156 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
loved, and [... he] loved—pretending, as he went along, to throw the
apple seed everywhere. (p. 318)The scene then culminates in the suitably mawkish image of Levov
being espied by his wife from an upstairs bedroom window. On being
asked what he was doing, he tells her, hoisting her up in his arms,
that he was “making love to his life” (p. 319). This moment is imbued
with a sardonic, mocking tone, which appears to emanate from
Zuckerman’s frustrated attempts to understand “the real” Levov, who,
for him, appears all too sincere, perfect, and “wonderful” (pp. 29–30).
Again, in so doing, Zuckerman is overtly subsuming Levov into the
tragic structure: setting up the “hero” for his dramatic fall.
An important element that presages this fall is the paradoxical
nature of Levov’s pastoral dream. Indeed, the pastoral in general
relies, to recall the words of Williams, upon a sharp and arbitrary
division between town and country that effaces the role of capitalism
in creating both. Levov himself personifies this contradictory qual-
ity of the pastoral conceit by dividing his life into two related but
apparently opposing realities: the town capitalist in the Newark Maid
glove factory and the country homeowner in quaint Old Rimrock.
Significantly, there are few visible social connections between the two
places. The factory’s employees are mostly black laborers, who have
recently migrated from the south of the country while, in contrast,
Old Rimrock is presented (through the helpful history lesson of his
neighbor Orcutt) as a place steeped in a distinctly white, Protestant
tradition and culture. In one particularly telling scene, Levov reflects
on the clement location he has chosen for a home.
Everybody else who was picking up and leaving Newark was headed for
one of the cozy suburban streets in Maplewood or South Orange, while
they, by comparison, were out on the frontier. During the two years
when he was down in South Carolina with the marines, it used to thrill
him to think, ‘This is the Old South. I am below the Mason-Dixon
line. I am Down South!’ Well, he couldn’t commute from Down South
but he could skip Maple-wood and South Orange, leapfrog the South
Mountain Reservation, and just keep going, get as far out west in New
Jersey as he could while still being able to make it every day to Central
Avenue in an hour. (p. 307)