The uses of adversity
Maloff, Saul
PHILIP ROTH & THE M/LSTER'S VOICE I The uses of adversity I SAUL MALOFF T HE BUZZ-VALUE of Philip Roth's new novel, * for readers enamored of such things, can be disposed of handily, without...
...Peter L. ~Berger on Religion and the American Future Donald G. Bloesch, Thomas Howard, and Robert E. W'eb~ on the Chicago Call J.M...
...Religious, cultural, and political affairs are discussed from~the perspective of the traditional values of Western culture...
...7 [-~ Sample copy...
...We've always known what they'll never know: that art is sovereign...
...4 cutting edge in American religious thought...
...The Master himself tells him not to worry, these things are to be expected...
...Lonoff, the illustrious Jewish short-story "writer, strongly suggests Bernard Malamud...
...Look...
...While Lonoff is a major character, and a constant presence in the novel's action and atmosphere, Abravanel is seen, or recollected, in passing, held just long enough to register some salient characteristics, and serves (here the resemblance to Bellow breaks down and is replaced by Mailer, if anyone) as a negative example for a young writer at the beginningof a greatly promising career...
...Anne Frank Herselfl How can anyone not see it is she...
...Various points of view are represented...
...Judge Wapter, assisted by his wife, the regional expert on such things as literature and art, rises superbly to the occasion...
...b) your community...
...But not quite: it is not for the deified Lonoff that Nathan creates Anne Frank out of baser materials...
...But the actual Amy Bellette, indifferent to and rather bored by Nathan, ~'emai-nS-s-tblidly herself and no one else...
...Articles, reviews, significant news, etc...
...In a wonderfully executed set-piece of a scene that curiously echoes a scene in Malamud's recent Dubin's Lives, some of the strands mesh...
...And what if Nathan, already enchanted, captures her for himself, becoming in a single stroke Lonoff's son and the source of immeasurable pride and pleasure to his bereaved parents and the other unbelievers back home in Newark...
...The attached document, which is some sort of masterpiece, is a questionnairean actual questionnaire headed "Ten Questions for Nathan Zuc~erman"-- prepared jointly by the Wapters in order to bring to Nathan's attention certain matters that might otherwise have eluded him, by way of easing him into examining his conscience to its rottenest depths...
...and a blind man standing off at a great distance can see him for what he is, his execrable wife for what she is: stock figures of knowing farce...
...rebuffed but persistent, she offers him her fair breast as a token of her esteem, and is again denied, kindly but fil'mly, by this man who understands the nature of limits...
...Clearly, the man is a crude joke, a pompous ass and petty tyrant...
...Oakland, CA 94618 CITY STATE ZIP CODE PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..J 9 November 1979:629threatening to leave forever, clearing the way for the adoring Amy...
...Another influence, described by Nathanson as "the 9 November 1979:631...
...Nathanson describes Lader as a "male chauvinist feminist" and says he was put off by Lader's willingness, for the sake of polemical effectiveness, to cast the Catholic hierarchy as chief villain in the abortion problem...
...If not, what credentials qualify you for writing about Jewish life for national magazines...
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...and Felix Abravanel, the other celebrated writer, as strongly suggests Saul Bellow, Roth, in a recent interview, angrily denied this, denouncing the New York literary scene as gossip-ridden (as of course it is) and pointing out triumphantly that he equipped the latter with his own physical attributes-- a strange, far-too-simple argument, and the most transparent of disguises...
...slobs...
...That noted, what more need be said of him...
...How mistaken we have been...
...Hope Lonoff is at the boiling point, Commonweal: 628ATTENTION: Evangelicals, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Other Believers Did You Miss...
...PHILIP ROTH & THE M/LSTER'S VOICE I The uses of adversity I SAUL MALOFF T HE BUZZ-VALUE of Philip Roth's new novel, * for readers enamored of such things, can be disposed of handily, without mystification or disingenuousness: E.I...
...Lonoff--not Roth's Lonoff but Nathan's, the character in his Anne Frank fantasies--knows that the girl of Nathan's dream is mad...
...In any case, against the Wapters nothing avails: the fiction he has composed as his unchaUengeable answer, by desanctifying the "Child Martyr," "would seem to them a desecration even more vile than the one they had read...
...The world, in the persons of his doting parents, relatives, neighbors, is not much interested in a fully achieved work of fiction which announces the arrival of a formidably gifted new writer...
...What will the neighbors say, and what will the goyim think...
...An illegal abortionist was found but the operation was very nearly botched and the trauma of the experience broke up the affair...
...Books: BACKING AWAY FROM ABORTION M OST PEOPLE interested in the abortion debate will' have heard of Bernard N. Nathanson...
...What a gift...
...Who is this Amy Bellette...
...Oh, '' his father will say, "how I have misunderstood my son...
...Newark is shocked, outraged, heartbroken: all the while they II I I I have been harboring a boy who's no better than an anti-Semite, who is indeed far worse, a viper but their viper...
...Henry on Issues in New Testament Theology Michael Novak on How He Has Changed His Mind Richard Quebedeaux on :the Left-wing Evangelicals Paul Seabury on John C. Bennett's PseudoNiebuhrianism G.B...
...Affluent women, tor whom pregnancy might be no more than an inconvenience, could expect cooperation from the profession in the "form of cooked lab reports, routine discoveries of psychiatric "indications" or referral to other jurisdictions (Japan, England, Puerto Rico) where abortion law was either permissive or loosely enforced...
...Whether you're concerned about our eroding cultural standards or the crisis of faith and practice in the churches, you'll want to become acquainted with~the New Oxford Review...
...The Ghost Writer is a kind of peace offering, Roth's own, I believe it fair to say, a filial gesture for wounds unintentionally administered, for art's sake...
...Just beyond Nathan's fingertips as he stands on a volume of Henry James's stories atop the desk, Amy pleads for Lonoff's love and is told to behave herself like a good girl...
...What does it do for the remnant of the holocaust...
...Lodging for the night in Lonoff's study, where he is attempting painfully, and unavailingly, to write out for their edification a definitive reply to his parents' protests, Nathan overhears a strange scene, enacted in the bedroom directly above his desk, between Lonoff and Amy...
...but he was betrayed by his own great virtues as a writer-- an eery gift for mimicry and an exhilarating acuity of eye and ear, together with an extraordinary literary intelligence, so that certain distinguishing qualities of the older writers' work are fixed to the wall with the highest precision...
...In internship and residency and later as he became successful in his practice, he learned (too well, he might say now) of the "tragic wastefulness, infuriating injustice and medical hypocrisy" of the abortion problem under proscriptive law...
...A kind of daughter...
...8.95...
...In Nathan's case, as, notoriously, in the young Roth's, the early work, instead of bringing him the world's love and admiration, as he confidently expected, brings him great grief and .pain...
...Even to Judge Wapter, Roth's worstcase possibility and most horrible example...
...In a paper he contributed to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1972, he described with some pride the standards and procedures used by the clinic to establish its record of safe operation...
...In it he acknowledged that he was "deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I . . . presided over 60,000 deaths" ABORTINg ANERICA Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., with Richard N. Ostllng Doubleday, $10, 320 pp...
...To be told by Lonoff that in its bloody contest with Life, Art must prevail...
...b) incessant fighting over money...
...For his part, Nathan is gravely wounded and implacably furious, in roughly equal measure...
...c) the Jewish religion...
...In his anguish over his son's story, Nathan's father has gone to Wapter as to a court of final appeal to implore him to intercede with his errant son before it's too late for him and for the Jews...
...Robert O. Hoyt at the clinic...
...Solemnly enthroned in his chambers he sports beneath his ceremonial robes argyle socks...
...Lonoff obliges, thus contriving to be both a lover and chaste: a father-of-sorts...
...In a splendid exercise of the fiction-making faculty Nathan conjures up a plausible Anne Frank, the woman the girl became after her supposed death, equipped with a SAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic, is a regular contributor to Commonweal and other magazines...
...Nathan has come out of the University of Chicago afire with the glad tidings of Art, and he its messsenger...
...For some time after this, he writes, he continued to perform abortions, including elective abortions, but with increasing reluctance, and he kept up his reflections...
...and so the fatherless child cuddles up in her Daddy's lap and begs him to comfort her with his celebrated imitation of the great Jimmy Durante...
...in making his pilgrimage to the Lanoff shrine he has already made his choice...
...he declares...
...but the grieving man somehow doesn't seem to get the point...
...Any clever schoolboy knows this...
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...history, a personality, a future, quirks, a voice, motives, oddities, the lot, all that is necessary to have come finally to this house and this predicament...
...This book is the result of his pondering...
...Short of the lies they solicit, the warm, comforting bedtime stories, there is no way of "answering" the Wapters that will not incur their wrath...
...merely a friend of the family...
...Lonoff is sore-tried...
...Just as once Roth resurrected Franz Kafka and brought him back alive, to Newark, so now he revives a heroic figure more to Newark's taste...
...After New YorkState, partly at NARAL's urging, legalized abortion in 1970, Nathanson served for nine~'een months as director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, which despite its name was "the first--and largest--abortion clinic in the Western world...
...In a story with a Jewish background, what reason is there for a description of physical intimacy between a married Jewish man and an unmarried Christian woman7 Why in a story with a Jewish background must there be (a) adultery...
...The offending story rattles with family skeletons: an ambitiou.s, domineering Jewish mother, a con-man and crook...
...Along with his wife, Lonoff's house is for the time occupied by Amy Bellette, a onetime student and now a friend of Lonoff's, come down from Cambridge ostensibly to bring order to the chaos of his "papers...
...What a trophy[ What a daughter-in-law to bring home...
...I the New Criticism--is the young writer, the narrator and central figure, 23years-old and the author of a few stories published to critical acclaim, one of which has created a major scandal back home and is the occasion of his quest for vindication, for moral and literary support from E.I...
...Nathan Zuckerman--the Rothcharacter, let's call him, and never mind classroom rubbish about the "biographicai fall~acy," that tiresome old gobliwof 9 The Ghost Writer, by Philip Roth, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 180 pp...
...a former, or current, lover...
...Nathan, raging at the Wapters, tells his frantic, tearful-mother that no, he'll see them inhell before replying to them...
...Both religious and secular issues are addressed...
...and as for his "father's love," the ultimate weapon invoked by the desperate mother, well, then, so be it: "I am on my own...
...gone to him as his forebears in the Old Country might have journeyed across the Pale to seek divine wisdom at the rabbinical court of the holiest sage...
...Lonoff, who has been there before, again and again and again, seeks to reassure him...
...These are the choices presented to Nathan...
...that its only responsibility (the word itself is absurd) is to itself, its own laws and truths...
...Cameron on Ronald Knox and His Brothers Carl F.H...
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...Do you believe 9 Shakespeare's Shylock and Dickens's Fagin have been 9 of no use to anti-Semites...
...The worst possible case, put by the Commonweal: 630worst possible advocate...
...Not such cold comfort as it may seem at first glance...
...Poor women who out of desperation induced their own abortions or found a hack :ibortionist risked disease, sterility and death...
...If so, how...
...tells her that Newark is not yet Belsen--in Newark the only violence committed on Jews is at the hands of plastic surgeons specializing in noses...
...And yet, the Wapters must be answered...
...How is one to live and serve one's talent purely and uncompromisingly in a world which has its own and very different ideas of what is important and valuable...
...An ambiguous figure from the outset, she comes to seem even more mysterious to the enthralled Nathan...
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...the Anne Frank he has fashioned, looking back twenty years after the events of the novel, resists all his strenuous efforts to "lift her out of her sacred book and make her a character in this life...
...So it must be...
...Beautiful but oddly out of focus, a European refugee of some sort, Amy eludes definition...
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...and with high moral seriousness: trivial and vulgar people, too, feel real pain, run real blood...
...But what does it entail: what deprivations, denials, exactions...
...Wapter is the Newark Jewish community's most distinguished figure, God help it, a power to reckon with, a puffed-up little martinet married to a rich woman who got in him no better than she deserved, the crassest sort of philistine oozing sanctity and complacency...
...In a letter and document almost too perfect to have been invented--starting with Goodbye, Columbus and the early stories (to say nothing of Portnoy's Complaint) Roth must have received mmldoads of such mail, all of it of course intended for his own good: Wapter's seems the quintessence of them,.a case of art improving on life--Wapter unctuously, more in sorrow than in anger, lectures the stripling on the "responsibilities" of his high calling, charging him in the gentlest of murmuring tones with high treason against God and man...
...But then Nathanson resigned from the Center and after a period of reflection submitted another manuscript to the same prestigious publication, published in 1974 as "Deeper into Abortion...
...c) warped human behavior in g e n e r a l ? " . . . . " A s i d e from financial gain to yourself, what benefits do you think publishing this story in a national magazine will have for (a) your family...
...Emphasis is given to enhancing understanding between Catholics and Evangelicals...
...Nathan needs her as his "unassailable advocate" against Newark's' 'charges.of defection and betrayal and reckless, heinous informing," his "unchaUengeable answer to their questionnaire that I proposed to offer the Wapters...
...Who is she really...
...A few morsels may suggest the banquet: 'qf you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story...
...But nobody 9 ever claimed that art was painless--how is one to broadcast that truism in Newark, or announce that the only truly unpardonable sin is bad art, the gratuitous infliction of pain...
...Yet the two became close allies in organizing NARAL and orienting it toward revolutionary rather than moderate change...
...For the rest of us The Ghost Writer will serve in a cruelly flawed world as the only possible answer: a novel about the nature and risks--and limits--of art and the imagination, about the surprising uses of adversity, as subtle, intricate, serious, finely-turned and deeply felt a fiction as Roth, in full voice, has wrought...
...At about the time Nathanson began to believe the laws should be changed, he met Lawrence Lader, a well-off, left-ofcenter magazine writer and crusader for social justice who had adopted total abolition of abortion laws as his cause...
...A New York City obstetrician-gynecologist, he took part in 1969 in founding the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), now the National Abortion Rights Action League...
...A straight-A student, he knows all the fight literary responses, none of the human ones...
...Raised them Out of obscurity and put them on the map...
...The Master's voice fills Nathan with joy--ah, to be sitting in the temple talking with its high priest about the writer's vocation, about Literature, while he himself is working on his first novel: that's happiness...
...and it may be fairly added that though Th-e Ghost Writer is not in any literal sense a roman ~ clef, certain personal traits are unmistakably caught--not in full portrait, of course, but in broad strokes, a gesture here, a tone of voice there, a turn of mind everywhere...
...Don't they see what he's done for them...
...Nathan is perplexed, and all the more dazzled...
...The resurrected saint is Nathan's gift to his father...
...In a superbly staged and greatly moving scene, he tries to explain all this to his loving father, a good and decent man...
...Nathanson's first serious personal encounter with abortion and abortion law occurred in his third year at McGill Uni- t versity Medical College in Montreal, when his partner in a love affair became pregnant...
...Certainly not to Nathan...
...Eliot Sheldon Vanauken on the Ordination of Women Dale Vree on Worshiping the Zeitgeist It's time 'for you to discover the New Oxford Review, a unique and fresh monthly magazine...
...he's a true writer and he must go on till he gets there--that must be his only concern...
...Lonoff, the JewishAmerican writer whom he most venerates and who has lived, over the years, isolated from literary (and any other) society in his Berkshire fastness, gone on writing his marvelous, burnished stories, indifferent to fashion, money, fame, aloof from and contemptuous of the great world, remote from his own family, unmoved by the public acclaim which was so slow in arriving: a life, in short, as secluded and austere in its devotion to his vocation as Abravanel's is gilded and worldly...
...All the same, he can't quite shake off his parents' misery, the nervous sense that perhaps he has not made them a fully adequate response to their baffled grief...
...You've broken your mother's heart...
...Let them then dare to question his loyalty, love, good-will...
...Looked at closely, with an eye that penetrates the surface of things to their veriest essence, could Amy not b e . . . why of course she can be, in fact doubtless is, none other than Anne Frank...
...but in the first place Newark wants to know: Isit good or bad for the Jews...
...justified their faith in him--they had always known the boy had everything--by becoming an artist...
...d) the well-being of the Jewish people...
...Look what you have done, my son, to your own people...
...Tennyson on the Rumors about T.S...
...Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels...
...Fine and dandy as far as it goes...
...Do you practice Judaism...
...Ablaze body and soul, his imagination ignites...
...Now perhaps they will begin to understand, where all else failed, the uses of the imagination and the divine power of art to bestow life...
Vol. 106 • November 1979 • No. 20
