Born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, the second son of an insurance salesman and a devoted housewife, Roth was a third-generation American Jew. His first experience of public opprobrium came in 1959, when he was twenty-six years old, following publication in the New Yorker of his short story ‘Defender of the Faith’. The story centres on a war-wearied Jewish-American sergeant named Marx, who, on the basis of their shared Judaism, gives successive breaks to conniving nineteen-year-old draftee Sheldon Grossbart. Marx allows Grossbart an exemption for the Sabbath; lobbies on Grossbart’s behalf about the food; and allows Grossbart and some friends to visit an aunt for Seder. Then Grossbart pleads for Marx to get him out of a posting to the Pacific, where war still rages. Marx, who discovers that Grossbart has lied about visiting his aunt, refuses, disgusted by Grossbart’s lies and abuse of their shared faith. When he discovers that Grossbart has pulled another string to get him out of that posting, Marx decides that Grossbart will go — and pulls his own string to guarantee it. Grossbart confronts Marx and again invokes their faith — this time to accuse Marx of disloyalty to it: ‘There is no limit to your anti-Semitism, is there?’ But the faith that Grossbart invokes is trumped by Marx’s awareness of another: ‘For each other we have to learn to watch out, Sheldon.’ The faith that Marx defends is one of shared loyalty, of a duty not merely between one Jew and another, but one that is ‘for all of us’.1
Roth’s portrayal of Grossbart offended Jewish leaders in the US, who, only fourteen years since World War II and the Holocaust, were sensitive to negative portrayals of Judaism. A New York rabbi sent an open letter to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in this vein, but with a censorious note. ‘What is being done to silence this man?’ he demanded to know, referring to Roth. ‘Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.’
The demand for Roth’s silence stunned the young author. ‘Defender of the Faith’ was no more or less offensive — if at all — than any of his other short stories. ‘The Conversion of the Jews’, about a thirteen-year-old schoolboy who threatens to jump from the roof of his local synagogue unless his mother, his rabbi, and all those watching kneel and say that they believe in Jesus, had aroused comment but nothing of this sort of outrage. ‘Epstein’, about a middle-aged Jew whose affliction by a rash and then a heart attack reveals that he has had an affair, was irreverent but, again, had caused nothing like this kind of scandal. Most of Roth’s stories had been published in small journals such as Partisan Review and Commentary. Publication in one of these, or, indeed, in an Israeli newspaper, Roth was told privately, would have ensured that ‘Defender of the Faith’ was judged ‘exclusively from a literary point of view’. Its publication in the New Yorker, however, was tantamount to an act of ‘informing’.
It was a serious charge to level. In the months that followed, the accusation once thrown at Marx was thrown at Roth. ‘You have done as much harm as all the organised anti-Semitic organisations have done to make people believe that all Jews are cheats, liars, connivers,’ ran one letter. ‘We have discussed this story from every possible angle and we cannot escape the conclusion that it will do irreparable damage to the Jewish people,’ ran another.2 ‘The only logical conclusion that any intelligent reader could draw from [Roth’s] stories or books,’ wrote Rabbi Theodore Lewis, ‘is that this country — nay the world — would be a much better and happier place without Jews.’3 Roth described his supposed crime in a straightforward way: ‘I had told the Gentiles what apparently it would otherwise have been possible to keep secret from them: that the perils of human nature afflict the members of our minority.’4
Roth would have no truck with it. As a writer, he had the freedom to depict characters as he wished. To depict those characters as philandering or conniving was no more to say that all Jews were so than it was to say that all French and Russian women, like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, were adulterous. Moreover, the kind of saintly depiction of Jews that Roth’s critics might wish for was mistaken. To refrain from writing about Jews in the same vein as ‘Defender of the Faith’ because anti-Semites might use that writing would only empower those anti-Semites, by submitting to them.5
Roth was convinced that he was in the right; that time would prove he was in the right; and that if he explained why he thought so, people would understand. The first belief would never be shaken, but events would shake the latter two certainties. Two months after ‘Defender of the Faith’ appeared, Roth’s first book — a collection of his short stories and a novella that gave the book its name, Goodbye, Columbus — was published to glowing reviews and acclaim that culminated, in 1960, in the National Book Award and the Daroff Award of the Jewish Book Council of America. But Roth continued to attract criticism, notably from Leon Uris, who had won the Daroff Award in 1959. ‘There is a whole school of Jewish American writers,’ Uris said, ‘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 bestseller lists. Their work is so obnoxious and makes me sick to my stomach.’
Roth heard this criticism again when he accepted an invitation to speak at Yeshiva University, in New York, in 1962. While appearing alongside Italian author Pietro di Donato and Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, it was clear that Roth was the main attraction — even the target — of the event. After each had spoken on the ‘crisis of conscience in minority writers of fiction’, the moderator turned to Roth and asked, ‘Mr Roth, would you write the same stories you’ve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?’
What followed seemed, to Roth, a ‘trial’. He was grilled, berated, and interrogated, and no response that he gave seemed to satisfy the audience: ‘I realised that I was not just opposed but hated.’ Ellison, whose work had attracted similar charges within the African-American community, came to Roth’s defence, but even that seemed only to pause the deluge. When the symposium was over, antagonistic students surrounded Roth as he sought to leave, accusing him of anti-Semitism and shaking their fists in his face. Afterwards, a shaken Roth vowed, ‘I’ll never write about Jews again.’
And yet, as he would admit, the affair left him in ‘thralldom’ to Jewish characters. He believed in the merits of his work, and saw untilled soil in which to work. But he would resist the lure of Jewish characters for some time. His first novel, Letting Go, was published a few months after the Yeshiva affair; it concerned Jewish characters, but its fine plotting and formal polish pointed to the influence of Henry James. His next book, When She Was Good, published in 1967, eschewed Jewish characters in favour of Midwest Americana.
Both novels were influenced by Roth’s then-wife, Margaret Martinson Williams. Four years older than Roth, Williams was a divorcée and the mother of two children, who were in the care of her ex-husband. Feeling free, young, and accomplished, yet also searching for something challenging, Roth idealised Williams and her troubled background: for having survived it, she seemed to him a woman of courage and strength. But his infatuation was short-lived. They took up together, split up, got back together again, and split up again. Roth moved to New York, went to Europe, and — as a gesture of both his guilt and his goodwill — got Williams a job at Esquire while he was away. But after his return she knocked on his door with a suitcase in hand. Beholden to a sense of duty that he would later rue, he took her in.
She claimed to be pregnant. He was certain this was a lie, but when she came to him with the results of a pregnancy test, he agreed to marry her — on condition that she have an abortion. She agreed, went, and returned in tears with details of how it had happened. They married on 22 February 1959, a few days before ‘Defender of the Faith’ was published and the heavens came down upon him.
The marriage was fraught. There were constant fights, and Roth was unfaithful. In 1962, threats from Williams that she would suicide angered Roth so much that he left
; then they frightened him so much that he returned — at which point, while he was helping Williams to regurgitate the sleeping pills and whisky she had taken, she told him that there had never been a baby. She had purchased the urine from a pregnant woman in a park, substituted it for her own when it came time to take the pregnancy test, and used the money Roth gave her for the abortion to go to a movie. It was downhill from there.
Letting Go had been dedicated to Williams, and When She Was Good was about her. By the time it was published, Roth was as far from her as he could be. She had rebuffed his efforts to obtain a divorce, and he had been forced to agree to a legal separation that entailed paying her around half of his income for the rest of his life, unless she remarried. He was furious about the deception she had practised on him, and bitter about the pull she had exerted on his promising trajectory as a writer. Hoping to work through this, in 1962 Roth began seeing Dr Hans Kleinschmidt, a New York–based psychiatrist well known for treating artists and writers. Unbeknownst to Roth, Kleinschmidt authored a thinly disguised account of their sessions in 1967, identifying Roth’s mother as his real problem:
His main problem was his castration anxiety vis-à-vis a phallic mother figure. He was six when he threatened to leave his home because of his displeasure with his mother’s discipline. He remembers that, at one point, his mother packed a little bag for him, told him to go ahead and leave the house, as he had said he would, but then he suddenly found himself outside the locked door, while trying in vain to get back inside by hammering at the door and crying to be permitted to come back … He may have been eight or nine years old when he still fantasied that his teachers were really his mother in disguise who in some very clever magic way would get home quickly and be there by the time he returned from school … He was eleven years old when he went with his mother to a store to buy a bathing suit. While trying on several of them, he voiced his desire for bathing trunks with a jock strap. To his great embarrassment his mother said in the presence of the saleslady: ‘You don’t need one. You have such a little one that it makes no difference.’ He felt ashamed, angry, betrayed, and utterly helpless … Submission seems to be the price for love both vis-à-vis his mother and his wife.6
According to Kleinschmidt, to avoid confrontation with ‘emotional reality’ and feelings of pain, Roth’s solution ‘has always been to libidinise both anger and anxiety’.
Roth was infuriated by the betrayal of his privacy. He was already sceptical of his sessions, particularly after Kleinschmidt persisted in making outlandish diagnoses. When Roth became ill while attending a party for the writer William Styron, Kleinschmidt said he was envious of Styron’s success. When Roth objected that he had felt ill even before the party, Kleinschmidt said it was his anticipation of the envy. The problem turned out to be physical: a ruptured appendix that required immediate surgery. Peritonitis had killed two of Roth’s uncles, almost killed his father, and kept Roth confined to a hospital for almost a month. He emerged from it, therefore, feeling as though he had cheated death — and that his time with Kleinschmidt was perhaps at its end.
But the time spent in analysis had sparked ideas, of form and character, and brought Roth back under that earlier ‘thralldom’ of Jewish characters. Teaching at the University of Iowa, Roth had noticed similarities in material written by three of his students: an overbearing mother, and a yearning for sexual experience. Then, in four different drafted works, Roth explored facets of the same idea. In The Jewboy, he explored growing up in Newark as a ‘species of folklore’. In The Nice Jewish Boy, a playscript read at the American Place Theatre in 1964, with Dustin Hoffman in the title role, he treated The Jewboy material more realistically and harshly. In a scatological and spirited spoof lecture on the genitalia of various eminences, he toyed with ideas of obscenity and fame. And, finally, in an autobiographical novel with the working title Portrait of the Artist, Roth found some room for invention. Over time, ideas and themes from these works began to coalesce and resurface in new material.7
In April 1967 — a month before the publication of When She Was Good — Roth began publishing short stories from this new material. ‘A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis’, published in Esquire, was first. A first-person monologue about an overbearing mother and ineffectual father, it began with an incident that Kleinschmidt had recorded from his sessions with Roth: ‘So deeply imbedded was she in my consciousness that for the first few years of school I believed that each of my teachers was actually my mother in disguise.’8 The sensational ‘Whacking Off’ came in August. Published in that ‘Mecca of modernism’ the Partisan Review, it opened:
Then came the years when half my waking life was spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet, or into the soiled clothes of the laundry hamper, or with a thick splat, up against the medicine chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers to see how it looked coming out. Or else I was doubled up over my flying fist, eyes closed but mouth wide open, to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue and teeth — though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil.9
Another instalment, ‘The Jewish Blues’, appeared a month later in New American Review. Another, ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, followed in another issue of Partisan Review. To each, there was a tremendous response: laughter, praise, interest. Roth felt that he was on the cusp of something good. His editors wanted more. And so did Maggie Williams, who now began to make noises about getting an increase in alimony. If there was anything that could stop Roth writing, it was this. To Roth, the marriage, which had lasted barely four years, had not resulted in any children, and yet had indebted him for life, was nothing less than court-ordered robbery.
And then he received a telephone call. Williams was dead, killed in a car accident. Roth was shocked, but not entirely sorry: ‘She died and you didn’t,’ he told himself.10 He organised the funeral, and then left for the verdant artist’s colony of Yaddo, near Saratoga Springs. In a burst of intense work, he finished writing the book that the earlier instalments had heralded: Portnoy’s Complaint.
***
An epigraph introduces the fictional medical condition that gives the book its title. ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’, it declares, is ‘a disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature’.11 Succinctly introduced is the key character, thirty-three-year-old lawyer Alexander Portnoy; his central problem and the novel’s theme; and, implicitly, the ‘silent ear’ of Dr Spielvogel, who listens to the monologue that constitutes the novel — the psychoanalytic session in which Alexander Portnoy is on the couch.
There is no traditional linear plot in Portnoy’s Complaint. Portnoy’s monologue moves backward and forward in time, digressing and leaping between events and subjects, sometimes without an apparent link or cause. Everything is mercurial. Portnoy on the couch is literate, manic, profane, mean, funny, touching, ashamed, abusive, euphoric, and vulnerable. He details his childhood and adolescence, and narrates the formative influence of his parents. His father, Jack Portnoy, is an insurance salesman who is as oppressed by his work as he is by his body and his spouse. Chewing dried fruit and taking suppositories to relieve his ever-present constipation, he is dominated by Sophie Portnoy, the omnipresent gorgonic force who smothers her son with love, surveillance, threats, and put-downs: ‘Who is Mommy’s good little boy?’12
The relationship between Portnoy and his parents is the cause of his adolescent compulsion to masturbate: it becomes his private rebellion from the suffocating drama in which they make him a central player. In what was to become one of the novel’s most famous scenes, Portnoy masturbates in the bathroom as his mother and father hammer on the door to be let in. Portnoy screams that he has diarrhoea, and pleads to be left alone. But his mother does not believe him:
‘Alex, I want an answer fro
m you. Did you eat French fries after school? Is that why you’re sick like this?’
‘Nuhhh, nuhhh.’
‘Alex, are you in pain? Do you want me to call the doctor? Are you in pain, or aren’t you? I want to know exactly where it hurts. Answer me.’
‘Yuhh, yuhhh —’
‘Alex, I don’t want you to flush the toilet,’ says my mother sternly. ‘I want to see what you’ve done in there. I don’t like the sound of this at all.’
‘And me,’ says my father, touched as he always was by my accomplishments — as much awe as envy — ‘I haven’t moved my bowels in a week,’ just as I lurch from my perch on the toilet seat, and with the whimper of a whipped animal, deliver three drops of something barely viscous into the tiny piece of cloth where my flat-chested eighteen-year-old sister has laid her nipples, such as they are. It is my fourth orgasm of the day. When will I begin to come blood?13
The central issues of the book are always present: the constant interference by Portnoy’s parents; the dichotomy between Portnoy’s Jewish heritage and America; and his penchant for comic exaggeration. He declares himself ‘the Raskolnikov of jerking off’; prompted by the discovery of a freckle on his penis, he believes that he has cancer and will soon die; he ejaculates accidentally into his eye, and fears he will go blind; he describes masturbating into a ‘maddened piece of liver’ behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson.14 This is the second time he has used liver in this way. On the first occasion, that used liver became part of a meal. ‘So,’ Portnoy tells Spielvogel. ‘Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family’s dinner.’15
Is it, though? As the novel progresses — narrating Portnoy’s intergenerational conflict, and his increasingly taboo-breaking sexual experiences — this declaration comes into question. Portnoy describes the way that Jewish clannishness and hyper-protection rule him in ways that are comedic and desperate. ‘YOU FUCKING JEWISH MOTHERS ARE JUST TOO FUCKING MUCH TO BEAR!’ he screams, at one point. But there are occasions where this becomes brutal. The most notable is the story Portnoy relates of his uncle Hymie, who discovers that his son Heshie intends to marry a gentile. Hymie meets with the girl and, telling her that Heshie has an incurable disease and can never marry, pays her to leave him. When an outraged and heartbroken Heshie confronts his father, Hymie wrestles him to the floor and cruelly forces his physical surrender. Of this, Portnoy remarks, ‘We are not a family that takes defections lightly.’16
The Trials of Portnoy Page 6