The Anatomy Lesson (8 page)

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 k
new, had ever written so unapol
ogetically 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 Mi
l
ton 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 tha
t
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 Zucke
rm
an 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 fami
lies 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 bi
t
es 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 h
e 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 xeno
phobes, 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
born
e 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
born
e 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.