American Pastoral

by Philip Roth

  Newark haven of Grossman’s Dress Shop; about how, in the attic space above the

  shop, she and her mother slept in the double bed in their one big room while

  Harold slept in the kitchen, on a sofa he made up each night and unmade each

  morning so they could eat breakfast there before going to school. She asked if I

  remembered Harold, now a retired pharmacist in Scotch Plains, and told me how

  just the week before she’d gone out to the cemetery in Brooklyn to visit her

  father’s grave—as frequently as once a month she went out there, all the way to

  Brooklyn, she said, surprised herself by how much this graveyard now mattered to

  her. “What do you do at the cemetery?” “I unabashedly talk to him,” Joy said.

  “When I was ten it wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now. I thought then it was odd

  that people had two parents. Our threesome seemed right.” “Well, all this,” I

  told her, as we stood there just swaying together to the one-man band closing

  the day down singing, “Dream … when you’re feelin’ blue, … dream …

  that’s the thing to do”—”all this I did not know,” I told her, “on the harvest

  moon hayride in October 1948.”

  “I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want anybody to know. I didn’t want anybody

  to find out Harold slept in the kitchen. That’s why I wouldn’t let you undo my

  bra. I didn’t want you to be my boyfriend and come to pick me up and see where

  my brother had to sleep. It had nothing to do with you, sweetheart.”

  “Well, I feel better for being told that. I wish you’d told me sooner.”

  “I wish I had,” she said, and first we were laughing and then, unexpectedly, Joy

  began to cry and, perhaps because of that damn song, “Dream,” which we used to

  dance to with the lights turned down in somebody or other’s basement back when

  the Pied Pipers still had Jo Stafford and used to sing it the way it’s supposed

  to be sung—in locked harmony, to that catatonic forties beat, with the ethereal

  tinkle of the xylophone hollowly sounding behind them—

  84

  or perhaps because Alan Meisner had become a Republican and second baseman Bert

  Bergman had become a corpse and Ira Pos-ner, instead of shining shoes at the

  newsstand outside the Essex County courthouse, had escaped his Dostoyevskian

  family and become a psychiatrist, because Julius Pincus had disabling tremors

  from the drug that prevented the rejection from his body of the fourteen-year-

  old girl’s kidney keeping him alive and because Mendy Gurlik was still a horny

  seventeen-year-old kid and because Joy’s brother, Harold, had slept for ten

  years in a kitchen and because Schrimmer had married a woman nearly half his age

  who had a body that didn’t make him want to slit his throat but to whom he now

  had to explain every single thing about the past, or perhaps because I seemed

  alone in having wound up with no children, grandchildren, or, in Minskoff’s

  words, “anything like that,” or perhaps because after all these years of

  separation this reuniting of perfect strangers had all gone on a little too

  * * *

  long, a load of unruly emotion began sliding around in me, too, and there I was

  thinking again of the Swede, of the notorious significance that an outlaw

  daughter had thrust on him and his family during the Vietnam War. A man whose

  discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror

  of self-reflection. All that normalcy interrupted by murder. All the small

  problems any family expects to encounter exaggerated by something so impossible

  ever to reconcile. The disruption of the anticipated American future that was

  simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation’s

  getting smarter—smarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the

  generations before—out of each new generation’s breaking away from the

  parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go the limit in America with

  your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional

  Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-America insecurities

  and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal

  among equals.

  And then the loss of the daughter, the fourth American generation, a daughter on

  the run who was to have been the perfected

  · 85 ·

  image of himself as he had been the perfected image of his father, and his

  father the perfected image of his father’s father … the angry, rebarbative

  spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful

  Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were a fugitive—initiating the Swede

  into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade

  blasting to smithereens his particular form of Utopian thinking, the plague

  America infiltrating the Swede’s castle and there infecting everyone. The

  daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into

  everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence,

  and the desperation of the counterpastoral— into the indigenous American

  berserk.

  The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when

  everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating

  back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual postimmigrant

  struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman

  farmer’s castle of our superordinary Swede. A guy stacked like a deck of cards

  for things to unfold entirely differently. In no way prepared for what is going

  to hit him. How could he, with all his carefully calibrated goodness, have known

  that the stakes of living obediently were so high? Obedience is embraced to

  lower the stakes. A beautiful wife. A beautiful house. Runs his business like a

  charm. Handles his handful of an old man well enough. He was really living it

  out, his version of paradise. This is how successful people live. They’re good

  citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling down on them.

  There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes

  impossible. Nothing is smiling down on anybody. And who can adjust then? Here is

  someone not set up for life’s working out poorly, let alone for the impossible.

  But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for

  tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man

  not set up for tragedy—that is every man’s tragedy.

  86

  He kept peering in from outside at his own life. The struggle of his life was to

  bury this thing. But how could he?

  Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, “Why are things the way they

  are?” Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are

  * * *

  things the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till

  then he was so blessed he didn’t even know the question existed.

  After all the effervescent strain of resuscitating our class’s mid-century

  innocence—together a hundred aging people recklessly turning back the clock to a

  time when time’s passing was
a matter of indifference—with the afternoon’s

  exhilarations finally coming to an end, I began to contemplate the very thing

  that must have baffled the Swede till the moment he died: how had he become

  history’s plaything? History, American history, the stuff you read about in

  books and study in school, had made its way out to tranquil, untrafficked Old

  Rimrock, New Jersey, to countryside where it had not put in an appearance that

  was notable since Washington’s army twice wintered in the highlands adjacent to

  Morristown. History, which had made no drastic impingement on the daily life of

  the local populace since the Revolutionary War, wended its way back out to these

  cloistered hills and, improbably, with all its predictable unforeseenness, broke

  helter-skelter into the orderly household of the Seymour Levovs and left the

  place in a shambles. People think of history in the long term, but history, in

  fact, is a very sudden thing.

  In earnest, right then and there, while swaying with Joy to that out-of-date

  music, I began to try to work out for myself what exactly had shaped a destiny

  unlike any imagined for the famous Weequahic three-letterman back when this

  music and its sentimental exhortation was right to the point, when the Swede,

  his neighborhood, his city, and his country were in their exuberant heyday, at

  the peak of confidence, inflated with every illusion born of hope. With Joy

  Helpern once again close in my arms and quietly sobbing to hear the old pop tune

  enjoining all of us sixty-odd-year-olds,

  87

  “Dream … and they might come true,” I lifted the Swede up onto the stage.

  That evening at Vincent’s, for a thousand different excellent reasons, he could

  not bring himself to ask me to do this. For all I know he had no intention of

  asking me to do this. To get me to write his story may not have been why he was

  there at all. Maybe it was only why I was there.

  Basketball was never like this.

  He’d invoked in me, when I was a boy—as he did in hundreds of other boys—the

  strongest fantasy I had of being someone else. But to wish oneself into

  another’s glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on

  psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you

  are. To embrace your hero in his destruction, however—to let your hero’s life

  occur within you when everything is trying to diminish him, to imagine yourself

  into his bad luck, to implicate yourself not in his mindless ascendancy, when he

  is the fixed point of your adulation, but in the bewilderment of his tragic

  fall—well, that’s worth thinking about.

  So then … I am out there on the floor with Joy, and I am thinking of the Swede

  and of what happened to his country in a mere twenty-five years, between the

  triumphant days at wartime Weequahic High and the explosion of his daughter’s

  bomb in 1968, of that mysterious, troubling, extraordinary historical

  transition. I am thinking of the sixties and of the disorder occasioned by the

  Vietnam War, of how certain families lost their kids and certain families didn’t

  and how the Seymour Levovs were one of those that did—families full of tolerance

  and kindly, well-intentioned liberal goodwill, and theirs were the kids who went

  on a rampage, or went to jail, or disappeared underground, or fled to Sweden or

  Canada. I am thinking of the Swede’s great fall and of how he must have imagined

  that it was founded on some failure of his own responsibility. There is where it

  must begin. It doesn’t matter if he was the cause of anything. He makes himself

  responsible anyway. He has been doing that all his life, making himself

  * * *

  unnaturally responsible, keeping under control not just himself but whatever

  else threatens to be uncontrollable, giving his all to keep his world together.

  Yes,

  the cause of the disaster has for him to be a transgression. How else would the

  Swede explain it to himself? It has to be a transgression, a single

  transgression, even if it is only he who identifies it as a transgression. The

  disaster that befalls him begins in a failure of his responsibility, as he

  imagines it.

  But what could that have been?

  Dispelling the aura of the dinner at Vincent’s, when I’d rushed to conclude the

  most thoughtless conclusion—that simple was that simple—I lifted onto my stage

  the boy we were all going to follow into America, our point man into the next

  immersion, at home here the way the Wasps were at home here, an American not by

  sheer striving, not by being a Jew who invents a famous vaccine or a Jew on the

  Supreme Court, not by being the most brilliant or the most eminent or the best.

  Instead—by virtue of his isomorphism to the Wasp world—he does it the ordinary

  way, the natural way, the regular American-guy way. To the honeysweet strains of

  “Dream,” I pulled away from myself, pulled away from the reunion, and I dreamed

  … I dreamed a realistic chronicle. I began gazing into his life—not his life

  as a god or a demigod in whose triumphs one could exult as a boy but his life as

  another assailable man—and inexplicably, which is to say lo and behold, I found

  him in Deal, New Jersey, at the seaside cottage, the summer his daughter was

  eleven, back when she couldn’t stay out of his lap or stop calling him by cute

  pet names, couldn’t “resist,” as she put it, examining with the tip of her

  finger the close way his ears were fitted to his skull. Wrapped in a towel, she

  would run through the house and out to the clothesline to fetch a dry bathing

  suit, shouting as she went, “Nobody look!” and several evenings she had barged

  into the bathroom where he was bathing and, when she saw him, cried out, “Oh,

  pardonnez-moi—j’ai pense que—” “Scram,” he told her, “get-outahere-moi.” Driving

  alone with him back from the beach one day that summer, dopily sun-drunk,

  lolling against his bare shoulder, she had turned up her face and, half

  innocently, half audaciously, precociously playing the grown-up girl, said,

  “Daddy, kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother.” Sun-drunk himself, vo-

  · 89 ·

  luptuously fatigued from rolling all morning with her in the heavy surf, he had

  looked down to see that one of the shoulder straps of her swimsuit had dropped

  over her arm, and there was her nipple, the hard red bee bite that was her

  nipple. “N-n-no,” he said—and stunned them both. “And fix your suit,” he added

  feebly. Soundlessly she obeyed. “I’m sorry, cookie—” “Oh, I deserve it,” she

  said, trying with all her might to hold back her tears and be his chirp-ingly

  charming pal again. “It’s the same at school. It’s the same with my friends. I

  get started with something and I can’t stop. I just get c-c-carried awuh-awuh-

  awuh-awuh—”

  It was a while since he’d seen her turn white like that or seen her face

  contorted like that. She fought for the word longer than, on that particular

  day, he could possibly bear. “Awuh-awuh—” And yet he knew better than anyone

  what not to do when, as Merry put it, she “started phumphing to beat the band.”

  He was the parent she could always rely on not to
jump all over her every time

  she opened her mouth. “Cool it,” he would tell Dawn, “relax, lay off her,” but

  Dawn could not help herself. Merry began to stutter badly and Dawn’s hands were

  clasped at her waist and her eyes fixed on the child’s lips, eyes that said, “I

  know you can do it!” while saying, “I know that you can’t!” Merry’s stuttering

  just killed her mother, and that killed Merry. “I’m not the problem—Mother is!”

  * * *

  And so was the teacher the problem when she tried to spare Merry by not calling

  on her. So was everybody the problem when they started feeling sorry for her.

  And when she was fluent suddenly and free of stuttering, the problem was the

  compliments. She resented terribly being praised for fluency, and as soon as she

  was praised she lost it completely—sometimes, Merry would say, to the point that

  she was afraid “I’m going to short out my whole system.” Amazing how this child

  could summon up the strength to joke about it—his precious lighthearted

  jokester! If only it were within Dawn’s power to become a little lighthearted

  about it herself. But it was the Swede alone who could always manage to be close

  to perfect with her, though even he had all he could do not to cry out in

  exasperation, “If you dare the gods and are fluent, what terrible thing do you

  · 90 ·

  think will happen?” The exasperation never surfaced: he did not wring his hands

  like her mother, when she was in trouble he did not watch her lips or mouth her

  words with her like her mother, he did not turn her, every time she spoke, into

  the most important person not merely in the room but in the entire world—he did

  everything he could not to make her stigma into Merry’s way of being Einstein.