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Youtunes seth roth a deach child1/24/2024 ![]() But he knows what awaits: “Once I was dead, who could protect the story of my life from Richard Kliman?” He will visit his doctors he will swim his laps and take his pills. Naturally, his concerns go beyond the reputation of his mentor. Zuckerman considers the biographer a ruthless seducer, out to cut the artist down to comprehensible and assailable size-to displace the fiction with the real story. Replace the genius of the genius with the secret of the genius.” During a heated conversation in Central Park, Zuckerman refuses to coöperate with the “rampaging” young man, and denounces his project: “So you’re going to redeem Lonoff’s reputation as a writer by ruining it as a man. Zuckerman is outraged at Kliman’s presumption. He is also eager to share a great discovery, Lonoff’s “secret”-an incestuous affair with his older half sister. In New York for medical treatment, Zuckerman encounters a young hustler named Richard Kliman, who has declared himself Lonoff’s biographer and who insists on interviewing Zuckerman. He fears, above all, the tyranny of the biographer. Yet his greatest anxiety does not concern his impotence and incontinence, or his deteriorating short-term memory. Zuckerman, suffering from prostate cancer, has been sapped of his physical and creative vitality. In Roth’s “ Exit Ghost” (2007), the last of the Zuckerman books, half a century has elapsed since the visit with Lonoff. And five years later there it was: “ Updike,” a biography by Adam Begley. In the weeks before his death, of lung cancer, in early 2009, he continued to write, including an admiring review of Blake Bailey’s biography of John Cheever. The resulting collection, “ Self-Consciousness,” is a dazzlingly intimate book, but his imagination and industry did more to draw biographical attention than to repel it. ![]() When Updike, in the eighties, felt the sour breath of potential biographers on his neck, he tried to preëmpt his pursuers by writing a series of autobiographical essays about such topics as the Pennsylvania town where he grew up, his stutter, and his skin condition. “As long as I am alive, I don’t want somebody else playing on my jungle gym-disturbing my children, quizzing my ex-wife, bugging my present wife, seeking for Judases among my friends, rummaging through yellowing old clippings, quoting in extenso bad reviews I would rather forget, and getting everything slightly wrong.” “A fiction writer’s life is his treasure, his ore, his savings account, his jungle gym,” he wrote. But he was hardly welcoming to prospective biographers. Painter’s Proust-and he allows that an expert biographer, by marshalling archival material to guide us through the geography of a writer’s life and times, can help us in “reëxperiencing” a literary work, with greater intimacy. In his essay “ One Cheer for Literary Biography,” he expresses admiration for some of the modern highlights-Richard Ellmann’s Joyce, Leon Edel’s James, George D. James admitted to his nephew and literary executor that his singular desire in old age was to “frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter.” In “ The Silent Woman,” Janet Malcolm, confronting a raft of Plath biographies, writes that the biographer is all too often like a burglar, “breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.” John Updike was gentler in his appraisal of the form. Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Walt Whitman, Henry James, and Sylvia Plath are but a few who put their letters and journals into the fire. Many literary figures have dreaded the spectre of the biographer. And until he died, in 2018, he spent a great deal of energy courting biographers, hoping that they would tell his story in a way that wouldn’t undermine his art or his legacy. The predatory dimension of one person telling the story of another: Roth wrangled with the theme throughout his career. “There’s paper on my desk,” Lonoff tells Zuckerman once they are left alone in the house. The clues to his puzzle.” The clues become another writer’s material. ![]() “When you admire a writer you become curious,” Zuckerman admits. Hope, refusing the self-abnegating existence of Tolstoy’s wife, walks out. Lonoff has betrayed his wife, Hope, with a former student named Amy Bellette, whom Zuckerman somehow imagines to be none other than Anne Frank. In the course of an overnight stay, Zuckerman is witness to his idol’s domestic implosion. Lonoff, an eminent novelist living in the New England woods. The story begins when Zuckerman, a young writer who has just published his first short stories, pays a visit to E. I. It was the first of nine novels by Philip Roth narrated by Nathan Zuckerman. “ The Ghost Writer” was published in 1979.
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