by Philip Roth
“Fame,” Rilke wrote, “is no more than the quintessence of all the misunderstandings collecting around a new name.” Mailerism and Salingerism are vigorous, highly conscious responses to that kind of misunderstanding: the first assaults the misunderstanding at the source, challenging its timidity and conventionality (“You think I’m bad? You don’t know how bad! You think I’m a brute? Well, I’m a courtly gentleman! You think I’m a gentleman? I’m a brute!” and so on), deliberately, as it were, exceeding the misunderstanding in an indefatigable act of public self-realization; the second, Salingerism, refuses to be vexed by misunderstanding (and misappropriation) in any way, even, if need be, by not being published. I suspect that serious American novelists with a sense of an audience swing on a pendulum from Mailerism to Salingerism, each coming to rest at a point on the arc that appears (and needless to say, a man can be wrong) to be congruent with his temperament and nourishing to the work.
To get back to the defense I made of my own work in Commentary in 1963—in that essay I evoked the name of Flaubert and the example of Emma Bovary, a memorable character, I said, because of the vividness and depth with which she was presented, and not because she was necessarily representative of French middle-class women of her day; likewise, I went on, my characters were not intended to provide a representative sampling of Jews, though they were well within the range of Jewish possibilities.
I wish now that instead of describing my intentions—or validating them—by referring to a revered artist out of the World Literature Pantheon, I had mentioned the name of Henny Youngman, a Jewish nightclub and vaudeville comic, whose wisecracks, delivered in an offhand whine while he played atrociously on the violin from the stage of the Roxy, had impressed me beyond measure at the age of ten. But because it was precisely my seriousness, my sense of proportion and consequence, that was under attack, I did not have the nerve to appear frivolous in any way. So much the worse for me. Had I had it in me to admit, in just those circumstances, that it was to the low-minded and their vulgarity that I owed no less allegiance than I did to the high-minded with whom I truly did associate my intentions, I might at least have provided myself with a fuller description and explanation of the work I was doing, if a still more repugnant one to those who disapproved of me.
Really, do you think of yourself as a disciple of Henny Youngman?
I do now. Also of Jake the Snake H., a middle-aged master of invective and insult, and a repository of lascivious neighborhood gossip (and, amazingly, the father of a friend of mine), who owned the corner candy store in the years when I much preferred the pinball machine to the company of my parents. I am also a disciple of my older brother’s friend and navy buddy, Arnold G., an unconstrained Jewish living-room clown whose indecent stories of failure and confusion in sex did a little to demythologize the world of the sensual for me in early adolescence. As Jake the Snake demythologized the world of the respectable. As Henny Youngman, whining about family and friends while eliciting laughable squeaks from the violin (the very violin that was to make of every little Jewish boy, myself included, a world-famous, urbane, poetic, dignified, and revered Yehudi), demythologized our yearnings for cultural superiority—or for superiority through culture—and argued by his shlemieldom that it was in the world of domestic squabble and unending social compromise, rather than on the concert stage, that the Jews of his audience might expect to spend their lives.
Later I also became a disciple of certain literature professors and their favorite texts. For instance, reading The Wings of the Dove all afternoon long in the graduate-school library at the University of Chicago, I would find myself as transfixed by James’s linguistic tact and moral scrupulosity as I had ever been by the coarseness, recklessness, and vulgar, aggressive clowning with which I was so taken during those afternoons and evenings in “my” booth at the corner candy store. As I now see it, one of my continuing problems as a writer has been to find the means to be true to these seemingly inimical realms of experience that I am strongly attached to by temperament and training—the aggressive, the crude, and the obscene, at one extreme, and something a good deal more subtle and, in every sense, refined, at the other. But that problem is not unique to any single American writer, certainly not in this day and age.
Back in 1939, Philip Rahv wrote a brief, incisive essay wherein he noted the opposition in American literature between “the thin, solemn, semiclerical culture of Boston and Concord” and “the lowlife world of the frontier and the big cities,” and accordingly grouped American writers around two polar types he called the “paleface” and the “redskin.” According to Rahv’s scheme, James was a paleface, as was T. S. Eliot: “The paleface continually hankers after religious norms, tending toward a refined estrangement from reality.… At his highest level the paleface moves in an exquisite moral atmosphere, at his lowest he is genteel, snobbish, and pedantic.” Whitman and Twain—and after them Anderson, Wolfe. Farrell, etc.—Rahv identified as redskins: their “reactions are primarily emotional, spontaneous, and lacking in personal culture.… In giving expression to the vitality and to the aspirations of the people, the redskin is at his best; but at his worst he is a vulgar anti-intellectual, combining aggression with conformity, reverting to the crudest forms of frontier psychology.”
What happened in postwar America is that a lot of redskins—if not to the wigwam, then to the candy store and the borscht belt born—went off to universities and infiltrated the departments of English, till then almost exclusively the domain of the palefaces. All manner of cultural defection, conversion, confusion, enlightenment, miscegenation, parasitism, transformation, and combat ensued. This is not the place to go into all that studies in English and American literature meant, in personal and social terms, to that tribe of redskins like myself, from the semiliterate and semiassimilated reaches of urban Jewish society, or all that the presence of such Jews signified to those directing their studies (what a novel that would make!). The point here is that the weakening of social and class constraints accelerated by World War II, and the cultural exchanges thus encouraged, has produced a number of writers, many now in their forties, who have to some degree reconciled what Rahv described as this “disunity of the American creative mind,” though not in any way necessarily congenial to Philip Rahv, or even to the writers themselves. For what this “reconciliation” often comes down to is a feeling of being fundamentally ill at ease in, and at odds with, both worlds, although, one hopes, ill at ease with style, alert to the inexhaustible number of intriguing postures that the awkward may assume in public, and the strange means that the uneasy come upon to express themselves. In short: neither the redskin one was in the days of innocence, nor the paleface one could never be in a million (or, to be precise, 5,733) years, but rather, at least in my own case, what I would describe as a “redface.”
To my mind, being a redface accounts as much as anything for the self-conscious and deliberate zigzag that my own career has taken, each book veering sharply away from the one before, as though the author were mortified at having written it as he did and preferred to put as much light as possible between that kind of book and himself. Rahv, in his essay, reminds us that the contemporaries Paleface James and Redskin Whitman “felt little more than contempt for each other.” The redface sympathizes equally with both parties in their disdain for the other, and, as it were, reenacts the argument within the body of his own work. He can never in good conscience opt for either of the disputants; indeed, bad conscience is the medium in which his literary sensibility moves. Thus the continuing need for self-analysis and self-justification.
Let’s go back to Jake the Snake. In The Great American Novel, your allegiance to him is obviously stronger than it is to Henry James, wouldn’t you say?
Yes, there is more of Jake the Snake in there than in Letting Go or in When She Was Good. Not that I regret now that I wasn’t writing books like The Great American Novel all along. I don’t know if I would ever have found my way to this “recklessness” if I
hadn’t first tried to dramatize, in a series of fictions—When She Was Good is one—the problematical nature of moral authority and of social restraint and regulation. Though I was not deliberate about this at all, it seems to me now that the question of who or what shall have influence and jurisdiction over one’s life has been a concern in much of my work. From whom shall one receive the Commandments? The Patimkins? Lucy Nelson? Trick E. Dixon? These characters, as I imagined them, are hardly identical in the particulars of their lives, nor do they inhabit similar fictional worlds, but invariably the claim each makes to being the legitimate moral conscience of the community is very much what is at issue in the book. The degree to which irony, pathos, ridicule, humor, or solemnity permeate Goodbye, Columbus, When She Was Good, and Our Gang seems to me now to have been determined by what I took to be the dubiousness (and relative danger) of that claim.
The question of moral sovereignty, as it is examined in Letting Go, Portnoy’s Complaint, and The Breast, is really a question of the kind of commandment the hero of each book will issue to himself; here the skepticism is directed inward, upon the hero’s ambiguous sense of personal imperatives and taboos. I can even think of these characters—Gabe Wallach, Alexander Portnoy, and David Kepesh—as three stages of a single explosive projectile that is fired into the barrier that forms one boundary of the individual’s identity and experience: that barrier of personal inhibition, ethical conviction and plain, old monumental fear beyond which lies the moral and psychological unknown. Gabe Wallach crashes up against the wall and collapses; Portnoy proceeds on through the fractured mortar, only to become lodged there, half in, half out. It remains for Kepesh to pass right on through the bloodied hole, and out the other end, into no-man’s-land.
To sum up: the comic recklessness that I’ve identified with my old mentor, Jake the Snake, the indecent candy-store owner, apparently could not develop to its fullest until the subject of restraints and taboos had been dramatized in a series of increasingly pointed fictions that revealed the possible consequences of banging your head against your own wall.
Did it help and encourage the anarchic spirit to be writing about baseball, morally a “neutral” subject, rather than about Jews, say, or sexual relations?
Maybe; though before beginning this novel I wrote a long story, “On the Air,” in which a small-time Jewish theatrical agent is put through a series of grotesque adventures, some violently sexual, that were as extreme in their comedy as anything in The Great American Novel. But it was only a story, and perhaps I couldn’t go further with it because the dreadful comic fantasies of persecution and humiliation depicted there were, to my mind, decidedly “Jewish.”
I think one reason I finally have finished a novel about baseball is that it happens to be one of the few subjects that I know much about. If I were as familiar with forestry, music, ironmongering, or the city of Rotterdam, I am sure I would have written fiction grounded in that knowledge long ago. I have not gotten around sooner to a subject as close to me as this one because I had thought that it could not be made to yield very much, the old bugaboo once again of seriousness, or profundity. Over the last fifty years some gifted writers had done pretty well by it, of course—Ring Lardner, Mark Harris, and Bernard Malamud particularly—but despite my admiration for their ingenuity (and the pleasure I took in baseball stories by writers as good, and as serious, as Isaac Rosenfeld and J. F. Powers), a certain snobbishness about the material held my own imagination in check.
What changed your mind?
The point I had reached in my own career: the confidence I had developed in my literary impulses, combined with the experience of the sixties, the demythologizing decade.
This confidence expressed itself partly in a greater willingness to be deliberately, programmatically perverse—subversive not merely of the “serious” values of official literary culture (such subversion, after all, is the standard stuff of our era, if not the new convention), but subversive of my own considerable investment (witness this interview)* in seriousness.
I had been at something like this for a while—in the chapter of Portnoy’s Complaint called “Whacking Off,” in much of Our Gang, in “On the Air”—but I still had not come anywhere near being as thoroughgoingly playful as I now aspired to be. In an odd way—maybe not so odd at that—I set myself the goal of becoming the writer some Jewish critics had been telling me I was all along: irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious. Ah, if only they knew what that entailed! And the personal triumph that such an achievement would represent! A quotation from Melville began to intrigue me, from a letter he had sent to Hawthorne upon completing Moby Dick. I pinned it up along with the other inspirational matter on my bulletin board. “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.” Now I knew that no matter how hard I tried I could never really hope to be wicked; but perhaps, if I worked long and hard and diligently, I could be frivolous. And what could be more frivolous, in my own estimation, than writing a novel about sports?
If perversity, contrariness, my pursuit of the unserious helped to relax my snobbishness about baseball as a subject for my fiction, the decade we had just been through furnished me with the handle with which to take hold of it. Not that I knew that at the outset, or even, in so many words, at the conclusion; but I know it now. I’ll try to explain.
Earlier I described the sixties as the demythologizing decade. I mean by this that much that had previously been considered in my own brief lifetime to be disgraceful and disgusting forced itself upon the national consciousness, loathsome or not; what was assumed to be beyond reproach became the target of blasphemous assault; what was imagined to be indestructible, impermeable, in the very nature of American things, yielded and collapsed overnight. The shock to the system was enormous—not least for those like myself who belong to what may have been the most propagandized generation of young people in American history, our childhoods dominated by World War II, our high school and college years colored by the worst of the Cold War years—Berlin, Korea, Joe McCarthy; also the first American generation to bear the full brunt of the mass media and advertising. Mine was of course no more gullible than any other generation of youngsters—it’s only that we had so much to swallow, and that it was stuffed into us by the most ingenious methods of force-feeding yet devised to replace outright physical torture. The generation known in its college years as “silent” was in actuality straitjacketed, at its most dismal bound by the sort of pieties, fantasies, and values that one might expect to hear articulated today only by a genuine oddball like Tricia Nixon.
Even to have been a dissident, highly skeptical member of that generation did not make one any better prepared than the straitjacketed to absorb the shocks and upheavals of post-Oswald America—for in retrospect the first act of demythologizing committed in the decade seems to me to have been the “demythologizing” of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. The remythologizing of Kennedy began the instant the last shot had been fired, but once the President of Camelot, as they called it, was pronounced dead, the point about the vulnerability and mortality of the charismatic and indestructible had been made. It remained for Sirhan Sirhan to demythologize Bobby Kennedy, and for the lesser characters like Jackie and Teddy Kennedy to demythologize themselves, the one with Aristotle Onassis and the other with Mary Jo Kopechne, for the decade to turn completely inside out that legend of glamour, power, and righteousness.
Disorienting, shocking, all this may have been, but it did not begin to work deeply to test or alter one’s ties to America; Vietnam did that. To have been trained to be a patriotic schoolchild on the rhetoric of World War II, to have developed an attachment to this country in good part on the basis of the myth (and reality) of that wartime America made my own spiritual entanglement with this wartime America probably more like Lyndon Johnson’s than Jerry Rubin’s. That I came eventually to despise Johnson did not mean that I was impervious, ever, to his sense, which I took to be genuine, that the America whose leader he was simply could not
be on the wrong side, even if for some reason everything seemed to look that way. No, no, cried the America of World War II—“Say it ain’t so, Lyndon.” Instead, he went on television and said it was, in the only real way he was ever able to admit it publicly, by washing his hands of the whole hideous mess. L.B.J., the last of the decade’s great demythologizers. Après lui, the bullshit artists once again.
All that by way of background. Here’s what I’m getting at: the fierce, oftentimes wild and pathological assault launched in the sixties against venerable American institutions and beliefs and, more to the point, the emergence of a counter-history, or countermythology, to challenge the mythic sense of itself the country had when the decade opened with General Eisenhower, our greatest World War II hero, still presiding—it was these social phenomena that furnished me with a handle by which to take hold of baseball, of all things, and place it at the center of a novel. It was not a matter of demythologizing baseball—there was nothing in that to get fired up about—but of discovering in baseball a means to dramatize the struggle between the benign national myth of itself that a great power prefers to perpetuate, and the relentlessly insidious, very nearly demonic reality (like the kind we had known in the sixties) that will not give an inch in behalf of that idealized mythology.
Now, to admit to the discovery of thematic reverberations, of depth, of overtone, finally of meaning, would seem to contradict what I have said about wanting fundamentally to be unserious; and it does. Yet out of this opposition, or rather out of the attempt to maintain these contradictory impulses in a state of contentious equilibrium, the book evolved. Sustaining this sort of opposition is not simply a mechanical means of creating literary energy, either; rather, it is itself an attempt to be simultaneously as loyal to one’s doubts and uncertainties as to one’s convictions, of being as skeptical of the “truth” turned up by imagination as of the actuality that may have served as inspiration or model. A full-scale farce is rarely directed outward only, but takes its own measure as well; much of its inventiveness goes into calling itself into question as a statement, satiric, humane, or what have you. In this sense, the genre is the message, and the message is agnostic: “I tell you (and I tell you and I tell you), I don’t know.”