The Counterlife (31 page)

“When it's gone, my disease, we can, if you like, conduct a very thorough investigation of our feelings. We can overexamine
those,
and if it
has
been nothing more than some overheated verbal infatuation—”

“Oh, no—no! I couldn't let you go ahead if everything were to dissolve when the worst is over. I will. I'll do it. I'll marry you.”

“Now my name.
Say it.
”

At last she submits. There is the climax to all our talk—Maria speaking my name. I have hammered and hammered—at her scruples, at her fears, at her sense of duty, at her thralldom to husband, background, child—and finally Maria gives in. The rest is up to me. Caught up entirely in what has come to feel like a purely mythic endeavor, a defiant, dreamlike quest for the self-emancipating act, possessed by an intractable idea of how my existence is to be fulfilled, I now must move beyond the words to the concrete violence of surgery.

*   *   *

So long as Nathan was alive, Henry couldn't write anything unself-consciously, not even a letter to a friend. His book reports back in grade school had been composed with no more difficulty than anyone else's, and in college he'd got through English with B's and had even done a brief stint as a sports reporter with the student weekly before settling into a predental program, but when Nathan began publishing those stories that hardly went unnoticed, and after them the books, it was as though Henry had been condemned to silence. There are few younger brothers, Henry thought, who had to put up with that too. But then all the blood relatives of an articulate artist are in a very strange bind, not only because they find that they are “material,” but because their own material is always articulated for them by someone else who, in his voracious, voyeuristic using-up of all their lives, gets there first but doesn't always get it right.

Whenever he sat down to read one of the dutifully inscribed books that used to arrive in the mail just before publication, Henry would immediately begin to sketch in his head a kind of counterbook to redeem from distortion the lives that were recognizably, to him, Nathan's starting point—reading Nathan's books always exhausted him, as though he were having a very long argument with someone who wouldn't go away. Strictly speaking there could be no distortion or falsification in a work not intended as journalism or history, nor could you charge with incorrect representation writing under no obligation to represent its sources “correctly.” Henry understood all that. His argument wasn't with the imaginative nature of fiction or the license taken by novelists with actual persons and events—it was with the imagination unmistakably his brother's, the comic hyperbole insidiously undermining everything it chose to touch. It was just this sort of underhanded attack, deviously legitimizing itself as “literature,” and directed most injuriously at their parents in the caricatured Carnovskys, that had led to their long estrangement. When their mother succumbed to a brain tumor only a year after the death of their father, Henry was no less willing than Nathan to let the break become final, and they had never seen each other or spoken again. Nathan had died without even telling Henry that he had a heart problem or was going in for surgery, and then, unfortunately, Nathan's eulogist praised just those exploitative aspects of
Carnovsky
that Henry had never been able to forgive and wanted least to hear about at a time like this.

He had come over to New York by himself, ready and eager to be a mourner, and then had to sit there listening to that book described as, of all things, “a classic of irresponsible exaggeration,” as though irresponsibility, in the right literary form, were a virtuous achievement and the selfish, heedless disregard for another's privacy were a mark of courage. “Nathan was not too noble,” the mourners were told, “to exploit the home.” And not overly sympathetic, you can be sure, for the home that had been exploited. “Plundering his own history like a thief,” Nathan had become a hero to his serious literary friends, if not necessarily to those who'd been robbed.

The eulogist, Nathan's young editor, spoke charmingly, without a trace of sadness, almost as though he were preparing to present the corpse in the casket with a large check rather than to usher it on to the crematorium. Henry had expected praise, but, naïvely perhaps, not in that vein or so remorselessly on that subject. Focusing entirely on
Carnovsky,
the eulogy seemed deliberately to be mocking their rift. The thing that drove our family apart, thought Henry, is here being enshrined—that was
designed
to destroy our family, no matter how much they say about “art.” Here they all sit, thinking, “Wasn't it brave of Nathan, wasn't it daring to be so madly aggressive and undress and vandalize a Jewish family in public,” but none of them, for that “daring,” had to pay a goddamn dime. All their pieties about saying the unsayable! Well, you ought to see your old parents down in Florida dealing with their bewilderment, with their friends, with their memories—they paid all right, they lost a
son
to the unsayable! I lost a
brother!
Somebody paid dearly for his saying the unsayable and it wasn't that effete boy making that pretentious speech, it was
me.
The bond, the intimacy, all we'd had during childhood, lost because of that fucking book and then the fucking fight. Who needed it? Why
did
we fight—what was
that
all about? You give my brother to this overeducated dandy, this boy who knows everything and nothing, whose literary talk makes so neat and clean what cost my family so much, and now just
listen
to him—memorializing the mess right out of existence!

The person speaking should have been Henry himself.
He
by all rights should have been the intimate of his brother to whom everyone was listening. Who was closer? But the night before, when he'd been asked on the phone by the publisher if he'd speak at the funeral, he knew he couldn't, knew he would never be able to find the words to make all those happy memories—of the father-and-son softball games, of the two of them skating on the Weequahic Park lake, of those summers with the folks down at the shore—mean anything to anyone other than himself. He spent two hours trying to write at his desk, remembering all the while the big, inspiring older brother he'd trailed behind as a child, the truly heroic figure Nathan had been until at sixteen he'd gone off to college to become remote and critical; yet all he was able to put down on his pad was “1933–1978.” It was as though Nathan were still alive, rendering him speechless.

Henry wasn't speaking the eulogy because Henry didn't have the words, and the reason he didn't have the words wasn't because he was stupid or uneducated but because if he had chosen to contend, he would have been obliterated; he who wasn't at all inarticulate, with his patients, with his wife, with his friends—certainly not with his mistresses—certainly not in his
mind
—had taken on, within the family, the role of the boy good with his hands, good at sports, decent, reliable, easy to get along with, while Nathan had got the monopoly on words, and the power and prestige that went with it. In every family somebody has to do it—you can't
all
line up to turn on Dad and clobber him to death—and so Henry had become loyal Defender of Father, while Nathan had turned into the family assassin, murdering their parents under the guise of art.

How he wished, listening to that eulogy, that he was a person who could just jump up and shout, “Lies! All lies! That is what drove us
apart!,
” the kind of person who could seize the moment and, standing on his feet, say anything. But Henry's fate was to have no language—that was what had saved him from having to compete with somebody who had been
made
out of words … made himself
out
of words.

Here is the eulogy that drove him nuts:

“I was lying on the beach of a resort in the Bahamas yesterday, of all things rereading
Carnovsky
for the first time since it was published, when I received a phone call telling me that Nathan was dead. As there was no flight off the island till late afternoon, I went back to the beach to finish the book, which is what Nathan would have told me to do. I remembered an astonishing amount of the novel—it's one of those books that stain your memory—although I had also distorted scenes in a revealing (to me) way. It's still diabolically funny, but what was new to me was a sense of how sad the book is, and emotionally exhausting. Nathan does nothing better than to reproduce for the reader, in his style, the hysterical claustrophobia of Carnovsky's childhood. Perhaps that's one reason why people kept asking, ‘Is it fiction?' Some novelists use style to define the distance between them, the reader, and the material. In
Carnovsky
Nathan used it to collapse the distance. At the same time, inasmuch as he ‘used' his life, he used it as if it belonged to someone else, plundering his history and his verbal memory like a vicious thief.

“Religious analogies—ludicrous analogies, he would be the first to tell me—kept recurring to me as I sat on the beach, knowing he was dead and thinking about him and his work. The meticulous verisimilitude of
Carnovsky
made me think of those medieval monks who flagellated themselves with their own perfectionism, carving infinitely detailed sacred images on bits of ivory. Nathan's is the profane vision, of course, but how he must have whipped himself for that detail! The parents are marvelous works of the grotesque, maniacally embodied in every particular, as Carnovsky is as well, the eternal son holding to the belief that he was loved by them, holding to it first with his rage and, when that subsides, with tender reminiscence.

“The book, which I, like most people, believed to be about rebellion is actually a lot more Old Testament than that: at the core is a primitive drama of compliance versus retribution. The real ethical life has, for all its sacrifices, its authentic spiritual rewards. Carnovsky never tastes them and Carnovsky yearns for them. Judaism at a higher level than he has access to does offer real ethical rewards to its students, and I think that's part of what so upset believing Jews as opposed to mere prigs. Carnovsky is always complying more than rebelling, complying not out of ethical motives, as perhaps even Nathan believed, but with profound unwillingness and in the face of fear. What is scandalous isn't the man's phallicism but, what's not entirely unrelated, yet far more censurable, the betrayal of mother love.

“So much is about debasement. I hadn't realized that before. He is so clear on the various forms it can take, so accurate about the caveman mentality of those urban peasant Jews, whom I happen to know a thing or two about myself, sacrificing their fruits on the altar of a vengeful god and partaking of his omnipotence—through the conviction of Jewish superiority—without understanding the exchange. On the evidence of
Carnovsky,
he would have made a good anthropologist; perhaps that's what he was. He lets the experience of the little tribe, the suffering, isolated, primitive but warmhearted savages that he is studying, emerge in the description of their rituals and their artifacts and their conversations, and he manages, at the same time, to put his own ‘civilization,' his own bias as a reporter—and his readers'—into relief against them.

“Why, reading
Carnovsky,
did so many people keep wanting to know, ‘Is it fiction?' I have my hunches, and let me run them past you.

“First, as I've said, because he camouflages his writerliness and the style reproduces accurately the emotional distress. Second, he breaks fresh ground in the territory of transgression by writing so explicitly about the sexuality of family life; the illicit erotic affair that we all are born to get enmeshed in is not elevated to another sphere, it is undisguised and has the shocking impact of confession. Not only that—it reads as though the confessor's having fun.

“Now
Sentimental Education
doesn't read as if Flaubert was having fun;
Letter to His Father
doesn't read as if Kafka was having fun;
The Sorrows of Young Werther
sure as hell doesn't read as if Goethe was having fun. Sure, Henry Miller seems like he's having fun, but he had to cross three thousand miles of Atlantic before saying ‘cunt.' Until
Carnovsky,
most everybody I can think of who had tackled ‘cunt' and that particular mess of feelings it excites had done it exogamously, as the Freudians would say, at a safe distance, metaphorically or geographically, from the domestic scene. Not Nathan—he was not too noble to exploit the home and to have a good time while doing it. People wondered if it was not guts but madness that propelled him. In short, they thought it was about him and that he had to be crazy—because for
them
to have done it
they
would have had to be crazy.

“What people envy in the novelist aren't the things that the novelists think are so enviable but the performing selves that the author indulges, the slipping irresponsibly in and out of his skin, the reveling not in ‘I' but in escaping ‘I,' even if it involves—
especially
if it involves—piling imaginary afflictions upon himself. What's envied is the gift for theatrical self-transformation, the way they are able to loosen and make ambiguous their connection to a real life through the imposition of talent. The exhibitionism of the superior artist is connected to his imagination; fiction is for him at once playful hypothesis and serious supposition, an imaginative form of inquiry—everything that exhibitionism is not. It is, if anything, closet exhibitionism, exhibitionism in hiding. Isn't it true that, contrary to the general belief, it is the
distance
between the writer's life and his novel that is the most intriguing aspect of his imagination?