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Suddenly, literature, politics, and analysis came together, and I began to think more inclusively about the emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit to which all human beings are heir. In the course of analytic time, it became apparent that—with or without the burden of social justice—the effort required to attain any semblance of inner freedom was extraordinary. Great literature, I then realized, is a record not of the achievement, but of the effort.
Jarrell once said that without literature human life was animal life. By literature, he meant, equally, both the writing of books and the reading of them. Reading, Jarrell thought, gave us back ourselves in a way that no other kind of non-material nourishment could match. In the ordinary dailiness of life we are alone in our heads, locked into a chaos of half-thoughts, fleeting angers, confused desires. When you read, the noise in your head clears out. You start having full thoughts. Full thoughts begin an internal conversation. Pretty soon, there are two of you in the room: you and your responding self. Now, you’ve got company, you’re connected. No longer do you feel alienated, not from yourself, not from others. Reading, therefore, is a supremely civilizing act.
The pity of it all is the loneliness trapped inside Roth’s radiant poison. In The Anatomy Lesson (by now it’s 1983) Nathan Zuckerman cries out, “How have I come to be such an enemy and a flayer of myself? And so alone! Oh, so alone! Nothing but self ! Locked up in me!” For Zuckerman, life, from beginning to end, is a howling wilderness. He is alone on the planet: alive but in solitary. All he has ever had to keep him company is the sexual force of his own rhetoric. Unchanged and unchanging, he struggles on, book after book, decade after decade, doomed to repeat in language that glows in the dark the increasingly tired narrative of the illness from which he can neither recover nor expire: his solipsism. He has succumbed to the danger inherent in closing the space between author and narrator; he has fallen in love with the inability to see himself in anyone other than himself, a development that leads inexorably to stasis.
wow
There’s a certain kind of cultural hero—the artist, the scientist, the thinker—who is often characterized as one who lives for “the work.” Family, friends, moral obligations be damned, the work comes first. The reason the work comes first in the case of the artist, the scientist, the thinker is that its practice makes flare into bright life a sense of inner expressiveness that is incomparable. To feel not simply alive but expressive is to feel as though one has reached center. That conviction of centeredness irradiates the mind, heart, and spirit like nothing else. Many if not most of the Communists who felt destined for a life of serious radicalism experienced themselves in exactly the same way. Their lives too—impassioned by an ideal of social justice—were irradiated by a kind of expressiveness that made them feel brilliantly centered. This centeredness glowed in the dark: it was what made them beautiful, well spoken, and often heroic.
[...] the mere articulation of the words in my mother’s mouth produced a peculiar and relieving focus against the murkiness of that mysterious force, a focus which told me where and who I was: I was the daughter of Papa who worked hard all day long. Finally, the words said: We are all of us, here in this house, vitally connected to the fact that Papa works hard all day long. We pay attention to and respect that fact; we make common cause with it. This last, this oneness, this solidarity, produced in me pride and excitement; it dissolved the numbness and transformed the pain back into a moving, stirring, agitating element: something to be understood and responded to, something to be dealt with and struggled against.
They took with them on this journey not only their own narrow, impoverished experience but a set of abstractions as well, abstractions with the power to transform. When these people sat down at the kitchen table to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them, above all, History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that had world-making properties. This context lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity of the soul into which they had been born and gave them, for the first time in their lives, a sense of rights as well as of obligations. They had rights because they now knew who and what they were. They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians. They were not a people without a history, they had the Russian Revolution. They were not without a civilizing world view, they had Marxism.
Who, who came out of that world could fail to remember the extraordinary quality these experiences embodied for all those living through them? You were, if you were there, in the presence of one of the most amazing of humanizing processes: that process whereby one emerges by merging; whereby one experiences oneself through an idea of the self beyond the self and one becomes free, whole, and separate through the mysterious agency of a disciplining context. In short, you were in the presence of the socializing emotion, that emotion whose operating force is such that men and women feel themselves not through that which composes their own unique, individual selves but rather through that which composes the shared, irreducible self.
What I remember most deeply about the Communists is their passion. It was passion that converted them, passion that held them, passion that lifted them up and then twisted them down. Each and every one of them experienced a kind of inner radiance: some intensity of illumination that tore at the soul. To know that radiance, to be lit from within, and then to lose it; to be thrown back, away from its light and heat; to know thereafter the ordinary greyness of life, black and lightless; that was to know a kind of exaltation and dread that can be understood only, perhaps, by those who have loved deeply and suffered the crippling loss of that love.
“[...] Imagine being that poor with nothing to explain your poverty to you, nothing to give it some meaning, to help you get through the days and years because you could believe that it wouldn’t always be this way.
“That’s what our politics was to us. It literally negated our deprivation. It was rich, warm, energetic, an exciting thickness in which our lives were wrapped. It nourished us when nothing else nourished us. It not only kept us alive, it made us powerful inside ourselves. During the Depression my father couldn’t even get work as a button-maker. He made syrups—vanilla and chocolate, I’ll never forget—on the kitchen stove, and he poured them into huge milk cans, and he lugged them around the neighborhood selling them door-to-door. From the time I could schlepp the milk can I went with him. . . .
“But every Sunday for thirty years, rain or shine, in blizzards, in heat, sick, starving or otherwise, he sold the Daily Worker down at the railroad yards. And when he sold the Daily Worker he seemed suddenly whole and strong, and then I loved him desperately.
Saltzman looks at his watch. “I’ve got to go,” he says. “You know, my union is striking. I’ve got to go relieve someone on the picket line.”
He shakes his head in wonder. “It’s not for myself that I picket anymore. I make good money now, I’m a privileged old man in the shop. It’s for them. It’s for these know-nothings who have come after me that I picket. You want an education in America? Come down to my shop building at seven o’clock in the morning. You’ll see them fighting like animals to get up to the shop to get at their machines. And then stand in the bank on Friday and look at their paychecks. A man with a family takes home seventy-seven dollars.”
Now Saltzman weeps in earnest. “For what?” he cries, forgetful of the fancy restaurant and the snobbish waiters. “All those years! For what? What have we accomplished here?”
man