Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  But it was also junior year when he got into the first real trouble of his life. And it was the result of his writing. Specifically, a double-spread satire, in Et Cetera, of the campus weekly newspaper—a beloved publication whose earnest mediocrity made it a perfect target for the self-styled twenty-year-old “critical antagonist.” His teachers in the English Department had nothing but praise for his wit. (“They had a little Jewish Swift on their hands,” Roth says—“Swiftberg.”) And he himself was pleased: this wasn’t one of his artificial stories but a refreshingly “reckless” response to something real. Shortly after publication, however, he was called in to see the dean of men. He remembers being scared. Potentially, at any rate, this was not a trifling matter: it was 1953, the Korean War was still on, and being expelled would have meant not only disgrace but vulnerability to the draft. The dean made it perfectly clear that Swift was not in the Bucknell spirit—the “-berg” part, Roth thinks, didn’t help—and Roth was also brought up before the college’s board of publications. Seeking advice and comfort, he went to see Mildred Martin, the most revered of his English teachers, who later recalled that he had shown up at her house nearly in tears. Roth balks at the notion that he was anywhere near crying. But he remembers, with appreciation, the counsel she gave: “That’s what you have to expect”—he recites the words with conviction—“if you want to be a satirist in this country.”

  He was not expelled, but he had discovered his gift for literary irreverence, and, through his interest in The New Yorker, the stories of J. D. Salinger, eight of which had appeared in the magazine by the spring of 1953. Roth had read The Catcher in the Rye as soon as it came out, two years earlier. Now, however, as a writer himself, he hunted down everything by Salinger he could find, including stories published during the forties in Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. It was “the voice, the intimacy,” he explains, that struck him. “That isn’t what you learned when you studied literature. There was this sense of talking, of confessing. It was indecorous. How was I to know about this from reading Thomas Hardy?” And it was Salinger, he says, who is most responsible for the embarrassing “sensitivity” of his early stories.

  Looking for journals that might publish his stories, he spent a lot of time during his senior year in the periodicals room of the Bucknell library. “The Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review,” he says, “I read them all, and more.” He was riveted by his discovery of Commentary. “I had no idea what it was,” he says, “but here were articles and stories about Jews of a kind I had never come across before—objective, forthright, descriptive.” In its pages, he came upon a review of Saul Bellow’s recently published novel, The Adventures of Augie March. The reviewer, Norman Podhoretz, judged the book an overall failure but offered praise for Bellow’s attempt “to put blood into contemporary fiction” and to provide “a sense of what a real American idiom might look like.” Roth went out and bought the book—it was, he tells me, only the second or third hardcover that he had bought in his life, aside from textbooks. “Books cost around five bucks—it was an investment.” At first, he found the book more confusing than exciting: “I didn’t know what to make of it. It was so new. It was a tremendous invasion into my academic training, and into everyone’s academic training, which was the point.”

  He read Bellow’s novel again during his first year of graduate school, at the University of Chicago—a wholly different intellectual environment. And his eyes were suddenly opened to the kind of literature a Jew might write about Jews: ebullient, modern, mindful. As an object lesson for a young writer, Augie March showed that “you could put everything into a book,” Roth says, “including thinking—which flies right in the face of Hemingway, who was then the supreme master.” Despite the book’s astonishing freshness, Roth felt continuities with another, already less fashionable literary master, his old hero Thomas Wolfe. Bellow, too, had read Wolfe with fervor, Roth points out, and the correspondences are clear: “the gush of language, the epic sense of life, the outsized characters, the passion for American bigness.” But his new literary hero, Roth says, was “a whole genius.”

  Bellow was the great liberator from traditional Jewish literary confines—“I am an American, Chicago born” are Augie’s famous first words—and he was soon followed in Roth’s reading by Bernard Malamud, whose work was not so obviously rebellious. Malamud’s stories are set among the Jewish immigrant poor and steeped in old-world sadness, yet Malamud made new art out of the Yiddish syntax and inflections of these people’s daily speech. It was a kind of speech, Roth later wrote—“a heap of broken verbal bones”—that had appeared of no use to any serious writer before. And, adding to the wonders of Malamud: “He had written a baseball book!” Recalling Malamud’s The Natural, Roth nearly shouts in recollected wonder. “I didn’t know you could write a grown-up book about baseball! Where did you get permission?” Yet the most important lesson that these two great writers taught him, he says, was that their stories of familial life in Chicago or Brooklyn were “as valid as Hemingway’s Paris or Fitzgerald’s Long Island” and that Jewish experience could be made into American literature.

  Roth’s own voice could be heard as soon as he started to write about the people he knew best. “The Conversion of the Jews” and “Epstein” were written during a year-long army stint that began in the fall of 1955, when he was twenty-two. After a year of graduate school in Chicago, he had decided to enlist, rather than wait to be drafted, but his service was curtailed because of a back injury acquired during basic training at Fort Dix. (He later wrote a story about such an injury, “Novotny’s Pain.”) This was not the army he had read about in Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions or Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, books he had devoured in his appetite for wartime heroism. He was assigned to a desk job at Walter Reed Hospital, in Washington, D.C., writing up hospital news for public distribution. Luckily, the job came with a typewriter that he was allowed to use in his spare time.

  It was in this period that he discovered music—specifically, chamber music, the other art that has concerned and consoled him throughout his life, engaging him while relieving him of words. He had never heard classical music at home. In Chicago, he went to Orchestra Hall a few times, but the big symphonic pieces, while impressive, seemed to him “clamorous,” and he went mostly because he thought he should. Then, at the army base in Washington, free tickets were available for concerts at the Library of Congress, where the Budapest String Quartet was in residence. It seemed like a good enough idea: he went alone, in uniform (“You could pick up girls in your uniform”), and he found himself deeply, unaccountably, stirred. The great conversion experience, he recalls, was Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, played by the Budapest with a visiting clarinetist—he is humming now, and trying to summon the name of the clarinetist at a concert fifty-seven years ago—and, he says, “I was gone!” He went to more concerts, and continued writing, but his back pain became so excruciating that he had to be hospitalized. He was released from the army with an honorable discharge in the summer of 1956, badly injured without ever having seen a battle.

  The stories he left the army with show a remarkable ear for the way ordinary people talk and a new willingness to trust it. “Epstein” reached back to a neighborhood scandal that his father had brought up at the dinner table. “The Conversion of the Jews” was based on a story told by Arthur Geffen, a young writer friend in Chicago, about a boy who threatened to jump from the roof of a synagogue while his rabbi pleaded with him from the street. Roth liked the image so much—the juxtaposed figures, child and rabbi, one above and one below—that, he relates in the Web of Stories interview, he told Geffen, “I’ll give you five years to write the story, and if you don’t, I will.” He adds, “I did it anyway, the next year—but Arthur’s still my friend today.”

  When Roth returned to Chicago to teach, after leaving the army, this story—still unpublished and rejected by “all the classy reviews”—met with the approval of no less a critic than Saul
Bellow, who was a special guest at a class taught by another of Roth’s writer buddies, Richard Stern. Stern had asked Roth’s permission to give the story to the class, and Roth sat in on the session. He went out for coffee afterward with Bellow and Stern, but he was awestruck by the great writer, and Bellow—however “amused by me,” Roth recalls—showed no sign whatever of wishing to pursue a friendship. Still, Roth knew that his work had made the author of Augie March laugh.

  Goodbye, Columbus had its origins in a Chicago eatery, the University Tavern, around the same time, in 1957. Roth was with Richard Stern and carrying on about a New Jersey family of country club Jews, whose terrific red-haired daughter, Maxine, he had dated steadily, if often long-distance, after graduating from Bucknell—and particularly about the experience of living in the family’s big suburban house for several weeks one summer. Roth remembers that Stern asked him what he planned to do with “this stuff” and that he didn’t even understand the question. It was Stern who told him to go home and write it down. Despite all Roth thought that he’d learned about the range of permissible subjects, the upscale Jersey suburbs seemed an impossible leap. He didn’t see why anyone would be interested. “It hadn’t dawned on me,” he said much later, “that it was my stuff.” Skeptical, he agreed to give it a try. He wrote a part of it and showed it to Stern, who asked for more. He wrote another part; still more was requested. And then he finished the whole thing in no time at all.

  Not Letting Go

  The stories that accompanied Goodbye, Columbus filled out not only its length but its themes, so that the whole collection appeared to be about Jewish cultural adjustments (or maladjustments) to contemporary American life. At the time, Roth argued against the widespread notion of his book as a report on the assimilation of a particular people. Surely it wasn’t only Jews who struggle, as his characters invariably do, to live a larger, freer life than that ordained for them by birth or circumstance? (This might even be considered a reasonable definition of “American.”) In an interview in the New York Post, in 1960, Roth described his work as being about “people in trouble”: a fairly universal concept. In the book’s immediate aftermath, however, far from ceasing to write about Jews, he attempted to confront the largest historical troubles that modern Jews had known.

  Casting about for a subject for his first novel, he came up with the idea of an American Jewish businessman who travels to Germany after the war, determined to kill a German, any German at all; he didn’t get very far with it, he says, because he had never been to Germany, and the subject seemed beyond his scope. He would have liked to write about Anne Frank, but he had no idea how to approach the subject. He did complete a play, commissioned by a producer of the television program Playhouse 90, about Jacob Gens, the head of the Vilna ghetto during the war, a man considered by many to have been a Nazi collaborator and by others to have been a noble-minded dupe. In the early sixties, before Hannah Arendt brought the Jewish Councils to wide attention, Roth chose to explore the “terrible but very appealing moral dilemma” of a Jew who bartered with the Nazis, offering up hundreds of Jewish lives in the vain hope of saving many more. “He had some belief that he could make it less horrible,” Roth explains, “but one could argue that was impossible. He knew the plan was a failure from the moment he undertook it.” The network decided against producing the script. “It was not the time for a play about a Jew turning in other Jews,” Roth agrees today. “It was too early.” Back then, however, he strongly believed that it should have been produced. Even though, he adds, “I probably would have had to run to Argentina, like Eichmann.”

  There could hardly have been a work more different than Letting Go, the novel that Roth published in 1962, shortly after the Yeshiva confrontation, and which contained not a page that would incite or likely even interest his attackers. Letting Go is about moral dilemmas, but on a far less earthshaking scale, written under the influence not of Bellow or of Malamud but of Henry James, an old master who had become new again in university English departments during the fifties, with the first volume of Leon Edel’s biography and any number of new editions and works of scholarship. Roth’s novel is a self-consciously Jamesian story of two young men, both graduate students at the University of Iowa: Gabe Wallach, an aspiring novelist, and Paul Herz, a struggling scholar, are based on Roth and his friend Ted Solotaroff, who actually met in a class on Henry James. (Solotaroff recalled that they used to refer to Isabel Archer as a shiksa.) The book, heavily plotted and polished, marked a retreat from New Jersey kosher dinner tables into a refined and recognizable literary mode. To the novelist, still shy of thirty, it’s clear why the retreat seemed more like an advance.

  There was a great deal to grapple with: a complex web of relationships among serious-minded young characters who judge humankind—and particularly one another—by the moral standards of The Portrait of a Lady and (back on familiar territory) between them and their mystified parents. But Letting Go is very much a book of its era, and about its era, the late fifties, and so is principally about not letting go: of responsibilities, of social expectations, of the standard divisions between men and women and the mutual sense of exploitation those divisions incurred. Roth’s boyish heroes are dragged relentlessly downward by adulthood, during the last American era when taking on immobilizing obligations, in one’s early twenties—marriage, children, a job to support them—was an essential proof of being a man. And the social setup is no less debilitating for the women.

  It is a weighty subject, and Roth produced a weighty, frequently absorbing but, at six-hundred-plus pages, overlong and—toward the end, especially—laborious book. The author sometimes seems as dutifully constrained by his responsibilities as his moralizing heroes. “I felt I had to put everything in,” Roth says, looking back; “I was writing a big American novel.” In his ambition, he was still as close to his old literary idol Thomas Wolfe as he was to Saul Bellow—master of inclusiveness—or to James. There’s some remarkably unabashed mimicry of Wolfe in Letting Go, as when Paul Herz, at his father’s funeral, embraces his long-estranged mother: “Now he closed his eyes and opened his arms and what he saw next was his life—he saw it for the sacrifice that it was. Isaac under the knife, Abraham wielding it. Both! While his mother kissed his neck and moaned his name, he saw his place in the world. Yes. And the world itself—without admiration, without pity. Yes! Oh yes!” Put that on a blind literary test and see who comes up with the name Philip Roth. What Letting Go shows, more than anything else, is a gifted writer trying different identities and searching for his own.

  Reviews were decidedly mixed; at the time, Roth said they made him sick. Even the more favorable ones—“Mr. Roth has a phenomenal ear for colloquial dialogue,” Orville Prescott noted in The New York Times—acknowledged the book’s unshapely sprawl and depressive atmosphere. (About the depressiveness, Solotaroff later wrote that Roth was not inaccurate—it was a time of difficult marriages, financial strains, endless winters—but that he had “laid it on and laid it on.”) Alfred Kazin called Roth a “born realist, observer, recorder, satirist,” and was typically astute in identifying Roth’s major concern as “people trying to live by unfulfillable notions of themselves”—a concern that plays out in his work to the very end. But ambivalent notices about “the kind of bad book that only a good writer could have written” and “the best bad book of the year” did not win many readers, and Letting Go was a commercial as well as a critical disappointment.

  The book has some marvelous scenes, though, that extend Roth’s already familiar strengths—a Thanksgiving shared by a group of elderly Central Park West Jews, perfectly suspended between satire and poignancy—and, in passages that look out through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl, effects that he never attempted again. (The girl believes that her teacher is her mother in disguise, a notion that Roth reused with much greater impact in the opening of Portnoy’s Complaint seven years later.) And the novel’s rather dour tone is occasionally shattered by a pair of slapstick Jewish comics
squabbling over a cache of stolen underwear—a glimpse of the Meister waiting to emerge from behind the Master—although Roth keeps their antics, and his energies, in check. The focus stays tight on his anxious, continually thwarted, painfully stifled young men: one is emotionally captive to a demanding, vulnerable, long-distance father, the other to a demanding, vulnerable, all-too-present wife, and both are trying to stand firm and bear up when they really want to run like hell.

  Roth had experience with both situations. He had married in February 1959, just before the publication of “Defender of the Faith,” when he was on the verge of everything: at twenty-five, he had a story about to be published in a national magazine, a contract for his first book, and unstinting encouragement from important editors. Just the year before, trusting at last that he could make it as a writer, he had put academia behind him and moved to New York, where he and Margaret Martinson Williams were married by a justice of the peace in Yonkers, in what appeared to be the sealing of his youthful triumph. Maggie was to all appearances Roth’s American dream made flesh. The product of a small midwestern town, Protestant, blue-eyed, and very blond, she was the “pictorial embodiment,” he later wrote, “of American Nordic rootedness,” which is to say of everything that he’d left home to find: “a virtual ringer for the solid, energetic girl in the cheery movies about America’s heartland, a friend of Andy Hardy’s, a classmate of June Allyson’s.” But that was only part of the attraction. He had met her in Chicago and had eagerly pursued her, although, as he pointed out, there was no shortage of blondes in the area. Maggie’s special charm seems to have been the cracks in the picture, intimations of an America that Andy Hardy had told him nothing about.