The Revolt of the Pendulum (13 page)

As often happens, the hard road makes for the more revealing journey. There are not many appreciators of Verdi who have been Secretary of Defence. Healey’s real university was not Oxford,
where he was merely brilliant, but war-time Italy, where he learned the prickly realities of making decisions that could lead to no clear result, but only, at best, to something that might have
been worse. The Anzio beach-master’s bitter experience (the landing went smoothly, but Kesselring’s counter-attack almost undid the whole enterprise) was behind the easy-seeming grace
of Healey’s slippered prose as old age approached: a grace – and here I switch to the present tense, because his style is still alive – that sins only in its undue fondness for
semi-colons, and in the occasional dangling participle. But he isn’t being lazy. He is just breathing out. After arguing for a living all his life, now at last he can settle down to be
unanswerable.

Nevertheless he is careful to put in plenty of self-deprecation. Opponents are allowed their opinions. If it turns out, as it almost invariably does, that Healey’s opinion was better, he
tries not to crow. He forgets to record that in 1945 he advised his fellow Labourites not to be panicked by evidence ‘that our comrades on the Continent are being extremist’. Annan does
not forget: in
Our Age
he quotes chapter and verse of what Stalin was up to, while conceding that Healey changed his mind the following year. But on the whole Healey is convincing when he
makes himself sound reasonable. Though he had the reputation of a bully among those he dominated, there was always evidence that the tolerance he claims in retrospect was genuinely there all along,
if sometimes well shrouded. I remember that after the first televised session of the House of Lords in 1985, Healey called Lord Stockton’s speech ‘a lulu’. Since Lord Stockton had
started life as Harold Macmillan, and Healey had publicly denounced Macmillan’s part in the Suez enterprise as a disgrace, unstinting admiration for a shameless piece to camera was a pretty
tolerant reaction to the decrepit lurk-man’s latter-day pose as a wise old bird who had seen it all.

Pushing tolerance to the limit, Healey even has good words for Harold Wilson. At the time, Healey’s contempt for Wilson’s opportunism matched Wilson’s fear of Healey’s
competence: the multilingual Healey was uniquely qualified to be Foreign Secretary, so Wilson kept him busy with every post except that. The good words make Healey’s portrait of Wilson even
more devastating. In R. H. S. Crossman’s long, detailed and hilariously self-approving parliamentary diaries, the portrait of Wilson is devastating too, but Crossman was a zany who amply
merited Healey’s one-line dismissal: ‘A Machiavelli without judgment is a dangerous colleague.’ Healey is too well-mannered to argue for his own intellectual superiority over most
of his coevals, but the superiority is plain. As with Roy Jenkins, you wonder about the amount of coincidence it must have taken to ensure that he did not become Prime Minister. In a presidential
system Healey would have taken the top spot for certain, because he was dynamite on TV. In the British system, however, the party must be pleased before the people, and never since Gaitskell has an
intellectual managed to please the Labour Party, unless, like Wilson, he is ready to wear disguise, or, like Michael Foot, to talk shapeless waffle on his feet in order to offset his scholarly
precision on the page. Besides, Healey was an unequivocating advocate of nuclear deterrence, and would have had a chance at the leadership only if he had equivocated. (Foot, who was helped to the
leadership by his advocacy of the opposite thing, equivocated in the opposite direction in order to win the general election, and the strain helped to ensure that he clamorously lost it.) Healey
never flaunted his culture, but he could not conceal it. It was there in the way he talked, and even in the way he listened. He might demolish somebody else’s argument in a few sentences, but
he took it in first.

So Healey had the credentials to detect intolerance in Gaitskell. Our initial quoted passage is made energetic by the analysis of why the Cabinet meeting goes on too long: because agreement is
not enough. But the way the passage is illustrated is what shows why Healey’s memoir is of such unusual quality. The reference to Dean Rusk is not dragged in. It just appears at the right
spot with perfect naturalness. Healey works the same quick magic at least once per paragraph throughout the book. Other people’s observations decorate his. If his were not so good, the
co-opted aphorisms would look like medals on a dummy. But they are not just worthy of their place, their place is worthy of them, and so everybody shines. Churchill never sounded better than when
quoted by Healey. As Secretary of Defence, Healey frequently played host to Montgomery, who would drop in for a chat when he was up in London visiting the House of Lords. Montgomery was a lonely
man by then, with no object in life beyond getting the rules changed so that nobody except him could be called a Field Marshal. The reminiscence is almost touching. But Churchill’s verdict on
Monty is quoted to stiffen it up: ‘In defeat, indomitable; in victory, insufferable; in NATO, thank God, invisible.’ Healey had an ear for rhythm, and anyone who has that will hear
rhythm wherever it occurs. He was delighted by every sharp mind he met. His reputation for brutality might have arisen among those who knew that they did not delight him. There was a sharp critical
ability at the heart of his wide powers of appreciation, and his excellent book of memoirs is a reminder that we should value the kind of public figure more interested in cultivating his mind than
polishing his image, even though he is likely to end up being sidelined by the man who is better at the second thing than at the first.

Standpoint
, November 2008

Postscript

Somebody wading through Bill Clinton’s memoirs, let alone Ronald Reagan’s, could be excused for wondering whether the experience of having held public office
were not a guarantee against recalling it effectively in print: even the ghost writers sound weary. But there is a contrary tradition of being energized by memory into a captivating summation, and
it goes back to Metternich at the very least. (It could be said that it goes back to Clarendon.) From his years at the coal-face of politics, Healey not only remembered the ring of the pick, he got
it into his style. The same was true for Abba Eban, whose two main books (
An Autobiography
and
Personal Witness
) were much in my mind while I was reading Healey. It goes without
saying that both men knew what they were talking about. What doesn’t go without saying is that they knew how to write it down.

ZUCKERMAN UNCORKED

Philip Roth’s
Exit Ghost

In a Moebius striptease, the disrobing stripper is always on the point of getting dressed again, and there is no resolution to the revelation. A Moebius striptease in
written form, Philip Roth’s new novel
Exit Ghost
is purportedly his long-running character Nathan Zuckerman’s new novel, narrated in the first person. During the course of Nathan
Zuckerman’s new novel, Zuckerman raises the question of just how far an author’s personal biography should be drawn into any discussion about his works of art. The answer seems to be
that any reader who might want to do so must be a bit of a klutz.

But we get that answer only if we decide that Zuckerman is speaking for Roth when he, Zuckerman, seems to endorse the opinion of Amy Bellette, now old, grey and diseased but once the young
mistress, helpmeet and nurse of Zuckerman’s mentor and hero E. I. Lonoff, that there is something crassly illiterate about any attempts even by scholars, let alone journalists, to trace the
inspiration of her erstwhile lover’s works to his actual life. And what if Zuckerman doesn’t endorse her opinion? He quotes her at length, but without explicitly agreeing, even though
the long letter in which she expresses her objections to biographical reductionism suggests that she can write an essay nearly as well as, say, Philip Roth.

Maybe Zuckerman is withholding judgment. He might well have reason to do so, because in Roth’s early Zuckerman works, notably
The Ghost Writer
(first published in 1979, and hey,
there’s the ghost already), Zuckerman was probing the secrets about the connection between Lonoff’s work and his real life even as a character in this new book, Richard Kliman, is
hoping, by revealing the facts about Lonoff’s real life, to win for the neglected Lonoff the fame that he has always lacked, and thereby get his works republished in the Library of America
(the same distinguished imprint which, we alert readers will note, is currently republishing the complete works of none other than Philip Roth – no victim of neglect he). Hoping to?
Insisting. There is no getting rid of Kliman. He just keeps on coming back.

As portrayed by Zuckerman, Kliman is irredeemably obnoxious. But room is left for the possibility that the young Zuckerman might once have been a bit less altruistic – a bit more
ruthlessly ambitious all round – than he once reported himself as being in the first person, or was reported to be by Roth in the third person. (If you want to go back and check this out, the
early,
Zuckerman Bound
sequence of Zuckerman novels is now published in a single, typically sumptuous volume from, you guessed it, the Library of America: but a warning – the name
Zuckerman has the word ‘sugar’ loosely buried within it, and once you give that old hunger a chance to burn again, you might not be able to stop.) What if the decaying Zuckerman, by
heaping imprecations on the repellent Kliman, is simply refusing to recognize his pristine young self reborn? Complicated enough for you yet? We’re just getting started.

If Zuckerman ever decides that he was once, under his show of Chekhov-loving sensitivity, crassly illiterate to stalk Lonoff, then we might decide that we are crassly illiterate to ask whether
Zuckerman’s state of health in this new novel has any connection to Roth’s in real life. In
Exit Ghost
, Zuckerman, whom we have known since he was young and potent, has had
prostate surgery that has left him impotent, not to mention incontinent. (We might not mention it now, but we’re going to have to soon.) There is a beautiful young woman in the novel, Jamie
Logan, who is willing to be made love to by the avowedly decrepit Zuckerman, but he deliberately fails to keep the appointment, or seems to. (By then he is talking about himself as if he were a
character in a play. Maybe he nailed her, but rigged the dialogue to suggest he didn’t. See my forthcoming paper
How Unreal was Thereal McCoy? Strategic Female Fantasy Figures in the
Disguised Biography of Philip Roth
.)

Is Roth saying, through Zuckerman, that the only reason he, Roth, might fail to show up for such a date is that he is no longer capable of going through with the consequences? Are we allowed to
ask whether the real-life Roth, who once had to stave off accusations of providing the model for his character Alexander Portnoy, is no longer in thrall to his virile member, if he ever was? (After
all, he never actually
said
he was. He said Portnoy was.) In the last rumour I heard on the subject, one of the most luxuriantly beautiful young Australian female film stars had thrown
herself at Roth’s feet lightly clad – I mean she was lightly clad, not Roth’s feet – and demanded satisfaction.

This rumour might have had no more substance than the one about the famous actor and the gerbil, but it travelled through cyberspace at the same speed, and for the same reason: it fitted the
legend. Roth has been catnip for upmarket women all his life, and never not renowned for it. In London, when he lived there, Roth would enter a fashionable drawing room with Claire Bloom on his arm
and you would wonder how he had got into the house without a band striking up ‘Hail to the Chief’.

Roth might never have been Alexander Portnoy, but the inventor of Alexander Portnoy, unless he was a studious lizard from outer space with limitless powers of telepathic imagination, was a male
human being well schooled in carnal relationships with women. It is true that Zuckerman, even when all the books of his saga are taken together, falls short of being a full case of Portnovian
satyriasis. Zuckerman lusts after many women, but he does not get to make them all. He gets to make notes on them all. He is a writer. In just such a way, Jay McInerney might have invented an alter
ego who was a dietician, and who lured all those fashion models up to his apartment in order to weigh them. How can we fail to ask whether or not Roth still has what it takes, if he presents us
with a central character based on himself who has it no longer? But is the character really based on himself? Let’s go back to the beginning.

Before we do, we should note that there is no question of abandoning the quest for clarification.
Exit Ghost
is just too fascinating to leave alone. It was designed that way, like the Tar
Baby. Actually – leaving all questions about authorial identity aside for the moment – this book is latter-day Roth at his intricately thoughtful best, and a vivid reminder of why a
dystopian satirical fantasy like
The Plot Against America
was comparatively weak. Roth has no business making up the world. His business is making up his mind, in the sense that his true
material for inventing a pattern is self-exploration, not social satire.

Roth, speaking
in propria persona
, once echoed Tom Lehrer’s remark by saying that when Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Prize for Peace it was time to give up on satire. But for Roth
it was always time to give up on satire. The world is too obviously out of whack for a writer of his quality to give it the best of his attention. He should reserve that for his own psyche, which
is only subtly out of whack, but still would be if he were living in paradise. Unlike the world, his mentality can’t be fixed, so a self-assertive rage is inappropriate. Only self-analysis
will serve, and to pursue that without solipsism is the continuing challenge. Roth gets as close as anyone ever has to being clinically detached about spreading his own brains all over the
operating table. But hold it there. We were going to start again.