The Revolt of the Pendulum (14 page)

And we have to start with the absorbent pads stuffed down the shorts. Zuckerman is leaking yellow water. Doing so, he has run for harbour. To change the metaphor, he has run for cover. He is
somewhere up in the Berkshires near Tanglewood, not far from where none other than E. I. Lonoff once holed up to keep the inquisitive literary world at bay. (The possibility that Amy Bellette might
really have been Anne Frank would have made the literary world’s investigators no less curious, but in this volume Roth has given up on that one.) When Zuckerman comes downtown to see the
doctor, he avoids Ground Zero. He no longer wants to keep up with the news, even that news. (‘I’ve served my tour.’) But he’s still not done with Lonoff.

At the Strand bookshop, Zuckerman puts together, for depressingly few dollars, a complete spare set of Lonoff’s first editions. (There was my chance to meet Zuckerman. I could well have
been in the Strand at the same time, adding to my row of Philip Roth hardbacks. If they had been first editions, they would have cost me thousands. Was that Zuckerman, the tall, grizzled patriarch
in the Rare Book section on the fourth floor who was going through that stack of
New Yorker
s with the original Roger Angell baseball articles? But wait a second: Zuckerman is a ghost.)

In Saul Bellow’s first post-Nobel novel,
The Dean’s December
, mortal fear centred on the colon: the item of anatomy, not the punctuation mark. (‘It’s serious
enough for me to be wearing the bag.’) In Roth’s
Exit Ghost
, it centres on the prostate, or anyway on where the prostate used to be. The bearer of the wound can reach no
accommodation with his loss. If I can speak for the outside world, which is where I come from, this is the thematic area where the current generation of magisterial American male writers who are
now making the last preparations for their immortality – Roth, Vidal, Mailer, Updike – come closest to evincing a common national characteristic.

This glittering crew, a Team America that not even Henry James and Edith Wharton put together could possibly have foreseen, are the most commanding bunch of representatives American literary
culture has yet had, but there is something about American culture which doesn’t want to accept death as a fitting end to life. They are so incorrigibly energetic that the white light of
their expectations bleaches even their pessimism. In that respect, they could all take a tip from, say, Joan Didion, who at least has never imagined that the Grim Reaper gets into the tournament
only on a wild card.

But this isn’t even a quibble. It’s just an observation from someone standing awed and stunned on the sidelines. In my own country, Australia,
Portnoy’s Complaint
, first
published in 1969, was a banned book for the first five years of its career. Having exiled myself to London, I was able to read it, but even in London there was no mistaking that the Americans were
leaving the old British Empire looking not just superseded but mealy-mouthed.

American English had become the dominant language of modern reality. There was still a lot to be said for a version of English that wasn’t dominant (the British and ex-colonial writers
would go on to prove that post-imperial confusion was at least as fruitful as the imperial success had ever been) but you couldn’t mistake the shift of cultural power. Even today, decades
later, a British professor of American Studies at a provincial university is in the position of someone with the free run of the PX at the local US Air Force base: he has access to goods whose
quality is hard to match locally. As for the home-grown literati, listen to Martin Amis talking about Bellow, and Ian McEwan talking about Updike. Try to imagine the same mentor-prentice
relationship in reverse. It might happen one day, but not quite yet. For my own part, I can only say this much: of the two funniest books I have ever read in my life,
Lucky Jim
made me laugh
loudest, but
Portnoy’s Complaint
set me free.

But in culture as in military strength, preponderance has its drawbacks. The big guns get a sense of mission, and their very confidence invites questions about their vision, even about their
ability to gaze within. Just as Bellow, in his factual writings, never asked himself the awkward question about divisions within Israel, so in his fictional writings he stifled a question that
would have multiplied his range: he never made a subject out of his succession of discarded wives, when you would have thought – must have thought – that for a writer otherwise so
brilliantly introspective, there lay the essence of his subject. Similarly, Mailer, unceasingly writing advertisements for himself, never delved far enough into his own psyche to make a subject out
of his complicity in the death of Jack Abbott’s victim: the great writer could face every embarrassment except the one that pierced to the centre of his responsibility as a public writer.

Vidal has never admitted, let alone explored, the question of whether his criticisms of the American power elite might not be compromised by his membership of it. Does he really think, when he
argues that FDR tricked Japan into World War II, that the Japanese right wing, currently making a come-back, will not take this as an endorsement of its views? And does Updike think we will never
ask how his basket-balling Rabbit can have the sensibility of Proust, or whether Bech, the character he created to embody his fame as a writer, was not calculated to increase it?

Finally it is only Roth who takes himself entirely to pieces. Has he been cruel to leave recognizable the outlines of discarded loved ones? Yes. Has he made a subject of that? Yes again.
That’s why his father keeps on coming back. Even less inclined to be shaken off than the awful Kliman, the fathers of Roth’s leading men walk the platform by dead of night. But does
even Roth complete the peeling of the artichoke? To look for the answer, we must go back again to the beginning of this new novel, and try, this time, to finish up somewhere beyond the start. For
Zuckerman, if not for Roth, potency is gone. Has desire gone with it? You bet your life it hasn’t. Listen to this.

But she’s been there since
Goodbye Columbus
, and as long as he can imagine her, he
is
whole again. The wholeness is in the style, which even now, as he (wait a second: as
Zuckerman) prays for the collagen injection to take effect on his slack urethra, proceeds with the delicious complexity of dream baseball. ‘I write a sentence and then I turn it
around,’ Lonoff once said in
The Ghost Writer
. ‘Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I have lunch.’ Roth can still do that. It’s still all there. Only the
big jokes are gone. He doesn’t laugh that way much any more. The style that sprang from sexual energy has moved up too far into the head to permit any more gut-busting inventions like Thereal
McCoy. She’s still lurking in the bathroom in
Portnoy’s Complaint
, waiting to blow the minds of the next generation of horny male adolescents: but the man who thought of her has
moved on. A long way from the entrance now, he is near the exit: or he says he is.

When the Ghost exits, he leaves us asking whether he is real. But he is real as long as Hamlet thinks so. Lonoff was the ghost of Zuckerman’s father the way that Portnoy’s father was
the ghost of Roth’s father, who, we may deduce, was pained by the way his brilliant son won fame. But we deduce it from one of his novels. In
Zuckerman Unbound
, Zuckerman emerged as
the author of
Carnovsky
, a book as scandalous to the older generation of Jews as
Portnoy’s Complaint
. Zuckerman went on to became further established as a writer with a career
path very much like Roth’s, except of course, it isn’t. Or what if ‘isn’t’ isn’t the word? Only the stage directions confirm that the speaker was ever there.

Exit Ghost.
Great title. The book of a great writer. A great book? Maybe it’s just another piece of a puzzle. A great puzzle, and true to life in being so. In these strange and
wonderful books that he writes under or about another name than his, Roth has been mapping the geography in an area of life where only his literary heroes – Kafka, of course, is one of them
– have ever gone. The labyrinth of consciousness is actually constructed from the only means by which we can find a way out of it. It’s a web that Ariadne spins from her own thread. You
don’t get to figure it out. You only get to watch it being spun. And if you are Nathan Dedalus (it was Zuckerman’s name for himself in the running heads to the second chapter of
The
Ghost Writer
) you are in love with her for life, even if it kills you.

New York Times
, October 7, 2007

Postscript

Some of my fellow critics thought I had been far too soft on
Exit Ghost.
But I wasn’t just making up for having had to be so hard on
The Plot Against
America
, which I reviewed for the
Atlantic Monthly
. (The review is collected in my book
The Meaning of Recognition
, and I hope it shows that I found Roth’s book weak only in
the context of a strength that I had always revered.) I really do think that Roth’s later follow-up novels, the ones that pick up on themes he treated earlier, are valuable even when the
action seems thin. They give us his later views on earlier conclusions, and show that they were never concluded. They project the author into time. When the day comes that he is projected into time
all the way, even his merest afterthoughts will be seen to enrich a picture which he, after all, was solely responsible for having brought into being. And if Roth’s voice seemed less vigorous
as time ran out, well, wasn’t that part of the story too? As with Kingsley Amis and
Lucky Jim
, Philip Roth, the inventor of
Portnoy’s Complaint
, was fated to spend his
career on a long march through his own shadow, because that single, early, violently funny book had changed the sensibility of the generation who would read everything he subsequently wrote, and
they could never go back to a state in which he seemed so new. But the penalty for knowing only the formative book (what Martin Amis calls ‘the talent novel’) is to miss the full
spiritual development of the author, and, as Martin Amis said again, we don’t read books, we read authors.

THE FLIGHT FROM THE DESTROYER

Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts
,
by Joseph Horowitz

Imagine Balanchine watching a bunch of cheerleaders and you’ve got this book in a flash. Vignettes are its basic strength, as was bound to be true. The subject of the
twentieth-century European artists in exile is too big for one book. Jean-Michel Palmier proved it by publishing his pioneering compendium
Weimar en Exil
as two books, one of them called
Exil en Europe
and the other
Exil en Ame´rique
. Since there could easily have been others –
Exil en Australie
would have been interesting – it will be
appreciated that Palmier himself felt obliged to limit his purview.

Joseph Horowitz gets the story into a single volume by concentrating on a single destination, America, and even then he trims the field. His subtitle ‘How Refugees from Twentieth-Century
War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts’ leaves out the writers, painters, photographers and architects, which means we aren’t going to hear much about any of the
Mann clan, and nothing at all about Mondrian, Ernst, Leger, Moholy-Nagy, Mies, Gropius, Andreas Feininger, Lyonel Feininger . . . but let’s stop. Horowitz gives us mainly those exiles who
worked in music, theatre and film. Even then, there are more than enough names to be going on with: Balanchine, Stravinsky, Koussevitsky, Toscanini, Stokowski, Kurt Weill and Rouben Mamoulian are
only the most prominent.

Horowitz provides biographical sketches for them all, each sketch studded with quotable illustrations. (Otto Preminger, hearing a group of his fellow e´migre´s speaking Hungarian,
said, ‘Don’t you people know you’re in Hollywood? Speak German.’) The result is a rich assembly, an unmasked ball teeming with famous names, but you always have to remember
– and our author, to his credit, never forgets – that in too many cases their attendance was compulsory, a fact which can lend a sad note to the glamour.

There was a trend towards America anyway. Market forces did their stuff, and even if there had been no wars and revolutions there would have been a transfer of creative power. Horowitz is right
to feature Dvorak prominently at the beginning of his line-up of the musicians. In the late nineteenth century, Europe wasn’t trying all that hard to drive Dvorak out, but he could see how
America was trying to pull him in. The ‘New World Symphony’ was written not just out of appreciation for America’s plantation melodies and rolling landscapes, but out of gratitude
for America’s readiness to employ him. Mahler, too, went to America for the job opportunities. Caruso could have stayed in Europe but he wanted to sing at the Met, correctly estimating that
it was the centre of his world.

In the twentieth century not even the Nazis could send Picasso transatlantic, but after his 1939 MOMA retrospective exhibition New York became the centre of Picasso’s financial empire. If
Horowitz had been following the money, Picasso would have got a mention. But our author can be excused for following only the physical freedom, which was the thing that the combined totalitarian
assault from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany made obviously crucial. There had always been a flight from Eastern Europe. The flight increased after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Even before the
Nazis came to power in 1933, the flight had turned into an exodus. Between 1931 and 1945, fifteen hundred European musicians arrived in America. Most of them would have been superfluous to
requirements if there had not been a demand to match the supply.