Philip Roth: The Agony of Identity

“Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre,” Philip Roth wrote in his 2006 novel Everyman. I had occasion to think of this as I watched my parents pass away. And now, the decrepitude of the body and all that this entails has caught up with Roth, who died a week ago at age 85 of congestive heart failure.

Raised in Judaism, later affirming atheism, Roth might be annoyed by this comparison, but in his work habits he resembled nothing so much as a medieval monk, forsaking most interview requests and even much of urban social life for the solitude of his Connecticut country home. That enabled him to churn out, for over a half century, more than 25 novels of consistently high quality. 

In researching a recent post about Tom Wolfe, I came across the following quotation from the author of The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities, given in a December 2012 interview with British GQ, that sums up my own feelings about much—but by no means all—of Roth’s work:

“Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He’s so good – I mean practically anything I’ve ever read of his I’ve really enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society.”

That sums up the nagging dismay that so many—me very much included—have felt at times about Roth. At times, this constant exploration of identity and the writer’s relationship to “Truth” could feel like repetitive, boring navel-gazing. 

And yet…when I took an inventory just now of how many of his books I have read, I came up with 13—roughly half  of his oeuvre.  Clearly, I wouldn’t have returned to his books so often if I hadn’t agreed with Wolfe that Roth could be “fabulous,” “so good,” with “tremendous talent.” 

No wonder Roth ended up America’s most honored and acclaimed novelist in the last half of the 20^th century. If the Nobel Prize for Literature eluded him, precious little else did—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, several film and TV adaptations of his work, bestsellerdom, and the like.

I can’t think of another writer who has returned so obsessively to the theme of identity. It started, but hardly finished, with his identity as a Jewish-American—first in breaking free from its mores and protective defensiveness in early works such as Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, then later—in his stunning alternative history, The Plot Against America—in evoking the bone-chilling fear and suspicion of non-Jewish America toward his kind in his childhood and youth.

But Roth’s fixation on fictionalized personas only thinly separated from himself was so insistent as to verge at times into narcissism. It involved not one, but several alter egos to take up the slack:

*Peter Tarnopol, the protagonist of My Life as a Man, whose marital nightmare to mentally unstable Maureen Ketterer paralleled Roth’s own with Margaret Martinson Williams.

*Nathan Zuckerman, the character that Tarnopol creates in the same novel, and who would go on to serve as the author’s observer-narrators in a series of other novels.

*David Kepesh, the libidinous protagonist in a Kafkaeque tale of bizarre metamorphosis, The Breast, then in a more restrained coming-of-age tale, The Professor of Desire, and the same creature of desire face to face with his mortality, The Dying Animal. 

* “Philip Roth,” not just the author himself but a character, don’t you know—in Operation Shylock, which features two adult Philip Roths, and The Plot Against America, where he speculates about what might have happened to his childhood self and his family had the inexplicably Hitler-friendly aviator Charles Lindbergh been elected President. 

This brief review demonstrates the multiple ways in which Roth played with the boundaries between fiction and reality by writing fictions within fictions, or meta-fictions. After a while it stopped being experimental, subversive or even funny, but simply predictable, and utterly dependent on how far readers were willing to go along with Roth’s frequent explorations of his own neuroses. 

A prime example was the “Zuckerman Bound” cycle, which uses its main character to explore the pain endured by a novelist in using material from his own life. In The Ghost Writer, Roth successfully used the restrained style of Henry James rather than his recent satiric voice as he considered how much he might be reinforcing stereotypes about his own ethnic heritage (a dilemma Roth faced with Goodbye, Columbus and a short story from the same collection, “Defender of the Faith”). In Zuckerman Unbound, he had fun with the scandal ignited by Portnoy’s Complaint. But an excerpt from The Anatomy Lesson was so whiny that I could not see how I could ever read his work again. 

I should have known better. Patrimony, one of his few explicitly non-fiction works, showed how much empathy Roth could exhibit when the subject was not himself. By functioning as witness to another character (in this case, his father) rather than as the chief character in his own script, Roth discovered not only the point of view that would underlie what I believe to be his principal achievement, but also the great subject matter of his last set of novels: the rage against the dying of the light as the American male transitioned from late middle age to old age. 

Portnoy’s Complaint made Roth notorious and materially comfortable, but, I would argue, it was his so-called “American Trilogy” of the late 1990s (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain) that assured his permanent place in the American literary canon. The sexual provocateur had been replaced by a more serious figure assessing how different forms of American madness in the postwar period (McCarthyism in the Fifties, radicalism in the Vietnam Era, and what Roth saw as the sexual puritanism underlying both academe and the Clinton impeachment in the 1990s) had upended American success stories.

The stories were individual, but I can’t recall anyone summarizing better than Roth the collective damage to their communities by those who rejected their processes and dreams of assimilation, as demonstrated in this passage from American Pastoral, on life in Newark after the 1967 race riots:

“On the east side of the street, the dark old factories—Civil War factories, foundries, brassworks, heavy-industrial plants blackened from the chimneys pumping smoke for a hundred years—were windowless now, the sunlight sealed out with brick and mortar, their exits and entrances plugged with cinderblock. These were the factories where people had lost fingers and arms and got their feet crushed and their faces scalded, where children once labored in the heat and the cold, the nineteenth-century factories that churned up people and churned out goods and now were unpierceable, airtight tombs. It was Newark that was entombed there, a city that was not going to stir again. The pyramids of Newark: as huge and dark and hideously impermeable as a great dynasty’s burial edifice has every historical right to be.”

If Roth appeared more thoughtful during this time, it was also because he had grown more compassionate and interested in the lives of others. His earlier fiction would have focused on a Rothian figure involved in lovemaking, but his Pulitzer Prize winner of the 1990s, American Pastoral, concentrated on a non-Roth stand-in, “Swede” Levov, with descriptions of the source of their fortune: not lovemaking, but glovemaking. It was the type of material Tom Wolfe could have written.

Not unlike John O’Hara and John Updike, two other American realist writers who ignited censorship battles in their youthful novels, Roth began to write by his early 60s about the freezing moment when eros felt blocked by mortality. In all three cases, it is a fascinating process to watch, like how T.S. Eliot described the month of April in The Waste Land: “mixing/Memory and desire.” 

Identity defined Roth from the start of his career to his end. But it wasn’t so much his identity as a Jewish-American that Roth could never really escape but his identity as an American, period.

In the end, Roth’s work resonated so strongly with even non-Jewish readers because he captured beautifully the allure of the American Dream to outsiders—as well as the cost to them in attaining it. A paragraph like the following from Goodbye, Columbus, would not have looked the slightest out of place in The Great Gatsby:

“It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside, regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture that were allowed access to their skin."

Besides narcissism, the other serious charge made against Roth over the years has been misogyny. Certainly he has articulate defenders such as critic-fiction writer Cynthia Ozick, who, in an article for The Wall Street Journal, argued that Roth was not castigating women but rather the juvenile instincts that kept males from acting like mensches. 

Over time, the uproar over Roth’s sometimes critical treatment of American Jews has abated. The increasing tendency of so many people to reveal all their secrets on social media has also rendered critics’ charges of narcissism against the novelist far less effective than before.

But the #MeToo movement has put in a less forgiving light his attitude toward women.

True, no accusations have come to light about Roth sexually harassing women or physically harming any. But charges of sexism and misogyny are, more and more, harder to dismiss. An inordinately large number of Roth female characters fall into two categories: 1) virtuous but dull, 2) beautiful but either shallow or vicious.

Certainly, it would have been understandable if the novelist’s own feelings about women hadn’t been completely colored by two disastrous marriages. First wife Margaret Martinson Williams tricked him into marriage by faking pregnancy, engaged him in endless quarrels, and refused to divorce him until she was killed in a car accident in Central Park in 1968.

The second marriage, to Claire Bloom, flared out in spectacular public fashion, as the actress wrote a tell-all memoir detailing his infidelity and coldness. (In one instance combining the two, she discovered the manuscript for his novel Deception, involving an adulterous middle-aged writer named “Philip” and his boring wife, “Claire.”)

But even this sorry marital history does not adequately account for what Huffington Post contributor Sandra Newman refers to as his “gleefully lascivious objectification of women.”  He was a man of his time, but in this case he had difficulty surmounting it.

“The man is nothing, the work — all,” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to George Sand. Roth didn’t blur that distinction so much as bombard it, then proceeded to hold each fragment to the light. It would be a simpler world if readers could just enjoy his slashing satire or his quicksilver sentences.

But he regarded himself, no less than other human beings, as complicated, and he was too uncompromising—and yes, honest—to let readers off from doing the hard work of separating his art from his heart.

Bonus Quote of the Day (Herman Wouk, on the Bronx Street Where He—and I—Lived)

“By luck, my childhood bedroom faced the sun. I grew up on Aldus Street in the Bronx, where my family lived on the top floor of a five-story walk-up in an apartment way in the back. Each morning from my bed, I’d see a beam of sunlight with motes dancing through it pass through the window. I felt good right away. The morning sun is cheering, no matter what mood you're in.”—Novelist Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny), as told to Marc Myers, “House Call—Herman Wouk: Last Guy Chosen for Stickball,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 11, 2016

Today marks the 65^th anniversary of the release of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller about seamen under stress in WWII, The Caine Mutiny. The 1951 novel would be adapted for Broadway, film and TV, and launch decades of success for author Herman Wouk (including his return to WWII, in his novels about naval attache “Pug” Henry, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance).

Wouk celebrated his 100^th birthday last year, and he has demonstrated his continuing mental agility not only in the interview with Marc Myers that I’ve hyperlinked above, but also through his memoir to mark his centennial, Sailor and Fiddler. That reminiscence may have disappointed readers who would have liked to have read more about his South Bronx childhood, but Wouk has a ready explanation: he had already poured his feelings and memories about that period into his 1948 coming-of-age novel, City Boy.

I had known the general milestones associated with Wouk’s life, notably his bestselling novels, but as I read his recent recollections in interviews, I felt a stronger sense of identification with him. Like me, he graduated from Columbia University; he had worked for five years as a writer for the mordant, influential Irish-American radio comedian Fred Allen, whose life and work have long fascinated me; and, to my considerable surprise, he had lived on “the top floor of a five-story walk-up” on Aldus Street, as had my family when I was an infant.

The fact that I come from this urban setting would surely surprise even friends who have known me from five decades in a New Jersey suburb close to the Big Apple. But maybe something from those first few months of my life survives in me as a stray gene transmitted from those closest to me.

If City Boy is an indication, Aldus Street furnished him with the kind of Tom Sawyer-ish adventures that a working-class urban kid could expect. Although Wouk has lived for years in Palm Springs, Calif., it does not appear to have dimmed one iota his vivid, affectionate memories of his sunny childhood and adolescence on the sidewalks of New York in the Calvin Coolidge era.

Three decades later, when my parents began to raise their three sons there, much remained of the neighborhood culture that Wouk recalled, but forces outside their control had begun to darken residents’ outlooks on their world.  The portion of the street where my family lived was still largely Irish and Jewish, and mothers from both groups kept a sharp eye out for the kids in the apartment buildings and the street. My older brothers, as Wouk and his friends had done three decades before, played stickball in the middle of the street, and open hydrants provided the neighborhood kids with impromptu outdoor showers.

It couldn’t last. By mid-1960, when I was just shy of a year old, hair-raising encounters with criminals in our building convinced my parents to cross the Hudson to New Jersey. Thousands of other residents came to the same conclusion in the next decade, leaving the new immigrants coming into the area finding nothing like the island of lower-middle-class aspiration that had lifted the Wouks. Aldus Street became part of the “Fort Apache” district that served as shorthand for urban decay and violence in the Seventies and Eighties. Strenuous efforts toward urban revival have been made in this now Latino-dominated neighborhood, but, judging from news accounts in recent years, it will still take some time before stability returns here.

Nostalgia, joyful and lyrical, is still inextricably bound to pain and loss. That complicated feeling—in this case, for a humble but seemingly secure South Bronx street— ties together two families otherwise separated by homeland, time and sensibility: the Wouks, Jewish emigrants from Minsk, Russia (modern-day Belarus), starting out in New York in the era surrounding World War I, and the Tubridys, from Irish stock, hoping, right after World War II, for similar mobility.

(Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on Writing as a Jewish American ‘For All Men’)

I’m an American, I’m a Jew, and I write for all men. A novelist has to, or he’s built himself a cage. I write about Jews, when I write about Jews, because they set my imagination going. I know something about their history, the quality of their experience and belief, and of their literature, though not as much as I would like. Like many writers I’m influenced especially by the Bible, both Testaments. I respond in particular to the East European immigrants of my father’s and mother’s generation; many of them were Jews of the Pale as described by the classic Yiddish writers. And of course I’ve been deeply moved by the Jews of the concentration camps, and the refugees wandering from nowhere to nowhere. I’m concerned about Israel….Sometimes I make characters Jewish because I think I will understand them better as people, not because I am out to prove anything. That’s a qualification. Still another is that I know that, as a writer, I’ve been influenced by Hawthorne, James, Mark Twain, Hemingway, more than I have been by Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, whom I read with pleasure. Of course I admire and have been moved by other writers, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, for instance, but the point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience. I wrote for those who read.”— Bernard Malamud interviewed by Daniel Stern in “Bernard Malamud, The Art of Fiction No. 52,” The Paris Review, Spring 1975

You can truly understand the vicissitudes of literary reputations when you consider the reviews of Adam Begley’s new biography of John Updike, which frequently have noted that the late man of letters could sure use a boost among critics these days. The fact that such a fate could befall the prolific and accomplished Updike—long a ubiquitous presence, and only dead five years—makes you appreciate the rather sorry posthumous fate of Bernard Malamud, with nowhere near his output and dead 28 years now. Several years ago, his daughter Jenna, a psychiatrist, came out with a biography in which she frankly admitted to the hope of bringing him back to where he was in the late Seventies: i.e., spoken as one of the "big three" postwar voices of Jewish America, along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Janna Malamud Smith’s 2006 bio, My Father is a Book, doesn’t seem to have done the trick, but the time might be right now for her father’s rising critical stock. Anniversaries, for instance, concentrate readers’ and publishers’ attention. Today, as it happens, marks the centennial of the birth of the novelist-short story writer in Brooklyn. Right on time come two volumes from the Library of America—Novels and Stories of the 1940s and 1950s and Novels and Stories of the 1960s—that, in effect, admit him to the American literary pantheon. Now, hopefully, more readers will approach him in the same spirit of astonished delight as Flannery O'Connor, who wrote a friend in 1958: "I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself. Go to the library and get a book called The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud."

Longtime readers of this blog might recall my prior post on the novel that won Malamud the Pulitzer Prize, The Fixer. But really, I don’t think that comes close to exhausting all that might be written about his carefully calibrated, exquisite prose; his compassion for his suffering characters and suffering humanity as a whole; and his quiet sense of irony and humor.

Malamud’s quote above comes cocooned in all kinds of irony. In the interview from which it came, he spoke of how protégé Philip Roth needed to stop writing so obsessively about his troubled first wife. Roth indeed followed that advice that year: his My Life as a Man, a thinly veiled exorcism of that matrimonial disaster.

Yet you can also practically hear the note of exasperation in Malamud’s voice when he says: “the point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience.” The best reminder of that is an apprentice novel that, over the years, has become one of his best known: The Natural (1952).

For more than three decades, my admiration for Robert Redford’s Capraesque film adaptation has led me to avoid what I have long known to be Malamud’s far more somber take on baseball. Now, however, I may be in the mood for the original. 

At a basic psychological level, Malamud can probably tell much about why athletes such as Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez could misuse their many, pure gifts to spoil America’s pastime. More broadly, its dominant literary conceit—Roy Hobbs’ New York Knights as a counterpart to King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table—can enable us understand the short-lived promise of the Camelot that held sway in the Kennedy White House within a decade of the novel’s publication—as well as why its collapse, amid treachery and tragedy, has proved so traumatic.

Short-story writer-critic Cynthia Ozick gave the correct response to her own question about whether Malamud was "an American Master": "Of course. He augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations....He wrote about the plentitude and unity of the world."