Life Versus Books

On Philip Roth's "The Ghost Writer", and whether life should be sacrificed for art.

There’s a certain kind of question people like to ask writers. Readers queue up at book events, like day-trippers at a zoo waiting to watch the bored lion get fed, so they can finally ask, “What kind of pen do you use to write your first drafts?” (Here, a number of people drop out of the queue, their question asked for them; those remaining shift to their second question: “Where do you get your ideas from?”)

This kind of reader is, apparently, fascinated by the details of how a writer writes. You have to assume these people are budding authors, or living an imagined life in which they will one day write the book they’re convinced lives within them.¹ I get it: there are few better ways of not writing than fantasising about how you might write, one day, when you get the perfect chair, the perfect desk, the perfect pen. Author interviews become the go-to for guidance on solving this puzzle of perfection.

“When you admire a writer you become curious. You look for his secret. The clues to his puzzle.”

This is the view of Nathan Zuckerman, narrator of Philip Roth’s minor masterpiece The Ghost Writer. For some reason, Nathan is best described in the German language. He is “a Bildungsroman hero”, whose Bildung is just beginning at the start of this Roman; he’s also a Wunderkind, and very aware of the fact; and the young, unmarried Nathan was the source of some Maskenfreiheit for his ageing, divorced author.

Nathan is the number-one fan of the reclusive E. I. Lonoff. When the young man arrives at the older novelist’s snowed-in hideaway (“the home of an unchaste monk”), he plans to become his idol’s protégé and surrogate son. Nathan has no questions about writing routines or penning a great query letter to agents. (Much of the content on Substack would no doubt bewilder him.) He wants to know how great writers build lives in service to Art, aggrandised through insistent capitalisation.

Forget where you get your pencils or your ideas; what matters here is which side you pick in a battle of life versus art. Sorry — Art.

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It’s easy to mock the young writer-as-devotee worshipping at the altar of Art. I was one of those young men (they’re usually men, for whatever reason) so I feel granted some freedom to be fairly derisive about them, because really I’m looking down on who I once was. It’s a salve to the shame of recognising the younger me in Nathan’s unembarrassed self-description as “an orthodox atheist and highbrow-in-training”.

But it’s not all turtlenecks, and correcting people’s grammar, and finding reasons to mention Goethe and over-pronouncing Goethe, and scoffing at people who think that modern absinthe is anything like real absinthe, the kind Baudelaire drank, a poet you consider your literary antecedent if only the world would finally recognise it. (See, it is easy to make fun of them.)

There’s also a real sincerity about these kids. They’re true believers in all the worst ways, yes, but also in the best. Their faith might often manifest as youthful naivety, but they also stand as a bulwark against the weary pessimism of age. In The Ghost Writer, Nathan relates how the trendy scene-shapers back in New York dismissed Lonoff as a mere comic figure of Jewish out-of-placery in the American wilderness:

“However, since everybody else of renown I mentioned at the party also seemed slightly amusing to those in the know, I had been skeptical about their satiric description of the famous rural recluse. In fact, from what I saw at that party, I could begin to understand why hiding out twelve hundred feet up in the mountains with just the birds and the trees might not be a bad idea for a writer, Jewish or not.”

I still remember how, back then, cynicism seemed to be the mere vinegar stench that came off of once-ripe talent left to sharpen and sour. In opposition to world-weary cynics masquerading as worldly pragmatists, and their pessimism passing for prescience, is the enthusiasm of the cultural initiate. For them, optimism is a kind of credo and idealism is a worldview.

It’s a religion that rejects the vulgarity of cynicism and its misguided course-correction in poptimism (you’ll never catch one of these young men taking a Marvel movie seriously), a faith that unabashedly aspires (in Nathan’s words) to “Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion”:

“All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the gruelling, exalted, transcendent calling.”

The question for such a person becomes: How does a writer find that seclusion, that sacred space for the holy act of devoting one’s life to Art?

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Here’s Roth telling David Remnick for The New Yorker about the shape of his solitary life:

“My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don’t have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don’t have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning — this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens — and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can’t sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I’m on call. I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.”

And here’s the daily life of the great E. I. Lonoff, whom Nathan wants to emulate:

“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.”

If he takes even a day away from this routine, his wife suffers the terrible mood and sulking that result from his becoming “frantic with boredom and a sense of waste”. Just to underline that: Lonoff is describing time spent with his wife as wasted. Here’s a typical Sunday, when he forces himself to take a walk with his wife in the woods behind their house:

“I’m restless, I’m bad-tempered, but she’s a human being too, you see,² so I go. To avoid trouble she makes me leave my watch at home. The result is that I look at my wrist instead. We’re walking, she’s talking, then I look at my wrist — and that generally does it, if my foul mood hasn’t already. She throws in the sponge and we come home.”

And how does Nathan respond to this?

“The life [Lonoff] described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.”

There’s the defence, the wall built between the ego within and accusations of narcissism from without: it’s not just for me, all this self-centred living, it’s for the good of the world. So it’s not only Art that gets the grandeur of a capital letter — so does the Artist.

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Philip Roth left twenty-five books as a legacy when he died; he won America’s four major literary awards in one decade, the nineties; he wrote not only some of the best books of that same decade — at least one of which sits among the greatest of the 20th century — but also the toweringly phenomenal American Trilogy in a mere four years.

Maybe this is the devil’s bargain required to achieve what Roth achieved. Any good Faustian pact has an upside bought at high cost, and some would point to that upside in defence of Roth’s ascetic lifestyle.³ The upside for Roth was his prolific and high-quality output.

Maybe he had to make the same choice as Nathan, who “chose perfection in the work rather than the life”. Maybe it was worth it.

Maybe.

Of course, it’s easy for me as a reader to say I’m glad Roth wrote the books he did, that if it cost him what it cost him, so be it. But would the people who knew him say that? What would (did) the people who had skin in the game of his life say about it?

Lonoff’s wife makes her feelings clear. Over dinner, she loses her cool with his incessant coolness about living, throwing a wineglass against a wall. She screams at him to throw her out of the house, before collapsing in a chair and insisting he take up with one of his young students. “If you want her, take her,” she cries, “and then you won’t be so miserable, and everything in the world won’t be so bleak.” By the end of the novel, she’s delivering this sermon of damnation against her miserable husband:

“Nothing can be touched, nothing can be changed, everybody must be quiet, the children must shut up, their friends must stay away until four...”

The actress Claire Bloom was living with Roth while he worked on The Ghost Writer, and in her memoir, she tells a story about how he came out of his study one day to ask what it was like to live with a writer. He wanted to add texture to his portrait of Lonoff’s wife, and he was happy to take that texture from Bloom. Her response was as certain as it was immediate:

“We don’t go anywhere! We don’t do anything! We don’t see anyone!”

Here is art imitating a life that imitates life. Here, as Lonoff’s long-suffering wife puts it, is his religion of art: “Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of!”

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In an interview with The Paris Review, Roth described his writing career like this:

“Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.”

Twenty-four-year-old me would find that idea and its phrasing — “a half-imaginary existence” — both romantic and sad. Present-day me, who went and lived the life that youthful writer planned to avoid, would say he’s only half-right. The actual drama of life seems like the place to be these days.

Because who’s the art for if not for other people? Is the idea to live alone to write stuff for yourself? You’d have a better time of it just staying in your room and masturbating. The writers who want their writing to connect with the world, who want their work to interact with life, who even quietly hope like a prayer to possibly-maybe-if-you’re-very-lucky change one reader’s life in some small way — those writers eventually trade their resentment at non-writerly obligations for gratitude that the world exists to inspire and receive their art.

I don’t mean to sound depressingly upbeat about the dynamics between mundane life and the effort to be creative. I spend a lot of time cursing my day job, and there are days when I’m too busy daydreaming about walking out of there to think about writing. But then I read someone like

Alexander Sorondo

turning the straw of his job at a grocery store into the gold of his Substack essays, and I remember the Stoics telling us that the world is the world and the best we can do is change our response to its intractable facts. So I go back to the day job with gratitude, and it lasts a few days before I’m pissed off again. Thankfully, Sorondo publishes often and regularly.

And that’s how this writer lives. Now I’m off out for a walk with my wife.

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1. Christopher Hitchens once wrote that it’s undoubtedly true that everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.

2. I love this showily patient and condescendingly didactic “you see”, like he’s explaining something quite mystifying and not at all entirely-bloody-obvious to everyone: his wife is a human, what insight.

3. It feels wrong to describe those lonely days emptied of relationships and filled with work as a “lifestyle”, like calling baldness a “hairstyle”.