The Ghost Writer (Vintage International)

by Philip Roth

description of the famous rural recluse. In fact, from what I

The living room he took me into was neat, cozy, and plain: a large circular hooked rug, some slipcovered easy chairs, a worn sofa, a long wall of books, a piano, a phonograph, an oak library table systematically stacked with journals and magazines. Above the white wainscoting, the pale-yellow walls were bare but for half a dozen amateur watercolors of the old farmhouse in different seasons. Beyond the cushioned windowseats and the colorless cotton curtains tied primly back I could see the bare limbs of big dark maple trees and fields of driven snow. Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling. I looked around and I thought, This is how I will live.

Description Of living room This is how I will live

were only so many hours in the day. “Either get laid,”

bowdlerized

For I had come, you see, to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E. I. Lonoff’s spiritual son, to petition for his moral sponsorship and to win, if I could, the magical protection of his advocacy and his love. Of course, I had a loving father of my own, whom I could ask the world of any day of the week, but my father was a foot doctor and not an artist, and lately we had been having serious trouble in the family because of a new story of mine. He was so bewildered by what I had written that he had gone running to his moral mentor, a certain Judge Leopold Wapter, to get the judge to get his son to see the light. As a result, after two decades of a more or less unbroken amiable conversation, we had not been speaking for nearly five weeks now, and I was off and away seeking patriarchal validation elsewhere.

Why Nathan came to Manny

Hardly anyone knew who he was or where actually he lived, and for a quarter of a century almost nobody cared. Even among his readers there had been some who thought that E. I. Lonoff’s fantasies about Americans had been written in Yiddish somewhere inside czarist Russia before he supposedly died there (as, in fact, his father had nearly perished) from injuries suffered in a pogrom. What was so admirable to me was not only the tenacity that had kept him writing his own kind of stories all that time but that having been “discovered” and popularized, he refused all awards and degrees, declined membership in all honorary institutions, granted no public interviews, and chose not

Manny the recluse

But then, along with tens of thousands of others, I discovered E. I. Lonoff, whose fiction seemed to me a response to the same burden of exclusion and confinement that still weighed upon the lives of those who had raised me, and that had informed our relentless household obsession with the status of the Jews. The pride inspired in my parents by the establishment in 1948 of a homeland in Palestine that would gather in the unmur-dered remnant of European Jewry was, in fact, not so unlike what welled up in me when I first came upon Lonoff’s thwarted, secretive, imprisoned

Response To Ilnoffs writing on the discrimination against Jews

Or so I argued in the college essay where I “analyzed” Lonoff’s style but kept to myself an explication of the feelings of kinship that his stories had revived in me for our own largely Americanized clan, moneyless immigrant shopkeepers to begin with, who’d carried on a shtetl life ten minutes’ walk from the pillared banks and gargoyled insurance cathedrals of downtown Newark; and what is more, feelings of kinship for our pious, unknown ancestors, whose Galician tribulations had been only a little less foreign to me, while growing up securely in New Jersey, than Abraham’s in the Land of Canaan.

Reference To immigrant orivins and lost connection

The Mixmaster whirled and the fire popped and the wind blew and the trees groaned while I tried, at twenty-three, to think of how to dispel his gloom. His openness about himself, so at odds with his formal attire and his pedantic manner, had me as unnerved as anything else; it was hardly what I was accustomed to getting from people more than twice my age, even if what he said about himself

was tinged with self-satire. Especially if it was tinged with self-satire.

there was Athene College. He spoke with devotion of the students in the two classes that he taught there. The little Stockbridge school had made a place for him on the faculty some twenty years before the rest of the academic world suddenly became interested, and for that he would always be grateful. But in truth, after so many years of teaching these bright and lively young women, both he and they, he found, had begun to repeat themselves a little.

Stockbridge Athene College

was only suggesting—surmising is more like it—that an unruly personal life will probably better serve a writer like Nathan than walking in the woods and startling the deer. His work has turbulence—that should be nourished, and not in the woods. All I was trying to say is that he oughtn’t to stifle

Nathan needs a turbulent life for his writing

what is clearly his gift.”

uxorious

Uxurious shoring too much love for ones wice

Hope Lonoff said, “I knew that she was a dancer from the Saturday Review.” The Saturday Review had published an article on America’s young, unknown writers,

Article about Nathan in Saturn Review mentioned split with dancer girlfriend

We talked about literature and I was in heaven—also in a sweat from the spotlight he was giving me to bask in. Every book new to me I was sure he must have annotated with his reading pen long ago, yet his interest was pointedly in hearing my thoughts, not his own. The effect of his concentrated attention was to make me heap insight onto precocious insight, and then to hang upon his every sigh and grimace, investing what was only a little bout of after-dinner dyspepsia with the direst implications about my taste and my intelligence. Though I worried that I was trying too hard to sound like the kind of deep thinker for whom he had no love, I still couldn’t stop myself, under the spell now not just of the man and his accomplishment but of the warm wood fire, of the brandy snifter balanced in my hand (if not yet the brandy), and of the snow falling heavily beyond the cushioned windowseats, as dependably beautiful and mystifying as ever. Then there were the great novelists, whose spellbinding names I chanted as I laid my cross-cultural comparisons and brand-new eclectic enthusiasms at his feet—Zuckerman, with Lonoff, discussing Kafka: I couldn’t quite get it, let alone get over it.

Talki ng literature with Lonoff

“I’ve just finished reading Isaac Babel,” I told him. He considered this, impassively.

A writer during an after Russian revolution Benya Kirk a mob boss in Babels Odessa Stories Based on a historical character

“I was thinking, for sport more or less, that he is the missing link; those stories are what connect you, if you don’t mind my mentioning your work—” He crossed his hands on his belly and rested them there, movement enough to make me say, “I’m sorry.” “Go ahead. Connected to Babel. How?” “Well, ‘connected’ of course isn’t the right word. Neither is ‘influence.’ It’s family resemblance that I’m talking about. It’s as though, as I see it, you are Babel’s American cousin—and Felix Abravanel is the other. You through ‘The Sin of Jesus’ and something in Red Cavalry, through the ironical dreaming and the blunt reporting, and, of course, through the writing itself. Do you see what I mean? There’s a sentence in one of his war stories: ‘Voroshilov combed his horse’s mane with his Mauser.’ Well, that’s just the kind of thing that you do, a stunning little picture in every line. Babel said that if he ever wrote his autobiography he’d call it The Story of an Adjective, Well, if it were possible to imagine you writing your autobiography—if such a thing were even imaginable—you might come up with that title too.

Lonoff as precursors to Isaac Babel

and had then recorded the words like a challenge—a flaming Dedalian

Father of Icarus symbol of wisdom and excellent crafstman

said, “I think of you as the Jew who got away.” “And does that help?” “There’s some truth in it, isn’t there? You got away from Russia and the pogroms. You got away from the purges—and Babel didn’t. You got away from Palestine and the homeland. You got away from Brookline and the relatives. You got away from New York—” “And all of this is recorded where? Hedda Hopper?”

Lonoff the Jew who got away escaped pogroms escaped Palestine

Benya Kriks, even in their diapers. I didn’t have enough strong opinions

Benya kirks character from Odessa Tales

“Away from all the Jews, and a story by you without a Jew in it is unthinkable. The deer, the farmers, the game warden—” “And don’t forget Hope. And my fair-haired children.” “And still all you write about are Jews.” “Proving what?” “That,” I said, cautiously, “is what I’d like to ask you.” He thought about it for a moment. “It proves why the young rabbi in Pittsfield can’t live with the idea that I won’t be ‘active.’

Lonoff escapes Jews in every way But he writes about them

“I’m not in the business. ‘Liking people’ is often just another racket. But you’re right to think well of his books. Not up my alley maybe, all that vanity face to face, but when he writes he’s not just a little Houyhnhnm tapping out his superiority with his hooves. More like a Dr. Johnson eating opium—the disease of his life makes Abravanel fly. I admire the man, actually. I admire what he puts his nervous system through. I admire his passion for the front-row seat. Beautiful wives, beautiful mistresses, alimony the size of the national debt, polar expeditions, war-front reportage, famous friends, famous enemies, breakdowns, public lectures, five-hundred-page novels every third year, and still, as you said before, time and energy left over for all that self-absorption. The gigantic types in the books have to be that big to give him something to

Great description of Abravanel Contrast to Lonof Living large

think about to rival himself. Like him? No. But impressed, oh yes. Absolutely. It’s no picnic up there in the egosphere. I don’t know when the man sleeps, or if he has ever slept, aside from those few minutes when he had that drink with me.”

loved him! Yes, nothing less than love for this man with no illusions: love for the bluntness, the scrupulosity, the severity, the estrangement; love for the relentless winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self; love for the artistic mulishness and the suspicion of nearly everything else; and love for the buried charm, of which he’d just given me a glimpse. Yes, all Lonoff had to say was that he did not even have the horse to talk to and somehow that did it, released in me a son’s girlish love for the man of splendid virtue and high achievement who understands life, and who understands the son, and who approves.

Nathan loves Lonoff

should mention here that some three years earlier, after several hours in the presence of Felix Abravanel, I had been no less overcome. But if I did not fall at his feet straightaway, it was because even a college senior as writer-worshipping as myself could see that with Abravanel such boundless adoration—at least if offered up by a youthful male admirer—was doomed to go unrequited. The ardor of those books, composed in the sunny stillness of his California canyon and seething with unbuttoned

Contrast with description of Abravanel

the writer whose absorption with “the grand human discord” made his every paragraph a little novel in itself, every page packed as tight as Dickens or Dostoevsky with the latest news of manias, temptations, passions, and dreams, with mankind aflame with feeling—well, in the flesh he gave the impression of being out to lunch.

Abravanel continued

It was a head that the Japanese technicians, with their ingenuity for miniaturizing, might have designed, and then given over to the Jews to adorn with the rug dealer’s thinning dark hair, the guarded appraising black eyes, and a tropical bird’s curving bill. A fully Semiticized little transistor on top, terrific clothes down below—and still the overall impression was of somebody’s stand-in.

Curious description of Abravanel

ungrandiloquent

“How else would you like to?” Well, I had done it, escaped at last from wooden self-consciousness and egregious overearnestness—and sporadic attempts to be witty in the Lonovian mode—and put to him a direct, simple question, the answer to which I wanted very much to hear.

“How else might I like to?”

“But from a lifetime of experience I happen to know what ordinary people will think when they read something like this story. And you don’t. You can’t. You have been sheltered from it all your life. You were raised here in this neighborhood where you went to school with Jewish children. When we went to the shore and had the house with the Edelmans, you were always among Jews, even in the summertime. At Chicago your best friends who you brought home were Jewish boys, always. It’s not your fault that you don’t know what Gentiles think when they read something like this. But I can tell you. They don’t think about how it’s a great work of art. They don’t know about art. Maybe I don’t know about art myself. Maybe none of our family does, not the way that you do. But that’s my point. People don’t read art—they read about people. And they judge them as such. And how do you think they will judge the people in your story, what conclusions do you think they will reach? Have you thought about that?”

Nathans father explaining to him how Gentiles will view his writing about the family

“Well, I can. And the street isn’t a bad place for it. Because I know the word. I wonder if you fully understand just how very little love there is in this world for Jewish people. I don’t mean in Germany, either, under the Nazis. I mean in run-of-the-mill Americans, Mr. and Mrs. Nice Guy, who otherwise you and I consider perfectly harmless. Nathan, it is there. I guarantee you it is there. I know it is there. I have seen it, I have felt it, even when they do not express it in so many words.”

Fathers worry about antisemitism

“Nathan, your story, as far as Gentiles are concerned, is about one thing and one thing only. Listen to me, before you go. It is about kikes. Kikes and their love of money. That is all our good Christian friends will see, I guarantee you. It is not about the scientists and teachers and lawyers they become and the things such people accomplish

To approach the judge, my father had first to contact a lofty cousin of ours—an attorney, a suburbanite, and a former Army colonel who had been president for several years of the judge’s Newark temple. Cousin Teddy had already helped him to the judge once before, back when my father had gotten it into his head that I should be one of the five youngsters for whom each year Wapter wrote letters of recommendation to college-admissions officers

Cousin Teddy

The sheet of questions prepared for me by the Wapters read as follows: TEN QUESTIONS FOR NATHAN ZUCKERMAN 1. If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story? 2. Do you believe Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’s Fagin have been of no use to anti-Semites? 3. Do you practice Judaism? If so, how? If not, what credentials qualify you for writing about Jewish life for national magazines? 4. Would you claim that the characters in your story represent a fair sample of the kinds of people that make up a typical contemporary community of Jews? 5. 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 woman? Why in a story with a Jewish background must there be (a) adultery; (b) incessant fighting within a family over money; (c) warped human behavior in general?

The judges questions to Nathan regarding the his writing a story about disfunction i a Jewish family It is his own life experience Does a writerhave th right or duty to use his ow life and tthe people in it as plot material ?

What set of aesthetic values makes you think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful than the sublime? 7. What in your character makes you associate so much of life’s ugliness with Jewish people? 8. Can you explain why in your story, in which a rabbi appears, there is nowhere the grandeur of oratory with which Stephen S. Wise and Abba Hillel Silver and Zvi Masliansky have stirred and touched their audiences? 9. Aside from the financial gain to yourself, what benefit do you think publishing this story in a national magazine will have for (a) your family; (b) your community; (c) the Jewish religion; (d) the well-being of the Jewish people? 10. 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?

“He only meant that what happened to the Jews—” “In Europe—not in Newark! We are not the wretched of Belsen! We were not the victims of that crime!” “But we could be—in their place we would be. Nathan, violence is nothing new to Jews, you know that!” “Ma, you want to see physical violence done to the Jews of Newark, go to the office of the plastic surgeon where the girls get their noses fixed. That’s where the Jewish blood flows in Essex County, that’s where the blow is delivered—with a mallet! To their bones—and to their pride!”

Fear of antisemitism in the 1960s and after Is it exaggerated ?

“I’m only quoting Teddy. Darling…” “What is it, Ma?” “Are you really anti-Semitic?” “I’ll leave it to you. What do you think?” “Me? I never heard of such a thing. But Teddy…”

Is Nathan antisemitic ? Self hating Jew

He was talking about the goyim, who looked down on us with enough unearned contempt already, and who would be only too pleased to call us all kikes because of what I had written for the whole world to read about Jews fighting over money. It was not for me to leak the news that such

What would the goyim think of Zukerman's characters?

thing could possibly happen. That was worse than informing—that was collaborating. Oh, this is useless, I thought, this

“Oh, Manny, we could be so happy—in Florence, my sweetest, we could come out of hiding.” “We’re not in hiding. We never have been.” “No, not when it’s like this. But otherwise it’s all so false and wrong and lonely. We could make each other so happy. I wouldn’t be your little girl over there. I would when we played, but otherwise I’d be your wife.” “We’d be what we’ve always been. Stop dreaming.” “No, not so. Without her—” “You want a corpse on your conscience? She would be dead in a year.” “But I have a corpse on my conscience.” The floor creaked where her two feet had suddenly landed. So she had been on his lap! “Look!” “Cover yourself.” “My corpse.” Scuffling on the floorboards. The heavy tread of Lonoff on the move. “Good night.” “Look at it.” “Melodrama, Amy. Cover up.” “You prefer tragedy?”

Amy and Lonoff Lovers He is a daddy/lover

“But I’m going crazy! I cannot live apart from you! I don’t know how. Oh, why didn’t I take that job—and move back! And the hell with her!” “You did the right thing. You know just what to do.” “Yes, give things up!” “Dreamy things, correct.” “Oh, Manny, would it kill you just to kiss my breasts? Is that dreamy, too? Would it cause the death of anyone if you just did that?” “You cover yourself now.” “Dad-da, please.”

My astonishment at what I’d overheard, my shame at the unpardonable breach of his trust, my relief at having escaped undiscovered—all that turned out to be nothing, really, beside the frustration I soon began to feel over the thinness of my imagination and what that promised for the future.

His fear about his lak of imagination when he could not realize the reality of their relationship

Florence, the great Durante; her babyishness and desire, his mad, heroic restraint— Oh, if only I could have imagined the scene I’d overheard! If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life! If one day I could just approach the originality and excitement of what actually goes on! But if I ever did, what then would they think of me, my father and his judge? How would my elders hold up against that? And if they couldn’t, if the blow to their sentiments was finally too wounding, just how well would I hold up against being hated and reviled and disowned?

After the war she had become Amy Bellette. She had not taken the new name to disguise her identity—as yet there was no need—but, as she imagined at the time, to

Amy's story

forget her life. She had been in a coma for weeks, first in the filthy barracks with the other ailing and starving inmates,

and then in the squalid makeshift “infirmary.” A dozen dying children had been rounded up by the SS and placed beneath blankets in a room with twelve beds in order to impress the Allied armies advancing upon Belsen with the amenities of concentration-camp living. Those of the twelve still alive when the British got there had been moved to an army field hospital. It was here that she finally came around. She understood sometimes less and sometimes more than the nurses explained to her, but she would not speak. Instead, without howling or hallucinating, she tried to find a w...

“Little Beauty” the nurses called her—a silent, dark, emaciated girl—and so, one morning, ready to talk, she told them that the surname was Bellette. Amy she got from an American book she had sobbed over as a child, Little Women. She had decided, during her long silence, to finish growing up in America now ...

She learned of her father’s survival while waiting to get her teeth examined by the Lonoffs’ family dentist in Stockbridge. She had been three years with foster families in England, and almost a year as a freshman at Athene College, when she picked an old copy of Time out of the pile in the waiting room and, just turning pages, saw a photograph of a Jewish businessman named Otto Frank. In July of 1942, some two years after the beginning of the Nazi occupation, he had taken his wife and his two young daughters into hiding. Along with another Jewish family, the Franks lived safely for twenty-five months in a rear upper story of the Amsterdam building where he used to have his business offices. Then, in August 1944, their whereabouts were apparently betrayed by one of the workers in the warehouse below, and the hideout was uncovered by the police. Of the eight who’d been together in the sealed-off attic rooms, only Otto Frank survived the concentration camps. When he came back to Amsterdam after the war, the Dutch family who had been their protectors gave him the notebooks that had been kept in hiding by his younger daughter, a girl of fifteen when she died in Belsen: a diary, some ledgers she wrote

IS AMY ANNE FRANK? Not really. Whose delusional?