January 1, 2008
Alan Bennett on Exit Ghost and the Upper East Side
Last January, on my other short-lived blog, Today In Letters, I posted an entry from Alan Bennett’s diary, a selection from which appears in the first issue of the London Review of Books published each year. Once again this year's selection is not available online (“for copyright or other reasons”), so here is one entry, posted to encourage you to pick up the magazine and read the rest:
1 November, New York. I have been reading Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, which I’ve enjoyed (insofar as I can enjoy a novel about an incontinent, impotent, irascible old writer who is two years younger than I am). One of the ghosts who is making his exit is, as I understand it, Nathan Zuckerman himself, Roth’s eidolon or alter ego whose parallel life he has traced in half a dozen books. Another ghost laid to rest is that of Amy Bellette, who in The Ghost Writer was the much younger lover of the virtually forgotten writer E.I. Lonoff. In that book Zuckerman comes to identify Amy, mistakenly, as Anne Frank, who has survived the camp and lives on unrecognized. In Exit Ghost she turns up again and is now revealed now as Anne Frank but as a survivor nonetheless, only from Norway not Holland.
I had been reading this when we go into EAT on Madison and 81st for acup of tea and a piece of (very unsatisfactory) coconut cake. An oldish woman in a red coat and beret (and looking not unlike how Enid Starkie used to look) beckons me over, having read and enjoyed some of my stuff. She particularly liked A Question of Attribution, the play that dealt with the Queen and Anthony Blunt. She has an accent which I don’t identify, but she says she spent her childhood in Occupied Europe and what she liked about the play was all the lies that were being told, ‘Both of them lying. Him lying, her pretending. That was my childhood,’ she says. She doesn’t say whether she’s Jewish or whether the lies were vital and necessary to survival, and in my typical unwriterly fashion I fail to ask, perhaps because it’s so like a scene from Roth’s novel. As we go she calls out: ‘Stay alive!’
The whole episode is a reminder of what an archaeological site the Upper East Side is, with skeletal old ladies pushed (by their black minders) in wheelchairs up Madison Avenue, all with their stories to tell. It’s like a long lost city in some Middle Eastern wilderness where shards of history are lying about waiting to be picked up—or, in this case, talked to. But not by me, who is at a loss for words.