The Anatomy Lesson

...Baruch had many devoted friends, including journalists like Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World (who wrote or touched up his speeches) and Arthur Krock, and General Pershing, whose financial affairs he handled from 1923 on...

...Wilson/Viking Press/S13.95 Roger Lewis P e t e r Ackroyd is a master of disguise...

...It is the only fun the reader has, as well...

...He decides that the way to do this is to shuck the writer's trade and find a profession which would make him focus on something beside himself...

...He pours all sorts of invective on AppelHowe's head, calling him President of the Rabbinical Society for the Suppression of Laughter in the Interest of Loftier Values, to choose one of the politer (and somewhat accurate) epithets...

...Even Updike, in his Bech books, works up an ironic distance which allows him to bring off some passing literary satire...

...Perhaps...

...Their actions had significance because of the resistance of this atmosphere...

...But somehow the whole that might spring from this lively mosaic of bits and pieces never quite comes into focus...

...He pontificated in that sense to Arthur Krock once, in opulent surroundings in Paris, while having a manicure...

...The people in Jane Austen's world moved in a highly pressurized moral and social atmosphere...

...In Mann's novel, however, the whole sick crew is preoccupied with the central issues of Western civilization...

...Apart from getting even with Max Appel, Ztickerman's major pursuit is getting rid of the mysterious pain...

...But the complaints themselves raise an intriguing question...

...Introspection of this sort makes bad psychotherapy and worse fiction...

...Maybe Roth should try an epistolary novel...

...Madame Bovary could accommodate her adulteries in an Open Marriage or, at worst, she and Charles could attend a Creative Divorce workshop at the New School...

...An unpleasant article written about his work by a highbrow critic named Max Arpel...

...But their novels deal with extra-literary themes and social milieus, and these provide a mediating distance through which the reader approaches the selfabsorbed artist...

...No wonder some of them yearn for the external stimuli provided by a totalitarian regime...

...When reporters asked about the charges, Baruch, in one of his wittier moments, responded: "Now, boys, you wouldn't expect me to deny them, would you...

...He has done the best of any novelist with the mandarin vaudeville style Bellow inaugurated in A ugie March...

...In order to find the tension which makes for a good story, he has to dig under the lax surface of a democratic society into business offices or artists' lofts or whatever, where he'll find plenty of what he wants...

...Ackroyd's novel pretends to be a journal of the writer's last few weeks when these two halves THE LAST TESTAMENT OF OSCAR WILDE Peter Ackroyd/Harper &Row/S12.95 WISE VIRGIN A.N...

...ever sponsors an airlift to Rumania for American novelists, Philip Roth will be my candidate for the first shuttle...

...The blandness may or may not have been belied in private...

...They stick ~to their own turf, which is the academy or a street somewhere in suburbia, and when these exhaust their powers of observation, there is always the final subject, their own free-floating egos...

...His favorite playmate, Jenny, is one of those Perfect Women who keep showing up in Roth's fiction, the intriguing, literate, unassuming, mothering sexual acrobat who is ultimately too demanding for Roth's narcissistic literateurs...

...Built from fragments of recollected conversations and snatches of dialogue overheard in history, the Cantos "moan round with many voices, " like the memories cloaked by the ocean in Tennyson's Ulysses...

...Their citizenry routinely faces the kind of moral dilemmas which are the stuff of good fiction and which the poor American novelist, dealing with a permissive democracy, cannot introduce into his work with a straight face...

...Had he kept a pain diary, the only entry would have been one word: Myself...

...Poor Doctorow and Coover and Piercy and Mailer...

...Is it true that writers who live under repressiv e regimes, whether of the Right or the Left, have larger themes at their disposal than writers who live in democracies where, as the novelist here under consideration has put it, "everything goes and nothing matters...

...Such are the salient features of the financial and public career of Bernard M. Baruch, man and "Wall Street legend...

...Eliot's The Waste Land ("throbbing between two lives/Old man with wrinkled female breasts") and in an elliptical way underpir~s Ackroyd's latest book, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde...

...Somebody should have told me about them long ago," runs the epiphany...

...It had seemed the appropriate' great tome for the occasion, but strapped inert upon his narrow bed, Zuckerman grew increasingly irritated by Hans Castrop and the dynamic opportunities for growth provided him by TB...

...There follow a number of discussions between the forty-year old novelist and his friends about the "real world" and what he is going to do in life--the sort you last heard senior year in college...

...all nuclear technologies and weapons to an international agency, under UN supervision...

...What is Nathan Zuckerman's main preoccupation when he isn't thinking about his ae~hing back...

...She reads tO him each day from The Magic Mountain...

...It is the same trick that most "serious" Broadway dramatists use these days, and it makes the assembly of characters in a room seem arbitrary...

...The best bits in his last books have been the letters which the characters compose~off-stage, of course...

...backing but never got off the ground, was to turn over control of...

...What there is of plot never advances unobtrusively through conversation...

...Every so often he publicly reiterated his standard advice: To get on, Americans must "work and save...

...Baruch cultivated an aura of blandness--"I am never quoted directly," he scolded once to a New Yorker writer who had quoted an uncharacteristically sharp remark about someone...

...Tom Wolfe has diagnosed the psychological basis of these grievances, and there is no need to dwell on the interior need of certain American intellectuals to feel persecuted...

...Wilde it is who throbs between two lives...

...animosities, seems to notice...

...Various women come to succor him...

...Roth, however, begins and ends with the selfabsorbed artist, whose gangrenous ego is bot e and milieu...

...Unfortunately, most novelists these days seem too lazy to do this...

...tions...

...Henry Ford's silly, anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent condemned him as the "proconsul of Judah in America...

...He should also take a cue from his literary alter ego, whose only fun in The Anatomy Lesson is when he gets out of his own skin and pretends to be a pornography magnate...

...He pushed a plan devised by David Lilienthal which inevitably became known, with no disclaimer on his part, as the Baruch Plan...

...They keep flailing away at America in book after book, and nobody, apart from those who already share their George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...Although I possess the wonder of Miranda~ I have also the faintness of Prospero who forswears his art as soon as life has quite matched his expectations...

...There, once he recovers some of his health, he makes the rounds with the doctors in intensive care and discovers that cancer, among other maladies, is worse than the pangs of a solipsistic literary conscience...

...He was teased about it in Hobcaw for years...

...In feature a Boer farmer, in manner a vestal virgin, as Wilde says of Walter Pater...

...Now, there is nothing wrong with making a writer or artist the hero of a novel...

...Healmost felt for Nixon, the only other American he saw daily who seemed to be in as much trouble as he was...

...Totalitarian regimes, so goes the argument, give the novelist what he wants--a milieu where things really matter...

...His last four novels, however, have made scant use of these gifts because their true subject is the narcissistic literary ego...

...Was there more to the legend than was seen, tucked away from sight like his sensible Sears Roebuck shoes...

...Grant chronicles them with a merry heart and a light touch, and is especially enlightening on the intricacies of stock speculation...

...We leave him treasuring the realization that he doesn't have it so bad after all, and there is a hint that he will return to the typewriter...

...Roth has shown he has the stuff of a good novelist...

...The idea, which enjoyed U.S...

...Naturally, he has writer's block...

...One might argue, looking at her and James and Balzac, that moral sensitivity, not to mention sheer craftsmanship, is more important than a writer's political context...

...Mann and Proust did, and produced great works...

...He also has a mysterious ailment which causes intolerable pain unless he remains fiat on hi~.back...

...A cancer ward, it seems, will do as well as the Gulag...

...Like numerous other characters in contemporary American fiction (and, one is tempted to say, like their creators), Nathan tries to achieve self-knowledge in exactly the way that William James said is impossible: not by observing himself indirectly through action, but by sitting still and sending his thoughts like a diving bell down into the murky depths of his psyche in order to find his Real Self...

...Superannuated, androgyne appears as Tiresias in T.S...

...But looked at with a critical eye, free from moral and social distaste, the concept of a man trying to turn himself into a woman enacts something important...

...Roth tells interviewers that his worl is not autobiographical, but the article described in the novel bears a curious resemblance to one that Irving Howe wrote about Roth's work some years ago in Commentary...

...But it is not he who dresses up: His talent is to divine the masquerades of other people...

...How much better they would feel knowing that the jackboots from State Security were on their way...

...With the looks of a lady and the appendages of the male, the transvestite is a creature closest to androgyne (andros male, gun~ woman, in Greek...

...on the other he was a frequenter of male brothels, a wallower in his own sins...

...But writing a novel in which the main objective emotion of the hero is animus 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 against a book reviewer would seem to prove Howe's point...

...it lurches from soapbox to soapbox...

...A social order which seems to have abandoned most rules is, indeed, a more difficul~t number for a novelist...

...Other people...

...The novel opens with Zuckerman stretched supine on a playmat in his study, his head supported by Roget's Thesaurus, watching Watergate on television through a pair of prism glasses that enable him to see at right angles...

...Grant here explores so entertainingly...

...Ostensibly about transvestism, it charted the couturial aids which help blur sexual distincRoger Lewis is fiction critic for the New Statesman (London...

...On the one hand he was a famous author, aphorist of the Cafd Royale with a respectable wife and family...

...His characters don't talk, they sandblast each other with words...

...handsome prince is in fact a strutting girl...

...One's first thought is to go back to an author like Jane Austen, who apparently spent more time worrying about knitting patterns and Hampshire balls than about politics...

...In Chicago he has a nervous breakdown, bangs himself falling on a tombstone (shades of Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle") and lands up in the hospital...

...He flies to Chicago to enroll in medical school...

...If our commentators about myth are to be believed, androgyne is the primal, undivided whole from which the rest of us have sprung...

...How many of the dilemmas portrayed in nineteenth-century fiction would make the slightest sense if transported, say, to the upper west side of Manhattan today...

...He once had a good eye for social detail, he still has an ear for vernacular, and he can be funny...

...But until we find the secret diary, or the set of indiscreet letters, all we have is the decorous, honorable record which Mr...

...There is a funny skit on the airplane where Zuckerman pretends to the staid businessman sitting next to him that he is a pornographer named Max Appel...

...This combination of masculine and feminine traits is the basis of comic confusion in much of Shakespeare (where girls turn into boys) and is the major convention in British pantomime (where the Ugly Sisters are vamps played by comedians and the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 39...

...He has already essayed Ezra Pound, an author whose endless Cantos form a ventriloquial epic...

...The rulers of these regimes, moreover, pay close attention to what writers have to say, and the writer, passing around his samizdat manuscripts in dimly lit cells while the snarling ideological watchdogs patrol outside, has the ticklish feeling that he is a part of History...

...P~re Goriot on Percodan or Valium ceases to be a plot catalyst...

...In that piece, Howe made the case that Roth is a vulgar, minor satirist who "cannot, or ought not, hold the interest of a reasonably mature reader...

...Ackroyd has also written a book called Dressing Up...

...THE ANATOMY LESSON Philip Roth/Farrar, Straus and Giroux/$14.95 George Sim Johnston I t has become the fashion among American novelists to envy their brethren in Eastern Europe...

...With such sentences does Roth try to give the impression that he is working a sidestreet of a ritzy literary neighborhood...

...Reviewers often praise Roth's style, and his writing/s smooth...

...Roth seems not to have gotten over it...

...I f P.E.N...

...But the issue is somewhat more complicated...

...There is more on the nature and destiny of Western man in Mansfield Park than in any work yet to come out of a modern police state...

...ckerman, novelist hero of the trilogy o vhich The Anatomy Lesson is, me ~ully, the conclusion, is interested only in his own needs and feelings...

...But his dialogt/e, even though it can be amusing, is something of a cheat...

...Now that he is done with Nathan Zuckerman, Roth should leave the exploration of the literary ego to the dozens of novelists currently working the terrain and let his not inconsiderable talents for gags and mimicry feed on more solid fare...