And here he is, doing it all over again. Is the present book a way of compounding the sin or of absolving it? As if to propitiate the ghosts of his parents, Zuckerman decides (like Bellow’s Eugene Henderson) to make a late bid for medical school, to become, however tardily, the good boy in the Portnoy joke. ‘Help!’ cries the Jewish mother on the beach. ‘My son the doctor is drowning!’ He flies out to Chicago, spurning his New York celebrity, his four mistresses, his inertness, abandoning above all and for ever those three hated words that have stared him in the face for twenty years: ‘qwertyuiop, asdfghkl and zxcvbnm.’
High on booze and pain-killers, on despair and mother-grief, Zuckerman undergoes his elaborate crack-up. He passes himself off as a gross, blaspheming pornographer (called Milton Appel: the intention is clear, as usual, though the humour here is way off beam); at a snowbound cemetery he attacks a pious and elderly Jewish mourner (Mr Freytag, one of several superb cameos): he falls (or is he pushed by his Nazi-ish chauffeuse?) and splits his face open on a headstone. Hospitalised, and silenced by his wired jaw, Zuckerman finally submits to the only real anatomy lesson. He finds out what pain can do – ‘he’d had no idea’ — and what it does to others. And he learns the impossibility, so the last sentence promises, of escaping ‘the corpus that was his’.
Well. Roth’s corpus certainly has a funny shape to it by now, entirely transformed as it has been by that ‘hate-filled bestseller’, Portnoy’s Complaint. No modern writer, perhaps no writer, has taken self-examination so far and so literally. What would Roth’s oeuvre look like now, if Portnoy had simply sunk without trace? He recognises that ‘the size of the success’ was largely fortuitous, and yet he has written three whole novels about what that success did to him. Where next? A novel about this novel? A tetralogy about the trilogy?
‘It wasn’t literary fame,’ says Zuckerman, ‘it was sexual fame, and sexual fame stinks.’ This may be true, but Portnoy remains the only novel in which Roth’s contorted genius managed to shed its inhibitions. With the case of Nathan Zuckerman, the self-revelation exhausts its power to titillate or scandalise, and the reader starts looking for the artistic content of the work, not the symbols, the decor, so much as the phrasing, the responsiveness. Roth’s prose is usually elegant and sprucely ironic, but it has lost the capacity to surprise. There is not enough laughter or lyricism, there is not enough weather, there is not enough happening on the page. The Zuckerman novels look like life looks before art has properly finished with it. And Roth’s corpus still gives the impression of a turbulent talent searching for a decorous way to explode.
New Statesman 1978 and Observer 1984
Elvis: He Did It His Way
At this stage in the obsequies, a genuinely ‘shocking’ book about Elvis Presley would disclose that the King secretly gave away vast sums to charity, that he was actually very slim and healthy, and spent much of his free time working with handicapped children. But it is not to be. Following the slanderous testimonies of every hanger-on in the entourage, we are now offered a definitive summation of the grossness, egomania and barbaric vulgarity that was, apparently, Elvis.
Albert Goldman’s Elvis, which one is obliged to call an investigative biography, begins and ends with an eerie evocation of the mature Presley. First, the house — Graceland. It looks like a brothel or a gangster’s triplex: red velour, gilded tassels, simulated waterfalls, polyurethane finish. Elvis always insisted that everything around him had to be new. ‘When I wuz growin’ up in Tupelo,’ he is quoted as saying, ‘I lived with enough fuckin’ antiques to do me for a lifetime.’
On to the master bedroom — black suede walls, crimson carpets and curtains, 81 square feet of bed with mortuary headboard and speckled armrests. To one side is an easel supporting a large photograph of Elvis’s mother Gladys; to the other is a sepia-toned portrait of Jesus Christ in his pink nightie. On the bed lies Elvis himself — ‘propped up’, in Goldman’s gallant formulation, ‘like a big fat woman recovering from some operation on her reproductive organs.’