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| Philip Roth |
The infinite voices of Philip Roth
One minor theme in the mess of the twentieth century was the novelist’s fear of the biography. “I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers”, wrote Vladimir Nabokov. “I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time – and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life.” Just as Milan Kundera, quoting those words in The Art of the Novel, added: “Overfamiliar metaphor: The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel. A novelist’s biographers thus undo what a novelist has done, and redo what he undid”. There was definitely, let’s say, a certain froideur.
But then there is the slightly more zany case of Philip Roth. In an interview for the Paris Review with Hermione Lee in 1984, he described his basic method: “Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend”. No less than Nabokov or Kundera, Roth believes in the novel as an independent aesthetic object. But the gleeful essence of his work has been his love of risking a total contamination, of making the life and the art seem like disguises for each other. That project became notorious in 1969, with Roth’s third novel, Portnoy’s Complaint. From then on, with that sustained series of rants and arias and comic interludes, he trained himself in literature’s most Grand Guignol ventriloquism, inventing alternative narrators and alter egos, such as Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist famous for his novel Carnovsky, and David Kepesh, a professor of literature – daring the reader to confuse these doubles for the original. Sometimes that double was also called Philip Roth. But then, why not? “Infinitely vulnerable in his sincerity and infinitely elusive in his irony”: that was Milan Kundera’s summary of Roth’s talent. That paradox has been the governing structure of Roth’s career, allowing him his games with fiction and fantasy, from Portnoy through to the series that forms Zuckerman Unbound and The Counterlife, culminating in the late novels like Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral.
Until, towards the end of 2012, Roth announced that he had given up writing. Since he was about to turn eighty, I guess this isn’t the most shocking retirement in literary history: it isn’t Rimbaud at twenty-one, in the midst of his illuminations. But also, it was slightly untrue. Gradually it has become clear that while Roth may have stopped writing fiction, he’s no less engaged in the project of fact and counterfact: it’s just that now he is doing it inside-out. His new method involves versions of biography. He has given interviews for newspapers and television, including a ninety-minute portrait by the Italian journalist Livia Manera for PBS; he has been writing notes and memos for his official biographer, Blake Bailey; and now there is this book, Roth Unbound, by Claudia Roth Pierpont – a staff writer at the New Yorker, and author of the collection of essays Passionate Minds.
Like every object on which Roth has collaborated, this book requires an intricate formal description. For Pierpont is a friend of Roth; she has spent, she writes, nearly a decade “discussing books and politics and a thousand other things” with him. In preparing this book on his books, she explains, “he was willing to talk with me about them, at length”. And so although Pierpont describes her study as “fundamentally an examination of Roth’s development as a writer, considering his themes, his thoughts, and his language”, the reader may be struck by an uneasiness, or qualm – since the usual mode of literary criticism is not to enlist the subject’s help. “Roth has been extremely generous. He has answered many, many questions.” It’s impossible to read this book without being aware that it is saturated in Roth’s presence, however much Pierpont might assure the reader that “he has done all of this with the understanding that he would read not a single word in advance of publication”. For her text is, as she notes, a “hybrid form . . . because of his own considerable contributions to its pages: memories, observations, opinions, thoughts and second thoughts, jokes, stories, even songs. Unless another source is noted, all quotations in the following pages are derived from my conversations with him”.
There are, no question, a lot of these quotations. But this is not where Roth’s silhouette ends. He is present in another form, too – for Roth has been over some of this material already. In 1988, he published The Facts, an autobiography in the form of five essays, covering his childhood, university, marriage, first stories, and then the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint. The basic outline of that book is replicated here – the familiar stages of Roth’s progress: his boyhood in Newark, his disastrous first marriage, the triumph of Portnoy, then on past The Facts to the Zuckerman books, his marriage to the actor Claire Bloom, and finally his return to Connecticut and the writing studio where he produced his late works. (The fact that the odd quoted phrase from Roth in Roth Unboundalso occurs in The Facts, like the “postgame pogroms” that took place in Newark in Roth’s childhood, just shows how mythic Roth’s story of his story has remained.)
The epigraph to The Facts was taken from Roth’s previous book, the novel The Counterlife: “And as he spoke I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into”. As always, his own focus was on the business of fiction, of falsification and disguise. His book was an examination not just of Roth’s life but of the reasons for a novelist writing a life at all. For why should such facts even matter? The novelist’s art is all grotesquerie and distortion – “Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology”. The essays of The Facts were therefore framed by two extra pieces: a letter from Roth to his character, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, asking Zuckerman’s opinion of the manuscript, and a reply from Zuckerman, advising Roth not to publish. The book, Zuckerman writes, is only dull. Without the mask of Roth’s inventions, a sprezzatura is missing. When Roth isn’t Zuckerman, says Zuckerman, he’s nothing. “I am your permission, your indiscretion, the key to disclosure”. And later: “Your medium for the really merciless self-evisceration, your medium for genuine self-confrontation, is me”.
The only true confession can be through the medium of fiction. This is one of the paradoxes on which Roth’s art has been based
The only true confession can be through the medium of fiction. This is one of the paradoxes on which Roth’s art has been based – and it’s impossible not to think of Zuckerman’s admonishment, while reading Pierpont’s book. For Pierpont is another kind of medium for Roth – a medium not for self-exposure but relaxed lovability. True, her book is a patient exposé of his novels and their various tricks, but her real interest is not so much in Roth’s techniques as his themes. Her book is an exercise in mollification, in reasoning, in being methodical with the facts against the accusations Roth has provoked: of anti-Semitism, misogyny, of immorality and obscenity. So this project – charming, and often affecting – is a little askew. Roth emerges as witty, mischievous, urbane. Why should I doubt it? But it is not the Roth that any true reader should care about. The real Roth is in his malicious inventions. “The butcher, imagination”, Roth once observed: “You wouldn’t want it as a friend.” And he’s right: who’d be friends with an imagination? True imagination is the absolute asocial. I kept remembering one of Zuckerman’s rants (himself impersonating somebody else), raging against “the anti-humanity that calls itself nice. Nice. I don’t care what my kid grows up to be . . . so long as he doesn’t turn out nice”. Whether Philip Roth is nice is a problem of biography. The definite lack of niceness in his art, however, is central to his talent. And so in patiently exploring Roth’s explosive themes – Jewishness, America, Israel, sex, ageing, etc – I worried that Pierpont was blurring the vital aesthetic fact: that Roth’s novels are based on outrage, in both the form and the content. His originality was to make the novel a mode of madcap, reckless offence.
In March 1959, Roth published his first story in the New Yorker, “Defender of the Faith” – “a story”, Roth writes in The Facts, “about some Jewish recruits in the wartime Army trying to extract favors from their reluctant Jewish sergeant”. To the neutral, belated reader, this story is only sardonic, flat, acidic. And yet the general Jewish community read it as a document of danger and betrayal. One prominent New York rabbi wrote to the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith with a simple question: “What is being done to silence this man?” And then added: “Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him”. The novelist as informer! – portraying, as the rabbi helpfully explained in another letter, “such conceptions of Jews as ultimately led to the murder of six million in our time”. The accusations were so numerous, and so brutal, that in 1962 Roth accepted an invitation to appear at the Yeshiva University in New York on a panel with the alluring title: “The Crisis of Conscience in Minority Writers of Fiction”. In Roth’s talk, reprinted as part of his essay “Writing About Jews”, he summed up his accusers’ basic worry: “What will the goyim think?” And then argued that to use that kind of question as a basis for the writing or analysis of fiction was surely crazy. The only question a novelist should be asking of fiction is whether it is true. And yet, in response to his speech, the moderator’s first question was this: “Mr Roth, would you write the same stories you’ve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?” The aesthetic, it appeared, was only an alibi for his deeper moral guilt.
The trauma of that period never left him. As Roth notes, the question turned up in his fiction nearly twenty years later, in The Ghost Writer. But a version of the same argument had appeared even earlier, in Portnoy’s Complaint, where Portnoy’s sister admonishes him for his lack of Jewish solidarity. (“Do you know, she asked me, where you would be now if you had been born in Europe instead of America?”) And it would also appear in inverted form, in a series of fictional experiments that recur throughout Roth’s works: what if Kafka had survived the Holocaust and ended up living in Newark (“Looking at Kafka”, 1973)? What if Anne Frank had survived the Holocaust and ended up living in Connecticut (The Ghost Writer, 1979)? What if Lindbergh had become President of the United States and invited von Ribbentrop as a guest of honour to the White House (The Plot Against America, 2004)?
No wonder Pierpont begins her book not with Roth’s childhood but with this traumatic entrance into the adult world. Publication – Roth’s primal scene. “After an experience like mine at Yeshiva, a writer would have had to be no writer at all to go looking elsewhere for something to write about”, Roth wrote later. “My humiliation before the Yeshiva belligerents – indeed, the angry Jewish resistance that I aroused virtually from the start – was the luckiest break I could have had. I was branded.” Such outrage! Such offence! Who wouldn’t see in this a subject? And this is why there’s something slightly out of focus in Pierpont’s emphasis in her study on Roth’s deliberately outraging themes. He loved themes that were already teeming with police – and they were useful because they disguised and disclosed his deeper subject: the self’s struggle against the judgements of other people. Those Yeshiva accusations, as he described it, led him “to take things more aggressively in hand”, to
“strike back at accusations that I had divulged Jewish secrets and vulgarly falsified Jewish lives by upping the ante in Portnoy’s Complaint. That was not mistaken for a conciliatory act, and the ramifications of the uproar it fomented eventually inspired me to crystallize the public feud into the drama of internal family dissension that’s the backbone of the Zuckerman series.”
He had discovered his deeper obsession: the fate of irony and playfulness in the era of sanctimony. (“I occasionally have an anti-Roth reader in mind”, he told an interviewer, years later, describing his writerly method: “I think, ‘How he is going to hate this!’ That can be just the encouragement I need”.)
Jewishness, in the end, was therefore just a distilled form of a universal problem: that the self is always in a mess of definitions and judgements by other people. “Here we go”, Zuckerman thinks to himself in The Counterlife, suddenly accosted at the Wailing Wall. “One Jew is about to explain to another Jew that he is not the same kind of Jew that the first Jew is – the source, this situation, of several thousand jokes, not to mention all the works of fiction.” But his other trick was to show that this kind of argument over identity could occur inside the self as well. His greatest characters, or narrators – like Zuckerman, and Portnoy – are intelligences embattled and at bay: monsters of both hyperdesire and hypermorality. The “determined self”, Roth called it once: the self revving itself up for its liberation, but always unable to move.
In an interview in 1974 with Joyce Carol Oates, Roth mentioned how he had “always been drawn to a passage that comes near the end of The Trial, the chapter where K., in the cathedral, looks up toward the priest, with a sudden infusion of hope”. Surely, thinks K., the priest can offer not just a manipulation of the case but “a circumvention of it, a breaking away from it altogether, a mode of living completely outside the jurisdiction of the Court. This possibility must exist, K. had of late given much thought to it”. And Roth continues:
“As who hasn’t of late? Enter Irony when the man in the pulpit turns out to be oneself. If only one could quit one’s pulpit, one might well obtain decisive and acceptable counsel. How to devise a mode of living completely outside the jurisdiction of the Court when the Court is of one’s own devising?”
The Court of one’s own devising: this is the deep setting of Roth’s novels – the Court internalized and resisted. For what, after all, is Portnoy’s Complaint itself – the illness from which Alexander Portnoy suffers? “A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” In other words: Portnoy’s illness is not the longing, it isn’t the chronic masturbation and fascination with sex: his illness is the combination of longing with repression. His desire for pleasure is only matched by his desire to please. So it’s maybe not surprising to discover the kind of reading list Roth was giving his students, in the era when he was planning Portnoy. “I realize that the course might have been called ‘Studies in Guilt and Persecution’ – ‘The Metamorphosis’, The Castle, ‘In the Penal Colony’, Crime and Punishment, ‘Notes from Underground’, Death in Venice, Anna Karenina”. There it is, in one equation – Crime and Punishment: both terms of that equation are relevant to Roth’s heroes. They are bound with responsibility as the orthodox are bound with tefillin.
That was the universal conflict for which Roth created his new forms – his new invention in the art of the novel. He made novels into toys and contraptions of offensiveness: gruesome, collapsed, with all the usual proportions and distances deflated, like those Hans Bellmer dolls. In order to provoke the maximum discomfort, he needed to dismantle the usual aesthetic distance, and the usual social politesse – those old-fashioned worries over shame, or dignity. The deformations wrought on Roth’s own personal biography by his alter egos, by Kepesh, Portnoy, Zuckerman, and so on – “concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life” – are interesting not for their overlap with his own biography, but for their use to him as a novelist, an importance signalled in the way he likes to orchestrate his bibliography according to his multiples, into Roth books, Zuckerman books, Kepesh books. The refusal of distance between the life and the work was designed to create a new effect – the refusal of distance between the reader and the work, in a sort of novelistic crumpling. And so he came up with his experiments in what Pierpont beautifully calls the “first-person intimate”, this collage of italics and capitals and exclamation marks and rhetorical questions, a voice submitted to the endless, sprightly indignity and humiliation of desire:
“ . . . But why must I explain myself! Excuse myself! Why must I justify with my Honesty and Compassion my desires! So I have desires – only they’re endless. Endless! And that, that may not be such a blessing, taking for the moment a psychoanalytic point of view . . . . But then all the unconscious can do anyway, so Freud tells us, is want. And want! And WANT! Oh, Freud, do I know!”
Saul Bellow, of course, had also allowed talkiness into fiction in a new way, but Bellow never risked such stunts of pure bravado, of consciousness gone hyper. With his new novels based on hysterical voices, Roth entertained pure vulgarity: the novel as Las Vegas, channelling a “reckless narrative disclosure of a kind I hadn’t learned from Henry James”. No wonder he admires the Catskills entertainers – like Herbie Bratasky in The Professor of Desire, who can not only “simulate the panoply of sounds . . . with which mankind emits its gases” but also “do diarrhea”. And so one beguiling motif of Pierpont’s book is the brilliance of Roth’s own impressions – he can do a lovely Marlon Brando playing Mark Antony in Joseph Mankiewicz’s movie, it turns out, and a defiant De Niro as Jake La Motta, in Scorsese’s Raging Bull.
So is it ungrateful to wish that there were more documentation of Roth’s neon and vulgar forms in Pierpont’s methodical book? His route to such innovation? There’s a moment in The Ghost Writer when Zuckerman notes down the books on his (fictional) hero E. I. Lonoff’s shelves, to make his own reading list, and at times I wanted to cry out to Claudia Roth Pierpont, my spy in Roth’s studio: but what books are lying around? Surely not just Hawthorne and Bellow! Tell us the inside dope! Tell me more, for instance, about Roth’s love of Colette – that great and underrated novelist. Tell me more about his speedy dismissal of Fitzgerald – another inventor of multiple perspectives. Because after all: a novelist’s true thinking is through the medium of literature. There in his studio, Roth tells Pierpont: “I don’t write about my convictions. I write about the comic and tragic consequences of holding convictions”. A novelist’s thinking is in the complications of a style.
And in particular, I kept thinking, tell me more about the Central Europeans. There’s a lovely chapter in Roth Unbound on Roth’s first visits to Prague in the early 1970s, after which he set up a fund for the support of dissident writers, and also the publishing series Writers from the Other Europe, which began in 1974. That series was not just important morally. It was also, I think, crucial in Roth’s personal development of an art of outrage and offence, his experiments in the High Malign. He published contemporaries like Milan Kundera and Danilo Kiš, along with older writers like Bohumil Hrabal and Witold Gombrowicz. These writers, says Roth to Pierpont, offered him “a whole side of literature that is muted in the American tradition” – “the richness of the screwball strain”.
Of course, that tradition was already there in his thinking, in Roth’s reading list in crime and punishment. But the manuscripts Roth discovered in Prague offered him something even more important: the possibility of moral and aesthetic extremism. In Kundera and Kiš, he found new models for the acrobatic suspension of moral judgement, where various voices are juxtaposed with each other, where the fiction is constantly flaunting its own construction. While in Hrabal and Gombrowicz, he discovered experiments in monologue and digression that went further than anything in the American tradition. Gombrowicz, in particular, I think, is crucial to Roth’s later style. (Roth discovered him, he tells Pierpont, in a London bookshop in the 1970s.) It was Gombrowicz whose great novel Ferdydurke explicitly begins with the shame of his first publication, a hallucinatory description of the vulnerability of the self to the judgements of other people. And it was Gombrowicz who proclaimed an aesthetic of zany excessive immaturity, against the elegance of good taste, down to the reckless inclusion of himself in his fiction as a character with his own name – “the better to implicate himself in certain highly dubious proceedings”, commented Roth, “and bring the moral terror to life”. Just as Roth explains his own method to Pierpont with the natty slogan: “I’m in the broiler, watch me broil”.
It was his European capers that allowed him to develop his sad, hysterical Americana voices
Sure, Roth is an American novelist. But it was his European capers that allowed him to develop his sad, hysterical Americana voices, his novels of fantasy arguments. (In a lovely aside, Pierpont says that Roth’s initial title for The Counterlife had been The Metamorphosis – “but the title was already taken”.) He took the ordinary realist plots of James and Chekhov – the plots of repressed desire, of thwarted hope, of marriages gone bad and rancorous, of compromise and dead illusions – but then voiced the frenzied monologues and thought balloons of characters trapped in such situations. Or even put himself inside them, too, using his own name. The setting is grisaille, but the foreground is all cartoon. “I didn’t know how to control a non-realistic book”, he tells Pierpont, and that may be right – but he is not a pure realist, either. Metafiction and fantasia are also his fiction’s modes – it’s just that they are used for unusually deflationary purposes. Portnoy, say, with its famous punchline of an ending – “So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” – closes the narrative on a hazy seal of realism: it turns out that Portnoy’s monologue has only been in his head – for the high jinx of Portnoy’s voice may not be accurate to a real conversation. As a fantasy of consciousness, however, who can doubt it?
In fact, throughout his thirty-one books, Roth has been so much the novelist of riff and rant and self-conversation that I wonder if it really makes sense to see him as the author of discrete novels. In the retrospective of Pierpont’s book, his whole oeuvre begins to form something more like one great improvisatory frieze: not books so much as sequences – comic bits, crazed arguments, stalled paragraphs. “Roth builds seriatim”, argues Pierpont, “book to book, offering up reversals and alternatives – counterbooks, counterprotagonists – and forging links in a continuing chain of thought”. But I’m not sure this is quite true. His theme – of multiple loyalties and disloyalties, of the self’s struggle to maintain its own definitions and desires, whether sexual, political, or racial – has remained constant, and so has his method: to make doubles and multiples, to make the novel into a presentation of stalled contraries. And Pierpont’s tender, detailed book is, in its way, another variation on the same material: from the conversations in Roth’s studio, his biography emerges as a suite of parables, lessons in the self’s miniature battles for its freedom.
But then, Roth cannot help it. Lost in the world’s unreality, according to the terms of his fiction, the self is the only reality: or at least, the self, with its infinite voices and disguises.
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