Philip Roth: Operation Shylock

“Well,” I said to Claire, “there’s somebody in Jerusalem attending the Ivan the Terrible trial who’s going around claiming to be me. Calls himself by my name. Gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper — that’s what Aharon was reading to me over the phone.”

“You found this out just now?” she asked.

“No. Aharon phoned me in New York last week. So did my cousin Apter. Apter’s landlady said she’d seen me on TV. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know what, if anything, it all amounted to.”

“You’re green, Philip. You’ve turned a frightening color.”

“Have I? I’m tired, that’s all. I was up on and off all night.”

“You’re not taking. …”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Don’t sound resentful. I just don’t want anything to happen to you. Because you have turned a terrible color — and you seem … swamped.”

“Do I? Did I? I didn’t think I did. And it’s you who have actually turned colors.”

“I’m worried, that’s why. You seem …”

“What? Seem what? What it seems to me I seem to be is someone who has just found out that somebody down in Jerusalem is giving newspaper interviews in his name. You heard what I said to Aharon. As soon as the business day begins in New York, I’m going to call Helene. I think now that the best thing is for her to telephone the paper and to get them to print a retraction tomorrow. It’s a start at stopping him. Once their retraction’s out, no other newspaper is going to go near him. That’s step number one.”

“What’s step number two?”

“I don’t know. Maybe step number two won’t be necessary. I don’t know what the law is. Do I slap an injunction on him? In Israel? Maybe what Helene does is to contact a lawyer down there. When I speak to her, I’ll find out.”

“Maybe step number two is not going there right now.”

“That’s ridiculous. Look, I’m not swamped. It’s not my plans that are going to change — it’s his.”

But by the afternoon I was back again to thinking that it was far more reasonable, sensible, and even, in the long run, more satisfyingly ruthless to do nothing for now. Telling Claire anything, given her continuing apprehension about my well-being, was, of course, a mistake and, had she not been sitting across from me at the breakfast table when Aharon phoned in his latest report, one that I would never have made. And an even bigger mistake, I thought, would be to set lawyers loose now, on two continents no less, who might not effect an outcome any less damaging than I could — if, that is, I could manage to remain something more helpful than volatilely irritated until, eventually, this impostor played out his disaster, all alone, as he must. A retraction was not likely to undo whatever damage had already been done by the newspaper’s original error. The ideas espoused so forcefully by the Philip Roth in that story were mine now and would likely endure as mine even in the recollection of those who’d read the retraction tomorrow. Nonetheless, this was not, I sternly reminded myself, the worst upheaval of my life, and I was not going to permit myself to behave as though it were. Instead of rushing to mobilize an army of legal defenders, better just to sit comfortably back on the sidelines and watch while he manufactures for the Israeli press and public a version of me so absolutely not-me that it will require nothing, neither judicial intervention nor newspaper retractions, to clear everyone’s mind of confusion and expose him as whatever he is.

After all, despite the temptation to chalk him up to Halcion’s lingering hold on me, he was not my but his hallucination, and by January 1988 I’d come to understand that he had more to fear from that than I did. Up against reality I was not quite so outclassed as I’d been up against that sleeping pill; up against reality I had at my disposal the strongest weapon in anyone’s arsenal: my own reality. It wasn’t I who was in danger of being displaced by him but he who had without question to be effaced by me — exposed, effaced, and extinguished. It was just a matter of time. Panic characteristically urges, in its quivering, raving, overexcitable way, “Do something before he goes too far!” and is loudly seconded by Powerless Fear. Meanwhile, poised and balanced, Reason, the exalted voice of Reason, counsels, “You have everything on your side, he has nothing on his. Try eradicating him overnight, before he has fully revealed exactly what he’s intent on doing, and he’ll only elude you to pop up elsewhere and start this stuff all over again. Let him go too far. There is no more cunning way to shut him down. He can only be defeated.”

Needless to say, had I told Claire that evening that I’d changed my mind since morning and, instead of racing into battle armed with lawyers, proposed now to let him inflate the hoax until it blew up in his face, she would have replied that to do that would only invite trouble potentially more threatening to my newly reconstituted stability than the little that had so far resulted from what was still only a minor, if outlandish, nuisance. She would argue with even more concern than she’d displayed at breakfast — because three months of helplessly watching my collapse up close had deeply scarred her faith in me and hadn’t done much for her own stability either — that I was nowhere ready for a test as unlikely and puzzling as this one, while I, experiencing all the satisfaction that’s bestowed by a strategy of restraint, exhilarated by the sense of personal freedom that issues from refusing to respond to an emergency other than with a realistic appraisal and levelheaded self-control, was convinced of just the opposite. I felt absolutely rapturous over the decision to take on this impostor by myself, for on my own and by myself was how I’d always preferred to encounter just about everything. My God, I thought, this is me again, finally the much-pined-for natural upsurge of my obstinate, energetic, independent self, zeroed back in on life and brimming with my old resolve, vying once again with an adversary a little less chimerical than sickly, crippling unreality. He was just what the psychopharmacologist ordered! All right, bud, one on one, let’s fight! You can only be defeated.

At dinner that evening, before Claire had a chance to ask me anything, I lied and told her that I had spoken with my lawyer, that from New York she had contacted the Israeli paper, and that a retraction was to be printed there the next day.

“I still don’t like it,” she replied.

“But what more can we do? What more need be done?”

“I don’t like the idea of you there alone while this person is on the loose. It’s not a good idea at all. Who knows what he is or who he is or what he’s actually up to? Suppose he’s crazy. You yourself called him a madman this morning. What if this madman is armed?”

“Whatever I may have called him, I happen to know nothing about him.”

“That’s my point.”

“And why should he be armed? You don’t need a pistol to impersonate me.”

“It’s Israel — everybody’s armed. Half the people in the street traipsing around carrying guns — I never saw so many guns in my life. Your going there, at a time like this, with everything erupting everywhere, is a terrible, terrible mistake.”

She was referring to the riots that had begun in Gaza and the West Bank the month before and that I’d been following in New York on the nightly news. A curfew was in effect in East Jerusalem and tourists had been warned away particularly from the Old City because of the stone throwing there and the possibility of violent clashes escalating between the army and the Arab residents. The media had taken to describing these riots, which had become a more or less daily occurrence in the Occupied Territories, as a Palestinian uprising.