The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Roth insists again and again on our seeing Portnoy as a joke—one that, for his quaking hero, is a nightmare he is unlikely ever to waken from. The form of the joke is a series of psychoanalytical sessions, during which Portnoy pours out in exuberant disarray a rich sampling of lubricious recollections. His ever-silent, ever-receptive listener is Dr. Spielvogel, whose first utterance is also the last sentence of the novel: “So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” This vaudeville take-off of a German accent strikes an unwelcomely gaglike note; best to forgive it as the author’s revenge on the obviousness of the literary device he has employed to frame and sustain his novel. (And the “Yes” with its question mark is surely a prankish tribute to the most celebrated final word in the history of the novel—a “yes” that is content to be followed by a full stop.) One sees the advantages of the device: among other things, it permits the author to juggle chronology in a fashion so vivid that it almost succeeds in taking the place of the conventional suspense provided by a plot, which Portnoy’s Complaint flagrantly omits. It can also permit the author to practice an indetectable carelessness of composition; it must be far easier to write a book higgledy-piggledy, in purported imitation of the tendentiousness of the unconscious mind, than to impose the calculated order of a “story” on it. Advantages allowed for, there remains something irritatingly old-fashioned about this particular device. For decades now, it has often been our lot to discover that the narrator of a novel is the inmate of a sanitarium, prison, or what you will, and is addressing his remarks—the body of the novel—not to us but to someone having a professional relationship to him; we readers are only eavesdroppers, presumably all the more ready to accept the validity of what is being said because we have no right to overhear it. Why, this late in the day and this late in the novel, cannot a work of fiction speak in its own voice, unaccounted-for? Wallace Stevens wrote that “The poem is the cry of its occasion, part of the res itself,” and so should a novel be; the trappings of a laborious verisimilitude (Dr. Spielvogel, say, or the pretense that Portnoy is the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity in the Lindsay administration) are but archaic nuisances.

  Be all that as it may, Portnoy lives—lives with an intensity of comic force that reminds us at first of the opening chapters of Lenny Bruce’s autobiography and of the Norman Mailer of Why Are We in Vietnam? and then, much more closely and more interestingly, of Mark Twain. How Twain in Heaven, vexed as usual and still having trouble with his “goddamns,” must envy Roth his freedom to write as he pleases! Roth’s exhilarating power of invention, his fearless upward spirals of exaggeration are obviously akin to Twain’s and to the whole nineteenth-century pioneer tradition of humor. Roth’s robust curiosity and coprophilous earthiness are also to be discerned in Twain, sometimes under astonishingly demure disguises. Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts; if Twain had enjoyed today’s wise permissiveness in respect to what one may write and publish, his career would probably not have been plagued by so long and sorry a sequence of false starts. No doubt he passes his time in Heaven pleasantly enough, swapping dirty limericks with Tennyson (who is said to have developed a fondness for them in old age), but he would have preferred joining the company of the great pornographers and scatologists—Rabelais, Restif de la Bretonne, Shakespeare, Rochester, Joyce, Céline. With this one short novel, easily raced through at a single sitting, Roth has edged into the outskirts of that company. It is an enviable place for a young writer to be.

  At the start, Roth prints a mock dictionary definition of his hero’s affliction:

  Portnoy’s Complaint (pôrt´-noiz kəm-plaˉnt´) n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933– )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: “Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient’s ‘morality,’ however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.” (Spielvogel, O. “The Puzzled Penis,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.

  This definition is characteristic of Roth in being both funny and exact, as far as it goes, but one would do more justice to the novel if one were to summarize it with the help of a single verse out of Yeats’ “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”:

  A living man is blind and drinks his drop.

  What matter if the ditches are impure?

  What matter if I live it all once more?

  Endure that toil of growing up;

  The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

  Of boyhood changing into man;

  The unfinished man and his pain

  Brought face to face with his own clumsiness?

  As the novel ends, there is no assurance that Portnoy’s ignominy and distress can be mitigated; he may never become that worthy thing “the finished man among his enemies.” But back of Portnoy and his perhaps incurable complaint looms the figure of his creator—the confident artist, rejoicing in the maturity of an exceptional talent and an exceptional intelligence. Roth has come into himself and into the world. He is a finished man, and if he finds himself among enemies they are almost certain to be of his own choosing. Patrick Kavanagh said of the Irish peasantry from which he sprang, “They live in the dark cave of the unconscious, and they scream when they see the light.” Portnoy’s Complaint is Roth’s scream, and from now on, whenever he screams, it will have the sound of song.

  L. E. SISSMAN

  DECEMBER 6, 1969 (JOYCE CAROL OATES’S THEM)

  WE IN THIS country have a bad habit of overpraising or overdamning our young writers; if they are not tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, they are paraded through our book reviews with a motorcycle escort and a cloud of ticker tape. Joyce Carol Oates is too good, and too serious, a writer to deserve the parade, which she seems in danger of. What she does deserve is a constructive and dispassionate appraisal of her strengths and shortcomings, both of which are quite in evidence in them (Vanguard), her latest book.

  them (a plague on titles with a lower-case initial, however significant; I’m calling it Them from here on), Them, then, is a five-hundred-page “work of history in fictional form,” according to Miss Oates’s preface, and it is based on the recollections of a former student of hers—recollections that cover thirty years of a family’s life in the slums of a Midwestern city that is perhaps Toledo and of Detroit. From 1937 to 1967, Miss Oates traces the moral and emotional history of Loretta Wendall and of two of her children, Maureen (the former student) and Jules.

  Let me say right now that I think this book is mainly a work of fiction and not of history at all; a good deal of internal evidence, which I’ll get to later, suggests that Miss Oates, starting with a few factual clues, designed and constructed most of the fabric of events herself, and with considerable coherence and skill. Almost all the way, it succeeds in reproducing the psychological tenor of poverty—a series of stultifying routines interrupted irregularly and arbitrarily by radical change and blinding violence—and its stunting effect on the emotional scope of the poor. It does, though (at least for me), fail to bond the foreground characters to the background of their time and place, especially in the first half of the novel. While I sympathize with Miss Oates’s desire to avoid the cluttered, too explicit stage sets of the old-time naturalistic novel and her determination to view the world through the minds and reactions of her people, I think that in discarding circumstantiality she has also discarded an essential key to their character. The city and the country slums of the thirties and forties—profusely detailed and profoundly interesting, too, like so many backgrounds to despair—cannot merely be assumed if we are to understand the people who lived in them. It is no
t a mass of detail but the significant detail that can illumine a character and his actions. In Them, backgrounds are scanted, glossed over, seen as in a dream, without weight or definition, without place names or map references. Thus, Loretta Wendall, the main figure in the first part of the book, is never in sharp relief—in her person, her actions, or her speech—as an individual. Though it is the author’s intention to show the submergence of her people’s personalities in the crushing numbness of poverty, it is also her intention—stated in her preface—to write a novel “which is truly about a specific ‘them’ and not just a literary technique of pointing to us all.” For her first two hundred pages, she points mainly to us all, or, at any rate, to all the poorer ones. Miss Oates, we feel, cannot successfully isolate and identify with Loretta Wendall and her time and place.

  Fortunately, the opposite is true of Loretta’s daughter, Maureen. When she assumes the center of the stage—as a sixteen-year-old who seeks dignity, power, and freedom by sleeping with a picked-up married man for money—the novel springs jarringly and truthfully to life. Somewhere in Salinger, Seymour Glass criticizes the triviality of his brother Buddy’s fiction by saying, “I want your loot.” In Maureen, we get Miss Oates’s loot—the whole double armload of truth of character she has swiped for her book. The whole truth of the book, in fact, resides in Maureen, and in her despairing, hopeful attempts to escape the cage of her life—and the cage of her person—as she grows older. Beaten by her stepfather for possession of her inexplicable money, she retreats into a kind of catatonia and grows grossly fat in her slatternly bedroom; after a year, she awakens and resumes her faceless losing battle of a life, this time as a night-school student. She accepts a nothing job, she goes on taking courses, she eventually sets her cap for a poor, seedy English instructor—a married man with children—choosing him as the escape mechanism to deliver her from her past and present, from herself. All this rings true.

  At this point, Maureen writes two letters to Miss Oates. The first probably is a genuine letter from a troubled girl to her former teacher. The second is something else entirely: an extended emotional autobiography, written with such literary craft, sustained at such a high and skillful pitch that we cannot quite accept it as the work of a failed night-school composition student. Maureen has revealed herself so well in dialogue and action that this letter seems gratuitous; it does not, however, destroy the development of her story or deter her final flight into a life of illusory acceptability. Maureen remains the crown of this book and its reason for being; she is one of the enduring women of contemporary American fiction.

  Her brother, Jules, falls short of this distinction. A fitfully realized character, he tumbles through a series of arbitrary and often unbelievable adventures. After a few years as a petty tough, he is employed by a mad financial manipulator, who is immediately murdered. Having fallen in love with Nadine, the financier’s niece, Jules uses his new job of delivering flowers to track her down to her Grosse Pointe house. Leaving his truck in the driveway, he talks his way into the house and up to her bedroom, where they spend the afternoon and evening. Her mother returns; cocktail guests arrive and leave; incredibly, nobody notices the truck in the drive. Finally, at one in the morning, they slip out, steal a neighbor’s car, and set off for the Southwest, where, after a nightmare tour of small-town motels, Jules, down with the flu and fever, is abandoned by Nadine. His progress through the South is traced by a series of funny and affecting letters to his mother and Maureen. When he comes home, he sees Nadine, now a suburban wife, in a restaurant. They consummate their affair in a rented apartment. The ferocious love scenes, meant, like Jules’s whole odyssey, to illuminate some versions of the lower-class American dream, succeed brilliantly on their own terms, but only by distorting and betraying the character of Jules. He becomes, like Nadine, a sort of upper-middle-class demon lover; his talk is not that of a recent dropout, a former slum kid, but of the other man in a worldly triangle. Nadine asks, “Don’t you want to know about me?” He answers, “As conversation, yes. For the next thirty years. But it isn’t essential. I can’t concentrate on it. I can’t even ask you whether you’ve had any lovers since your marriage, or before, because that isn’t any of my business.” The affair ends when Nadine, who can neither accept him nor reject him, shoots and nearly kills him. Eventually, he drifts, aimlessly, into a circle of student militants in Detroit. He takes part, aimlessly, in the 1967 Detroit riots; aimlessly, he murders a policeman. Without motive, he escapes. In the household she has set up with her captured English instructor, he visits Maureen, but they part without comprehension of what they have become, and Jules goes to California, in his new air-conditioned car, for his new job with a fraudulent anti-poverty program.

  In the end, we can just manage to accept Jules as a protean mirror that reflects a dozen states of modern American consciousness; we cannot accept him at all as a character who ever was. As I’ve suggested, it’s difficult, too, to regard Them as a genuine history—difficult because the characters vary so radically in their definition and intensity; difficult because so many incidents, especially Jules’s love affair and the climactic race riots, seem introduced to round out a picture or make a point without having an organic part in the story; difficult because, on legal grounds alone, it is hard to believe that any writer would write or any publisher publish an account of a presumably unsolved 1967 murder committed by a real, only thinly disguised person. All that aside, Miss Oates is a writer of daring, discipline, and talent. Her taste is almost unerring; few writers have her gift for handling sexual scenes with masterly tact and suggestion, avoiding the wrenchingly explicit and the bathetically lyrical. Her skill in realizing character is rare and growing. Them is a novel to be read for its virtues.

  A NOTE BY DANA GOODYEAR

  POETRY’S SUBVERSIONS ARE subtle, deep, and methodical, and can catch you unawares, as when the bough breaks in the nursery rhyme and you are left to wonder what befell the sleeping babe. In the 1960s, while the known shapes of the world were exploding at time-lapse speed, many of the poets published in The New Yorker clung to form, building scaffolds around the shocking, unruly, difficult narratives they felt emboldened to design. Their poems are more disturbing for these soothing surfaces, and full of exquisite, excruciating tensions and turns.

  James Merrill, in the seven dazzling sonnets of “The Broken Home,” conjures his childhood as in a séance, examining its myths to see if, at thirty-six, his only offspring avocado seeds grown in a jar, he is as “real” as the large-looming, gold-lit figures of his memory. His parents—one a warrior of boardroom and bedroom, the many-times-married founder of Merrill Lynch; the other named only “whom we sought,” iconic and doomed—he wittily casts as “Father Time and Mother Earth, / A marriage on the rocks.” The ornate patterning suggests a dutiful working over of the problem, and the poet’s resurgent hope that some new form will resolve the played-on-repeat drama of his past.

  Some of these writers, because they revealed themselves unsparingly and allowed the details of the poems to track to their biographies, were referred to as “confessional poets.” But these are not so much poems of revelation as poems of inquiry. What place should the self occupy in a world where the bonds of family and society are coming unglued? Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips,” published in the year before her suicide, chronicles a patient convalescing in a hospital. She has given up her history to the anesthetist and her body to the surgeons, and wishes to rid herself of her remaining “baggage,” including her husband and her child. The white room represents radical detachment—stillness, peace, effacement, death—but for the dozen red tulips someone has delivered, which, in their insistent, troubling vitality, call her to attend, to think, to write, and, for the time being, to stay alive.

  Plath is considered a feminist because she was a woman who wrote brilliantly about her cultivation of and rebellion against domestic life; Merrill was openly gay at a time when being out in public represented considerable social and legal risk. Yet n
either poet was remotely political: in “The Broken Home,” Merrill admits that he barely reads the newspaper or votes. As the decade progressed and the Vietnam War intensified, subversion surfaced from the underground and went pop. Poetry in the magazine became a site of protest. Writing in 1966, under the pointed title “The Asians Dying,” W. S. Merwin assailed American nihilism, racism, and environmental carelessness: “The dead go away like bruises / The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands / Pain the horizon / Remains.” The poem is unpunctuated—it describes all-encompassing, open-ended devastation, history obliterated, tomorrow in flames. The following year, Muriel Rukeyser’s “Endless” mournfully addressed a victim of the war, whose body is turned to dirt. “I look down at the one earth under me, / through to you and all the fallen / the broken and their children born and unborn / of the endless war.”

  Mid-century poetry was a clubby affair: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were married; W. S. Merwin knew them well; Anne Sexton and Plath studied with Robert Lowell (not represented here), who was friends with Randall Jarrell, who is. James Merrill and May Swenson were both close to Elizabeth Bishop, who published in the magazine for decades. Howard Nemerov and Muriel Rukeyser, New Yorkers like Merrill, both went to Ethical Culture; James Dickey and Jarrell were rivals. But the poets did not form a school. What they had in common was that they spoke in a voice that was personal rather than rhetorical; idiomatic, not ideological. The poems were rigorous, carefully crafted, and risky; they had one foot in a past of commonly held values and one foot in an unknowable future.