Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books
Page 9
Drilling for Inspiration
Roth’s ultimate answer to all the accusations against him was his faith in America. In the bluntly titled essay “Writing About Jews,” published in Commentary in 1963, he replied to the question of whether he would write as he did if he were in Nazi Germany by pointing out that he was emphatically not writing there, and that legal barriers to persecution were strong in the United States. And should those barriers ever seem to be weakening, he went on, the actions needed to strengthen them would certainly not include his critics’ demands for “putting on a good face”—that is, for pretending that Jewish lives were subject to none of the failings that mark the lives of other people. Jews who insisted on this sort of falseness and repression were choosing to live as victims in a country that had finally freed them from that role. As he saw it, the undue tolerance of persecution that history had bred among the Jews—“the adaptability, the patience, the resignation, the silence, the self-denial”—must end now, in America, where the only proper response to the threat of a restriction of liberties was, “No, I refuse.” Unlike his detractors, he didn’t doubt his rights or his place here. As a free-speaking Jew and a man head over heels in love with American ideals, Roth could reasonably defend his work as part of the great national project of liberation.
By 1969, however, he was less sure about the country’s ideals. Richard Nixon was in the office once held by Franklin Roosevelt; the goals of the Vietnam War had replaced those of the Second World War; the progress of what Roth called the “demythologizing decade” was propelling him, like so many others, into unprecedented political opposition. In March 1970, with some of his Portnoy money and his new girlfriend, Barbara Sproul, he traveled to Cambodia. It wasn’t a political trip, initially; Sproul had suggested it to celebrate his birthday and to help him escape from the still oppressive post-Portnoy fame. They went first to Greece, and the trip also included Bangkok and Rangoon. Sproul was completing a doctorate in religion, comparing the creation myths of different cultures, and her interests ranged wide. Roth had been asked by an editor at Look magazine to keep his eye out for an interesting subject, and at first he thought he’d found it in Bangkok, where he was astonished to see—“whatever one had heard”—that “every ounce of female flesh was for sale.”
Most astonishing were “all these tiny Thai girls with their pimps waiting at the airport for the GIs to arrive for R and R,” he recalls today. “The guys would hire a girl for maybe fifty bucks for five days, sign up for the week. And you’d see them leaving, too, back at the airport, it looked like they’d fallen in love, the girls madly kissing them goodbye and calling out, ‘Bye-bye, GI, I love you! I’ll visit you in Ronkonkoma’ or wherever … and then they’d just wait there until the next plane came in.” He took notes, too, on kickboxing matches and on a local band of AWOL GIs who “looked like a cross between Hendrix and the crew of Captain Ahab’s ship.” It was, he says, in a phrase of the time, “a rock-and-roll war.”
They arrived in Cambodia, to see the temples at Angkor Wat, just weeks before U.S. air strikes on the country began. (Or, rather, before airstrikes that the government was forced to acknowledge began; secret bombings had been going on since 1965.) Roth took the time to visit a few settlements along an enormous lake some miles to the south, and there he knew that he’d found his subject. On his return home, he wrote an article, titled “Cambodia: A Modest Proposal,” that appeared in Look in October 1970 and has been republished in Reading Myself and Others. Half satire—the tribute to Swift is clear—and half tragedy, it begins with a simple description of what he’d seen among the clusters of bamboo huts set on stilts in the soft mud: “The possessions of each household appeared to consist of a sampan, fishing nets, straw baskets for fish and rice, and a water jug.” And then Roth explains that it would make far more political sense to drop shoes, vaccines, bags of rice, refrigerators, and air conditioners, rather than bombs, on the helpless population. He acknowledges that there are serious risks to this alternative program; somebody is bound to be hit on the head. So he is proposing “specially demarcated air-conditioner drop zones,” to prevent the casualties that our compassionate government surely wished to avoid. (“I am categorically opposed to the crushing of any child anywhere under an air conditioner, even a Communist child.”)
He had turned to political satire, he said, because of a single word: “Nixon.” He was proud to say that his devout New Deal Democratic family had considered Nixon a crook some twenty years before the rest of the country caught on. When, in a single week in April 1971, the president granted leniency to Lieutenant William Calley, one day after Calley’s conviction for the murder of twenty-two Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, and then released an anti-abortion statement proclaiming his “personal belief in the sanctity of human life,” Roth could not resist writing an op-ed piece, which The New York Times rejected as “tasteless.” Barbara Sproul, living with him in Woodstock at the time, tells me that she remembers him banging away on the typewriter and saying over and over, “Tasteless, I’ll show them tasteless!” In a mere three months, he had completed the full-length anti-Nixon satire, Our Gang.
Published in the fall of 1971, and featuring epigraphs from Swift and Orwell, the book betrayed serious moral rage behind its twisted tales of Trick E. (Tricky) Dixon, who campaigns to bring the vote to the unborn, while defending Lieutenant Calley from charges made by “Monday Morning My Lai Quarterbacks.” When a concerned citizen wonders if one of the women killed by Calley may have been pregnant—which would make him guilty of the serious crime of abortion—Tricky points out that you can’t expect “an officer rounding up unarmed civilians” to distinguish between a Vietnamese woman who is pregnant and one who is merely stout. “Now if the pregnant ones would wear maternity clothes, of course, that would be a great help to our boys. But in that they don’t, in that all of them seem to go around all day in their pajamas…” He promises the American people that he has a secret timetable for the complete withdrawal of the Vietnamese people from Vietnam.
Tricky is eventually murdered and found stuffed into a plastic bag, and large numbers of citizens turn out to be eager to confess to the crime. The president of Random House, Robert L. Bernstein, was reluctant to publish the book, at first, not for political reasons but because of what Roth himself now calls questions of “taste and discretion,” particularly on the subject of assassination (in whatever bizarre form), and despite the fact that Tricky is back on his feet in the last chapter, planning his comeback, from Hell. Roth tells me that he and Bernstein had “a very reasonable discussion,” however, in which Roth elaborated on the place of satire in a civilized society and mentioned Swift—“You always pull out Swift,” he adds, “when you’re doing something disgusting.” The publisher ultimately agreed that bringing out the book was the right thing to do.
In The New York Times Book Review, Dwight Macdonald called Our Gang “far-fetched, unfair, tasteless, disturbing, logical, coarse and very funny”—“in short, a masterpiece.” He said that he laughed out loud sixteen times. Needless to say, he mentioned Swift. The review put the book on the bestseller list, where it remained (albeit in the lower reaches) for four months. Even today, it delivers some knockout laughs, although not nearly as many as Macdonald got. The problem with Our Gang, though, isn’t that it’s dated—we are unlikely ever to be rid of the kind of deadly political obfuscation that Roth mocks—but that there is a lot of space between those laughs, and the jokes themselves are too often suited to a frat night skit: overextended and strained. In part, this is because Roth, without any real characters to explore—his cast also includes the likes of Lyin’ B. Johnson and Chief Heehaw of the FBI—was out of his element, which was writing novels about people with sometimes overscaled but always recognizable emotions. And also, in part, because he was struggling to exaggerate a reality so grimly absurd, it outdid satire.
NIXON: What if anything do you know about the Roth book …
HALDEMAN: Oh, a fair amount.
HALDEMAN: Yeah, because they gave it a review way out of proportion to the book. We got advances of it and our people were very disturbed about it. It’s a judgment call. I read it, or skimmed through it. It’s a ridiculous book. And it’s sickening, and it’s—
NIXON: What’s it about?
HALDEMAN: It’s about the president of the United States.
NIXON: I know that! I know that. What’s the theme?
HALDEMAN: Trick E. Dixon. And the theme is that, uh, he’s tied to the abortion thing. The thing that inspired the book was your statement on abortion, and so he’s decided that—and then he juxtaposes that with your defense of Calley, as he puts it, who shot a woman who had a child in her. A pregnant woman. And he relates that you’re defending a guy who kills a woman with an unborn child in her … Balances out. It’s sick, you know, perverted kind of thing … It ends up with you being assassinated—or with Trick E. Dixon being assassinated, and then he goes to hell and in hell he starts politically organizing down there.
NIXON: Did The New York Times review it favorably too?
HALDEMAN: I didn’t see the Times review, so I don’t know that.
NIXON: How big is the circulation?
HALDEMAN: The book? It isn’t showing up on the sales lists yet. There’s no indication of it. But Philip Roth is a very big author, so he’s got—
NIXON: What is he? What is he?
HALDEMAN: He wrote Goodbye, Columbus, which became a very big movie, which got him some notoriety. But then his big thing is Portnoy’s Complaint, which is the most obscene, pornographic book of all time.
NIXON: That’s what I mean …
HALDEMAN: This book is apparently obscene in a different kind of sense. And it’s very cute. The minister in it is Billy Cupcake instead of Billy Graham. And the attorney general is John Malicious instead of John Mitchell. And you know he’s done this play on names all the way through it. But it’s—at least to me it seems a very childish book. I never read Portnoy’s Complaint, but I understand it was a well-written book but just sickeningly filthy …
NIXON: Roth is of course a Jew.
HALDEMAN: Oh yes … He’s brilliant in a sick way.
NIXON: Oh, I know—
HALDEMAN: Everything he’s written has been sick …
NIXON: A lot of this can be turned to our advantage … I think the anti-Semitic thing can be, I hate to say it, but it can be very helpful to us. I mean you hear a singer even as brilliant as Richard Tucker and he’s a Jew.
HALDEMAN: Is he?
NIXON:… He’s pushy …
HALDEMAN: There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews, and the anti-Semites are with us generally and the Jews sure aren’t.
This conversation was not invented by Roth—imagine the howls of outrage if it had been—and it touches on subjects that he never approached in Our Gang. It is a transcription (with some omissions where other subjects were briefly taken up or the voices are inaudible) from the Nixon tapes, recording a conversation between the president and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, held on the morning of November 3, 1971, in the Executive Office Building of the United States.
Roth had written Our Gang hurriedly, while other subjects were on his mind and on his desk. Following several bombings in America by the radical anti-war group the Weather Underground, he began a novel about a teenage girl who blows up a building. He completed fifty or sixty pages, but he couldn’t get a story to coalesce around the character or imagine what would happen after the bombing, so he put the manuscript away. He was also having trouble with a novel that he was trying to shape—again—around his marriage and the purchased urine sample that Maggie had used to trick him into it. He had tried to find a place for the tormenting scene even in Portnoy. Although it had not worked in anything he’d written—“too lurid and dark,” he says today—it would not let him go.
The hero of this unruly novel keeps above his desk the maxim by Flaubert that Roth had found above Styron’s desk: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” It’s true that the life Roth had settled into with Barbara Sproul in Woodstock showed no trace of the violent and original books that he was brewing or, even less, the uproar over Portnoy he had fled. Sproul worked on her dissertation while he wrote. He loved living in the countryside and walked for miles every day. (Sproul remembers that she had just about convinced him that no one cared who he was when, as they were walking on a quiet country road, a man stuck his head out of a car window and yelled, “It’s Portnoy!”) Although there weren’t many people around, Roth became good friends with the painter Philip Guston, a co-refugee from Manhattan twenty years Roth’s senior, who—according to an essay that Roth wrote about him years later—was in the act of “an artistic about-face” very like Roth’s own (it involved farce and dread and a rejection of complexity), since he was “bored and disgusted by the skills that had gained him renown.” In place of the unmourned New York literary world, there was teaching, which Roth has always loved. “That’s the one place where I could be serious about books,” he says today, rather wistfully. “Everywhere else, you bring up a book and people start talking about movies.”
Roth had begun teaching a literature class at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965, but he stopped in the aftermath of Portnoy, because, he says, “I just didn’t want to be visible.” In 1971 he began again, teaching a course in Kafka. He still had his New York apartment, and he and Sproul would travel from Woodstock to the city on Monday; he’d leave for Philadelphia on Tuesday morning and return to New York late Tuesday night. Sproul taught an introductory philosophy course at Hunter College during the week, and they would drive back to the country after her last class. The sheer amount of effort involved—he certainly didn’t need the money anymore—suggests how important the experience was to him.
Sproul is a woman of large intellectual appetite and accomplishment; she went on to become director of the Program in Religion at Hunter (she was brought up a Unitarian and has never been religious herself), but she did not consider herself especially literary. She remembers Roth going over every class with her as he made his notes and worked out his thoughts. She happily read her way through a long reading list that he provided—a kind of life reading list—and also kept up with the weekly assignments for his classes. She often read his copies of the books, and she was perplexed, at first, by the underlining. She recalls bringing one mysterious passage to Roth to ask why he had marked it—she had an ingrained sense that reading was meant to convey information—and her surprise and delight when he replied, “because it’s beautiful.”
Even now, there is nothing that Roth loves talking about more than books: plots, characters, language, even particular old paperback editions. None of his passion for these things has faded. There are works he regularly rereads: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician. (He says that if he were dying and were allowed to read just one more thing, it would be Mario.) He’s been known to give copies of whatever he’s reading to his friends, to get the talk going. Returning to teaching, in 1971, he found his students at Penn wonderfully responsive. “They had the freedom that the sixties had given them, but they still had their brains,” is how he puts it. “I just had to light the fuse and step back.” Through the mid-seventies, he taught books from all over the literary map: Madame Bovary and Cancer Ward, works by Céline, Genet, Mishima. One year, he taught a class just in Colette and Chekhov, another year it was his twin idols Kafka and Bellow: “the hunger artist and the artist of abundance, of superabundance,” he says. “I wanted to show them the pendulum, the swing of fiction.”
Back at his writing desk, he was on an escapade meant to take him as far from both Portnoy and the darkly nagging marriage theme as he could get. He loved baseball almost as much as he loved b
ooks; it was tied to his childhood, and it was one of the uncorruptedly mythic things still going on in the country. If Malamud had written about it, why couldn’t he? Just about a two-hour drive from Woodstock is the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, where he went to read through the library and listen to the tape recordings of old players, taking down a lot of what he heard. He was, he says, in bliss. The book that he came up with, The Great American Novel, is a sprawling, cheerful, wearying, sometimes funny, ultimately headache-inducing farce, a book that at least one male, sports-loving writer I know—Scott Raab of Esquire—considers an overlooked masterpiece, but that seems to many a giddy mess.
Perhaps he loved the subject too much. There appears to be nothing that Roth did not happily throw into the epic of a Second World War–era baseball team of misfits—a one-legged catcher, a one-armed outfielder, a midget with the jersey number ½—to whom he gave some of the godlike names he had learned on his trip through the temples of Asia. (A decade earlier, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Roth was on a softball team made up of novelists who played against a team made up entirely of poets—Mark Strand at first base, Donald Justice as shortstop—in a league that many people might consider almost equal misfits, although Roth is very proud of his home-run record and swears that the poets were tough.) The heroic pitcher at the center of Roth’s tale, Gil Gamesh, was bullied as a child for being Babylonian (“Go back to where you belong, ya’ dirty bab!”) and is ultimately revealed to be a Communist spy. Ernest Hemingway puts in an appearance, sailfishing and arguing about the Great American Novel with an eighty-seven-year-old sportscaster he accuses of stealing his style. (“If I have a message,” “Hem” declares, “I send it Western Union.”) Meanwhile—enough not being nearly enough—a seagull swoops down on Hemingway crying, “Nevermore!” The midget players multiply, and the sportswriter, Word Smith, gives us his baseball-inflected take on Moby-Dick. To borrow the criticism of one of Mr. Smith’s readers, it’s “wildly excessive” and “just a little desperate.”