In this section from the forthcoming novel The Anatomy Lesson (the concluding volume of Roth's Zuckerman trilogy), the novelist Nathan Zuckerman is manacled to his Manhattan apartment by an enigmatic affliction—undiagnosed pain in his neck, arms and shoulders. Zuckerman now spends most of the day stretched supine across a plastic play mat on his study floor. Unable to sit up and write, he reflects upon all that has been lost and destroyed since the amazing success of Carnovsky, his scandalous 1969 bestseller about the sexual delinquency of an uncircumcised male. It is 1973 and Zuckerman is forty.

GONE. Mother, father, brother, birthplace, subject, health, hair—according to the critic Milton Appel, his talent too. According to Appel, there hadn’t been much talent to lose. In Inquiry, the Jewish cultural monthly that fifteen years earlier had published Zuckerman’s first stories, Milton Appel had unleashed an attack upon Zuckerman’s career that made Macduff’s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical. Zuckerman should have been so lucky as to come away with decapitation. A head wasn’t enough for Appel; he tore you limb from limb.

Zuckerman didn’t know Appel. They’d met only twice—one August out in the Springs on Long Island, strolling by each other at the Barnes Hole beach, then briefly at a big college arts festival where each was sitting on a different panel. These meetings came some years after Appel’s review of Zuckerman’s first book had appeared in the Sunday Times. That review had thrilled him. In the Times in 1959, the twenty-six-year-old author had looked to Appel like a wunderkind, the stories in Higher Education “fresh, authoritative, exact”—for Appel, almost too pointed in their portraiture of American Jews clamoring to enter Pig Heaven: because the world Zuckerman knew still remained insufficiently transformed by the young writer’s imagination, the book, for all its freshness, seemed to Appel more like social documentation, finally, than a work of art.

Fourteen years on, following the success of Carnovsky, Appel reconsidered what he called Zuckerman’s “case”: now the Jews represented in Higher Education had been twisted out of human recognition by a willful vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy and the tenets of realistic fiction. Except for a single readable story, that first collection was tendentious junk, the by-product of a pervasive and unfocused hostility. The three books that followed had nothing to redeem them at all—mean, joyless, patronizing little novels, contemptuously dismissive of the complex depths. No Jews like Zuckerman’s had ever existed other than as caricature; as literature that could interest grown people, none of the books could be said to exist at all, but were contrived as a species of sub-literature for the newly “liberated” middle class, for an “audience,” as distinguished from serious readers. Though probably himself not an outright anti-Semite, Zuckerman was certainly no friend of the Jews: Carnovsky's ugly animus proved that.

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. 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, 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 ’50s, 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 worshiped 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 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 horsedrawn 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 or 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 bom 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 feel of a rebellious act in the resurrection of those Yiddish writers, a rebellion all 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 sat 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-’60s. Round-faced, bespectacled, tallish, 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 bioi graphical 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 while 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 twothousand-, three-thousand-, five-thousand-word lashing that doesn’t sting just 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 state.

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 ’60s 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 overbearing; Zuckerman’s guess was that if he could get all that overbearing nature coursing through the prose, abandon his halfhearted objectivity and strange lingering respect for the great moral theme, Ivan Felt 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 to 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’d 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 I 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 waiting 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 Dostoyevsky and Joyce and Flaubert. Obstinate independence. Unshakable defiance. Perilous freedom. No, in thunder.

It was the first time they’d met on Eighty-first Street. No sooner had Felt entered the living room and begun pulling off his jacket, his cap, and the assortment of old sweaters that he was wearing under the windbreaker and over the T-shirt, than he was appraising aloud all he saw. “Velvet curtains. Persian carpet. Period mantelpiece. Overhead the ornamented plaster, below the gleaming parquet floor. Ah, but properly ascetic all the same. Not a hint of hedonism yet somehow—cushy. Very elegantly underfurnished, Nathan. The pad of a well-heeled monk.”

But how Felt sardonically sized up the decor interested Zuckerman less than the new diagnosis. They just kept coming, these diagnoses. Everybody had a slant. The illness with a thousand meanings. They read the pain as his fifth book.

“Buried anger?” Zuckerman asked him. “Where’d you get that idea?”

“Camovsky. Incomparable vehicle for the expression of your inadmissible loathings. Your hatred flows at flood level—so much hatred the heap of flesh can’t contain it. Yet, outside the books, you act like you ain’t even here. Moderation itself. Altogether, your books give off a greater sense of reality than you do. The first time I saw you, the night you came down into the dining room at Quahsay, the Glittering Guest of the Month, I said to little Gina, the lesbian poet, ‘I’ll bet that fellow never gets mad outside of those best-sellers.’ Do you? Do you know how to?”

“You’re tougher than I am, Ivan.”

“That’s a flattering way of saying I’m nastier than you are.”

“When do you get angry outside of the writing?”

“I get angry when I want to get rid of somebody. They’re in my way. Anger is a gun. I point it and I Fire, and I keep Firing till they disappear. I’m like you are in the writing outside the writing and in the writing. You button your lip. I’ll say anything.”

By now, with all Felt’s layers of clothes unpeeled and strewn across the floor, the pad of the well-heeled monk looked as if it had just been sacked.

“And,” Zuckerman asked, “you believe what you’re saying when you say anything?”

Felt looked over at him from the sofa as though Zuckerman were demented. “It doesn’t matter whether I believe it. You’re such a good soldier you don’t even understand. The thing is to make them believe it. You are a good soldier. You seriously entertain the opposition point of view. You do all that the right way. You have to. You’re always astonished how you provoke people by pouring out the secrets of your disgraceful inner life. You get stunned. You get sad. It’s a wonder to you that you’re such a scandal. The wonder to me is that you can possibly care. You, down with a case of the Bad-Taste Blues! To require the respect of men and women’s tender caresses. Poppa’s approval and Momma’s love. Nathan Zuckerman! Who’d believe it?”

"And you require nothing? You believe that"

“I sure don’t let guilt enter everything, not the way you good soldiers do. It’s nothing, guilt—it’s selfindulgence. They despise me? They call me names? They don’t approve? All the better. A girl tried to commit suicide at my place last week. Dropped by with her pills for a glass of my water. Swallowed them while I was off teaching my afternoon dopes. I was furious when I found her. I phoned for an ambulance, but I’d be damned if I’d go with her. If she had died? Fine with me. Let her die if that’s what she wants. I don’t stand in their way and nobody stands in mine. I say, ‘No, I don’t want any more of this—it’s not for me.’ And I start firing until it’s gone. All you need from them is money—the rest you take care of yourself.”

“Thanks for the lesson.”

“Don’t thank me,” said Felt. “I learned it in high school, reading you. Anger. Point it and fire it and just keep firing until they disappear. You’ll be a healthy novelist in no time.”

Appel’s paragraph, xeroxed by Felt and sent on to Zuckerman in New York:

Truth to tell, I don’t know that there’s much we can do—first the Jews were destroyed by gas, and now it may be in oil. Too many around New York are shameful on this matter: it’s as if their circumcisions were acquired for other reasons. The people who raised hell about Vietnam are not saying much on Israel (but for a few souls). However, insofar as public opinion matters, or the tiny fraction of it we can reach, let me offer a suggestion that may irritate you, but which I’ll make nonetheless. Why don’t you ask your friend Nate Zuckerman to write something in behalf of Israel for the Times Op-Ed page? He could surely get in there. If I come out in support of Israel there, that’s not exactly news: it’s expected. But if Zuckerman came out with a forthright statement, that would be news of a kind, since he has prestige with segments of the public that don’t care for the rest of us. Maybe he has spoken up on this, but if so I haven’t seen it. Or does he still feel that, as his Carnovsky says, the Jews can stick their historical suffering up their ass? (And yes, I know that there’s a difference between characters and authors; but I also know that grownups should not pretend that it’s quite the difference they tell their students it is.) Anyway, brushing aside my evident hostility to his view on these matters, which is neither here nor there, I honestly believe that if he were to come out publicly, it would be of some interest. I think we’re at the point where the whole world is getting ready to screw the Jews. At such points even the most independent of souls might find it worth saying a word.

Well, now he was angry outside of the books. Moderation? Never heard of it. He got down a copy of Carnovsky. Had it really been proposed in these pages that Jews can stick their suffering quote unquote? A sentiment so scathing just dropped like a shoe? He looked in his book for the source of Appel’s repugnance and found it a third of the way through: penultimate line of two thousand words of semihysterical protest against a family’s obsession with their minority plight—declaration of independence delivered by Carnovsky to his older sister from the sanctuary of his bedroom at the age of fourteen.

So: undeluded by what grown-ups were pretending to their students, Appel had attributed to the author the rebellious outcry of a claustrophobic fourteenyear-old boy. This was a licensed literary critic? No, no—an overwrought polemicist for endangered Jewry. The letter could have come from the father in Carnovsky. It could have come from his own real father. Written in Yiddish, it could have come from Appel’s, from that ignorant immigrant junkman who, if he hadn’t driven young Milton even crazier than Carnovsky, had clearly broken his heart.

He pored over the paragraph like a professional litigant, drawn back in a fury to what galled him most. Then he called Diana at school. Needed her to type. Had to see her right away. Anger was a gun and he was opening fire.

Diana Rutherford was a student at Finch, the rich girls’ college around the corner where the Nixons had sent Tricia. Zuckerman was out mailing a letter the first time they met. She wore the standard cowpoke denims, jeans and jacket beaten senseless on sunbleached stones of the Rio Grande, then shipped north to Bonwit’s. “Mr. Zuckerman,” she’d said, tapping him on his shoulder as he dropped the envelope in the box, “can I interview you for the school paper?” Only yards away, two roommates were in stitches over her brashness. This was obviously the college character. “Do you write for the school paper?” he asked her. “No.” Confessed with a large guileless smile. Guileless, really? Twenty is the age of guile. “Walk me home,” he said; “we’ll talk about it.” “Great,” the character replied. “What’s a smart girl like you doing at a place like Finch?” “My family thought I ought to learn how to cross my legs in a skirt.” But when they got to his door fifty feet down the block, and he asked if she’d like to come up, the brashness gave out and she sashayed back to her friends.

The next afternoon, when the buzzer rang, he asked who it was through the intercom. “The girl who’s not on the school paper.” Her hands were trembling when he let her in. She lit a cigarette, then removed her coat, and without waiting to be invited, set about examining the books and the pictures. She took everything in room by room. Zuckerman followed.

In the study she asked, “Don’t you have anything out of place here?”

“Only you.”

“Look, it’ll be no contest if you start off hypersardonic.” Her voice quivering, she still spoke her mind. “Nobody like you should have to be afraid of anybody like me.”

In the living room again, he took her coat from the sofa and, before hanging it in the closet, looked at the label. Bought in Milano. Setting somebody back many, many hundreds of thousands of lire.

“You always this reckless?” he asked.

“I’m writing a paper on you.” From the edge of the soFa she lit the next cigarette. “That’s a lie. That’s not true.”

“You’re here on a dare.”

“I thought you were somebody I could talk to.”

“About what?”

“Men. I can’t take much more of them.”

He made them coffee and she began with her boyfriend, a law student. He neglected her and she didn’t understand why. He phoned her in tears in the middle of the night to say that he didn’t want to see her but he didn’t want to lose her either. Finally she’d written a letter asking him what was going on. “I’m young,” she told Zuckerman, “and I want to fuck. It makes me feel ugly when he won’t do it.”

Diana was a long, narrow girl with a minute behind, small conical breasts, and boyishly clipped dark curls. Her chin was round like a child’s, and so were her dark Red Indian eyes. She was straight and circular, soft and angular, and certainly wasn’t ugly, except for the pout, the Dead End Kid look around the mouth whenever she began to complain. Her clothes were a child’s: tiny suede skirt over a black leotard and, pinched from Momma’s closet to amaze the other girls, high-heeled black shoes with open toes and sequined strap. The face was really a baby’s too, until she smiled—that was big and captivating. Laughing she looked like someone who’d seen it all and emerged unscathed, a woman of fifty who’d been lucky.

What she’d seen and survived were the men. They’d been in pursuit since she was ten.

“Half your life,” he said. “What have you learned?”

“Everything. They want to come in your hair, they want to beat your ass, they want to call you on the phone from work and get you to finger yourself while you’re doing your homework. I’m without illusions, Mr. Zuckerman. Ever since I was in seventh grade a friend of my father’s has been calling every month. He couldn’t be sweeter to his wife and his kids, but me he’s been calling since I’m twelve. He disguises his voice and every time it’s the same damn thing. ‘How would you like to straddle my cock?’”

“What do you do about it?”

“I didn’t know what to do in the beginning except listen. I got frightened. I bought a whistle. To blow into the mouthpiece. To burst his eardrum. But when I blew it finally, he just laughed. It turned him on more. This is eight years now. He calls me at school once a month. ‘How would you like to straddle my cock?’ I say to him, ‘Is that it? Is that the whole thing?’ He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. Because it is. Not even to do it. Just to say it. To me.”

“Every month, for eight years, and you’ve done nothing about it except buy a whistle?”

“What am I supposed to do, call the cops?”

“What happened when you were ten?”

“The chauffeur used to play with me when he drove me to school.”

“Is that true?”

“The author of Camovsky asks me if that’s true?”

“Well, you might be making yourself interesting by making it up. People do that.”

“I assure you, it’s writers who have to make things up, not girls.”

After an hour he felt as if Temple Drake had hitched up from Memphis to talk about Popeye with Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was stunned. It was a little hard to believe in all she said she’d seen—in all she seemed to be saying she was. “And your parents?” he asked her. “What do they say to these chilling adventures with all the terrible men?”

“Parents?” She came catapulting up onto her feet, sprung by that one word alone from the cushioned nest she’d dug down in the sofa pillows. The length of the leotarded legs, the speed and aggression of the delicate fingers, that mocking, cocky beat she took before driving in her point—a budding female matador, Zuckerman decided. She’d certainly look great in the gear. Might be frightened out of her wits to begin with, but he could also see her going in there and doing it. Come and get me. She’s breaking free and being brave—or trying hard, by tempting fate, to learn. Sure there’s a side of her that wants and invites this erotic attention—along with the side that gets angry and confused; but all in all there is something more intriguing here than mere teenage chance taking. There’s a kind of perverse autonomy covering up a very interesting, highly strung girl (and woman, and child, and kid). He could remember what it was like saying, “Come and get me.” That of course was before they’d got him. It got him. Whatever you wanted to call it, something had got him.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “There are no more parents. Parents are over. Look, I’ve tried to make a go of it with the law student. I thought he’d help me concentrate on this silly school. He studies, he jogs, he doesn’t do too much dope, and he’s only twenty-three—and for me that’s young. I’ve worked hard on him, damn it, him and his hang-ups, and now, now he doesn’t want to do it all. I don’t know what the matter is with that boy. I look at him cockeyed and he turns into a baby. Fear, I guess. The sane ones bore you practically to death, and the ones who fascinate you turn out to be nuts. Know what I’ve been pushed to? What I’m just about ready for? To be married. To be married and to get knocked up, and to say to the contractor, ‘Put the pool in over there.’”

Twenty minutes after receiving Zuckerman’s call, Diana was sitting in the study with the pages to be typed and mailed to Appel. He’d filled four long yellow pages before sliding from his chair to the playmat. Back on his back he tried to get the throbbing to subside in his upper arm by kneading the muscle with his fingers. The base of his neck was on fire too, the toll for the longest sustained piece of prose he’d composed sitting upright in over a year. And there were more bullets left in the chamber. Suppose through careful analysis of those early essays I demonstrate how Appel harshly denounces Zuckerman because of a distressing conflict with Poppa insufficiently settled in himself— show that it’s not only the menace of Islam that’s provoked this reappraisal of my “case,” but Ocean Hill— Brownsville and black anti-Semitism, the condemnation of Israel in the Security Council, even the New York teachers’ strike; that it’s the media da-da of loud Jewish Yippies whose playpen goals he ludicrously associates with me. Now for my reappraisal of him. It isn’t that Appel thinks he was wrong about Zuckerman in 1959. Or wrong about his own rootlessness in 1946. Right then, and now that he’s changed his mind, right again. The “mind” may change, or appear to, but never the inquisitor’s passion for punishing verdicts. Behind the admirable flexibility of judicious reappraisal the theoretical substructure is still blast-proof concrete: none of us as seriozny as Appel. “The Irrefutable Rethinkings of Milton Appel.” “Right and Rigid in Every Decade: The Polemical Spasms of a Hanging Judge.” He came up with titles by the dozen.

“I’ve never heard anybody like you on the phone,” Diana said. She sat submerged in her secretarial camouflage: shapeless overalls and a bulky sweater intended originally to help him dictate his fiction. When she showed up in the child’s skirt, little dictation was ever taken. The skirt was another reason to give up. “You should see yourself,” she said. “Those prism glasses, that contorted face. You should see what you look like. You let something like this get inside you and it builds and builds until your head comes off. And with your hair in it. That’s exactly why you’re losing your hair. It’s why you have all this pain. Look at you. Have you looked in a mirror?”

“Don’t you get angry about things? I’m angry.”

“Yes, sure, of course I do. There’s always somebody in the background of anybody’s life driving you mad and giving you cystitis. But I think about them. I do my yoga. I run around the block and I play tennis and I try to get rid of it. I can’t live like that. I’d have an upset stomach for the rest of my life.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Well, I think I do. You have it at school.”

“You can’t equate this with school.”

“Well, you can. You get the same kind of knocks at college. And they’re damn hard to get over. Especially when they seem to you totally unjust.”

“Type the letter.”

“I’d better read it first.”

“Not necessary.”

Through the prism glasses he impatiently watched her read it, meanwhile kneading away at his upper arm to try to subdue the pain. What helped sometimes with the deltoid muscle was the electronic pain suppressor. But would the neurons even register that lowvoltage shock, what with this supercharge of indignation lighting up his brain?

“I’m not typing this letter. Not if this is what it says.”

“What the hell business is it of yours what it says?”

“I refuse to type this letter, Nathan. You’re a crazy man when you start on these things, and this letter is crazy. ‘If the Arabs were undone tomorrow by a plague of cheap solar power, you wouldn’t give my books a second thought.’ You’re off your head. That makes no sense. He wrote what he wrote about your books because that is what he thinks. Period. Why even care what these people think, when you are you and they are nobody? Look at you. What a vulnerable, resentful mouth! Your hair is actually standing on end. Who is this little squirt anyway? Who is Milton Appel? I never read any books by him. They don’t teach him at school. I can’t fathom this in a man like you. You’re an extremely sophisticated, civilized man—how can you be caught in a trap by these people and let them upset you to such a degree?”

“You’re a twenty-year-old girl from an ultraprivileged Christian Connecticut background, and I accept that you haven’t any idea what this is all about.”

“Well, a lot of people who aren’t twenty and don’t have ultraprivileged Christian Connecticut backgrounds wouldn’t understand either, not if they saw you looking like this. ‘Why those Jews in Higher Edu- cation, all too authentic to you in 1959, are suddenly the excreta of a vulgar imagination is because the sole Jewish aggression sanctioned in 1973 is against Egypt, Syria, and the PLO.’ Nathan, you can’t believe the PLO is why he wrote that piece.”

“But it is. If it wasn’t for Yasir Arafat he’d never be on my ass. You don’t know what frazzled Jewish nerves are like.”

“I’m learning. Please, take a Percodan. Smoke some pot, Have a vodka. But calm down."

“You get over to that desk and type. I pay you to type for me.”

“Well, not that much. Not enough for this.” Again she read aloud from his letter. “ ‘In your view, it really isn’t deranged Islam or debilitated Christianity that’s going to deal us the death blow anyway, but Jewish shits who write books like mine, carrying the hereditary curse of self-hate. And all to make a dollar. Six million dead—six million sold. Isn’t that the way you really see it?’ Nathan, this is all ludicrous and overstated. You’re a man of forty and you’re flailing out like a schoolboy who’s been made to stand in the corner.”

“Go home. I greatly admire your self-possession in telling me off like this, but I want you to go away.”

“I’ll stay till you calm down.”

“I’m riot calming down. I’ve been calm long enough. Go.”

“Do you really think it’s intelligent to be so unforgiving about this great wrong that’s been committed against you? This enormous wrong?”

“Oh, should I forgive him?”

“Yes. You see, I am a Christian. I do believe in Christ. And in people like Gandhi. And you're going back to that dreadful Old Testament. That stonelike book. Eye for eye and teeth for teeth and never forgive anybody. Yes, I’m saying that I believe in forgiving my enemies. I can’t believe in the end that it isn’t healthier for everybody.”

“Please don’t prescribe peace and love. Don’t make me a member of your generation.”

“Gandhi wasn’t a member of my generation. Jesus isn’t a member of my generation. St. Francis of Assisi wasn’t a member of my generation. As you God damn well know, I'm not even a member of my generation.”

“But I’m not Jesus, Gandhi, St. Francis, or you. I’m a petty, raging, vengeful, unforgiving Jew, and I have been insulted one time too many by another petty, raging, vengeful, unforgiving Jew, and if you intend to stay, then type what I’ve written, because it cost me bloody hell in my aching joints to write it.”

“Okay. If you’re such a Jew, and these Jews are all so central to your thinking—and that they have this hold is unfathomable to me, really—but if you really are stuck on Jews like this, and if Israel does mean something to you, then sure I’ll type—but only if you dictate an essay about Israel for the New York Times."

“You don’t understand. That request from him, after what he’s published in Inquiry, is the final insult. In Inquiry, run by the kind of people he used to attack before he began attacking people like me!”

“Only it is not an insult. He’s asked you what he’s asked because people know who you are, because you can be so easily identified with American Jews. What I can’t understand is what you’re in such a state about. Either do it or don’t do it, but don’t take it as an insult when it wasn’t meant as one.”

“What was it meant as? He wants me to write an article that says I’m not an anti-Semite anymore and that I love Israel with all my heart—and that he can stick up his ass.”

“I can’t believe that’s what he wants you to write.”

“Diana, when somebody who has said about me and my work and the Jews what this guy has, then turns around and says why don’t you write something nice about us for a change—well, how can you fail to understand that this is particularly galling to me? ‘Write something in behalf of Israel.’ But what about the hostility to Jews that’s at the heart of every word I publish? To propagate that caricature in Inquiry, publicly to damn me as the caricaturist, and then in private to suggest this piece—and with some expectation at least of the crypto anti-Semite’s acquiescence! ‘He has prestige with segments of the public that don’t care for the rest of us.’ Right—the scum, the scum whom his novels are fashioned to please. If Zuckerman, a Jew adored by the scum for finding Jews no less embarrassing and distasteful than they do, were to make the argument for the Jews to the scum, ‘it would be of some interest.’ You bet! Like a case of schizophrenia is of interest! On the other hand, when Appel speaks up in a Jewish crisis, ‘it’s expected.’ Sign of deep human engagement and predictably superior compassion. Sign of nothing less than the good, the best, the most responsible Jewish son of them all. These Jews, these Jews and their responsible sons! First he says I vilify Jews under the guise of fiction, now he wants me to lobby for them in the New York Times! 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 any consequence without ever having read Proust past Swann's Way. And the ghetto—what the ghetto saw of these guys was their heels: out, out, screaming for air, to write about great Jews like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Dean Howells. But now that the Weathermen are around, and me and my friends Jerry Rubin and Herbert Marcuse and H. Rap Brown, it’s where oh where’s the inspired orderliness of those good old Hebrew school days? Where’s the linoleum? Where’s Aunt Rose? Where is all the wonderful inflexible patriarchal authority into which they wanted to stick a knife? Look, I obviously don’t want to see Jews destroyed. That wouldn’t make too much sense. But I am not an authority on Israel. I’m an authority on Newark. Not even on Newark. On the Weequahic section of Newark. If the truth be known, not even on the whole of the Weequahic section. I don’t even go below Bergen Street.”

“But it’s not a matter of whether you’re an authority. It’s a matter of people reading what you say because at the moment you’re very famous.”

“So is Sammy Davis. So is Elizabeth Taylor. They’re even more famous. And they’re real Jews who haven’t ruined their credentials writing vulgar books. They haven’t set loose the illicit forces that are now corrupting the culture. Why doesn’t he ask them, if he wants somebody famous? They’d jump at the chance. Besides, that I’m famous for what I’m famous for is precisely what makes me reprehensible to Appel. That's what he’s scolding me about. He actually seems to have read that book as a manifesto for the instinctual life. As if he’d never heard of obsession. Or repression. Or repressed obsessive Jews. As if he isn’t one himself, the fucking regressive nut! Diana, I have nothing to say, at Appel’s request, about Israel. I can write an essay about a novelist, and even that takes six months, but I can’t write an essay about international politics, not for anyone. I don’t do it, I never have. I am not Joan Baez. I am not a great thinker like Leonard Bernstein. I am not a political figure—he flatters me to suggest that I am.”

“But you’re a Jewish figure. Whether you want to be or not. And as you seem to want to be, you might as well do it. Why are you making it so difficult? Just state your opinion. It’s as simple as that. Where you stand.”

“I will not make atonement on the Op-Ed page for the books he’s accused me of writing! I cracked a few jokes about playing stinky-pinky in Newark and you’d think I’d blown up the Knesset. Don’t start confusing me with your Wasp clarity—‘there is no problem.’ There is! This is not my maiden appearance in the pages of Foreskin as their Self-Hating Jew of the Month.”

“But that is a petty little ghetto quarrel of no interest to anyone. How many Jews can dance on the head of a pin? No one cares. You can’t really remember what some silly magazine has said about you—your mind would just be muck. If the magazine is as awful as you say, why should you even bother to worry? Besides, the one subject is so big and the other is so tiny, and the two have come together for you in a very strange way that I cannot understand, no matter how many ways you explain it. To me it seems like you’re balancing a very large mountain against a very tiny molehill, and, truthfully, if anybody had told me you were like this before I met you ... or that Jews were like this. I just thought they were immigrants—period. No, I don't understand. Maybe I’m only twenty, but you’re forty years old. Is this really what happens when people hit forty?”

“You bet. They’ve had it up to fucking here. This is exactly what happens. Twenty years into your livelihood, and whether you know how to do it, whether you should be doing it at all, still a matter of public debate! And still in doubt yourself. How do I even know that Appel isn’t right? What if my writing’s as bad as he says? I hate his guts, and obviously the ’60s have driven him batty, but that doesn’t make him a fool, you know. He’s one of the few of them around who make any sense at all. Let’s face it, even the worst criticism contains some truth. They always see something you’re trying to hide.”

“But he exaggerates it. It’s all out of proportion. He doesn’t see the good things. He won’t even acknowledge that you’re funny. That’s ridiculous. He only sees crudely what you fail at. Well, everybody has failings.”

“But suppose he’s right. Suppose nobody needs my books. Suppose I don’t even need them. Am I funny? And if I am, so what? So are the Ritz Brothers. Probably funnier. Suppose what he implies is true and I’ve poisoned their sense of the Jewish reality with my vulgar imagination. Suppose it’s even half true. What if twenty years of writing has just been so much helplessness before a compulsion—submission to a lowly, inconsequential compulsion that I’ve dignified with all my principles, a compulsion probably not all that different from what made my mother clean the house for five hours every day. Where am I then? Look, I’m going to medical school.”

“Pardon?”

“Medical school. I’m pretty sure I’ve got the grades. I want to be a doctor. I’m going back to the University of Chicago.”

“Oh, shut up. So far, this conversation has just been depressing. Now it’s idiotic.”

“No, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I want to be an obstetrician.”

“At your age? Really? In ten years you’ll be fifty. Pardon me, but that’s an old man.”

“And in sixty years I’ll be a hundred. But I’ll worry about that then. Why don’t you come with me? You can transfer your credits from Finch. We’ll do our homework together.”

“Do you want to write the piece about Israel or not?”

“No. I want to forget Israel. I want to forget Jews. I should have the day I left home. Take your penis out in public and of course the squad car comes around— but, really, this has gone on now a little too long. The way I found to spring myself from everything that held me captive as a boy, and it’s simply extended the imprisonment to my fortieth year. Enough of my writing, enough of their scolding. Rebellion, obedience—discipline, explosion—injunction, resistance—accusation, denial—defiance, shame...no, the whole God damn thing has been a colossal mistake. This is not the position in life that I had hoped to fill. I want to be an obstetrician. Who quarrels with an obstetrician? Even the obstetrician who delivered Bugsy Siegel goes to bed at night with a clear conscience. He catches what comes out and everybody loves him. When the baby appears they don’t start shouting, ‘You call that a baby? That’s not a baby!’ No, whatever he hands them, they take it home. They’re grateful for his just having been there. Imagine those butter-covered babies, Diana, with their little Chinese eyes, imagine what seeing that does to the spirit, that every morning, as opposed to grinding out another two dubious pages. Conception? Gestation? Gruesome laborious labor? The mother’s business. You just wash your hands and hold out the net. Twenty years up here in the literary spheres is enough—now for the fun of the flowing gutter. The bilge, the ooze, the gooey drip. The stuff. No words, just stuff. Everything the word’s in place of. The lowest of genres—life itself. Damn right I’ll be fifty next time I look. No more words! On to the delivery room before it’s too late. Headlong into the Cloaca Maxima and all the effusions thereof. Leave Finch and fly out to Chicago with me. You can go to school at my alma mater.”

“Leave Finch and I lose my trust fund. You don’t want me anyway. You want a nursemaid. You want a governess.”

“Would it make any difference if I said I’d marry you?”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“But would it?”

“Yes, it would, of course it would. Do it. Do it now. Let’s get married tonight. Then we’ll run away from your life and you’ll become a doctor and I’ll become a doctor’s wife. I’ll take the phone calls. I’ll make the appointments. I’ll boil your instruments. The hell with my trust fund. Let’s do it now. Let’s go out tonight and get the license and the blood tests.”

“My neck hurts too much tonight.”

“That’s what I figured. You’re full of shit, Nathan. There’s only one thing for you to do and that’s to get on with it. WRITE ANOTHER BOOK. Camovsky is not the end of the world. You cannot make yourself a life of misery out of a book that just happened to have been a roaring success. It cannot stop you in your tracks like this. Get up off the floor, get your hair back, straighten out your neck, and write a book that isn’t about these Jews. And then the Jews won't bug you. Oh, what a pity you can’t shake free. That you should still be aroused and hurt by this! Are you always fighting your father? I know it may sound like a cliche, probably it would be with somebody else, but in your case I happen to think that it’s true. I look through these books on your shelves, your Freud, your Erikson, your Bettelheim, your Reich, and every single line about a father is underlined. Yet when you describe your father to me, he doesn’t sound like a creature of any stature at all. He may have been Newark’s greatest chiropodist, but he sure doesn’t sound like much of a challenge otherwise. That a man of your breadth of intelligence, and your total freedom in the world . . . that this should beat you down. That you should be so broken down from these Jews. You hate this critic Appel? You don’t ever want to stop hating him? He’s done you such a grievous injury? Okay, the hell with this crazy little four-page letter—go bonk him on the nose. Are Jews scared of physical confrontations? My father would go and punch him in the nose if he thought he’d been insulted the way you do. But you aren’t man enough to do that, and you aren’t man enough just to forget it—you aren’t even man enough to write for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. Instead you lie there in your prism glasses and make up fairy tales about medical school, and having a doctor’s office with a picture on the desk of a doctor’s wife, and coming home FROM work and going out TO RELAX, and when someone on a plane faints and a stewardess asks if anybody here is a doctor, you can stand up and say I am.”

“Why the hell not? They never come around when someone faints and ask if anybody here is a writer.”

“More of your black-and-blue humor. Go back to school again, to study, to be the professor’s pet and make the dean’s list and get an ID card for the library and all the student activities. At forty. You know why I wouldn’t marry you? I would say no anyway, because I couldn’t marry anybody so weak.”