Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  Just how imaginary, however, is the world recorded in Roth’s book? A Lindbergh presidency may be imaginary, but the anti-Semitism of the real Lindbergh was not. And Lindbergh was not alone. He gave voice to a native anti-Semitism with a long prehistory in Catholic and Protestant Christianity, fostered in numbers of European immigrant communities, and drawing strength from the anti-black bigotry with which it was, by the irrational logic of racism, tightly entwined (of all America’s ‘historic undesirables’, suggests Roth, none could be more unalike than blacks and Jews).6 A volatile and fickle voting public captivated by surface rather than substance – Tocqueville foresaw the danger long ago – might in 1940 as easily have fallen for the aviator hero with the simple message as for the incumbent with the proven record. In this sense, the fantasy of a Lindbergh presidency is only a concretisation, a realisation for poetic ends, of a certain potential in American political life.

  With this reading of Lindbergh in mind, we may return to the question of the scar carried into the future by the child of the 1940s. And here, rather than searching into the life and character of the real Philip Roth, a questionable enterprise under any circumstances, it may help to turn to the other Roth boy, Philip’s elder brother Sandy, the one who did not run away from history (and did not write a book about his childhood either). Philip, passionately patriotic, collects icons (postage stamps) of exemplary Americans. Sandy, artistically gifted, prefers to draw his heroes. Both own treasured images of Lindbergh the aviator; as Jews, both face a crisis when Lindbergh reveals his true political colours. Philip does not want to give up his Lindbergh stamps; Sandy hides his Lindbergh portraits under his bed.

  Under the influence of a collaborationist rabbi to whom their mother’s sister is married, but against his parents’ wishes, Sandy enrols voluntarily in the Just Folks programme, which takes Jewish children away from the cities for the summer and quarters them with typical (i.e., Lindbergh-inclined) non-Jewish families in rural areas. He spends a summer on a farm in Kentucky and comes back husky and tanned, unable to understand why his parents, whom he sneers at as ‘ghetto Jews’ suffering from a ‘persecution complex’, get excited about Hitler. It takes Sandy a full year to appreciate that what he calls a persecution complex may really be a survival mechanism. (p. 193)

  By any objective standard, Sandy emerges from the Lindbergh years as scarred as his younger brother, perhaps more so, since he has to live like an alien in a disapproving parental household. If those years had really occurred, the historical Philip Roth’s elder brother – who is just as real as Philip, and lived through the same history – would bear the marks too. But there were no Lindbergh years, and therefore there are no Lindbergh marks as such. What then is the nature of the scar that both brothers, the writer and the non-writer, bear, as a result of a history that is poetically (in Aristotle’s sense) called the Lindbergh presidency; or is it only the writer brother who bears the scar; or is there in fact no scar at all?

  Though young Philip will of course grow up to become a famous writer, The Plot is not a book about the incubation of the writer’s soul. Nowhere does Roth invoke the trope of the artist as a being wounded by life whose wound becomes the source of his art. The only answer that seems to make sense of the Lindbergh scar is that the scar is Jewishness itself – Jewishness, however, of a particular etiology: Jewishness as an outsider’s idea – and a hostile outsider’s at that – of what it is to be a Jew, an idea forced upon the growing child too early, and by means that, while they might not be extreme in themselves, might easily – the 1940s, the quintessential time of the unforeseen, provide proof aplenty – become extreme.

  What the plot against America does to young Philip between the ages of seven and nine is terrible. It forces upon him – though less, it must be noted, at first hand than through the medium of newsreels and radio programmes and from eavesdropping on his parents’ worried conversations – a vision of a world based on hatred and suspicion, a world of them and us. It turns him from a Jewish American into an American Jew, or in the eyes of his enemies just a Jew in America. In waking him up to ‘reality’ too early, it strips him of his childhood. Or rather, the Zionists would say, it strips him of his illusions. A Jew can expect no home on earth but in the Jewish homeland.

  What is it to be a Jew in America? Does a Jew belong in America? Can America be a Jew’s true home? Herman and Bess Roth, Philip’s parents, were born in the United States in the early twentieth century, into immigrant families. They love their native country and work hard to make their way in it. Philip offers a tribute to their generation that is not without overtones of elegy:

  It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbours for me far more than religion. Nobody . . . had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap . . . The adults were no longer observant in the outward, recognizable ways . . . [The one] stranger who did wear a beard . . . [and] appeared every few months after dark to ask in broken English for a contribution toward the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine . . . seemed unable to get it through his head that we’d already had a homeland for three generations . . . (pp. 3-4)

  These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language – they had one, their native tongue, whose vernacular expressiveness they wielded effortlessly . . . What they were was what they couldn’t get rid of – what they couldn’t even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. (p. 220)

  The account Roth gives here of the Judaism of people like his parents is wholly affirmative. There is no hint of what he suggests elsewhere: that for some Jews a religion reduced to an ethical code plus some social practices may prove too barren, that to give a fuller meaning to their lives they may plunge hysterically into cults (Mickey Sabbath’s wife in Sabbath’s Theater) or revolutionary violence (Meredith Levov in American Pastoral).

  The Jewishness of Herman Roth and his kind may be devoid of a metaphysical dimension but it does embody a chemistry that neither the Zionists nor the architects of Homestead 42 are able to grasp. Jewish-Americanness is a compound, not a simple mixture. One cannot simply subtract one element (‘Jewishness’ or ‘Americanness’) and be left with the other. To be American – to speak the American language, participate in the American way of life, be absorbed in American culture – does not require that one cease being a Jew or entail a loss of Jewishness; conversely, being relocated by fiat from a Jewish to an ‘American’ (i.e., gentile) community will not make one more of an American. The same holds or held true for the Jews of Europe. Roth quotes with approval Aharon Appelfeld’s mordant observation: ‘I have always loved assimilated Jews, because that was where the Jewish character, and also, perhaps, Jewish fate, was concentrated with greatest force.’7

  After the election of Lindbergh, Herman takes his family on a trip to Washington, DC, where he hopes that contact with the enduring monuments of American democracy will wash away the bad taste. Instead the family is given a taste of what public life in the wider America is becoming. They are turned out of their hotel room on a pretext and subjected to anti-Semitic menaces by fellow tourists. Lindbergh’s triumph has clearly been read by middle Americans as a signal that the hunting season can commence.

  A strange man attaches himself to the Roths. He claims to be a professional guide and will not be shaken off. Who is he really? In their new, paranoid state, the Roth parents suspect he is an FBI agent, and test him out. He passes every test. The simple truth is that he is what he says, a tour guide, and a good one too. But in the new America, nothing is any longer simple. A trip that had been intended to reassure the boys about their common heritage turns into a lesson in exclusion. Philip: ‘A patriotic paradise, the American Garden of Eden spread before us, and we stood huddled together there, the family expelled.’ In the starkest terms, that is what the plot in Roth’s title is meant
to achieve and, at the level of the imaginary, does achieve: to expel Jews from America. Juden raus. That is what Philip cannot forget. (p. 66)

  To put all talk of metaphorical scarring in perspective, finally, we ought not to forget the third boy in the Roth household: Alvin, their twenty-one-year-old ward, an orphan in the true sense of the word, who runs off to join the Canadian army and fight the Nazis, loses a leg ingloriously, and returns to Newark in a wheelchair with a medal and a seething rage against all and sundry. With grim purposefulness Alvin descends into a life of crime, his anti-fascist past dismissed as a foolish juvenile escapade. Scarred more deeply than either of the brothers, Alvin is in the book to give a sobering reminder of what real history can do in the way of destroying lives.

  Although the mind through which the events of 1940–42 are mediated is that of a child, the account we get is not a faux-naïf one. The voice speaking to us is that of the child grown up, yet subjecting himself to the vision of his younger self, and in return lending to the younger self a concentrated self-awareness that no child possesses.

  There are no particular signs that the grown-up voice reaches us from the first decade of the twenty-first century (there is hardly any forward perspective beyond 1945), but given the autobiographical traces we may take it as belonging to the historical Philip Roth or his fictional alter ego ‘Philip Roth’, from whose repertoire the wisdom of hindsight has been deliberately excluded, and who passes over every opportunity to be smart at the expense of the child. If one may speak of the affection of a grown man for his childhood self, then the affection and respect of the writer for young Philip is one of the most appealing aspects of the book. The modulation between youthful freshness of vision and adult insight is brought off with such skill that we lose awareness of who is speaking in our ear at any given moment, child or man. Only rarely does Roth’s hand fail, as for example when the child Philip sees his aunt Evelyn for who she is: ‘Her pretty face, with its large features and thickly applied makeup, suddenly looked to me preposterous – the carnal face of [a] ravenous mania.’ (p. 217)

  Subjecting himself to a child’s world-view means that Roth has to eschew a range of stylistic resources, in particular the harsher reaches of irony and the wails and tirades of desperate eloquence that distinguish such novels as The Dying Animal (2001) and the great Sabbath’s Theater (1995), an eloquence sparked by the brute resistance of the world to the human will or by the prospect of approaching extinction. On the other hand, it does place Roth out of range of William Faulkner, the influence of whose heady prose has sometimes overwhelmed him of late, particularly in The Human Stain (2000).

  Roth has grown in stature as a writer as he has grown older. At his best he is now a novelist of authentically tragic scope; at his very best he can reach Shakespearean heights. By the standard set by Sabbath’s Theater, The Plot Against America is not a major work. What it offers in place of tragedy is pathos of a heart-wrenching kind saved from sentimentality by a sharp humour, a risky, knife-edge performance that Roth brings off without a slip.

  The subject of the keenest pathos is not young Philip – though, clutching his stamp album, heading off into the night, determined to be just a boy again, Philip is pathetic enough – but Philip’s neighbour and shadow self, Seldon Wishnow. Like Philip, Seldon is a clever, impressionable, obedient little boy. He is also fatally unlucky, a born victim, and Philip wants nothing to do with him (Seldon of course adores Philip). In his efforts to shake off the curse of Seldon, Philip suggests to Aunt Evelyn, who works in the relocation bureau, that the Wishnows, widow and son, be packed off to Kentucky. To his dismay she acts on his suggestion. Within months of arriving in the town of Danville, Seldon’s mother has been set upon and murdered by anti-Semitic vigilantes, and Seldon has to be brought back to Newark an orphan. Philip thus has to bear not only the guilt of sending Mrs Wishnow to her death but the punishment of having Seldon quartered upon him.

  The night of his mother’s disappearance, Seldon telephones Newark (he knows no one in Kentucky), and Mrs Roth, calling on all her resources of motherly firmness, confronts no less a task than keeping the excitable child sane. Their long-distance conversation contains some of the most heart-rending (we know Seldon’s mother is dead but Seldon and Mrs Roth do not, though she suspects the worst) yet funniest dialogue Roth has written.

  An historical novel is, by definition, set in a real historical past. The past in which The Plot Against America is set is not real. The Plot is thus, generically speaking, not an historical but a dystopian novel, though an unusual one, since the dystopian novel is usually set in the future, a future toward which the present seems to be tending. George Orwell’s 1984 is an exemplary dystopian novel. It looks forward to 1984 from the perspective of a 1948 in which the threat of total control seems ominously strong.

  In the typical dystopian novel there is a convenient gap between present and future – convenient because it frees the author from having to demonstrate step by step how present turns into future. Roth’s task is more difficult. He needs to provide two lines of suturing: the imaginary Lindbergh years have to be sutured at one end to the real history from which they diverge in mid-1940, and at the other end to the real history that they rejoin in late 1942. By strict standards, Roth’s surgery fails and has to fail. Even under a resolutely isolationist administration, American history cannot proceed independently of world history. The absence of America from the international stage for two years would inevitably have affected the course of the war and thereby changed the world.

  If, by its nature, Roth’s alternative history cannot pass the test of the real, can it pass the lesser test of the plausible? Is it plausible, for example, that Congress should not have been disquieted by the spectacle of Japanese forces sweeping through Indonesia, India, and Australia, thereby laying the foundations for a vast Co-Prosperity Sphere run from Tokyo? Is it plausible that what the US armed forces took four years of real history (1942–45) to achieve could be achieved in three years of revised history (1943–45)?

  Questions like these would be less relevant if Roth were indulging in a fable of the ‘what if ?’ kind. But the challenge he has set himself is more rigorous. Roth is writing a realistic novel about imagined events. From the premise of the election of a fascist to the White House all else ought to follow by a logic of plausibility. That is why, in order to explain American inaction, Roth has to go to the trouble of creating a network of secret agreements between Nazi Germany and imperial Japan on the one hand, and their puppet in the White House on the other. That is why he has to revise the chronology of the war. But by the standard of plausibility to which he subjects himself, this historical framework is more than a little rickety.

  In real life, Charles Lindbergh responded to Pearl Harbor by joining the war effort and flying bombing runs against the Japanese. He died in 1974. What happens to the fictional Lindbergh after October 1942, when he takes off, flying solo, and is never seen again?

  We get no solid answer, only rumours. According to one rumour Lindbergh was forced down on Canadian soil by British planes. According to the Germans he has been kidnapped by the international Jewish conspiracy. The British say that he ditched his plane in the Atlantic and was taken by U-boat to Germany. Anne Morrow Lindbergh puts out a story that the Lindbergh child was not murdered in 1932 but spirited away to Germany, where he has been held as a hostage to ensure that his parents carry out the will of their German masters; and that Charles Lindbergh himself was shot out of the skies by German agents because he was no longer deemed trustworthy. In the face of these competing versions, all that we as readers of this fictional history can say is that we do not know what happened to Lindbergh, and, more seriously, that we do not know why the Lindbergh presidency or plot had to end when it did, given that resistance to it had not got beyond the stage of speechmaking.

  The spirit that reigns rather distantly over the last, hurried-sounding pages of The Plot Against America is that of Jorge Luis Borges. But Borges would ha
ve made better use of the layer of solid historical research on which Roth has built his book. As Lindbergh himself disappears into thin air, leaving nothing behind, so his presidency disappears, leaving its trace only on the mind of the boy who will grow into Philip Roth the writer. Save for the book we hold in our hands, there is no Lindbergh legacy. The two ghostly, parallel years in the American story – and, since the world is indivisible, in the story of the world – might as well not have occurred.

  What Borges knew is that the ways of history are more complex and more mysterious than that. If there had been a President Lindbergh, our lives would be different today, probably worse, though exactly how we cannot be sure.

  (2004)

  19 Nadine Gordimer

  IN A STORY by Nadine Gordimer dating to the 1980s, a working-class British couple take in as lodger a quiet, studious young man from the Middle East. He becomes intimate with their daughter, gets her pregnant, and proposes marriage. The parents give their dubious consent. Before he can marry the girl, however, announces the lodger, she must travel unescorted to his home country to meet his family. As he says goodbye to her at the airport, he slips explosives into her suitcase. The plane is blown up; all the passengers die, including his duped bride-to-be and their unborn child.1