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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.
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