize something else about it: nothing could sound less like me. For I too, like Lenny, am a difficult friend. I too have little Command of Temper and no Moderation in my Passions. Perhaps that is why his dying has so possessed me.

  Certainly it explains why we quarreled so many times. And when I say quarreled, I do not mean a brief spat. Each of our quarrels was epic in length, lasting a minimum of a year and in some cases four or five years. During these periods we would not speak to each other at all. And then, when we began speaking again, we resumed the friendship as if it had never been interrupted. We disregarded those wordless years casually, easily, as if we had all the time in the world. Each of us perhaps imagined that we did.

  2.

  “Personally, I'm more interested in the past than in

  visions of the future, which is, I'm afraid, ultimately

  the same for all of us.”

  —Time Out of Mind

  I can no longer remember the exact timing of the quarrels, but I am pretty sure that the first one involved the movie of The Men's Club. Lenny published a number of books in his lifetime, but he only published one novel, and that was by far his worst book. It had redeeming features—when he read aloud from it, you could fall out of your seat laughing at the hilarious bits—but overall it was not a success in any way except financially. Compared to the movie that was made from it, however, it was a great work of art. I am not sure I've ever seen a worse movie than The Men's Club. Even now, watching Stockard Channing as the First Lady on The West Wing, I feel a slight revulsion which can be traced back, I suspect, to her role in that terrible movie. And the other actors, some of them very good actors, were equally hopeless in the face of the intractable material.

  My quarrel with Lenny started before the movie was ever made. Perhaps I should back up and say that we became friends after I was his student, first in a graduate research methods class and then in a creative writing seminar. Lenny was not, strictly speaking, a good teacher— I learned nothing about research methods from him, and very little about creative writing—but he had a way of reading aloud a line of Wallace Stevens, say, or Kafka, that would change forever your understanding of a poem or story. His voice was his greatest pedagogical instrument. On the other hand, he excused every class early, without exception. I don't think I ever saw him last to the end of the hour.

  But if I am really to arrive at the origins of our friendship, I must go back even further, to the summer of 1975, when I was about to start graduate school at Berkeley. Toward the end of that summer, I lay on a chaise in the backyard of my mother's house in Palo Alto, reading Going Places, Lenny's first book of short stories. It was and still is one of his best books: wildly energetic, elegantly written, surprising, violent, and cruel. I remember going inside and saying to my mother, “This Leonard Michaels is a great writer, but I don't think I'd want him as a friend.” Over the years I was to recount this anecdote many times, to Lenny's great pleasure and mine.

  The Men's Club was a problem of a different order. The book had its own violence and cruelty, yes; but out of the book grew a specter, half-real and half-imaginary that was more destructive than anything in the book itself. I am referring to the movie deal. This golem-like entity drove Lenny almost literally crazy. He viewed it as his chance at real power and prestige, his crack at the big money, his opportunity to connect with the glamor of Hollywood. It brought out all that was most credulous and hungry and disturbingly naive in Lenny's character, and it did so for years on end. He talked about his producer so much, and with so little to show for it, that we all began to view this figure as a kind of imaginary friend, Lenny's very own extra-terrestrial companion. And then the producer appeared one night at a dinner party.

  I had probably had a bit too much to drink. My usual progression at a dinner party is to go from friendly conversation to excessively lively charm and thence to aggressive argumentation, though the progression can be stopped if the dinner party ends early enough, or if someone succeeds in squelching me before I get too far. No one squelched me that night, and by dessert I was well launched into a vigorous attack on the movie Altered States, which had come out the previous year. I believe I called it the worst movie ever made, but I cannot now remember my exact words. All I can recall is the expression on the face of Lenny's producer. “I made that movie,” he announced quietly. A silence fell on the dinner table.

  Now, I could point out that it was rude of the producer to announce this. He could just have kept his mouth shut and we would all have been none the wiser. Still, I'll admit I was in the wrong. But it was too late to apologize—that would only have made things worse. Besides, my friends are used to this sort of behavior. It is part of my known character as a difficult person, this unrestrained tactlessness, and people usually let me get away with it.

  Lenny did not. I had insulted his producer (that's how it became known in Berkeley: the dinner at which I insulted Lenny's producer), and he had to renounce me in order to preserve the movie deal. I doubt that this was an actual clause written into the contract. But it was certainly part of Lenny's complex system of superstition—a system which, unfortunately, neatly meshed with Hollywood's own version of magical thinking. If he did not renounce me, he was just asking for the movie deal to fall through.

  For years Lenny would cut me when we met at cocktail parties, refuse to acknowledge me when we passed on the street, and make it clear to mutual friends that he did not want to be invited over with me. I saw his point at first: I had committed a crime, however obliviously, and he was right to be angry. But when it went on and on, I began to find the reaction excessive.

  And then one day it ended. The movie had come out and been roundly trashed. Lenny had recovered from his craziness sufficiently to view the entire episode as one of the worst experiences of his creative life. He had turned against the producer, and therefore he no longer needed to be angry at me: the producer had taken my place as the object of venomous hatred. (Like a primitive tribe or a born mathematician, Lenny always operated with a very precise calculus of emotional equivalences and exchanges.) So one day, out of the blue, he called me up and we met for coffee. Nothing more was ever said between us about either the movie or the producer.

  The next quarrel, which began a few years later, was more complicated and less my fault. It began when one of Lenny's wives chose me as the sympathetic ear for her confidences.

  Lenny had four wives in the course of his life—five, if you count the longtim
e girlfriend who couldn't marry him because she was already married to a Swedish baron (a connection of which Lenny was inordinately proud: he spoke as often and as admiringly of The Baron as he had, during an earlier phase, of The Producer). Of these five women, four survived him, and all four were present, grief-stricken, at his funeral, as were his three grown children. Endlessly infuriating, he was nonetheless a man who inspired great loyalty among those who had been loved by him.

  But loyalty of a different sort was precisely what was at issue in the confidences I received from his wife. I gave no advice; I merely listened. (Another friend, also a teacher of mine, whom I have known for even longer than I knew Lenny, has taught me always to suspect that word “merely.” But let it pass, for now.) The wife didn't, in any case, want advice, and I wouldn't have known what to advise: I had no inside knowledge of the straits into which marriage to Lenny could force one. My job was just to provide a sympathetic ear, and I saw no harm in it. I have never felt morally responsible for my role as passively involved bystander in the lives of other adults. It is up to them to make their own choices, whatever I say or do not say. I am not their parent or their psychoanalyst. (This, at least, has been my internal self-justification. Explicitly stated, it begins to sound like too much protest. But what is the alternative? To begin viewing myself as a dangerous influence, a manipulator of human souls?)

  At any rate, I kept the confidence. But the wife did not. After that crisis in their marriage had passed, she confessed to Lenny that she had told me about it. (I am deducing this part, as I am deducing everything about the intimate conversation that took place between them. All I witnessed were the results.) Perhaps she confessed to clear her conscience—she had been raised a practicing Christian—or perhaps she confessed as revenge, after discovering some counterpart indiscretion of Lenny's. Or perhaps her motives were a mixture of innocent and vengeful, as they so often are in our morally loaded actions. As I said, I don't know exactly what happened. All I know is that my name somehow came into it.