Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  Until he quits and runs away. His reasons aren’t entirely clear; he startles even himself with his decision. The turning point comes when he is visiting the house of his girlfriend, Marcia Steinberg. Marcia is no Brenda Patimkin; a first-grade teacher, she is just as genial as Bucky, and her family has not a trace of Patimkin-style vulgarity. Her father, a doctor, is a man of “natural, unadorned authority,” unfailingly kind and wise. Marcia is away when Bucky makes his visit; she, too, is working as a camp counselor, but in the Poconos, where the kids are healthy and far better off than Bucky’s Newark charges. Bucky, without a father of his own, has come seeking advice, and is suitably awed by the family’s house, with its “surfeit of bathrooms” (more than one) and its backyard garden. (Bucky is such a naïf that he thought only public parks had gardens.) He isn’t wildly ambivalent, like Neil at the Patimkins’, or wildly excited, like Portnoy at his college girlfriend’s big American house, which “might have been the Taj Mahal for the emotions it released in me”—there’s no wildness in Bucky of any kind. He is just quietly impressed, most of all by the sweetness of a rather symbolic peach he is given to eat, which falls somewhere between the biblical apple and Patimkin bounty. Add a phone call from Marcia that suggests the pleasures of parentally unsupervised sex, and the next thing Bucky knows, he has taken a job at Marcia’s camp and left behind both the sweltering city and its dying children. Bucky merely wants to have a break, to feel a breeze, to get away from death. As Marcia tells him, “This is simply prudence in the face of danger—it’s common sense!”

  The Poconos are a break for us, too. Blue skies, fresh air, a little sweet-natured, very discreet sex on a nearby island—this book could not be more different from The Humbling—and even a touch of humor at the expense of an Indian-themed camp for Jewish children. (“It’s our medicine man,” another counselor informs Bucky when, on Indian Night, a figure in a commanding bird-mask appears: “It’s Barry Feinberg.”) But much of this material seems merely filler, a series of distractions meant to take our minds off the city streets and the attendant worries about polio, so that we will be as shocked as Bucky is when a teenage counselor in his cabin is stricken, just a week after Bucky arrives. The only conclusion, for Bucky, is that he is a carrier of the disease and has infected innocents both on the city playground and in the bucolic mountains—several more campers quickly become sick—before, finally, he succumbs himself.

  Bucky is hospitalized and then in rehabilitation for more than a year, but he survives, physically crippled yet no worse off than many other polio victims of the time, including President Roosevelt and Arnie Mesnikoff. Arnie recognizes his old teacher on the street one day, in 1971, twenty-seven years after that awful summer—and more than a decade after the vaccine had virtually eradicated the disease, making the afflictions these men still bear seem even more gallingly gratuitous. It turns out that they have adapted to their fates in entirely different ways. And this difference, it seems, is the point and meaning of the entire story. Arnie has gone on to get married, to have children, and to start an engineering business that specializes in adapting buildings for access by the handicapped. Bucky, on the other hand, refused to marry Marcia all those years ago, certain that he had to free her of her obligation—that his last chance to be a man of integrity was to spare “the virtuous young woman he dearly loved from unthinkingly taking a cripple as her mate for life.” He has lived alone ever since, cut off from everything that once mattered to him. And he has never stopped hating the God who made everything happen the way it did.

  Nemesis is notable among Roth’s books for containing a Hebrew prayer. True, Portnoy prays for his mother’s deliverance from cancer—“Baruch atoh Adonai, let it be benign!”—and Neil Klugman has his own approach to the Divine: “I am carnal, and I know You approve, I just know it. But how carnal can I get?” But this is something more serious. “May His great Name be blessed forever and ever,” the prayer reads, in part, in the English translation printed beneath the Hebrew text. It is recited at the funeral of a twelve-year-old, on an incineratingly hot day in Newark in 1944, when Bucky is already ablaze with his refusal “to swallow the official lie that God is good and truckle before a cold-blooded murderer of children.” Ultimately, Bucky’s search for explanations exceeds even Swede Levov’s; his bitter retreat from life exceeds even Nathan Zuckerman’s. The most harshly assailed of Roth’s assailable men—assailed from within as well as without—he bases the rest of his life on a vision of God as

  an omnipotent being whose nature and purpose was to be adduced not from doubtful biblical evidence but from irrefutable historical proof, gleaned during a lifetime passed on this planet in the middle of the twentieth century. His conception of God was of an omnipotent being who was a union not of three persons in one Godhead, as in Christianity, but of two—a sick fuck and an evil genius.

  To Arnie, this is not blasphemy—Arnie thinks in terms of chance, not of God—but merely “stupid hubris”: “the hubris of fantastical, childish religious interpretation.” To Arnie’s atheistic mind, Bucky’s need to find a reason for everything is absurd. “He has to ask why. Why? Why? That it is pointless, contingent, preposterous, and tragic will not satisfy him.” One tends not to think of Roth’s work in theological terms, yet this endlessly troubling “Why? Why?” goes back to the very beginning, to the thirteen-year-old Hebrew school student of the story “The Conversion of the Jews,” who pursues the story’s rabbi with the same kind of irksome and unanswerable questions about God. Familiar, too, is the question of why one child is consigned to unspeakable suffering and death, through an accident of geography, while another child gets, so to speak, the Poconos—which, until the plot twist at the end of the book, is a green and perfect place where children grow up undisturbed: a “splendid sanctuary,” an America. (“Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied Europe with a rifle in his hands,” Bucky thinks, making the analogy wholly clear, “and the other in the Indian Hill dining lodge in front of a plate of macaroni and cheese?”) And Bucky is hardly the first of Roth’s protagonists to qualify for Arnie’s furious condemnation as a “maniac of the why.”

  It seemed evident to me, on finishing the book, that Arnie is the saner man—by virtue of having salvaged a life out of meaningless catastrophe—and that Bucky suffers from what Dr. Steinberg, early on, calls “a misplaced sense of responsibility.” But J. M. Coetzee took another view, in an especially thoughtful critique in The New York Review of Books. Bucky, he writes, in trying “to grasp God’s mysterious designs,” is the one who “takes humanity, and the reach of human understanding, seriously.” He may be pigheaded and self-defeating, but he “keeps an ideal of human dignity alive in the face of fate, Nemesis, the gods, God.” Camus also presents an argument about God, between the doctor and a priest, after they have observed the horrible death of a child and joined battle in, of all places, a school playground. The doctor, rather like Coetzee, divides the post-plague population into people who regain happiness because their desires are limited to human love, and those “who aspired beyond and above the human individual towards something they could not even imagine.” The path for such people is, of course, much harder.

  “I wasn’t interested in the philosophical reverberations,” Roth responds to these readings and their implications, “only in the psychological soundness.” He finds that Coetzee takes a “grander stand” than he himself is able to do. (“It’s a stand I would have taken as a younger man.”) Yet his own assessment differs more in language than in kind, as he, too, defends Bucky’s lonely resolve. He could have written a book about a man who was savvy and selfish enough to hang on to Marcia’s love, Roth says, and to let her spend the rest of her life taking care of him—but Nemesis is not that book. Because, Roth tells me, Bucky is “bigger than that.” And what if the woman wanted to take care of him? “There are some men who don’t like being taken care of,” he replies—“my brother, my father, being taken care of was a misery to them.” And what if Bucky is wrong about
his responsibility for spreading the disease? And even if he is responsible, he’s really just another victim (as Arnie points out), isn’t he? “Well,” Roth says—pushed into a grander stand—“Oedipus wasn’t responsible, either, in that he didn’t know what he was doing. And Bucky, like Oedipus, chooses to live the way he lives, in recognition of the greatest fact of his life.”

  Nemesis concludes with a brief vision of Bucky at his youthful best, a latter-day Greek hero, showing his awestruck boys how to throw a javelin and counseling them to practice the three D’s: “determination, dedication, and discipline.” The contrast between the apparent invulnerability of youth and Bucky’s later crippled state is somewhat heavy-handed—one recalls Roth’s scorn for a “framing” structure for American Pastoral—but it underscores the book’s fable-like quality, and it makes a fitting ending for the fable-like quartet. Certainly, there is much in these books that is genuine, real, and alive: the graveside scenes in Everyman, the confrontations between Marcus and the dean in Indignation, the radiating heat of a pestilent Newark summer in Nemesis. Yet one cannot help being aware of the formidable determination, dedication, and discipline that brought these books into being, and of the limitations that have been forged into new interests, methods, consequences. There is an invaluable lesson in seeing a powerful writer grapple with the constrictions of age—particularly a writer who takes these constrictions as a major subject—and continue to write books that rouse us with a blow to the head.

  “The twilight of my talent”: Zuckerman’s self-abnegating phrase does not seem right for an artist who remained so relentlessly productive. What’s certain, however, is that these final novels would have been filled out very differently at an earlier time in Roth’s career. Is there a danger that a young reader coming upon these books will think that this is all there is to the work? At their best, these stripped-down tales appear to be attractive to an entirely new set of readers. Reviewing Indignation in The New York Times Book Review, David Gates remarked that he had a preference for Roth’s “short, devastating sex-and-mortality novels,” and in a review of Nemesis on the front page of the same publication, Leah Hager Cohen began by saying, “I wrote Roth off,” and then went on to explain why she had become a convert and considered his latest books to be his best, possessing “all his brilliance, minus the bluster.” Tina Brown, in an interview with Roth for The Daily Beast, also said that she prefers the later, shorter books, for their simplicity, directness, and urgency: “It feels like you are taken over in one mood.” It seems to me that these books, although they are far more developed, bear comparison with Hemingway’s late novella (and huge success) The Old Man and the Sea: easy to read, deeply engaging as storytelling, yet so simplified that they are equally engaging on the level of parable, ideal for the kind of elucidation that takes place in schools—or, today, in reading groups. If these are not Roth’s best works, they may nevertheless last a long time.

  “What the stories all have in common,” Roth sums up, “is the cataclysm. Here are four men of different ages, brought down.” Roth had weathered his own share. His beloved dead now included his brother: Sandy Roth died in May 2009, at eighty-one, while Roth was working on Nemesis. So many of his Connecticut friends were dead that winters in his house had become almost unendurably lonely. And then there were all those drafts of Nemesis: written, he said, because he was having so much trouble getting it right but also, it seems, because he couldn’t bear to let it go. He didn’t have another book in sight, a situation that he described, in the fall of 2009, as “painful,” and he seemed to mean it viscerally. He was seventy-six, and it was just beginning to become clear that this would be the last novel he wrote. And then what?

  The assailable man. The vulnerable man. The man who gets old, gets sick, can’t perform anymore: the man brought down. We have been discussing this subject in his work, in a suitably encroaching twilight, with suitable seriousness, when the esteemed author suddenly rises and begins to act out the stunned and bloodied Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. LaMotta has just been beaten to a pulp in the ring by Sugar Ray Robinson. He’s lost the championship. He’s dripping blood. But he’s still on his feet and he’s now staggering toward me, proudly wheezing out the words—Roth does an excellent De Niro—“You never got me down, Ray. You hear me? You see? You never got me down, Ray, you never got me down.”

  Afterthoughts, Memories, and Discoveries: At It Again

  Roth also does a dead-on Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, reciting “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” and getting remarkably far into the speech on the spur of the moment, as we walk through midtown on a sunny afternoon. He’s orating to the Roman populace, and it’s amazing how few people turn their heads. Later, he tells me that he watches The Godfather once a year and that he does it mostly for “the Daumier faces.”

  * * *

  It’s easy to see all the mistakes in his past work, he says—much harder with the newer things. And the really early books make him squirm: the last, Israeli chapter of Portnoy’s Complaint, for example. And don’t even get him started on Goodbye, Columbus. “To begin with,” he says, “Aunt Gladys would have been of my parents’ generation, not an immigrant, so she wouldn’t have talked that way—that’s just wrong.” Aunt Gladys was right about the absence of Jews in Short Hills, though. (“So when do Jewish people live in Short Hills? They couldn’t be real Jews believe me.”) Jews had moved from Newark to Maplewood and South Orange after the war, he tells me—“those were the suburban paradises”—but Short Hills was still off-limits. This was not a mistake but a way of covering for the real family he knew. The only character he’s willing to stand up for is the girl, Brenda Patimkin. “She’s young, she’s decisive, she’s playful, she’s audacious,” he says, just like the girl who inspired her. It’s the voice of the hero, Neil Klugman, that he now finds “a bit smug.” Where did that smugness come from? “Well, there was a lot of superiority going around about the suburbs. But I can’t blame anybody else. That was just me.”

  * * *

  He sometimes quotes the last lines of The Great Gatsby, but admits that he has some reservations about the book: “It’s a bit melodious for my taste.” He believes that Hemingway was the stronger writer. I mention Fitzgerald’s early draft of Gatsby, published about a dozen years ago, as Trimalchio, in which Gatsby’s attitude toward Daisy is harsher than in the finished book, and Gatsby himself is less of a glowing Don Quixote. He replies, “It sounds like it was probably better that way.”

  * * *

  None of the other distinguished honorees can have felt more honored than Roth, the FDR baby and lifelong Democrat, to be awarded the National Humanities Medal, by President Obama, in March 2011. He is still excited when he shows me a video of the ceremony, beginning with the recipients of both the Arts and Humanities medals waiting in the White House Green Room—Joyce Carol Oates and Sonny Rollins among them—when suddenly the door opens and the president walks in. This was a break in protocol, Obama explains a little later, at the ceremony; he was meant to make a formal entrance into the East Room after the medal recipients were seated in the hall. But he says that he couldn’t wait to see these people. And Roth is the first person the president sees: he lights up in recognition and breaks into a big smile as he calls out, “Philip Roth!” Roth replies exactly in kind, with the same tone of surprise and delight (what a surprise to see you here!): “President Obama!”

  The ceremony is dignified, inspiring. The president, at the lectern, speaks feelingly of “thumb-worn editions of these works of art and these old records,” works that “helped inspire me or get me through a tough day or take risks that I might not otherwise have taken.” American art, he proclaims, is one of the country’s major “tools of change and of progress, of revolution and ferment.” He speaks jointly of the works of Harper Lee—an honoree who was not present—and Roth, an unlikely pair who have “chronicled the American experience from the streets of Newark to the courts of Alabama.” After a tribute to Lee’s teachings about r
acism, the president says, quietly sly, “How many young people have learned to think by reading the exploits of Portnoy and his complaints?” There is a double wave of laughter: at first, people are laughing to themselves, and then—after Obama has taken a long, deadpan pause—there is a second, bigger swell when they realize that everyone else is laughing, too.

  Finally, it is time to present the awards. A military officer recites a very brief summary of each recipient’s achievements. Two of Roth’s books are cited: Portnoy’s Complaint, of course, and American Pastoral—“which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize.” (The young officer mispronounces the word “pastoral,” but then no one has told him how to pronounce the name W.E.B. Du Bois in the citation for the biographer Arnold Rampersad.) Up on the stage, Roth stares out at the crowd, as though trying to fix the moment in his mind. The president says a few confidential words as he lowers the medallion, on its red ribbon, over Roth’s bowed head. Roth tells me that Obama said, “You’re not slowing down at all.” And that he had replied, “Oh yes, Mr. President, I am.”

  * * *

  He’s had a lot of back pain in recent years and is facing major surgery. It’s the spring of 2012, and I speculate that, when he has recovered and is pain-free and back in Connecticut, he may yet write another novel. He sighs and says, “I hope not.”

  * * *

  We are talking about his first wife, Maggie, and I ask if he really believes, as Nathan Zuckerman claims in The Facts, that she was responsible for releasing him from the role of a pleasing, analytic good boy who would never have been much of a writer—that, in a literary sense, he owes her big. At first he seems taken aback, and then he growls, “Nathan Zuckerman was making it up. I don’t owe her shit.”