The exactions of art
Maloff, Saul
PHILIP ROTH RETURNING TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME The exactions of art SAUL MALOFF Philip ROTH introduces some new material, or variations on familiar material, in the latest volume of what looks...
...PHILIP ROTH RETURNING TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME The exactions of art SAUL MALOFF Philip ROTH introduces some new material, or variations on familiar material, in the latest volume of what looks in a fair way of becoming a serial dynastic novel -a family saga, a continuing bildungsroman or sentimental education carried far past the conventional limits of the mode (the rites of passage into manhood and the ways of the world) and into the mid-journey crises of Nathan Zuckerman, the writer-protagonist of Zuckerman Unbound* (some Prometheus, this one) and its predecessor The Ghost Writer...
...Still, if the novel is to be faulted, it is precisely on the grounds that it is too much composed of gleaming fragments and episodes, dazzling but replaceable parts, "numbers," "turns," and here and there collapses into private jokes, nudges, and winks...
...Not only is she beautiful and talented-she reads Kierkegaard...
...The moral question-the human costs and consequence of art-was left suspended in The Ghost Writer...
...A madman (though he may not be mad at all, only a free-market entrepreneur with a nose for a good thing) demands a siza...
...You are a bastard," his only brother tells him...
...The world is too much with him...
...Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families-everything is grist for your fun-machine...
...His abandoned love will not take him back...
...Lunatics stop him on the street-the scenes dominated by Alvin Pepler (the nutty idiot-savant with perfect memory, total recall, and gnawing grievances, traduced into becoming the fall guy in the notorious TV quiz scandals of the fifties which marked the end of American innocence) are brilliant comic set-pieces, inspired burlesque, vaudeville at its best...
...Bastard, was what Dad said, he tells him, and that's only the beginning...
...Prometheus as Job...
...10.95, 225 pp...
...What more could Zuckerman ever ask of life...
...Instead, Nathan, the stand-up comedian, entertained him and the others keeping the death-watch by informing him in detail of the "big bang" theory of cosmic beginnings as culled from a paperback read on the plane-ride down to the deathbed in Miami...
...I've served my time...
...Everything is changed beyond recognition, of course...
...He is now "No one . . . no longer some good woman's husband . . . no longer [his ] brother's brother, and you don't [he concludes ] come from anywhere anymore, either...
...one word only but it is enough, it will do...
...What price is the artist willing to pay: anything at all up to and including that pact with the devil...
...Now, at last, all that is behind him, or so he tells himself: "Over . . . Over...
...Gossip columnists plague him...
...In a somber, elegiac final scene , Nathan, famous, rich, bereft, miserable, desolate, gazing into the abyss, returns to the old neighborhood for a last look at where it all started-in a hired limo driven by an armed bodyguard...
...The young writer of the earlier novel, feverish with his first success, deeply *Farrar, Straus and Giroux...
...Lest there be any mistaking the evidence of his senses (the dying chiropodist, paralyzed by a succession of strokes, is incapable of speech...
...But the day of reckoning is at hand, and the judgment will be rendered...
...a final massive effort produces the terrible pronouncement, an outpouring, so to speak, of his heart's blood, though it kills him to say it), lest Nathan feel disposed to spare himself by deciding he had mis-heard, his decent, gentle brother assures him he heard right...
...After the first book, stories that provoked a volcanic family crisis and boiling agitation in Newark's Jewish community, Nathan had gone dutifully on to a second book and a third and then -now -to his fourth, a novel called Carnovsky, regarding which it is demanded of us that we think Portnoy, just as previously we were urged to think of his debut as Goodby, Columbus and the deadly stories included with it...
...Yet the dead are not so easily buried as all that, as Nathan, poor boy, has reason to know, and if we hear further moral tales of the Zuckermans we should not be wholly surprised...
...Bastard is the least of it...
...And since the reckoning is definitive, a dramatic and structural climax, Henry allows nothing to escape his fury, as if he'd been waiting a very long time for this moment...
...It's one thing for the imagination to feed on life-to prey on life...
...Everything is expos-able...
...A great, ancient, awesome theme: the wages of sin, the terrible exactions of art and imagination...
...The flaring pain which afflicted the young Nathan in The Ghost Writer was never resolved, not finally and for good-the Jews of Newark were never really convinced, as any graduate student worth the grant-in-aid knows full well, that Art is autonomous, answerable to nothing but itself and its own laws of being, and transcends impiously the niggling little concerns of fools and philistines, relatives and neighbors...
...You killed him, Nathan With that book...
...that was the only gift he required...
...but for Nathan, only trouble and grief...
...Such concerns in this instance as : Is it good or bad for the Jews...
...What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul...
...As if his life hasn't changed utterly he goes on dining on greasy take-out food...
...Over...
...Over Over...
...But as with Roth so with Nathan: liberation or bondage, obscurity or fame, there is a canker at the heart of things, and a need (which if it were still permissible to use such language I'd call a repetition compulsion) to return to the source of pain...
...That single curse constitutes his father's deathbed speech (at the end of a marvelous, bizarre deathbed scene...
...Over...
...That was the doting father who apparently wasn't quite convinced by Nathan's earlier attempts at explanation and self-justification (in a beautifully executed scene in the earlier novel), and that utterance is his final judgment upon his pride and joy, his firstborn son and kaddish Nathan, the Writer...
...At his wit's end, he can't do a stroke of work...
...Fame and fortune and the love of women-the rewards of art...
...Somehow, no one seems to understand the crucial distinction between Art and Life, artifact and artificer, the "art of depiction," as Nathan says, and -that which is depicted-not Mom and Dad, not his brother Henry, not Aunt Essie, not even Laura, the splendid girl he leaves behind with her boring, virtuous work of defendSAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic, is a regular contributor...
...troubled by its consequences, and come to learn the whole unvarnished truth about Art and Life from the old master E. Lonoff (he learns that Art is always bitterly hard-won and that Life, at best a mixed blessing, is neither here nor there), is longer so young that he shouldn't have known better...
...ing, as their lawyer, peace and civil-rights activists when he himself decides to get out of the " virtue racket...
...With Carnovsky, the work by which Nathan hoped to unbind the shackles of his past, to squeeze the serf out of himself drop by drop, as his adored Chekhov said of himself, and attain his own absolute liberation -with Carnovsky the heavens fall in...
...The resolution toward which Roth appears to be moving in The Ghost Writer is confirmed by the logic and form of this "sequel"-in effect a conclusive moral argument of the bridge-burning kind...
...Bastard...
...All the old man wanted, Henry tells him, was to hear his son say: "Dad, I love you...
...ble bundle on the threat of kidnapping his mother...
...Cranks and extortionists drive him mad...
...How much bloodletting can the writer permit himself in order to compose his work-and whose blood should he spill...
...Life will never be the same...
...Love, marriage, children, what the hell do you care...
...Everything happens to Nathan: overnight celebrity, tons of money, a night in the bed of a beautiful actress-and that's it, one night, before she resumes her regular arrangement with Fidel Castro, the same...
...Even -even...
...They all persist, along with the crazies, fanatics, hustlers who torment him, in confusing "impersonation with confession...
...A heartless conscienceless bastard" who doesn't begin to know the meaning of loyalty and love, responsibility, "self-denial . . . restraint -anything at all...
...Bastard," his dying father says...
...and now that he has arrived it has come back to haunt him again, more tormentingly still...
...Even your shiksas go down the drain when they don't tickle your fancy anymore...
...the old synagogue where he'd studied Hebrew in preparation for entering upon the state of manhood is now an African Methodist Episcopal Church...
...He makes, as he says, a fiasco of fame and fortune...
...To you," he says, weeping, "everything is disposable...
...That is the primal ooze and there the imagination spawns monsters.nation spawns monsters...
...What can be more definitive than that tolling bell "Over" pronounced one time more than Lear's five-times uttered "Never...
...it's another for it to devour, to cannibalize, its own flesh and blood, and so to engorge its essential sustenance...
...Is the wound it inflicts on the writer's family, lover, kin deep enough to kill -or surely maim beyond hope of renewal...
Vol. 108 • July 1981 • No. 13
