The Anatomy Lesson (Vintage International)

by Philip Roth

Zuckerman grew increasingly irritated by Hans Castorp and the dynamic opportunities for growth provided him by TB. Nor could life in New York Hospital’s room 611 be said to measure up to the deluxe splendors of a Swiss sanatorium before the First World War, not even at $1,500 a week. “Sounds to me,” he told Jenny, “like a cross between the Salzburg Seminars and the stately old Queen Mary. Five great meals a day and then tedious lectures by European intellectuals, complete with erudite jests. All that philosophy. All that snow. Reminds me of the University of Chicago.”

Suppose pain had come, then, not to cut him down to size like Herbert’s “Lord,” or to teach him civility like Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly, or to make him into a Jew like Job, but to rescue Zuckerman from the wrong calling. What if pain was offering Zuckerman the best deal he’d ever had, a way out of what he should never have got into? The right to be stupid. The right to be lazy. The right to be no one and nothing. Instead of solitude, company; instead of silence, voices; instead of projects, escapades; instead of twenty, thirty, forty years more of relentless doubt-ridden concentration, a future of diversity, of idleness, of abandon. To leave what is given untrans-formed. To capitulate to qwertyuiop, asdfghjkl, and zxcvbnm, to let those three words say it all. Pain to bring Nathan purposeless pleasure. Maybe a good dose of agony is what it took to debauch him. Drink? Dope? The intellectual sin of light amusement, of senselessness self-induced? Well, if he must. And so many women? Women arriving and departing in shifts, one barely more than a child, another the wife of his financial adviser? Usually it’s the accountant who cheats the client, not the other way around. But what could he do if pain required it? He himself had been removed from command, released from all scruple by the helpless need. Zuckerman was to shut up and do what he was told—leave off rationing out the hours, stop suppressing urges and super-supervising every affair, and from here on, drift, just drift, car...

Zuckerman had lost his subject. His health, his hair, and his subject. Just as well he couldn’t find a posture for writing. What he’d made his fiction from was gone—his birthplace the burnt-out landscape of a racial war and the people who’d been giants to him dead. The great Jewish struggle was with the Arab states; here it was over, the Jersey side of the Hudson, his West Bank, occupied now by an alien tribe. No new Newark was going to spring up again for Zuckerman, not like the first one: no fathers like those pioneering Jewish fathers bursting with taboos, no sons like their sons boiling with temptations, no loyalties, no ambitions, no rebellions, no capitulations, no clashes quite so convulsive again. Never again to feel such tender emotion and such a desire to escape. Without a father and a mother and a homeland, he was no longer a novelist. No longer a son, no longer a writer. Everything that galvanized him had been extinguished, leaving nothing unmistakably his and nobody else’s to claim, exploit, enlarge, and reconstruct.

Life and art are distinct, thought Zuckerman; what could be clearer? Yet the distinction is wholly elusive. That writing is an act of imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everyone.

The sharp smells, the decisive noises, the American ideals, the Zionist zeal, the Jewish indignation, all that to a boy was vivid and inspiring, almost superhuman, had belonged to his father; the mother who’d been so enormous to him for the first ten years of his life was as diaphanous in recollection as the chiffon hood. A breast, then a lap, then a fading voice calling after him, “Be careful.” Then a long gap when there is nothing of her to remember, just the invisible somebody, anxious to please, reporting to him on the phone the weather in New Jersey. Then the Florida retirement and the blond hair. Neatly dressed for the tropics in pink cotton slacks and a monogrammed white blouse (wearing the pearl pin he’d bought years before in Orly Airport and brought home for her from his first summer in France), a little brown-skinned blond-haired woman waiting down at the end of the corridor when he gets off the elevator with his bag: the unconstrained grin, the encompassing dark eyes, the sad clinging embrace, instantly followed by the gratitude. Such gratitude! It was as though the President of the United States had arrived at the condominium to call upon some lucky citizen whose name and address had been drawn from a hat.

Out past the new condominium that had gone up next door, he saw a wide slice of the bay. So long as her husband was alive, they used to look at the bay ritually from the bedroom balcony every evening after dinner and the TV news. “Oh, Nathan, you should have seen the colors last night at sunset—only you would have the words to describe it.” But after Dr. Zuckerman’s death, she couldn’t face all that ineffable beauty alone and just kept watching television, no matter what was on.

he tried being reasonable for fifteen minutes. He doesn’t find me funny. Well, no sense writing to tell him to laugh. He thinks I depict Jewish lives for the sake of belittling them. He thinks I lower the tone to please the crowd. To him it’s vulgar desecration. Horseplay as heresy. He thinks I’m “superior” and “nasty” and no more. Well, he’s under no obligation to think otherwise. I never set myself up as Elie Wiesel. But long after the reasonable quarter hour had passed, he remained shocked and outraged and hurt,

He wrote about Camus and Koestler and Verga and Gorky, about Melville and Whitman and Dreiser, about the soul revealed in the Eisenhower press conference and the mind of Alger Hiss—about practically everything except the language in which his father had hollered for old junk from his wagon. But this was hardly because the Jew was in hiding. The disputatious stance, the aggressively marginal sensibility, the disavowal of community ties, the taste for scrutinizing a social event as though it were a dream or a work of art—to Zuckerman this was the very mark of the intellectual Jews in their thirties and forties on whom he was modeling his own style of thought. Reading the quarterlies for the essays and fiction of Appel and his generation—Jewish sons born into immigrant families a decade or more after his own father—only corroborated what he’d first sensed as a teenage undergraduate at Chicago: to be raised as a post-immigrant Jew in America was to be given a ticket out of the ghetto into a wholly unconstrained world of thought. Without an Old Country link and a strangling church like the Italians, or the Irish, or the Poles, without generations of American forebears to bind you to American life, or blind you by your loyalty to its deformities, you could read whatever you wanted and write however and whatever you pleased. Alienated? Just another way to say “Set free!” A Jew set free even from Jews—yet only by steadily maintaining self-consciousness as a Jew. That was the thril...

Milton Appel=Irving Howe

Appel’s disgust for the happy millions who worship at the shrine of the delicatessen and cherish Fiddler on the Roof was far beyond anything in Zuckerman’s nastiest pages. How could Zuckerman be sure? He hated Appel, that’s how.

The comedy is that the real visceral haters of the bourgeois Jews, with the real contempt for their everyday lives, are these complex intellectual giants. They loathe them, and don’t particularly care for the smell of the Jewish proletariat either. All of them full of sympathy suddenly for the ghetto world of their traditional fathers now that the traditional fathers are filed for safekeeping in Beth Moses Memorial Park. When they were alive they wanted to strangle the immigrant bastards to death because they dared to think they could actually be of consequence without ever having read Proust past Swann’s Way.

Also studying Holy Scriptures. Delving into all the translations. Amazing what’s in there. Yet the writing I don’t like. The Jews in the Bible were always involved in highly dramatic moments, but they never learned to write good drama. Not like the Greeks, in my estimation. The Greeks heard a sneeze and they took off. The sneezer becomes the hero, the one who reported the sneeze becomes the messenger, the ones who overheard the sneeze, they became the chorus. Lots of pity, lots of terror, lots of cliff-hanging and suspense. You don’t get that with the Jews in the Bible. There it’s all round-the-clock negotiation with God.”

Because I am the best woman in the world for falling in love with the wrong man. I have the record in the Communist countries. Either they are married, or they are murderers, or they are like you, men finished with love. Gentle, sympathetic, kind with money and wine, but interested in you mainly as a subject. Warm ice. I know writers.” “I won’t ask how. But go on.” “I know writers. Beautiful feelings. They sweep you away with their beautiful feelings. But the feelings disappear quickly once you are no longer posing for them. Once they’ve got you figured out and written down, you go. All they give is their attention.” “You could do worse.” “Oh yes, all that attention. It’s lovely for the model while it lasts.”

There was also some question as to whether he was sane, or was entering that stage of chronic ailing known as the Hysterical Search for the Miraculous Cure. That might be all that Chicago was about: purifying pilgrimage to a sacred place. If so, beware—astrology lies just around the corner. Worse, Christianity. Yield to the hunger for medical magic and you will be carried to the ultimate limit of human foolishness, to the most preposterous of all the great pipe dreams devised by ailing mankind—to the Gospels, to the pillow of our leading dolorologist, the voodoo healer Dr. Jesus Christ.

Dante got out of hell easier than you’ll escape Zuckerman-Carnovsky. You don’t want to represent her Warsaw—it’s what her Warsaw represents that you want: suffering that isn’t semi-comical, the world of massive historical pain instead of this pain in the neck. War, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, literature on which the fate of a culture hinges, writing at the very heart of the upheaval, a martyrdom more to the point—some point, any point—than bearing the cocktail-party chitchat as a guest on Dick Cavett. Chained to self-consciousness. Chained to retrospection. Chained to my dwarf drama till I die. Stories now about Milton Appel? Fiction about losing my hair? I can’t face it. Anybody’s hair but mine. “Diana, come over, spend the night.” “No.” “Why no? Why not?” “Because I’m not going to suck you off for ten consecutive hours on your playmat and then listen to you for ten hours more screaming about this Milton Appel.” “But that’s all over.” But she’d hung up: he’d become another of her terrible men.

In his former life he could never have imagined lasting a week without writing. He used to wonder how all the billions who didn’t write could take the daily blizzard—all that beset them, such a saturation of the brain, and so little of it known or named. If he wasn’t cultivating hypothetical Zuckermans he really had no more means than a fire hydrant to decipher his existence. But either there was no existence left to decipher or he was without sufficient imaginative power to convert into his fiction of seeming self-exposure what existence had now become. There was no rhetorical overlay left: he was bound and gagged by the real raw thing, ground down to his own unhypothetical nub. He could no longer pretend to be anyone else, and as a medium for his books he had ceased to be.

(Erotically speaking, we—women—decide very young that we’ll be either priestesses or sacrifices. And we stick to it. And then midway into your career you long to switch and that is just the opportunity you gave me with the grand that I blew at Bergdorf’s. By way of explaining still further.)

There are no Jewish evil eyes or double Jewish whammies. Illness is an organic condition. Illness is as natural as health. The motive is not revenge. There is no motive. There are only nerve cells, twelve thousand million nerve cells, any one of which can drive you mad without the help of a book review.

Sublimate, my child, sublimate, like the physicists who gave us the atomic bomb.

When, some years later, he went to see a production of Waiting for Godot, he said afterwards to the woman who was then his lonely wife, “What’s so harrowing? It’s any writer’s ordinary day. Except you don’t get Pozzo and Lucky.”

Forget those fictionalized book-bound Zuckermans and invent a real one now for the world. That’s how the others do it. Your next work of art—you.

“Except, whatever problems are plaguing you in writing, they’re going to be right there, you know, when you’re a doctor. You can grow sick and tired of the real thing too. Tired of the cancers, tired of the strokes, tired of the families taking the bad news. You can get just as tired of malignant tumors as you can of anything else. Look, I’ve had experience right up to here, and it doesn’t pay off as greatly as you might think. You get so involved in experience, you lose the opportunity to grasp what you’re going through. You pay your money, Zuck, and you take your choice. I happen to think you’re going to be Zuckerman the doctor just the way you’re Zuckerman the writer, no different.” “But the isolation won’t be there, the solitude won’t be there—it can’t be there. The physical differences are too great. There are a thousand people walking around this hospital. Know who walks around my study, who I palpate and tell to say ‘Ahhh’? Writing is not a very sociable business.” “I don’t even agree with that. Your solitude is of your own making. Working with people is obviously alien to your nature. Your temperament’s your temperament, and it’ll still be yourself you’re telling to say ‘Ahhh.’

The mother dies, the old father becomes the son’s son.

To so easily answer a father’s need! It was a job for which he’d received an excellent education—for which he’d displayed prodigious talent even as a very small boy. Only when he was fully grown did the task for which his other talents equipped him keep getting in the way. How he went about that estranged him from father, mother, brother, and then from three wives—rooted more in the writing than in them, the sacrificial relationship with the books and not with the people who’d helped to inspire them. As the years passed, along with the charge of being out of reach, there were sexual complaints from the wives. Then the pain, so persistent as to estrange him even from the writing. On the playmat every other predicament, large or small, was inconceivable: no character imaginable other than the one in pain. What prevents my recovery, what I do or what I don’t do? What does this illness want with me anyway? Or is it I who want something from it? The interrogation had no useful purpose, yet the sole motif of his existence was this hourly search for the missing meaning. Had he kept a pain diary, the only entry would have been one word: Myself.

The experience of contradiction is the human experience; everybody’s balancing that baggage—how can you knuckle under to that?

The burden isn’t that everything has to be a book. It’s that everything can be a book. And doesn’t count as life until it is.