The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  “Thrown out of Athena,” he told me, “for being a white Jew of the sort those ignorant bastards call the enemy. That’s who’s made their American misery. That’s who stole them out of paradise. And that’s who’s been holding them back all these years. What is the major source of black suffering on this planet? They know the answer without having to come to class. They know without having to open a book. Without reading they know—without thinking they know. Who is responsible? The same evil Old Testament monsters responsible for the suffering of the Germans.

  “They killed her, Nathan. And who would have thought that Iris couldn’t take it? But strong as she was, loud as she was, Iris could not. Their brand of stupidity was too much even for a juggernaut like my wife. ‘Spooks.’ And who here would defend me? Herb Keble? As dean I brought Herb Keble into the college. Did it only months after taking the job. Brought him in not just as the first black in the social sciences but as the first black in anything other than a custodial position. But Herb too has been radicalized by the racism of Jews like me. ‘I can’t be with you on this, Coleman. I’m going to have to be with them.’ This is what he told me when I went to ask for his support. To my face. I’m going to have to be with them. Them!

  “You should have seen Herb at Iris’s funeral. Crushed. Devastated. Somebody died? Herbert didn’t intend for anybody to die. These shenanigans were so much jockeying for power. To gain a bigger say in how the college is run. They were just exploiting a useful situation. It was a way to prod Haines and the administration into doing what they otherwise would never have done. More blacks on campus. More black students, more black professors. Representation—that was the issue. The only issue. God knows nobody was meant to die. Or to resign either. That too took Herbert by surprise. Why should Coleman Silk resign? Nobody was going to fire him. Nobody would dare to fire him. They were doing what they were doing just because they could do it. Their intention was to hold my feet over the flames just a little while longer—why couldn’t I have been patient and waited? By the next semester who would have remembered any of it? The incident—the incident!—provided them with an ‘organizing issue’ of the sort that was needed at a racially retarded place like Athena. Why did I quit? By the time I quit it was essentially over. What the hell was I quitting for?”

  On just my previous visit, Coleman had begun waving something in my face from the moment I’d come through the door, yet another document from the hundreds of documents filed in the boxes labeled “Spooks.” “Here. One of my gifted colleagues. Writing about one of the two who brought the charges against me—a student who had never attended my class, flunked all but one of the other courses she was taking, and rarely attended them. I thought she flunked because she couldn’t confront the material, let alone begin to master it, but it turned out that she flunked because she was too intimidated by the racism emanating from her white professors to work up the courage to go to class. The very racism that I had articulated. In one of those meetings, hearings, whatever they were, they asked me, ‘What factors, in your judgment, led to this student’s failure?’ ‘What factors?’ I said. ‘Indifference. Arrogance. Apathy. Personal distress. Who knows?’ ‘But,’ they asked me, ‘in light of these factors, what positive recommendations did you make to this student?’ ‘I didn’t make any. I’d never laid eyes on her. If I’d had the opportunity, I would have recommended that she leave school.’ ‘Why?’ they asked me. ‘Because she didn’t belong in school.’

  “Let me read from this document. Listen to this. Filed by a colleague of mine supporting Tracy Cummings as someone we should not be too harsh or too quick to judge, certainly not someone we should turn away and reject. Tracy we must nurture, Tracy we must understand—we have to know, this scholar tells us, ‘where Tracy’s coming from.’ Let me read you the last sentences. ‘Tracy is from a rather difficult background, in that she separated from her immediate family in tenth grade and lived with relatives. As a result, she was not particularly good at dealing with the realities of a situation. This defect I admit. But she is ready, willing, and able to change her approach to living. What I have seen coming to birth in her during these last weeks is a realization of the seriousness of her avoidance of reality.’ Sentences composed by one Delphine Roux, chairman of Languages and Literature, who teaches, among other things, a course in French classicism. A realization of the seriousness of her avoidance of reality. Ah, enough. Enough. This is sickening. This is just too sickening.”

  That’s what I witnessed, more often than not, when I came to keep Coleman company on a Saturday night: a humiliating disgrace that was still eating away at someone who was still fully vital. The great man brought low and suffering still the shame of failure. Something like what you might have seen had you dropped in on Nixon at San Clemente or on Jimmy Carter, down in Georgia, before he began doing penance for his defeat by becoming a carpenter. Something very sad. And yet, despite my sympathy for Coleman’s ordeal and for all he had unjustly lost and for the near impossibility of his tearing himself free from his bitterness, there were evenings when, after having sipped only a few drops of his brandy, it required something like a feat of magic for me to stay awake.

  But on the night I’m describing, when we had drifted onto the cool screened-in side porch that he used in the summertime as a study, he was as fond of the world as a man can be. He’d pulled a couple of bottles of beer from the refrigerator when we left the kitchen, and we were seated across from each other at either side of the long trestle table that was his desk out there and that was stacked at one end with composition books, some twenty or thirty of them, divided into three piles.

  “Well, there it is,” said Coleman, now this calm, unoppressed, entirely new being. “That’s it. That’s Spooks. Finished a first draft yesterday, spent all day today reading it through, and every page of it made me sick. The violence in the handwriting was enough to make me despise the author. That I should spend a single quarter of an hour at this, let alone two years . . . Iris died because of them? Who will believe it? I hardly believe it myself any longer. To turn this screed into a book, to bleach out the raging misery and turn it into something by a sane human being, would take two years more at least. And what would I then have, aside from two years more of thinking about ‘them’? Not that I’ve given myself over to forgiveness. Don’t get me wrong: I hate the bastards. I hate the fucking bastards the way Gulliver hates the whole human race after he goes and lives with those horses. I hate them with a real biological aversion. Though those horses I always found ridiculous. Didn’t you? I used to think of them as the WASP establishment that ran this place when I first got here.”

  “You’re in good form, Coleman—barely a glimmer of the old madness. Three weeks, a month ago, whenever it was I saw you last, you were still knee-deep in your own blood.”

  “Because of this thing. But I read it and it’s shit and I’m over it. I can’t do what the pros do. Writing about myself, I can’t maneuver the creative remove. Page after page, it is still the raw thing. It’s a parody of the self-justifying memoir. The hopelessness of explanation.” Smiling, he said, “Kissinger can unload fourteen hundred pages of this stuff every other year, but it’s defeated me. Blindly secure though I may seem to be in my narcissistic bubble, I’m no match for him. I quit.”

  Now, most writers who are brought to a standstill after rereading two years’ work—even one year’s work, merely half a year’s work—and finding it hopelessly misguided and bringing down on it the critical guillotine are reduced to a state of suicidal despair from which it can take months to begin to recover. Yet Coleman, by abandoning a draft of a book as bad as the draft he’d finished, had somehow managed to swim free not only from the wreck of the book but from the wreck of his life. Without the book he appeared now to be without the slightest craving to set the record straight; shed of the passion to clear his name and criminalize as murderers his opponents, he was embalmed no longer in injustice. Aside from watching Nelson Mandela, on TV, forgiving his jaile
rs even as he was leaving jail with his last miserable jail meal still being assimilated into his system, I’d never before seen a change of heart transform a martyred being quite so swiftly. I couldn’t understand it, and I at first couldn’t bring myself to believe in it either.

  “Walking away like this, cheerfully saying, ‘It’s defeated me,’ walking away from all this work, from all this loathing—well, how are you going to fill the outrage void?”

  “I’m not.” He got the cards and a notepad to keep score and we pulled our chairs down to where the trestle table was clear of papers. He shuffled the cards and I cut them and he dealt. And then, in this odd, serene state of contentment brought on by the seeming emancipation from despising everyone at Athena who, deliberately and in bad faith, had misjudged, misused, and besmirched him—had plunged him, for two years, into a misanthropic exertion of Swiftian proportions—he began to rhapsodize about the great bygone days when his cup ranneth over and his considerable talent for conscientiousness was spent garnering and tendering pleasure.

  Now that he was no longer grounded in his hate, we were going to talk about women. This was a new Coleman. Or perhaps an old Coleman, the oldest adult Coleman there was, the most satisfied Coleman there had ever been. Not Coleman pre-spooks and unmaligned as a racist, but the Coleman contaminated by desire alone.

  “I came out of the navy, I got a place in the Village,” he began to tell me as he assembled his hand, “and all I had to do was go down into the subway. It was like fishing down there. Go down into the subway and come up with a girl. And then”—he stopped to pick up my discard—“all at once, got my degree, got married, got my job, kids, and that was the end of the fishing.”

  “Never fished again.”

  “Almost never. True. Virtually never. As good as never. Hear these songs?” The four radios were playing in the house, and so even out on the road it would have been impossible not to hear them. “After the war, those were the songs,” he said. “Four, five years of the songs, the girls, and that fulfilled my every ideal. I found a letter today. Cleaning out that Spooks stuff, found a letter from one of the girls. The girl. After I got my first appointment, out on Long Island, out at Adelphi, and Iris was pregnant with Jeff, this letter arrived. A girl nearly six feet tall. Iris was a big girl too. But not big like Steena. Iris was substantial. Steena was something else. Steena sent me this letter in 1954 and it turned up today while I was shoveling out the files.”

  From the back pocket of his shorts, Coleman pulled the original envelope holding Steena’s letter. He was still without a T-shirt, which now that we were out of the kitchen and on the porch I couldn’t help but take note of—it was a warm July night, but not that warm. He had never struck me before as a man whose considerable vanity extended also to his anatomy. But now there seemed to me to be something more than a mere at-homeness expressed in this exhibition of his body’s suntanned surface. On display were the shoulders, arms, and chest of a smallish man still trim and attractive, a belly no longer flat, to be sure, but nothing that had gotten seriously out of hand—altogether the physique of someone who would seem to have been a cunning and wily competitor at sports rather than an overpowering one. And all this had previously been concealed from me, because he was always shirted and also because of his having been so drastically consumed by his rage.

  Also previously concealed was the small, Popeye-ish, blue tattoo situated at the top of his right arm, just at the shoulder joining—the words “U.S. Navy” inscribed between the hooklike arms of a shadowy little anchor and running along the hypotenuse of the deltoid muscle. A tiny symbol, if one were needed, of all the million circumstances of the other fellow’s life, of that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography—a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.

  “Kept it? The letter? Still got it?” I said. “Must’ve been some letter.”

  “A killing letter. Something had happened to me that I hadn’t understood until that letter. I was married, responsibly employed, we were going to have a child, and yet I hadn’t understood that the Steenas were over. Got this letter and I realized that the serious things had really begun, the serious life dedicated to serious things. My father owned a saloon off Grove Street in East Orange. You’re a Weequahic boy, you don’t know East Orange. It was the poor end of town. He was one of those Jewish saloon keepers, they were all over Jersey and, of course, they all had ties to the Reinfelds and to the Mob—they had to have, to survive the Mob. My father wasn’t a roughneck but he was rough enough, and he wanted better for me. He dropped dead my last year of high school. I was the only child. The adored one. He wouldn’t even let me work in his place when the types there began to entertain me. Everything in life, including the saloon—beginning with the saloon—was always pushing me to be a serious student, and, back in those days, studying my high school Latin, taking advanced Latin, taking Greek, which was still part of the old-fashioned curriculum, the saloon keeper’s kid couldn’t have tried harder to be any more serious.”

  There was some quick by-play between us and Coleman laid down his cards to show me his winning hand. As I started to deal, he resumed the story. I’d never heard it before. I’d never heard anything before other than how he’d come by his hatred for the college.

  “Well,” he said, “once I’d fulfilled my father’s dream and become an ultra-respectable college professor, I thought, as my father did, that the serious life would now never end. That it could never end once you had the credentials. But it ended, Nathan. ‘Or are they spooks?’ and I’m out on my ass. When Roberts was here he liked to tell people that my success as a dean flowed from learning my manners in a saloon. President Roberts with his upper-class pedigree liked that he had this barroom brawler parked just across the hall from him. In front of the old guard particularly, Roberts pretended to enjoy me for my background, though, as we know, Gentiles actually hate those stories about the Jews and their remarkable rise from the slums. Yes, there was a certain amount of mockery in Pierce Roberts, and even then, yes, when I think about it, starting even then . . .” But here he reined himself in. Wouldn’t go on with it. He was finished with the derangement of being the monarch deposed. The grievance that will never die is hereby declared dead.

  Back to Steena. Remembering Steena helps enormously.

  “Met her in ’48,” he said. “I was twenty-two, on the GI Bill at NYU, the navy behind me, and she was eighteen and only a few months in New York. Had some kind of job there and was going to college, too, but at night. Independent girl from Minnesota. Sure-of-herself girl, or seemed so. Danish on one side, Icelandic on the other. Quick. Smart. Pretty. Tall. Marvelously tall. That statuesque recumbency. Never forgotten it. With her for two years. Used to call her Voluptas. Psyche’s daughter. The personification to the Romans of sensual pleasure.”

  Now he put down his cards, picked up the envelope from where he’d dropped it beside the discard pile, and pulled out the letter. A typewritten letter a couple of pages long. “We’d run into each other. I was in from Adelphi, in the city for the day, and there was Steena, about twenty-four, twenty-five by then. We stopped and spoke, and I told her my wife was pregnant, and she told me what she was doing, and then we kissed goodbye, and that was it. About a week later this letter came to me care of the college. It’s dated. She dated it. Here—‘August 18, 1954.’ ‘Dear Coleman,’ she says, ‘I was very happy to see you in New York. Brief as our meeting was, after I saw you I felt an autumnal sadness, perhaps because the six years since we first met make it wrenchingly obvious how many days of my life are “over.” You look very good, and I’m glad you’re happy. You were also very gentlemanly. You didn’t swoop. Which is the one thing you did (or seemed to do) when I first met you and you rented the basement room on Sullivan Street. Do you remember yourself? You were incredibly good at swooping, almost like birds do when they fly over land or sea and spy something moving, something bursting with life, and div
e down—or zero in—and seize upon it. I was astonished, when we met, by your flying energy. I remember being in your room the first time and, when I arrived, I sat in a chair, and you were walking around the room from place to place, occasionally stopping to perch on a stool or the couch. You had a ratty Salvation Army couch where you slept before we chipped in for The Mattress. You offered me a drink, which you handed to me while scrutinizing me with an air of incredible wonder and curiosity, as if it were some kind of miracle that I had hands and could hold a glass, or that I had a mouth which might drink from it, or that I had even materialized at all, in your room, a day after we’d met on the subway. You were talking, asking questions, sometimes answering questions, in a deadly serious and yet hilarious way, and I was trying very hard to talk also but conversation was not coming as easily to me. So there I was staring back at you, absorbing and understanding far more than I expected to understand. But I couldn’t find words to speak to fill the space created by the fact that you seemed attracted to me and that I was attracted to you. I kept thinking, “I’m not ready. I just arrived in this city. Not now. But I will be, with a little more time, a few more exchanged notes of conversation, if I can think what I wish to say.” (“Ready” for what, I don’t know. Not just making love. Ready to be.) But then you “swooped,” Coleman, nearly halfway across the room, to where I was sitting, and I was flabbergasted but delighted. It was too soon, but it wasn’t.’”

  He stopped reading when he heard, coming from the radio, the first bars of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” being sung by Sinatra. “I’ve got to dance,” Coleman said. “Want to dance?”

  I laughed. No, this was not the savage, embittered, embattled avenger of Spooks, estranged from life and maddened by it—this was not even another man. This was another soul. A boyish soul at that. I got a strong picture then, both from Steena’s letter and from Coleman, shirtless, as he was reading it, of what Coleman Silk had once been like. Before becoming a revolutionary dean, before becoming a serious classics professor—and long before becoming Athena’s pariah—he had been not only a studious boy but a charming and seductive boy as well. Excited. Mischievous. A bit demonic even, a snub-nosed, goat-footed Pan. Once upon a time, before the serious things took over completely.