BOOKS
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impregnated Maria; she is carrying his child. They have gone to
Christmas services with her mother and her sisters, after which they
have a tremendous fight. This is brought on by the anti-Semitism of
Maria's mother, revealed rather nastily to Nathan by Maria's sister,
Sarah. They argue-and I think Maria wins the argument. She,
too, is a writer, and according to Nathan, a better writer than he.
Now in the speeches they make to each other and in the letters they
write after Maria has walked out, they clearly put the force of
literary expression above the hope of being reconciled. Their
preference for expression over living has brought them together.
And it decrees that they must part. Not that like Rhett Butler and
Scarlett, they do not understand each other. Nathan and Maria
understand themselves and each other, yet they must part. They
have eaten of the fruit of the tree of literature. Can they spend their
days in a garden?
A great book is in some ways like a disaster: it tells us, as
disasters do, just how things stand. Everyone knew that nuclear
power is dangerous. It took Chernobyl to tell that we didn't really
know what we thought we knew. Roth's novel tells us of disasters of
the spirit we may have guessed at but not grasped as he has.
The
Counterlije,
like
The Sun Also Rises,
sets the horizon for a whole
generation, and I think Roth's generation is less likely to find a
traversible path than was Hemingway's, called "lost" by Gertrude
Stein. At least in the twenties it was not impossible to think of good
writing as away, and of literature as giving form to life. But Roth
has inherited-as we have-a world, in which one of the problems of
living is that life is now much too literary, and even for those who do
not write. But in fact, who is there now who does not write, or at
least think of writing? Who is not subject to the problems imposed
by writing, which the writers we admire surmount? And how can the
less gifted surmount them? We look with longing into the past, when
actions were admired, and deeds held better than words. But now
when there is practically nothing to be done, and nothing anyone
can think of doing, is the last word to be with words?
In
The Counterlije
as in
The Sun Also Rises
what is inescapably
real is impotence . Jake, the hero of Hemingway's novel, is physi–
cally impotent, while the other characters are simply unable to love .
In Roth's novel, the impotence of the hero, Nathan, and of his
brother, is said to be physical, induced by a drug for which there is
no other substitute than the operation which proves fatal to both in
the different versions of the event. But whatever the cause of
