Deception, p.7
Deception, page 7
“Absolutely not. No! You’re cookin’. You’re on fire! You’re dazzling! Go on, go on.”
“But that would not be my position at all, of course. I’d side with the Lonoffs. I happen to believe strongly in privacy.”
“Who cares? This is exquisite. Go on.”
“ ‘And then all the things that Lonoff himself destroyed. Lonoff was so paternal—I had to work through all my father shit with him. My wife wouldn’t believe that. She kept telling me, “Come on, just type it up and hand it in. What’s your problem?” I showed Zuckerman a chapter. I was so embarrassed, because I hate to show people things that are messy and unfinished. He read it and he said, “It’s all here somewhere. But there are two things you’re really going to have to do here. You can’t do it right away. You’re going to have to put this away for a while.” ’ ”
“ ‘What were the two things?’ ”
“ ‘He said, “You have to write and you have to think.” ’ ”
“ ‘And that was helpful to you? You didn’t know that?’
“ ‘It was helpful. The most helpful things are the most obvious things. Coming from someone else and said in a certain tone. He sort of brought me back down to earth. You work on the life of Lonoff long enough and there’s a sense of this rarefied being. A kind of piety crept into my approach, which I couldn’t stand. And Zuckerman was great, because as a young man he’d had the same feelings. He was very funny about it. He gave me a sort of license to transgress. Zuckerman was the great sanctioner. Not that I wanted to slash Lonoff to pieces. But I had to feel that I wasn’t an earnest graduate student, that I didn’t have to have this phony nobility I had about Lonoff, revering him and so on. Zuckerman told me how, when he visited Lonoff in his early twenties, Lonoff had said to him, “You’re not so nice as you look.” Zuckerman said to me, “I’m going to repeat to you what Lonoff said to me.” And it was the most liberating thing he could have told me.’ ”
“ ‘How so?’ ”
“ ‘It liberated me from my scruples.’ ”
“Oh, sweetheart—why do you look so sad saying that?”
“Because you have no scruples and I just know what I’m in for.”
“I have no scruples but I do love you terribly.”
“You only do if I play reality shift.”
“You were wonderful. You should be the writer, you know.”
“Nope. Never. Couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Not a bad enough fellow. Insufficiently aggressive. Insufficiently ruthless. Insufficiently capricious, venomous, childish, et cetera. My scruples.”
“But maybe you’re not as nice as you look either.”
“I’m afraid I am. It’s grotesque. I’m English. I’m even nicer.”
* * *
—
“I had a little adventure on Sunday. I was walking in Chelsea with my Israeli friend Aharon Appelfeld and his son Itzak. We were just off St. Leonard’s Terrace, heading up toward the King’s Road. We were on the left side of the street and coming along on the right side were two men in their thirties or early forties, who looked like professional men, nicely dressed in sweaters and slacks, out for a stroll. As they were approaching us, they began to cross over to our side of the street and I noticed that one of them, wearing a green sweater, was mumbling out loud, or repeating something out loud, and all the while glaring at me. I couldn’t make out what he was saying—he was sort of half saying it to himself—but he kept it up even as they passed us and continued down the street. I turned to look after them just as he happened to turn to look after us, and he was still at it. I couldn’t figure it out exactly, though I had a hunch. I shouted at him, ‘What’s bothering you?’ At first he just glared back at me. Then he gestured at his own clothes and he shouted, ‘You don’t even dress right!’ I got confused by that. My pullover sweater happened to be dark brown while his was green, but otherwise we were dressed almost exactly alike. Though I did have my beard, of course, and it is getting scruffy and needs a trim. So—what he’d seen, you see, was a bearded, spectacled, darkish man dressed more or less like himself, talking animatedly to a smallish, bald middle-aged man wearing a sports jacket and a sport shirt and to a dark-haired boy of eighteen, both of whom had been listening and laughing as they all three walked along the quiet, civilized streets of Chelsea on a beautiful Sunday afternoon at the end of the summer almost, I might add, as though they owned the place. He answered, ‘You don’t even dress right,’ and just stood there glaring at me, full of fury. And then I knew for sure what it was. I could have killed him. If I’d had a gun I would have shot him. Not because I was that enraged for myself—it was because who I happened to be walking with was a dear friend whose mother had been killed by the Nazis and who had himself spent part of his childhood in a concentration camp. I thought, ‘No, this won’t do,’ and I walked a couple of steps toward him and, in my best American accent, I said, ‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ He looked back at me for a second or two, but then he just turned and stormed away. I have to tell you, if there was going to be a brawl, I was counting very heavily on Itzak, Aharon’s son, a big strong boy who does lots of push-ups every morning, but it turned out that the English gentleman wasn’t looking for a fight. He was just furious, that’s all, the mere sight of me on the quiet, civilized streets of Chelsea had simply driven him up the wall. The fury was in his stride, on his face, it was in every breath he drew. The whole thing left me very agitated—and a little puzzled. I couldn’t understand what he’d meant by telling me that I wasn’t even dressed right. Aharon couldn’t figure it out either and Itzak was just amused. He’s an Israeli-born kid and he’d never actually witnessed an anti-Semitic incident before. To this boy from Jerusalem the man had just seemed ludicrous. But I come from Newark and I kept puzzling over the damn thing, and then it dawned on me: the reason my clothes just like his were wrong was because they were just like his. What with my beard and my looks and my gesticulations, I should have been wearing a caftan and a black felt hat. I should have been wrapped in a prayer shawl. I shouldn’t have been in clothes like his at all. Well, that afternoon Aharon took the train back to Oxford, where he was staying with Itzak, and that evening we had a few people over for dinner and I told them this story. I was still full of what had happened and also I thought that his remark about my clothes was kind of interesting for having seemed, at first, so enigmatic. Actually, to run into an anti-Semite on a London street didn’t seem to me so amazing—that could happen anywhere. No, what amazed me was that every last person at that dinner was convinced that I hadn’t run into an anti-Semite. They were all amused by me, by how I had, characteristically, misconstrued the meaning of his behavior. He was just eccentric, they told me, crazy—’mad’ is the euphemistic Englishism—he was just some kind of lunatic, and the incident was utterly without meaning. Except for its proving, once again, what a paranoid I am on this subject. I said, ‘But what activated his “madness"? What about me in particular set him off?’ But they all just laughed and explained to me again how nuts I am and, I tell you, never have I felt more misplaced in any country than I did listening to all these intelligent and decent people going on and on denying what was staring them right in the face. I remember the first year I was here, I was watching television one night and there was a commercial for little cigars, cigarillos, whatever they’re called. It showed the final moments of a performance of a play featuring Dickens’s Fagin, a Fagin complete with the enormous hooked nose and disheveled mop of greasy white hair. The curtain comes down, Fagin takes his bows—and then the actor is back in his dressing room, in front of his mirror, pulling off the hooked nose and the ugly wig and scrubbing himself back to normal with cold cream. Underneath the makeup there is, lo and behold, a fair-haired, handsome, youngish middle-aged, rather upper-class English actor. To relax after the performance he lights up one of these little cigarillos, contentedly he puffs away at it, talking about the flavor and the aroma and so on, and then he leans very intimately into the camera and he holds up the cigarillo and suddenly, in a thick, Faginy, Yiddish accent and with an insinuating leer on his face, he says, ‘And, best of all, they’re cheap.’ Well, being characteristically myself, I was a little taken aback by this. I happened to be home alone at the time and since I felt the urge, suddenly, to ask somebody a few questions about this place where I was now trying to live in peace, I telephoned an old friend of mine, an English Jew up in Hampstead and I said, ‘Do you know what I just saw on television?’ But when I told him, he laughed too. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to me, ‘you’ll get used to it.’ ”
“You really are boiling, aren’t you?” “Well, the insinuation that I’m the one who’s behaving badly by taking exception to these insults does piss me off a little, yes. ‘Oh, why do you Jews make such a fuss about being Jewish?’ But is it we who are making the fuss? Do you believe that too, my dear?” “I wouldn’t dare.”
* * *
—
“You asked me what lay behind the British distaste for Jews—those were your words. I think actually it is snobbery. And I’ll tell you what makes me think so—because it’s not felt about those Jews who are part of the aristocratic establishment or upper-middle-class establishment.”
“But Jews have the same snobbery about Jews themselves.”
“Yes. But I’m just trying to explain something to you. That the general perception of Jews is of, I think—this may not be right—I think it’s of Jews who are not like that, who haven’t become part of British culture in the sense that they have been here for centuries, like the Waly-Cohens, who are very rich—” “So it’s money.”
“It is with the aristocracy generally. You can’t be upper class without money.”
“If you make it through into the upper class, then you are relieved of certain distasteful stigmas.”
“I’m trying to tell you something interesting and you’re being quite resentful.”
“No I’m not. I’m not. I’m listening.”
“They aren’t just rich. These certain families, like the Samuelses and to a certain extent the Sieffs and the Seligmanns and the Montefiores, and plenty of others, they are not only acceptable, they are smack in the middle of British culture: they own land, they captain cricket teams, they master the foxhounds, they get into the House of Lords—you know, the whole bit. Just the same as anybody else in that kind of way of life. What people hold against certain Jewish manifestations is that these are downmarket carry-ons. This may sound very stupid to you, but I’m sure if I put it better, and more subtly—”
“You’re talking about ethnic behavior. It doesn’t go here. But what about the Italians in London, the Italians, the Greeks—do their downmarket carry-ons excite the same disgust?”
“No. Because Italians and Greeks aren’t prominent in other ways in English life. There’s no doubt about it, the Jews achieve in disproportion to their numbers and therefore they attract attention.”
“Is that distasteful as well?”
“No, not in itself. But it makes people quite twitchy.”
“So behaving upmarket isn’t really more helpful, finally, than behaving downmarket, where a Jew is concerned. Unless he has ten million pounds and captains the cricket team, virtually any manifestation of social behavior on the part of the Jew is going to elicit an enormous amount of sensitivity. Make people ‘twitchy.’ ”
“Well, no, I don’t think that’s true. People don’t feel like that about them. If you look into certain worlds, if you look into the world of art dealing that is carried on by a collection of aristocratic Jewish owners—but this is clearly a dangerous subject with you. You are getting more and more resentful with every word I say, and so I am saying no more.”
* * *
—
“Can you explain to the court why you hate women?”
“But I don’t hate them.”
“If you do not hate women, why have you defamed and denigrated them in your books? Why have you abused them in your work and in your life?”
“I have not abused them in either.”
“We have heard testimony from expert witnesses, expert witnesses who have pointed to chapter and verse to support their every judgment. And yet you are trying, are you, to tell this court that these authorities with unimpeachable professional standards, testifying under oath in a court of law, are either mistaken or lying? May I ask you, sir—what have you ever done that has been of service to women?”
“And why do you, may I ask, take the depiction of one woman as a depiction of all women? Why do you imagine that your expert witnesses might not themselves be contradicted by a different gang of expert witnesses? Why—?”
“You are out of order! It is not for you to interrogate the court but to answer the questions of the court. You are charged with sexism, misogyny, woman abuse, slander of women, denigration of women, defamation of women, and ruthless seduction, crimes all carrying the most severe penalties. People like you are not treated kindly if found guilty, and for good reason. You are one with the mass of men who have caused women great suffering and extreme humiliation—humiliation from which they are only now being delivered, thanks to the untiring work of courts such as this one. Why did you publish books that cause women suffering? Didn’t you think that those writings could be used against us by our enemies?”
“I can only reply that this self-styled equal-rights democracy of yours has aims and objectives that are not mine as a writer.”
“Please, the court is not eager to hear once again a discussion of literature from you. The women in your work are all vicious stereotypes. Was that your aim as a writer?”
“Many people have read the work otherwise.”
“Why did you portray Mrs. Portnoy as a hysteric? Why did you portray Lucy Nelson as a psychopath? Why did you portray Maureen Tarnopol as a liar and a cheat? Does this not defame and denigrate women? Why do you depict women as shrews, if not to malign them?”
“Why did Shakespeare? You refer to women as though every woman is a person to be extolled.”
“You dare to compare yourself to Shakespeare?”
“I am only—”
“Next you will be comparing yourself to Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker! Let us go into your background. You were once a university professor.”
“I was.
“As a university professor, you engaged in sexual practices with your female students.”
“That humiliates women too?”
“Does it not? They were honored, were they, to be chosen? How many times did you forcibly induce your students to fornicate with you, a professor acting in loco parentis.”
“There was no need to exert force.”
“Only because of the power to influence and control implicit in the relationship.”
“Of course there is the possibility of abuse—there as everywhere. On the other hand, you may do your own sex a disservice when you postulate intelligent young women as lacking the courage to be desirable—as having no aggression, no imagination, no daring, no adventurousness, and no perversity. For an education in the temptation to brutal sensuality that springs up spontaneously between youth and maturity, for a lesson on the torrents of feeling that flow just the other side of the taboo, you might do well to study the erotic liaisons depicted by a French writer named Colette.”
“A counterrevolutionary voluptuary named Colette! A traitor bent on pleasure named Colette! How many students did you abuse and exploit in this way?”
“Three. I had love affairs, over the years, with three—”
“First you patronize us with a lecture on literature; now are we to have a lecture on love? From you? Be careful, sir, how far you go with your insulting ironies. The court may feel obliged to have patience with such behavior but, I must warn you, the vast, indignant television audience that watches these trials is not bound by the legal niceties that obtain here. You were an adulterer, were you not?”
“Still am.”
“With the wives of friends?”
“Sometimes. More often with the wives of strangers, like you.”
“And with whom was the treachery more perversely enjoyable? Whom did you delight most in sadistically betraying, friends whose wives you ruthlessly seduced or strangers whose wives you ruthlessly seduced?”
“Oh, you are a wonderful girl! You are clever! You are beautiful!”
“Your Honor, I must ask the court to instruct this man that I am not a ‘girl’!”
“Come over here, prosecutor, would you please—”
“Your Honor, I beg you, the defendant is blatantly—”
“I want to ask your expert opinion about this—this—”
“Help, help, he’s exploiting me, he’s degrading me, he’s defaming me, he’s attempting with this grotesque display of phallic—”
