Goodbye, Nathan Zuckerman

By R.Z. Sheppard

The Anatomy Lesson concludes Philip Roth's comic trilogy

"Does he know his sentence?" "No," said the officer, eager to go on with his exposition . . . "There would be no point in telling him. He'll learn it on his body."

--Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony

Nearly 25 years after Goodbye, Columbus brought him early fame and 15 years since Portnoy 's Complaint made him notorious and rich, Philip Roth continues to be misunderstood, or understood too quickly. There are causes for confusion: the contrast between the high-minded explainer of literary culture and the unbuttoned comedian who writes America's most raucously funny novels; the zigzagging from realism to fantasy, political satire to slapstick; and the dual image of the Connecticut country gentleman and the writing drudge whose spiritual home is Kafka's Prague.

There is also the matter of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's fictional alter id and hero of a comic trilogy that has forever flattened the myth of the glamorous writing life. Zuckerman, of course, is not Roth but rather the fullest and most personal expression of a theme that has come to dominate his work: the mayhem unleashed by those who would escape their pasts. This may be what David Kepesh in Roth's The Professor of Desire had in mind when he spoke stiltedly of "the destructive power--of those who see a way out of the shell of restrictions and convention, out of the pervasive boredom and the stifling despair, out of the painful marital situations and the endemic social falsity, into what they take to be a vibrant and desirable life." Kepesh, a randy academic, discovered his freakish freedom in The Breast, a tale about a man who turned into a mammary gland.

Roth has a genius for the comedy of entrapment. He is an uncompromising myth buster with a taste for bruising intimacy. Neil Klugman of Goodbye, Columbus and Alexander Portnoy were devoid of sentimentality and nostalgia for a lost paradise. Their Newark neighborhood had its charms, but it was basically a staging area for an assault on the sophisticated culture of New York, perhaps even London and Paris. The golden ghettos of suburbia struck them as Newarks with wall-to-wall carpeting.

Ambitious boy kicks burg is a familiar story, and central to the Zuckerman books. The Ghost Hunter (1979) introduced a young Nathan, like Roth a Newark-born writer who was hailed as the most promising voice in American letters. Zuckerman Unbound (1981) found the hero in his 30s, beleaguered by celebrity and controversy. Carnovsky, a Portnoy-like novel, had angered the community and his own family. His father's dying word to his son was "Bastard." Roth's father, a retired insurance executive, is a vigorous supporter of his son's work.

In Act III, The Anatomy Lesson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 291 pages; $14.95), Mr. Z. is battling disillusionment and the grand paradox of the writer's life: "Chicago had sprung him from Jewish New Jersey, then fiction took over and boomeranged him right back. He wasn't the first: they fled Newark, New Jersey, and Camden, Ohio, and Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and Asheville, North Carolina; they couldn't stand the ignorance, the feuds, the boredom, the righteousness, the bigotry, the repetitious narrow-minded types; they couldn't endure the smallness; and then they spent the rest of their lives thinking about nothing else. Of all the tens of thousands who flee, those setting the pace for the exodus are the exiles who fail to get away. Not getting away becomes their job--it's what they do all day."

Nathan Zuckerman, now 40, spends many of his waking hours stretched on the floor with Roget's Thesaurus under his head. He suffers from chronic, undiagnosed pain in the neck, arms and shoulders. "When he is sick, every man wants his mother," begins Roth. "If she's not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women." In turn, they feed him, read his mail and distract him with sex as he lies nearly motionless on his playmat.

The veteran novelist is too conscious of his unconscious to believe that the agony is mere retribution for his novels. "No," Zuckerman reasons, "if the pain intended to accomplish something truly worthwhile, it would not be to strengthen his adamancy but to undo the stranglehold ... Let the others write the books. Leave the fate of literature in their good hands."

Fed up with writing ("ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters"), he heads for the University of Chicago with plans to enroll in medical school. The decision restores his creative urges in an unfortunate way. He buttonholes strangers with wildly obscene monologues describing himself as Milton Appel, a no-holds-barred pornographer. Appel is the name of Zuckerman's nemesis, a leading literary critic who once branded Carnovsky and its author vulgar and demeaning.

Zuckerman is propelled through Chicago by pain, anger, remorse, Percodan, alcohol and a woman driver in wicked black boots. He is undone by a visit to a Jewish cemetery. Burdened by guilt, he attacks an aged mourner and cries: "We are the dead. These bones in boxes are the Jewish living! These are the people running the show!" The last things he sees before regaining consciousness in the hospital are his driver's boots. His jaw is broken and must be wired shut.

Zuckerman's comeuppance leaves little to the imagination, though Roth teases the reader with two possibilities: his most personal character has either been kicked or fallen on a gravestone. In any case, he is silent because he has nothing more to say; or to put it another way, Roth has exhausted the possibilities of his character.

The trilogy is Roth's most complex and structurally satisfying work. It is a disciplined string ensemble compared with Portnoy's Complaint, which had the primal power of a high school band. Yet Zuckerman and Portnoy have close ties. Both star in comedies of the unconscious, burlesques of psychoanalytic processes whose irreverence and shocking explicitness challenge the pieties that protect hidden feelings. "Ill tell you your calling," screams Zuckerman at Critic Appel, "President of the Rabbinical Society for the Suppression of Laughter in the Interest of Loftier Values! Minister of the Official Style for Jewish Books Other than the Manual for Circumcision."

Roth has expressed similar sentiments, more suitably phrased for literary debate, in Reading Myself and Others (1975). In this collection of essays and interviews he answered his critics, among them Irving Howe. In the pages of Commentary, the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee, Howe rendered the solemn judgment that Portnoy's Complaint degraded American Jews. Roth saw the roots of such attacks in history. Wrote the embattled author: "He [the Jew] is not expected to make a spectacle of himself, either by shooting off his mouth or shooting off his semen, and certainly not by shooting off his mouth about shooting off his semen."

One of the ironies of Roth's career is that his style is so immediate, his sense of phrasing so vital, that readers cannot be blamed for blurring the distinction between the writer and his creation. Even Claire Bloom, with whom Roth shares a "paperless marriage," sometimes slips and says "you" when referring to Zuckerman. Bloom, 52, and the novelist, 50, have been together seven years. Roth's only marriage ended when his wife, Margaret Martinson, was killed in a 1968 car accident. The couple had been separated for five years; they had no children.

Both Roth and Bloom spend much of their time in the writer's 1790 colonial farmhouse on 40 orderly acres in northwest Connecticut. There are frequent stays in London, where Bloom continues to act on stage and before the camera. In January she will appear in Roth's adaptation of The Ghost Writer on Public Broadcasting.

"Life is being alone in a room," says Roth, who does most of his writing in a two-room cottage several hundred yards from the main house. "At this stage of the game I know it. I know there is no way out. You choose your prison, and I've tried to put mine in paradise." The room is neat and sparsely furnished. A worn book about Newark is at hand for reference, and a haunted Franz Kafka gazes from a prominently displayed photograph to remind the writer of paradise's alternative.

Roth has never had an easy time behind his typewriter. He is a demanding craftsman who has chosen difficult material. "Intimacy and subjectivity are my subjects," he explains, though that is as far as he goes toward defining the boundary between himself and Nathan Zuckerman. Their Newarks are the same; both lived in the Weequahic section, which Roth describes as once having been a Jewish village of hard-working plumbers, salesmen and shopkeepers.

Herman and Elizabeth Roth's youngest son skipped two grades, entering high school at twelve. His senior yearbook was premonitory: "A boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense." Roth recalls that at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pa., he asked his English instructor if he should participate in activities that would help him get along with people. "Why would you want to do a thing like that?" replied the prof. Says the reluctant joiner: "It was wonderful ... the first great line of my education."

Formal learning continued at the University of Chicago, where Roth earned a master's degree in literature. Quarterlies published his first stories. One of them, The Contest for Aaron Gold, was selected for the 1956 Martha Foley collection of Best American Short Stories. By this time, he was a 22-year-old PFC churning out press releases for the U.S. Army. In off-hours, he used his Government-issue typewriter to compose the tales that would eventually merge in Goodbye, Columbus.

This work won the 1960 National Book Award for fiction and launched a career that has seen its share of fluctuations. Readers and critics kept expecting the fresh voice of that first book, while Roth labored to expand his range. Letting Go was a solid conventional novel about graduate-school life; When She Was Good told a depressing story of how a Middle Western girl became a man hater. Portnoy brought his distinctive tone back with a vengeance. Its success freed him from money worries but encouraged what he calls "the unreckoned consequences of art." It was as if the smartest and nicest boy in the class had robbed a bank. Says Roth: "I understood what literary fame and recognition were. I didn't know what it was to create a scandal--a scandalous act for which I was then paradoxically rewarded."

The Zuckerman trilogy distorts those rewards with comic punishments. Roth's inspiration for the character came after several trips to Czechoslovakia. He was stirred by the contrast between the benign annoyances of literary celebrity in the U.S. and the repression of writers in Prague, Kafka's home town. "In America," he observes, "everything goes and nothing matters. While in Eastern Europe, nothing goes and everything matters." The calculated absurdity of the Zuckerman books is that everything goes and everything matters.

Roth once wrote that deadly seriousness and playfulness were his friends, but he left out frustration. Of the six years it took to finally shut Zuckerman's mouth, he says, "Ten out of every twelve months spent writing are spent being wrong." This is a hard fact of literary life. It might well be the origin of Dr. Spielvogel's concluding line in Portnoy: "Now vee may perhaps to begin." --

--By R.Z. Sheppard.

Reported by Joelle Attinger/Boston

Excerpt

Enough of my writing, enough of their scolding. Rebellion, obedience--discipline, explosion--injunction, resistance--accusation, denial--defiance, shame--no, the whole God damn thing has been a colossal mistake. This is not the position in life that I had hoped to fill. I want to be an obstetrician. Who quarrels with an obstetrician? Even the obstetrician who delivered Bugsy Siegel goes to bed at night with a clear conscience. He catches what comes out and everybody loves him. When the baby appears they don't start shouting, 'You call that a baby? That's not a baby!' No, whatever he hands them, they take it home. They're grateful for his just having been there. Imagine those butter-covered babies, Diana, with their little Chinese eyes, imagine what seeing that does to the spirit, that every morning, as opposed to grinding out another two dubious pages. Conception? Gestation? Gruesome laborious labor? The mother's business. You just wash your hands and hold out the net. Twenty years up here in the literary spheres is enough--now for the fun of the flowing gutter.

With reporting by Joelle Attinger/Boston This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.