Free The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth Page B

back to Fort Dix, and after supper in the mess hall, returned to the quiet empty office where during the day h e wrote press releases for the Public Information Officer. There at his desk he sal studying Yiddish. Just one lesson each night and by the time he was discharged he would be reading his literary forefathers in their original tongue. He managed to stick with it for six weeks.
    Zuckerman had retained only a very dim sense of Appel ’ s appearance from the mid-sixties. Round-faced, bespectacled, tailish, balding—that ’ s all he came up with. Maybe the looks weren ’ t as memorable as the opinions. A more vivid recollection was of a striking wife. Was he still married to the pretty, delicate, dark woman who ’ d been walking hand in hand with him along the Barnes Hole beach? Zuckerman recalled rumors of an adulterous passion. Which had she been, the discard or the prize? According to Inquiry ’ s biographical note, Milton Appel was at Harvard for the year, on leave from his Distinguished Professorship at NYU. When literary Manhattan spoke of Appel, it seemed to Zuckerman that the name Milton was intoned with unusual warmth and respect. He couldn ’ t turn up anyone who had it in for the bastard. He fished and found nothing. In Manhattan. Incredible. There was talk of a counterculture daughter, a dropout from Swarthmore who took drugs. Good. That might eat his guts out. Then word went around that Milton was in a Boston hospital with kidney stones. Zuckerman would have liked to witness their passing. Someone said that a friend had seen him walking in Cambridge with a cane. From kidney stones? Hooray. That satisfied the ill will a little. Ill will? He was furious, especially when he learned that before publishing “ The Case of Nathan Zuckerman ” Appel had tried it out on the road, traveled the college lecture circuit telling students and their professors just how awful a writer he was. Then Zuckerman heard that over at Inquiry they had received a single letter in his defense. The letter, which Appel had dismissed in a one-line rebuttal, turned out to have been written by a young woman Zuckerman had slept with during a summer on the Bread Loaf staff. Well, he ’ d had a good time too, but where were the rest of his supporters, all the influential allies? Writers shouldn ’ t—and not only do they tell themselves they shouldn ’ t, but everybody who is not a writer reminds them time and again—writers of course shouldn ’ t, but still they do sometimes take these things to heart. Appel ’ s attack—no, Appel in and of himself, the infuriating fact of his corporeal existence—was all he could think about (except for his pain and his harem).
    The comfort that idiot had given the fatheads! Those xeno phobes, those sentimental, chauvinist, philistine Jews, vindicated in their judgment of Zuckerman by the cultivated verdict of unassailable Appel, Jews whose political discussions and cultural pleasures and social arrangements, whose simple dinner conversation, the Distinguished Professor couldn ’ t have born e for ten seconds. Their kitsch alone made Appel ’ s gorge rise; their taste in Jewish entertainment was the subject of short scalding pieces he still dutifully published in the back pages of the intellectual journals. Nor could they have born e Appel for long either. His stern moral dissection of their harmless leisure pursuits—had the remarks been delivered around the card table at the Y, instead of in magazines they ’ d never heard of—would have struck them as cracked. His condemnation of their favorite hit shows would have seemed to them nothing less than anti-Semitic, Oh, he was tough on all those successful Jews for liking that cheap middlebrow crap. Beside Milton Appel, Zuckerman would have begun to look good to these people. That was the real joke. Zuckerman had been raised in the class that loved that crap, had known them all his life as family and family friends, visited with them,