by Philip Roth
Now, Malamud and Salinger cannot, of course, be considered to speak for all American writers, and yet their fictional response to the world about them—what they choose to emphasize or to ignore—is of interest to me simply because they are two of the best. Of course there are plenty of other writers around, capable ones too, who do not travel the same roads; however, even among these others, I wonder if we may not be witnessing a response to the times, less apparently dramatized perhaps than the social detachment in Salinger and Malamud, but there in the body of the work nonetheless.
Let us take up the matter of prose style. Why is everybody so bouncy all of a sudden? Those who have been reading Saul Bellow, Herbert Gold, Arthur Granit, Thomas Berger, and Grace Paley will know to what I am referring. Writing recently in The Hudson Review, Harvey Swados said that he saw developing “a nervous muscular prose perfectly suited to the exigencies of an age which seems at once appalling and ridiculous. These are metropolitan writers, most of them are Jewish, and they are specialists in a kind of prose-poetry that often depends for its effectiveness as much on how it is ordered, or how it looks on the printed page, as it does on what it is expressing. This is risky writing…” Swados added, and perhaps it is in its very riskiness that we can discover some kind of explanation for it. I’d like to compare two short descriptive passages, one from Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, the other from Gold’s new novel, Therefore Be Bold, in the hope that the differences revealed will be educational.
As numerous readers have already pointed out, the language of Augie March combines literary complexity with conversational ease, joins the idiom of the academy with the idiom of the streets (not all streets—certain streets); the style is special, private, energetic, and though it can at times be unwieldy, it generally serves Bellow brilliantly. Here, for instance, is a description of Grandma Lausch:
With the [cigarette] holder in her dark little gums between which all her guile, malice, and command issued, she had her best inspirations of strategy. She was as wrinkled as an old paper bag, an autocrat, hard-shelled and jesuitical, a pouncy old hawk of a Bolshevik, her small ribboned gray feet immobile on the shoekit and stool Simon had made in the manual-training class, dingy old wool Winnie [the dog] whose bad smell filled the flat on the cushion beside her. If wit and discontent don’t necessarily go together, it wasn’t from the old woman that I learned it.
Herbert Gold’s language has also been distinctly special, private, energetic. One notices in the following passage from Therefore Be Bold that here too the writer begins by recognizing a physical similarity between the character to be described and some unlikely object, and from there, as in Bellow’s Grandma Lausch passage, attempts to wind up, via the body, making a discovery about the soul. The character described is named Chuck Hastings.
In some respects he resembled a mummy—the shriveled yellow skin, the hands and head too large for a wasted body, the bottomless eye sockets of thought beyond the Nile. But his agile Adam’s apple and point-making finger made him less the Styx-swimmer dog-paddling toward Coptic limbos than a high school intellectual intimidating the navel-eyed little girls.
First, the grammar itself has me baffled: “… bottomless eye sockets of thought beyond the Nile.” Is the thought beyond the Nile, or the eye sockets? What does it mean to be beyond the Nile anyway? These grammatical difficulties have little in common with the ironic inversion with which Bellow’s description begins: “With the holder in her dark little gums between which all her guile, malice, and command issued…” Bellow goes on to describe Grandma Lausch as an “autocrat,” “hard-shelled,” “jesuitical,” “a pouncy old hawk of a Bolshevik”—imaginative certainly, but tough-minded, exact, not primarily exhibitionistic. Of Gold’s Chuck Hastings, however, we learn, “His agile Adam’s apple and point-making finger made him less the Styx-swimmer dog-paddling toward Coptic limbos,” etc.… Language in the service of the narrative, or literary regression in the service of the ego? In a recent review of Therefore Be Bold, Granville Hicks quoted this very paragraph in praise of Gold’s style. “This is high-pitched,” Mr. Hicks admitted, “but the point is that Gold keeps it up and keeps it up.” I take it the sexual pun is not deliberate; nevertheless, it might serve as a reminder that showmanship and passion are not one and the same. What we have here is not stamina or vitality but reality taking a back seat to personality—and not the personality of the imagined character, but of the writer who is doing the imagining. Bellow’s description seems to arise out of a writer’s firm grasp of his character: Grandma Lausch is. Behind the description of Chuck Hastings there seems to me something else that is being said: Herbert Gold is. Look at me, I’m writing.
Now, I am not trying to sell selflessness here. Rather, I am suggesting that this nervous muscular prose that Swados talks about may perhaps have something to do with the unfriendly relations that exist between the writer and the culture. The prose suits the age, Swados suggests, and I wonder if it does not suit it, in part, because it rejects it. The writer thrusts before our eyes—it is in the very ordering of his sentences—personality, in all its separateness and specialness. Of course, the mystery of personality may be nothing less than a writer’s ultimate concern; and certainly when the muscular prose is revealing of character and evocative of an environment—as in Augie March—it can be wonderfully effective; at its worst, however, as a form of literary onanism, it seriously curtails the fictional possibilities, and may perhaps be thought of as a symptom of the writer’s loss of the community—of what is outside himself—as subject.
True, the bouncy style can be understood in other ways as well. It is not surprising that most of the practitioners Swados points to are Jewish. When writers who do not feel much of a connection to Lord Chesterfield begin to realize that they are under no real obligation to try and write like that distinguished old stylist, they are likely enough to go out and be bouncy. Also, there is the matter of the spoken language which these writers have heard, as our statesmen might put it, in the schools, the homes, the churches and the synagogues of the nation. I would even say that when the bouncy style is not an attempt to dazzle the reader, or one’s self, but to incorporate into American literary prose the rhythms, nuances, and emphases of urban and immigrant speech, the result can sometimes be a language of new and rich emotional subtleties, with a kind of back-handed charm and irony all its own, as in Grace Paley’s book of stories The Little Disturbances of Man.
But whether the practitioner is Gold, Bellow, or Paley, there is a further point to make about the bounciness: it is an expression of pleasure. However, a question: If the world is as crooked and unreal as it feels to me it is becoming, day by day; if one feels less and less power in the face of this unreality; if the inevitable end is destruction, if not of all life, then of much that is valuable and civilized in life—then why in God’s name is the writer pleased? Why don’t all our fictional heroes wind up in institutions, like Holden Caulfield, or suicides, like Seymour Glass? Why is it that so many of them—not just in books by Wouk and Weidman but in Bellow, Gold, Styron, and others—wind up affirming life? For surely the air is thick these days with affirmation, and though we shall doubtless get our annual editorial this year from Life calling for affirmative novels, the fact is that more and more books by serious writers seem to end on a note of celebration. Not just the tone is bouncy, the moral is bouncy too. In The Optimist, another of Gold’s novels, the hero, having taken his lumps, cries out in the book’s last line, “More. More. More! More! More!” Curtis Harnack’s novel, The Work of an Ancient Hand, ends with the hero filled with “rapture and hope” and saying aloud, “I believe in God.” And Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King is a book given over to celebrating the regeneration of the heart, blood, and general health of its hero. Yet it is of some importance, I think, that the regeneration of Henderson takes place in a world that is thoroughly and wholly imagined, but that does not really exist. It is not the tumultuous Africa of the newspapers and the United Nations
discussions that Eugene Henderson visits. There is nothing here of nationalism or riots or apartheid. But why should there be? There is the world, and there is also the self. And the self, when the writer turns upon it all his attention and talent, is revealed to be a most remarkable thing. First off, it exists, it’s real. I am, the self cries out, and then, taking a nice long look, it adds, and I am beautiful.
At the conclusion to Bellow’s book, his hero, Eugene Henderson, a big, sloppy millionaire, is returning to America, coming home from a trip to Africa, where he has been plague fighter, lion tamer, and rainmaker; he is bringing back with him a real lion. Aboard the plane he befriends a small Persian boy, whose language he cannot understand. Still, when the plane lands at Newfoundland, Henderson takes the child in his arms and goes out onto the field. And then:
Laps and laps I galloped around the shining and riveted body of the plane, behind the fuel trucks. Dark faces were looking from within. The great, beautiful propellers were still, all four of them. I guess I felt it was my turn now to move, and so went running—leaping, leaping, pounding, and tingling over the pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence.
And so we leave Henderson, a very happy man. Where? In the Arctic. This picture has stayed with me since I read the book a year ago: of a man who finds energy and joy in an imagined Africa, and celebrates it on an unpeopled, icebound vastness.
Earlier I quoted from Styron’s new novel, Set This House on Fire. Now Styron’s book, like Bellow’s, also tells of the regeneration of an American who leaves his own country and goes abroad for a while to live. But where Henderson’s world is wildly removed from our own, Kinsolving, Styron’s hero, inhabits a place we immediately recognize. The book is thick with detail that twenty years from now will probably require extensive footnotes to be thoroughly understood. The hero is an American painter who has taken his family to live in a small town on the Amalfi coast. Cass Kinsolving detests America, and himself. Throughout most of the book he is taunted, tempted, and disgraced by Mason Flagg, a fellow countryman, who is rich, boyish, naïve, licentious, indecent, cruel, and stupid. Kinsolving, by way of his attachment to Flagg, spends most of the book choosing between living and dying, and at one point, in a tone that is characteristic, says this about his expatriation:
… the man I had come to Europe to escape [why he’s] the man in all the car advertisements, you know, the young guy waving there—he looks so beautiful and educated and everything, and he’s got it made, Penn State and a blonde there, and a smile as big as a billboard. And he’s going places. I mean electronics. Politics. What they call communication. Advertising. Saleshood. Outer space. God only knows. And he’s as ignorant as an Albanian peasant.
However, despite all his disgust with what American public life can do to a man’s private life, Kinsolving, like Henderson, comes back to America at the end, having opted for existence. But the America that we find him in seems to me to be the America of his childhood, and (if only in a metaphoric way) of everyone’s childhood: he tells his story while he fishes from a boat in a Carolina stream. The affirmation at the conclusion is not as go-getting as Gold’s “More! More!” or as sublime as Harnack’s “I believe in God,” or as joyous as Henderson’s romp on the Newfoundland airfield. “I wish I could tell you that I had found some belief, some rock…” Kinsolving says, “but to be truthful, you see, I can only tell you this: that as for being and nothingness, the only thing I did know was that to choose between them was simply to choose being…” Being. Living. Not where one lives or with whom one lives—but that one lives.
And what does all of this add up to? It would, of course, drastically oversimplify the art of fiction to suggest that Saul Bellow’s book or Herbert Gold’s prose style arise ineluctably out of our distressing cultural and political predicament. Nonetheless, that the communal predicament is distressing weighs upon the writer no less, and perhaps even more, than upon his neighbor—for to the writer the community is, properly, both subject and audience. And it may be that when this situation produces not only feelings of disgust, rage, and melancholy but impotence too, the writer is apt to lose heart and turn finally to other matters, to the construction of wholly imaginary worlds, and to a celebration of the self, which may, in a variety of ways, become his subject, as well as the impetus that establishes the perimeters of his technique. What I have tried to point out is that the vision of self as inviolable, powerful, and nervy, self imagined as the only seemingly real thing in an unreal-seeming environment, has given some of our writers joy, solace, and muscle. Certainly to have come through a serious personal struggle intact, simply to have survived, is nothing to be made light of, and it is for just this reason that Styron’s hero manages to engage our sympathies right down to the end. Still, when the survivor cannot choose but be ascetic, when the self can only be celebrated as it is excluded from society, or as it is exercised and admired in a fantastic one, we then do not have much reason to be cheery. Finally, for me there is something unconvincing about a regenerated Henderson up on the pure white lining of the world dancing around that shining airplane. Consequently, it is not with this scene that I should like to conclude, but instead with the image of his hero that Ralph Ellison presents at the end of Invisible Man. For here too the hero is left with the simple stark fact of himself. He is as alone as a man can be. Not that he hasn’t gone out into the world; he has gone out into it, and out into it, and out into it—but at the end he chooses to go underground, to live there and to wait. And it does not seem to him a cause for celebration either.
Some New Jewish Stereotypes*
I find that I am suddenly living in a country in which the Jew has come to be—or is allowed for now to think he is—a cultural hero. Only recently on the radio I heard a disc jockey introducing the theme song from the new movie Exodus. The words were to be sung by Pat Boone. The disc jockey made it clear that this was the “only authorized version of the song.” Authorized by what? For whom? Why? No further word from the d.j. Only a silence crackling with piety, and then Mr. Boone, singing out of something less than a whirlwind—
This land is mine,
God gave this land to me!
I do not know whether I am moving up or down the cultural ladder, or simply sideways, when I recall that there has been the song “Exodus,” preceded by the movie Exodus, preceded by the novel Exodus. However you slice it, there does not seem to be any doubt that the image of the Jew as patriot, warrior, and battle-scarred belligerent is rather satisfying to a large segment of the American public.
In an interview in the New York Post, Leon Uris, the author of the novel, claims that his image of the Jewish fighter is a good deal closer to the truth than images of Jews presented by other Jewish writers. I take it I am one of the others to whom Mr. Uris is referring—the Post clipping was mailed to me by a woman demanding some explanation for the “anti-Semitism and self-hatred” that she found in a collection of my short fiction that had just been published. What Uris told his interviewer, Joseph Wershba, was this:
There is a whole school of Jewish American writers, who spend their time damning their fathers, hating their mothers, wringing their hands and wondering why they were born. This isn’t art or literature. It’s psychiatry. These writers are professional apologists. Every year you find one of their works on the best seller lists. Their work is obnoxious and makes me sick to my stomach.
I wrote Exodus because I was just sick of apologizing—or feeling that it was necessary to apologize. The Jewish community of this country has contributed far more greatly than its numbers—in art, medicine, and especially literature.
I set out to tell a story of Israel. I am definitely biased. I am definitely pro-Jewish.
An author goes through everything his readers do. It was a revelation to me, too, when I was researching Exodus in Europe and in Israel. And the revelation was this: that we Jews are not what we have been portrayed to be. In truth, we have been fighters.
“In truth, we have been fighters.” So
bald, stupid, and uninformed is the statement that it is not even worth disputing. One has the feeling that, single-handed, Uris has set out to counter with his new image of the Jew, the older one that comes down to us in those several stories, the punch line of which is, “Play nice, Jakie—don’t fight.” However, there is not much value in swapping one simplification for the other. What Uris might do, when he is not having revelations by way of “researching” novels, is to read a new book called Dawn, by Elie Wiesel. Wiesel is not an American-Jewish writer; he is a Hungarian Jew now living in New York, and his first book, Night, was an autobiographical account of his experiences as a fifteen-year-old boy in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, those concentration camps, he writes, which “consumed my faith forever … murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.” Dawn, the second book, has for its background the Jewish terrorist activities in Palestine that preceded the establishment of the State of Israel. The hero is assigned the task of executing a British major who has been taken hostage by the Jewish terrorists; the novel deals with the terrible hours the hero spends prior to the execution. I should like to tell Uris that Wiesel’s Jew is not so proud to discover himself in the role of a fighter, nor is he able to find justification for himself in some traditional Jewish association with pugnacity or bloodletting. But actually it turns out that there is really no need to tell Uris anything of the sort; if we can believe a news item that we find in Time magazine, he already knows more than he lets on in the New York Post.
In Manhattan, Time reports,
Captain Yehiel Aranowicz, 37 … one-time master of the blockade-running Israeli refugee ship “Exodus,” reported some reservations back home about the best selling (4,000,000 copies to date) novel inspired by his 1947 heroics. “Israelis,” he said, “were pretty disappointed in the book, to put it lightly. The types that are described in it never existed in Israel. The novel is neither history nor literature.” … In Encino, California, Exodus’ author Leon Uris rebutted: “You may quote me as saying, ‘Captain who?’ and that’s all I have to say. I’m not going to pick on a lightweight. Just look at my sales figures.”