Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  The chief defender of the upright is Sabbath’s loyal friend Norman Cowan, a genuinely decent man—a kinder, less angry Henry Zuckerman—who offers Sabbath refuge in his Manhattan apartment, although Norman is struggling, even before Sabbath’s one-man wrecking committee arrives, to maintain domestic peace. Norman is not a blind or limited person, not a simpleton. He sees all the dangers in the world that Sabbath sees. It is precisely because of these dangers that he has chosen to live a very different life and hold tight to “the portion of the ordinary I’ve been lucky enough to corral.” (Sabbath is not unappreciative of the benefits of Norman’s choices: “The repose when all is well. Somebody there while you wait for the biopsy report to come back from the lab.”) But even princely Norman is pushed to the edge after Sabbath tries to seduce Norman’s wife and raids his nineteen-year-old daughter’s underwear drawer. Norman speaks for a lot of people when he angrily dismisses Sabbath as “a pathetic, outmoded old crank” and “the discredited male polemic’s last gasp.” Roth himself says that he wouldn’t be able to tolerate Mickey Sabbath in person. For one thing, Sabbath is just too dirty. “If he were sitting right here,” Roth says, gesturing at his nice white couch, “I’d throw him out.”

  Norman’s seducible wife is more open to Sabbath’s ways, however, and offers a more psychologically nuanced case. Michelle Cowan is a minor character with major impact, a portrait of the successful modern woman—career, loving husband, daughter at Brown—as a secret, Bovaryesque malcontent and sexual outlaw. She is the reason that her husband struggles to preserve the peace. (“There is something in her that is always threatening to undo it all,” Sabbath realizes, “the warmth, the comfort, the whole wonderful eiderdown that is their privileged position.”) Michelle is the only person who shares Sabbath’s painfully conflated sense of sex and loss. Accustomed to being vibrant and attractive, having lived without reserve through her thirties and forties, she has suddenly awakened to being “fifty-five and seared with hot flashes,” and to the feeling that “everything is racing off at a tremendous speed.” Sabbath sees her menopausal flashes in an intensely sympathetic, even exalted, light: “Dipped, she is, in the very fire of fleeting time.” (Or, less poetically, “It’s no fun burning on a pyre at dinner.”) And, unsurprisingly, he sees nobility in her refusal to go gently into unsexed darkness. Entirely different from Drenka in terms of class, education, and temperament, Michelle is another morally dedicated adulteress, a Molly Bloom refusing to let anything go: “Must everything be behind her? No! No! The ruthless lyricism of Michelle’s soliloquy: and no I said no I will No.”

  However repellent Mickey Sabbath may be, though—considered as a man of flesh rather than of words, a befouler of white couches—he is clothed in Roth’s most gorgeous and expansive language. It gives him stature, humor, color, and charm far beyond his naked self and turns him into a Whitman of negativity, a figure of engulfing if improper vitality. People may reasonably object to the idea of an old satyr rifling through a teenage girl’s underwear drawer, but the catalogue that Sabbath makes of his findings is a thing of hilarity and joy:

  Brilliant hues of silk and satin. Childish cotton underpants with red circus stripes. String bikinis with satin behinds. Stretch satin thong bikinis. Floss your teeth with those thongs. Garter belts in purple, black, and white. Renoir’s palette! Rose. Pale pink … Lace body stockings, three, and all black. A strapless black satin bodysuit with padded push-up cups, edged with lace and hooks and straps. Straps. Bra straps, garter straps, Victorian corset straps. Who in his right mind doesn’t adore straps, all the abracadabra of holding and lifting? And what about strapless? A strapless bra. Christ, everything works. That thing they call a teddy (Roosevelt? Kennedy? Herzl?), all in one a chemise up top and, down below, loose-fitting panties with leg holes that you slip right into without removing a thing. Silk floral bikini underpants. Half-slips. Loved the outmoded half-slip. A woman in a half-slip and a bra standing and ironing a shirt while seriously smoking a cigarette. Sentimental old Sabbath.

  No surprise that Roth got these elements from a lingerie catalogue. But who in his right mind doesn’t adore the abracadabra of such writing?

  Sabbath isn’t sentimental about much else, however, at least among the living. He thrives on antagonism: the real reason he can’t leave this earth, he finally admits—it’s the book’s punch line—is that “everything he hated was here.” There’s a lot to hate, and Sabbath goes out of his way to make his hatreds hard to swallow. (“You’ll do anything,” Michelle tells him, “not to be winning.”) Among his principal targets are the university feminists whose very purpose, he believes, is to deceive and deform their impressionable female students. Or, as Sabbath—at his most Miller-like—describes these puritanical enemies, addressing one such impressionable student, whose head happens to be buried in his lap: “these filthy, lowlife, rectitudinous cunts who tell you children these terrible lies about men, about the sinister villainy of what is simply the ordinary grubbing about in reality of ordinary people like your dad and me.” Also despicable, of course, is the “stunted argot” that these students—among others—speak. (One group that doesn’t come under attack, notably, is the Jews. Roth seems finally to have exhausted the subject in Operation Shylock.)

  But Sabbath’s list of bugaboos gets worse. Half a century after his idolized older brother was shot down over the Philippines—he died a few days later, with burns over eighty percent of his body—Sabbath reserves his fiercest loathing for the people he calls “the Japaneez.” He flies into a rage at newspaper articles that report the most ordinary political events concerning the “little flat-faced imperialist bastards” and is only slightly less angry at New Yorkers eating sushi. This is not an entirely incredible position for a man of his generation and experience. (“You lost the right to fish, you bastards, on December 7, 1941.”) But Sabbath holds to the offending theme with unremitting focus and tenacity. And Roth, peeking out from behind the mask, supplies a little antagonism of his own.

  Michiko Kakutani, in a murderous review in The New York Times, noted the book’s anti-Japanese vituperation and quoted Roth on “little flat-faced imperialist bastards.” She chose not to mention the character of a female college dean named Kimiko Kakizaki, whom Sabbath refers to as “the Japanese viperina” after she fires him from his teaching job for sexual misconduct with a student. (From Sabbath’s outraged point of view, he is guilty of nothing more than “teaching a twenty-year-old to talk dirty twenty-five years after Pauline Réage, fifty-five years after Henry Miller, sixty years after D. H. Lawrence, eighty years after James Joyce,” and so on, back to Aristophanes.) Roth had deliberately shot off a few provocative rounds at Kakutani, in exchange for her review of Operation Shylock. The Japanese subtheme fit easily into Sabbath’s thuggish Pearl Harbor pathology. “The Immaculate Kamizoko,” Sabbath spews about his viperina: “Kakizomi. Kazikomi. Who could remember their fucking names. Who wanted to. Tojo and Hirohito sufficed for him.” Kakutani, with a few more rounds in her own belt, concluded her review by suggesting that few readers would be able to finish this “distasteful and disingenuous book.”

  Other reviewers disagreed. In The New York Times Book Review, William Pritchard called it Roth’s “richest, most rewarding novel” and found the scene of Drenka’s final hours to be “as powerful as writing can be.” Frank Kermode, writing with exceptional if not atypical erudition in The New York Review of Books, admired Roth’s “Rabelaisian range and fluency” and evoked comparisons ranging from Thomas Mann and Robert Musil to Milton as he analyzed “this spendidly wicked book.” Sabbath’s Theater won the National Book Award, and even People magazine got into the act, describing Mickey Sabbath as “Roth’s finest, fiercest creation.” It’s true, though, that many of these reviews came with a warning: Sabbath was not good company for everyone. Pritchard wrote that some readers—though he thought that they were wrong—would find the book “repellent, not funny at all.” (Of course, as Kermode saw, taking this kind of risk is exactly wh
at the book’s genius—Roth’s genius—is about.)

  Despite the numerous curses that Sabbath gives and receives in the course of the book, not all of his feeling is for desecration. Far from it. He can be yearning and ardent, especially when he remembers the people of his past. Roth had written many strong secondary figures of old men in his novels. But Sabbath’s Theater was his first work of fiction centered on an old man since “Epstein,” the short story he wrote in his twenties, when the combination of decrepitude and appetite seemed good for a laugh (if a sympathetic laugh, even then). In the intervening years, of course, he had grown and changed; he had written Patrimony. Roth himself was turning sixty when Mickey Sabbath came into his head. His parents, like Sabbath’s, were dead. He had written about visiting his mother’s grave, in Patrimony, and even about trying to talk to her while he stood there. This is not to say that biography is the only key to the insistent themes of time and grief and death. The mad, snow-driven cemetery scene in The Anatomy Lesson was written more than a decade earlier. But the feelings in the cemetery have changed. The target of the raging energy has been displaced, from an incarnation of the father to the forces that have taken that father away.

  To live long is, inevitably, to escape the world of family that one wished so much, in youth, to escape. But everyone else in the family escapes, too, eventually: all gone. Roth’s love for his parents and his childhood was always present in his books, even when, as in the case of Alexander Portnoy, it was nearly overmatched by anger. Twelve years after Portnoy, Nathan Zuckerman assures his mother (in Zuckerman Unbound) that his childhood was a paradise. By the time of The Facts, in 1988, Zuckerman is berating Roth for having become “so tenderized” by his father’s approaching death that he can’t even remember the hard parts of having grown up his father’s son. This is the transformation wrought by age: there is nothing more to fight or resist back in the past. Mickey Sabbath is sixty-four. The most beautiful passages in Sabbath’s Theater are his memories of childhood. The paradise that Zuckerman merely suggested Sabbath raises up before us, his memories of life on the Jersey Shore rendered in hard, clean nouns—another magnificent catalogue—as essential as the things themselves:

  There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime—the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began … In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazzling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April—name a month, and they had it in spades. They’d had endlessness. He’d grown up on endlessness and his mother—in the beginning they were the same thing.

  The chant of single syllables: the light, the dark, the tide. The sudden opening to the sea, booming and silent. The months, named and colored like a child’s calendar. The starting over, the casual plenitude. It’s possible that not since Proust has a writer so nearly captured Time.

  “You could touch with your toes where America began.” A small boy stands in the water off a rinky-dink New Jersey beach, the continent rising behind him. Sabbath’s Theater is the book in which Roth rediscovered America: the mythic, grand-scale country of promises and principles, the America of his childhood indissolubly bound to the moral victory of the Second World War. This book is the first real result of his return home. “I was back embedded in American life and it was wonderful,” he said on French TV, as a little Gershwin was obligingly brought up in the background. “All my memories were useful,” he went on. “The American language was useful, strong, powerful in me.” Although Sabbath’s Theater is not a historical novel, it is the first of Roth’s books in which history lifts the characters in its grasp, tosses them around, and tears them apart.

  And it is the first book in which Roth claims America for himself. Young Alexander Portnoy envies the little boys named John and Billy, Smith and Jones, all the blond Christians who seem to him “the legitimate residents and owners of this place.” (“Don’t tell me,” he insists, “we’re Americans just like they are.”) Roughly a quarter of a century later, Morris Sabbath has no doubts that he is American. It isn’t only that he has paid the price: toward the end of the book, he literally wraps himself in the flag that was sent home with his brother’s body—a big flag, with forty-eight stars—and sits on the beach and cries. Since Portnoy’s childhood—since Roth’s childhood—more recent immigrants have replaced the Jews’ sense of foreignness and longing with their own. Sabbath, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the collected recordings of Benny Goodman and his command of the vernacular, is to his Croatian girlfriend what the shiksas were to Portnoy. She calls him her American boyfriend. And before she dies, she remembers their good times, when he would sing along to the music: “I was dancing with America,” she tells him. “Sweetheart,” he replies, “you were dancing with an unemployed adulterer.” But she knows better. We know better. “You are America,” she tells him. “Yes, you are, my wicked boy.”

  America Amok

  “The epithet ‘American Jewish writer’ has no meaning for me,” Roth told an interviewer soon after the publication of American Pastoral in 1997: “If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.” This position was hardly new or unique. Few artists welcome the limitations implied by category, whether as Jews or blacks or women or any other subset of the species. And the American absolutism can be traced back to the opening words of Bellow’s Augie March (“I am an American, Chicago born”), which had been so revelatory to Roth some forty years earlier. He also insisted, in the same interview, on French TV, that “being a Jew is just another way of being an American.” He had never doubted this precept while growing up, whatever the doubts and insecurities voiced by his characters (or, for that matter, the doubts and insecurities voiced by the people who had once been so worried about his characters). He had been away from the country for long enough—and, in his early sixties, had lived long enough—to command a larger view. For Roth, the return to America was as fundamentally a literary move as it was a practical or emotional one. If he was not a writer, he was nothing.

  American Pastoral grew out of some pages that he wrote in the early seventies and had kept in a drawer ever since. He pulled them out every time he started writing a new book, to see if he could figure out how to use them, but nothing had come to him until now, more than twenty years later. The pages were about a politically radicalized young woman who blows up a building as a protest against the Vietnam War. Why a woman? Because, unlike the angry young men of the anti-war movement, Roth explains today, the women acted without the threat of being drafted and becoming cannon fodder. There was a “purity to their rage,” he says, which made them less immediately explicable and more compelling as a subject. In The Facts, he recalls that Maggie’s daughter, Holly—whom he renames Helen—was so outspoken against the war during her high school years in New York that she became known as Hanoi Holly. (She did not, however, blow up any buildings.) Also vital to a book about the sixties, these women were a phenomenon unique to the times: “Women were active in the anti-war movement in a way that they had never been in the suffrage movement,” he says. “They were openly violent. Young, college-educated women not afraid of violence—this was extraordinary in the history of American politics and American women.”

  He was particularly inspired by the case of Kathy Boudin, a young woman who became a prominent member of the violent anti-war group the Weather Underground. At the time the book was finally coming into focus, Boudin had been in jail for more than a decade, for her part in a robbery that had resulted in the murder of three people. Roth was acquainted with Boudin’s parents—he says that Kathy “couldn’t have had a more terrific childhood”—and he had been friendly
with a family who lived across the street from the Greenwich Village town house that the so-called Weathermen accidentally blew up, in March 1970, when three members of the group were assembling a bomb in the basement. All three were killed; Boudin, who had been in another part of the house, escaped and went into hiding for years. The heroine of Roth’s original story was a New Jersey high school student who blows up the Princeton Library. She was not an entirely unsympathetic figure. Back in 1970, Roth tells me, he was so frustrated with the war that—however figuratively—“I was pretty ready to set off a bomb myself.” He had written fifty or sixty pages and got as far as the explosion, but he didn’t know where to go from there.

  The answer came to him, not surprisingly, in the figure of the father. Although Roth was exhilarated by the writing of Sabbath’s Theater, he had grown heartily sick of Mickey Sabbath: the cynicism, the anger, the relentless darkness. He found himself longing to write about “a good man,” he says, and he started with a name, or, rather, a nickname: “the Swede,” recalled from an actual high school hero back in Weequahic, an all-star athlete whose triumphs in the mid-thirties were still legend in Roth’s era, a decade later. (“We didn’t have too many football heroes at Weequahic,” he says. “It was still a new school, and it was a Jewish school. We had a great band.”) He began to work out everything the name evoked: blond hair, blue eyes, strong jaw, a Viking look, stature, strength, general adulation. For whom is it easier to be good, after all, than one who has been given much and who mistakes his luck for the way of the world?