Nathan has always been an independent and solitary thinker, using himself as a guinea pig for daring artistic experiments. He is an artist who works from a model (reality being his constant model), which he accesses through avid curiosity, irony, skepticism, and free play. He doesn’t hesitate to put himself in the often disturbing position of being a target of his own sarcasm; the same sarcasm that he levels at society as a whole. Even when he focuses on the most intimate and elemental of all human desires, the erotic, he is searching for layers of nuance, the individual confronting itself, as well as confronting those outside the self. Perhaps the guiding principle for such an unsettling search for trouble is to be found in Kierkegaard: “The opposite of sin isn’t virtue, but freedom.” Freedom to think and feel and speak out, in order to face up to your true self, has been the main obsession of Nathan’s comedy of manners. His linguistic range, and the immediacy and charm of his style, have always served to conflate the personal and political, the inner and outer world, in a relentless scrutiny of the traps set for all of us by our centrifugal, challenging, rapidly changing and disconcerting modernity.
I hadn’t seen Nathan since our Bard meeting in 2006, but the following year I received a copy of Exit Ghost, along with some nice words of friendship. I tried to call, he never answered. Still, over the past couple of years, I’ve had some news about him. During a trip to Berlin, I read in an important German daily an article entitled “Where is Nathan Zuckerman?” In the name of his readers, the journalist deplored Nathan’s disappearance from the literary news. This claim was recently contradicted, even if not entirely, by a blog entitled “Nathan Zuckerman as Presidential Adviser,” in which we learn that President Obama’s intellectual formation is due to Jewish scholars and writers, including none other than Nathan himself. And now, in the current issue of the New Republic, an article entitled “English anti-Semitism on the March” starts with this quote from Nathan, circa 1987: “England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks.” Obviously, because of its open and hidden anti-Semitism. The article continues: “Twenty years on, it is difficult to imagine Nathan Zuckerman lasting eight days in England, let alone eight weeks.”
In Exit Ghost, Nathan reaffirms a concern we first see in The Ghost Writer in 1979; that is, a concern to protect his former mentor, E. I. Lonoff against the new cannibalism of the mass media, its vulgar and cynical exploitation of a writer’s private life.
It was in Lonoff’s Berkshire home that, many years before, Nathan had first encountered the charming Amy Bellette, the young mistress of the old man. Thirty years later Amy writes, in a letter to the editor of a prestigious newspaper:
During the decades of the Cold War, in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe satellites, it was serious writers who were expelled from literature; now, in America, it is literature that has been expelled as a serious influence on how life is perceived … As soon as one enters into ideological simplifications and the biographical reductivism of cultural journalism, the essence of the artifact is lost. Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in “the arts,” and everything that it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher or pet?
Amy’s letter was, in fact, Lonoff’s letter, which was Nathan’s letter, and, in the very end, the letter of the master being celebrated here this evening. Reading it, I was thinking, unavoidably, about Nathan’s many appearances as a character and narrator in Philip’s great books. And I was thinking, of course, about Nathan’s last meeting after so many years with Amy Bellette, that inspiration of amorous fantasies past, that former mesmerizing embodiment of mystery and attraction and passion (including a passion for literature), now a dying old woman. Nathan meets her, this time in New York, at the same time as he meets Jamie Logan, the new mesmerizing young woman, the new embodiment of mystery, sensuality and literature, for the now old and sick and not totally tamed Nathan.
The crashing exit of this last, virtual lover, and of love itself, is an extraordinary moment of perplexity where the classic and obsolete literary confrontation between passion and duty is replaced by the much more authentic and actual confrontation between excitement and extinction, desire and dullness, youth and old age, life and death. Should Nathan give in to the unforgotten crazy needs and dreams of youth still contained in old age? What does he want? Sex, of course. The impotent man wants frenetic abandonment and fulfillment, the incontinent old man wants tender and savage intercourse, its urges and hypnosis, the solitary man wants life and light and intensity, he wants time past in time present. Melancholy and vitality, weakness and resilience, bitterness, desperation and pride and sadness are accomplices in one of the most moving literary moments in contemporary prose.
After so many books and battles, we may ask ourselves what makes Nathan Zuckerman a hero of our time in such different places as Newark and Chicago and New York and Sarah Palin’s Alaska, in post-Nazi Germany and post-communist Romania and postmodern France and in so many other places.
Nathan is quite an original, and very contemporary, cerebral magician, a tireless and appealing explorer of his and our environment, its vigor and void, its dynamism and dread. He is also a burlesque and incisive explorer of eroticism, a profound experiment in social knowledge. He achieves a unique and paradoxical breakthrough in modern literature as a trustworthy seismograph of the shifting tectonics of American political life during the Roosevelt era, the era of the Vietnam war, the time of Nixon, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and George Bush, as well as the post-9/11 period, all the way up to the present moment.
Through his fresh, funny, and ferocious scrutiny of intimacy and subjectivity, we are offered a revealing portrait of America over the past fifty years, its scandals and prejudices, its shallowness and energy, its clichés, candor, and rebellions. The turbulence of the individual is always seen in connection with the taboos, treachery, and tragicomedy of the common culture. I don’t know of any witness to the drastic changes and the stable aberrations of this country who has been able to express its contrasts with such wit, irony, and imagination, with such rich and meaningful ambiguities and contradictions. Nathan enters through his self-made secret door into the history of American literature, but also perhaps into the history of America itself, just as Don Quixote could be seen as part of Spanish history and Gogol’s Dead Souls as part of Russian history.
Surprisingly, a few days ago, I received a phone call from Nathan. I knew why he was calling. “Are you coming to the celebration?” I said. “What celebration?” “Five decades of fiction, three decades of Nathan Zuckerman! You should come, you’re part of it.” He kept silent. “Everybody will be there, Sabbath, the puppeteer, Coleman Silk, the whitened black, Seymour Levov, the Swede and his brother Jerry, the doctor, and the women, Miss New Jersey and Faunia Farley and Consuela Castillo.” Nathan was silent. I understood that he preferred to stay in his cave in the Berkshires. But he spoke, finally. He whispered, in fact, like an old man. “Mister So-and-So, published another book. I’m not in it. Another one is coming out. I’m not in it. And one is already on his table, I’m not in it, either. Tell him I know everything. Even here, in the woods, I can find out everything.”