by Martin Amis
The book convocates in the theme of Israel, but loosely, not too schematically, not too teachably, above all. One of the things that can’t be thematically squared, it seems to me, is Roth’s entirely personal bedevilment by the ramifications of autobiographical fiction. For what must be historical reasons, modern fiction is unprecedentedly close to the authors’ peculiar realities: the idea of the freely gambolling fancy doesn’t appear to cut much mustard any more. Roth has never looked at these questions historically, only personally. How does this fit in with Israel? In its tendency to exploit and gobble up half-formed lives? Well, here I think we are stretching it; and there is no need or inclination to stretch it elsewhere. One equation feels particularly satisfying: that between Israel and Philip Roth. In Ulysses Joyce calls Judaea ‘the grey sunken cunt of the world’. I wouldn’t like to say what Roth does to the place, or with what mixture of emotions; but the union is explosive. Like Israel, he exhausts you, he unsettles you, he galvanizes your responses. In this book (wonderfully sharp, worryingly tense) he is an electrifier.
Atlantic Monthly February 1987
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
Pondering Sabbath’s Theater, and sitting around recovering from it, I found myself reaching for the new seminar buzzword, performative. Performative literature, the idea is, coerces the reader into a personal enactment of its themes. Thus Paradise Lost, read performatively, tempts you to sympathize with Satan, with Adam, with Eve; it tempts you to doubt God’s wisdom and God’s justice; it tempts you to stray, to sin, to fall. What Sabbath’s Theater involves you in is a 450-page spasm of hysteria. It is an hysterical novel about the hysteria of an hysterical man, and it leaves you feeling hysterical.
Philip Roth has always been a rich but miserly comic genius. Comedy is hoarded, and Roth receives his compound interest in the form of more sophisticated perversities and contortions. Well, Sabbath’s Theater isn’t funny. That gulping and cackling you hear coming of the page may sound like laughter, but hysteria is never funny. As a spectacle, hysteria is embarrassing, then alarming, then depersonalizing. All hysteria does is sustain itself until it exhausts itself. In this novel Roth conducts an amazing tantrum: a tantrum directed at that tragi-comic duo, sex and death. Halfway through the book you begin to think: yes, this is what morbid erotomania must really feel like. It’s an itch in the brain: a cerebral nettlerash.
Sabbath’s Theater is an upheaval novel, a crisis novel, a howl novel. Its authentic power is not in doubt, but one quickly starts questioning its universality. How general is the fate that befalls Mickey Sabbath? Can we all start pencilling it in? Talking of another casualty, an acquaintance of Mickey’s comments: ‘Some shock just undoes them around sixty, the plates shift and the earth starts shaking and all the pictures fall off the wall.’ Sabbath has felt this seismic stirring throughout his adult life. What triggers his personal Big One is the death of his mistress, Drenka, ‘the erotic light of his life’, as Roth puts it, unusually mildly.
I am writing in a family newspaper, but Sabbath’s Theater can hardly inspire a family book-review. It is not a family novel; it is an anti-family novel, in several senses. It is also unbelievably dirty. Drenka is that rare find, ‘a conventional woman who would do anything’: ‘Inside this woman was someone who thought like a man.’ Carnal bliss, as we shall see, is more or less impossible to evoke. Humble plot summary, therefore, must serve as Drenka’s tribute. In one of his routine visits to the cemetery, where he intends to masturbate on Drenka’s grave, Sabbath finds that his spot has been taken by another lover. On his next try, Sabbath finds that his spot has been taken by another lover. There is practically a queue up there, or a circle jerk. That’s how good Drenka was.
The dangers of writing concertedly about sex are numerous, and Roth skirts none of them. To his left, the Scylla of schlock; to his right, the Charybdis of pornography. So we are bounced from ‘the breasts whose soft fullness had never ceased to captivate him’ to the Cro-Magnon gurgle of ‘Ohhhh. Ohhhh. Ohhhh’ and ‘There! No there! Right … there! There! There! There! Yes! There!’ and ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Mickey! Oh, my God! Ahh! Ahh! Ahh!’ Roth even combines schlock and pornography, as in Drenka’s response to her first taste of Mickey’s belt on her backside (It’s tenderness going wild!’), or in the soaring hymn to sexual urination which constitutes the novel’s climax. Erotic prose is either pallidly general or unviewably specialized. Universality crumbles into a litter of quirks. After a while it provokes in the reader only one desire: the desire to skip. You toil on, looking for the clean bits.
And what are they about? Despite its deliberate barbarities, Sabbath’s Theater is not a primitive work. Old Mickey was once a street-showman type, a puppeteer; and the standard range of puppet motifs – inertness, manipulation – is predictably collocated. Similarly, for all his hostility to therapeutic nostrums (twelve-step programmes, ‘Courage to Heal’, and so on), Roth presents Mickey as an intelligible case. The awful agitation of his lusting and rutting is seen as a response to the immanence and imminence of death. Mickey blunders through a veritable necropolis of funeral parlours, cadavers, cemeteries, centenarians, hospitals, deathbeds. Of course he behaves badly: ‘If you can still do something, then you must do it!’ It wasn’t Mickey’s fault. Death did it.
Perhaps the most significant page of any novel comes early on and is normally headed ‘By the Same Author’. Contemplating this sturdy pillar of high achievement, you realize that the vapours and humours that becloud Sabbath’s Theater have always been present in Roth’s work: the unapologetic cynicism, the scarily illusionless intelligence, the reductive sexuality, the sociopathic laughter. These transgressive tendencies were given balance by a series of opposing preoccupations. In the very early novels, the culture of academic earnestness; rather later, a cluster of concerns about Jewish identity which eventually found their focus in the question of Israel; the interplay, or interface, between fiction and autobiography; finally, a passionate dedication to literary form. The Counterlife was a work of such luminous formal perfection that it more or less retired post-modern fiction, and may well have proved to be a heavy trophy for its author. Maybe Sabbath’s Theater is the counternovel. Roth has always been a divided self. But this is the first time that Mr Hyde has been given the floor.
Simplifying Tolstoy, Sabbath suggests that all marriages are unhappy marriages. All couples are terrible couples. Thus, infidelity becomes a sacrament; and even death can look good if you regard it as an instant divorce. Like his creator, Sabbath is childless: he is resolutely childless. He may be married, but he’s not completely stupid. There is much undeclared emotion here, you suspect. Famed for his crucifixion of the Jewish Mother, Roth is an unfailingly gentle memoirist of his own parents: see, particularly, Patrimony (1991). Sabbath’s Theater offers us a freakshow of fearsome fathers, ‘an alcoholic suicide who terrified [his daughter]’, ‘a bullying, vulgar businessman’, ‘an even more bullying and vulgar businessman’, ‘an overbearing bastard’. The Roth male may be miserable, but he won’t hand on misery. Well, people have children for a big reason, if not a good one. Whatever else they may get up to, children prolong your story. They escort you from the biological desert, where all you hear are the jabberings of sex and death. And sex and death, of course, are the most terrible couple of all.
Sunday Times September 1995
The Name Is William Burroughs
The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead by William S. Burroughs
If a weak baboon is attacked by a strong baboon it has two means of escape: it can offer up its awful plum-hued rear for passive intercourse or it can mastermind and lead an attack on an even weaker baboon. Thus, in The Naked Lunch, Dr Benway moralizes: ‘Baboons always attack the weakest party in an altercation. Quite right too. We must never forget our glorious simian heritage.’ William Burroughs’s characters are rarely in danger of doing that. They are the ironist’s version of nature without nurture, like Swift’s Yahoos – filthy, treacherous, dreamy, vicious and lustful.<
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The ‘wild boys’ are an army of jock-strapped Arab terrorists dedicated to mindless violence (they make hashish pouches out of their enemies’ scrotums) and pensively ritualized male orgies. Financed by the harmless practical joker A.J. – who is so rich that his annual parties collapse currencies – the boys finally defeat the military and begin destroying civilization. In the last sentence they are glimpsed smiling for the first time as the ‘stars are blowing away across a gleaming empty sky’, having subverted, it seems, the entire universe. But that’s only the plot.
Most of the book, like most of Burroughs, is a tour de force of delirious erotic imagery, clipped and spliced like a stream-of-consciousness shooting-script. Heterosexuality is strictly eschewed: ‘two translucent salamanders in slow sodomy golden eyes glinting enigmatic lust … Lesbian electric eels squirm’ – and so on. Halfway through there’s forty solid pages of rectal mucus, rainbow ejaculations, craning phalloi and scoured tubs of Vaseline – all written with devout lyricism, and of only academic interest to the heterosexual reader. The intensity and the verbal contortions are still there, but one feels that Burroughs is losing some of the unselfconsciousness, the artlessness, that made his earlier novels so horrific and so hilarious.
The blurb calls The Wild Boys science fiction and explains to you how ‘prophetic’ Burroughs is being in it. But this is precisely how not to read him. SF always tries to be realistic. Burroughs never does. Some critics are confined by his lack of realism and get depressed because they feel that the world is a rather more decent and wholesome place than he would have us believe. But the only time an educated and well-balanced person has any business being depressed by a book is when its author is simply a bore. (One wearily instances the possibility represented by King Lear, at once the most harrowing and uplifting work in the language.) Art can be illustrative, where it’s the subject-matter that is important, or it can rely on the play of words, ideas and wit. Burroughs doesn’t want to convert or convince us; he wants only to write well, and very often does.
Observer June 1972
Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs
To begin with, Cities of the Red Night reads like a new departure for William Burroughs: it has a plot, it has characters, and you can just about tell what’s going on. This is daring stuff indeed, coming from the zap-poet of drug-highs and sex-deaths, the militant Beat, the author of The Naked Lunch and six further experiments in hallucinatory chaos.
The novel opens with a series of historical – and futuristic – vignettes. Health Officer Farnsworth is marooned at a remote colonial outpost, circa 1920. In the speculative present, military scientists look for new angles in virus warfare. Captain Strobe, the utopian pirate, sails the seas, tangling with the Spanish in Central America, circa 1700. These chapters are, for Burroughs, bafflingly straightforward – and deliberately clichéd (‘grinding poverty’, ‘oppressive heat’, ‘searing pain’). Often we are not far from the gentle pastiche of, say, Golding’s Rites of Passage.
Chopped in with the narratives is a stylistically antithetical tale set in the near future. The voice behind this story-line, however, is much more familiar: ‘The name is Clem Snide. I am a private asshole’ (as opposed, presumably, to a private dick). In relaxed, slangy, Chandleresque prose, Clem tells of his investigation into a sex-murder in Greece – ‘A real messy love death.’ The mystery even has elements of suspense, a commodity quite unknown in Burroughs’s previous work. All this naturalism – it seems terribly unnatural. What is happening? Is Burroughs going straight?
Not really. The alert and wary reader will have noticed that all the narrative lines have been increasingly threatened by the usual convulsions of Burroughs’s anarchic impulses. There have been blackouts and crackups, time warps and fear probes. The bizarre obsession with body transference starts to make frequent intrusions: ‘Something familiar about Adam, Audrey thinks. Why … it’s me!’ “No! No!” Audrey screams without a throat, without a tongue.’ Characters switch from one narrative and show up in another. The genres began to mangle too: there are snippets of science fiction, westerns, fairy tales. Before long, and with a surge of previously checked energy, we are back in the known Burroughs world, the world of spectral rhetoric, drug withdrawal, urban breakdown, rampant vandalism, and no women. So in the cities of the red night the DNA Police quell the ID riots. The Chameleon Kids and Carrion Boys maraud among the cathouses and ghostly penny arcades. Dream Killers writhe to the drug-induced Black Hate Fever.
The Dog Catchers will seize any youths they encounter in the Fair Game areas and sell them off to hanging studios and sperm brokers … The boys sprint around the bodies and turn into an alley … The days seem to flash by like a speeded-up chase scene … Shatter Day always closer …
Experienced readers of Burroughs will know this sort of stuff pretty well by now. Tyros, on the other hand, will feel like the passer-by to whom a street-arab ‘makes a gesture that is unmistakably obscene and at the same time incomprehensible’. The confusion is a legitimate one. Does Burroughs ‘add up’? Is he anything more than a gloating litanist of turmoil?
There will always be people who think so. The academic machine is busy decoding him, dispensing a symbol here, a structure there. For instance Eric Mottram, in his long and humourless monograph The Algebra of Need, claims that Burroughs’s obsession with the sexual hanging of young boys (and there must be more than a hundred gallows scenes in the new novel) merely constitutes a symbol of ‘critical anarchism’. Well, you said it. The truth is that for all his sophistication Burroughs remains a primitive, extreme, almost psychotic artist. His work is in many respects impenetrably clandestine, and frighteningly personal.
Those who persist with Burroughs do so for the accidental delights of his style. It is muscular, musical and profane. His ear for the vernacular is marvellously sharp; he has an evidently limitless talent for parodying contemporary voices. It is perhaps inevitable that, despite his recent excursions into narrative, his prose should helplessly fragment into the same street scenes, the same blasphemous fantasies, the same sense of ubiquitous collapse. How long can Burroughs’s writing follow this trail without impacting altogether? Shatter Day feels always closer.
Observer March 1981
Queer by William Burroughs
Shocking the world all over again, William Burroughs has written a thoughtful and sensitive study of unrequited love. Mind you, he wrote it a long time ago – in the early Fifties, between the documentary Junky and the hallucinatory Naked Lunch. The author explains, in an agonized introduction, why the manuscript was for so long an object of untouchable distress. ‘The book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned … the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan’ (by his own hand). So Queer is oddly snared in Burroughs’s personal voodoo; it is like him, and not like him; surprisingly lucid and touching, recognizably antic and feral.
The unrequited love is of course homosexual. William Lee (an often-used surrogate) is lying low in Mexico City in a halfway house full of American dropouts and bail-beaters, all hectically gratifying their ‘uh, proclivities’. ‘ “Maurice is as queer as I am,” Joe belched. “Excuse me. If not queerer … As a matter of fact, he’s so queer I’ve lost interest in him.” ’ Intransigently Lee yearns for what is presented as an impossibility: homosexual love, the real thing. It never works, but Lee ‘had never resigned himself’. By a process of elimination he settles on Eugene Allerton, a man without qualities (he isn’t even queer), an appropriate recipient for unrequitable love.
One of the obstacles appears to be money, in that homosexual sex is always bought sex, sooner or later. Lee, who is rich, seduces Allerton through money and then loses him through money. After a while he wins him back through money. An ‘arrangement’: rostered sex in return for a free adventure holiday. They go to South America, in search of an ‘altering’ drug which, Lee jokes, will make Lee less queer or Allerton queerer. More impossibilities. The book ends with a horrifying dream in
which Lee comes to haunt Allerton, to reclaim his loan. “I wonder if you know just what ‘or else’ means, Gene?” ’
How do things work, anyway, when a male desires maleness? Is it something to do with wanting to become the other person? ‘I want myself the same way I want others … I can’t use my own body for some reason.’ Disembodiment is a constant theme here, as it is in all Burroughs. Earlier, Lee daydreams that he is in the body of a young boy.
Now he was in a bamboo tenement. An oil lamp lit a woman’s body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other’s body. ‘I’m not queer,’ he thought. ‘I’m disembodied.’
Perhaps, then, we do glimpse the dead wife, the marriage, the other impossibility.
Allerton is featureless but everything about Lee is inordinate. His need for love has a tearing avidity that is in itself repellent. Lee is impossible, and he knows it. The lovers squabble about separate beds: “ ‘Wouldn’t it be booful if we should juth run together into one gweat bib blob? … Am I giving you the horrors?” “Indeed you are.” ’ Lee releases tension through what he calls ‘the Routine’, fantastic monologues that are deliberately embarrassing, scabrous, pathological. They point the way, as do many local effects (‘pathic dismay’, ‘so nasty’, ‘another angle is malaria’, ‘like music down a windy street’), to that great extended Routine, The Naked Lunch: ‘I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants – a body.’
Retroactively the book humanizes Burroughs’s work. An impossibility to which one never resigns onself: this is as good a reason for writing as any. Queer also helps account for the particular slant of Burroughs’s humour, the comic valuelessness of his despair. In the jungle: