An earnest young woman who has not yet said a word now volunteers: “Because of our ridiculous historical moment. Because all of our classes are about gender. I have to deal with lit classes where we talk about Joyce’s portrayal of women, and Tolstoy’s.” She is clearly unhappy with this aspect of her education, and it seems momentarily that Roth’s point about dogma has prevailed. And then one of the equally earnest young women who began the debate responds, suggesting that her generation is too liberated to identify with the female characters in most of the literature they read in school. Growing up, she says, she identified with the heroes in books, with the men, “and that creates some confusion.” No one thinks of connecting her longing for a heroine with young Nathan’s exhilaration at having a male teacher, after years of being taught by women; or with how much this sense of identification and legitimization meant to him.
Instead, Roth thinks of a connection with a different sort of lesson—a broader one, perhaps. Making a parable of his answer, he tells the students that, after growing up in “an extremely Jewish environment,” he found that there were very few Jews in literature at all, aside from some figures “to make fun of” in T. S. Eliot or Hemingway. How could he be expected to “identify” with the characters of a Christian writer like Dostoyevsky? How? Through literature itself, he tells them—literature, in which we can identify with anyone and become larger than ourselves. But class time is nearly up, and the two sides seem to have fought to a draw. Not a truce. If nothing else, Roth pleads, finally, doesn’t this discussion get to be boring?
Point of view is among the most crucial aspects of Roth’s writing. “I found the right people” is a reason that he often gives for a book’s particular power, but finding the right outlook on these people is even more important. With very few and rather compromised exceptions—some of the early stories, parts of Letting Go, When She Was Good—there are no omniscient narrators in his books. Always, someone is telling (or, as with Sabbath, channeling) the story, even when, as in American Pastoral, the storyteller obligingly disappears. This may be one reason that Roth sticks to the narrators who have been successful: his enormous bibliography clusters around a not enormous group of narrators’ names. It’s true that these storytellers are notably similar in their biographies to the author: Zuckerman, Kepesh, and, needless to say, “Philip Roth” are all male, all Jews who grew up in the thirties and forties. Even Amy Bellette’s fantasy of being Anne Frank—a lengthy, dramatic, heartbreaking narration about a young woman, much of which takes place “inside her head”—turns out to be the fantasy of Nathan Zuckerman, although he is no more perceptible on the page than when he is telling the story of Swede Levov. The utterly free mind of Mickey Sabbath sets the tone for the freest of Roth’s novels; the mind of the Swede brings forth a different kind of order, a different kind of thought, a different kind of sentence. Roth’s way into a story is through a particular voice, a pair of eyes. But it’s what these faculties convey that matters. Especially in these later books (and even in books with major failings, like I Married a Communist), there is an endless human carnival to be observed—a carnival of men and women, too. If the klieg lights are anchored in wartime New Jersey (they have to be anchored somewhere, don’t they?), their beams sweep the sky.
Literature, which makes us larger than ourselves. In I Married a Communist, Nathan gets a lesson in the difference between politics and literature from his final mentor, a young college professor who dismisses Nathan’s proud attempt at a Corwin-style radio play and argues, somewhat schematically, against making arguments in books. “Politics is the great generalizer,” he begins, “and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other—they are in an antagonistic relationship.” The words that follow seem as close to a credo as Roth has ever written:
As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, à la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself—for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized.
Nathan’s feet are now set on the path to holy art and Henry James and E. I. Lonoff’s front door. And then onward to short stories and to books that will antagonize anyone who wishes to read an approvable message.
But if, for the writer, this is a book about starting out, it is also about ending up. Nathan has been cut down, sickened, sexually incapacitated—we learned of his prostate surgery in American Pastoral—and he insists that he no longer has a story to tell. “He’s now of an age when people come to tell him their stories,” Roth says to the Bard class, “not of an age when he’s going to tell them his—an astonishing change.” It seems possible that the eager, glowing students understand this part of his message even less (and, certainly, identify with it less) than with the other things he’s said. Nathan explains his retreat from the world as part of a long tradition—the shack in the woods, the place where you go, in the end, to “absolve yourself of striving”:
The place where you disrobe, molt it all, the uniforms you’ve worn and the costumes you’ve gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and your resentment, your appeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and its manhandling of you. The aging man leaves and goes into the woods—Eastern philosophical thought abounds with that motif, Taoist thought, Hindu thought, Chinese thought. The “forest dweller,” the last stage on life’s way. Think of those Chinese paintings of the old man under the mountain, the old Chinese man all alone under the mountain, receding from the agitation of the autobiographical. He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now, becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business.
This quietly wise and beautiful passage must be labeled, I suppose, “late Roth.” Although Nathan is not finished yet.
The Fantasy of Purity Is Appalling
Roth’s condemnation of the American propensity for “gossip as gospel, the national faith” seemed uncomfortably prescient when I Married a Communist was released, in the fall of 1998, just eight months after Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky had commandeered the nation’s attention. But, as Murray Ringold points out, Senator McCarthy hardly originated the American show trial: rather, he took us “back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks. That’s how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment.” Nothing had changed.
Although the public fiasco was sufficient reason for Roth to have Clinton on his mind, he had private reasons, too. Earlier that year, Clinton had secured an emergency visa for Roth’s friend Emmanuel Dongala, a Congolese writer who had attended college in the United States in the sixties and had been unofficially adopted by Roth’s close friends and Connecticut neighbors, C. H. Huvelle and his wife, Mary. Dongala—like Primo Levi, a chemist as well as a novelist—had returned to the Republic of the Congo, where he was the dean and a professor of chemistry at the university in Brazzaville and where he was trapped for months with his wife and children after civil war broke out. As a first step toward bringing him back to the United States, Roth alerted Leon Botstein, the president of Bard, who immediately offered Dongala a job. After attempts to get him a visa failed, Roth wrote a letter to Clinton—whom he had never met—but received no reply. And then William Styron took Roth to lunch at a Connecticut restaurant and mentioned that he was going to a ceremony at the White House the next day. Roth drove back to his house, got a copy of the letter, and asked Styron to put it directly into Clinton’s hands: “Don’t let him put it in his pocket. Make him read it right there.” The visa came through the following day, and visas for Dongala�
��s family soon afterward. That summer, Roth met Clinton at a party on Martha’s Vineyard, and, Roth recalls today, the first thing the president said was, “Is your friend all right?” Clinton had just spent hours testifying about Lewinsky, and, Roth adds, “he looked battered, like he’d spent fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali.”
In November 1998, Roth was awarded the National Medal of Arts and attended a ceremony at the White House himself. It was just after the midterm elections, and the Democratic victory made it seem that the worst had passed, although the question of impeachment still hung in the air. The president and Mrs. Clinton, dispensing the honors together, appeared ebullient. The citation that Clinton read was thoughtful and apt: “What Dublin was to Joyce or Yoknapatawpha County was to Faulkner, Newark is to Philip Roth.” But when he introduced Roth as a “grand old man of American letters,” Roth, stepping forward to receive the medal, entered into a brief whispered exchange, which Clinton relayed into the microphone: “He just told me he really isn’t that old. Hillary told him it was a literary expression.”
Roth was already working on what amounted to a historical novel about that very year. After completing I Married a Communist, he told an interviewer for Dutch television, he’d begun to wonder: would it be possible to “treat 1998 the way you treat 1970 or 1948?” Culturally speaking, the moment seemed riveting, and it was a challenge to seize history as it was being made. He was not focusing on the Clinton scandal, nor was he writing about anyone directly affected by it—as Swede Levov had been affected by the events of his own time. Rather, he was exploring the country’s “moral mood.” Or, as he writes at the beginning of The Human Stain, published just two years later: “If you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is.” Much of the book takes place in the summer of that year, at the moment of “an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism—which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security—was succeeded by cocksucking,” and when “life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.” Nathan Zuckerman dreams of a mammoth Christo-like banner draped across the White House and emblazoned with the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.
If American Pastoral and I Married a Communist are about people crushed by history, the third book of Roth’s American trilogy is about people determined to escape it, by fleeing the past and strategically remaking themselves. The goal was hardly new to Roth’s protagonists. As recently as I Married a Communist, Nathan Zuckerman recalls that, as a Jewish child, “I didn’t care to partake of the Jewish character … I wanted to partake of the national character.” But it is too easy to localize the national habit of escape: personal reinvention—what Roth calls “the high drama that is upping and leaving”—is one of the biggest American themes. It unites such unlikely representatives of our communal aspirations as Jay Gatsby, Alexander Portnoy, and the hero of The Human Stain, Coleman Silk, a light-skinned black man who passes for white throughout his adult life.
The issue for Silk is not self-hatred or hatred of his race: the issue is freedom. Freedom from all that his father endured. (“The impositions. The humiliations. The obstructions. The wound and the pain and the posturing and the shame.”) Freedom from “society’s most restrictive demarcations.” Freedom from being part of a despised “they” and part of an equally tyrannous “we”—“the we that is dying to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral we.” Silk has escaped from his race not because he longs to be white but because he longs to be unrestrictedly human. (It’s difficult not to recall Alexander Portnoy, at fourteen, railing, “Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew!… I happen also to be a human being!”) To Zuckerman, who discovers the truth about Silk only after his death, there is something almost heroic in the way that he severed himself from his loved and loving but ineradicably Negro family, “in order to live within a sphere commensurate with his sense of scale.” There is a faint echo here of the end of Gatsby, where Fitzgerald writes of man’s glimpse of “something commensurate to his capacity for wonder” in newfound America itself. Coleman Silk’s decision to cross the color line, made when he joined the navy in 1944, a month before he turned eighteen, makes him, in his own eyes—and in Zuckerman’s—“the greatest of the great pioneers of the I.”
It’s clear why Silk becomes important to Zuckerman. The fact that Silk pretends to be Jewish is an added irony, since Jewishness provides a convincing cover not only for his physical appearance—“the small-nosed Jewish type,” Zuckerman initially sizes him up, “one of those crimped-haired Jews of a light yellowish skin pigmentation”—but also for the ostensible absence of living relatives and the uncertain origins of dead ones. What other group could have provided such a credible familial dead end? (“There was a whole generation of Jews like that. They never really knew.”) Adding to the cover, his Jewish wife’s abundantly frizzy hair promises a ready excuse for any racially telltale symptoms that their children might reveal. (Silk himself was circumcised, for hygienic reasons; his mother was a nurse.) But there are no symptoms. All four Silk children grow up with no doubts that they are fully white; the youngest, seeking his roots, becomes Orthodox. And when Silk is murdered, his killer has no doubt that he has eliminated a “two-bit kike professor” and a “Jew bastard.”
Coleman Silk is a professor of classics, and The Human Stain is to some degree a campus satire, in the mode of Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe or Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution. Like those earlier works, it has scores to settle. Betrayal is still on Roth’s mind, although this time the subject is bound up not with politics but, rather, with the cultural politics that one might say have “hijacked” the discussion in American classrooms. (Roth had stopped teaching by this time; the Bard experience, he tells me, finished him off.) Professor Silk has twice run afoul of the Department of Languages and Literature of little Athena College, where he served as dean for many years and where, at nearly seventy, he stepped down from his position to return to teaching. In the first instance, a female student complained that the plays by Euripides assigned in his course were “degrading to women,” and the head of the department—French, female, twenty-nine years old, with a degree from Yale and a vocabulary blighted by terms like “narratology” and “diegesis”—chastised him for “fossilized pedagogy,” specifically for “the so-called humanist approach to Greek tragedy you’ve been taking since the 1950s.” (Oh, for the good old 1970s, when all the Professor of Desire had to complain about were structure, form, and symbols.)
Second, and far more serious, when two students failed to show up for the first six weeks of class, Silk casually threw out the question “Do they exist or are they spooks?” Since the word “spook” has been used historically as a degrading reference to African Americans, and the students in question turned out to be African Americans, Silk found himself accused of racism. The charge was so ludicrous, yet so debilitating in its humiliations—meetings, hearings, investigations—that he treated it as a terrible joke until his healthy sixty-four-year-old wife died suddenly, of a stroke. It was then, after arranging for her burial and before quitting the college in a fury, that he came banging on Zuckerman’s door, demanding the well-known writer’s help. Because a book is the only way that such a thoughtful, law-abiding, cautious man—the opposite of Roth’s last hero, Ira Ringold—can think of to obtain revenge.
Zuckerman turns him down. He barely knows this enraged man. And, of course, Zuckerman is a damaged man himself. Not owing entirely to the effects of cancer surgery but certainly aided by them, he remains confined to “a rigorous reclusion such as that practiced by religious devouts.” He is sixty-five. It has been five years since he undertook this isolated non-life. In the first two books of the trilogy he remained true to his vows, keeping his distance from the action and serving essentially as a repository of memory or as an imagination-for-hire. Such a setup suited Roth at the time, and it suited Zuckerman. But five years is a long time to spend alone, and Coleman Silk stirs some
thing in Zuckerman that opens him again to friendship, to participation in the story, and to the fears and dangers he had fled.
It’s a dance, of all things, that seals the bond. What an unlikely scene for Roth: two men doing an impromptu fox-trot, on a porch in summertime, while on the radio Sinatra sings “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” The impulse to dance comes from Silk, exhilarated by a new love affair that has finally wiped out the “spooks”-related bitterness—two years have gone by—and made him a new man. He is seventy-one and the woman is thirty-four: the summer of 1998 was notable not only for Clinton-Lewinsky but for the advent of Viagra, which the classics professor says should have been called “Zeus.” Rapturously virile again, still possessing the strength and bounce of the high school boxer he once was—“a snub-nosed, goat-footed Pan”—Silk is as attractive to poor, unmanned Zuckerman as the manly heroes he worshipped as a boy. The pull of the Eros of life sweeps over him as Silk, shirtless in the summer heat, leads him dreamily across the floor. “I hope nobody from the volunteer fire department drives by,” Zuckerman says. But, while the dance is not in any way a carnal act, he assures us, it is more than satire. As far as Zuckerman knows, it’s his last romance.
The book that Zuckerman eventually produces, after Silk is dead—he tells us, before it’s finished, that it’s titled The Human Stain—is very different from the book Silk wanted him to write about how the college killed his wife. It is about race. It is about having secrets. It is about lust and rage—two old standby subjects that Silk himself elevates by tracing them, in his teaching, to the wrath of Achilles and the fall of Troy: Western literature born from a fight between two infuriated men over a girl. (It’s enough to enlarge one’s perspective on the ten-dollar pills that guarantee Silk’s potency—and that’s the idea.) Yet for all its differences from the book that Silk thought he wanted, The Human Stain embodies precisely the “humanist approach” that Zuckerman’s hero—Roth’s hero—lived for. Determinedly rational and informed by history, Roth’s twenty-third book treats a wider range of human conduct and human failings than the author ever had before, and with a quiet sympathy unmatched in his earlier work.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 30