Beyond the shadow of the ship
I watched the water snakes …
Within the shadow of attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gusht from my heart,
And I blest them unaware!..
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea
Colley, just before his final ordeal, looks over the side of the ship:
I gazed down into the water, the blue, the green, the purple, the snowy, sliding foam! I saw with a new feeling of security the long green weed that wavers under the water from our wooden sides … It seemed to me then — it still seems so — that I was and am consumed by a great love of all things …
There are many other obvious echoes. Just as Golding challenges the dogmas of his literary starting points in his first three novels so he “deconstructs” Coleridge in Rites of Passage. To put it at its most brief, Colley is at once Mariner and Albatross, and the purgatorial sufferings which lead to redemption in the poem are pointedly, and with wicked irony, eschewed here. In the poem the Mariner confers his blessing on the water snakes and is freed from the albatross by his unselfish act. Colley, re-enacting the Mariner’s part with a more literal accuracy, goes on from this point to assume an albatross which leads to his squalid end. His geographical passage across the equator, his physical move over the white line painted on the deck to separate “gentlemen” from “people,” symbolizes his own transit from the factitious world of civilized appearance to the darker realms of the unconscious, which ultimately brings about his doom. This is a multi-layered and marvellously intelligent novel with endless subtle allusions and reverberations and effortlessly marshalled cross-references. It is also a witty and solidly realistic account of life on a sailing ship at the beginning of the last century. There is an exuberance and confidence about the book that signals the author’s own awareness of his return to former strengths. The balance is triumphantly right.
1981
Philip Roth (Review of Zuckerman Unbound)
Philip Roth’s last book, The Ghost Writer, featured an unknown novelist called Nathan Zuckerman and dealt with the visit he paid to the home of a literary giant. In Zuckerman Unbound Zuckerman is now a celebrated and notorious author, whose novel, Carnovsky, has brought him overnight fame. Zuckerman Unbound details his inept attempts at coping with being a celebrity and, more seriously, considers the connections that exist between a writer’s life and his art.
The Zuckerman/Carnovsky link seems parallel to that between Roth and Portnoy’s Complaint. Carnovsky is a graphic account of the sex life of its eponymous hero and the simple equation that exists in the minds of its readers is that Zuckerman and the fictional Carnovsky are, in actual fact, interchangeable. There’s a lot of amusing detail about the pressures of living with fame, reminiscent in parts of Woody Allen’s film Stardust Memories. Allen’s paranoia is also echoed in Zuckerman’s fears that he will end up the victim of some deranged fan. Zuckerman finds himself pestered by the usual collection of cranks and weirdos, but is dogged more persistently by one Alvin Pepler, a contemporary who hails from the same town — Newark, New Jersey. Pepler had achieved a short span of fame as winner on a nationwide quiz show, a success brought to him by virtue of his photographic memory. But the quiz show was rigged (a genuine scandal in the fifties) and Pepler was “defeated” by another contestant and condemned to return to the obscurity from which he’d briefly emerged.
Pepler’s obsessions and his grandiose ambitions (he wants Zuckerman to help promote his book) are irritating, but later Zuckerman becomes more intrigued with this extraordinary character. For a while he contemplates writing Pepler and his life into a novel and begins to make transcriptions of everything he says. This illustration of a writer engaged in the process of turning life’s raw materials into art bears on the book’s wider theme, namely the persistent identification the public makes of the artist with his creation. Or, as Zuckerman cogently puts it, confusing the “dictating ventriloquist with the demonic dummy.”
The most serious consequences of this sort of identification are experienced by members of the artist’s family, especially if — as in the Roth/Zuckerman case — characters, such as parents, play a large part in the fiction. It’s in his relationships with members of his family that Zuckerman sees the genuine damage that his fame has caused. The incomprehension of his parents and brother, the sense of betrayal that they feel, have opened up an unbridgeable gap between them. The novel ends with Zuckerman returning to his native Newark, the setting for Carnovsky. It has all changed, to such an extent that it is almost unrecognizable. Roth seems to be leaving us with a symbolic reminder of the difference between life and art, a warning not to mistake the illusion for the illusionist.
It was T. S. Eliot who emphasized the gulf between the “man who suffers and the mind which creates.” It’s a separation that Zuckerman insists on throughout the novel too. There’s no connection, he repeats, between what happens in his novels and what’s happened in his life. Zuckerman Unbound is a very funny account of the consequences of not observing the distinction. Some consequences are easy to live with — Zuckerman’s sexual renown allows him to bed film stars — others are very sad: Zuckerman senior’s dying word to his son is “bastard.” But essentially Roth, I think, is playing an elaborate joke on the reader. In Zuckerman Unbound we constantly hear of other readers’ stupidity in taking Zuckerman for his fictional hero Carnovsky, and we sympathize with Zuckerman’s frustration. But at the same time — I’ve been doing it throughout this review myself and, I guarantee, it will occur in every notice the book receives — we identify Zuckerman with Roth and talk about Zuckerman Unbound in terms of Roth and the reception of Portnoy. Perhaps all that Roth is pointing out in laying this trap for us is simply to show how instinctive such a response is; that it’ll be made anyway, no matter what the writer tries to do. Is it an error on the reader’s part, though? Is the reader hopelessly unsophisticated? Roth doesn’t actually come out and say so, but I think that throughout the novel — especially in the way he reacts to Pepler — he drops hints that the notion of the separation of the artist from his art is, in a significant sense, something of a convenient piece of camouflage for the artist. Certainly Eliot for one — who energetically pursued this line throughout his life — was not doing it disinterestedly. Zuckerman Unbound is an elegant and amusing contribution to the debate.