Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Philip Roth
Praise
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
1. The Collar
2. Gone
3. The Ward
4. Burning
5. The Corpus
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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VINTAGE
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London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Philip Roth 1983
Handwritten lettering © Ulla Puggaard
Philip Roth has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Jonathan Cape in Great Britain in 1984
First published by Vintage in 1995
Published by Vintage 2005
Sections of this book appeared in slightly different form in Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Vogue.
The quotation from James Cyriax’s Textbook of Orthopaedic Medicine, copyright © 1978 by Ballière Tindall is reprinted with the kind permission of Ballière Tindall, 1 St Anne’s Road, Eastbourne, East Sussex, England.
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099476610
For Richard Stern
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for ‘the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004’.
Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award ‘for a body of work … of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship’ and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose ‘scale of achievement over a sustained career … places him or her in the highest rank of American literature’. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize.
Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.
ABOUT THE BOOK
With his fortieth birthday receding into the distance, along with his hairline and his most successful novel, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction – pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, finds himself physically unable to write a line.
He treks from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Could it be, he wonders to himself, that the cause of the pain is nothing less than the books he has written? As he grapples with this possibility, he tries an onslaught of painkillers, then vodka, and finally marijuana. He contemplates threatening the pain with suicide, attempting to scare it out of his system. He toys with the prospect of a dramatic career change. What will it take for the pain to finally leave him alone?
‘America’s greatest living novelist’
Sunday Times
‘There aren’t supposed to be degrees or intensities of uniqueness, and yet Roth is somehow inordinately unique. He is bloodymindedly himself, himself, himself’
Martin Amis
‘Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition on a boiler roar into life. Passion is what we’re going to get, and plenty of it’
Guardian
‘He is a writer of quite extraordinary skill and courage; and he takes on bigger enemies in every book he writes’
Frank Kermode
‘Philip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism’
Milan Kundera
‘There is a clarity, almost a ruthlessness, to his work, which makes the experience of reading any of his books a bracing, wild ride’
The Times
‘He is skilled, witty, energetic and performs like a virtuoso’
Saul Bellow
‘Nobody writes about the American family with more tenderness and honesty’
New Statesman
‘Roth is a living master’
Harold Bloom
ALSO BY PHILIP ROTH
Zuckerman Books
The Ghost Writer
Zuckerman Unbound
The Prague Orgy
The Counterlife
American Pastoral
I Married a Communist
The Human Stain
Exit Ghost
Roth Books
The Facts
Deception
Patrimony
Operation Shylock
The Plot Against America
Kepesh Books
The Breast
The Professor of Desire
The Dying Animal
Nemeses: Short Novels
Everyman
Indignation
The Humbling
Nemesis
Miscellany
Reading Myself and Others
Shop Talk
Other Books
Goodbye, Columbus
Letting Go
When She Was Good
Portnoy’s Complaint
Our Gang
The Great American Novel
My Life as a Man
Sabbath’s Theater
The chief obstacle to correct diagnosis in painful conditions is the fact that the symptom is often felt at a distance from its source.
Textbook of Orthopaedic Medicine
JAMES CYRIAX, M.D.
WHEN HE IS sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women. He’d never had so many women at one time, or so many doctors, or drunk so much vodka, or done so little work, or known despair of such wild proportions. Yet he didn’t seem to have a disease that anybody could take seriously. Only the pain—in his neck, arms, and shoulders, pain that made it difficult to walk for more than a few city blocks or even to stand very long in one place. Just having a neck, arms, and shoulders was like carrying another person around. Ten minutes out getting the groceries and he had to hurry home and lie down. Nor could he bring back more than one light bagful per trip, and even then he had to hold it cradled up against his chest like somebody eighty years old. Holding the bag down at his side only worsened the pain. It was painful to bend over and make his bed. To stand at the stove was painful, holding nothing heavier than a spatula and waiting for an egg to fry. He couldn’t throw open a window, not one that required any strength. Consequently, it was the women who opened the windows for him: opened his windows, fried his egg, made his bed, shopped for his food, and effortlessly, manfully, toted home his bundles. One woman on her own could have done what was needed in an hour or two a day, but Zuckerman didn’t have one woman any longer. That was how he came to have four.
To sit up in a chair and read he wore an orthopedic collar, a spongy lozenge in a white ribbed sleeve that he fastened around his neck to keep the cervical vertebrae aligned and to prevent him from turning his head unsupported. The support and the restriction of movement were supposed to diminish the hot line of pain that ran from behind his right ear into his neck, then branched downward beneath the scapula like a menorah held bottom side up. Sometimes the collar helped, sometimes not, but just wearing it was as maddening as the pain itself. He couldn’t concentrate on anything other than himself in his collar.
The text in hand was from his college days, The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse. Inside the front cover, above his name and the date inscribed in blue ink, was a single penciled notation in his 1949 script, a freshman aperçu that read, “Metaphysical poets pass easily from trivial to sublime.” For the first time in twenty-four years he turned to the poems of George Herbert. He’d got the book down to read “The Collar,” hoping to find something there to help him wear his own. That was commonly believed to be a function of great literature: antidote to suffering through depiction of our common fate. As Zuckerman was learning, pain could make you awfully primitive if not counteracted by steady, regular doses of philosophical thinking. Maybe he could pick up some hints from Herbert.
… Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordiall fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did drie it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the yeare only lost to me?
Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
… But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word
Me thought I heard one calling, Childe:
And I reply’d, My Lord.
As best he could with his aching arm, he threw the volume across the room. Absolutely not! He refused to make of his collar, or of the affliction it was designed to assuage, a metaphor for anything grandiose. Metaphysical poets may pass easily from trivial to sublime, but on the strength of the experience of the past eighteen months, Zuckerman’s impression was of proceeding, if at all, in the opposite direction.
Writing the last page of a book was as close as he’d ever come to sublimity, and that hadn’t happened in four years. He couldn’t remember when he’d written a readable page. Even while he was wearing the collar, the spasm in the upper trapezius and the aching soreness to either side of the dorsal spine made it difficult to type just the address on an envelope. When a Mount Sinai orthopedist had ascribed his troubles to twenty years of hammering away at a manual portable, he at once went off to buy an IBM Selectric II; however, when he tried at home to get to work, he found that he ached as much over the new, unfamiliar IBM keyboard as he had over the last of his little Olivettis. Just a glimpse of the Olivetti stowed away in its battered traveling case at the back of his bedroom closet and the depression came rolling in—the way Bojangles Robinson must have felt looking at his old dancing shoes. How simple, back when he was still healthy, to give it a shove and make room on his desk for his lunch or his notes or his reading or his mail. How he’d loved to push them around, those silent uncomplaining sparring partners—the pounding he’d been giving them since he was twenty! There when he paid his alimony and answered his fans, there to lay his head beside when overcome by the beauty or ugliness of what he’d just composed, there for every page of every draft of the four published novels, of the three buried alive—if Olivettis could talk, you’d get the novelist naked. While from the IBM prescribed by the first orthopedist, you’d get nothing—only the smug, puritanical, workmanlike hum telling of itself and all its virtues: I am a Correcting Selectric II. I never do anything wrong. Who this man is I have no idea. And from the look of things neither does he.
Writing manually was no better. Even in the good old days, pushing his left hand across the paper, he looked like some brave determined soul learning to use an artificial limb. Nor were the results that easy to decipher. Writing by hand was the clumsiest thing he did. He danced the rumba better than he wrote by hand. He held the pen too tight. He clenched his teeth and made agonized faces. He stuck his elbow out from his side as though beginning the breast stroke, then hooked his hand down and around from his forearm so as to form the letters from above rather than below—the contortionist technique by which many a left-handed child had taught himself how not to smear his words as he proceeded across the page from left to right back in the era of the inkwell. A highly recommended osteopath had even concluded that the cause of Zuckerman’s problems was just this: the earnest left-handed schoolboy, straining to overcome the impediment of wet ink, who had begun microscopically to twist the writer’s spine off the vertical axis and screw it down cockeyed into his sacrum. His rib cage was askew. His clavicle was crooked. His left scapula winged out at its lower angle like a chicken’s. Even his humerus was too tightly packed into the shoulder capsule and inserted in the joint on the bias. Though to the untrained eye he might appear more or less symmetrical and decently proportioned, within he was as misshapen as Richard III. According to the osteopath, he’d been warping at a steady rate since he was seven. Began with his homework. Began with the first of his reports on life in New Jersey. “In 1666 Governor Carteret provided an interpreter for Robert Treat and also a guide up the Hackensack River to meet with a representative of Oraton, the aged chief of the Hackensacks. Robert Treat wanted Oraton to know that the white settlers wished only peace.” Began at ten with Newark’s Robert Treat and the euphonious elegance of interpreter and representative, ended with Newark’s Gilbert Carnovsky and the blunt monosyllables cock and cunt. Such was the Hackensack up which the writer had paddled, only to dock at the port of pain.
When sitting upright at the typewriter became too painful, he tried leaning back in an easy chair and doing the best he could with his imperfect longhand. He had the collar to brace his neck, the firm, uncushioned, back of the upholstered chair to support his spine, and a piece of beaverboard, cut to his specifications, laid across the arms of the chair to serve as a portable desk for his composition books. His place was certainly quiet enough for total concentration. He’d had his big study windows double-glazed so that nobody’s television or phonograph would blare through from the building backing onto his brownstone apartment, and the ceiling had been soundproofed so he wouldn’t be disturbed by the scratching of his upstairs neighbor’s two Pekinese. The study was carpeted, a deep copper-brown wool, and the windows were hung to the floor with creamy velvet curtains. It was a cozy, quiet, book-lined room. He’d spent half his life sealed off in rooms just like it. Atop the small cabinet where he kept his vodka bottle and his glass were favorite old photographs in Plexiglas frames: his dead parents as newlyweds in his grandparents’ backyard; ex-wives blooming with health on Nantucket; his estranged brother leaving Cornell in 1957, a magna cum laude (and a tabula rasa) in a cap and gown. If during the day he spoke at all, it was only small talk to those pictures; otherwise, enough silence even to satisfy Proust. He had silence, comfort, time, money, but composing in longhand set off a throbbing pain in his upper arm that in no time at all made him sick to his stomach. He kneaded the muscle with his right hand while he continued to write with the left. He tried not thinking about it. He pretended that it wasn’t his upper arm hurting but somebody else’s. He tried to outwit it by stopping and starting. Stopping long enough helped the pain but hurt the writing; by the tenth time he’d stopped he had nothing left to write, and with nothing to write, no reason to be. When he tore off the neck collar and threw himself to the floor, the ripping sound of the Velcro fastener coming undone could have been emitted by his guts. Every thought and feeling, ensnared by the selfness of pain.
In a children’s furniture store on Fifty-seventh Street he had bought a soft red plastic-covered playmat that was permanently laid out in his study now, between his desk and his easy chair. When he could no longer bear sitting up, he stretched supine upon the playmat, his head supported by Roget’s Thesaurus. He’d come to conduct most of the business of his waking life on the playmat. From there, no longer laden with an upper torso or saddled with fifteen pounds of head, he made phone calls, received visitors, and followed Watergate on TV. Instead of his own spectacles, he wore a pair of prism glasses that enabled him to see at right angles. They were designed for the bedridden by a downtown optical firm to which he’d been referred by his physiotherapist. Through his prism glasses he followed our President’s chicanery—the dummy gestures, the satanic sweating, the screwy dazzling lies. He almost felt for him, the only other American he saw daily who seemed to be in as much trouble as he was. Flat out on the floor, Zuckerman could also see whichever of his women was seated upright on the sofa. What the woman in attendance saw were the rectangular opaque undersides of the protruding glasses and Zuckerman explaining Nixon to the ceiling.
He tried from the playmat to dictate fiction to a secretary, but he hadn’t the fluency for it and sometimes went as long as an hour without a word to say. He couldn’t write without seeing the writing; though he could picture what the sentences pictured, he couldn’t picture the sentences unless he saw them unfold and fasten one to the other. The secretary was only twenty and, during the first few weeks particularly, got too easily caught up in his anguish. The sessions were torture for both of them, and generally ended with the secretary down on the playmat. Intercourse, fellatio, and cunnilingus Zuckerman could endure more or less without pain, provided he was supine and kept the thesaurus beneath his head for support. The thesaurus was just the right thickness to prevent the back of his skull falling below the line of his shoulders and setting off the pain in his neck. Its inside cover was inscribed “From Dad—You have my every confidence,” and dated “June 24, 1946.” A book to enrich his vocabulary upon graduation from grade school.
To lie with him on the playmat came the four women. They were all the vibrant life he had: secretary-confidante-cook-housekeeper-companion—aside from the doses of Nixon’s suffering, they were the entertainment. On his back he felt like their whore, paying in sex for someone to bring him the milk and the paper. They told him their troubles and took off their clothes and lowered the orifices for Zuckerman to fill. Without a taxing vocation or a hopeful prognosis, he was theirs to do with as they wished; the more conspicuous his helplessness, the more forthright their desire. Then they ran. Washed up, downed a coffee, kneeled to kiss him goodbye, and ran off to disappear in real lives. Leaving Zuckerman on his back for whoever rang the bell next.
Well and working, he’d never had time for liaisons like these, not even when he’d been tempted. Too many wives in too few years to allow for a consortium of mistresses. Marriage had been his bulwark against the tremendous distraction of women. He’d married for the order, the intimacy, the dependable comradery, for the routine and regularity of monogamous living; he’d married so as never to waste himself on another affair, or go crazy with boredom at another party, or wind up alone in the living room at night after a day alone in his study. To sit alone each night doing the reading that he required to concentrate himself for the next day’s solitary writing was too much even for Zuckerman’s single-mindedness, and so into the voluptuous austerity he had enticed a woman, one woman at a time, a quiet, thoughtful, serious, literate, self-sufficient woman who didn’t require to be taken places, who was content instead to sit after dinner and read in silence across from him and his book.
Following each divorce, he discovered anew that unmarried a man had to take women places: out to restaurants, for walks in the park, to museums and the opera and the movies—not only had to go to the movies but afterwards had to discuss them. If they became lovers, there was the problem of getting away in the morning while his mind was still fresh for his work. Some women expected him to eat breakfast with them, even to talk to them over breakfast like other human beings. Sometimes they wanted to go back to bed. He wanted to go back to bed. It was certainly going to be more eventful in bed than back at the typewriter with the book. Much less frustrating too. You actually could complete what you set out to accomplish without ten false starts and sixteen drafts and all that pacing around the room. So he dropped his guard—and the morning was shot.
No such temptations with the wives, not as time went by.
But pain had changed it all. Whoever spent the night was not only invited to breakfast but asked to stay on for lunch if she had the time (and if no one else was to turn up till dinner). He’d slip a wet washcloth and a bulging ice pack under his terry-cloth robe, and while the ice anesthetized his upper trapezius (and the orthopedic collar supported his neck), he’d lean back and listen in his red velvet chair. He’d had a fatal weakness for high-minded mates back when all he ever thought about was toiling away; excellent opportunity, immobilization, to sound out less predictably upright women than his three ex-wives. Maybe he’d learn something and maybe he wouldn’t, but at least they would help to distract him, and according to the rheumatologist at NYU, distraction, pursued by the patient with real persistence, could reduce even the worst pain to tolerable levels.
The psychoanalyst whom he consulted took a contrary position: he wondered aloud if Zuckerman hadn’t given up fighting the illness to retain (with a fairly untroubled conscience) his “harem of Florence Nightingales.” Zuckerman so resented the crack he nearly walked out. Given up? What could he do that he hadn’t—what was left that he was unwilling to try? Since the pains had begun in earnest eighteen months before, he’d waited his turn in the offices of three orthopedists, two neurologists, a physiotherapist, a rheumatologist, a radiologist, an osteopath, a vitamin doctor, an acupuncturist, and now the analyst. The acupuncturist had stuck twelve needles into him on fifteen different occasions, a hundred and eighty needles in all, not one of which had done a thing. Zuckerman sat shirtless in one of the acupuncturist’s eight treatment cubicles, the needles hanging from him, and reading The New York Times—sat obediently for fifteen minutes, then paid his twenty-five dollars and rode back uptown, jangling with pain each time the cab took a pothole. The vitamin doctor gave him a series of five vitamin B-12 shots. The osteopath yanked his rib cage upward, pulled his arms outward, and cracked his neck sharply to either side. The physiotherapist gave him hot packs, ultrasound, and massage. One orthopedist gave him “trigger-point” injections and told him to throw out the Olivetti and buy the IBM; the next, having informed Zuckerman that he was an author too, though not of “best-sellers,” examined him lying down and standing up and bending over, and, after Zuckerman had dressed, ushered him out of his office, announcing to his receptionist that he had no more time that week to waste on hypochondriacs. The third orthopedist prescribed a hot bath for twenty minutes every morning, after which Zuckerman was to perform a series of stretching exercises. The baths were pleasant enough—Zuckerman listened to Mahler through the open doorway—but the exercises, simple as they were, so exacerbated all his pains that within the week he rushed back to the first orthopedist, who gave him a second series of trigger-point injections that did no good. The radiologist X-rayed his chest, back, neck, cranium, shoulders, and arms. The first neurologist who saw the X-rays said he wished his own spine was in such good shape; the second prescribed hospitalization, two weeks of neck traction to alleviate pressure on a cervical disc—if not the worst experience of Zuckerman’s life, easily the most humbling. He didn’t even want to think about it, and generally there was nothing that happened to him, no matter how bad, that he didn’t want to think about. But he was stunned by his cowardice. Even the sedation, far from helping, made the powerlessness that much more frightening and oppressive. He knew he would go berserk from the moment they fastened the weights to the harness holding his head. On the eighth morning, though there was no one in the room to hear him, he began to shout from where he was pinned to the bed, “Let me up! Let me go!” and within fifteen minutes was back in his clothes and down at the cashier’s cage settling his bill. Only when he was safely out onto the street, hailing a cab, did he think, “And what if something really terrible were happening to you? What then?”
Jenny had come down from the country to help him through what was to have been the two weeks of traction. She made the round of the galleries and museums in the morning, then after lunch came to the hospital and read to him for two hours from The Magic Mountain. It had seemed the appropriate great tome for the occasion, but strapped inert upon his narrow bed, Zuckerman grew increasingly irritated by Hans Castorp and the dynamic opportunities for growth provided him by TB. Nor could life in New York Hospital’s room 611 be said to measure up to the deluxe splendors of a Swiss sanatorium before the First World War, not even at $1,500 a week. “Sounds to me,” he told Jenny, “like a cross between the Salzburg Seminars and the stately old Queen Mary. Five great meals a day and then tedious lectures by European intellectuals, complete with erudite jests. All that philosophy. All that snow. Reminds me of the University of Chicago.”
He’d first met Jenny while visiting the retreat of some friends on a wooded mountainside in a village up the Hudson called Bearsville. The daughter of a local schoolteacher, she’d been down to art school at Cooper Union and then three years on her own with a knapsack in Europe, and now, back where she’d begun, was living alone in a wood shack with a cat and her paints and a Franklin stove. She was twenty-eight, robust, lonely, blunt, pink-complexioned, with a healthy set of largish white teeth, baby-fine carrot-colored hair, and impressive muscles in her arms. No long temptress fingers like his secretary Diana—she had hands. “Someday, if you like,” she said to Zuckerman, “I’ll tell you stories about my jobs—‘My Biceps and How I Got Them.’” Before leaving for Manhattan, he’d stopped off at her cabin unannounced, ostensibly to look at her landscapes. Skies, trees, hills, and roads just as blunt as she was. Van Gogh without the vibrating sun. Quotations from Van Gogh’s letters to his brother were tacked up beside the easel, and a scarred copy of the French edition of the letters, the one she’d lugged around Europe in her knapsack, lay in the pile of art books by the daybed. On the fiberboard walls were pencil drawings: cows, horses, pigs, nests, flowers, vegetables—all announcing with the same forthright charm, “Here I am and I am real.”
They strolled through a ravaged orchard out behind the cabin, sampling the crop of gnarled fruit. Jenny asked him, “Why does your hand keep stealing up to your shoulder?” Zuckerman hadn’t even realized what he was doing; the pain, at this point, had only cornered about a quarter of his existence, and he still thought of it as something like a spot on his coat that had only to be brushed away. Yet no matter how hard he brushed, nothing happened. “Some sort of strain,” he replied. “From stiff-arming the critics?” she asked. “More likely stiff-arming myself. What’s it like alone up here?” “A lot of painting, a lot of gardening, a lot of masturbating. It must be nice to have money and buy things. What’s the most extravagant thing you’ve ever done?” The most extravagant, the most foolish, the most vile, the most thrilling—he told her, then she told him. Hours of questions and answers, but for a while no further than that. “Our great sexless rapport,” she called it, when they spoke for long stretches on the phone at night. “Tough luck for me, maybe, but I don’t want to be one of your girls. I’m better off with my hammer, building a new floor.” “How’d you learn to build a floor?” “It’s easy.”
One midnight she’d called to say she’d been out in the garden bringing in the vegetables by moonlight. “The natives up here tell me it’s going to freeze in a few hours. I’m coming down to Lemnos to watch you lick your wounds.” “Lemnos? I don’t remember Lemnos.” “Where the Greeks put Philoctetes and his foot.”
She’d stayed for three days on Lemnos. She squirted the base of his neck with anesthetizing ethyl chloride; she sat unclothed astride his knotted back and massaged between his shoulder blades; she cooked them dinner, coq au vin and cassoulet—dishes tasting strongly of bacon—and the vegetables she’d harvested before the frost; she told him about France and her adventures there with men and women. Coming from the bathroom at bedtime, he caught her by the desk looking into his datebook. “Oddly furtive,” he said, “for someone so open.” She merely laughed and said, “You couldn’t write if you didn’t do worse. Who’s ‘D’? Who’s ‘G’? How many do we come to all together?” “Why? Like to meet some of the others?” “No thanks. I don’t think I want to get into that. That’s what I thought I was phasing myself out of up on my mountaintop.” On the last morning of that first visit he wanted to give her something—something other than a book. He’d been giving women books (and the lectures that went with them) all his life. He gave Jenny ten $100 bills. “What’s this for” she said. “You just told me that you couldn’t stand coming down here looking like a yokel. Then there’s the curiosity about extravagance. Van Gogh had his brother, you have me. Take it.” She returned three hours later with a scarlet cashmere cloak, burgundy boots, and a big bottle of Bal à Versailles. “I went to Bergdorf’s,” she said rather shyly, but proudly—“here’s your change,” and handed him two quarters, a dime, and three pennies. She took off all her yokel clothes and put on just the cloak and the boots. “Know what?” she said, looking in the mirror. “I feel like I’m pretty.” “You are pretty.” She opened the bottle and dabbed at herself with the stopper; she perfumed the tip of her tongue. Then again to the mirror. A long look. “I feel tall.” That she wasn’t and wouldn’t be. She phoned from the country that evening to tell him about her mother’s reaction when she stopped by the house, wearing the cloak and smelling of Bal à Versailles, and explained it was a gift from a man. “She said, ‘I wonder what your grandmother will say about that coat.’” Well, a harem’s a harem, Zuckerman thought. “Ask your grandmother’s size and I’ll get her one too.”
The two weeks of hospital traction began with Jenny reading to him in the afternoons from The Magic Mountain, then back at his apartment at night drawing pictures in her sketchbook of his desk, his chair, his bookshelves, and his clothes, pictures that she taped to the wall of his room the next time she came to visit. Each day she made a drawing of an old American sampler with an uplifting adage stitched in the center, and this too she taped to the wall he could see. “To deepen your outlook,” she told him.
The only antidote to mental suffering
is physical pain.
KARL MARX
One does not love a place the less for having
suffered in it.
JANE AUSTEN
If one is strong enough to resist certain shocks, to solve more or less complicated physical difficulties, then from forty to fifty one is again in a new relatively normal tideway.
V. VAN GOGH
She devised a chart to trace the progress of the treatment on his outlook. At the end of seven days it looked like this:
On the eighth afternoon, when she arrived with her drawing pad at room 611, Zuckerman was gone; she found him at home, on the playmat, half drunk. “Too much inlook for the outlook,” he told her. “Too all-encompassing. Too isolating. Broke down.”
“Oh,” she said lightly, “I don’t think this constitutes much of a breakdown. I couldn’t have lasted an hour.”
“Life smaller and smaller and smaller. Wake up thinking about my neck. Go to sleep thinking about my neck. Only thought, which doctor to turn to when this doesn’t help the neck. There to get well and knew I was getting worse. Hans Castorp better at all this than I am, Jennifer. Nothing in that bed but me. Nothing but a neck thinking neck-thoughts. No Settembrini, no Naphta, no snow. No glamorous intellectual voyage. Trying to find my way out and I only work my way further in. Defeated. Ashamed.” He was also angry enough to scream.
“No, the problem was me.” She poured him another drink. “I wish I were more of an entertainer. I only wish I weren’t this tough lump. Well, forget it. We tried—it didn’t work.”
He sat at the kitchen table rubbing his neck and finishing the vodka while she made her bacony lamb stew. He didn’t want her out of his sight. Levelheaded Jenny, let’s make the underside of domesticity the whole thing—live with me and be my sweet tough lump. He was about ready to ask her to move in. “I said to myself in bed, ‘Come what may, when I get out of here I throw myself back into work. If it hurts it hurts and the hell with it. Muster all your understanding and just overcome it.’”
“And?”
“Too elementary for understanding. Understanding doesn’t touch it. Worrying about it, wondering about it, fighting it, treating it, trying to ignore it, trying to figure out what it is—it makes my ordinary inwardness look like New Year’s Eve in Times Square. When you’re in pain all you think about is not being in pain. Back and back and back to the one obsession. I should never have asked you to come down. I should have done it alone. But even this way I was too weak. You, a witness to this.”
“Witness to what? Come on, for my outlook it was just fine. You don’t know how I’ve loved running around here wearing a skirt. I’ve been taking care of myself a long time now in my earnest, blustery way. Well, for you I can be softer, gentler, calmer—you’ve provided a chance for me to provide in a womanly way. No need for anybody to feel bad about that. It’s guilt-free time, Nathan, for both of us. I’ll be of use to you, you be of use to me, and let’s neither of us worry about the consequences. Let my grandmother do that.”
Choose Jenny? Tempting if she’d have it. Her spunk, her health, her independence, the Van Gogh quotations, the unwavering will—how all that quieted the invalid frenzy. But what would happen when he was well? Choose Jenny because of the ways in which she approximates Mrs. Zuckermans I, II, and III? The best reason not to choose her. Choose like a patient in need of a nurse? A wife as a Band-Aid? In a fix like this, the only choice is not to choose. Wait it out, as is.
It was the severe depression brought on by the eight days imprisoned in traction—and by the thought of waiting it out as is—that sent him running to the psychoanalyst. But they didn’t get on at all. He spoke of the appeal of illness, the returns on sickness, he told Zuckerman about the psychic payoff for the patient. Zuckerman allowed that there might well be profits to be reckoned in similarly enigmatic cases, but as for himself, he hated being sick: there was no payoff that could possibly compensate for his disabling physical pain. The “secondary gains” the analyst identified couldn’t begin to make up for the primary loss. But perhaps, the analyst suggested, the Zuckerman who was getting paid off wasn’t the self he perceived as himself but the ineradicable infant, the atoning penitent, the guilty pariah—perhaps it was the remorseful son of the dead parents, the author of Carnovsky.
It had taken three weeks for the doctor to say this out loud. It might be months before he broke the news of the hysterical conversion symptom.
“Expiation through suffering?” Zuckerman said. “The pain being my judgment on myself and that book?”
“Is it?” the analyst asked.
“No,” Zuckerman replied, and three weeks after it had begun, he terminated the therapy by walking out.
One doctor prescribed a regimen of twelve aspirin per day, another prescribed Butazolidin, another Robaxin, another Percodan, another Valium, another Prednisone; another told him to throw all the pills down the toilet, the poisonous Prednisone first, and “learn to live with it.” Untreatable pain of unknown origins is one of the vicissitudes of life—however much it impaired physical movement, it was still wholly compatible with a perfect state of health. Zuckerman was simply a well man who suffered pain. “And I make it a habit,” continued the no-nonsense doctor, “never to treat anybody who isn’t ill. Furthermore,” he advised, “after you leave here, steer clear of the psychosomologists. You don’t need any more of that.” “What’s a psychosomologist?” “A baffled little physician. The Freudian personalization of every ache and pain is the crudest weapon to have been bequeathed to these guys since the leech pot. If pain were only the expression of something else, it would all be hunky-dory. But unhappily life isn’t organized as logically as that. Pain is in addition to everything else. There are hysterics, of course, who can mime any disease, but they constitute a far more exotic species of chameleon than the psychosomologists lead all you gullible sufferers to believe. You are no such reptile. Case dismissed.”
It was only days after the psychoanalyst had accused him, for the first time, of giving up the fight that Diana, his part-time secretary, took Zuckerman—who was able still to drive in forward gear but could no longer turn his head to back up—took him out in a rent-a-car to the Long Island laboratory where an electronic pain suppressor had just been invented. He’d read an item in the business section of the Sunday Times announcing the laboratory’s acquisition of a patent on the device, and the next morning at nine phoned to arrange an appointment. The director and the chief engineer were in the parking lot to welcome him when he and Diana arrived; they were thrilled that Nathan Zuckerman should be their first “pain patient” and snapped a Polaroid picture of him at the front entrance. The chief engineer explained that he had developed the idea to relieve the director’s wife of sinus headaches. They were very much in the experimental stages, still discovering refinements of technique by which to alleviate the most recalcitrant forms of chronic pain. He got Zuckerman out of his shirt and showed him how to use the machine. After the demonstration session, Zuckerman felt neither better nor worse, but the director assured him that his wife was a new woman and insisted that Zuckerman take a pain suppressor home on approval and keep it for as long as he liked.
Isherwood is a camera with his shutter open, I am the experiment in chronic pain.
The machine was about the size of an alarm clock. He set the timer, put two moistened electrode pads above and below the site of the pain, and six times a day gave himself a low-voltage shock for five minutes. And six times a day he waited for the pain to go away—actually he waited for it to go away a hundred times a day. Having waited long enough, he then took Valium or aspirin or Butazolidin or Percodan or Robaxin; at five in the evening he said the hell with it and began taking the vodka. And as tens of millions of Russians have known for hundreds of years, that is the best pain suppressor of all.
By December 1973, he’d run out of hope of finding a treatment, drug, doctor, or cure—certainly of finding an honest disease. He was living with it, but not because he’d learned to. What he’d learned was that something decisive had happened to him, and whatever the unfathomable reason, he and his existence weren’t remotely what they’d been between 1933 and 1971. He knew about solitary confinement from writing alone in a room virtually every day since his early twenties; he’d served nearly twenty years of that sentence, obediently and on his best behavior. But this was confinement without the writing and he was taking it only a little better than the eight days harnessed to room 611. Indeed, he had never left off upbraiding himself with the question that had followed him from the hospital after his escape: What if what was happening to you were really terrible?
Yet, even if this didn’t register terrible on the scale of global misery, it felt terrible to him. He felt pointless, worthless, meaningless, stunned that it should seem so terrible and undo him so completely, bewildered by defeat on a front where he hadn’t even known himself to be at war. He had shaken free at an early age from the sentimental claims of a conventional, protective, worshipful family, he had surmounted a great university’s beguiling purity, he had torn loose from the puzzle of passionless marriages to three exemplary women and from the moral propriety of his own early books; he had worked hard for his place as a writer—eager for recognition in his striving twenties, desperate for serenity in his celebrated thirties—only at forty to be vanquished by a causeless, nameless, untreatable phantom disease. It wasn’t leukemia or lupus or diabetes, it wasn’t multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy or even rheumatoid arthritis—it was nothing. Yet to nothing he was losing his confidence, his sanity, and his self-respect.
He was also losing his hair. Either from all the worrying or all the drugs. He saw hair on the thesaurus when he rose from a session on the playmat. Hair came away by the combful as he prepared himself at the bathroom mirror for his next empty day. Shampooing in the shower, he found the strands of hair looped in the palms of his hands doubling and tripling with every rinse—he expected to see things getting better and with each successive rinsing they got worse.
In the Yellow Pages he found “Anton Associates Trichological Clinic”—the least outlandish ad under “Scalp Care”—and went off to the basement of the Commodore Hotel to see if they could make good on their modest promise to “control all controllable hair problems.” He had the time, he had the hair problem, and it would be something like an adventure voyaging from the playmat to midtown one afternoon a week. The treatments couldn’t be less effective than what he’d been getting at Manhattan’s finest medical facilities for his neck, arms, and shoulders. In happier times he might have resigned himself with little more than a pang to the dismaying change in his appearance, but with so much else giving way in life, he decided “No, no further”: vocationally obstructed, physically disabled, sexually mindless, intellectually inert, spiritually depressed—but not bald overnight, not that too.