Eulogy: Nathan Zuckerman, 1933-2007

281 For all of us gathered here mourning Zuckerman, I must forthrightly confess that even as I deliver this eulogy, a part of me still wonders if his death is just another one of his schemes, another outgrowth of his imagination that he has, once again, taken too far. Would any of us be surprised, after all, if Nathan Zuckerman suddenly reappeared, laughing off our inveterate confusion over reality and literary representation? Bound up in considering Zuckerman’s life is the sense that we never really knew him at all—that only one person (a certain writer who shall here remain nameless so as to avoid their chronic conflation on such a solemn occasion) has known for sure when Zuckerman was the genuine article and when Zuckerman put on a front. But if it is true this time (as it wasn’t in The Counterlife) that Nathan Zuckerman is gone for good, then we mourn his absence. Why do we mourn his absence when we can always find him in the pages of a book just as we found him before? We mourn for a future without his keen insights about the innermost emotions of others. Zuckerman’s greatest asset was his knack for illimitable empathy, for imagining beyond all expectation the intimate details of another’s life in order to understand him/her without judgment. Holed up in his writing quarters, he spent much of the end of his life telling other people’s stories, sharing with us his intricate revelations, so that we might learn, ourselves, to live out our wildest potentials shamelessly. Nathan Zuckerman, one might say, was not afraid of using counterfeit to expose something more true than anything that could be real. That was why he was so hard, for some, to love. Yet simultaneously true and false, forthright and manipulative—he showed us that which exists within all of us. To cast him off as crude is to ignore the corners of one’s own heart. To scoff at his experimental intelligence is to deny the substance latent in possibility. To take only offense at his humor is to miss half the point. If this eulogy is, indeed, in vain, it almost makes no difference; Zuckerman Eulogy: Nathan Zuckerman, 1933-2007 Miriam Jaffe-Foger, Co-Guest Editor 282 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2009 can’t be pinned down in a eulogy anyway. No posthumous representation will ever carry out some kind of final justice. Yet this problem of posthumous representation haunted Zuckerman. He once imagined his own eulogy as delivered by his young editor. It was a defense of Carnovsky, of both his right and ability to write fiction. It feigned to take the focus off of Zuckerman’s character even though it scrupulously exacted vengeance upon those who had misunderstood his intentions and rather slyly declared that one cannot claim to know a novelist through his writing. In his last novel, Zuckerman projected his preoccupation with how he might be remembered onto his mentor and colleague, hoping, perhaps, to escape the fate of his beloved E.I. Lonoff. Oh, dear Zuckerman, no one can control everything, not even an omniscient narrator. Just let us remember you, as we have here. Your readers, your family, your friends, your enemies, your critics, your fans will all have their own perspectives. You are lucky in death to have been understood by many in many different ways, to have shared your art for us to interpret however we may. We have just begun to tell your story, Zuckerman. You will live on as the sum of many parts. ...