I made my way back along the footpath and onto the campus proper. The session made the college seem even more foreign and forbidding than before. Walking into the shadow of the science complex, I recalled a statistic our guide had conveyed, inexplicably, on our campus tour. Each academic year at the university, she announced to the assembled families, more mice were decapitated for experiments than students graduated. I scrambled back into daylight.
Then, at the top of a hill leading to the Castle, an imposing medieval replica complete with turrets, corbels, buttresses, and battlements, I caught a sight through scattered oaks of the entrance to the library, and my mood improved. I hadn’t been inside the library since my truncated attempt at therapeutic breathing; it had taken on, like a growing number of settings in my life, the queasy aura of my discomfort.
This now struck me as intensely stupid. The library: of course! The library was the solution to my predicament, the only conceivable place on campus I’d be able to find the solitude I needed and the wisdom I wanted. I had no intention of going back to the clinic. (I’d lie to my parents from then on.) What was the point? I could do better than some newly minted shrink just scanning the shelves, picking out clues and consolations when and from where it felt right to me. And how it felt right. With a therapist you have to sit and be prodded into self-examination no matter how anxious you are. With books you can shut the process down at any moment with the flip of a cover. If a book wasn’t working for you, if you found it too offensive or contrary or pretentious or slight, you could simply choose another. Being in the library was like being in the perfect sanatorium. How could I not have realized this?
Well, I realized it now, and I let that realization lead me through the doors and past the thrumming, crowded computer stations. For the next four months, until winter break, I barely left the library’s crypt-like lower levels.
• • •
Some months ago, my brother Scott e-mailed me a document along with a note that said, “Just thought you might like to see how it’s shaking out.” The document was titled thebookofscott.doc, and it consisted of about forty quotations organized into five “chapters”: Discipline, Awareness, Fear, Creativity, and General Tonic. Scott had been accumulating the quotations for several months, ever since, in the same two-week period, his wife gave birth and he started a new job and he found that, once again, hypochondriasis was making life difficult to lead. His goal was to produce a compact volume of wisdom—a kind of commonplace book—that he could use to pull himself together whenever he felt his nerves growing frayed.
One motivation for the project was envy. My brothers and I grew up in a Jewish but largely secular home. Each of us had a bar mitzvah, but we managed to emerge from childhood with little understanding of, and littler faith in, religious texts. Scott is convinced that our lack of religion has handicapped us psychologically. “It’s not really fair, when you think about it,” he told me when he began the project. “We’re surrounded by people who came into this world with these portable little bundles of certainty, these neat foundational texts. They don’t have to go rooting around for comforting words. They were handed to them at birth—pre-edited, pre-legitimized, pre-authorized. There are almost seven billion people on the planet and ninety percent have scriptures. And what do we have? What did we get? Nothing. A handful of movies and a few of Dad’s jokes. We’re at sea. We’ve always been at sea.”
It remains to be seen whether The Book of Scott will close the gap between my brother and the world’s devout. Yet looking over its contents recently (Milton: “He who reigns within himself and rules his passions, desires, and fears, is more than a king.” Santayana: “Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.” Flaubert: “Shut up and get on with it.”) I couldn’t help but regret that I didn’t have something like it to guide me during those long months I spent in the bowels of the college library. The qualities embodied by Scott’s selections—simplicity, mindfulness, pragmatism, stoicism—are exactly those qualities an anxious person needs to foster in himself if he is going to change in any real and lasting way. They are the qualities common to every therapeutic literature that has ever been useful to anyone, and at the age of eighteen I didn’t have the first clue they were what I should be searching for.
There are many sections in a library where an anxious young man might find solace and self-understanding: poetry, philosophy, theology, psychology, art. Being fond of stories, I gravitated toward the fiction stacks. I staked a claim to a carrel beside the Vs and Ws in twentieth-century American literature, in a dim corner of the first basement level, and between dutiful sessions attending to class assignments, I began to range at random through the offerings.
I found myself reading anything whose opening lines, scanned standing up in the narrow alleys between the shelves, felt capable of coaxing my anxiety down from its stubborn heights. Nabokov famously said that one should gauge literature with “the top of the tingling spine.” I gauged it with the icicle in my chest. If, reading the first sentences of a novel, my icicle thawed, I would carry the book with me back to the carrel and jump in. If my icicle began to swell and stick in my sternum, I would slam the book shut and replace it on the shelf. In this way, the masterworks of modern American literature began to shake out according to a sort of ad hoc neurotic analysis. James, Faulkner, O’Connor, Cheever, DeLillo, Gaddis, and Pynchon were among those deemed, for whatever unconscious reasons, too anxiety-provoking to absorb. Those who made the cut included Hemingway, Bellow, Updike, Doctorow, and Styron. But the author whom my icicle urged me to read more avidly than any other that year, the author who, once I discovered him, seemed to articulate my condition with such uncanny precision that his novels came to be not just a comfort but an explanation—a diagnostic source—was Philip Roth. When I found Roth, I felt I had found my anxiety’s Rosetta Stone.
The affinity was immediate. The first Roth book I pulled from the shelf was The Ghost Writer, his eighth. It was like looking into a mirror. Here, making his inaugural appearance, was Nathan Zuckerman—Roth’s “alter-consciousness,” as he has fastidiously called his creation—and he was just like me: a bookish, sensitive, libidinous young man trying to make his way following a cloistered childhood in a loving Jewish home. No, change that: trying to make his way in spite of a cloistered childhood in a loving Jewish home. For that was the conflict, the stark, startling, surprisingly resonant conflict at the core of the novel. Zuckerman, just a few years removed from being “an orthodox college atheist and highbrow-in-training,” has written a story based on an embarrassing episode in his family’s past and finds himself, suddenly and for the first time, the object of his parents’ disapproval. Ambitious, passionate, idealistic to a fault, he has set out to exert his will on the world and discovered that he is more bound than he had ever imagined to the concern, authority, and love—above all the love, to which he has an “addiction”—of his formidable, doting family.
In its particulars, Zuckerman’s story was not mine. I could scarcely imagine undergoing a bruising battle with my father, as he does, over the competing claims of literary integrity and ethnic solidarity. My father would probably take literature’s side. But it felt like my story. The novel excavated a species of torment—a concurrent hunger and repulsion for the protection and adoration of one’s family—that I had never encountered in a novel before, and to which I felt a curious, reflexive kinship. After I read The Ghost Writer (twice) I turned at once to Roth’s other books, and as I inhaled them in order that fall, from Goodbye, Columbus to Operation Shylock, I came again and again upon the same dogged theme, the same irresolvable tension, and I began to work up a theory as to why Roth’s depiction of family life felt so familiar.
• • •
The big clue came from brooding about my surroundings. Whenever I dared to voyage away from my carrel and out of the basement—furtive, blinking sorties to stretch my legs—I would look out the tall windows at the campus and think, I don’t want to be here. I had never wanted to be here. I hated it here. Yet I was here. Why on earth was I here?
It was my mother, I recalled, who first suggested that I consider Brandeis, at the start of my senior year. The idea struck me as preposterous. College, I explained, was for broadening one’s perspectives, for seeking out the unfamiliar and the untried. It should be, ideally, like the black-and-white-to-Technicolor switchover in The Wizard of Oz. Brandeis’s student body was nearly two-thirds Jewish, just like my high school. If I were being raised in, say, the Ozarks, it might make sense to enroll, see what it’s like to be in the majority for a change. But I was being raised on Long Island. I was swimming in Jews. Every third friend a Rachel or an Aaron, a bar or bat mitzvah every weekend, High Holiday services so crowded people scalped tickets. “Ma,” I said, “we’ve got two black families in this town and one of them goes to our synagogue. What’s the point?”
But she persisted. She appealed to my practical side. I needed to increase the number of my applications. I needed to apply to more schools likely to offer me scholarship money. I needed another safety school. Then the coup de grâce: What was the big deal? Why all the fuss? If I got in and didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t go.
“Humor me,” she said. “Fill out an application.”
I humored her. By that time, my anxiety had subsided to the point at which I could appreciate humor again. Kierkegaard, I would later learn, argued that there is an inverse relationship between humor and anxiety, since humor comes out of taking a detached stance toward something and anxiety is the state of being utterly, hopelessly attached to everything. One of the things I knew about Brandeis was a sort of joke. Originally, the school was to have been named Einstein University, but when the founders suggested this to the great man, in the 1930s, he demurred. That’s very thoughtful of you, he said, but my life isn’t over. What if I do something bad? What if my work turns out to be, you know . . . destructive? Not long afterward, Einstein urged Roosevelt to build the atomic bomb. “The worst mistake of my life,” he later called it. Ha ha.
When the university sent its acceptance package, it was accompanied by the offer of a full scholarship. I wouldn’t have to pay a nickel. This was very flattering, but I wasn’t prepared for how the money would transform, in my mother’s hands, from a financial incentive into an emotional one. My high school was one of those suburban piles crammed to the rafters with overachievers—dozens upon dozens of extracurricularly resplendent teenagers with secret amphetamine habits and early-onset gastric ulcers. I rated, but just barely, and I’d never much cared. Now came the suggestion that I should care, that to have had so many above me in the rankings for so long could only have been a strain on my confidence, which was, as evidenced by my recent breakdown, lacking. The scholarship Brandeis was offering was an opportunity to rise in my own and others’ estimations, to bolster my self-esteem. It was an opportunity, as my mother telegraphed all this, to be “a big fish in a small pond.”
This argument confused me on a number of levels. To begin with, I hadn’t thought my self-esteem needed so heavy an infusion. It’s true that I’d gone through a tough time. But I was on the upswing. Also, I had not previously harbored an ambition to be a “big fish.” An engaged fish, yes. An involved fish. But dominant? It honestly never occurred to me. Finally, this wasn’t just any small pond. This was a Jewish small pond. Which suggested that there were certain ethnic and religious considerations at play in my mother’s mind. This was odd, because I’d never thought my parents cared much about the maintenance or advancement of our Jewish identities beyond what was required as a matter of social and familial course: five or six desultory years of Hebrew school; a lavish bar mitzvah with hired dancers and a Viennese table; an annual seder in which the epic tale of exile, exodus, and Egyptian infanticide was speed-read so that we could get down to the real business of engorging ourselves on brisket. I thought all the Jewish stuff was just so much inherited furniture. But for my mother, it now seemed, it meant enough that she was troubled by the thought of its absence in my life. A few weeks later, touring Georgetown, by whose Gothic spires and Jesuit gravitas I was particularly entranced, my mother took a long look around and said, “All these crosses make me uncomfortable!” Then she asked the tour guide where the Hillel chapter was located.
A more self-assured young man would not have been swayed by any of this. A more self-assured young man would have gone and done exactly what he wanted where he wanted. But that was just the point, I realized. That was the most plausible answer to the question I wanted answered—not just “What am I doing here?” but the exponentially more consequential “What’s wrong with me?” What defect was responsible for this terrible anxiety?
What defect? How about being a weakling? How about being a pushover? How about being shamefully, contemptibly, pathetically, unreservedly acquiescent to the wills of others? How about being so weak of will that you may as well not even have one?
It fit, this explanation. It fit as an explanation for why I’d enrolled at Brandeis despite not wanting to, it fit as an explanation for why I’d slept with Esther despite not wanting to, and it fit as an explanation for why I’d broken down in the aftermath of both: Even someone who acquiesces in ignorance knows in his bones that he has acquiesced. His body registers the self-betraying act of submission. And I never acquiesced in ignorance. Never. Whenever I did what I didn’t want to do I did it with a glimmer of awareness, with an intuition of my own desires but with a slavish readiness to abandon that intuition. At moments of decision I treated my intuition in the opposite way everyone treated theirs, not as a handy volitional dispatch from the characterological depths but as a suspicious, mercurial, dubious voice from the same, mired in the chaos of existence and so best to be discounted in favor of more objective-seeming data—namely, other people’s opinions. I shut my eyes, held out my hands, and asked other people to lead me. What else could I possibly be but anxious?
• • •
I didn’t blame my mother for my feeble will, though. Don’t get me wrong. Despite the torrid Oedipal rants of Portnoy’s Complaint, which had me cackling with pleasure, that wasn’t the lesson about anxiety I took away from my reading. I didn’t emerge from those stacks poisoned by grievances against a castrating mother, that mythical villain. On the contrary, I emerged from the library more sympathetic to my mother than ever, more cognizant and welcoming of our similarities, and even with a wry smile for where our little collegiate psychodrama had landed me. It was perfect, in its way. My anxious mother had contrived to deliver her anxious son to the land of the anxious: to the Jews. Because of Roth, I could now appreciate the joke.
Because of Roth, I had to appreciate the joke. Appreciating the joke was the only viable prescription for the diagnosis his books amounted to, and what they amounted to was this: anxiety was my birthright. This wasn’t panic disorder or generalized anxiety disorder or any other DSM designation. This was a Jewish disorder—a genetic and environmental disease that consists of being pulled simultaneously in the directions of rebellion and approval-seeking, of wanting to live adventurously and wanting to live conventionally, of selfishness and selflessness. This thing I was walking around with wasn’t psychiatric; it was ethnic, like Tay-Sachs or a taste for smoked fish. And if I was reading Roth correctly, it was untreatable.
It was a relief. I felt relief having drawn this conclusion. It lent my anxiety a sheen of, if not normality then at least of sanctioned abnormality. It gave the condition a kind of tribal distinction, a historical heft and respectability. I was aware, in no small part because Roth’s novels fixated on the point, that not everyone felt the same way. Poor Zuckerman, like his creator, suffers the disdain of many of his own people for publishing books that portray Jews in an unflattering light. (“Dear Mr. Zuckerman: It is hardly possible to write of Jews with more bile and contempt and hatred. . . .”) The last word Zuckerman’s own father speaks before he dies, staring into his son’s eyes, is: “Bastard.” And at the end of Portnoy, Roth cleverly subjects his protagonist to the scorn of his exact opposite—a courageous, decisive, morally resolute Israeli soldier.
By dawn I had been made to understand that I was the epitome of what was most shameful in “the culture of the Diaspora.” Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself—frightened, defensive, self-deprecating, unmanned and corrupted by life in the gentile world. It was Diaspora Jews just like myself who had gone by the millions to the gas chambers without ever raising a hand against their persecutors, who did not know enough to defend their lives with their blood. The Diaspora! The very word made her furious.
Yet for all the disparagement, no one inside or outside Roth’s fictional world denied that such frightened, self-deprecating, disagreeably overwrought Jews existed. How could they? We were here. We were real. I was real. My mother was real. My brother Scott was real. Woody Allen and Jules Feiffer and Fran Lebowitz were real. Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had taken place, and what Roth’s fiction seemed at least in part designed to argue was that the ceaseless cerebration in which two millennia of Jewish wandering had allegedly resulted was not only valid but vital. Exegesis—interminable, serpentine, mind-knotting, tormented exegesis—was the very soul of the Jewish experience. The goys read the Bible and only the Bible. The Jews read the Torah and what thousands of long-dead, contentious, slippery-minded scholars had to say about what the Torah may or may not mean, what to do when it seems to mean two different things at once, what seeming to mean two different things at once says about meaning in general and about what God may or may not be trying to say about meaning in general, and about how all this should or should not color one’s understanding of divine authority, ethics, secular law, and so on and so forth in an unending welter of confusion. This is Judaism. This disputatiousness was the engine of its development. And like it or not this, Roth seemed to be saying, is part of its psychic legacy. In “Eli, the Fanatic,” one of his earliest stories, a young, assimilated suburban lawyer is enlisted to evict the tenants of a Hasidic yeshiva that has sprouted up in the neighborhood and ends up wearing the uniform of the chief rabbi, wide-brimmed hat, phylacteries, and all. Everyone thinks Eli has had a nervous breakdown, but, Roth writes, “he felt those black clothes as if they were the skin of his skin . . . he would walk forever in that black suit, as adults whispered of his strangeness and children made ‘Shame . . . shame’ with their fingers.”
That defiance in the face of shame was perhaps the greatest attraction of Roth’s work. Roth’s protagonists are for the most part not good men. They tend to be selfish, overbearing, misogynistic, and vain. In some instances they are downright vicious. But they are almost always exceedingly honest—even, or especially, at the expense of their own serenity. They never recoil from the truth, even when the truth is horrendous. Their will to self-awareness is almost tyrannical.
This thrilled me. I exalted in the uncompromising nature of Roth’s characters, for they seemed to transform the idea of anxiety from a pathology into nothing less than a virtue—a heroic trait. They suffered, Roth’s men. How they suffered! But their suffering was indivisible from their brilliance. They refused to sacrifice even one mote of their intelligence for the sake of dumb, ordinary comfort. In this Roth is like Kierkegaard, and not yet knowing the risks I attended closely to the message: To be anxious wasn’t shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life’s contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin. It was to be a writer, and I wanted in.