Shop Talk (14 page)

Roth:
Are there no women as promiscuous?

O'Brien:
They sometimes are but it doesn't give them the same sense of achievement. A woman, I dare to say, is capable of a deeper and more lasting love. I would also add that a woman is more afraid of being left. That still stands. Go into any women's canteen, dress department, hairdresser's, gymnasium, and you will see plenty of desperation and plenty of competition. People utter a lot of slogans but they
are only slogans and what we feel and do is what determines us. Women are no more secure in their emotions than they ever were. They simply are better at coming to terms with them. The only real security would be to turn away from men, to detach, but that would be a little death—at least for me it would.

Roth:
Why do you write so many love stories? Is it because of the importance of the subject or because, like many others in our profession, once you grew up and left home and chose the solitary life of a writer, sexual love inevitably became the strongest sphere of experience to which you continued to have access?

O'Brien:
First of all, I think love replaced religion for me in my sense of fervor. When I began to look for earthly love (i.e., sex), I felt that I was cutting myself off from God. By taking on the mantle of religion, sex assumed proportions that are rather far-fetched. It became the central thing in my life, the goal. I was very prone to the Heathcliff/Mr. Rochester syndrome and still am. The sexual excitement was to a great extent linked with pain and separation. My sexual life is pivotal to me, as I believe it is for everyone else. It takes up a lot of time both in the thinking and in the doing, the former often taking pride of place. For me, primarily, it is secretive and contains elements of mystery and plunder. My daily life and my sexual life are not of a whole—they are separated. Part of my Irish heritage!

Roth:
What's most difficult about being both a woman and a writer? Are there difficulties you have writing as a woman that I don't have as a man? And do you imagine that there might be difficulties I have that you don't?

O'Brien:
I think it is different being a man and being a woman—it is very different. I think you as a man have
waiting for you in the wings of the world a whole cortege of women—potential wives, mistresses, muses, nurses. Women writers do not have that bonus. The examples are numerous: the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Carson Mc-Cullers, Flannery O'Connor, Emily Dickinson, Marina Tsvetayeva. I think it was Dashiell Hammett who said he wouldn't want to live with a woman who had more problems than he had. I think the signals men get from me alarm them.

Roth:
You will have to find a Leonard Woolf.

O'Brien:
I do not want a Leonard Woolf. I want Lord Byron and Leonard Woolf mixed in together.

Roth:
But does the job fundamentally come down to the same difficulties then, regardless of gender?

O'Brien:
Absolutely. There is no difference at all. You, like me, are trying to make something out of nothing and the anxiety is extreme. Flaubert's description of his room echoing with curses and cries of distress could be any writer's room. Yet I doubt that we would welcome an alternative life. There is something stoical about soldiering on all alone.

141 rue de Rennes
75006 Paris
January 11, 1987

Dear Philip:

Thank you for sending me your book
[The Counterlife],
which I started reading with excitement and enthusiasm that continued to mount through the section in Israel and the El Al part, too, but that left me in England at Christmastime, not to return, and I don't know why exactly. Perhaps you have a better guess than I. It is probably never wise to give an author a negative or "qualified" opinion of his book, but I am moved to do so because I liked your last book, all the parts of it, very, very much and I guess because I assumed that if you sent me your book it was because you were interested in my opinion of it.

So I will try to say what I think. The high point, for me, was the Hebron chapter, brilliant in every way and laying the whole problem—Israel—out with honesty and clarity. As I read, I kept contrasting it with an imaginary novel by
Bellow. I also liked the earlier, dentist's office parts, the bifurcation of the Zuckerman figure, and the independent existence, like an angleworm's, achieved by the separate pieces. It seems to me a pity that this idea (unless I failed to understand) seems to have been lost sight of in
Gloucestershire
and
Christendom,
which, on their own, wearied me. With what feels to me like pathology—a severe case of anti-anti-semitism.

I remember Philip Rahv saying that all Gentiles, without exception, were anti-semitic. If so, that is an awful problem for a Jewish novelist who wants to have Gentile characters in his work. Maybe the English sections of
The Counterlife
won't offend Jewish readers, but they irritated and offended. I'm not a Christian (I don't believe in God), but to the extent that I am and can't help being (just as a "nice Jewish boy" can't help being Jewish), I bridle at your picture of Christianity. There's more to Christmas, that is, to the idea of the Incarnation, than Jew-hatred. True, I've sometimes thought that all our Christmas-caroling must be offensive to non-sharers in the bliss of that wondrous occasion. But perhaps non-sharers, those outside the Law, can get the general idea or try to, as I hope I would try to get the idea of the Wailing Wall, repellent as it is to me, if I were taken to it. And I confess that the crib with angels and animals and a star is to me a more sympathetic idea than the Wailing Wall; as a non-believer, I greatly prefer it. The residual Christian in me probably looks forward happily to the millennium and the conversion of the Jews, including Philip Roth. Philip Rahv too.

Then all that circumcision business. Why so excited about making a child a Jew by taking a knife to him? I have nothing against circumcision; the men of my generation
were all circumcised—a de rigueur pediatric procedure—and my son's generation, too. It must have been Freudian influences somehow that in the Forties persuaded educated people that circumcision was a superstition (I even heard it called a dirty Jewish superstition) which robbed the male of full sexual enjoyment in the pretended interest of hygiene. So then it became unchic to have a baby boy circumcised. Religion did not enter into any of this, any more than it did into the breast-feeding, anti-breast-feeding discussion. And if Nathan Zuckerman
isn't
a believing Jew, why is he so hung up on this issue?

Forgive me if all this is disagreeable to you. It is strange to
me
that
The Counterlife
should remind me so forcibly that I am a Christian whatever I choose to imagine. The last time in my adult life that I felt anything like that was in Hanoi in 1968 with U.S. bombers overhead when I reacted, in the privacy of my thoughts, against the Marxist-Buddhist orthodoxy that I felt in the local leaders.

I am sorry that we never got together with Leon [Botstein] this past fall. Next year, I hope. I last saw him at a Christmas-carol singing, just before we flew back here.

Happy New Year, sincerely,
Mary

15 Fawcett St.
London SW10
January 17, 1987

Dear Mary:

Thanks for writing at such length about the book. Of course I would want to know what you thought and that is indeed why I sent you the book, and I'm delighted that you have been so candid with me.

To begin with, it sounds as though you were held by an awful lot of it, virtually everything up to the last two chapters. I won't go into a discussion of why the structural idea was not abandoned in the last two chapters but in fact sealed and reinforced, since I think that would take too long and probably sound like a lecture, which I don't intend to deliver to you, of all people.

I happen to be known (to Jews) for having "a severe case of anti-anti-Semitism," as you claim to have yourself,
as does Zuckerman.
I think here all these issues seem to have struck you
outside
the narrative context and the thematic preoccupations of the book.

Let me take up your points one at a time.

1. Rahv's statement that all Gentiles are anti-Semitic. This is, of course, exactly what Zuckerman hears at Agor [a Jewish settlement on Israel's West Bank]. He is hardly sympathetic to that assertion. How could he have married Maria Freshfield if he were? Though that's the least of it: it simply runs counter to his experience, period. The irony, it seemed to me, was that, having been exposed to a kind of rhetoric he finds profoundly unpersuasive, he then comes back to London and runs smack into Maria's sister, her hymn of [anti-Semitic] hate, and her insinuations about [the anti-Semitism of] Maria's mother. There is then the [anti-Semitic] incident at the restaurant and the conversation with Maria [about English anti-Semitism] that gets so hopelessly out of hand. None of this is evidence that all Gentiles are anti-Semitic. But it does force Zuckerman—the very same fellow so skeptical, to put it mildly, of Lippman's [Agor] manifesto—to have to deal with a phenomenon previously unknown to him, though hardly unknown in the world (or in England, for that matter). I wanted him astonished, caught off-balance,
educated.
I wanted him threatened with the loss of this woman he adores because of this stinking, hideous old problem that seems to have turned up right at the heart of the family into which he has married. Truly, I don't see what there is to be offended by there, and maybe it wasn't this that offended and irritated you.

2. "There's more to Christmas, that is, to the idea of the Incarnation, than Jew-hatred." But Zuckerman doesn't say there isn't. He does, however, articulate (for the first time anywhere in fiction, as far as I know) how many a Jew happens to feel when confronted with this stuff. Whether justified or
not
, he is mildly affronted, and what he says is not quite what you suggest he says. "But between me and
church devotion [not
the Incarnation] there is an unbridgeable world of feeling, a natural and thoroughgoing incompatibility—I have the emotions of a spy in the adversary's camp and feel I'm overseeing the very rites that
embody the ideology
that's been responsible for the persecution and mistreatment of Jews ... I just find the religion ... profoundly inappropriate, and never more so than when the congregants are observing the highest standards of liturgical decorum and the clerics most beautifully enunciating the doctrine of love." (I've added the italics.) Now, you may not think such reasoning is sound, but that even an intelligent Jew is capable of reasoning in just that way is a fact. I was trying to be truthful.

3. "...as a non-believer, I greatly prefer it," you say, meaning "the crib with angels and animals and a star" to "the Wailing Wall." That is again where you and Zuckerman part company. As a non-believer, he prefers neither. He finds little to recommend the sanctification of either set of icons or symbols or whatever they all are taken together.
Furthermore, Zuckerman behaves beautifully at the carol service and therefore
looks
at least as you might look at the Wailing Wall, where you say you would try to get the idea, repellent as it is to you. I think you have—a word I hate—overreacted to these few observations, which he himself knows are determined by his Jewishness and nothing more. "Yet, Jewishly, I still thought, what
do
they need all this stuff for?" His objections really are aesthetic, aren't they? "Though frankly I've always felt that the place where Christianity gets dangerously, vulgarly obsessed with the miraculous is Easter, the Nativity has always struck me as a close second to the Resurrection in nakedly addressing the most childish need." You say you bridle at my picture of Christianity, and if you bridle at this, so be it. But you do see it has nothing to do, or not much to do, with "Jew-hatred."

Now to speak only as a novelist (which I am far more than I am a Jew). If Zuckerman hadn't gone to [Agor in] Judea and heard what he heard there I would never have had this scene in the church or have had him think these thoughts. But it seemed to me only fair that—no, I don't mean that: it seemed to me simply that the one scene called forth the other. I didn't want all his skepticism focused on Jewish ritual and none of it on Christian. That would have had all the wrong implications and made him see what he is not, and that is a self-hating Jew who—to borrow a phrase—casts a cold eye only on his own.

4. "Why so excited about making a child a Jew by taking a knife to him?" Context, context, context. This is his response, his aggressive and angry response, to the suggestion that his child will have to be christened in order to please Maria's mother. The paean to circumcision arises out of that threat. If you won't listen to me on this subject,
listen to Maria. In her letter (written in fact by Z., but that subject I'm not going into) she writes, "If it's this that establishes for you the truth of your paternity—that regains for you the truth of your
own
paternity—so be it." Here I was thinking thoughts that the reader can hardly be expected to follow. I was thinking about Zuckerman and his own father, and the word
bastard
that the old man Zuckerman [in
Zuckerman Unbound
] whispers to Nathan from his deathbed. The circumcision of little English-American Z. is big American Z. settling that issue at last. That is my business, I suppose, but it figured in the thing.

I think you also fail to see how serious this circumcision business is to Jews. I am still hypnotized by uncircumcised men when I see them at my swimming pool locker room [in London]. The damn thing never goes unregistered. Most Jewish men I know have similar reactions, and when I was writing the book, I asked several of my equally secular Jewish male friends if they could have an uncircumcised son, and they all said no, sometimes without having to think about it and sometimes after the nice long pause that any rationalist takes before opting for the irrational. Why is N.Z. hung up on circumcision? I hope that's clearer now.