The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  At moments she even feels herself betraying Milan Kundera, and so, silently, when she is alone, she will picture him in her mind’s eye and speak to him and ask his forgiveness. Kundera’s intention in his lectures was to free the intelligence from the French sophistication, to talk about the novel as having something to do with human beings and the comédie humaine; his intention was to free his students from the tempting traps of structuralism and formalism and the obsession with modernity, to purge them of the French theory that they had been fed, and listening to him had been an enormous relief, for despite her publications and a growing scholarly reputation, it was always difficult for her to deal with literature through literary theory. There could be such a gigantic gap between what she liked and what she was supposed to admire—between how she was supposed to speak about what she was supposed to admire and how she spoke to herself about the writers she treasured—that her sense of betraying Kundera, though not the most serious problem in her life, would become at times like the shame of betraying a kindly, trusting, absent lover.

  The only man she’s been out with frequently is, oddly enough, the most conservative person on campus, a divorced man of sixty-five, Arthur Sussman, the Boston University economist who was to have been secretary of the treasury in the second Ford administration. He is a bit stout, a bit stiff, always wearing a suit; he hates affirmative action, he hates Clinton, he comes in from Boston once a week, is paid a fortune, and is thought to make the place, to put little Athena on the academic map. The women in particular are sure she has slept with him, just because he was once powerful. They see them occasionally having lunch together in the cafeteria. He comes to the cafeteria and he looks so excruciatingly bored, until he sees Delphine, and when he asks if he may join her, she says, “How generous of you to endow us with your presence today,” or something along those lines. He likes that she mocks him, to a point. Over lunch, they have what Delphine calls “a real conversation.” With a thirty-nine-billion-dollar budget surplus, he tells her, the government is giving nothing back to the taxpayer. The people earned it and they should spend it, and they shouldn’t have bureaucrats deciding what to do with their money. Over lunch, he explains in detail why Social Security should be given over to private investment analysts. Everybody should invest in their own future, he tells her. Why should anyone trust the government to provide for people’s futures when Social Security has been giving you x returns while anybody who had invested in the stock market over the same period of time would now have twice as much, if not more? The backbone of his argument is always personal sovereignty, personal freedom, and what he never understands, Delphine dares to tell the treasury-secretary-who-never-was, is that for most people there isn’t enough money to make choices and there isn’t enough education to make educated guesses—there isn’t enough mastery of the market. His model, as she interprets it for him, is based on a notion of radical personal liberty that, in his thinking, is reduced to a radical sovereignty in the market. The surplus and Social Security—those are the two issues that are bugging him, and they talk about them all the time. He seems to hate Clinton most for proposing the Democratic version of everything he wanted. “Good thing,” he tells her, “that little squirt Bob Reich is out of there. He’d have Clinton spending billions of dollars retraining people for jobs they could never occupy. Good thing he left the cabinet. At least they have Bob Rubin there, at least they have one sane guy who knows where the bodies are buried. At least he and Alan kept the interest rates where they had to be. At least he and Alan kept this recovery going . . .”

  The one thing she likes about him is that, aside from his gruff insider’s take on economic issues, he happens also to know all of Engels and Marx really well. More impressive, he knows intimately their The German Ideology, a text she has always found fascinating and loves. When he takes her out to dinner down in Great Barrington, things turn both more romantic and more intellectual than they do at lunch in the cafeteria. Over dinner he likes to speak French with her. One of his conquests years ago was Parisian, and he goes on endlessly about this woman. Delphine does not, however, open her mouth like a fish when he talks about his Parisian affair or about his manifold sentimental attachments before and after. About women he brags constantly, in a very suave way that she doesn’t, after a while, find suave at all. She cannot stand the fact that he thinks she’s impressed by all his conquests, but she puts up with it, only slightly bored, because otherwise she’s glad to be having dinner with an intelligent, assertive, well-read man of the world. When at dinner he takes her hand, she says something to let him know, however subtly, that if he thinks he is going to sleep with her, he is crazy. Sometimes in the parking lot, he pulls her to him by cupping her behind and holding her against him. He says, “I cannot be with you time after time like this without some passion. I can’t take out a woman as beautiful as you, talk to her and talk to her and talk to her, and have it end there.” “We have a saying in France,” she tells him, “which is . . .” “Which is what?” he asks, thinking he may pick up a new bon mot in the bargain. Smiling, she says, “I don’t know. It’ll come to me later,” and in this way gently disentangles herself from his surprisingly strong arms. She is gentle with him because it works, and she is gentle with him because she knows he thinks it is a question of age, when in fact it is a question, as she explains to him driving back in his car, of nothing so banal: it is a question of “a frame of mind.” “It’s about who I am,” she tells him, and, if nothing else has done it, that sends him away for two or three months, until he next turns up in the cafeteria, looking to see if she is there. Sometimes he telephones her late at night or in the early hours of the morning. From his Back Bay bed, he wants to talk with her about sex. She says she prefers to talk about Marx, and it takes no more, with this conservative economist, to put a stop to that stuff. And yet the women who don’t like her are all sure that because he’s powerful she has slept with him. It is incomprehensible to them that, bleak and lonely as her life is, she has no interest in becoming Arthur Sussman’s little badge of a mistress. It has also gotten back to her that one of them has called her “so passé, such a parody of Simone de Beauvoir.” By which she means that it is her judgment that Beauvoir sold out to Sartre—a very intelligent woman but in the end his slave. For these women, who observe her at lunch with Arthur Sussman and get it all wrong, everything is an issue, everything is an ideological stance, everything is a betrayal—everything’s a selling out. Beauvoir sold out, Delphine sold out, et cetera, et cetera. Something about Delphine makes them go green in the face.

  Another of her problems. She does not want to alienate these women. Yet she is no less philosophically isolated from them than from the men. Though it would not be prudent for her to tell them so, the women are far more feminist, in the American sense, than she is. It would not be prudent because they are dismissive enough and seem always to know where she stands anyway, always suspecting her motives and aims: she is attractive, young, thin, effortlessly stylish, she has climbed so high so fast she already has the beginnings of a reputation beyond the college, and, like her Paris friends, she doesn’t use or need to use all their clichés (the very clichés by which The Diapers are so eagerly emasculated). Only in the anonymous note to Coleman Silk did she adopt their rhetoric, and that was not only accidental, because she was so overwrought, but, in the end, deliberate, to hide her identity. In truth, she is no less emancipated than these Athena feminists are and perhaps even more: she left her own country, daringly left France, she works hard at her job, she works hard at her publications, and she wants to make it; on her own as she is, she has to make it. She is utterly alone, unsupported, homeless, decountried—dépaysée. In a free state but oftentimes so forlornly dépaysée. Ambitious? She happens to be more ambitious than all those staunch go-it-alone feminists put together, but because men are drawn to her, and among them is a man as eminent as Arthur Sussman, and because, for the fun of it, she wears a vintage Chanel jacket with tight jeans, or a s
lip dress in summer, and because she likes cashmere and leather, the women are resentful. She makes it a point not to be concerned with their ghastly clothing, so by what right do they dwell on what they consider recidivist about hers? She knows everything they say in their annoyance with her. They say what the men she begrudgingly respects are saying—that she’s a charlatan and illegitimate—and that makes it hurt more. They say, “She is fooling the students.” They say, “How can the students not see through this woman?” They say, “Don’t they see that she is one of those French male chauvinists in drag?” They say that she got to be the department chair faute de mieux. And they make fun of her language. “Well, of course, it’s her intertextual charm that’s gotten her her following. It’s her relationship to phenomenology. She’s such a phenomenologist ha-ha-ha!” She knows what they are saying to ridicule her, and yet she remembers being in France and being at Yale and living for this vocabulary; she believes that to be a good literary critic she has to have this vocabulary. She needs to know about intertextuality. Does that mean she’s a phony? No! It means that she’s unclassifiable. In some circles that might be thought of as her mystique! But just be the least bit unclassifiable at a backwoods hellhole like this place, and that annoys everyone. Her being unclassifiable even annoys Arthur Sussman. Why the hell won’t she at least have phone sex? Be unclassifiable here, be something they cannot reconcile, and they torment you for it. That being unclassifiable is a part of her bildungsroman, that she has always thrived on being unclassifiable, nobody at Athena understands.

  There is a cabal of three women—a philosophy professor, a sociology professor, and a history professor—who particularly drive her crazy. Full of animosity toward her simply because she is not ploddingly plugged in the way they are. Because she has an air of chic, they feel she hasn’t read enough learned journals. Because their American notions of independence differ from her French notions of independence, she is dismissed by them as pandering to powerful males. But what has she ever actually done to arouse their distrust, except perhaps handle the men on the faculty as well as she does? Yes, she’d been at dinner in Great Barrington with Arthur Sussman. Does that mean she didn’t consider herself his intellectual equal? There’s no question in her mind that she is his equal. She isn’t flattered to be out with him—she wants to hear what he has to say about The German Ideology. And hadn’t she first tried to have lunch with the three of them, and could they have been any more condescending? Of course, they don’t bother to read her scholarship. None of them reads anything she’s written. It’s all about perception. All they see is Delphine using what she understands they sarcastically call “her little French aura” on all the tenured men. Yet she is strongly tempted to court the cabal, to tell them in so many words that she doesn’t like the French aura—if she did, she’d be living in France! And she doesn’t own the tenured men—she doesn’t own anyone. Why else would she be by herself, the only person at the desk of a Barton Hall office at ten o’clock at night? Hardly a week goes by when she doesn’t try and fail with the three who drive her nuts, who baffle her most, but whom she cannot charm, finesse, or engage in any way. “Les Trois Grâces” she calls them in her letters to Paris, spelling “grâces” maliciously “grasses.” The Three Greaseballs. At certain parties—parties that Delphine doesn’t really want to be at—Les Trois Grasses are invariably present. When some big feminist intellectual comes along, Delphine would at least like to be invited, but she never is. She can go to the lecture but she’s never asked to the dinner. But the infernal trio who call the shots, they are always there.

  In imperfect revolt against her Frenchness (as well as being obsessed with her Frenchness), lifted voluntarily out of her country (if not out of herself), so ensnared by the disapproval of Les Trois Grasses as to be endlessly calculating what response might gain her their esteem without further obfuscating her sense of herself and misrepresenting totally the inclinations of the woman she once naturally was, at times destabilized to the point of shame by the discrepancy between how she must deal with literature in order to succeed professionally and why she first came to literature, Delphine, to her astonishment, is all but isolated in America. Decountried, isolated, estranged, confused about everything essential to a life, in a desperate state of bewildered longing and surrounded on all sides by admonishing forces defining her as the enemy. And all because she’d gone eagerly in search of an existence of her own. All because she’d been courageous and refused to take the prescribed view of herself. She seemed to herself to have subverted herself in the altogether admirable effort to make herself. There is something very mean about life that it should have done this to her. At its heart, very mean and very vengeful, ordering a fate not according to the laws of logic but to the antagonistic whim of perversity. Dare to give yourself over to your own vitality, and you might as well be in the hands of a hardened criminal. I will go to America and be the author of my life, she says; I will construct myself outside the orthodoxy of my family’s given, I will fight against the given, impassioned subjectivity carried to the limit, individualism at its best—and she winds up instead in a drama beyond her control. She winds up as the author of nothing. There is the drive to master things, and the thing that is mastered is oneself.

  Why should it be so impossible just to know what to do?

  Delphine would be entirely isolated if not for the department secretary, Margo Luzzi, a mousy divorcée in her thirties, also lonely, wonderfully competent, shy as can be, who will do anything for Delphine and sometimes eats her sandwich in Delphine’s office and who has wound up as the chairperson’s only adult woman friend at Athena. Then there are the writers in residence. They appear to like in her exactly what the others hate. But she cannot stand them. How did she get in the middle like this? And how does she get out? As it does not offer any solace to dramatize her compromises as a Faustian bargain, so it isn’t all that helpful to think of her in-the-middleness, as she tries to, as a “Kunderian inner exile.”

  Seeks. All right then, seeks. Do as the students say—Go for it! Youthful, petite, womanly, attractive, academically successful SWF French-born scholar, Parisian background, Yale Ph.D., Mass.-based, seeks . . . ? And now just lay it on the line. Do not hide from the truth of what you are and do not hide from the truth of what you seek. A stunning, brilliant, hyperorgasmic woman seeks . . . seeks . . . seeks specifically and uncompromisingly what?

  She wrote now in a rush.

  Mature man with backbone. Unattached. Independent. Witty. Lively. Defiant. Forthright. Well educated. Satirical spirit. Charm. Knowledge and love of great books. Well spoken and straight-speaking. Trimly built. Five eight or nine. Mediterranean complexion. Green eyes preferred. Age unimportant. But must be intellectual. Graying hair acceptable, even desirable . . .

  And then, and only then, did the mythical man being summoned forth in all earnestness on the screen condense into a portrait of someone she already knew. Abruptly she stopped writing. The exercise had been undertaken only as an experiment, to try loosening the grip of inhibition just a little before she renewed her effort to compose an ad not too diluted by circumspection. Nonetheless, she was astonished by what she’d come up with, by whom she’d come up with, in her distress wanting nothing more than to delete those forty-odd useless words as quickly as possible. And thinking, too, of the many reasons, including her shame, for her to accept defeat as a blessing and forgo hope of solving her in-the-middleness by participating in such an impossibly compromising scheme . . . Thinking that if she had stayed in France she wouldn’t need this ad, wouldn’t need an ad for anything, least of all to find a man . . . Thinking that coming to America was the bravest thing she had ever done, but that how brave she couldn’t have known at the time. She just did it as the next step of her ambition, and not a crude ambition either, a dignified ambition, the ambition to be independent, but now she’s left with the consequences. Ambition. Adventure. Glamour. The glamour of going to America. The superiority. The superiority of leaving
. Left for the pleasure of one day coming home, having done it, of returning home triumphant. Left because I wanted to come home one day and have them say—what is it that I wanted them to say? “She did it. She did that. And if she did that, she can do anything. A girl who weighs a hundred and four pounds, barely five foot two, twenty years old, on her own, went there on her own with a name that didn’t mean anything to anybody, and she did it. Self-made. Nobody knew her. Made herself.” And who was it that I wanted to have said it? And if they had, what difference would it make? “Our daughter in America . . .” I wanted them to say, to have to say, “She made it on her own in America.” Because I could not make a French success, a real success, not with my mother and her shadow over everything—the shadow of her accomplishments but, even worse, of her family, the shadow of the Walincourts, named for the place given to them in the thirteenth century by the king Saint Louis and conforming still to the family ideals as they were set in the thirteenth century. How Delphine hated all those families, the pure and ancient aristocracy of the provinces, all of them thinking the same, looking the same, sharing the same stifling values and the same stifling religious obedience. However much ambition they have, however much they push their children, they bring their children up to the same litany of charity, selflessness, discipline, faith, and respect—respect not for the individual (down with the individual!) but for the traditions of the family. Superior to intelligence, to creativity, to a deep development of oneself apart from them, superior to everything, were the traditions of the stupid Walincourts! It was Delphine’s mother who embodied those values, who imposed them on the household, who would have enchained her only daughter to those values from birth to the grave had her daughter been without the strength, from adolescence on, to run from her as far as she could. The Walincourt children of Delphine’s generation either fell into absolute conformity or rebelled so gruesomely they were incomprehensible, and Delphine’s success was to have done neither. From a background few ever even begin to recover from, Delphine had managed a unique escape. By coming to America, to Yale, to Athena, she had, in fact, surpassed her mother, who couldn’t herself have dreamed of leaving France—without Delphine’s father and his money, Catherine de Walincourt could hardly dream, at twenty-two, of leaving Picardy for Paris. Because if she left Picardy and the fortress of her family, who would she be? What would her name mean? I left because I wanted to have an accomplishment that nobody could mistake, that had nothing to do with them, that was my own . . . Thinking that the reason she can’t get an American man isn’t that she can’t get an American man, it’s that she can’t understand these men and that she will never understand these men, and the reason she can’t understand these men is because she is not fluent. With all her pride in her fluency, with all her fluency, she is not fluent! I think I understand them, and I do understand; what I don’t understand isn’t what they say, it’s everything they don’t say, everything they’re not saying. Here she operates at fifty percent of her intelligence, and in Paris she understood every nuance. What’s the point of being smart here when, because I am not from here, I am de facto dumb . . . Thinking that the only English she really understands—no, the only American she understands—is academic American, which is hardly American, which is why she can’t make it in, will never make it in, which is why there’ll never be a man, why this will never be her home, why her intuitions are wrong and always will be, why the cozy intellectual life she had in Paris as a student will never be hers again, why for the rest of her life she is going to understand eleven percent of this country and zero percent of these men . . . Thinking that all her intellectual advantages have been muted by her being dépaysée . . . Thinking that she has lost her peripheral vision, that she sees things that are in front of her but nothing out of the corner of her eye, that what she has here is not the vision of a woman of her intelligence but a flat, a totally frontal vision, the vision of an immigrant or a displaced person, a misplaced person . . . Thinking, Why did I leave? Because of my mother’s shadow? This is why I gave up everything that was mine, everything that was familiar, everything that had made me a subtle being and not this mess of uncertainty that I’ve become. Everything that I loved I gave up. People do that when their countries are impossible to live in because the fascists have taken change but not because of their mother’s shadow . . . Thinking, Why did I leave, what have I done, this is impossible. My friends, our talk, my city, the men, all the intelligent men. Confident men I could converse with. Mature men who could understand. Stable, passionate, masculine men. Strong, unintimidated men. Men legitimately and unambiguously men . . . Thinking, Why didn’t somebody stop me, why didn’t somebody say something to me? Away from home for less than ten years and it feels like two lifetimes already . . . Thinking that she’s Catherine de Walincourt Roux’s little daughter still, that she has not changed that by one iota . . . Thinking that being French in Athena may have made her exotic to the natives, but it hasn’t made her anything more extraordinary to her mother and it never will . . . Thinking, yes, that’s why she left, to elude her mother’s fixed-forever overshadowing shadow, and that’s what blocks her return, and now she’s exactly nowhere, in the middle, neither there nor here . . . Thinking that under her exotic Frenchness she is to herself who she always was, that all the exotic Frenchness has achieved in America is to make of her the consummate miserable, misunderstood foreigner . . . Thinking that she’s worse even than in the middle—that she’s in exile, in, of all things, a stupid-making, self-imposed anguishing exile from her mother—Delphine neglects to observe that earlier, at the outset, instead of addressing the ad to the New York Review of Books, she had automatically addressed it to the recipients of her previous communication, the recipients of most of her communications—to the ten staff members of the Athena Department of Languages and Literature. She neglects first to observe that mistake and then, in her distracted, turbulent, emotionally taxing state, neglects also to observe that instead of hitting the delete button, she is adding one common-enough tiny error to another common-enough tiny error by hitting the send button instead. And so off, irretrievably off goes the ad in quest of a Coleman Silk duplicate or facsimile, and not to the classified section of the New York Review of Books but to every member of her department.