The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (21 page)

Speaking of being loved, just look at how you begin this thing. The little marsupial in his mother’s sealskin pouch. No wonder you suddenly display a secret passion to be universally coddled. But where, by the way, is the mother after that? It may well be that this incredible animal love that you have for your mother, and that you allude to in only one sentence in the prologue, can’t be exposed by you undisguised, but aside from that sealskin coat, there is no mother. Of course it speaks volumes, that coat—it tells nearly everything you need to know about your mother at that point; but the fact remains that your mother has no developed role either in your life or in your father’s. This picture of your mother is a way of saying “I was not my mother’s Alexander nor was she my Sophie Portnoy.” Perhaps that’s true. Yet this image of an utterly refined, Jewish Florence Nightingale still seems to me particularly striking for all it appears to omit.

Nor have I any idea what’s going on with you in relation to your father, his rise in the world, his fall in the world, his rise again. There’s only a sense of you and Newark, you and America, you and Bucknell, but what is going on within you and within the family is not here, can’t be here, simply because it
is
you and not Tarnopol, Kepesh, Portnoy, or me. In the few comments you do make about your mother and father, there’s nothing but tenderness, respect, understanding, all those wonderful emotions that I, for one, have come to distrust partly because you, for one, have made me distrust them. Many people don’t like you as a writer just because of the ways you invite the reader to distrust those very sentiments that you now publicly embrace. Comfort yourself, if you like, with the thought that this is Zuckerman talking, the disowned son embittered permanently by his deprivation; take solace in that if you like, but the fact remains I’m not a fool and I don’t believe you. Look, this place you come from does not produce artists so much as it produces dentists and accountants. I’m convinced that there is something in the romance of your childhood that you’re not permitting yourself to talk about, though without it the rest of the book makes no sense. I just cannot trust you as a memoirist the way I trust you as a novelist because, as I’ve said, to tell what you tell best is forbidden to you here by a decorous, citizenly, filial conscience. With this book you’ve tied your hands behind your back and tried to write it with your toes.

You see your beginnings, up to and including Bucknell, as an idyll, a pastoral, allowing little if no room for inner turmoil, the discovery in yourself of a dark, or unruly, or untamed side. Again, this may be dismissed as so much Zuckermania, but I don’t buy it. Your psychoanalysis you present in barely more than a sentence. I wonder why. Don’t you remember, or are the themes too embarrassing? I’m not saying you
are
Portnoy any more than I’m saying you are me or I am Carnovsky; but come on, what did you and the doctor talk about for seven years—the camaraderie up at the playground among all you harmless little Jewish boys? In fact, after the prologue and those first two sections, I can see the hero becoming a lawyer, a doctor, a suburban developer—he’s had his literary fling, his maverick fun, he’s had his gentile Polly, and now he’s going to settle down, marry into a good Jewish family, make money, be rich, have three children—and you have Josie instead. So there’s something missing, a big gap—those idyllic sections don’t at all add up to “Girl of My Dreams.” The very end of the little prologue, lyrically evoking the fleshly bond to your mother, tell me, please, how do you get from that to Josie? As you yourself point out, Josie isn’t something that merely happened to you, she’s something
that you made happen.
But if that is so, I want to know what it is that led to her from that easy, wonderful, shockless childhood that you describe, what it is that led to her from the cozily combative afternoons with Pete and Dick at Miss Martin’s seminar. Your story in Newark and Lewisburg was far from tragic—and then, in an extraordinarily brief period, you became immersed in the pathologically tragic. Why? Why did you essentially mortify yourself in a passionate encounter with a woman who had a sign on her saying
STAY AWAY KEEP OUT
? There has to be some natural link between the beginning, between all that early easy success, culminating at Bucknell and Chicago, and the end, and there isn’t. Because what’s left out is the motive.

In the exploits with Polly, the encounter with Mrs. Nellenback, the business with
The Bucknellian,
there’s no sense that you’re truly dissatisfied and looking for something else. Only glancingly do you touch on your dissatisfactions; even the conflict with your father you treat peripherally, and yet the note of grievance, of criticism, of disgust and satire and estrangement, sounds so powerfully in your fiction. Which am I to believe is the posturing: the fiction or this? Everything you describe in your childhood is undoubtedly still strongly there—the well-brought-up side, the nice-guy side, the good-kid side. This manuscript is steeped in the nice-guy side. In autobiography you seem to have no choice but to document mainly the nice-guy side, the form signaling to you that it is probably wisest to suppress the free exploration of just about everything else that goes into the making of a human personality. Where once there was satiric rebellion, now there is a deep sense of belonging; no resentment but rather gratitude, gratitude even for crazy Josie, gratitude even for the enraged Jews and the wound they inflicted. Of course, you are not the first novelist who, by fleeing the wearying demands of fictional invention for a little vacation in straightforward recollection, has shackled the less sociable impulses that led him or her to become a novelist in the first place. But the fact remains that it wasn’t exactly the nice-guy side that got the Yeshiva people all hot under their tefillin. And what you
were
tapping there did not come from nothing, even if it looks as though it did here. You were tapping exactly what produced your excruciating need for independence and the need to shatter the taboo. You were tapping what has compelled you to live out the imaginative life. I suspect that what comes somewhat closer to being an autobiography of
those
impulses was the fable,
Portnoy’s Complaint.

Where’s the anger? You suggest that the anger only developed
after
Josie, a result of her insanely destructive possessiveness and then the punishment handed out to you in court. But I doubt that Josie would have come into your life at all had the anger not been there already. I could be wrong, but you’ve got to prove it, to convince me that early on you didn’t find something insipid about the Jewish experience as you knew it, insipid about the middle class as you experienced it, insipid about marriage and domesticity, insipid even about love—certainly you must have come to feel that Gayle Milman was insipid or you would never have forsaken that pleasure dome.

And where’s the hubris, by the way? What’s not here is what it felt like to meet you—you say why, sociologically, Josie might have fallen in love with you, but you don’t say what she might have found appealing about you. It seems to me you relished the way you were and what you did, yet you talk in this veiled way, or not at all, about your qualities: “the exuberant side of my personality.…” How restrained and cool. How tremendously unexuberant. Positively British. You speak of yourself as a “good catch,” but why not be more boastful in your autobiography? Why shouldn’t autobiography be egotistical? You talk about what you were up against, what you wanted, what was happening to you, but you rarely say what you were like. You can’t or you won’t talk about yourself as yourself, other than in this decorous way. When you give the details of how you responded to the news of Josie’s death, you don’t cover anything up to make yourself look good. Yet it seems to me you’re too proper to say why these women were drawn to you; at least you act that way here. But obviously it’s just as impossible to be proper and modest and well behaved and be a revealing autobiographer as it is to be all that and a good novelist. Very strange that you don’t grasp this. Or maybe you do but, because of a gigantic split between how you’re sincere as yourself and how you’re sincere as an artist, you can’t enact it, and so we get this fictional autobiographical projection of a
partial
you. Even if it’s no more than one percent that you’ve edited out, that’s the one percent that counts—the one percent that’s saved for your imagination and that changes everything. But this isn’t unusual, really. With autobiography there’s always another text, a countertext, if you will, to the one presented. It’s probably the most manipulative of all literary forms.

To move on—when you’re young, energetic, intelligent, you have of course to deny in yourself what you see as being part of the tribe. You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe’s stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that—all those protestations notwithstanding—your self-hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is
valuable
for a young person. What should he or she have instead—self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It’s not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when those norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces or the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren’t even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance—and perhaps even invigorated the tribe’s health—may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn’t this a bit premature in you, aren’t you really too young yet to have it so fully developed? Personally I tend to trust the novella
Goodbye, Columbus,
written when you were still in your early twenties, as a guide to your evaluation of the Milmans more than I trust what you care to remember about them now. The truth you told about all this long ago you now want to tell in a different way. At fifty-five, with your mother dead and your father heading for ninety, you are evidently in a mood to idealize the confining society that long ago ceased impinging on your spirit and to sentimentalize people who by now inhabit either New Jersey cemeteries or Florida retirement communities and are hardly a source of disappointment to you, let alone a target for the derisive comedy unleashed first on poor Barbara Roemer and the
Bucknellian.

At fifty-five you may even find it hard to remember the extent of your adolescent despair over the way these people spoke and what they spoke about, over what they thought and thought about, over how they lived and genuinely expected their offspring, like you and Gayle, to live. At fifty-five, after all the books and the battles, after more than three decades of uprooting and remaking your life and your work, you’ve begun to make where you came from look like a serene, desirable, pastoral haven, a home that was a cinch to master, when, I suspect, it was more like a detention house you were tunneling out of practically from the day you could pronounce your favorite word of all, “away.”

And if I’m right, at the end of the tunnel, waiting like your moll in the getaway car, was Josie, embodying everything the Jewish haven was not, including the possibilities for treachery—those too must have had their allure. My uneasiness is that you present yourself not as an ingenious escapee on the run from home but as little more than a victim. Here I am, this innocent Jewish boy and American patriot, my mother’s papoose and Miss Martin’s favorite, brought up in these innocent landscapes, with all these well-meaning, innocent people, and I fall headlong into this trap. As though you still have no sense of how you were conspiring to make it all come about.

Now, it may well be that naked in autobiography, deprived of the sense of impregnability that narrative invention seems to confer on your self-revealing instincts, you can’t easily fathom your part in all this; nonetheless, after college, you simply do not present yourself as in any way responsible for what is happening. Enter Josie and, as you see it, the thing was a Pandora’s box—you opened it up and everything flew out. But what makes me resist that idea is your
pursuit
of the woman. The initial flirtation is very charming and could just about have been enough, but you persist. You don’t turn away from her any more than you refuse to go speak at Yeshiva, knowing when you accept that you can expect some sort of humiliating battle and, I contend,
needing
that battle, that attack, that kick, needing that
wound,
your source of invigorating anger, the energizer for the defiance. They boo you, they whistle, they stamp their feet—you hate it but you thrive on it. Because the things that wear you down are the things that nurture you and your talent.

You were passive with Josie only insomuch as you couldn’t control her; otherwise, the whole thing can be seen in an entirely different way from how it reads here. You, in fact, can be seen as the real troublemaker, setting before her so tantalizingly your mother’s hot tomato soup. You can also be seen, paradoxically, as the relentless aggressor practically begging Josie to behave as she did by ignoring the implications of her broken background. As you suggest, even the brightest can be awfully naïve, but anybody with tentacles and antennae would have had to know that Josie meant disaster, not after the first conversation necessarily, but surely after the first three or four weeks; certainly from the way you depict her here, only a dimwit, which you were not, would have failed to recognize the destructiveness. A good case can be made that you were deliberately drawing out of her every drop of her chaos. At the least, there is more ambiguity in your role than you are willing to acknowledge. But speaking as yourself, unprotected by the cunning playfulness of fictional masquerade, without all the exigencies of a full-scale, freewheeling narrative to overwhelm the human, if artistically fatal, concern for one’s vulnerable self, you are incapable of admitting that you were more responsible for what befell you than you wish to recall.