Roth v. Roth v. Roth
The complexities and conundrums of reading Philip Roth’s work as autobiography
by JOSEPH O’NEILL (The Atlantic, April 2012)
NOWADAYS, TO ATTEMPT a critical
investigation of the work of Philip Roth is to put oneself in the humiliating
position of the flatfoot arriving at the scene of the crime only to discover
that, yet again, he’s been beaten to it by the private eye, the eye who has not
just cracked the case but got the girl and held the press conference. The eye
is, of course, Roth himself. Any idea that might occur to us about the author
has already occurred to him, only more intelligently. Roth, for these
purposes, includes his brilliantly self-diagnosing and self-disputing
writer-narrators Nathan Zuckerman, Peter Tarnopol, David Kepesh, and of course
the invented character Philip Roth, Roth the author of fiction, Roth the
(pseudo) memoirist, and Roth the interviewee, self-interviewer, and essayist.
His first collection of critical writings is titled Reading Myself and
Others: not only does he read himself like a book, he reads us like
a book, too. Still, we must plod on. A crime has been committed and someone has
to do the paperwork. Moreover, there is something fishy about the case: the
perp, by his own confession, is none other than the private eye. Philip Roth
did it.
Before we
can go further into this conflation of art and criminality—before we can go
anywhere—we must get some kind of a handle on the corpus. A new Roth
publication these days includes, in the front matter, a “Books by Philip Roth”
page on which his works are listed in subgroups (devised by the author, I
assume) such as “Zuckerman Books” and “Roth Books” and “Nemeses: Short Novels.”
The 31 (so far) titles course all the way down the page until they reach the
distinctly deltaic shape made by “Other Books.” We’re looking at a kind of Nile
of writing.
It is hard
to contemplate a body of work of such magnitude and grandeur without a little
melancholy. Few literary writers younger than, say, 60 have much chance of
achieving a comparable yield, and one wonders how many would even want to. The
Rothic dedication to productivity seems anachronistic, even uncalled-for, in a
culture ever less hospitable to the demands made by a lengthy written text, the
most basic being that the reader sit down for hours without some powerful
electronic agitation of the senses. Roth himself has predicted—with excessive
gloom, I hope—that before long the reading of novels will occupy a niche not
much more significant than the one currently occupied by the reading of poems
in Latin. But neither pessimism nor, phenomenally, age has held Roth back.
Since 2000 he has come out with eight books, and that’s not counting the seven
volumes of Library of America definitive editions, most recently The
American Trilogy, comprising American Pastoral (1997), I Married
a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). As Philip Roth
pushes 80, the writing flows out of him more voluminously and urgently than
ever.
I suppose
there are people who believe that even good novels spring from an instrumental
urge on the part of the writer to explore his “themes.” If that were true, the
work of Philip Roth would be largely reducible to his pressing and often
recurrent interest in Jews in America (and Israel and Europe); the social
history of Newark; sex; marriage; illness and aging; the prostate gland; pain;
persecution and disgrace; the political landscape of post-war America;
masturbation; death; writing; identity and masquerade; desire; life; Nixon;
racial and sexual politics; childhood; the dealings of men and women; and
baseball. (Roth himself has compared his repertoire to his father’s
conversation: “Family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew.”)
But of course, there is no reason why such preoccupations, of neutral worth in
themselves, would result in writing rather than some other activity—chatter,
say. Furthermore, themes come and go. If we dropped Philip Roth on a cartoon
desert island, we could expect a book featuring a solitary palm tree and the
predicament of a fictional Philip Roth marooned on a desert island.
This last
scenario would suggest an autobiographical critique. Roth writes about himself:
to know the life is to know the work. Certainly, by using narrators who are
nominally Roth or may be easily taken to be his shadows, he may be understood
to be inviting such an approach. Also, hasn’t he admitted to being an
“autobiographical writer” whose only real beef, in this regard, is with
misconceptions surrounding “the autobiographical writer that I am thought to
be”? Hasn’t he written of “the facts” as his “way of springing into fiction”?
Maybe so; but as someone who has trouble reading even autobiographies as fact
and finds mostly arid the concept of a novel as a portal to its author, I
receive Roth’s stories with a no doubt simplistic acceptance of the fictivity
they obviously (albeit postmodernly) assert. In this sense, I take his fiction
at face value, even as the very notion of the face as a site of value is put in
question by the “masks, disguises, distortions, and lies” with which Roth
imagines actuality. Still, one
must take into account certain basic facts. Roth himself has done so, in The
Facts (1988).
PHILIP ROTH COMES, as used to be said,
from nothing, his nothing being a densely Jewish neighborhood of Newark, New
Jersey, named Weequahic. The grandson of Galician immigrants, he grew up as the
“good boy” and the “gorged beneficiary” of a gentle, domestically expert mother
“who raised housekeeping in America to a great art” and of a loving, bossy
father educated only through eighth grade but determined and able enough to
ascend into middle management at Metropolitan Life. Family and community
enabled Roth to enjoy the “intensely secure and protected childhood” that we
recognize as Nathan Zuckerman’s in American Pastoral and I Married a
Communist, and that we encounter also in those fruitfully nostalgic short
novels Everyman (2006) and Nemesis (2010). Even as an adult, Roth
remained powerfully filial. Parental presences are strong in his prodigious
debut, the story collection Goodbye, Columbus (1959); in Portnoy’s
Complaint (1969); in the underestimated tragicomedy My Life as a Man
(1974); and in the irregular roman-fleuve of the Zuckerman stories. Over the
course of these and other books, mother and father figures, troublesomely overbearing
at first, appear in a progressively heroic and frankly loving light. The weight
and fragility of sonhood is most directly evidenced in Roth’s nonfiction. He
has written movingly, if relatively briefly, about his mother (“who still, in
my mind, seems to have died inexplicably—at seventy-seven in 1981”) and
extensively about his father, who died in 1989. In his marvelous paternal
portrait, Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Roth realizes:
If not in my books or in my life, at least in my dreams I would live perennially as [my father’s] little son, with the conscience of a little son, just as he would remain alive there not only as my father but as thefather, sitting in judgment on whatever I do.
Beyond
family are the professional and the personal. Roth’s celebrated professional
life needs little elaboration. He is the most prizewinning English-writing
author alive, even though one or more Swedish blackballers continue to deny him
the Nobel. No one can say that Roth has not always worked very hard. He seems to
be in the grip of an artistic dedication that, if it is anything like
Zuckerman’s, involves a fear of all connections and activities that threaten to
separate even briefly the writer from his desk.
As for the
personal, Roth, though evidently blessed with decent health, has not enjoyed
immunity from life’s distressing hazards, which in his case include a
“crack-up” in his mid-50s and two marriages that came to grief. The second of
these was to the English actress Claire Bloom. Bloom wrote a memoir, presumably
not postmodern, touching on their marriage, but Roth has not gone there. His
first marriage, on the other hand, became a source of anguished written
reflection, notably in The Facts and also in My Life as a Man, a
novel that in key passages “precisely duplicates the autobiographical.”
At 23, Roth
became romantically involved with Margaret Martinson Williams, a divorcée and
noncustodial parent of two children. She worked at the University of Chicago in
a secretarial job, he (after short-lived graduate studies) as a composition
instructor. Williams, four years his senior, was “blond without” but also, as a
consequence perhaps of a miserable Michigan upbringing and an early marriage
gone very wrong, “raving within.” Grounded in an estimation of her as “a woman
of courage and strength for having survived that awful background,” and
animated—according to the self-analysis offered in The Facts—by a kind
of rescue complex and by the desire “to work at life under more difficult
conditions,” young Roth pursued the relationship. After more than two years of
wildly driving through marital red lights—crazy quarrels, reproductive fraud
(Williams faked a pregnancy and an abortion), separations, and other
irresistible evidence of incompatibility—Roth, acting under the influence of “a
disastrously confused, unaccountable sense of personal obligation,” wed
Williams in 1959. The union was as bad as he could have subconsciously hoped
for. Williams withheld her consent to a divorce; nevertheless, Roth was forced
to make onerous alimony payments that ended only when she was killed in an
automobile accident in Central Park in 1968.
Aside from Roth
v. Roth, the great contentious drama of this period was Certain
Hyperanxious Jews v. Roth: the brouhaha involving the author and a small,
loud portion of American Jewry that, beginning with the appearance of Roth’s
early short story “Defender of the Faith,” accused him of anti-Semitism and
other tribal wrongs. On this subject, Roth saw fit to abandon his desk. He gave
talks, wrote articles, took part in symposia, submitted to public questioning.
From this distance, it all seems a little overblown. How could anyone credibly
maintain that Roth’s writing at any point damaged or even dented (perceived)
Jewish interests—or vice versa? Even allowing for the sensitivities arising
from his membership in a Jewish generation confronted in the United States with
educational and professional bias and confronted elsewhere with genocidal
murder, the degree to which Roth took the complaints to heart—and, by his
public appearances, voluntarily fanned them—is striking.
This
entertaining episode of mutual paranoia illustrates the productive grandiosity
that so often (and of course self-consciously) energizes Roth. Grandiosity is
an obvious comic ingredient in such novels as Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
and Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993); more subtly, it underlies
and draws our attention to the adversarial moral excitement that is central to
almost everything Roth has written.
AS A YOUTH, Philip Roth aspired to the
legal profession: before transferring to Bucknell University, he was a pre-law
student at Rutgers University’s Newark campus. To judge from his literary
performance, he’d have made a terrific litigator, and not only because he would
have been ready to work at all hours.
Especially
in many of his mature works, Roth proceeds, like a lawyer, arguendo: the
novelistic inquiry asserts a factual premise, makes fiction’s argument based on
that premise, then makes a different argument based on factual assumptions put
in the alternative to the initial factual assumption. The Counterlife (1986)
offers a famous example. Nathan Zuckerman’s brother, Henry, suffers from a
heart condition that finally kills him; alternatively, Henry survives the heart
condition and emigrates to Israel; alternatively, Nathan and not Henry suffers
from the heart condition. This system also arises in a more theoretical
context. In Operation Shylock, it is averred that the book is a factual
account by Philip Roth of an Israeli adventure that resulted in his real-life
recruitment by the Mossad (Roth gave a very funny metafictional interview to TheNew
York Times confirming the book’s purely factual nature); alternatively, and
save the aforesaid, the book is part factual, part fictional, and is to be read
mutatis mutandis; in the further alternative, and without prejudice to the
foregoing, the book is a work of fiction.
What,
though, is at issue in these proceedings? My Life as a Man ends with
Peter Tarnopol having finally seen off his horribly antagonistic wife. Turning,
he sees his new girlfriend sitting there, waiting. “Oh, my God, I thought—now
you. You being you! And me! This me who is me being me and none other!”
Here is one fundamental, never-ending suit that cannot be settled: that between
the self and the other. In question is the ethics of human proximity, with
special reference to the conflicts of interest created by the demands of love
and/or marriage. Then there is the matter, unusually important in Roth’s writing,
of self and community. And finally, of course, there is the quarrel that
subsumes every other: Self v. Self v. Self v. Self, ad infinitum. Hedonist
Roth v. Hermit Roth v. Husband Roth v. Good-Son Roth v. Bad-Jew Roth v.
Good-Jew Roth v. Zionist Roth v. Diasporist Roth v. American Roth v. Israeli
Roth v. Child Roth v. Adult Roth. It adds up to “a kind of intricate
explanation to myself of my world,” as he has put it, rather mildly. Or, as a
youthful character in American Pastoral says, “He’s someone who is very
caught up in issues of right and wrong and being punished for doing wrong and
the prohibitions against sex.”
NO WONDER SO MANY Roth novels turn on
unjust condemnations: the hounding of Coleman Silk on charges of racism and
sexism; the destruction of Ira Ringold for membership in the Communist Party;
the wrongful expulsion of Marcus Messner from college; the public disgrace of
Mickey Sabbath for sexual misconduct; the bringing-down of blameless Swede
Levov by cruel life itself … The legalistic bent of these dramatic undertakings
is heightened by the often summary nature of Roth’s speedily expository prose,
in which he freely disregards the workshop rule of showing and not telling. Everyman
is a wonderful instance of this almost post-novelistic method—it reads
practically like a set of medicolegal findings, only terrifically so. “His
special talent,” Zuckerman helpfully writes about someone, “was for dramatizing
inquiry, for casting a strong narrative spell even when he was being strictly
analytic.”
Much of the
action in these novels takes the form of the claims and counterclaims and
rationalizations and cross-examinations and mea culpas and shame-on-yous
pronounced by the disputants or bystanders. Consequently, the characters
deliver long, brilliantly penetrating monologues that contradict the verbal and
psychological realism with which their worlds are otherwise presented. How does
Roth get away with it? You could say that the problem doesn’t even arise in the
Zuckerman books—after all, if Nathan Zuckerman in his writing takes liberties
with reported speech, that is a matter for him, not Philip Roth, to answer for.
(Clever author, to eat his cake and have it too.) You could also defend the
inconsistency pragmatically: the characters’ implausible oral powers of
advocacy are a price you happily pay for the writing’s overall
true-to-lifeness. Theatrical plays can work this way. (As it happens, Roth has
a weakness for play-like dialogue that is, in fact, a weakness. Deception
[1990], written entirely in the form of conversations, is unproductively hard
going, and the playlets scattered in some of his novels have a low wattage.)
But the
actual reason we accept unreal speechifying in Roth’s books is, of course, that
he is an extraordinarily good artist, good enough to create his own
idiosyncratic but persuasive version of reality. This is from the wonderful
early pages of American Pastoral:
Mr. Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakeable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.
Note the two
long sentences, written to be wolfed down. Note the final heart-stopper. Note
the boyish innocence of the observer, that susceptibility to faith that is a
prerequisite of susceptibility to scandalization. Can You Believe It?—that
could be the subtitle of any of Roth’s books; he cannot stop being taken aback.
“To record, one must be unwary,” noted F. Scott Fitzgerald. One of the
appealing things about Philip Roth is that the more he clothes himself in
knowingness and worldliness, the more he reveals his inextinguishable Adamic
innocence.
And he’s
very funny. How about Cousin Apter, the Holocaust-surviving painter bothered by
the fact that “even Hitler painted better than I do”? Or “wicked” Mickey
Sabbath, he of the “dog-red cock”? Or Milton Appel, the voluble, repulsive
pornographer whom Zuckerman reinvents himself as? Or poor David Kepesh,
transformed into a giant breast by reason of “an endocrinopathic catastrophe”?
The Breast notwithstanding, reservations have been expressed
about the stubborn masculinity of Roth’s fiction, in which, moreover, there is
no shortage of women who are paragons of femininity, who are sexual playthings,
or who are (enter Lucy Nelson, Sybil Van Buren, Katrina Van Tassel Grant,
Delphine Roux, Eve Frame and her sinister daughter, Sylphid …) nemeses of men.
I suppose it would be possible to mount a detailed defense of, or attack on,
the author on charges of gender misrepresentation, but that seems beside the
point in Roth’s case. Surely it is beyond serious dispute that he writes with
all the probity and bravery at his disposal, and thus with a remarkably
subjective candor that is inevitably and indeed conscientiously male—and
Jewish, and white, and heterosexual. That being so, I read all his work with
ethical trust, a trust that remains unbroken even when his constructs do not
meet with my imaginative agreement.
But things
are not that straightforward: the trust of the reader is distrusted by Roth.
Hence the games he plays with authorial identity and with crossing our lines of
decency. It’s as if the only ethically tolerable situation, for Roth the
artist, is that of being under permanent accusation—his most diligent accuser
being himself. And what is the accusation? That, in breach of the paternal
injunction, he is not being good. That he is being bad. But the world is what
it is. Philip Roth can rewrite it, can protest it, can serve as our proxy
vexatious litigant against the indifferent respondent gods—but he cannot make
it otherwise. Philip, it’s not your fault. You didn’t do it, son.
Philip Roth in 1968 |