Shop Talk

by Philip Roth

  Cut off from New York and living apart from Woodstock's local artists, with whom he had little in common, Philip often felt out of it: isolated, resentful, uninfluential, misplaced. It wasn't the first time that his ruthless focus on his own imperatives had induced a black mood of alienation, nor was he the first American artist embittered by the syndrome. It was as common among the best as it was among the worst—only with the best it was not necessarily a puerile self-drama concocted out of egomaniacal delusion. In many ways it was a perfectly justified response for an artist like Guston, whose brooding, brainy, hypercritical scrutiny of every last aesthetic choice is routinely travestied by the misjudgments and simplifications that support a major reputation.

  Philip and his gloom were not inseparable, however. In the company of the few friends he enjoyed and was willing to see, he could be a cordial, unharried host, exuding a captivating spiritual buoyancy unmarked by anguish. In his physical bearing, too, there was a nimble grace touchingly at variance with the bulky torso of the heavy-drinking, somewhat august-looking, white-haired personage into whom darkly, Jewishly, Don Juanishly handsome Guston had been transformed in his fifties. At dinner, wearing those baggy-bottomed, low-slung khaki trousers of his, with a white cotton shirt open over his burly chest and the sleeves still turned up from working in the studio, he looked like the Old Guard Israeli politicians in whom imperiousness and informality spring from an unassailable core of confidence. It was impossible around the Guston dining table, sharing the rich pasta that Philip had cooked up with a display of jovial expertise, to detect any sign of a self-flagellating component within his prodigious endowment of self-belief. Only in his eyes might you be able to gauge the toll of the wearing oscillation—from iron resolve through rapturous equilibrium to suicidal hopelessness—that underlay a day in the studio.

  What caused our friendship to flourish was, to begin with, a similar intellectual outlook, a love for many of the same books as well as a shared delight in what Guston called "crapola," starting with billboards, garages, diners, burger joints, junk shops, auto body shops—all the roadside stuff that we occasionally set out to Kingston to enjoy—and extending from the flat-footed straight talk of the Catskill citizenry to the Uriah Heepisms of our perspiring president. What sealed the camaraderie was that we liked each other's new work. The dissimilarities in our personal lives and our professional fortunes did not obscure the coincidence of our having recently undertaken comparable self-critiques. Independently, impelled by very different dilemmas, each of us had begun to consider crapola not only as a curious subject with strong suggestive powers to which we had a native affinity but as potentially a tool in itself: a blunt aesthetic instrument providing access to a style of representation free of the complexity we were accustomed to valuing. What this self-subversion might be made to yield was anybody's guess, and premonitions of failure couldn't be entirely curbed by the liberating feeling that an artistic about-face usually inspires, at least in the early stages of not quite knowing what you are doing.

  At just about the time that I began not quite to know what I was doing exulting in Nixon's lies, or traveling up to Cooperstown's Hall of Fame to immerse myself in baseball lore, or taking seriously the idea of turning a man like myself into a breast—and reading up on endocrinology and mammary glands—Philip was beginning not quite to know what he was doing hanging cartoon light bulbs over the pointed hoods of slit-eyed, cigar-smoking Klansmen painting self-portraits in hideaways cluttered with shoes and clocks and steam irons of the sort that Mutt and Jeff would have been at home with.

  ***

  Philip's illustrations of incidents in The Breast, drawn on ordinary typing paper, were presented to me one evening at dinner shortly after the book's publication. A couple of years earlier, while I was writing Our Gang, Philip had responded to the chapters that I showed him in manuscript with a series of caricatures of Nixon, Kissinger, Agnew, and John Mitchell. He worked on these caricatures with more concentration than he did on the drawings for The Breast, and he even toyed with the thought of publishing them as a collection under the title Poor Richard. The eight drawings inspired by The Breast were simply a spontaneous rejoinder to something he'd liked. The drawings were intended to do nothing other than please me—and did they!

  For me his blubbery cartoon rendering of the breast into which Professor David Kepesh is inexplicably transformed—his vision of afflicted Kepesh as a beached mammary groping for contact through a nipple that is an unostentatious amalgam of lumpish, dumb penis and inquisitive nose—managed to encapsulate all the loneliness of Kepesh's humiliation while at the same time adhering to the mordantly comic perspective with which Kepesh tries to view his horrible metamorphosis. Though these drawings were no more than a pleasant diversion for Philip, his predilection for the self-satirization of personal misery (the strategy for effacing the romance of self-pity that stuns us in Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" and "The Nose") as strongly determines the images here as it does in those paintings where his own tiresome addictions and sad renunciations are represented by whiskey bottles and cigarette butts and forlorn insomniacs epically cartoonized. He may only have been playing around, but what he was playing with was the point of view with which he had set about in his studio to overturn his history as a painter and to depict, without rhetorical hedging, the facts of his anxiety as a man. Coincidentally, Philip, who died in 1980 at the age of sixty-six, represents himself in his last paintings as someone who also endured a grotesque transformation—not into a thinking, dismembered sexual gland but into a bloated, cyclopsian, brutish head that has itself been cut loose from the body of its sex.

  ***

  Rereading Saul Bellow

  [2000]

  The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

  The transformation of the novelist who published Dangling Man in 1944 and The Victim in 1947 into the novelist who published The Adventures of Augie March in '53 is revolutionary. Bellow overthrows everything: compositional choices grounded in narrative principles of harmony and order, a novelistic ethos indebted to Kafka's The Trial and Dostoyevsky's The Double and The Eternal Husband, as well as a moral perspective that can hardly be said to derive from delight in the flash, color, and plenty of existence. In Augie March, a very grand, assertive, freewheeling conception of both the novel and the world the novel represents breaks loose from all sorts of self-imposed strictures, the beginner's principles of composition are subverted, and, like the character of five Properties in Augie March, the writer is himself "hipped on superabundance." The pervasive threat that organized the outlook of the hero and the action of the novel in The Victim and Dangling Man disappears, and the bottled-up aggression that was The Victim's Asa Leventhal and the obstructed will that was Joseph in Dangling Man emerge as voracious appetite. There is the narcissistic enthusiasm for life in all its hybrid forms propelling Augie March, and there is an inexhaustible passion for a teemingness of dazzling specifics driving Saul Bellow.

  The scale dramatically enlarges: the world inflates, and those inhabiting it, monumental, overwhelming, ambitious, energetic people, do not easily, in Augie's words, get "stamped out in the life struggle." The intricate landscape of physical being and the power-seeking of influential personalities make "character" in all its manifestations—particularly its ability indelibly to imprint its presence—less an aspect of the novel than its preoccupation.

  Think of Einhorn at the whorehouse, Thea with the eagle, Dingbat and his fighter, Simon coarsely splendid at the Magnuses and violent at the lumberyard. From Chicago to Mexico and the mid-Atlantic and back, it's all Brobdingnag to Augie, observed, however, not by a caustic, angry Swift but by a word-painting Hieronymus Bosch, an American Bosch, an unsermonizing and optimistic Bosch, who detects even in the eeliest slipperiness of his creatures, in their most colossal finagling and conspiring and deceit, what is humanly enrapturing. The intrigues of mankind no longer incite paranoid fear in the Bellow hero but light him up. That the richly rendered surface is manifold with c
ontradiction and ambiguity ceases to be a source of consternation; instead, the "mixed character" of everything is bracing. Manifoldness is fun.

  Engorged sentences had existed before in American fiction—notably in Melville and Faulkner—but not quite like those in Augie March, which strike me as more than liberty- taking; when mere liberty-taking is driving a writer, it can easily lead to the empty flamboyance of some of Augie March's imitators. I read Bellow's liberty-taking prose as the syntactical demonstration of Augie's large, robust ego, that attentive ego roving and evolving, always in motion, alternately mastered by the force of others and escaping from it. There are sentences in the book whose effervescence, whose undercurrent of buoyancy leave one with the sense of so much going on, a theatrical, exhibitionistic, ardent prose tangle that lets in the dynamism of living without driving mentalness out. This voice no longer encountering resistance is permeated by mind while connected also to the mysteries of feeling. It's a voice unbridled and intelligent both, going at full force and yet always sharp enough to sensibly size things up.

  Chapter XVI of Augie March is about the attempt, by Thea Fenchel, Augie's headstrong beloved, to train her eagle, Caligula, to attack and capture the large lizards crawling around the mountains outside Acatla, in central Mexico, to make that "menace falling fast from the sky" fit into her scheme of things. It's a chapter of prodigious strength, sixteen bold pages about a distinctly human happening whose mythic aura (and comedy too) is comparable to the great scenes in Faulkner—in The Bear, in Spotted Horses, in As I Lay Dying, throughout The Wild Palms—where human resolve pits itself against natural wildness. The combat between Caligula and Thea (for the eagle's body and soul), the wonderfully precise passages describing the eagle soaring off to satisfy his beautiful fiendish trainer and miserably failing her, crystallize a notion about the will to power and dominance that is central to nearly every one of Augie's adventures. "To tell the truth," Augie says near the end of the book, "I'm good and tired of all these big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big-wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists."

  On the book's memorable first page, in the second sentence, Augie quotes Heraclitus: a man's character is his fate. But doesn't The Adventures of Augie March suggest exactly the opposite, that a man's fate (at least this man's, this Chicago-born Augie's) is the impinging character of others?

  Bellow once told me that "somewhere in my Jewish and immigrant blood there were conspicuous traces of doubt as to whether I had the right to practice the writer's trade." He suggested that, at least in part, this doubt permeated his blood because "our own Wasp establishment, represented mainly by Harvard-trained professors," considered a son of immigrant Jews unfit to write books in English. These guys infuriated him.

  It may well have been the precious gift of an appropriate fury that launched him into beginning his third book not with the words "I am a Jew, the son of immigrants" but, rather, by warranting that son of immigrant Jews who is Augie March to break the ice with the Harvard-trained professors (as well as everyone else) by flatly decreeing, without apology or hyphenation, "I am an American, Chicago born."

  Opening Augie March with those six words demonstrates the same sort of assertive gusto that the musical sons of immigrant Jews—Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, Leonard Bernstein—brought to America's radios, theaters, and concert halls by staking their claim to America (as subject, as inspiration, as audience) in songs like "God Bless America," "This Is the Army, Mr. Jones," "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," "Manhattan," and "Ol' Man River"; in musical plays like Oklahoma!, West Side Story, Porgy and Bess, On the Town, Show Boat, Annie Get Your Gun, and Of Thee I Sing; in ballet music like Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, and Billy the Kid. Back in the teens, when the immigration was still going on, back in the twenties, the thirties, the forties, even into the fifties, none of these American-raised boys whose parents or grandparents had spoken Yiddish had the slightest interest in writing shtetl kitsch such as came along in the sixties with Fiddler on the Roof. Having themselves been freed by their families' emigration from the pious orthodoxy and the social authoritarianism that were such a great source of shtetl claustrophobia, why would they want to? In secular, democratic, unclaustrophobic America, Augie will, as he says, "go at things as I have taught myself, free-style."

  This assertion of unequivocal, unquellable citizenship in free-style America (and the five-hundred-odd-page book that followed) was precisely the bold stroke required to abolish anyone's doubts about the American writing credentials of an immigrant son like Saul Bellow. Augie, at the very end of his book, exuberantly cries out, "Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand." Going where his pedigreed betters wouldn't have believed he had any right to go with the American language, Bellow was indeed Columbus for people like me, the grandchildren of immigrants, who set out as American writers after him.

  Seize the Day (1956)

  Three years after The Adventures of Augie March appeared, Bellow published Seize the Day, a short novel that is the fictional antithesis of Augie March. In form spare and compact and tightly organized, it is a sorrow-filled book, set in a hotel for the aged on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a book populated largely by people old, sick, and dying, while Augie March is a vast, sprawling, loquacious book, spilling over with everything, including authorial high spirits, and set wherever life's fullness can be rapturously perceived. Seize the Day depicts the culmination, in a single day, of the breakdown of a man who is the opposite of Augie March in every important way. Where Augie is the opportunity seizer, a fatherless slum kid eminently adoptable, Tommy Wilhelm is the mistake maker with a prosperous old father who is very much present but who wants nothing to do with him and his problems. Inasmuch as Tommy's father is characterized in the book, it is through his relentless distaste for his son. Tommy is brutally disowned, eminently unadoptable, largely because he is bereft of the lavish endowment of self-belief, verve, and vibrant adventurousness that is Augie's charm. Where Augie's is an ego triumphantly buoyed up and swept along by the strong currents of life, Tommy's is an ego quashed beneath its burden—Tommy is "assigned to be the carrier of a load which was his own self, his characteristic self." The ego roar amplified by Augie March's prose exuberance Augie joyously articulates on the book's final page: "Look at me, going everywhere!" Look at me—the vigorous, child's demand for attention, the cry of exhibitionistic confidence.

  The cry resounding through Seize the Day is Help me. In vain Tommy utters, Help me, help me, I'm getting nowhere, and not only to his own father, Dr. Adler, but to all the false, rogue fathers who succeed Dr. Adler and to whom Tommy foolishly entrusts his hope, his money, or both. Augie is adopted left and right, people rush to support him and dress him, to educate and transform him. Augie's need is to accumulate vivid and flamboyant patron-admirers while Tommy's pathos is to amass mistakes: "Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here." Tommy, at forty-four, searches desperately for a parent, any parent, to rescue him from imminent destruction, while Augie is already a larkily independent escape artist at twenty-two.

  Speaking of his own past, Bellow once said, "It has been a lifelong pattern with me to come back to strength from a position of extreme weakness." Does his history of oscillation from the abyss to the peak and back again find a literary analogue in the dialectical relationship of these two consecutive books of the 1950s? Was the claustrophobic chronicle of failure that is Seize the Day undertaken as a grim corrective to the fervor informing its irrepressible predecessor, as the antidote to Augie March's manic openness? By writing Seize the Day, Bellow seems to have been harking back (if not deliberately, perhaps just reflexively) to the ethos of The Victim, to a dour pre-Augie world where the hero under scrutiny is threatened by enemies, overwhelmed by uncertainty, stalled by confusion, held in check by grievance.


  Henderson the Rain King (1959)

  Only six years after Augie, and there he is again, breaking loose. But whereas with Augie he jettisons the conventions of his first two, "proper" books, with Henderson the Rain King he delivers himself from Augie, a book in no way proper. The exotic locale, the volcanic hero, the comic calamity that is his life, the inner turmoil of perpetual yearning, the magical craving quest, the mythical (Reichian?) regeneration through the great wet gush of the blocked-up stuff—all brand-new.

  To yoke together two mighty dissimilar endeavors: Bellow's Africa operates for Henderson as Kafka's castle village does for K., affording the perfect unknown testing ground for the alien hero to actualize the deepest, most ineradicable of his needs—to burst his "spirit's sleep," if he can, through the intensity of useful labor. "I want," that objectless, elemental cri de coeur, could as easily have been K.'s as Eugene Henderson's. There all similarity ends, to be sure. Unlike the Kafkean man endlessly obstructed from achieving his desire, Henderson is the undirected human force whose raging insistence miraculously does get through. K. is an initial, with the biographylessness—and the pathos—that that implies, while Henderson's biography weighs a ton. A boozer, a giant, a Gentile, a middle-aged multimillionaire in a state of continual emotional upheaval, Henderson is hemmed in by the disorderly chaos of "my parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul!" Because of all his deformities and mistakes, Henderson, in his own thinking, is as much a disease as he is a man. He takes leave of home (rather like the author who is imagining him) for a continent peopled by tribal blacks who turn out to be his very cure. Africa as medicine. Henderson the Remedy Maker.