Deception

by Philip Roth

You’re back thirty-five years and the writer is unguarded by any sense of self-consciousness. He’s not writing for any audience. It’s the writer before the audience sets in. You see this slightly repulsive embryonic writer in his letters, trying out on one or two people, and in private, the voice with which he’s going to try to capture the attention of the larger audience. And all the false steps. The falseness in the voice moves you more than anything else. You see the writer becoming more and more manipulative, slier and craftier and underhanded. Now this biographer—you—he’s already written the biography of E. I. Lonoff. He wouldn’t have undertaken Zuckerman’s biography, but since Zuckerman only lived to be forty-four, he figures he can do it in two years. Lonoff drove him nuts. Lonoff destroyed everything, and it took him five years to do a hundred and eighty-five pages. None of the people in Lonoff’s life would give him anything. Zuckerman died suddenly and so he didn’t have a chance to destroy anything. The Lonoff book turned out to be a critical biography, Between Worlds, The Life of E. I. Lonoff. The tentative title of the Zuckerman book is Improvisations on a Self, and he started off thinking it was going to be easy. People say to him, ‘Why are you wasting your time on a minor writer?’ But he knows he’s going to make money on this book. There’s a lot of curiosity about Zuckerman. The fucking particularly. People want to know the dirt. It’s going to be Book-of-the-M...