by Philip Roth
For several hours every morning and again sometimes in the afternoons when there is nothing better to do, I listen to my Shakespeare records: Olivier playing Hamlet and Othello, Paul Scofield as Lear, Macbeth as performed by the Old Vic company. Unable to follow with a text while the play is being spoken, I invariably miss the meaning of an unfamiliar word or lose my way in the convoluted syntax. Then my mind begins to wander, and when I tune in again, little makes sense for lines on end. Despite the effort—oh, the effort, minute-by-minute this effort!—to keep my attention fixed on the plight of Shakespeare’s suffering heroes, I do continue to consider my own suffering more than can be good for me.
The Shakespeare edition I used in college—Neilson and Hill, The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, bound in blue linen, worn at the spine by my earnest undergraduate grip, and heavily underlined by me then for wisdom—is on the table beside the hammock. It is one of several books I have asked Claire to bring from my apartment. I remember exactly what it looks like, which is why I wanted it here. In the evenings, during the second half hour of her visit, Claire looks up for me in the footnotes words whose usage I long ago learned and forgot; or she will slowly read aloud some passage that I missed that morning when my mind departed Elsinore Castle for Lenox Hill Hospital. It seems to me important to get these passages clear in my head—my brain—before I go off to sleep. Otherwise it might begin to seem that I listen to Hamlet for the same reason that my father answers the phone at my Uncle Larry’s catering establishment—to kill time.
Olivier is a great man, you know. I have fallen in love with him a little, like a schoolgirl with a movie star. I’ve never before given myself over to a genius so completely, not even while reading. As a student, as a professor, I experienced literature as something unavoidably tainted by my self-consciousness and all the responsibilities of serious discourse; either I was learning or I was teaching. But responsibilities are behind me now; at last I can just listen.
In the beginning I used to try to amuse myself when I was alone in the evenings by imitating Olivier. I worked with my records during the day to memorize the famous soliloquies, and then I performed for myself at night, trying to approximate his distinctive delivery. After some weeks it seemed to me that I had really rather mastered his Othello, and one night, after Claire had left, I did the death-scene speech with such plaintive passion that I thought I could have moved an audience to tears. Until I realized that I had an audience. It was midnight, or thereabouts, but nobody has given me a good reason yet why the TV camera should shut down at any hour of the day or night—and so I left off with my performance. Enough pathos is enough, if not, generally, too much. “Come now, David,” said I to myself, “it is all too poignant and heartbreaking, a breast reciting ‘And say besides, that in Aleppo once…’ You will send the night shift home in tears.” Yes, bitterness, dear reader, and of the shallow sort, but then permit my poor professorial dignity a little rest, won’t you? This is not tragedy any more than it is farce. It is only life, and I am only human.
Did fiction do this to me? “How could it have?” asks Dr. Klinger. “No, hormones are hormones and art is art. You are not suffering from an overdose of the great imaginations.” “Aren’t I? I wonder. This might well be my way of being a Kafka, being a Gogol, being a Swift. They could envision the incredible, they had the words and those relentless fictionizing brains. But I had neither, I had nothing—literary longings and that was it. I loved the extreme in literature, idolized those who wrote it, was virtually hypnotized by the imagery and the power—” “And? Yes? The world is full of art lovers—so?” “So I took the leap. Made the word flesh. Don’t you see, I have out-Kafkaed Kafka.” Klinger laughed, as though I meant only to be amusing. “After all,” I said, “who is the greater artist, he who imagines the marvelous transformation, or he who marvelously transforms himself? Why David Kepesh? Why me, of all people, endowed with such powers? Simple. Why Kafka? Why Gogol? Why Swift? Why anyone? Great art happens to people like anything else. And this is my great work of art! Ah,” but I quickly added, “I must maintain my sane and reasonable perspective. I don’t wish to upset you again. No delusions—delusions of grandeur least of all.”
But if not grandeur, what about abasement? What about depravity and vice? I could be rich, you know, I could be rich, notorious, and delirious with pleasure every waking hour of the day. I think about it more and more. I could call my friend to visit me, the adventurous younger colleague I spoke of earlier. If I haven’t dared to invite him yet, it isn’t because I’m frightened that he’ll laugh and run like Arthur Schonbrunn, but rather that he’ll take one look at what I am—and what I could be—and be all too eager to help; that when I tell him I have had just about enough of being a heroically civilized fellow about it all, enough of listening to Olivier and talking to my analyst and enjoying thirty minutes every day of some virtuous schoolteacher’s idea of hot sex, he won’t argue the way others would. “I want to get out of here,” I’ll say to him, “and I need an accomplice. We can carry with us all the pumps and pipes that sustain me. And to look after my health, such as it is, we can hire doctors and nurses to come along—money will be no problem. But I am sick and tired of worrying about losing Claire. Let her go and find a new lover whose sperm she will not drink, and lead with him a normal and productive life. I am tired of guarding against the loss of her angelic goodness. And between the two of us, a little tired of my old man too—he bores me. And, really, how much more Shakespeare do you think I can take? I wonder if you realize how many of the great plays of Western literature are now available on excellent long-playing records. When I finish with Shakespeare, I can go right on to first-rate performances of Sophocles, Sheridan, Aristophanes, Shaw, Racine—but to what end? To what end! That is killing time. For a breast it is the bloody murder of time. Pal, I am going to make a pot of money. I don’t think it should be difficult, either. If the Beatles can fill Shea Stadium, why can’t I? We will have to think this through, you and I, but then what was all that education for, if not to learn to think things through? To read more books? To write more critical essays? Further contemplation of the higher things? How about some contemplation of the lower? I will make hundreds of thousands of dollars—and then I will have girls, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls, three, four, and five at a time, naked and giggling, and all on my nipple at once. I want them for days on end, greedy wicked little girls, licking me and sucking me to my heart’s content. And we can find them, you know that. If the Rolling Stones can find them, if Charles Manson can find them, then with all our education we can probably find a few ourselves. And women. There will also be women eager to open their thighs to a cock as new and thrilling as my nipple. I think we will be happily surprised by the number of respectable women who will come knocking at the dressing-room door in their respectable chinchillas just to get a peek at the tint of my soft hermaphroditic flesh. Well, we will have to be discriminating, won’t we, we will have to select from among them according to beauty, good breeding, and lewd desire. And I will be deliriously happy. And I will be deliriously happy. Remember Gulliver among the Brobdingnags? How the maid-servants had him strolling out on their nipples for the fun of it? He didn’t think it was fun, poor lost little man. But then he was a humane English physician, a child of the Age of Reason, a faithful follower of the Sense of Proportion trapped on a continent of outlandish giants; but this, my friend and accomplice, is the Land of Opportunity, this is the Age of Self-Fulfillment, and I am the Breast, and will live by my own lights!”
“Live by them or die by them?”
“It remains to be seen, Dr. Klinger.”
Permit me now to conclude my lecture by quoting the poet Rilke. As a passionately well-meaning literature teacher I was always fond of ending the hour with something moving for the students to carry from the uncontaminated classroom out into the fallen world of junk food and pop stars and dope. True, Kepesh’s occupation’s gone—Othello, Act III, Scene 3—but I haven’t
lost entirely a teacher’s good intentions. Maybe I haven’t even lost my students. On the basis of my fame, I may even have acquired vast new flocks of undergraduate sheep, as innocent of calamity as of verse. I may even be a pop star now myself and have just what it takes to bring great poetry to the people.
(“Your fame?” says Dr. Klinger. “Surely the world knows by now,” I say, “excepting perhaps the Russians and Chinese.” “In accordance with your wishes, the case has been handled with the utmost discretion.” “But my friends know. The staff here knows. That’s enough of a start for something like this.” “True. But by the time the news filters beyond those who know and out to the man in the street, he tends by and large not to believe it.” “He thinks it’s a joke.” “If he can take his mind off his own troubles long enough to think anything at all.” “And the media? You’re suggesting they’ve done nothing with this either?” “Nothing at all.” “I don’t buy that, Dr. Klinger.” “Don’t. I’m not going to argue. I told you long ago—there of course were inquiries in the beginning. But nothing was done to assist anyone, and after a while these people have a living to make like everybody else, and they move right along to the next promising misfortune.” “Then no one knows all that’s happened.” “All? No one but you knows it all, Mr. Kepesh.” “Well, maybe I should be the one to tell all then.” “Then you will be famous, won’t you?” “Better the truth than tabloid fantasy. Better from me than from the chattering madmen and morons.” “Of course the madmen and the morons will chatter anyway, you know. You realize that you will never be taken on your own terms, regardless of what you say.” “I’ll still be a joke.” “A joke. A freak. If you insist on being the one to tell them, a charlatan too.” “You’re advising me to leave well enough alone. You’re advising me to keep this all to myself.” “I’m advising you nothing, only reminding you of our friend with the beard who sits on the throne.” “Mr. Reality.” “And his principle,” says Klinger.)
And now to conclude the hour with the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke entitled “Archaic Torso of Apollo” written in Paris in 1908. Perhaps my story, told here in its entirety for the first time, and with all the truthfulness that’s in me, will at the very least illuminate these great lines for those of you new to the poem—particularly the poet’s concluding admonition, which may not be so elevated a sentiment as appears at first glance. Morons and madmen, tough guys and skeptics, friends, students, relatives, colleagues, and all you distracted strangers, with your billion different fingerprints and faces—my fellow mammalians, let us proceed with our education, one and all.
We did not know his legendary head,
in which the eyeballs ripened. But
his torso still glows like a candelabrum
in which his gaze, only turned low,
holds and gleams. Else could not the curve
of the breast blind you, nor in the slight turn
of the loins could a smile be running
to that middle, which carried procreation.
Else would this stone be standing maimed and short
under the shoulders’ translucent plunge
nor flimmering like the fell of beasts of prey
nor breaking out of all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
BOOKS BY PHILIP ROTH
Goodbye, Columbus
Letting Go
When She Was Good
Portnoy’s Complaint
Our Gang
The Breast
The Great American Novel
My Life as a Man
Reading Myself and Others
The Professor of Desire
The Ghost Writer
A Philip Roth Reader
Zuckerman Unbound
PHILIP ROTH was born in New Jersey in 1933. He studied literature at Bucknell University and the University of Chicago. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1960. The Breast, his sixth book, was first published in 1972, substantially revised in 1980, and appears here in the revised text. Philip Roth has lived in Rome, London, Chicago, New York City, Princeton, and New England. Since 1955, he has been on the faculties of the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he is now Adjunct Professor of English. He is also General Editor of the Penguin Books series “Writers from the Other Europe.” Recently he has been spending half of each year in Europe, traveling and writing.
Copyright © 1972, 1980 by Philip Roth
Originally published in 1972, The Breast was substantially revised by the author in 1980. This is the revised text
All rights reserved
Published in Canada by McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., Toronto
“Archaic Torso of Apollo” is reprinted from Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, by M. D. Herter Norton. By permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright 1938 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1966 by M. D. Herter Norton
Library of Congress catalog card number: 81-70745
eISBN 9781466846401
First eBook edition: May 2013
