But of course Miller’s title has a second, ironic meaning. If the cowboys are misfits in Eisenhower’s America, the Nevada mustangs are even more deeply so. There used to be tens of thousands of them; now there are only pitiful troops up in the hills, barely worth being exploited. From being an embodiment of the freedom of the frontier, they have become an anachronism, creatures with no useful role in a mechanised civilisation. It is their lot to be herded and hunted from the air; if they are not actually being shot from the air, that is only because their flesh would spoil before the horse-butcher could arrive with his refrigerated truck.
And then, of course, Roslyn (Marilyn Monroe) is a misfit too, in ways less easy to put a finger on, ways that lead us to the creative heart of the film. Miller was married to Monroe at the time, though the marriage broke up during the course of the filming; one suspects that the character of Roslyn was shaped around Monroe, or around Miller’s sense of who the inner Monroe was or could be. In some of the more impressive scenes, Miller and Huston do no more than create a space in which Monroe is allowed to act out herself, create herself on film.
Ironies run particularly deep here, since Monroe in part embodied, and in part struggled against, the dumb-blonde type that the Hollywood star system prescribed for her. A further complication: it is not always easy to distinguish the elusive charm of the character Roslyn from the slack, Nembutal-induced good humour of the troubled actress.
The key scene in this respect occurs about thirty minutes into the film. Roslyn has been dancing with Guido, while Gaye and Roslyn’s older friend Isabelle look on. Roslyn is charming, full of vitality; but whatever further signals she is sending out, Guido misreads. To him the dance is sexual courtship; but Roslyn keeps evading him in a way that is beyond mere coyness. Eventually she dances out of the house into the evening sun (‘Watch out!’ calls Gaye – ‘There’s no step!’) and continues her dance around the trunk of a tree, falling at last into a half-undressed coma.
Gaye understands what possesses Roslyn no better than Guido does, but he knows enough to hold Guido back. The two men, and Isabelle, stand and watch in bafflement while Roslyn – who at this point, one can recognise with historical hindsight, might as well be Monroe herself, or at least Arthur Miller’s Monroe – does her thing.
What is Roslyn-Monroe’s thing? In part it is Angst of a rather hand-me-down kind, for which Left Bank café existentialism must be blamed. But in part, too, it has to do with a resistance to the highly focused and even regimented models of sexuality purveyed not only by Hollywood and the media but by academic sexology. Roslyn is dancing out a diffuse and – in the light of the rest of the film – forlorn sensuality to which neither Guido’s sexual predatoriness nor Gaye’s old-fashioned suave courtliness is an adequate response.
Another haunting scene comes toward the end of the film, when it is brought home to Roslyn with full force that the men have been lying to her, that finally they care more for the macho exploit in which they are involved – capturing the wretched horses – than they care for her, that pleas and even bribery will get her nowhere. In despair and rage she tears herself away from the men; she screams and rants and weeps against their heartlessness. To a more conventional director, this high moment – the moment when all veils are torn from Roslyn’s eyes and she realises that, as a woman and perhaps also as a human being, she is alone – would have seemed an opportunity for acting in an old-fashioned sense: for intense close-ups, for crosscutting from face to angry face. In fact Huston shoots the scene contrary to such conventions. The camera stays on the side of the men; Roslyn is so far away that she is almost swallowed up by the expanse of the desert; her voice cracks; her words are incoherent. The effect is disturbing.
But the scenes – the long sequence of scenes – that stay most indelibly in the mind are those involving the horses.
In the credit sequences to any film involving animal participants that is made nowadays, at least any film made in the West, cinemagoers are assured that no hardship was caused to the animals, that what may have appeared to be hardship was only filmic sleight of hand. One presumes that such assurances were brought about by pressure from animal rights organisations upon the film industry.
Not so in 1960. The horses used in the filming of The Misfits were wild horses; the exhaustion and pain and terror one sees on the screen are real exhaustion and pain and terror. The horses are not acting. The horses are the real thing, being exploited by Huston and the people behind Huston for their strength and beauty and endurance; for the spiritual integrity of their response to their enemy, man; for actually being what they seem to be and are held to be in the mythology of the West: creatures of the wild, untamed.
The point is worth stressing because it brings us close to the heart of film as a representational medium. Film, or at least the visual component of naturalistic film, does not work via intermediary symbols. When you read, in a book, ‘His hand brushed hers,’ it is not a real hand that brushes a real hand but the idea of a hand that brushes the idea of another hand. Whereas in a film, what you see is the visual record of something that once really happened: a real hand that came in contact with another real hand.
Part of the reason why the debate on pornography is still alive in respect of the photographic media when it has all but died out in the case of print is that the photograph is read, and justifiably so, as a record of something that really happened. What is represented on celluloid was actually done at some time in the past by actual people in front of a camera. The story in which the moment is embedded may be a fiction, but the event was a real one, it belongs to history, to a history that is relived every time the film is rolled.
Despite all the cleverness that has been exercised in film theory since the 1950s to bring film into line as just another system of signs, there remains something irreducibly different about the photographic image, namely that it bears in or with itself the trace of a real historical past. That is why the horse-capturing sequences of The Misfits are so disturbing: on the one side, out of the field of the camera lens, a gang of horse-wranglers and directors and writers and sound technicians united in trying to fit the horses into places that have been prescribed for them in a fictional construct called The Misfits; on the other side, in front of the lens, a handful of wild horses who make no distinction between actors and stuntmen and technicians, who don’t know about and don’t want to know about a screenplay by the famed Arthur Miller in which they are or are not, depending on one’s point of view, the misfits, who have never heard of the closing of the Western frontier but are at this moment experiencing it in the flesh in the most traumatising way. The horses are real, the stuntmen are real, the actors are real; they are all, at this moment, involved in a terrible fight in which the men want to subjugate the horses to their purpose and the horses want to get away; every now and again the blonde woman screams and shouts; it all really happened; and here it is, to be relived for the ten thousandth time before our eyes. Who would dare to say it is just a story?
(2000)
18 Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
IN 1993, OVER the name ‘Philip Roth’, there appeared a book entitled Operation Shylock: A Confession, which besides being a dazzling raid into territory that had seemed to be staked out by John Barth and the metafictionists, was also about Israel and its relations with the Jewish Diaspora. Operation Shylock presents itself as the work of an American writer named Philip Roth (within the book, however, there are two such Philip Roths) who admits to a history of covertly assisting the Israeli intelligence services. We may choose to take this confession at face value. On the other hand, this confession may be part of a larger fiction: Operation Shylock – A Confession:A Novel. Which would be the truer reading? The ‘Note to the Reader’ with which the book concludes seems to promise an answer. The note commences, ‘This book is a work of fiction,’ and ends, ‘This confession is false.’ We are, in other words, in the sphere of the Cretan Liar.1
If Roth did and did not
mean his book about Israel to be read as a lie, an invention, is his new book about America – which contains a similar Note commencing with the words ‘The Plot Against America is a work of fiction’ – to be read in the same way, namely with its truth status held in suspension? In a sense, no, obviously not. The plot of The Plot Against America cannot be true since many of the events on which it hinges are universally known never to have occurred. For instance, there was no President Charles Lindbergh in the White House in the years 1941–42, putting into effect secret orders from Berlin. Just as obviously, however, Roth has not concocted this lengthy fantasy of an America in thrall to the Nazis simply as a literary exercise. So what is the relation of his story to the real world? What is his book ‘about’?2
Roth’s President Lindbergh favours an oratorical style based on the clipped declarative sentence. His administration runs sinister programmes with reassuring titles like ‘Just Folks’ and ‘Homestead 42’ (compare ‘Homeland Security’, ‘Patriot Act’). Behind him lurks an ideologue of a vice-president impatient to get his hands on the levers of power. The similarities between the Lindbergh presidency and the presidency of George W. Bush are hard to brush over. Is Roth’s novel of America under fascist rule then ‘about’ America under the younger Bush?
At the time the book was launched, Roth took steps to head off such a reading. ‘Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman à clef to the present moment in America,’ he wrote in the New York Times Book Review. ‘That would be a mistake . . . I am not pretending to be interested in [the years 1940–1942] – I am interested in those two years.’3
The disclaimer sounds unambiguous, and it is. Nevertheless, a novelist as seasoned as Roth knows that the stories we set about writing sometimes begin to write themselves, after which their truth or falsehood is out of our hands and declarations of authorial intent carry no weight. Furthermore, once a book is launched into the world it becomes the property of its readers, who, given half a chance, will twist its meaning in accord with their own preconceptions and desires. Again Roth is aware of this: in the same NewYork Times piece he reminds us that, though Franz Kafka did not write his novels as political allegories, East Europeans under Communist rule read them as such and put them to work for political ends.
Finally, we might note that this is not the first time Roth has invited us to think about a slide into fascism led from above. In American Pastoral (1997) the hero’s father, watching the Watergate hearings on television, observes of the circle around Richard Nixon:
These so-called patriots . . . would take this country and make Nazi Germany out of it. You know the book It Can’t Happen Here? There’s a wonderful book, I forget the author, but the idea couldn’t be more up-to-the-moment. These people have taken us to the edge of something terrible.4
The book referred to is the now barely readable It Can’t Happen Here (1935), in which Sinclair Lewis imagines a takeover of the American government by an unstable mix of far-right and populist forces. As a model for his fascist president Lewis uses not Lindbergh but Huey Long.
In any sensible reading, The Plot Against America can be ‘about’ the presidency of George W. Bush in only the most peripheral way. It needs a paranoid reader to turn it into a roman à clef for the early twenty-first century. However, one of the things that The Plot Against America is about is, precisely, paranoia. In Roth’s story, the plot from above, which is immediately a plot against America’s Jews but ultimately a plot against the American republic, works so insidiously that at first sensible people cannot see it. Those who talk about plots are dismissed as crazy.
Roth’s fictive history begins in 1940 when, riding on the back of a campaign to keep America out of the newly erupted European war, the aviator Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the presidency. Plenty of folk are horrified by the election of a known Nazi sympathiser. But in the face of the new president’s success in keeping America peaceful and prosperous, opposition dwindles. Roosevelt retires to lick his wounds. The first laws targeting Jews are passed, and evoke no outcry.
What resistance there is crystallises around an unlikely centre. Week after week the journalist Walter Winchell uses his radio programme to lambaste Lindbergh. Outside the Jewish community there is little support for Winchell. The New York Times criticises his tirades for their ‘questionable taste’ and applauds the advertisers who have him removed from the airwaves. Winchell responds by denouncing the proprietors of the Times as ‘ultra-civilised Jewish Quislings’. Stripped of his only access to the media, Winchell announces himself as a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1944. At a rally in the Lindbergh heartland, however, he is assassinated. At the memorial service Fiorello La Guardia delivers a Mark Antony-type oration, full of scorching irony, over the coffin. In response Lindbergh climbs into his plane, flies off into the blue, and is never heard from again. (pp. 240, 242)
After Lindbergh’s disappearance, things get worse before they get better. His vice-president and successor, Burton K. Wheeler, is an extremist. Under Wheeler there is a brief reign of terror. Riots break out; Jews and Jewish businesses are targeted. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, of all people, raises her voice in protest, and is promptly whipped off into protective custody by the FBI. There is talk of a war against Canada, which has been giving shelter to Jews from its mighty southern neighbour.
Then the country pulls itself right. Resistance brings together political figures like La Guardia and Dorothy Thompson, wife of Sinclair Lewis and animating spirit behind It Can’t Happen Here, with decent Americans from all walks of life. In an extraordinary presidential election in November 1942 Roosevelt is returned to office, and Japan promptly bombs Pearl Harbor. Thus, exactly one year late, the ship of history – American history, that is – resumes its wonted course.
The 1940s are conveyed to us through the eyes of one Philip Roth, born 1933, a youngster with a stable and happy disposition that comes from being ‘an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world’. As the Lindbergh programme unrolls, however, young Philip has to absorb, step by step, a lesson that may well be at the heart of his author’s enterprise: that the history we learn from history books is a censored, domesticated version of the real thing. Real history is the unpredictable, ‘the relentless unforeseen’. ‘The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides.’ To the extent that it chronicles the irruption of the relentless unforeseen into the life of a child, The Plot Against America is a history book, but of a fantastic kind, with its own truth, the sort of truth Aristotle had in mind when he said that poetry is truer than history – truer because of its power to condense and represent the multifarious in the typical. (pp. 7, 113, 114)
Philip’s father, Herman Roth – whose real-life avatar has already been eulogised by his son in Patrimony (1991) – is a man of sterling qualities with a more intense, or perhaps more romantic, loyalty to the ideals of American democracy than anyone else in the book. Herman does his best to shield his family from the gathering storm; but in order to keep them from relocation from their native Newark to the hinterland (this is what Homestead 42 is all about – isolating Jews), he has to quit his job selling insurance and take night work lugging crates in the produce market; and even there he is not safe from the threats of Agent McCorkle of the FBI.
The spectacle of his father’s powerlessness against the state sets off a psychic breakdown in Philip. This begins with petty delinquency, proceeds through alienation (‘She’s somebody else,’ he thinks to himself, watching his mother – ‘everybody is’), and ends with him fleeing home to seek sanctuary in a Catholic orphanage. He is quite clear about the meaning of running away from home. ‘I wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible.’ (pp. 194, 232)
Philip’s breakdown is treated with a light hand – despite the menace in the air, the tone of the book is comic. His flight expresses panic more than rejection of fami
ly and heritage. One of Roth’s alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman, has in the past insinuated that Roth the obedient, dutiful son is an impostor, and – worse – a boring impostor, that the true Roth is the sly, scabrous rebel who first stuck out his head in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). The Plot Against America in effect speaks back to Zuckerman, offering a pedigree for the more filial, ‘citizenly’ Roth.5
Nevertheless, Lindbergh, and what Lindbergh represents – licence for everything that is ugliest in the American psyche to emerge and run riot – forces Philip to grow up too fast, lose his childhood illusions too early. In the longer term, what effect does this abrupt awakening from childhood have on Philip? In a sense the question is illegitimate. Since Roth’s novel ends in 1942, we do not get to see Philip after nine. But if the author Philip Roth had meant to write about a fictive child whose sole existence is between the pages of a novel, he would not have called that child Philip Roth, born in the same year as himself and of parents with the same names as his. In some sense the young Philip Roth about whose childhood we read continues his life in the life of the Philip Roth who six decades later not only narrates the child’s story but writes it too.
In some sense, then, we are reading not just the story of a representative Jewish-American child of the generation that came to awareness in the 1940s – albeit here in a perverted version of the 1940s – but also the story of the real, historical Philip Roth. Puzzling out in what sense the real Philip Roth can be said to bear the marks of the child Philip’s ravaged childhood may help us to answer the question, what is this book, this work of fiction, really about?
Whatever marks are borne by Philip seem all the stranger as one scrutinises them. Oskar Matzerath, in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, bears in or on himself more obviously than Philip the proof that he wanted nothing to do with history. Oskar asserts his right to childhood not by hiding from history, which cannot be done, not even in an orphanage, but by ceasing to grow, which – in a sense – can be done. But the history with which Oskar collides, the history of the Third Reich, is not some abstract ‘unforeseen’: it really happened, as attested in common memory and recorded in thousands of books and millions of photographs. The history that scars Philip, on the other hand, happened only in Philip Roth’s head and is recorded only in The Plot Against America. Making sense of The Plot and its imaginary world is therefore nowhere near as straightforward as making sense of The Tin Drum.
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