322
PARTISAN REVIEW
from Raymond Chandler's
The
Big
Sleep,
during which our
unclearness as to what was occurring on the screen made some of us
like the film all the more.
For it is not what happens but the attitudes taken towards what
mayor may not happen or have happened that interest the novelist
and should interest his readers. To be sure, Nathan and Henry must
really go to Israel if readers are to locate them there, and find out
their attitudes towards the state, also towards the Israeli extremists.
But did they both go to Israel? Did Henry not go?
If
dead, how could
he have gone? Did Nathan go? And does he just imagine he found
Henry there, transformed into a follower of the fanatical, much–
worse-than-right-winger, Mordecai Lippman? Does it matter?
What counts, and whatever counts here counts comically, is the at–
titude we watch Henry assume, also the attitude Mordecai Lippman
makes dramatic as we listen to his wild harangues. And we do listen,
for his rhetoric is gorgeously comical.
Equally eloquent are the railings of Shulik, the Israeli jour–
nalist, who is against everything that smacks of madman-Zionism.
Probably Shulik's sentiments are rather close to the novelist's but
this, too, hardly matters . The novelist is not interested in our hear–
ing the different, opposed positions, he is not telling us what he
thinks, he is telling us of his hate . And his ire is not aroused by any
position taken, but by someone's belief in whatever position he took.
What provokes Roth's derision is belief as such, and never its object,
be that God, literature, dentistry, Christendom, Norman Mailer
wrongdoing of whatever epoch , Irving Howe goody-goodying of
whatever period. What is wrong is believing, not what is believed.
Thus Roth is not so much against God as against praying to God,
which, to him, means licking God's ass.
What does Roth have against believing? ln Israel (assuming he
is really there) Nathan has this thought about his brother : "What if
Henry has signed on with the Jewish cause without believing a
word? Could he have become that interesting?" But some men have
thought that it is interesting, even infinitely interesting, to believe .
Goethe, when asked which periods of history were interesting,
replied that it was the periods when people believed in something.
But Nathan Zuckerman and his creator Philip Roth are not living in
one of those periods when people's beliefs may have made them in–
teresting. Philip Roth, like his character, is living in our own period
of history , and from Roth's latest book I take it that he thinks
