Portnoy’s awareness of the difficulties of defection is ironic, for every action he takes to try to break free only ever ends up binding him more closely. The worst thing that he does will always be trumped by another worst thing. Even as Portnoy deliberately chases ‘shikse cunt’ — arguing that, ‘through fucking, I will discover America’, and thereby escape his family — he castigates himself for failing to put down roots and marry, which in turn leads him to even further transgressions. Taking up with the Monkey — his nickname for the woman he will not marry, but who fulfils his ‘most lascivious adolescent dreams’ — Portnoy has a ménage à trois with a prostitute in Rome, but afterwards finds that disgust and pity overwhelm him. It is a recurrent experience. He cannot escape the force of his heritage and his family — his fate, even:
Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke — only it ain’t no joke! Please, who crippled us like this? Who made us so morbid and hysterical and weak? Why, why are they screaming still, ‘Watch out! Don’t do it! Alex — no! ’ and why, alone on my bed in New York, why am I still hopelessly beating my meat? Doctor, what do you call this sickness I have? Is this the Jewish suffering I used to hear so much about? Is this what has come down to me from the pogroms and the persecution? From the mockery and abuse bestowed by the goyim over these two thousand lovely years? Oh my secrets, my shame, my palpitations, my flushes, my sweats! The way I respond to the simple vicissitudes of human life! Doctor, I can’t stand any more being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy, publicly pleasing my parents while privately pulling my putz! Enough!17
Towards the end of the novel, Portnoy travels to Israel and attempts to seduce a Jewish-American woman named Naomi, who has been working in a team to clear volcanic boulders from a mountain overlooking the Syrian border. In no small part because she also resembles his mother, Portnoy has deluded himself that Naomi is his ‘salvation’. But she has no interest in him in that way. ‘You seem to take some special pleasure, some pride, in making yourself the butt of your own peculiar sense of humour,’ she tells him. ‘I don’t believe you actually want to improve your life. Everything you say is somehow always twisted, some way or another, to come out “funny”.’ Portnoy deflects this, and tries to force himself upon her — only to find himself impotent. ‘Another joke?’ she asks, when he titters at this.18
The novel is awash in comedy and shards of icy pain. Both are present in every new transgression, amid Portnoy’s despair, and immediately counter the heated declarations of his desires. Derived from the schtick of Roth’s dinnertime playacting and conversation with friends, the duelling forces were also, Roth said later, drawn from Kafka. ‘It was all so funny, this morbid preoccupation with punishment and guilt,’ he explained later. ‘Hideous, but funny.’19 They punctuate the novel’s conclusion. As Portnoy — tormented, wracked, and self-flagellating — bursts into a scream of inarticulate agony, Spielvogel finally speaks. ‘So,’ he says. ‘Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?’20
Portnoy’s Complaint was both an abrupt departure from Roth’s earlier work and a radical piece of literature. It drew together the stream-of-consciousness method of narration pioneered by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the bodily focus of Joyce and Henry Miller, the shock and vigour of D.H. Lawrence, the force and mania of comedians such as Lenny Bruce, the morbid preoccupations of Kafka, and the ideas of Freud. Delivered in a voice so natural-seeming that Roth’s craft and skill were invisible, the novel belied its intricate construction and brimmed with ideas and energy. As the literary scholar David Braudel later wrote, Portnoy’s Complaint was ‘both the culmination of a certain tradition of Jewish American fiction, and its death-knell’.21
***
Roth emerged from Yaddo elated and relieved. As he was to recall, he had survived Williams, had survived the Roth family menace — peritonitis — and the book that he had written was unlike any other.22 He felt triumphant, that he had come into his own. He presented the manuscript to his publisher, Random House; within days, chairman Bennett Cerf was presenting him with a contract and a $250,000 advance.23
This was not all. The paperback rights to Portnoy were sold to Bantam for $350,000, and the film rights to Warner Bros. for $250,000. The incredible sums of money, and the notoriety of the chapters that had already appeared, ensured that Portnoy’s publication was widely anticipated. The New York Times Book Review said there was no question that it would be ‘one of the most talked about books of the winter’; Time declared that it had the biggest prepublication fanfare since William Manchester’s account of the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy; and Newsweek noted that excitement in the literary world over the novel was ‘intense’.24 In February 1969, the month that Portnoy’s Complaint was published, Life decided that it was going to be ‘a major event in American culture’.
For once, magazine hyperbole turned out to be true. Portnoy’s Complaint all but flew off the shelves. It sold 210,000 copies in hardback in ten weeks, and more than 400,000 by the year’s end — more than Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. It was, recalled Cerf, ‘an immediate sensation and one of the fastest-selling novels in the history of Random House’.25 The simple, lurid yellow cover that Paul Bacon designed for the Random House edition, with the title and Roth’s name rendered in swash script, avoided any kind of sensationalist image that might undermine the novel’s literary merit — appropriate, Bacon said later, for this ‘enormously complicated’ book.26 Especially important for publicity, the cover ensured that the book was distinctive and memorable.
The critical reception to the book was effusive. In The New York Times Book Review, Josh Greenfeld lauded Roth’s decision to pair tropes of American Jewish literature and culture — in particular, ‘the mother lode of guilt’ that the American Jewish character could neither live with nor without — with the psychoanalysis-spurred monologue. ‘The result is not only one of those bullseye hits in the ever-darkening field of humour, a novel that is playfully and painfully moving, but also a work that is certainly catholic in appeal, potentially monumental in effect — and, perhaps more important, a deliciously funny book, absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious.’ For all the apparent digression and circuitous plotting, Greenfield argued, the book was intricately constructed: ‘every curlicue is a real clue’.27 Critic Alfred Kazin, one of the ‘tigers’ of Jewish-American literature, wrote that Roth was ‘vibrantly talented, an original, as marvellous a mimic and fantasist as has been produced’, and that Portnoy was ‘touching as well as hilariously lewd’.28 Time, meanwhile, called it a ‘dazzling performance’, and lauded Roth’s writing. The novel was skilfully paced, layered, with characters that were ‘super-stereotypes’, and absurdly funny: ‘It is a work of farce that exaggerates and then destroys its content.’29
The praise was not confined to America. When Jonathan Cape published its hardcover edition in the UK, critic Tony Tanner called it ‘compulsive reading’ for anyone who could recall ‘the awesome mystery and humiliating farce called growing up’. Portnoy broke its own mould, he argued, and exhausted its genre: ‘And it is, blessedly, extremely funny.’30 Guardian critic Christopher Wordsworth got squarely at the near-dichotomous facets of the book:
It is the most scabrous and disgraceful piece of living tissue since Henry Miller, and just possibly the most outrageously funny book about sex yet written. Also and curiously, far from being offensive it is positively and humanly endearing. It should be suspended by a hair, preferably pubic, as a warning, over the desks of those novelists who brandish their current sex-license like a rattle. Rather than toil in Roth’s wake they might be persuaded to reapply their talents and leave sex to a master of the field.31
But the old charges of anti-Semitism returned, with a vehemence and passion that would have been comedic had they not been so extreme. As Bernard
Avishai would joke, ‘American Jews thought they had earned a kind moral intermission.’32 Yet here was Roth, again, tweaking the nose of the sacred cow, brutally exploring the fallacies, contradictions, and failings of Jewish characters. The response was extreme, and the most notable was that authored by German-born Israeli philosopher and critic Gershom Scholem. In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Scholem declared that Roth was perverted, that Portnoy was ‘the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying’, that it would be more disastrous than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that the Jewish people were ‘going to pay a price’ for it. Portnoy’s Complaint, he intoned, would make all Jews ‘defendants at court’:
This book will be quoted to us — and how it will be quoted! … I wonder what price k’lal yisrael [the Jewish community] — and there is such an entity in the eyes of the Gentiles — is going to pay for this book. Woe to us on that day of reckoning!33
Others believed that the novel was evidence of the decline in standards of public decency. On 1 April, The New York Times wrote of a ‘best-seller hailed as a masterpiece which, wallowing in a self-indulgent public psychoanalysis, drowns its literary merits in revolting sex excesses’, and lamented the failure of the court system to arrest such ‘descents into degeneracy’. That this anguished editorial appeared opposite an enormous advertisement for the novel was, to say the least, ironic; nonetheless, the plentiful obscenities and the relish with which Portnoy smacked taboos aside did become notorious. Thinking Portnoy a confession masquerading as a novel, people conflated Roth with Portnoy himself — to the point that they would accost him in the street, call him Portnoy, and tell him to ‘leave it alone’. Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann spoke to this when she declared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show that, while she would much like to meet Roth, she would not wish to shake his hand.
Roth was not shy about responding. As he told George Plimpton, ‘Obscenity as a usable and valuable vocabulary, and sexuality as a subject, have been available to us since Joyce, Henry Miller, and Lawrence … In my writing lifetime the use of obscenity has, by and large, been governed by literary taste and tact and not by the mores of the audience.’34 But the notoriety of obscenity, Roth argued, should not overshadow the fact that obscenity itself was, in many ways, the subject of his book. Obscenity was the issue itself: Portnoy was ‘obscene because he wants to be saved’. His pain, Roth argued, arose ‘out of his refusal to be bound any longer by taboos which, rightly or wrongly, he experiences as diminishing and unmanning’. There was a joke to this, however: breaking the taboo was as ‘unmanning’ for Portnoy as honouring it might have been. Added Roth: ‘Some joke.’35
What was not a joke was the impact the novel made in popular culture. Portnoy’s Complaint spread like the cold. It was shocking. It was sensational. It was funny. It did things that no novel before seemed to have done. When young British writer Salman Rushdie read Portnoy, he thought that ‘the cobwebs had been blown away’ from the novel as a literary form. Here, he thought, was a harbinger: ‘Something very new was being born.’36 The writer James Atlas recalled it in similar terms: the book upended all he was being taught about literature at college. ‘An entire expressive medium had been instantaneously transformed,’ he said later. ‘Had a fire broken out in the hallway of my dorm, I wouldn’t have noticed.’37 There were some who were uneasy: Saul Bellow said later that he ‘wasn’t down on it’, and Gore Vidal, after Portnoy’s sales overtook those of Myra Breckinridge, said that it was ‘the greatest blow for masturbation I’ve ever read’. But more lauded the freedom with which Portnoy had approached sex and praised its breaking of the mould.38 The writer Anthony Burgess declared that Portnoy had done for masturbation what ‘Melville did for the whale’.39
The book spoke to a broad cultural moment. The ‘most important book of my generation’, as the Washington Post called it, the ‘autobiography of America’, as the Village Voice decided, it reached for readers in a way that no other novel in this time did. In retrospect, Claudia Roth Pierpont would argue, Portnoy’s Complaint was one of the ‘signal subversive acts of a subversive age’, the detonated charge of a turbulent decade and the start of a new one:
Along with rock concerts and protest marches — with which it seemed to have more in common than with other books — it spoke to the generation-wide rejection of long unquestioned and nonsensical rules, to the repudiation of powerful authorities, and to the larger struggle for personal and political freedom.40
It was for reasons such as this that Portnoy’s Complaint would become a battering ram in the battles to defeat censorship in Australia.
CHAPTER 6
Regulation 4A
It was of little surprise that Portnoy’s Complaint ran afoul of Australia’s censors. Its force and its skill counted for nothing with them; all the overseas praise and excitement that the book had generated meant little. The censors looked for sex and four-letter words — and, when Jonathan Cape sent a copy of the book as part of its application for approval to export it to Australia in March 1969, they found them in abundance.
‘This is a bound copy set for publication in April,’ wrote the Customs officer tasked with assessing the novel. ‘Whilst of some merit, there is an over frankness in the attitude toward sex.’ The officer duly noted instances of sex and crude language, and recommended that the book be prohibited. But, with an eye to the considerable publicity that surrounded the novel, he sent the decision up the chain for review.1
Another official looked the book over. ‘Jewish lawyer with chip on his shoulder tells of his life and upbringing with particular emphasis on his sexual exploits,’ ran his assessment. That official made the same recommendation, but was similarly unnerved by Portnoy’s fame and acclaim.2 Citing the publicity that it had attracted, Customs officials suggested sending the book to the National Literature Board of Review, where the decision could be made and owned by experts.3
Thus the request to the board: was Portnoy’s Complaint possessed of literary, artistic, or scientific merit? Was it blasphemous, indecent, or obscene? Did it unduly emphasise sex, horror, violence, or crime? Was it likely to encourage depravity?4
The board had doubts and expressed internal differences.5 Una Mulholland thought the language repetitive, the story slight, the satire ineffective, the sex tedious — but admitted a scruple: ‘I am not completely sure that it could [do] harm to a mature person.’ H.C. Chipman identified literary merit and thought the book ‘an excellent satire’, but regarded the focus on sexual issues so narrowing as to render it ‘spurious’. Marie Neale anguished over whether the ‘obscenity and vulgarity’ was outweighed by the ‘literary merit’ of the novel’s themes, plot, and character. ‘I am most perplexed as to how to make a recommendation,’ she wrote, ‘which takes account of the merit and the excesses of abnormal reaction to love and other accepted modes of behaviour in personal encounter[s] in our society.’ Board deputy chairman Lloyd O’Neil thought it ‘a brilliant and witty novel of high literary standard’, but argued that its frankness when dealing with sexual matters meant that ‘it must be considered obscene’.
On the vital question — should Portnoy’s Complaint be allowed into Australia? — all four concurred: the book should be prohibited.6 The decision was made. On 11 June, the first assistant comptroller-general, R.M. Keogh, wrote to the new customs minister, West Australian senator Malcolm Scott: ‘I submit that the Board’s recommendation be accepted and that Portnoy’s Complaint be prohibited in terms of regulation 4A.’7 Five days later, with Scott’s assent, the telegrams went out to all of the Customs offices and state governments: ‘PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT BY PHILIP ROTH PROHIBITED REG. 4A.’8
Jonathan Cape was stung by the decision. The publisher had made hopeful plans to ship Portnoy to Australia by air as soon as Customs gave its approval; with those plans shattered, it turned critical. Tom Maschler, Cape’s literary director, lambasted Australia’s censors and pointed out their isolation. ‘I�
�m not wildly surprised that the book has been banned,’ he said. ‘It’s just one of the more absurd cases I’ve heard of. Obviously we will appeal, but one thing I flatly refuse to do is produce an Australian edition. That would be acknowledging censorship, and I am opposed to it absolutely.’ The book’s literary merit was beyond dispute, he said. ‘This is clear from a literary point of view — and almost universally acknowledged to be — one of the most important literary works we have published in the last ten years.’9
The charismatic Maschler attracted the first headlines, but it was his colleague, managing director Graham C. Greene, who would be pivotal thereafter. Then thirty-three years old, Greene was a genial, bookish, bespectacled man with a round, usually beaming face. The son of BBC director-general Hugh Carleton Greene, and a nephew of the famed British novelist who was his namesake (hence his use of the differentiating initial), Greene was diligent and self-effacing, and prized literature for its role in shaping culture. He had been an unsuccessful, if naïve, advocate for Lolita when the UK rights were in the offing; had been instrumental, along with Maschler, in founding the Booker Prize the previous year; and would become the implacable advocate of publishing the diaries of former British cabinet minister Richard Crossman, despite considerable pressure from the British government.10 Greene was quiet, liberal, and cautious, but when set upon a cause he was unswerving in his pursuit of it. When he learned of the ban on Portnoy, he became determined to see it published in Australia.
The Trials of Portnoy Page 7