Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

It became clear why in all these years he hadn’t ever discussed my article about Eliade with me; in fact, he never warned me that he was writing the novel Ravelstein, which in December 1999 must have been on the road to print, precisely when we were conducting our six-hour videotaped interview for the Jerusalem Cultural Project.* In 1997, when, uneasily, I prepared for a visit to Romania, he advised me to follow my instincts and avoid the trip. Not because it would be dangerous, as others maintained, but because I would only torture myself unnecessarily. “You have enough to torture yourself with here. You don’t need a supplement. You’ll feel miserable. I just read another book about another celebrated Romanian. The manners, the culture, you know. But what’s underneath … No, don’t go. Profit from the distance.”

*This is a non-profit Israeli organization that sponsored a series of interviews with important Jewish writers.

When I met him at the Romanian Writers’ Union in 1978, I asked Bellow if he would choose between Herzog and Humboldt. Between the intellectual, rationalist, humanist, contemplative, on the one hand, and the genius artist, damned, excessive in everything, on the other. “Difficult question,” he had responded, adding that he felt tied to both characters.

In 1999, I asked the question again in America, reminding him of the meeting in Bucharest. I added that I had the impression that in the intervening years he had become closer to the artist, that he had developed a basic distrust of the intellectual.

“Maybe. I hadn’t thought of this. I’m not used to thinking about such questions. These are questions of a theoretical interest, but something else drives you. To define who you are: an intellectual or an artist? It leads to thinking about who is actually more naïve, the intellectual or the artist. I’ve never reached a conclusion. I’m not even sure that being naïve is a sin. Maybe the question leads to something much more serious.”

In our last meetings Saul could seem tired or apathetic and suddenly awaken, spring to life at some slight provocation or piece of wit. Before a reading he was to give in 2002 at the 92nd Street Y, we sat with him in a luxurious Central Park West apartment, at a party given in his honor. But most of the other guests were unconcerned with him, absorbed by the day’s gossip. Bellow lay absently, alone on the sofa, like an aged grandfather that no one paid attention to anymore, and he watched, amused, from time to time, his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who ran tirelessly from corner to corner. When Philip Roth appeared and greeted him with classic Middle English verses, however, he woke up promptly. He responded in turn with other verses from The Canterbury Tales. For about ten minutes, an amazing, merry contest was pursued, with poems recited from memory. Neither of the competitors could be defeated. I was astonished.

“It’s nothing special. Clever boys always,” Philip said. “Didn’t you learn important Romanian poetry by heart?”

Yes, in high school I had won a sort of unofficial contest for the memorization of Romanian poetry.

III

The incident reminded me of a dinner we had in the summer of 2001 at Le Petit Chef in Vermont. Saul woke up abruptly from his dreamy absence when his editor asked him, as she had asked everyone else, what he thought about the decadence of American culture and his own relation to it. Bellow looked at her for a long time and responded, somewhat obliquely: “When I decided my way in life, I knew that society would be against me. I also knew that I would win …. And that it would be a small victory.”

He had been completely blank until that moment, and it was difficult for us to believe that he could be brought back from his amnesia. His appealing response woke us up too, and I took it also as an answer to the many questions I had put to him — in Bucharest, in Boston and Vermont. And I pursue him still, with my questions, to this very day.

Translated by Carrie Messenger, fall, 2005

The last time I met Nathan Zuckerman was July 2006, when he came to Bard College for the birthday party celebrating the end of my puberty.

That evening I found myself reflecting upon our nearly twenty years of friendship, during which Nathan has served as an unconventional and invaluable guide to American life, psyche, and art. And I was struck yet again by what a privilege it has been, as a newcomer to this country, to have someone like Nathan decoding for me this unknown, new territory.

We live today in a time when nothing is seen, heard, or read if it’s not scandalous and nothing seems scandalous enough to be memorable. Yet, in his triple role — as author, character, and narrator, a quite unusual literary performance — Nathan has proven, over a long and extraordinary career, to be, and to remain, memorable.

How does a writer who declares himself preoccupied with “introspection and subjectivity” become a master chronicler of the American twentieth century? By using the individual — the real subject of literature — as the focal point for introspection in a nation that doesn’t have time for introspection and doesn’t like it too much. Suspicious of parochial thinking or habits, Nathan has nevertheless established himself as a deep and knowledgeable observer of communal and community manners, Jewish, black, feminist and even political correctness. For him, “running away” from our narrow, little routines means a necessary flight from bigotry, feuds, social hypocrisy and other constrictions in order to acquire references larger, as he says, “than the kitchen table in Newark.” Yet he also understands, painfully well, not only the liberating but the taxing power of such an essential and risky enterprise.

*This text was read at the festive evening at Queens College, New York, Tuesday April 28, 2009, honoring “50 years of fiction” by Philip Roth.

A reviewer once called Nathan’s work “the comedy of entrapment.” As someone who comes from a place and a biography where the tragicomedy of entrapment was daily, unavoidable and for everybody, I can understand what my American interlocutor means when he says: “As an artist the nuance is your task and the intrinsic nature of the particular is to fail to conform.” Or when he confesses: “Disillusionment is a way of caring for one’s country.” Or when he warns us: “About a man everything is believable.” What essentially fuels his battles and his successes is the uncompromising courage, humor, intelligence, and talent evident in all his writing. His creed has persistently been the same: “My mind is my church — my laughs are the core of my faith.” This may be one very good reason why his readers have not parted from him.

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.