Before the Law (Page 3)

In Shadows on the Hudson, set in New York in the late 1940s, the protagonist's name is Hertz Grein and, like Asa Heshel, "He had...dreamed of finding a book that would explain all secrets, unerringly reveal the right way. Every time Grein went into a library he searched for just this book.... What Grein sought did not and could not exist: he wanted the fear of heaven without dogma; religion without revelation; discipline without proscriptions." Hertz berates himself for having become a lapsed Jew who nonetheless cannot make a life in the world. Unable to give himself to work or family or spiritual devotion, he wanders from pillar to post, creating emotional chaos wherever he goes. He too runs frantically about among a wife and two mistresses, heaping abuse on himself even as he lusts after and lies repeatedly to each and every one. After 500-odd pages of an exhausting narrative in which Hertz endlessly rehashes God, Man and Worldliness; reviles Utopian Politics (Singer once said that God was everywhere except at a Marxist meeting); and realizes that he is a fool for seeking salvation in bed--he flees to Israel as one would to a monastery.

Enemies: A Love Story, the strongest of these books by far, also set in New York in the 1940s, tells of Herman Broder, a Holocaust survivor who, before the war, had also sought answers to the hard questions--he'd been a philosophy student in Warsaw--and had also been crippled by his own mysteriously demoralized will. The war, however, had solved the problem of a meaningful life, and now, in New York, Herman thinks of himself as one of the walking dead--even as he runs madly about the city among (again!) three women: living with his current wife (the Polish peasant who hid him from the Germans) in Brooklyn; sleeping with his passionate mistress (also a survivor) up in the Bronx; and drinking tea with his original wife (miraculously returned from the dead) down on the Lower East Side.

In this novel Singer successfully makes a metaphor out of the uselessness of having "survived" the Holocaust--these are truly people with leftover life to kill. Still: Herman is Asa and Hertz in spades. When Tamara (the first wife) and Herman find each other again, she questions him intently about his life with Yadwiga (the second wife) and Masha (the mistress). He hangs his head and tells her he doesn't know what he is doing, he just doesn't know. She stares at him and says, "You haven't learned a thing. Absolutely nothing." He agrees with her. He, too, thinks his perpetual "bewilderment" long precedes the war.

The house of cards finally falls in on Herman and he sits alone, experiencing a moment of terrified remorse in which he "had sworn to renounce all worldly ambitions, to give up the licentiousness into which he had sunk when he had strayed from God, the Torah and Judaism." The very next day, of course, the spineless Herman goes back on his own resolution. In the end, like Hertz Grein, he up and disappears, leaving Yadwiga pregnant, Masha dead and Tamara stunned. Maybe he joined Hertz in Jerusalem; maybe he's still hiding out in Cincinnati. Wherever he is, he is surely making life a living hell for himself and everyone who cares for him, as the devotion of Herman-Hertz-Asa to feeling scummy is boundless. Like the characters in Graham Greene's novels of lapsed-Catholic torment, Singer's, too, must go on sinking into a bottomless well of guilt, regret and the kind of elaborate self-revulsion that precludes any sort of rescue, either intellectual or psychological. That, finally, is the name of their game.

Having made the association with Greene, let me take it one step further. Upon rereading these novels of Singer's after many years away from them, I suddenly realized that a comparison with Greene feels more apt than with any other writer I can think of. While writers like Wallace Stevens really did--and do--address the immensity of "this iron solitude," Greene's writing often seems in service to a colossal piece of self-dramatization that compels him to make religious allegory out of bad character. I always feel Greene routinely beating his own self-deceived breast through the moral lapses that send his people spinning into the delicious despair they feel at living in a world bereft of God. It is the same with Singer in these novels. When Singer won the Nobel, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that Singer had made the Eastern European Jew "an exemplar of the suffering modern man who has been exiled from his divine inheritance." As the decades pass it becomes harder and harder to take seriously such an assessment. Singer once said, "I'm Herman, for good and for bad"--ostensibly with rue but actually, one suspects, with secret pride--and I remember thinking, "Ah, now we're coming closer to the heart of the matter."

If there's one thing the reader of a Singer biography wants, it is to get inside the passive-aggressive who said, "I'm Herman." What we want to know is: Who is he? How did he come to be? And how does that development illuminate the work? A flash of insight somewhere along these lines would, I think, provide a successful organizing principle for any book that purports to give us an I.B. Singer "Life." Unfortunately, in Florence Noiville's new biography we get nothing of the sort. Noiville is a French journalist with an astonishing predilection for hagiography. She absolutely adores Singer. For her, he can do no wrong.

Singer, apparently, had a character of monstrous complexity. Publicly he was seen as charming, folksy, unpretentious; whereas, by many accounts, he was inordinately vain, selfish and demanding. He betrayed friendships, discarded lovers, abandoned his one and only son. "But," his distraught biographer pleads on this last score, "at least Singer was sincere and frank.... He refused to become mired in the sham of family bonds." Detailing many moments of really questionable behavior on the part of her protagonist, she is often content to forgo analysis, exclaiming, "But at least he was sincere!" Perhaps it is just a matter of bad writing--as a teacher of writing I know how bad writing and bad thinking complement each other--maybe that accounts for the low level of interpretive intelligence that informs this Life. Examples such as the following abound:

About living on Krochmalna Street: "What is most important about those years is that he attended the school of life."

On reading a diary description of Singer's thoughts at 13: "He was already the 'eternal outsider' forever at odds with his background."

Looking at a photo of Singer at 22: "One can almost imagine the four-year-old boy who was taught to read the Pentateuch and almost recognize the face of the future Nobel Prize winner."

These are the sentences of a myth-maker, not a biographer of honest or searching intent. The thing that is most wanted from a literary biography is neither endorsement nor denunciation of the artist but rather a narrative that will reveal the person who wrote the books. In the case of Singer, one would have appreciated most some insight into the writer who when he gained distance on his subject served his gift magnificently, and when he used himself as a model for the protagonist got lost in a mass of words that, ultimately, provided neither wonder nor clarity.

Singer was a man not so much divided against himself as ambitious to climb literary heights for which he did not always have the right equipment. He loved and read the Russians throughout his life. He took them as exemplars and mentors. On reading Gogol, he said, "How is it possible that this man who lived a hundred years before me has stolen so many of my stories?" And indeed, the Gogol in Singer truly wrote fantastically; it was he who had the capacity not only to capture but to inhabit, in all its glory and foolishness, the thrill of the lowest of the low imitating God through the unruliness of their passions, the chutzpah of their strange imaginings, the daring of transgression. The problem was Singer also read Dostoyevsky. When he was in the shtetl, watching lust and Torah chase each other around the village square, he was Gogol; when he was beating his lapsed-Jewish breast he was Dostoyevsky. The talent lay with Gogol.

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