The Anatomy Lesson Page 6

  Since Zuckerman had heard most of this before—and usually in Inquiry, whose editorial admiration he’d lost long ago—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. Weil, 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, not so much by Appel’s reconsidered judgment as by the polemical overkill, the exhaustive reprimand that just asked for a fight. This set Zuckerman’s teeth on edge. It couldn’t miss. What hurt most was that Milton Appel had been a leading wunderkind of the Jewish generation preceding his own, a contributing editor to Rahv’s Partisan Review, a fellow at Ransom’s Indiana School of Letters, already publishing essays on European modernism and analyses of the exploding American mass culture while Zuckerman was still in high school taking insurgency training from Philip Wylie and his Finnley Wren. In the early fifties, during a two-year stint at Fort Dix, Zuckerman composed a fifteen-page “Letter from the Army,” describing the bristling class resentment between black cadre just back from Korea, white commanding officers recalled to active duty, and the young college-educated draftees like himself. Though rejected by Partisan, the manuscript was returned with a note which, when he read it, excited him nearly as much as if it had been a letter of acceptance: “Study more Orwell and try us again. M.A.”

  One of Appel’s own early Partisan essays, written when he was just back from World War II, had been cherished reading among Zuckerman’s friends at the University of Chicago circa 1950. No one, as far as they knew, had ever written so unapologetically about the gulf between the coarse-grained Jewish fathers whose values had developed in an embattled American immigrant milieu and their bookish, nervous American sons. Appel pushed his subject beyond moralizing into deterministic drama. It could not be otherwise on either side—a conflict of integrities. Each time Zuckerman returned to school from a bruising vacation in New Jersey, he took his copy of the essay out of its file folder (“Appel, Milton, 1918- “) and. to regain some perspective on his falling out with his family, read it through again. He wasn’t alone … He was a social type … His fight with his father was a tragic necessity…

  In truth, the type of intellectual Jewish boy whom Appel had portrayed, and whose struggles he illustrated with painful incidents from his own early life, had sounded to Zuckerman far worse off than himself. Maybe because these were boys more deeply and exclusively intellectual, maybe because their fathers were more benighted. Either way, Appel didn’t minimize the suffering. Alienated, rootless, anguished, bewildered, brooding, tortured, powerless—he could have been describing the inner life of a convict on a Mississippi chain gang instead of the predicament of a son who worshipped books that his unschooled father was too ignorant to care about or understand. Certainly Zuckerman at twenty didn’t feel tortured plus powerless plus anguished—he really just wanted his father to lay off. Despite all the solace that essay had given him, Zuckerman wondered if there might not be more comedy in the conflict than Appel was willing to grant.

  Then again, Appel’s might well have been a more dispiriting upbringing than his own. and the young Appel what he himself would later have labeled a “case.” According to Appel, it was a source of the deepest shame to him during his adolescence that his father, whose livelihood was earned from the seat of a horse-drawn wagon, could speak to him easily only in Yiddish. When, in his twenties, the time came for the son to break away from the impoverished immigrant household and take a room of his own for himself and his books, the father couldn’t begin to understand where he was going or why. They shouted, they screamed, they wept, the table was struck, the door was slammed, and only then did young Milton leave home. Zuckerman, on the other hand, had a father who spoke in English and practiced chiropody in a downtown Newark office building that overlooked the plane trees in Washington Park; a father who’d read William Shirer’s Berlin Diary and Wendell Willkie’s One World and took pride in keeping up; civic-minded, well-informed, a member admittedly of one of the lesser medical orders, but a professional, and in that family the first. Four older brothers were shopkeepers and salesmen; Dr. Zuckerman was the first of the line even to have gone beyond an American grade school. Zuckerman’s problem was that his father half understood. They shouted and screamed, but in addition they sat down to reason together, and to that there is no end. Talk about torture. For the son to butcher the father with a carving knife, then step across his guts and out the door, may be a more merciful solution all around than to sit down religiously to reason together when there is nothing to reason about.

  Appel’s anthology of Yiddish fiction, in his own translations, appeared when Zuckerman was at Fort Dix. It was the last thing Zuckerman expected after the pained, dramatic diction of that essay proclaiming the depths of alienation from a Jewish past. There were also the critical essays that had, since then, made Appel’s reputation in the quarterlies and earned him, without benefit of an advanced degree, first a lectureship at the New School and then a teaching job up the Hudson at Bard. 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 thrillingly paradoxical kicker.

  Though Appel’s initial motive for compiling his Yiddish anthology was, more than likely, the sheer excitement of discovering a language whose range he could never have guessed from the coarseness of his father’s speech, there seemed a deliberately provocative intention too. Far from signaling anything so comforting and inauthentic as a prodigal son’s return to the fold, it seemed, in fact, a stand against: to Zuckerman, if to no one else, a stand against the secret shame of the assimilationists, against the distortions of the Jewish nostalgists, against the boring, bloodless faith of the prospering new suburbs—best of all, an exhilarating stand against the snobbish condescension of those famous departments of English literature from whose impeccable Christian ranks the literary Jew, with his mongrelized speech and caterwauling inflections, had until just yesterday been pointedly excluded. To Appel’s restless, half-formed young admirer, there was the dynamic feet of a rebellious act in the resurrection of those Yiddish writers, a rebellion ail the more savory for undercutting the anthologist’s own early rebellion. The Jew set free, an animal so ravished and agitated by his inexhaustible new hunger that he rears up suddenly and bites his tail, relishing the intriguing taste of himself even while screaming anguished sentences about the agonies inflicted by his teeth.

  After reading Appel’s Yiddish anthology,
Zuckerman went up to New York on his next overnight pass, and on lower Fourth Avenue, on booksellers’ row, where he normally loaded up with used Modern Library books for a quarter apiece, searched the stores until he found secondhand copies of a Yiddish grammar and an English-Yiddish dictionary. He bought them, took them back to Fort Dix, and after supper in the mess hall, returned to the quiet empty office where during the day he wrote press releases for the Public Information Officer. There at his desk he sal studying Yiddish. Just one lesson each night and by the time he was discharged he would be reading his literary forefathers in their original tongue. He managed to stick with it for six weeks.

  Zuckerman had retained only a very dim sense of Appel’s appearance from the mid-sixties. Round-faced, bespectacled, tailish, balding—that’s all he came up with. Maybe the looks weren’t as memorable as the opinions. A more vivid recollection was of a striking wife. Was he still married to the pretty, delicate, dark woman who’d been walking hand in hand with him along the Barnes Hole beach? Zuckerman recalled rumors of an adulterous passion. Which had she been, the discard or the prize? According to Inquiry’s biographical note, Milton Appel was at Harvard for the year, on leave from his Distinguished Professorship at NYU. When literary Manhattan spoke of Appel, it seemed to Zuckerman that the name Milton was intoned with unusual warmth and respect. He couldn’t turn up anyone who had it in for the bastard. He fished and found nothing. In Manhattan. Incredible. There was talk of a counterculture daughter, a dropout from Swarthmore who took drugs. Good. That might eat his guts out. Then word went around that Milton was in a Boston hospital with kidney stones. Zuckerman would have liked to witness their passing. Someone said that a friend had seen him walking in Cambridge with a cane. From kidney stones? Hooray. That satisfied the ill will a little. Ill will? He was furious, especially when he learned that before publishing “The Case of Nathan Zuckerman” Appel had tried it out on the road, traveled the college lecture circuit telling students and their professors just how awful a writer he was. Then Zuckerman heard that over at Inquiry they had received a single letter in his defense. The letter, which Appel had dismissed in a one-line rebuttal, turned out to have been written by a young woman Zuckerman had slept with during a summer on the Bread Loaf staff. Well, he’d had a good time too, but where were the rest of his supporters, all the influential allies? Writers shouldn’t—and not only do they tell themselves they shouldn’t, but everybody who is not a writer reminds them time and again—writers of course shouldn’t, but still they do sometimes take these things to heart. Appel’s attack—no, Appel in and of himself, the infuriating fact of his corporeal existence—was all he could think about (except for his pain and his harem).

  The comfort that idiot had given the fatheads! Those xenophobes, those sentimental, chauvinist, philistine Jews, vindicated in their judgment of Zuckerman by the cultivated verdict of unassailable Appel, Jews whose political discussions and cultural pleasures and social arrangements, whose simple dinner conversation, the Distinguished Professor couldn’t have borne for ten seconds. Their kitsch alone made Appel’s gorge rise; their taste in Jewish entertainment was the subject of short scalding pieces he still dutifully published in the back pages of the intellectual journals. Nor could they have borne Appel for long either. His stern moral dissection of their harmless leisure pursuits—had the remarks been delivered around the card table at the Y, instead of in magazines they’d never heard of—would have struck them as cracked. His condemnation of their favorite hit shows would have seemed to them nothing less than anti-Semitic, Oh, he was tough on all those successful Jews for liking that cheap middlebrow crap. Beside Milton Appel, Zuckerman would have begun to look good to these people. That was the real joke. Zuckerman had been raised in the class that loved that crap, had known them all his life as family and family friends, visited with them, eaten with them, joked with them, had listened for hours to their opinions even when Appel was arguing in his editorial office with Philip Rahv and acting the gent to John Crowe Ransom. Zuckerman knew them still. He also knew that nowhere, not even in the most satiric of his juvenilia, was there anything to match Appel’s disgust at contemplating this audience authenticating their “Jewishness” on Broadway. How did Zuckerman know? Ah, this is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you. 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. He hated Appel and would never forgive or forget that attack.

  Sooner or later there comes to every writer the two-thousand-, three-thousand-, five-thousand-word lashing that doesn’t just sting for the regulation seventy-two hours but rankles all his life. Zuckerman now had his: to treasure in his quotable storehouse till he died, the unkindest review of all, embedded as indelibly (and just about as useful) as “Abou Ben Adhem” and “Annabel Lee,” the first two poems he’d had to memorize for a high-school English class.

  Inquiry’s publication of Appel’s essay—and the outbreak of Zuckerman’s hatred—took place in May 1973. In October, five thousand Egyptian and Syrian tanks attacked Israel on Yom Kippur afternoon. Caught off guard, the Israelis took three weeks this time to destroy the Arab armies and approach the suburbs of Damascus and Cairo. But after the rallying to victory, the Israeli defeat: in the Security Council, the European press, even in the U.S. Congress, condemnation of Jewish aggression. Of all things, in the desperate search for allies. Milton Appel turned to the worst of Jewish writers for an article in support of the Jewish slate.

  The appeal wasn’t put directly, but through their mutual acquaintance Ivan Felt, who had once been Appel’s graduate assistant at NYU. Zuckerman, who knew Felt from the artist’s colony at Quahsay, had introduced him to his own publisher the year before, and Felt’s first novel, soon to be published, would carry a paragraph of appreciation by Zuckerman on the jacket. The contemptuous destructive rage of the sixties was Felt’s subject, the insolent anarchy and gleeful debauchery that had overturned even the most unlikely American lives while Johnson was devastating Vietnam for the networks. The book was as raw as Felt but, alas, only half as overhearing; Zuckerman’s guess was that if he could get alt that overbearing nature coursing through the prose, abandon his halfhearted objectivity and strange lingering respect for the great moral theme, Ivan Fell might yet become a real artist in the demonic, spiteful Celine line. Surely his letters, Zuckerman wrote to Felt, if not his fiction, would live forever in-the annals of paranoia. As for the brash, presumptuous overconfidence and ostentatious egoism, it remained 10 be seen how much protection they would offer for the long-drawn-out brawl: Felt was twenty-seven and the literary career yet to begin.

  Syracuse— 12/1/73

  Nathan—

  Xerox paragraph (enclosed) from correspondence between M. Appel and myself concerning NZ. (Rest about B.U. vacancy I asked him, and now you. to support me for.) I stopped at his Harvard pulpit when in Boston ten days back. Hadn’t heard any echo since galleys went off to him weeks ago. Told me he’d read a chapter but wasn’t “responsive” to “what that sort of humor represents.” Only trying to strip everything I fear of its “prestige.” I said what’s wrong with that, but he wasn’t interested, said he didn’t have strong impressions any longer of my book, his mind far away from fiction. On Israel’s enemies. “They’ll kill us all gladly,” he told me. I told him that’s how I saw everything. When later I said of Israel, “Who isn’t worried.’” he thought I was assuming a profitable role—’took it for playacting. So out I lashed at the tirade on you. He said I should have written the magazine if I wanted to debate. He didn’t have the energy or inclination now—”Other things on my mind.”‘ On leaving [ added that one Jew worried about Israel was you. His paragraph follow-up to that parting shot. Civilized world knows how celebrated paranoid would rush to respond. Wait to learn what invitation to clear your conscience whips
up in loving soul like you,

  Your public toilet.

  I.F.

  “Buried anger, troves of it”; this was young Dr. Felt on the origins of Zuckerman’s affliction. When news had reached him the year before that Zuckerman was hospitalized for a week, he phoned from Syracuse to find out what was wrong, and stopped by when he was next in New York. Out in the hallway, in his hooded high-school windbreaker, he’d taken his comrade by the arms—arms whose strength was ebbing by the day—and, only half mockingly, pronounced judgment.

  Felt was constructed like a dockworker, strutted about like a circus strong man. piled layers of clothes on like a peasant, and had the plain ungraspable face of a successful felon. Compact neck, thick back, shock-absorbent legs—roll him up and you could shoot him from a cannon. There were those in the Syracuse English Department wailing in line with matches and powder. Not that Ivan cared. He’d already ascertained the proper relationship of Ivan Felt to his fellow man. So had Zuckerman, at twenty-seven: Stand alone. Like Swift and Dostoevsky and Joyce and Flaubert. Obstinate independence. Unshakable defiance. Perilous freedom. No, in thunder.