Nothing Whatever to Say

 Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson—the third novel in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy about Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman—is a book about a writer trying to escape the curse of writing. 

It's really not so unusual. Writing is not the sort of activity you enjoy. It's a compulsion, in which a small dose of reward chemicals that comes from having written is bookended by long periods of agony: first, there's the period in which you have an idea you want to express. It builds inside you until you can't tolerate the inward "pressure of clauses and sentences" (George Eliot) any longer. 

Then, there's the ordeal of writing itself. The boundless frustration that comes from feeling that whatever you're putting on the page isn't really what you wanted to say. That this is all wrong. That you sound like an idiot. That the idea is escaping from you irretrievably, to be replaced with this inadequate copy. 

Finally, you have written the thing. And then, indeed, there is a moment or two in which you feel satisfaction from a job complete. But it never lasts. Because then comes the agony of having no idea you want to express. You are spent. There's nothing else to write. Like Mike Gold in the satirical E.E. Cummings poem, "The Ballad of an Intellectual"—you wake up one morning "to find you have nothing whatever to say." 

This agony is worse than the first two. At least those promise some relief. They point toward some definite outlet. When you have an unexpressed idea, you know you can at least try to translate it into words. 

But when one has no ideas—nothing to say—there is no obvious end-point to the ordeal; and no obvious solution. Eventually, one learns merely to wait. One has to exercise faith that the next idea will eventually come on its own. But this is a faith grounded in nothing firmer than past experience, which—as we know from the problem of induction—is an imperfect guide. 

One feels always haunted by the danger that this time—nothing will come at all. 

And if nothing comes—then what? You simply go through life without blogging about it? You have experiences that go unrecorded? Thoughts that are never immortalized? That seems a contradiction in terms. Or you simply exist in a state without thoughts; without meaningful experience. Which sounds to the writer like a kind of living death. 

And yet, other people seem to do it. Plants, minerals, and animals do it. Most of the universe manages to exist without needing to explain its existence to itself. As the Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray once put it: "Stars, herbs and cattle exist without reasons, they fit the universe wherever they occur without need of language to maintain their forms[.]" If they can do it—why, oh why, can't I? 

This, in essence, is what Roth's third Zuckerman book is about. In the second novel in the series, Zuckerman reckons with the downsides of fame and success. In this, the third, he contends with the frustrations of writer's block. 

The third novel finds Zuckerman sprawled out on a mat at home, nursing an inexplicable pain in his neck and upper body that a horde of psychoanalysts wants to convince him is in some way self-inflicted and psychosomatic.

He's not buying it; but the result of the mysterious illness is that he cannot write. 

Or is the mental block on his writing the product of something else—a problem deeper than the physical pain? Does it perhaps—he wonders to himself—descend from the fact that he has exhausted his subject? 

Part of the writer's misery is that everything they have to write about comes from their subjectivity and experience. A writer—like most people, perhaps—lives most vividly in their first three decades on this Earth. That's when they face their first crises of identity. They have to forge a selfhood and a vocation. They have to define themselves in opposition to something. They have to suffer their little rebellions and victories and defeats. Maybe they even fall in love.

Then—being writers—they have to fight for solitude and independence to go and write about what they learned. 

Eventually—if they are lucky—they find it. Zuckerman, by the start of this novel, has found it. He has won all the money and fame he needs to spend his time writing. He has no financial or familial demands on his time other than the urging of the blank page—he could devote every day to writing, and nothing else. 

But—the very solitude and independence that he needed in order to have time to write has thereby deprived him of a subject. If the writer's subject comes from experience—and one has to close oneself off to experience in order to find time to write—then one is left with nothing to write about. One is forced to return to the well of earlier experience—to mine those childhood, adolescent, and early adulthood years for whatever secrets they haven't yet disclosed. 

But that's what one was writing about already. How many times can one tell the same tired story of adolescent identity formation? 

(So Zuckerman, having gone to the University of Chicago to escape from Newark to the larger world of ideas, finds he keeps coming back to Newark anyway—finds that, in his artistic life, he never gets beyond Newark (just as Joyce, writing in Trieste decades later, nonetheless could only write about Dublin in 1904).)

That is one potential source of Zuckerman's writer's block, then: he already shot his load. At the very moment he found the most time and the best position from which to write, he also used up all his content. He has "awoken"—as the E.E. Cummings poem puts it—"to find he has nothing whatever to say." 

And so, he faces the third kind of agony of the writer's life—the worst of them all: the agony of having no idea what else to write about. 

But—in the midst of his despair—Zuckerman starts to wonder whether this might not be a kind of blessing or relief. Is there perhaps not actually something to be said for having nothing else to write about?

Does it not mean that one is finally free of the compulsion to chronicle all experience—free to experience experience for its own sake; to live the life of the "Stars, herbs, and cattle" that Gray wrote about—the life that doesn't need to be justified or explained in order to have the right to exist—the "unjustified life"; as Zuckerman calls it at one point—and elsewhere: "the unexamined life, the only life worth living"?

If so, Zuckerman concludes—then the pain must really be a sort of invitation to start over; to begin a second life without the burden of self-consciousness and the writer's compulsions. 

It's not unheard of. "The dream of breaking out isn't that rare," observes Zuckerman. "It happens to the most hardened writers." Most writers fantasize about one day being liberated from the all-consuming obsession and its three agonies. 

Some writers—incredibly—even manage to accomplish it. Rimbaud moved to Africa and somehow managed never to write again. He lived decades more—surrounded by the most poetic locales and experiencing the extremes of nineteenth century life in the raw—without ever sublimating this experience into poetry. Valéry had his notorious twenty years of silence. And so on. 

But the vast majority of writers never escape. As W.G. Sebald puts it, in A Place in the Country: "There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it, even at the critical age when [...] one every day [...] longs for nothing more than to put a halt to the wheels ceaselessly turning in one's head." (Catling trans.)

Yes, indeed, to write is a compulsion—often bringing no more joy to the sufferer than counting tiles on the kitchen floor. 

And so—Zuckerman concludes—if he has been suddenly relieved of the compulsion—perhaps that is a thing to be celebrated. Perhaps it just means he's free now. Free—he thinks at first—to live a life of bodily pleasures. He is now rich and famous in America. If he no longer has the duty to write every day—perhaps he can learn to enjoy even "the intellectual sin of light amusement." 

Perhaps the pain in his neck and back has given him the hard-earned "right to be stupid. The right to be lazy. The right to be no one and nothing"—"To learn to lead the wholly indefensible, unjustified life—and to learn to like it"—in short, to learn the ways of the "stars, herbs, and cattle." 

But he quickly wearies of that—and so, he comes to embrace the second possible lesson of the pain. Perhaps, having liberated him from his career as a writer, it offers a chance to pursue a second career—a fresh start as something else. But what? 

For an American who has grown up worshipping at the altar of higher eduction, there can only be one answer to that question: the pinnacle of achievement for every would-be good boy: become a doctor. That's right—Zuckerman, famous and controversial novelist, at age 40, wants to go back to school at his alma mater, the University of Chicago, to finish the science credits he would need to enroll in the university's Pritzker School of Medicine. (One of the abundant pleasures of this novel for the U of C alum is the plethora of references to beloved landmarks of this sort: Ida Noyes, Burton Judson, Rockefeller Chapel, Jimmy's—they all make an appearance). 

Zuckerman struggles to explain or justify this bizarre plan to his friends and lovers—but it makes perfect sense to me. The writer and the physician are in some ways opposites—but only in the sense that one is a kind of mysterious shadow of the other. Of course the writer is fascinated by the doctor. The doctor does what the humanist does: tries to help people; to explain them; to make sense of them; to cure them. Except that the doctor goes about it with a tool that is wholly inaccessible to us—and therefore, mysterious and fascinating: empirical science. 

Moreover, the doctor goes about their task of curing bodies largely without reflecting on the experience or trying to explain it through literature (unless they happen to moonlight as writers—as plenty have done; Zuckerman offers a list of writer-doctors at one point; to it, I would add, as further examples: George Crabbe and Gottfried Benn). 

No wonder, then, that doctors come to represent for Zuckerman the ideal of experience in its pure form: experience that can simply be experienced; experience that doesn't have to be translated into words. Who—after all—experiences more on a daily basis than an ER doctor; confronted with the extremes of life and death and joy and suffering—the start of new life and the extinction of old? And who tells us less about what they see every day—who else takes that much experience with them into the silence of the grave—like so many unreflecting stars, herbs, and cows? 

Doctors are like us; but not like us. They are the humanist's shadow self. So—when a writer suddenly finds himself flummoxed and stymied by his own profession; when he wakes up one day with "nothing whatever to say"—no wonder he would turn to this great mirror-universe version of his own profession as the ideal way to start his second chapter? How better to spend the second half of a life than living it as a perfectly inverted mirror image of the first? 

Needless to say—Zuckerman's friends don't see it that way. They get more hung up on the practical realities: his lack of scientific training or of any clear sign hitherto in his life of interest in the medical profession. His age. The fact that he had graduated from college twenty years earlier. The fact that he had already achieved fame and success in a completely different field. Why start over? And if he was going to start over, why start over in the hardest possible way? Why not pick something closer to his own set of talents and interests. 

To which Zuckerman replies: "What's easier doesn't answer the need for something difficult." 

Indeed. I've faced the same questions about my own periodic fantasies of starting over. I was doing pretty well there in my late twenties and early thirties as a human rights advocate, communications professional type. Why not keep going? Or, if I was going to start over, why not pick a field closer to my own? 

To which I answered, with Zuckerman: the whole point of the fantasy is a completely new start. Something already close to my own field—more self-consciousness, more indignation, more railing against injustice; would miss the whole point of the fantasy. I want something different—the difference from all that has gone before is the whole point.

My friends were about as persuaded by this as Zuckerman's. (Indeed, I've even run the idea of going to medical school by them several times—and gotten about the same bemused and skeptical response.)

And, it must be said, Zuck's plan to go to med school doesn't work out too well in the novel. He doesn't quite succeed in starting over. And I probably wouldn't either. I probably could not endure an unreflective practical profession that does not involve self-recursive writing. 

Zuckerman observes at one point: "In his former life he could never have imagined lasting a week without writing. He used to wonder how all the billions who didn't write could take the daily blizzard—all that beset them, such a saturation of the brain, and so little of it known or named." 

Indeed, I still don't know how they do it—in my current life. I can't actually imagine living the life of an ER doctor—because I couldn't possibly live through so much in a given day and not write about it every morning. And I couldn't write about it every morning without time in which to write about it (and solitude and coffee and leisure, etc.) 

In which case, we're back to the paradox with which we started: I have to minimize experience in order to find time to write about experience, which means that the very things that make writing possible also cut the writer off from his subject and his source material. 

It may be simply the curse of fate, then—that the people who live the most, and have the most to say, will never be able to say it. Experience is necessary to writing, and yet anathema to it. 

And so, we who do write are condemned to turn about and about again in the same narrow field. We'll never know what ER doctors might have to tell us if they found the time—though I'm sure it would be interesting. The public is left hearing from people like me and Zuckerman—people who live at home and read and write all day; and write about writing and reading. 

Which can't be very interesting—even if one is primarily interested in reading and writing. For, as Hazlitt once put it: "A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of them."

I guess I'm trapped here. So was Zuckerman. So, it must be said, was Roth. Even as his fictional alter ego Zuckerman was going through writer's block—Roth was writing about his writer's block. Even as Zuckerman fantasized about escaping from the compulsion—from Sebald's "wheels ceaselessly turning in one's head"—Roth was indulging the compulsion—writing compulsively about his fictional counterpart's yearning to end the compulsion. 

Roth couldn't really imagine "lasting a week without writing" any better than I can. I couldn't join any of these professions that demand seven days a week from you—because I've already given those days over to writing. 

I don't know how other people endure otherwise. How do they survive the "blizzard" of thoughts? How do they withstand the "pressure of clauses and sentences" without bursting? 

I wish that we could combine tasks. I wish that the people who do the living could also find time to write about it—so the world isn't stuck just hearing from those of us who write without living—and therefore never have actual life explained to them, but only the artist's deliberately-chosen non-life—Proust's immurement in his cork-lined bedroom. 

For this reason, Zuckerman even starts trying to investigate lives radically different from his own—the life of people with real problems—exiles from totalitarian regimes, Eastern European refugees—rather than people like himself, who "feel not a want but what [them]selves create," (to borrow a phrase from Robert Burns). But he finds he can't do it. 

"Though people are weeping in every corner of the earth from torture and ruin and cruelty and loss," Roth writes, "that didn't mean he could make their stories his, no matter how passionate and powerful they seemed beside his trivialities." 

It would be nice if we could have a division of labor in society in this way: some people live; and other people write about what those people live. We'd accomplish a lot more. 

But it is part of the curse of the writer that they can only write about their own experience—they can write only what they know. There is no relief, ultimately, from what Byron called the "gloomy vanity of 'drawing from self'"—much as we might long to find it in writing about other people, or living for other people, as doctors do. As Roth/Zuckerman observes, "if Zuckerman wrote about what he didn't know, who then would write about what he did know?" 

So, the same person has to live and write in their own lifetime. But this means—the people with the most interesting stories—and therefore the most to write about—will never tell us what these things are. They will remain locked in them until the end. 

And you all are left with me and Roth and Zuckerman to keep you company—each purporting to write about the other only as an excuse to write about the self; to find yet another on-ramp to the self; another entry point; another device to make use of that one and only subject we have: those first three decades of life when we were discovering who were are, attending the University of Chicago, and conceiving of ourselves for the first time as people with an authorly vocation.