Indelible

1.

Philip Roth is quick to remind us, right near the beginning of The Human Stain (2000), that Western literature begins with a bitter argument, one that takes place in the midst of a bogged-down war. If “all of European literature springs from a fight,” so does, not so coincidentally, Roth’s pugnacious novel, set in the midst of America’s “culture wars” at the very end of the twentieth century.

Coleman Silk, the book’s protagonist, is a former professor of classics, who spent his entire career, both teaching and in administration, at Athena College, located in the Berkshire hills and mountains of rural Massachusetts. When he was still teaching, before his angry resignation (more about that in a minute), Professor Silk, having taken the roll at the first class meeting of his ancient Greek literature course, would rhetorically ask his students, “You know how European literature begins?” and immediately supply the answer: “With a quarrel. All of European literature springs from a fight.”

To demonstrate his point, Silk would pick up a copy of Homer’s Iliad and read to the class its indelible opening lines, “Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles… Begin where they first quarreled, Agamemnon the King of men, and great Achilles.” Looking up from Homer, Silk would ask, “And what are they quarreling about, these two violent mighty souls? It’s as basic as a barroom brawl. They are quarreling over a woman. A girl, really. A girl stolen from her father. A girl abducted in a war…”

And we’re off, as countless other Greek Lit in Translation survey courses have been, parsing the details of who said what to whom on the plains of Troy, and what Apollo, Athena, Zeus and other divinities thought and did. Not only does the Iliad begin with the Greek military leaders quarreling among themselves about sacrificed daughters, wives on the homefront, and girls who are the spoils of war, but, it will be recalled, the whole quagmire of the Trojan War is predicated on an even more sensational outrage, the elopement or abduction (depending on whether you read the blogs or the middle-class news websites) of Helen, wife of a Greek king, by the intemperate Paris, prince of Troy.

The Human Stain, the first great American novel of the new millennium (which I had occasion to re-read recently), opens a couple of years after the professor’s last classroom peroration, with the revelation of a semi-scandalous secret about a woman. As the book’s narrator puts it, “It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbour Coleman Silk… confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college,” one Faunia Farley.

The voice of the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, will be familiar to readers of Philip Roth. The Human Stain is the concluding volume of an “American” trilogy that Roth produced in his mid-60s, at a time in life when many writers are winding down. (I discuss Roth’s late writings further in a recent essay, “Exit Strategies.”) It is also the eighth of a nine-novel cycle in which Zuckerman, Roth’s “alter brain,” appears. Zuckerman is, in this incarnation, in his mid-60s, a reclusive, well-known Jewish novelist, now incontinent and impotent (the result of the removal of his cancerous prostate), who has retreated into the New England backwoods, Nathaniel Hawthorne country, to practice his solitary, exacting vocation, one that, as he says much later, is “in professional competition with death.”

But before Roth provides the details of Coleman’s affair with Faunia and the quarrels it engenders, quarrels on the order of those between Agamemnon and Achilles — what were the names of those hapless girls they wrangled over, Chryseis?, Briseis? — Zuckerman launches into a medium- decibel tirade about the broader cultural war in which this particular skirmish will play out.

“The summer that Coleman took me into his confidence about Faunia Farley and their secret,” says Zuckerman, “was the summer, fittingly enough, that Bill Clinton’s secret emerged in every last mortifying detail — every last lifelike detail, the livingness, like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of the specific data.” Perhaps a decade or so on from President Bill Clinton’s fling with a government intern, Monica Lewinsky, the lifelike details of the forensics, including a semen-stained blue dress, and possibly even the ensuing congressional impeachment trial of the libidinous president, will have faded from public memory. But not for Zuckerman.

Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, … and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism — which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the nation’s security — was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenaged kids in a parking lot revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony. In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band; all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne (who, in the 1860s, lived not many miles from my door) identified in the incipient country of long ago as ‘the persecuting spirit’… No, if you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is.

Whatever else is going to happen at ground level to Coleman and Faunia (and plenty will), Zuckerman wants us to be apprised of the larger context, the Olympian level, the quarrels of the gods. Not perhaps the magnitude of a war over Troy, but an American culture war over Trojan condoms, identity politics, Viagra, racial righteousness, family values, and sexual propriety. As Zuckerman says, if you weren’t there, you don’t know what sanctimony is.

Prior to his semi-forced resignation, Coleman Silk had been a paragon of academia, “one of a handful of Jews on the Athena faculty when he was hired and perhaps among the first of the Jews permitted to teach in a classics department anywhere in America.” Moreover, for all those decades, he’d been an ostensibly orthodox family man, married four decades to his wife, Iris, and father of four children. While reconstructing Silk’s c.v., Zuckerman notes in an aside that a few years earlier Jews had been a rarity in those parts; indeed, the only Jew around Athena had been E.I. Lonoff, the all-but-forgotten short story writer, to whom, back when Zuckerman was a newly published apprentice, he had paid a “memorable visit.” Faithful readers of Roth will get the little in- joke here, a reference to The Ghost Writer (1979), the first of the Zuckerman cycle, in which that memorable visit to Lonoff is recounted.

Not only was Silk a prominent professor, he was also the first and only Jew ever to become dean of faculty at Athena, and as dean, “Coleman had taken an antiquated, backwater, Sleepy Hollowish college and not without steamrolling, put an end to the place as a gentleman’s farm…” Then, in 1995, after stepping down as dean, in order to round out his career back in the classroom before full retirement, he resumed teaching in the newly combined languages and literature department, which had in postmodernist fashion absorbed “classics,” run by the stylish French-born Professor Delphine Roux.

It was back in the classroom as a full-time professor “that Coleman spoke the self-incriminating word that would cause him voluntarily to sever all ties to the college — the single self-incriminating word of the many millions spoken aloud in his years of teaching and administering at Athens, and the word that, as Coleman understood things, directly led to his wife’s death.” Like profs everywhere, Silk had taken attendance at the beginning of the semester, partly to learn the names of his students. But there were two names that failed to get a response five weeks into the semester. At the next class, Coleman opened the session by asking, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?” Spooks.

Later that day, Professor Silk was “astonished to be called in by his successor, the new dean of faculty, to address the charge of racism brought against him by the two missing students, who turned out to be black, and who, though absent, had quickly learned of the locution in which he’d publicly raised the question of their absence.”

Impatiently, Silk tells the dean, “I was referring to their possibly ectoplasmic character. Isn’t that obvious? These two students had not attended a single class. That’s all I knew about them. I was using the word in its customary and primary meaning: ‘spook’ as a specter or a ghost. I had no idea what color these two students might be. I had known perhaps fifty years ago but had wholly forgotten that ‘spooks’ is an invidious term sometimes applied to blacks. Otherwise, since I am a totally meticulous…” Though he goes on (and on, as all of Roth’s characters do), given the moment in American cultural life, whatever he says is going to be too much and not enough.

In due course, Silk angrily resigns from Athena, his wife Iris unexpectedly dies of a stroke in the middle of the dispute (which is why Coleman thinks of her death as a direct casualty of the bizarre incident of political correctness), and Coleman goes a little crazy — which is what brings him into contact with Zuckerman, with whom heretofore he’d had only a nodding acquaintance.

Then, it’s two years later, the year of Clinton’s fling and impeachment. The retired Silk has managed to right himself and is in the midst of his age-defying affair with Faunia, when trouble comes again. This time, it’s double-barrelled: first, there’s an anonymous letter that says, “Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age,” penned, it turns out, by no one other than the Fury-driven Professor Delphine Roux, who also had had a hand in the “spooks” incident. Second, there’s Les Farley, the ex-husband of Faunia, a damaged Vietnam vet still suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder a quarter-century after the war that gave rise to it, who’s prone to stalking his ex-wive and her elderly Jewish lover. As Roth sets it up, there’s no shortage of quarrels, no lack of elements of tragedy in an era “when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered ‘Why are we so crazy?’”

2.

The high-tide waters of academic “identity politics,” though they left vestigial flotsam in the form of campus “harassment officers” and “speech codes,” have considerably receded in the interim since Roth’s book appeared. And perhaps with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, so has the broader cultural war in America. Readers coming belatedly to The Human Stain may wonder if there really was a time when a misconstrued word on a college campus could lead to a witchhunt, or a cross-generational romance could excite the Furies, feminist or warrior, to a wrath equivalent to that depicted in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.

The year before Roth’s novel was published, Richard Rorty (1931-2007), the most interesting American philosopher of the latter part of the century, discussed the country’s ongoing ideological confrontation in an essay in his Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), one of the defining books of the era. “At the moment there are two cultural wars being waged in the United States,” Rorty observes. The first war, he says, is the important one. It’s the one between “decent, humanitarian liberals” and fundamentalists of various stripes, promoting everything from born-again religious revivalism to faith-based opposition to abortion, homosexuality, gun control and even government itself. The outcome of that cultural war, says Rorty, “will decide whether our country continues along the trajectory” of everything from the Bill of Rights to the New Deal to the civil rights, feminist, and gay movements of our own era. “Continuing along that trajectory would mean that America might continue to set an example of increasing tolerance and increasing equality.” Rorty sees the fundamentalists, “the people who think hounding gays out of the military promotes traditional family values, as the same honest, decent, blinkered, disastrous people who voted for Hitler in 1933.” Rorty sees the humanitarian liberals “as defining the only America I care about.”

The second cultural war, he argues, is being waged primarily in the universities and its attendant intellectual journals. “It is between those who see modern liberal society as fatally flawed (the people handily lumped together as ‘postmodernists’) and typical left-wing Democrat professors like myself, people who see ours as a society in which technology and democratic institutions can, with luck, collaborate to increase equality and decrease suffering. This war is not very important,” Rorty declares. It is, he says, “just a tiny little dispute” within the ranks of “upmarket progressives.”

People on the harsher postmodernist left, says Rorty, operate from the perspective that the U.S. “is not so much in danger of slipping into fascism as it is a country which has always been quasi-fascist. These people typically think that nothing will change unless we get rid of ‘humanism,’ ‘liberal individualism’ and ‘technologism.’ People like me,” the social democratic Rorty admits, “see nothing wrong with any of these -isms, nor with the political and moral heritage of the Enlightenment.”

The identity politics of the 1990s that raged in the corridors of academia were far removed, in tone and temperament, from the earlier counterculture campus politics of the 1960s, a now legendary time of turbulence frequently and falsely cited by conservatives as the source of all of America’s subsequent ills. Though the New Left student politics of the 1960s were not short of foolishness and self-inflation, they were interestingly utopian, sometimes imaginative, and even playful. By contrast, the left-wing campus politics of the 1990s were rather a grim-lipped affair, humourless for the most part, and possessed of a self-righteousness reflective of an academic left that was powerless outside the precincts of its own committee rooms, lacking influence in a world where the real inequalities reigned. Since absence of power is proportionally inverse to the savagery displayed in its own bailiwick, the excesses of political correctness were predictable, if not of primary importance.

Though Rorty regards most of what got to be called “political correctness” and “identity politics” in the 1990s as “politically silly,” and quickly picked up on the early-warning signs of academic tribalism, he nonetheless also saw that many of those attacking postmodernism were prone to a sort of “Blimpishness.” They tended to ignore the criticisms of injustice that had motivated the postmodernists in the first place. Overall, Rorty demonstrates a level-headedness when it comes to the less important academic disputes, a cool demeanour not shared at Athena College. As for the important cultural war with the fundamentalists, whom Rorty believes to be “philosophically wrong as well as politically dangerous,” that’s the one to pay attention to, he insisted.

At the time of Rorty’s essay, the first signs of calm on the turbulent waters of identity politics were about to appear, but the flood waters of the important cultural war continued to rage. It’s the genius of Roth’s Human Stain to inextricably intertwine both aspects of those culture wars that Rorty delineated.

The point is that Roth isn’t making it up, even though he’s writing satire. By happenstance, as a faculty member myself, at a backwater post-secondary institution not all that different from Roth’s Athena College, I was one of the people who “lived through it,” as Zuckerman says, and thus got an intimation of “what sanctimony is.”

The discussion of “sexual harassment” on campus, and corollary issues involving discrimination against people of different ethnic and racial identities, as well as those of differing abilities and sexual orientation, began plausibly enough. When the problem of sexual harassment was called to our attention, I and others were prepared to raise our hands at the appropriate time to vote for the resolution to stop that sort of thing.

The appropriate moment and the resolution soon arrived. But from the beginning, there was something curious about the issue for which we were devising preventive mechanisms. First, there already existed an extensive process of monitoring and evaluating the performance and behaviour of teachers and students, which included the acts now called “sexual harassment,” and provided penalties up to and including expulsion. Second, our school, and similar ones, were already in the intellectual forefront of criticising sexism, racism, and homophobia in our society. But, on the other hand, maybe a proverbial “ounce of prevention” was worth the effort, we thought, to capture some acts lying between Criminal Code offenses and institutional regulatory codes.

In the end, the policy we (and many others) adopted, included, among much else, the notion that sexual harassment isn’t just unwanted touching and threatening come-ons, but also “comment of a sexual nature when the comment has the effect of creating an offensive [classroom or campus] environment, and it may include the expression of sexist attitudes.” It didn’t take much foresight to envision that the policy’s virtues might be outstripped by its potential excesses.

I probably would have thought Coleman Silk’s “spooks” incident rather farfetched if I hadn’t seen a “decent, humanitarian liberal” professor at a neighbouring university get caught up in the cogs of the academic machinery. Protesting a graduate student’s thesis defence at which male faculty and students had been barred, the professor penned a memo in which he described the dissertation examination as an “orgy of self-congratulation.” He was promptly charged by the student and her faculty advisor with sexual harrassment — the use of “orgy” was construed to mean an outbreak of lesbian sexuality on campus — and for the next two or three years his career was entangled in the coils of various human rights’ tribunals and commissions. There were other such incidents, but perhaps not as many as conservative professors and commentators liked to claim. Eventually, the fuss died down.

In the end, a sort of sanity, or maybe only exhaustion from unreason, prevailed, and most of the circumstances that Roth sends up in The Human Stain have simply become an historical memory, along with “the persecuting spirit” Hawthorne detected in The Scarlett Letter.

3.

About a quarter of the way into Roth’s novel about identity politics, another far deeper secret about identity, with barely a hint of forewarning, is suddenly revealed. Silk is consulting his ambitious, young lawyer in Athena, Nelson Primus, about getting a restraining order against the possibly psychopathic Les Farley. Instead, Primus subjects Silk to an overbearing lecture about the foolishness of such a course of action and primly advises the elderly academic to simply drop his scandalous affair with Faunia. Silk is enraged. He tells Primus, “I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug fucking lily-white face.”

A little aside here. The cameo characters, like Primus, who appear throughout The Human Stain, are never cut-outs, never mere caricatures. Rather than simply dispatching the smug lawyer, as he might have done, Roth gives us the subsequent scene in which Primus goes home that evening and explains to his wife how he totally blew it with old Silk, perhaps as a result of some combination of intimidation (“the man is a force… Somebody’s there when he’s sitting there.”) and a “wrong-headed attempt to be taken seriously by him, to impress him.” That is, Roth is sufficiently attentive to the nuances of human personality to show us that Primus is not just a self-righteous jerk. But Primus is left with a lingering question. “No, I don’t fault him for unloading on me like that. But, honey, the question remains… ‘Lily-white’? Why ‘lily-white’?”

With no more than that bare hint, Zuckerman begins a lengthy, richly detailed account of the youth of “Silky” Silk, growing up in a small New Jersey town, not unlike the one in which Zuckerman himself was raised, as the favourite son of a middle-class “model Negro family” of the late 1930s. They’re middle-class enough to be shocked to discover that the adolescent, athletic Coleman has successfully taken up the pugilistic arts at the local boxing club. (How Zuckerman acquires all this deep background is only revealed near the novel’s end, but as is typical of Roth’s storytelling skills, the intricate plot is woven with adamant confidence.)

The revelation that Silk is a light-skinned black man who could and did pass as white (and Jewish), for most of a lifetime — and what about his kids? what if they display a recessive gene? (they don’t) — only adds ultimate irony to his downfall, based as it is on a false accusation of uttering a racially derogatory remark. The improbable story of a man who reinvents himself at the cost of severing almost all ties to his past, and breaking a mother’s heart, is Roth’s daring reversal of every celebration of “roots.” If cultural politics is what the American left and right want to battle over, Philip Roth is prepared to lace up his gloves and take on America’s deepest cultural shame, the “human stain” of skin colour itself.

The Human Stain was, for the most part, not only favourably received, but listed as one of the New York Times’ “10 best books of 2000,” and it picked up a couple of lesser literary prizes, the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. It didn’t receive any of the bigger American prizes (the Pulitzer, National Book Award, or the National Book Critics Circle Award), and one critic, who otherwise praised the book, complained that the novel’s weakest parts were the “hatefully rendered interior monologues” of Delphine Roux and Les Farley.

Well, it’s true that Roth is less than fair to the French-born postmodern Fury, Delphine Roux, but it’s also true that identity politics spewed up its share of unfairness as well. However, the charge about the portrait of Les Farley is false, I think. Fairly early on in the story, Roth enters the Vietnam vet’s tortured mind, and what ensues is a by now classic Roth full-rage riff that runs on for 6, 7 riveting pages. Here, and in subsequent chilling set pieces Roth recreates the burnt out psychopathology of a permanently damaged warrior, presented with no more squeamishness than the ancient bard’s portrait of battlefield carnage at Troy. By the time we get to the final scene, which finds Les ice-fishing at a remote pond and brandishing a sharp-bladed auger before Zuckerman’s eyes, we are persuaded that such spectral casualties of war are afoot in the land.

Indeed, Roth’s consummate mastery as a writer is repeatedly displayed in what I think of as the filigree work of the novel. As with the secondary character, Nelson Primus, the lawyer, all of the lesser figures of the book — Coleman’s children; or the first black professor that Silk hired at Athena; or the  testosterone-fuelled ex-football star who now runs the college’s maintenance department; even a cameo encounter with a cautious young policeman — are all drawn with full-bodied nuance, as Roth reveals their hypocrisies, strategic moves, their admirable strengths, in short, human complexities no less than those of the warriors in the old epics. Even the novel’s presiding muse, Faunia, improbable and wounded as her life may be, is believable.

Roth can deliver a pitch-perfect filthy conversation (overheard by Silk) between three college employees on lunch-break lasciviously discussing the shenanigans between the American president and the smitten Monica Lewinsky. “She was talking to everybody,” says one of them. “She’s part of that dopey culture. Yap, yap, yap. Part of this generation that is proud of its shallowness. The sincere performance is everything. Sincere and empty, totally empty… The sincerity that is worse than falseness, and the innocence that is worse than corruption.”

Roth’s characters talk and talk. No other American novelist so lets his characters ramble on, whether in interior monologues or aria-like orations. For all their loquaciousness, our attention seldom flags, so supple is Roth’s grasp of the American conversation.

In almost every really first-rate novel, there’s a moment or a scene where you know you’re inside the story and are therefore prepared, as a reader, to let it carry you. That scene occurs early on in Roth’s Human Stain. Silk first met Zuckerman by barging into the writer’s cabin the day after his wife’s death, demanding that Zuckerman write up the outrageous mistreatment that led to Silk’s downfall and his wife’s “murder.” “All the restraint had collapsed within him, and so watching him, listening to him — a man I did not know, but clearly someone accomplished and of consequence now completely unhinged — was like being present at a bad highway accident…”  Ever since Zuckerman declined the proposal, Silk had been “at work on a book of his own about why he had resigned from Athena, a nonfiction book he was calling Spooks.”

It’s some time later. A friendship of sorts has grown, and Silk has gotten into the habit of inviting Zuckerman over to his place on a Saturday night for a drink or a game of cards while they listen to the radio playing old tunes from their youth. They’re sitting in the screened-in side porch Coleman uses as a summertime study, Silk’s notebooks stacked on his desk, and there’s an epiphany.

“Well, there it is,” said Coleman, now this calm, unoppressed, entirely new being. “That’s it. That’s Spooks. Finished a first draft yesterday, spent all day today reading it through, and every page made me sick… That I should spend a single quarter of an hour at this, let alone two years… But I read it and it’s shit and I’m over it. I can’t do what the pros do. Writing about myself. I can’t maneuver the creative remove. Page after page, it is still the raw thing. It’s a parody of the self-justifying memoir…”

Now, most writers who are brought to a standstill after rereading two years’ work — even one year’s work, merely half a year’s work — and finding it hopelessly misguided and bringing down on it the critical guillotine are reduced to a state of suicidal despair from which it can take months to recover. Yet Coleman, by abandoning a draft of a book as bad as the draft he’d finished, had somehow managed to swim free not only from the wreck of the book but from the wreck of his life … he appeared now to be without the slightest craving to set the record straight; shed of the passion to clear his name and criminalize as murderers his opponents, he was embalmed no longer in injustice… I’d never before seen a change of heart transform a martyred being quite so swiftly.

And then later that same evening, as the first bars of Frank Sinatra singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” ooze from the radio, Coleman says to Zuckerman, “I’ve got to dance. Want to dance?”

I laughed. No, this was not the savage, embittered, embattled avenger of Spooks, estranged from life and maddened by it — this was not even another man. This was another soul…

“Come, let’s dance.”

“But you mustn’t sing into my ear.”

“Come on, get up.”

What the hell, I thought, we’ll both be dead soon enough, and so I got up, and there on the porch Coleman Silk and I began to dance the fox trot together. He led, and, as best I could, I followed… One would have thought that never again would this man have a taste for the foolishness of life, that all that was playful in him and light-hearted had been destroyed and lost, right along with the career, the reputation and the formidable wife.  Maybe why it didn’t even cross my mind to laugh and let him, if he wanted to… place his arm around my back and push me dreamily around that old bluestone floor was because I had been there that day when her corpse was still warm and seen what he’d looked like.

“I hope nobody from the volunteer fire department drives by,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “We don’t want anybody tapping me on the shoulder and asking, ‘May I cut in?’”

On we danced. There was nothing overtly carnal in it, but because Coleman was wearing only his denim shorts and my hand rested easily on his warm back… it wasn’t entirely a mocking act. There was a semi-serious sincerity in his guiding me about on the stone floor, not to mention a thoughtless delight in just being alive, accidentally and clownishly and for no reason alive…

Once you’ve seen those two old men dancing across the porch of a rural cabin on a summer Saturday night, you’re willing to hear whatever Roth has to tell you about — to echo the final word of his novel — “America.”

.

Berlin, March 25, 2009

Exit Strategies

1.

It’s fitting, I suppose, that I’m only belatedly getting around to Edward Said’s posthumously-published On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006). The multi-talented Said, who died in 2003 of leukemia, at age 67, was a long-time Columbia University literature professor; a cultural critic, the author of the groundbreaking if tendentious Orientalism as well as Culture and Imperialism; a Palestinian political activist; the subtle memoirist of Out of Place; and a non-professional but accomplished pianist. In On Late Style, Said is interested, “for obvious personal reasons” — i.e., his own medical condition — in “the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health or other factors that… bring on the possibility of an untimely end.” He proposes to “focus on great artists and how, near the end of their lives, their work and thought acquires a new idiom, what I shall be calling a late style.”

As literary critic Michael Wood, who edited and introduces this final volume of Said’s writing, says about one of the two key terms in On Late Style, “It’s worth pausing over the delicately shifting meanings of the word late, ranging from missed appointments through the cycles of nature to vanished life. Most frequently perhaps late just means ‘too late,’ later than we should be, not on time. But late evenings, late blossoms, and late autumns are perfectly punctual… Dead persons have certainly got themselves beyond time, but then what difficult temporal longing lurks in our calling them ‘late’? Lateness doesn’t name a single relation to time, but it always brings time in its wake.”

Said’s notion of late style carries a particular twist. We’re all familiar with “last works that reflect a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of common reality,” such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “Each of us can readily supply evidence of how it is that late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour,” Said says, then asks, “But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradictions?” Troubled lateness is what Said seeks to explore, what he describes as “late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against…” (ellipsis in the original).

The idea of “late style” that Said elaborates is directly inspired by Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School critical theorist, who first broached the concept in an essay in 1937 on “Beethoven’s Late Style.” In Said’s essays on the subject, he takes up, among his examples, Beethoven, Adorno’s reading of that composer as well as Adorno himself, and a diverse array of other musicians, writers, filmmakers and performers ranging from Mozart to pianist Glenn Gould, with Jean Genet, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Thomas Mann, and Constantine Cavafy included along the way. While the individual judgments may be contestable, the scope and context of Said’s discussion are consistently stimulating.

At the very outset, under the heading of “timeliness and lateness,” Said’s initial contention is that “all of us, by virtue of the simple fact of being conscious, are involved in constantly thinking about and making something of our lives, self-making being one of the bases of history…” The important distinction, Said declares, “is that between the realm of nature on the one hand and secular human history on the other.” The body, in all its conditions, belongs “to the order of nature; what we understand of that nature, however, how we see and live it in our consciousness, how we create a sense of our life individually and collectively, subjectively as well as socially, how we divide it into periods, belongs roughly speaking to the order of history.” Our reflections on our selves are part of the process of making those selves.

“I have for years been studying this self-making process through three great problematics,” Said notes. The first, he says, is the whole notion of beginnings, a topic that was the theme of one of his earliest books, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), a work “about how the mind finds it necessary at certain times to retrospectively locate a point of origin for itself.” Things begin “in the most elementary sense with birth,” of course, but there is also the moment of giving birth to ourselves, that moment, to take a famous philosophic example, when Kant first reads David Hume and is awakened from his “dogmatic slumber.”

As well, Said sees a rough parallel to this human schema in art, particularly in Western literature, where the “form of the novel is coincidental with the emergence of the bourgeoisie in the late seventeenth century,” and where, not so coincidentally, the novel’s first century is often about “birth, possible orphanhood, the discovery of roots and the creation of a new world.” He cites Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, and Tristram Shandy as examples of the preoccupation with beginnings.

The second great problematic “is about the continuity that occurs after birth, the exfoliation from a beginning” toward “youth, reproductive generation, maturity.” In the history of the novel, which Said regards as “the Western aesthetic form that offers the largest and most complex image of ourselves that we have,” we find as a parallel to this stage of life, “the Bildungsroman or novel of education, the novel of idealism and disappointment (Education sentimentale, Illusions Perdues), the novel of immaturity and community, like George Eliot’s Middlemarch…”

In the passages of human life, “there is assumed to be a generally abiding timeliness,” meaning “that what is appropriate to earlier life is not appropriate to later stages.” Those “later stages” of life are the third problematic and the focus of Said’s book. It’s at this point, at the end of one’s time, that Said raises the possibility not of timeliness – “the accepted notion of age and wisdom in some last works that reflect… a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity” — but its obverse, lateness. For Said, the artistic lateness of most interest is not that of “harmony and resolution,” but “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradictions.” Said doesn’t exactly say why he’s so fascinated with this “nonharmonious, nonserene tension,” this “sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against… ,” but perhaps it lies in Said’s self-description as a “profoundly secular person.” For someone who doesn’t allow him- or herself metaphysical consolation, perhaps the prospect of death ought to provoke not reconciliation but unresolved contradiction. Anything else would be, in the existentialist sense, bad faith.

It is here that Said turns to Adorno on Beethoven’s late works: the last piano sonatas and bagatelles, the Ninth Symphony, and the last half-dozen string quartets. “For Adorno, far more than for anyone who has spoken of Beethoven’s last works,” Said says, “those compositions… constitute an event in the history of modern culture: a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. His late works constitute a form of exile.” In Beethoven, and in Adorno’s reading of him, Said says, “Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality.”

He adds, “The reason Beethoven’s late style so gripped Adorno throughout his writing is that in a completely paradoxical way, Beethoven’s immobilized and socially resistant final works are at the core of what is new in modern music of our own time.” Here, we must recall that these are hardly judgments from the sidelines: Adorno, as an occasional composer and pianist himself, and the musically competent Said are both speaking from the keyboard and not merely from a lectern.

Said then addresses Adorno’s own “lateness,” and finds in his “astonishingly bold and bleak ruminations on the position of the aging artist” something close to what seems, for Adorno, to be “the fundamental aspect of aesthetics and of his own work as critical theorist and philosopher.” Said is quick to admit that “no one needs to be reminded that Adorno is exceptionally difficult to read, whether in his original German or in any number of translations.” Adorno’s prose style, says Said, “violates various norms: he assumes little community of understanding between himself and his audience; he is slow, unjournalistic, unpackageable, unskimmable. Even an autobiographical text like Minima Moralia is an assault on biography, narrative, or anecdotal community; its form exactly replicates its subtitle — Reflections from damaged life — a cascading series of discontinuous fragments, all of them in some way assaulting suspicious ‘wholes.’”

Perhaps this is a sufficient tracking of Said’s text to suggest the richness of his writing and thought. In each of the essays, no matter how unpromising the subject may seem at the outset, I found some observation of Said’s, some thought worth underlining in order to return to it again, later.

For example, writing about Mozart’s opera Cosi Fan Tutte, a late work only by the retrospective fact of the composer’s very early death, Said notes, “Most people concede that the music is extremely wonderful, but the unsaid implication is that it is wasted on a silly story, silly characters, and an even sillier setting.” The plot, it might be recalled, turns on two girls whose lovers are persuaded to test their fidelity. They disguise themselves as foreigners and woo each other’s partner, and discover, to everyone’s unease, that they succeed all too easily. From these improbable materials, Said arrives at the notion that Mozart is daringly portraying “a universe shorn of any redemptive or palliative scheme, one whose law is motion and instability expressed as the power of libertinage and manipulation.” Now, I’m not sure if Said makes his case for this as an example of late style, or even how persuasive his reading of the opera is, but what’s characteristic of Said here is that he makes even a skeptical reader tempted to take another look at whatever it is that’s engaged Said’s attention.

I find myself, somewhat unusually, little inclined to argue with Said’s judgments about, say, Lampadusa’s The Leopard or Jean Genet’s final book, Prisoner of Love. Instead, I’m content to be appreciative of, as one reviewer of Late Style put it, “the supple intelligence Said brings to bear” on his material. No doubt my mood is shaded by consciousness of the death of Said, and the many other fertile thinkers — Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard — that we have lost in this decade.

In a summary moment in his not quite completed final book, Said says, “Each of the figures I have discussed here makes of lateness or untimeliness, and a vulnerable maturity, a platform for alternative and unregimented modes of subjectivity, at the same time that each — like the late Beethoven — has a lifetime of technical effort and preparation.” All of them, from Adorno to Glenn Gould, says Said, “play off the great totalizing codes” of their culture and times. “It is as if having achieved age, they want none of its supposed serenity or maturity, or any of its amiability or official ingratiation. Yet in none of them is mortality denied or evaded, but keeps coming back as the theme of death which undermines, and strangely elevates their uses of language and the aesthetic.”

2.

Although Said’s concept of late-work-against-the-grain is provocative, my own interest in this subject is rather more orthodox. Lately (pun inevitable), like most literary critics of “a certain age,” I’ve become more focused on writers of pensionable vintage. Not only are they agemates of mine, but the first decade of the 21st century marks the ending of a writing generation born mostly in the 1920s, 30s and 40s (but sometimes earlier), whose careers shaped the literary landscape of the second half of the preceding century. My attention is not so much on artists whose late works “constitute a form of exile,” as Said describes them, but simply with how various writers have dealt/are dealing with their old age in terms of productivity and subject matter, as well as style.

My focus is more on what might be called “exit strategies,” in Thomas Hobbes’s blunt sense of seeking “a hole to crawl out of this world from.” In some instances, such as those of John Updike, Norman Mailer, and possibly Kurt Vonnegut, all of whom died in this decade, while their last years were more or less prolific (Updike, moreso; Vonnegut less), their late writings don’t strike me as crucial to their body of work, either in terms of resistance or resolution. Something similar can be said about the later works of V.S. Naipaul, Gore Vidal, and perhaps Doris Lessing, at least to date. (I hesitate about Vonnegut because his final novel, Timequake (1997), written a decade before his death, seems to me a masterpiece, though that’s not a view shared by most critics. Similarly, I hesitate about Lessing because of how taken I am with the title novella of  her The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels (2003), a wicked adult fairy tale about pederastic love that she published in her mid-80s.)

It also seems to me that whether or not a writer produces memorable late works should not be regarded as a crucial measure of that writer’s oeuvre. If a writer does, that provides an additional dimension to our understanding of the work; if not, then not. That is, I don’t want to overburden the idea of late work. But with writers like Saul Bellow, Czeslaw Milosz, Mordecai Richler, J.M. Coetzee, Jose Saramago and Philip Roth  (the last three still in progress), the exit strategies have been explicit and profoundly interesting. There are no doubt many others who might be considered — Gunter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez come to mind — but let’s refrain from an infinite list or else, as Coetzee says, We’ll be here all afternoon.

Bellow, who died in 2005 at age 89, opened the new century with an elegiac yet surprisingly buoyant last novel written in his mid-80s, Ravelstein (2000). It’s a portrait of his late friend and sometime intellectual mentor, Allan Bloom, the conservative thinker and author of The Closing of the American Mind, who died of Aids in the early 1990s. I don’t know if Ravelstein exhibits late style in Said’s sense, but then again, none of the eponymous protagonists of Bellow’s earlier novels, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog or Humboldt’s Gift can be said to bask in “a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity.”

Certainly, there’s a noticeable stylistic difference between Bellow’s first major novel, Augie March (1953) and his last one, and the source of the difference is to be found in the constrictions of old age. Compared to the full-bodied impasto oil portraits and detailed scenes of his early work, Ravelstein offers looser, sketched-in, watercolour-like backgrounds. Instead of every object receiving equally impartial attention, Bellow picks out a luminescent, surrealistic detail, like the appearance of flocks of wild green parrots on the South Side of Chicago who built “their long sac-like nests in the lake-front park and later colonized the alleys… in bird tenements that hung from utility poles.” Various characters can be casually limned; Bellow only needs to etch with Dureresque precision the figure of Ravelstein who “with his bald powerful head, was at ease with large statements, big issues, and famous men,” but whose “Japanese kimono fell away from legs paler than milk… the calves of a sedentary man — the shinbone long and the calf muscle abrupt, without roundness.” It’s as if Bellow no longer has time to fill in the whole of the picture, but of necessity now has to practice what Philip Roth calls “compression.” And perhaps also as a function of age, he views the fuzzier whole with more compassion.

Bellow’s fond portrait of his friend Bloom cuts plenty of slack for a man who might be read as dogmatic, bullying, fiscally wasteful, and painfully self-indulgent. But as Bellow’s narrator Chick says, “In my trade you have to make more allowances, taking all sorts of ambiguities into account — to avoid hard-edged judgments. All this refraining may resemble naivete. But it isn’t quite that. In art you become familiar with due process. You can’t simply write people off or send them to hell.”

The debt that instigates Bellow’s pitch-perfect short novel, tinged with death on all sides (including an account of the author’s own near-death from food poisoning), as well as the always surprising flare-up of desire, is the duty of friendship:

Ravelstein would frequently say to me, “‘There’s something in the way you tell anecdotes that gets to me, Chick. But you need a real subject. I’d like you to write me up, after I’m gone…”

“It depends, doesn’t it, on who beats whom to the barn?”

“Let’s not have any bullshit about it. You know perfectly well that I’m about to die…”

Of course I knew it. Indeed I did.

“You could do a really fine memoir. It’s not just a request,” he added. “‘I’m laying this on you as an obligation. Do it in your after-supper-reminiscence manner, when you’ve had a few glasses of wine and you’re laid back and making remarks… I’ve often thought how well you deal with a story when you’re laid back.”

There was no way I could refuse to do this.

And if Ravelstein is wonderfully laid-back, it’s also the case that, as Bellow says, “You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.”

3.

Each of the writers whose “exit strategies” interest me turns the prism, through which the refractions of suffering, desire, sickness, old age and death are seen, in his own distinctive way. Bellow’s younger Canadian contemporary, Mordecai Richler (who died at age 70 in 2001), conjured up an equally cranky and satisfyingly unsatisfied baggy monster in his final novel, Barney’s Version (1997). In Barney Panofsky, Richler gives us a last version of the character who bespoke Richler’s self-knowledge of his own grumpy, almost parodic, public persona, and a creature far removed from the youthful ambitions of the eponymous protagonist of Richler’s early main work, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

By contrast, the late work of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, is probably closer to Edward Said’s notion of “serene maturity.” As Milosz, who died in 2004 at age 93, says in the poem “Late Ripeness,”

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning

But in Milosz’s ABC’s (1997-98; English translation, 2001), in a passage on “Adam and Eve” and our enduring fascination with the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Milosz says, “In our deepest convictions, reaching into the very depths of our being, we deserve to live forever. We experience our transitoriness and mortality as an act of violence perpetrated against us.”

That unreconciled tone is undergirded with melancholy resignation in a late prose poem, “Pity,” which appeared in Road-side Dog (1997): “In the ninth decade of my life, the feeling which rises in me is pity, useless. A multitude, an immense number of faces, shapes, fates of particular beings, and a sort of merging with them from inside, but at the same time my awareness that I will not find anymore the means to offer a home in my poems to these guests of mine, for it is too late.”

If Richler and Milosz make a contrasting if arbitrary pairing, so do two other prominent senior writers at work throughout the century’s first decade, the transplanted-to-Australia, South African-born J.M. Coetzee, and Portugal’s Jose Saramago, both, like Bellow and Milosz, Nobel Prize winners. Coetzee, at 69, is often described as reclusive, coldly dour, and decidedly unreconciled (in Said’s sense), bearing a seldom-smiling spare visage and temperament that puts me in mind of the great Austrian novelist, Thomas Bernhard. And yet in three novels written in this decade, Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), and Diary of a Bad Year (2007), Coetzee ranks with the very best of writers who have unflinchingly faced the grotesqueries of late life, and who have remained committed to technical innovation in fiction. Perhaps I should say that Coetzee “arguably” ranks with the best, since there is a fairly long line of critics prepared to argue the worth of his late strategy.

Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, I think, is unarguably readable and engaging. The framing device that Coetzee comes up with is that each “lesson” is a little story about a lecture given, often reluctantly, by an aging and famous Australian woman novelist, the title character. Several of these stories, especially those about the pain we inflict on other animals, were delivered as actual lectures by Coetzee. Right from the opening line of the first story, “Realism,” there is, in addition to Costello and her son John who is accompanying his aged mother, and various others, also an unnamed narrator who offers observations or instructions about the storymaking in which he is engaged. Sometimes it’s no more than a blunt stage direction to get on with it: “There is a scene in a restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip.” Or, having described Elizabeth Costello preparing herself for an evening out, the narrator intervenes:

The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, cast up on the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. “I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them,” says he, “except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.” Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by the foaming seas off the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair, just hats and caps and shoes.

Costello is presented with an award, prior to giving an acceptance speech, titled “What is Realism?” But first Coetzee steps in: “The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, suspended by the time and space of the fiction.” Coetzee admits that breaking into the narrative “plays havoc with the realist illusion.” However, unless he skips, “we will be here all afternoon,” he says, mock-impatiently. In any case, “the skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance.” I suppose postmodern critics would describe all this as “destabilizing the text,” but whatever it is Coetzee is doing in this virtuoso performance, it’s surprisingly compelling. At which point, Elizabeth Costello dons her reading glasses and commences her lecture.

It’s about Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” a story in which an ape gives a lecture to a learned society about his former life as an ape. Costello says, “We don’t know and will never know, with certainty, what is really going on in this story.” Then she adds,

There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said, “On the table stood a glass of water,” there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them.

But all that had ended. The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems. About what is really going on in the lecture hall your guess is as good as mine: men and men, men and apes, apes and men, apes and apes… The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each proclaiming “I mean what I mean!”

Each of the stories has a similar literally eccentric, off-centre, character about it. Each says something about art, about aging, about the world, and, at the end, about waiting “at the gate,” a Kafkaesque gate on whose far side might or might not be another world.

Coetzee’s subsequent novels, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year are far more contested “performances,” to put it gently, than the innovative Elizabeth Costello. One critic, the novelist Francine Prose, was practically driven up the wall by Slow Man, the story of an aging Australian photographer hit by a car while bicycling, and his lengthy recuperation after the amputation of part of his leg. “My mixed feelings about Coetzee’s earlier work hardly prepared me for, or explained, the strong emotions — feelings that ranged from impatience to a dull rage to a sort of despairing boredom — that overcame me…” (Francine Prose, “The Plot Doesn’t Thicken,” www.slate.com, Sept. 14, 2005.)

Another reviewer, Robert MacFarlane, in the London Sunday Times, who wittily describes Coetzee as “one of the great novelists of omission… He has always eschewed more than he has bitten off,” judged that Slow Man “is not only unmistakably Coetzee’s least accomplished work, it is also, by more general standards, a mediocre novel.” Few critics were much kinder, and most of them were appalled that in the middle of the novel, almost out of nowhere, Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of Coetzee’s previous novel, turns up at the Slow Man’s door in order to try to speed him up. The critics resented getting halfway into a book only to be met by the possibility that the protagonist was merely the creature of a story being written by a fictional author.

Yet, in a curious way, isn’t Coetzee’s Slow Man an example of Edward Said’s notion of late style? The elderly Nobel Prize winner eschews all notion of reconciliation and serenity, instead giving us characters filled with “intransigance, difficulty and unresolved contradiction,” and to make matters worse, a narrative of tottering uncertainty. Despite all, including longeurs in the text that made me at one point fantasize about what it would be like if Coetzee suddenly decided to turn the Slow Man’s tale into Rocket Man pornography, there is something there, something about the struggle, not necessarily successful, against stasis and silence in our diminishing existence.

Coetzee’s more recent Diary of a Bad Year fared better with the critics. In it, Coetzee tells the story of an aging, prominent South African novelist now resident in Australia, who bears more than a passing resemblance to J. Coetzee, as he writes a series of op-ed pieces under the heading “Strong Opinions,” and at the same time is “uselessly afflicted with desire” (as critic James Wood puts it) for a young woman neighbour named Anya who lives in his apartment building and whom he hires to type his writing. Coetzee divides the printed page into three parts: at the top is the “strong opinion” piece he’s writing, in the middle his account of his infatuation with the young woman, and at the bottom, her view of the awkward relationship, although there are occasional variations.

The exit strategy here is a weaving of worldly reflections with a tale of not entirely futile desire in late life. The opinions traverse a wide range of topics: democracy, terrorism, Guantanamo Bay prison camp, pedophilia, the fate of animals (as always), intelligent design, Bach, aging, and inevitably, the writing life. About the latter, Coetzee or his alter ego says,

During the years I spent as a professor of literature, conducting young people on tours of books that would always mean more to me than to them, I would cheer myself up by telling myself that at heart I was not a teacher but a novelist. And indeed, it was as a novelist rather than as a teacher that I won a modest reputation.

But now the critics voice a new refrain. At heart he is not a novelist after all, they say, but a pedant who dabbles in fiction. And I have reached a stage in my life when I begin to wonder whether they are not right — whether, all the time I thought I was going about in disguise, I was in fact naked.

Meanwhile, down in the apartment tower’s basement laundry room (and at the bottom of the page), “As I watched her an ache, a metaphysical ache, crept over me that I did nothing to stem. And in an intuitive way she knew about it, knew that in the old man in the plastic chair there was something personal going on, something to do with age and regret and the tears of things.”

So, that’s the way it is. We have, as long as we’re able, something to say about the world, and we recognize, as one poet put it, that “the love I never conquered when young / will remain as such” as we prepare to “pay death’s duty.”

4.

At the far end of the emotional spectrum from Coetzee are the late works of Jose Saramago, the octegenarian author of an extraordinary series of a half-dozen or more, playfully grim “what if” fables. The best known is Blindness (1995), in which a city is struck by a mysterious and contagious plague of sightlessness, and soon reduced to conditions of barbarism. Both before and after that landmark novel, there are equally innovative fantasies: in one, the Iberian landmass is detached from Europe and sails the oceans as The Stone Raft (1986); in another, a lonely proofreader willfully changes a single word in a text about The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989) in an effort to alter the course of history. More recently, writing in his mid-80s, Saramago proposes, in Death with Interruptions (2006; English translation 2008), that death herself (but only lower-case “death,” she insists) takes a sort of romantic holiday, leaving in her wake social chaos.

In a sense, all of Saramago’s writings are late works, considering that he had such an unusually belated beginning, only becoming a full-time writer in his mid-50s. Born to a family of impoverished peasants in 1922, Saramago was educated and worked as a mechanic, and only gradually and tentatively, by way of journalism, made his way to his present trade. After an initial attempt at writing, Saramago fell into a sort of literary silence for some three decades, finally emerging in the late 1970s with something equivalent to a “first novel.” Only in his mid-60s did he write what is consensually regarded as a masterpiece, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1986), a meditation on the greatest writer in 20th century Portugal, Fernando Pessoa, and the conditions of life under the Iberian dictatorships of the 1930s. To make matters more personally difficult, Saramago became and has remained an unrepentent communist, to the dismay of some of his admirers. As the American literary scholar Harold Bloom puts it, “Saramago’s novels are endlessly inventive, endlessly good-natured, endlessly skillful, but it baffles me why the man can’t grow up politically.”

In Saramago’s mordantly comic Death with Interruptions, people suddenly stop dying on New Year’s Eve in an unnamed landlocked country of 10 million inhabitants, one equipped with the usual institutional accoutrements of modern society. Though some may object to the immaturity of Saramago’s leftist politics, his political satire on church, government, media, “maphia,” and various branches of the funeral industry (now reduced to burying cats and dogs) will strike most readers as “deadly” accurate in this depiction of the effects of temporary immortality.

From the outset, the pace is simultaneously brisk but leisurely, and the tone is mock-dry:

The following day, no one died. This fact, being absolutely contrary to life’s rules, provoked enormous and, in the circumstances, perfectly justifiable anxiety in people’s minds, for we have only to consider that in the entire forty volumes of universal history there is no mention, not even one exemplary case, of such a phenomenon ever having occurred, for a whole day to go by, with its generous allowance of twenty-four hours, diurnal and nocturnal, matutinal and vespertine, without one death from an illness, a fatal fall, or a successful suicide, not one, not a single one. Not even from a car accident, so frequent on festive occasions, when blithe irresponsibility and an excess of alcohol jockey for position on the roads to decide who will reach death first.

At first ordinary people are thrilled, at last in possession of “humanity’s greatest dream since the beginning of time.” But cooler, more calculating minds, those of authority soon prevail. All the major institutions of power quickly come to view the end of death as a calamity. If people live forever, what will happen to the pension system? Funeral homes and life insurance companies will be driven out of business. “The absence of death, at first good news, now threatens to be every bit as big a social catastrophe as the plague of blindness was in Saramago’s novel of that name,” notes reviewer D.T. Max (“Stay of Execution,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2008). “If we don’t start dying again, we have no future,” the prime minister tells the king.

All of this is delivered with Saramago’s trademark eccentric punctuation. His tales are constructed in long run-on sentences marked only by commas, a “flood of prose,” one critic remarks, in which the characters’ thoughts and dialogue, as well as the observations of the narrator are undifferentiated. And who is the presiding narrative personality of this and other fictions? Critic James Wood describes the narrator’s voice as that of “a sly old Portuguese peasant, who knows everything and nothing.”

Then, halfway through, after we’ve pretty much got the absurdist picture, and just as death has suspended the “moratorium” on death as a botched experiment, there’s a surprising turn in the tale. The surprise is for the title character, that shrouded rack of bones with only a scythe for companionship, who nonetheless has the shape-shifting power to become a corporeal being, say, an attractive young woman in her 30s. In the course of her professional duties, death runs into a cellist. Not a great cellist like Rostropovich, perhaps, but one good enough to perform the occasional solo when it’s called for by the symphony orchestra that employs him. He’s a rather lonely cellist of 50, with a dog, whose amusements are as modest as walks in the park, and whose evening repast is as humble as cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. Something about this cellist, not to put too fine a pun on it, strikes a chord in death.

What makes this late work of Saramago’s not only thoroughly enjoyable, but in fact joyous, at least to my mind (other critics accorded it those dreaded “mixed reviews”), is that its creator allows us to momentarily imagine an eternal version of the only paradise worth having, life itself. For a stretch of just under two hundred pages we are permitted to doff the unbearable weightiness of being that is contained in the perpetual reminder of mortality. All the while, of course, we continue to know what’s in store for us, though as Saramago says in a recent interview, “The worst that death has is that you were here, and now you’re not.”

5.

Finally, there’s Philip Roth. Or perhaps I should say, best of all, there’s Philip Roth. Of all the writers of this decade whose late works invite consideration, no account of a writer’s development is more remarkable than that of Roth. For many readers, fellow writers, and critics (including myself), Roth, who marked his 75th year in 2008, is regarded as the pre-eminent living novelist in the United States.

Born in 1933, Roth was recognized as early as his first books, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Letting Go (1962), as a leading literary figure of his generation, as well as the heir to the Jewish-American novelists of the preceding period, Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Henry Roth.

With his scandalous bestseller, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), appearing in the midst of the so-called sexual revolution, and ever since, through a dozen subsequent volumes that brought him into mid-life, Roth has been something of a controversial figure, often described as a disloyal troublemaker within his own ethnic community. It was that infra-Jewish discomfiture that partially inspired Roth to pen The Ghost Writer (1979), the first of what would turn out to be a nine-volume cycle of novels featuring a sort of literary alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.

In that brief novel, a retrospectively seen account written some two decades after the events it depicts, set in the mid-1950s, the young Zuckerman, who has published only his first troublemaking-among-his-Jewish-kin stories, visits the New England rural retreat of his literary hero, E.I. Lonoff, a short-story author of esquisite restraint, thought to be partly modeled on Malamud. The aesthetic argument of the book in fact turns on Lonoff’s controlled passion and isolated operating mode, turning a sentence over again and again, versus Zuckerman’s raging exuberance.

By the way, the question of the relationship or identity between Zuckerman and Roth, or even between “Philip Roth” and Roth (the former turns up as a narrator in several of Roth’s books), or even of that between the fictional Lonoff and his real-life sources, is, as the critic Clive James notes, “a Mobius striptease” issue that has no resolution, and really doesn’t need one.

The living muse of The Ghost Writer, a young woman graduate student of Lonoff’s, is named Amy Bellette. In the uproarious course of this one-night sleepover at the backwoods home of Lonoff and his wife of some 30 years, young Zuckerman witnesses the breakup of Lonoff’s marriage in favour of life with his mistress. In addition, the exuberant Zuckerman conjures up an erotic fantasy of his own about Amy Bellette in which the 20-something European immigrant is somehow transformed into the Holocaust martyr Anne Frank (who has survived, and resurfaced, incognito, in literary America). What better solution to Zuckerman’s problem with the Jews than to out-do his compatriots with a marriage to the ultimate orthodox Jewish heroine of the age? The whole tale, by now characteristic of Roth, the author of Portnoy, is blasphemous, disruptive, obscene, and hilarious.

In subsequent Zuckerman novels, Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and The Prague Orgy (1985), Zuckerman is the successful, indeed notorious, author of Carnovsky, a scandalous Portnoy-like, sex-and-Jewish- troublemaking novel that he has to live down while figuring out how to write on. All of the tangles, rages, and rants, and the Mobius strip twists between biography and imagination are there with mischief aforethought.

Then, just as many writers of his era were tailing off, something remarkable happened in the work of Roth, then approaching 60. While the work of others was diminishing in intensity and perhaps relevance, Roth experienced an extraordinary late flowering. It wasn’t a break, or comeback, or return after long silence, since Roth was a steady producer who could be counted on for a book every couple of years.

I think I first noticed it when Roth published Patrimony: A True Story (1991), a memoir and meditation about the recent death of his 85-year-old father. It read as unembellished reportage, written with classic restraint and great beauty, about the death of an ordinary, aged, former insurance salesman. It was, as Edward Said says about other mature works, a “miraculous transfiguration of common reality.”

If Patrimony was Roth’s soberest work, the subsequent Operation Shylock (1993) was his most riotous. The protagonist is a troubled “Philip Roth” who goes to Israel to cover the trial of an alleged Nazi concentration camp guard, but is shadowed by an imposter “Philip Roth” who can reproduce the real Roth’s every mannerism. This roccoco satire on Israel and Palestine not only plays on Roth’s own shifting identity, but also drags in the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld for a cameo role and a Palestinian figure who bears a disconcerting resemblance to Edward Said. Its scope is near-epic, the competing rage of all its characters as unstoppable as the political conflict that motivates it. It’s without question the great American novel about the seemingly perpetual and savage Israeli-Palestinian war.

As well, in the decade of the 1990s, Roth produced three more full-scale novels, Sabbath’s Theatre (1995), and the first two volumes of a loose Zuckerman-narrated trilogy, American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998). The trilogy’s concluding piece-de-resistance was The Human Stain (2000), a brilliant investigation of racial identity, old age, late desire, and American national and academic politics during the Bill Clinton era, all set in the small New England college town of Athena, not far from Zuckerman’s Berkshire Hills rural retreat, itself a stone’s throw from the former home of Zuckerman’s old mentor, E.I. Lonoff.

The Human Stain was merely Roth’s opening salvo in the first decade of the new century, a decade in which Roth’s astonishing rate of productivity continued apace. The prolificness is notable, but other writers have been prolific, especially Roth’s contemporary, John Updike who, until his death, almost obsessively published a volume or more per year. What’s remarkable about Roth is the variety, quality and pertinence of each new book

The indelible Human Stain was followed by The Dying Animal (2001); then another “Roth” novel, The Plot Against America (2004); Everyman (2006), the second of a sort of trilogy about death; and its conclusion, Exit Ghost (2007);  Indignation (2008); and the announcement in early 2009 of two forthcoming books, The Humbling (2009) and Nemesis (set for 2010).

Exit Ghost takes its title from a terse stage direction in Hamlet. Roth declares that old age isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre, and in this likely final Zuckerman novel, he’s not the least bit squeamish about providing the details. The 71-year-old Zuckerman, having been holed up for the past decade in nearly total seclusion in his Berkshire Hills retreat, doggedly writing away and doing little else, suddenly comes to New York in autumn 2004 for medical treatment to repair some of the damage, particularly incontinence, caused by a prostectomy operation several years before. A young clinician is offering a technique that supposedly reduces the leakage, and which will hopefully do away with Zuckerman’s mortification at having to trundle around in adult diapers. It’s not only Zuckerman’s leaky, impotent spigot at issue, there’s also the leakage of his mind: forgotten names, faces, telephone numbers, even pages from Zuckerman’s own hand.

The plot is about the return of The Ghost Writer, a half-century later, and Zuckerman’s “rash moments” in attempting to revivify his life. Amy Bellette turns up, the former muse a now 75-year-old woman with a partially shaved head and a disfiguring scar across her skull from a recent brain cancer operation. Lonoff, now literally a ghost, is there, too, on the urine-reeking stairs of a Lower East Side walk-up.

When Zuckerman rashly decides to answer an ad to exchange residences for a year (a New York apartment in return for his rural hermitage), he meets a young couple, both aspiring writers, Billy Davidoff and Jamie Logan, and through them the noxious Richard Kliman, a would-be biographer of the forgotten Lonoff, who intends to reveal the ghost writer’s darkest sexual secret, apparently an adolescent incestuous affair with his older stepsister. (Here, Roth is merging Lonoff-Malamud with Henry Roth, whose belated last novels suggested such an affair.)

Of course, once Zuckerman sets eyes on the langourous but troubled Jamie, the insane infatuation is inevitable, and produces not only futile/fertile desire but a “He and She” playlet, penned by Zuckerman, that imagines even further twists and near-erotic turns. Against all this is the loosely sketched-in background of 2004 America in which people are ceaselessly jabbering into their cellphones, and the hopes of young liberals like Billy and Jamie are crushed by the reelection of George W. Bush. There are resemblances to Bellow’s Ravelstein, though no one would ever accuse Roth of being laid-back, and in the afflictions of desire, there are parallels to Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year.

Perhaps Exit Ghost is a novel more for devotees of the Zuckerman series than for a general readership, but, even at worst, it almost works. It sets out Lonoff’s spare credo: “The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly.” To which it counterposes the rage of the toothless old lion and the handsome virile bull, Zuckerman and Kliman screaming at each other in the middle of New York’s Central Park over the fate of Lonoff’s ghost.

The other evening, as I was writing these paragraphs, I sat down for a few hours and re-read Exit Ghost, just to be sure that my own grip wasn’t entirely slipping. It’s an uncomfortable text, squirm-making in places, but on the whole pretty persuasive, if you’re willing, as Bellow advises, to make allowances. I probably would do something other, something slightly more practical, with those “useless passions.” In one of Coetzee’s novels, Disgrace, the distressed protagonist makes a regular arrangement with a local sex-worker, which at least dispells some of the illusions of late longing.

But Zuckerman’s Rip van Winkle-like return to New York and the quick-sketch of the depths of the Bush era and a vacuous trivial culture, the embattled ruminations on biography and identity, the massacre of old age, the absence of “serenity and reconciliation” (in Said’s sense), all that seems pretty much right.

It makes sense that late works address the frailties of the flesh and mind, cast a cold eye on the passing caravan, play endgames with ever fewer pieces on the board. “Late style”? Well, it can be both timely and untimely. Milosz’s grave serenity and Saramago’s critical playfulness are as possible, as plausible as Coetzee’s and Roth’s raging against the dying of the light. Yeats was right that “No single story would they find / Of an unbroken happy mind, / A finish worthy of the start. Young men know nothing of this sort, / Observant old men know it well.” We’ve been graced, in this decade, and others, with “observant old men.” And, as Yeats also asked, in the title of that poem, “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?”

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Berlin, March 1, 2009