Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  He thought at first that it was a trick meant to catch him in a nasty response that Maggie could use against him in court. That sort of deliverance, after all, happened only in fiction. As it turned out, the circumstances of her death were far more banal than the frozen tomb he had invented: a car crash, in Central Park. No one else was hurt. For the sake of her children, he agreed to organize the funeral. It was a Jewish service, as Holly said she’d wanted, and Roth found himself selecting the appropriate psalms alongside one of the rabbis who had accused him, not many years before, of being a danger to the Jews. A few days after the funeral, he left New York for Yaddo, where in an excited rush of twelve- to fourteen-hour days he completed the book that would show the rabbi what he could really do to endanger the Jews when he put his mind to it.

  A Jewish Joke

  Portnoy’s Complaint (pôrt’-noiz kɘm-plānt’) 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.

  Portnoy’s Complaint was one of the signal subversive acts of a subversive age. The excitement surrounding its publication was so high that even before its appearance, in February 1969, Life magazine pronounced it “a major event in American culture.” Along with rock concerts and protest marches—with which it seemed to have more in common than with other books—it spoke to the generation-wide rejection of long unquestioned and nonsensical rules, to the repudiation of powerful authorities, and to the larger struggle for personal and political freedom. The downfall of LBJ, the end of the war, the demise of hypocrisy! The final extinction of the fifties! And all by way of thirteen-year-old Alexander Portnoy, overcosseted Jewish son, obsessively masturbating behind the bathroom door (“My wang was all I really had that I could call my own”) or wherever and however the undeniable need happened to strike. On a bus beside a dozing girl, into an apple core, into the family’s uncooked liver dinner—the giddy exposure of masturbatory compulsion gave the novel its absolute stamp of the late-arriving Sixties, its obscene zest, and, of course, its notoriety. If Holden Caulfield ever behaved like this, he didn’t tell us about it.

  The subject of a wretchedly good Jewish boy’s attempts to squirm out of the ethical straitjacket of his childhood was not so distant from that of some of Roth’s earlier stories, or of Letting Go. By struggling to defeat his overdeveloped conscience and become a bad Jewish boy, however, Portnoy turned the tragic destiny of his earlier counterparts into comedy; and by failing miserably at being bad—by paying the price in mental anguish for every insistently outrageous deed—he made the comedy emotionally complex and painfully funny. Even grown to manhood, Portnoy remains “marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions,” incapable of unrepented pleasures. Yet in the ballistic force of the writing Roth himself achieved the freedom that his hapless hero could not win; the book’s shameless, taboo-squelching language was liberating for both the author and his readers. In his Web of Stories interview, Roth explained the process of writing the book in terms of a private revolution: “I was overthrowing my literary education,” he says. “I was overthrowing my first three books.” And if, at the farthest extreme, he was overthrowing the “literary seriousness that had accompanied my education and that had launched me into writing in the first place,” he was also finding a way to reclaim it.

  The Portnoys had their origins as wildly exaggerated relatives who lived upstairs from Roth’s own sane and solid family, in a manuscript that he abandoned when he hit on psychoanalysis as a way to tell the story. The premise of a marathon, book-length psychiatric session, following years of his own psychiatric sessions, was what finally allowed him, in his mid-thirties, to let go. The premise itself meant that nothing should be hidden. (“You want to hear everything,” Portnoy tells his psychiatrist, Dr. Spielvogel, “okay, I’m telling everything.”) Chronology was moot. (“I suddenly remember how my mother taught me to piss standing up! Listen, this may well be the piece of information we’ve been waiting for.”) Digressions, diversions, excursions, were all permissible—were, in fact, the way to go. (“The only book I knew that operated through digression was Tristram Shandy,” Roth notes, “but I wouldn’t call that an influence.”) It was this unprecedented permission that allowed him to blow the lid off Henry James and midwestern truculence and every gentle, Gentile characteristic that he had associated with the great American plains of Literature.

  The public permissiveness of the era also played a role: politics, theater, sex, the political and sexual theater of New York. Even while he was toiling away on When She Was Good, Roth was performing dinner table routines for his New York Jewish friends, as he’d once performed radio routines for his parents and Newark routines for his teachers at Bucknell. These new routines were a literal sounding board for the antics of Portnoy, and he had found an ideal audience. These were people who had emerged from a background not unlike his own, who were as conversant with Lenny Bruce and The Fugs as with Freud and Kafka, and who could appreciate the mixture of reality and farce in his shtick about Jewish families. (Roth recalls that he once chased Jules Feiffer, in a manic two-person improvisation, all around the Upper West Side apartment of his publishing friends Jason and Barbara Epstein.)

  In a milder era, Roth’s conversational style had yielded Goodbye, Columbus; now it dawned on him that he could use this “uninhibited playacting” in his writing, too. Not since Henry Miller adapted his joyously filthy letters home from Paris in order to blast his way out of literary rectitude and into Tropic of Cancer had a writer plumbed such an essentially low-down mode—stand-up comedy with an improvisatory streak—to reinvigorate literature itself. Picking up once again with the material of the unfinished Jewboy, he turned his attention to the formation of the other half of the tormented couple that had made up his marriage. Tracing the chronic guilt that had got him stuck there and the fury that had laid him out on the couch, he dived into the swamps of the Jewish joke and splashed around.

  And so thirty-three-year-old Alexander Portnoy recounts for the doctor, as calmly as he can, a recent evening in the company of his parents:

  Doctor, these people are incredible! These people are unbelievable! These two are the outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time! They render it from me like fat from a chicken! “Call, Alex. Visit, Alex. Alex, keep us informed. Don’t go away without telling us, please, not again. Last time you went away you didn’t tell us, your father was ready to phone the police. You know how many times a day he called and got no answer? Take a guess, how many?” “Mother,” I inform her, from between my teeth, “if I’m dead they’ll smell the body in seventy-two hours, I assure you!” “Don’t talk like that! God forbid!” she cries. Oh, and now she’s got the beauty, the one guaranteed to do the job. Yet how could I expect otherwise? Can I ask the impossible of my own mother? “Alex, to pick up a phone is such a simple thing—how much longer will we be around to bother you anyway?”

  The quietly beleaguered father, the manipulating gorgon of a mother, and the tortured son who (barely) survives to tell the story: Roth’s trio was the newest development in the pained tradition of Jewish comedy. Jews had always been the Jewish joke’s primary instigators and best audience. Scholars and psychologists (including Freud) have noted the Jewish propensity for self-lacerating humor, arising as an outlet for inevitable aggression and frustration. (Who else, after all, could the Jews take it out on?) And then, to limit criticism to one’s persecutors reveals resentment and marks the victim. Also relevant is the will to self-protection: the same will that inspired African Americans to invent the rhyming insult game “the dozens”—if you said the awful thing first, it wouldn’t hurt so much when it came out of other people’s mouths, and a little laugh might even distract them from killing you. Among the varied subjects of the Jewish jokes that Freud catalogued in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) are an aversion to taking baths (especially among Galicians), the deceptions of mar
riage brokers regarding their human merchandise (at times involving humps), and the gall of the scheming Schnorrer taking money from the rich man. But there is no sign of the Jewish mother.

  A couple of decades later, at the end of the twenties, the most famous Jewish mother in the culture, Al Jolson’s in The Jazz Singer, was a gentle, sweetly loving figure, the kind of household saint that led Irving Howe to describe the Jewish mother in immigrant America as “an object of sentimental veneration.” The comic turns of Fanny Brice—in a vaudeville routine called “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach”—and Gertrude Berg brought in the meddling tone recognizable in Neil Klugman’s Aunt Gladys, with her Borscht Belt syntax and her need to feed. (“You leave over sometimes I show your Uncle Max your plate it’s a shame.”) But Gladys, like her forebears, has no malignity and no real power. She is not Neil’s mother, of course. And the new prototype—overbearing, powerful, wreaking psychic havoc—was just being born.

  The “Jewish mother” did not emerge alone but had something in common with other monstrous “mother” types that were prevalent in the American imagination at the time: the domineering, parasitical “mom” of Philip Wylie’s bestselling Generation of Vipers of the early forties (“She plays bridge with the stupid voracity of a hammerhead shark”), the supposedly cold and unloving “refrigerator mothers” whom psychologists blamed throughout the fifties for children’s autism, even the recklessly driven stage mother of the hit Broadway show Gypsy of 1959. But historians of these things—Joyce Antler, Lawrence J. Epstein—date the emergence of the stereotypically Jewish mother, tellingly, to theatrical comedy: specifically, to a Nichols and May routine, performed on Broadway in 1960, in which Mike Nichols played a rocket scientist being reproved for failing to call his mother during takeoff. (“It’s always something!” the mother—an improvising Elaine May—replies.)

  The joke was not without a basis in reality: Nichols later explained that his inspiration had come from a phone call from his own mother. Likewise, Roth cites among his inspirations for Sophie Portnoy, the transcendent Jewish mother, three stories submitted by three different Jewish graduate students to a class he was teaching at Iowa, all revolving around a Jewish son’s inability to evade the watchful gaze of his omnipresent mother, and his envy of the Gentile boys for the parental indifference that allows them to sneak off to sexual adventures. In a 1974 essay, published in Reading Myself and Others, Roth explained that he had immediately identified the situation as “an authentic bit of American-Jewish mythology.” But it was a while before he understood just how to give it life: by grounding it in “the recognizable, the verifiable, the historical”—that is, in the kitchens (and bathrooms) of Newark.

  There were reasons for the Jewish mother’s fraught overcautiousness, of course, in the long, historical uncertainty that her children would escape unbloodied from the most ordinary day under the boot of the Russians or the Poles or the Germans. The word “Holocaust” never appears in Portnoy’s Complaint. It was not in common use during the years when Alexander Portnoy—or Philip Roth—was growing up. Yet it might be said to inform everything that Sophie Portnoy does. Alex himself connects the comic and the tragic as the intertwining threads of his own Jewish fate:

  Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke! Please, who crippled us like this? Who made us so morbid and hysterical and weak? Why, why are they screaming still, “Watch out! Don’t do it! Alex—no!” and why, alone on my bed in New York, why am I still hopelessly beating my meat? Doctor, what do you call this sickness I have? Is this the Jewish suffering I used to hear so much about? Is this what has come down to me from the pogroms and the persecution? from the mockery and abuse bestowed by the goyim over these two thousand lovely years? Oh my secrets, my shame, my palpitations, my flushes, my sweats! The way I respond to the simple vicissitudes of human life! Doctor, I can’t stand any more being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy, publicly pleasing my parents while privately pulling my putz! Enough!

  But this is Alex speaking as an adult (however adult he has managed to be). As a boy he admits no excuses—and certainly none that make a special case out of the Jews. When his sensible older sister, Hannah, tries to quell his adolescent rage and defend their parents, she only upsets him further by invoking the Nazis. “I suppose the Nazis are an excuse,” he cries, “for everything that happens in this house!” To which she replies, “Maybe, maybe they are.” It’s hard not to read their exchange as quietly central to all the paranoid hilarity. “Do you know,” Hannah asks, “where you would be now if you had been born in Europe instead of America?” He doesn’t have an answer, so she tells him: “Dead. Gassed, or shot, or incinerated, or butchered, or buried alive.”

  But Alexander Portnoy was born in America, the land of brotherhood and the dignity of man. He even wrote a radio play about Tolerance and Prejudice—taken from Roth’s own eighth-grade graduation pageant—called Let Freedom Ring! Against this democratic dazzle, his parents’ endless fears and admonitions appear not strategic and judicious but infuriating and ridiculous, and his parents themselves so distant from his safe American life that they “might as well have had plates in their lips and rings through their noses and painted themselves blue for all the human sense they made!” The perception of this cultural chasm was not new. In 1964, four years after the Nichols and May routine, Dan Greenburg’s bestseller, How to Be a Jewish Mother, emphasized such important techniques of the suddenly renowned maternal figure as “Making Guilt Work” and “How to Administer the Third Helping.” The same year, The New York Times called the heroine of Bruce Jay Friedman’s novel A Mother’s Kisses “the most unforgettable mother since Medea.”

  She was in the air, so to speak, the best joke that postwar, comfortable, assimilated Jews could share about their distance from their living past. (In 1989, Woody Allen actually sent her into the air, like a huge and hectoring balloon, in New York Stories.) By the time Portnoy appeared, the Times could refer to Sophie’s excesses as “new whines out of all the old battles.” But Roth’s book was the apotheosis of the subject, the killer punch. No other mother had overseen her son so scrupulously at both ends of the alimentary canal. Threatening him with a bread knife when he refuses to eat, she is equally threatening outside the bathroom door: “Now this time don’t flush. Do you hear me, Alex? I have to see what’s in that bowl!” The reason for the Americanized generation’s desperate need to get away, if not to get revenge, is expressed by her son in screaming capital letters, should anyone have missed the point: “BECAUSE WE CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE! BECAUSE YOU FUCKING JEWISH MOTHERS ARE JUST TOO FUCKING MUCH TO BEAR!”

  Small wonder that the tremendous affection Portnoy also feels for his parents tended to be overlooked in the hubbub that greeted the book, although it is as strong as his rage and as necessary to his psychic tension. (“Doctor, what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred … or the love?”) There are so many things he remembers about his childhood with “a rapturous, biting sense of loss”: coming home on a winter afternoon to the smell of tomato soup simmering on the stove, summers in a furnished room on the Jersey Shore, his parents’ determination to spare him the harshness of their own lives. But filial tenderness was easily overshadowed by the anger and the masturbation and the golden-haired sexual conquests who taught the country a new Yiddish word, shiksa: a non-immigrant, non-Jewish, all-American girl, needing to prove nothing to anyone in the country that produced her.

  The shiksa was the last and most thrilling taboo, combining sex and familial repudiation with the most powerful of Portnoyan desires: to be American. (“What I’m saying, Doctor, is that I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds—as though through fucking I will discover America.”) So there is Kay Campbell (“like the soup”) from Davenport, Iowa, who, amazingly, lives
on a street called Elm Street and has a mother named Mary; there is Sarah Abbott Maulsby from New Canaan, Connecticut, who is inspired to her first act of fellatio by hearing the Budapest String Quartet play (what else?) Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. The Portnoyan manifest destiny, deeply patriotic, is “to seduce a girl from each of the forty-eight states.” (In regard to Alaskans and Hawaiians—“Eskimos and Orientals”—he remains indifferent.) But no matter how much baseball Alexander Portnoy played as a kid or how many shiksas he conquers, no matter that he was valedictorian of Weequahic High or even editor of the Columbia Law Review, he cannot shake the suspicion that being Jewish—being Portnoy rather than Smith or Jones—means he will never be a real American.

  Enough reason for an uproar among the Jews? For good measure, Roth threw in a little extraneous nastiness about the “fat, pompous, impatient fraud” who is the elder Portnoys’ revered rabbi. “Don’t you understand,” fourteen-year-old Alex harangues his mother, “the synagogue is how he earns his living, and that’s all there is to it.” The finale of the book brings Portnoy to Israel, where he attempts to force himself upon a nearly six-foot-tall red-haired ex-military Sabra—“spread your chops, blood of my blood, unlock your fortressy thighs, open wide that messianic Jewish hole”—only to fall back and admit that the main effect on him of being in the Promised Land is that he cannot get it up. (“Im-po-tent in Is-rael, da da daaah”: it’s a giddy discovery, which he sings to the tune of “Lullaby in Birdland.”) Roth had discovered that a little opposition really got his juices flowing.

  But the rabbis hardly registered in the overwhelming response to Portnoy’s Complaint. A private letter to the Anti-Defamation League may have had some force in response to a short story, or even to the twelve thousand hardcover copies that Goodbye, Columbus sold. Portnoy’s Complaint, however, sold two hundred and ten thousand copies during its first ten weeks and more than four hundred thousand by the end of the year, beating out The Godfather for the number one bestselling novel of 1969. Obviously, many Jews (as well as non-Jews) relished the book, and at least one rabbi publicly acclaimed it as a noble document reflecting mankind’s unquenchable yearning for a moral life. (And who better to represent that yearning, he nobly noted, than a Jew?) But Roth’s treatment of the equally unquenchable sexual yearnings that make havoc of that moral life was a lot more difficult for some Jewish readers to accept than Mafia murders seemed to be for Mario Puzo–reading Italians. When had so much dirty Jewish laundry ever been displayed before so many Gentiles, people who had never required as much as a soiled hanky to justify Jew-hating crimes?