… from Zuckerman ’ s notebooks
New York, Jan. 11. 1976
“ Your novel, ” he says, “ is absolutely one of the five or six books of my life. ”
“ You must assure Mr. Sisovsky, ” I say to his companion, “ that he has flattered me enough. ”
“ You have flattered him enough, ” she tells him. A woman of about forty, pale eyes, broad cheekbones, dark, severely parted hair—a distraught, arresting face. One blue vein bulges dangerously in her temple as she perches at the edge of my sofa, quite still. In black like Prince Hamlet. Signs of serious wear at the seat of the black velvet skirt of her funereal suit. Her fragrance is strong, her stockings laddered, her nerves shot.
He is younger, perhaps by ten years: thick-bodied, small, sturdy, with a broad, small-nosed face that has the ominous potency of a gloved fist. I see him lowering the brow and breaking doors down with it. Yet the longish hair is the hair of the heartthrob, heavy, silky hair of an almost Oriental darkness and sheen. He wears a gray suit, a faintly luminous fabric, the jacket tailored high under the arms and pinching a little at the shoulders. The trousers cling to a disproportionately powerful lower torso— a soccer player in long pants. His pointed white shoes are in need of repair; his white shirt is wo rn with the top buttons open. Something of the wastrel, something of the mobster, something too of the over - privileged boy. Where the woman ’ s English is heavily accented, Sisovsky ’ s is only mildly flawed, and articulated so confidently—with od dly elegant Oxonian vowels—that the occasional syntactical contusion strikes me as a form of cunning, an ironical game to remind his American host that he is, after all, only a refugee, little more than a newcomer to the tongue mastered already with so much fluency and charm. Beneath all this deference to me, I take him to be one of the strong ones, one of the stallions who has the strength of his outrage.
“ Tell him to tell me about his book, ” I say to her. “ What was it called? ”
But on he continues about mine. “ When we arrived in Canada from Rome, yours was the first book that I bought. I have learned that it had a scandalous response here in America. When you were so kind to agree to see me, I went to the library to find out how Americans have perceived your work. The question interests me because of how Czechs perceived my own work, which also had a scandalous response. ”
“ What was the scandal? ”
“ Please, ” he says, “ I don ’ t wish to compare our two books. Yours is a work of genius, and mine is nothing. When I studied Kafka, the fate of his books in the hands of the Kafkologis t s seemed to me to be more grotesque than the fate of Josef K. I feel this is true also with you. This scandalous response gives another grotesque dimension, and belongs now to your book as Kafkologine stupidities belong to Kafka. Even as the banning of my own little book creates a dimension not at all intended by me. ”
“ Why was it banned, your book? ”
“ The weight of the stupidity you must carry is heavier than the weight of banning. ”
“ Not true. ”
“ I am afraid it is, cher ma î tre. You come to belittle the meaning of your vocation. You come to believe that there is no literary culture that matters. There is a definite existential weakening of your position. This is regrettable because, in fact, you have written a masterpiece. ”
Yet he never says what it is about my book that he likes. Maybe he doesn ’ t really like it. Maybe he hasn ’ t read it. Much subtlety in such persistence. The ruined exile will not be deflected from commiserating with the American success.
What ’ s he want?
“ But it ’ s you, ” I remind him, “ who ’ s been denied the right to practice his profession. Whatever the scandal, I have been profusely—bizarrely—rewarded . Everything from an Upper East Side address to helping worthy murderers get
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