Sabbath grew up in a town on the Jersey Shore, where the Roth family spent a few weeks every summer. But Sabbath spent his entire childhood there, a Jewish kid among the Italians and the Irish—it was the Irish who turned the common Jewish name Morris into Mickey. After the years at sea, he became a puppeteer, performing on the street and eventually running a little ninety-seat place of his own, on Avenue C: the Indecent Theater of Manhattan. Roth remembers that his mother’s youngest, unmarried sister, his Aunt Honey—renamed Aunt Rhoda when Roth paired her off with his fictional Kafka, the Newark Hebrew teacher—worked for a WPA puppet theater and brought two marionettes as gifts for him and Sandy; they kept them at the back of their closet, and he loved to see them collapsed there whenever he opened the door. He also recalls that while writing this book he spent a good deal of time with avant-garde puppeteers, and swears that he saw an all-puppet version of Kafka’s The Trial, performed by a visiting group from Prague, in Czech.
At sixty-four, Sabbath has retired from puppetry because his hands are crippled with arthritis, and he has been forced to retire from teaching, too, because of an unfortunate incident involving a female student, phone sex, and a tape recorder. (The entire filthy conversation runs along the bottom of the relevant pages, like footnotes.) But—despite being a shortish barrel of a man, with a straggly white beard and uncertain hygienic habits—he remains wholly dedicated to his alternate vocation as a whoremonger and dirty old man.
Mickey Sabbath suffers from no inhibitions, in part because he has rejected the bargain that most people make with civilization and its discontents. He has none of Alexander Portnoy’s constricting ethical impulses. Yet if he is free of constraints—“freed from the desire to please”—it is because he has already lost so much: his older brother, shot down during the war; his mother, who never recovered from the loss; the wife of his youth, who disappeared somewhere along the way. And a beloved mistress, who has just died of cancer and who meant more to him than any other woman he had ever known. Sabbath can do whatever he wants, at whatever risk, because nothing more can be taken from him.
And so he has become a haunter of cemeteries. Inept at dealing with the living, Sabbath is assured and intimate with the dead. He talks fairly often with his mother’s ghost. (“Do you know only what you knew when you were living, or do you now know everything, or is ‘knowing’ no longer an issue? What’s the story?”) He would prefer to be dead himself, but he cannot manage to commit suicide, no matter how carefully he plans or how often he tries. He manages to mess up every deadly scheme. There’s the cemetery where his parents and his brother are buried, for example. He arrives there in perfect good faith, ready to resign himself to the adjoining plot, only to discover that his mother’s older sister, who died just two years earlier, has taken his space. Did they forget all about him? Did they assume he was already dead, because of the way he lived? It’s a bad blow:
King of the kingdom of the unillusioned, emperor of no expectations, crestfallen man-god of the double cross, Sabbath had still to learn that nothing but nothing will ever turn out—and this obtuseness was, in itself, a deep, deep shock. Why does life refuse me even the grave I want! Had I only marshaled my abhorrence in a good cause and killed myself two years ago, that spot next to Ma’s would be mine.
And even if he could manage the logistics, get the time and place exactly right, there is always one more experience looming that he can’t bear to miss. Sabbath is firmly attached even to the worst aspects of life, perhaps especially attached to those, because they are all that he has and because they show just how strong his attachment is:
Yes, yes, yes, he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life. And a laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! More missionaries! God willing, more cunt! More disastrous entanglement in everything.
The experience that’s hardest to leave behind is, of course, sex.
Sabbath’s Theater is a very cheerfully dirty-minded book, elevating the familiar theme of sex as freedom into sex as a protest against the grave itself. And Mickey Sabbath protests quite a lot. Aside from any number of determinedly outrageous acts—golden showers, graveside masturbation—the book contains rhapsodic odes to the morning hard-on (“No deceit in it. No simulation. No insincerity. All hail to that driving force!”) and the clitoris (“The mother of the microchip, the triumph of evolution, right up with the retina and the tympanic membrane. I wouldn’t mind growing one myself, in the middle of my forehead like Cyclops’s eye”). “Shocking” sexual antics had already become something of a default mode in American fiction, and Roth, since the advent of Zuckerman, had confined his heroes to little more than fleeting cartoon lust. But Sabbath is serious about sex, and he has met his match: a short, dark-haired, middle-aged Croatian émigrée, a bit on the plump side, who runs an inn with her husband in New England and whose sexual appetite and contempt for rules surpass even Sabbath’s. This prodigal’s name is Drenka Balich, and the truly surprising aspect of her affair with Sabbath is not its every-which-way taboo-breaking sex but—so much harder to bring off—the depth and innocence of their love.
How many great love affairs have there been in recent fiction? This one lasts thirteen years. And then, at fifty-two, Drenka gets sick and dies, sending Sabbath on a downward spiral and starting the novel on its course. Like Lolita, Roth’s book is a retrospective account of a transgressive passion—Sabbath and Drenka are both married, both dedicatedly promiscuous—although, in this case, the woman is anything but a nymphet:
It was supposed to be otherwise, with the musculature everywhere losing its firmness, but even where her skin had gone papery at the low point of her neckline, even that palm-size diamond of minutely crosshatched flesh intensified not merely her enduring allure but his tender feeling for her as well. He was now six short years from seventy: what had him grasping at the broadening buttocks as though the tattooist Time had ornamented neither of them with its comical festoonery was his knowing inescapably that the game was just about over.
And it isn’t only the sex, or the daring in the sex, or the defiance of convention in the sex. Drenka is practical, funny, and—an attribute as important as the others—an old-fashioned, loving mother. When she takes five hundred dollars from Sabbath for playing his whore, she buys a gift for her grown son. (The son is a state trooper, and Drenka owns a scanner that monitors police radio signals, so she can keep track of his whereabouts when he’s on duty all night; her devotion is nearly worthy of Mrs. Portnoy.) Part of the thrill is in the contradiction: “A respectable woman who was enough of a warrior to challenge his audacity with hers,” by which Sabbath means that Drenka is proud and pleased to have had sex with four men in a single day. But Drenka is also described (by Sabbath) as “plainly ecstatic to be living on earth,” and as “a piece of human sunlight” (by her clueless, adoring husband). It would be a stretch to call Mickey Sabbath a hero, but Drenka Balich is undoubtedly a heroine, a worthy descendant of the great adulteresses of European literature.
Roth was initially inspired by a married Connecticut neighbor with whom he had begun an affair in the late seventies; the affair had continued right through his marriage and, finally, survived it, although not for long. The arrangement was never exclusive. Roth was away in London, after all, for half of every year, and he was not the only man with whom this “unashamedly polyamorous woman” (as he describes her to me) was adulterously involved—for him, in fact, this was the essence of her charm. He viewed her as a sensualist, a nonconformist, and a wholly free spirit; he wondered if this freedom had to do with the fact that she was not American. (She was not Croatian, however, but Scandinavian. Friends of Roth’s who knew her at the time reinforce his claims: Judith Thurman talks about a woman who was “completely uninhibited”—virtually echoing Roth’s book—and yet maternal, “the most caressing person I’ve ever known,” although Thurman also thinks she probably exaggerated her sexual exploits to impress Roth.) It
lasted up until the time that he was suddenly divorced and she was suddenly divorced, and they began “seeing each other regularly,” Roth explains, “for more than just a few stolen hours of sex.” The relationship collapsed, apparently under the weight of ordinariness, in 1995, the year that Sabbath’s Theater was published.
Yet the character of Drenka, in all her sunlight, is drawn from imagination as much as memory. The great gift that Roth bestows on her is not beauty but an absolute, good-natured freedom, which is based in strength and radiates joy. An intoxicating earth mother, Drenka is absolved of sentimentality by raunchy sex and weight around the hips. It is easy to enjoy her, and impossible not to weep along with Sabbath at her deathbed. Although she does not live the way most women live, or might want to live, she enlarges the sense of female possibility, and that’s what heroines are for.
And then there is the way Drenka speaks. For all the sexual animation of Roth’s heroes and their famed excitement over breasts, they are also and increasingly voice men, suckers for a woman’s words. (Even Alexander Portnoy rejects a flaxen-haired beauty because he can’t bear her “cutesy-wootsy boarding school argot”; Nathan Zuckerman, of course, risked his life for “a finely calibrated relative clause.”) “Phonetic seduction,” Roth calls it here. Sabbath relishes both Drenka’s “juicy” accent and, even more, her knack for turning clichés into little verbal artworks: “It takes two to tangle,” “I’ve got to get quacking,” “a bottomless piss.” For Sabbath, these malapropisms have a cheering linguistic freshness—she calls another lover’s erection “the rainbow,” because it is long and has a curve—that reflects the lack of cliché in the way she thinks and lives. (Linguistic torture, on the other hand, is inflicted by the college girl who tells him that she feels “empowered” by knowing him—“that language which they all used and which made him want to cut their heads off”—and by his wife, who returns from AA meetings speaking interminably about “sharing”: “What he loathed the way good people loathe fuck was sharing.”) The morality of language, freedom from cant: or, as Sabbath puts it, the pleasure of words “freed from their daily duty to justify and to conceal.” There is nothing Mickey Sabbath won’t do with his body, but his sense of language remains unsullied.
Roth’s own language takes on a new richness and beauty in Sabbath’s Theater, a development that he attributes to the unprecedented freedom that he felt in writing it—“the freest experience of my life.” He believes that he owes this literary freedom, in turn, to the unrestricted personal freedom of Mickey Sabbath: a far more unbridled protagonist even than Portnoy. The prose, cast in a deeply subjective third person, moves seamlessly in and out of Sabbath’s thoughts, revving up to gale force while maintaining the confiding ease that Roth had long ago perfected. Despite a touch of almost biblical grandeur here and there, despite the mortal themes and the immortal longings and the musical swellings, Sabbath’s Theater reads as naturally as Goodbye, Columbus.
As a strict linguistic moralist, however, Roth makes beauty pay its way. His style has always been hard to characterize beyond the energy and concentration, the uncanny capturing of voices, and a tendency toward exclamation points and capital letters when he is on a comic tear—when he grabs you by the collar and won’t let you go. He is still unlikely to linger over a landscape. He distrusts extended description—the glinting observations of a surrounding world that give Updike’s work its texture—and seems ever wary of the risks of pretentiousness or of diffusing the pressure of the voice. Even here, a note of lyric gorgeousness is apt to end with a blackened eye, as when Sabbath comes to stand at Drenka’s grave, in an isolated country cemetery, in the dark of night, when her son or husband or other more properly accredited mourners are less likely to discover him:
Five months after her death, a damp, warm April night with a full moon canonizing itself above the tree line, effortlessly floating—luminously blessed—toward the throne of God, Sabbath stretched out on the ground that covered her coffin and said, “You filthy, wonderful Drenka cunt! Marry me! Marry me!”
You didn’t think you were going to get a whole sentence about the luminous moon, did you? This passage works almost as a formula for the entire book: a mixture of the male hormone that Sabbath calls “preposterone,” crazy sorrow, and love.
It was possibly frightening and certainly strange to visit a cemetery late at night, alone. And to render the atmosphere exactly, Roth began to visit Janet Hobhouse’s grave, late at night and alone. The Cornwall cemetery happens to lie just at the edge of the town; in the book, Roth moved it farther away and onto a hillside, partly for the scenic drama but mostly in order to allow Sabbath to perform his peculiar rites of mourning, which include (lovingly) ejaculating on Drenka’s grave. (Sabbath is outraged when another man shows up—it’s the rainbow!—and delivers the same tribute.) Roth had visited Hobhouse’s grave often in the months after her death. Drenka’s horrible cancer death clearly owes much to that tragic example. But Roth’s midnight visits, he tells me, were not all tragedy. Prowling around the gravestones late one freezing winter night, he says, he could distinctly hear Hobhouse’s voice addressing him: “You’re working on a book, aren’t you?”
Sabbath’s Theater makes no use of the tricks of time or the narrative tumult that are key to The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, because its central point is that time moves in only one direction and leads to only one end. Sabbath’s thoughts about death, his longing for people who are gone, flow steady through its pages; the beauty is the result not of adjectival elaboration but of close observation and imaginative precision. Here Sabbath, having exhausted all other possibilities, has a eureka-simple inspiration for abolishing death:
Turning life back like a clock in the fall. Just taking it down off the wall and winding it back and winding it back until your dead all appear like standard time.
And here he reads the tombstones in a cemetery he has gone to visit:
Beloved wife Tillie. Beloved husband Bernard. Beloved husband and father Fred. Beloved husband and father Frank. My beloved wife our dear mother Lena. Our dear father Marcus. On and on and on. Nobody beloved gets out alive.
Mickey Sabbath is a natural poet, yet he is also undeniably repellent to many people—in and out of the book—with his grizzled eroticism and his glee in defilement. Certainly, part of Roth’s intention is to push us through these repellent qualities to a wider embrace of the human animal. “Repellent” is a word that comes up often when he talks about this book: “I wanted to let the repellent in,” he says. Why? “Because we try so hard not to see it,” he replies. “We just throw an ugly name on it and look away.” Roth says that he learned about the importance of admitting the repellent, in literature, from Henry Miller, and, indeed, it’s difficult to imagine Mickey Sabbath without the precedent of Tropic of Cancer. Roth had read it sometime in the mid-fifties, in the notorious Obelisk Press edition that travelers smuggled in from Paris before the book became legal, in 1961, in the United States. In some unpublished notes about his literary influences—the same notes in which he looks back on Thomas Wolfe—Roth reports that he read Miller as he had once read Wolfe, “swooningly,” thrilled by his exploration of “vast areas of unspeakable thought and unspoken-of conduct,” and by his unashamed witness to “the impertinent minutiae of male desire.”
It might be said, of course, that this description applies equally to Roth. And the freedom of Portnoy’s Complaint, in this light, may owe as much to Miller as to psychoanalysis. (“All the force in Henry Miller,” Roth’s notes continue, “all the anarchistic individualism seemed to be generated and sustained by his phallus.”) Roth is a far greater novelist and comprehends far broader areas of thought and conduct. But Miller’s lesson remains. Let the sexual in. Let the body in. It’s there in The Ghost Writer, when young Zuckerman announces that he intends personally to enlarge Isaac Babel’s definition of the Jewish writer as a man “with autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose” to include “blood in his penis.” It’s there in
Patrimony, when Roth cleans up his father’s shit after the old man has had an accident, scraping it out from between the wooden floorboards of the bathroom with a toothbrush. Let the repellent in. It’s part of life. Not until Sabbath’s Theater did Roth take up the challenge in full, bringing a rigorous intellect and aching honesty to the subject of the human body—compulsive, smelly, beautiful, ugly, riddled with cancer and love, corruptible only in death.
But the idea of the repellent is also, for Roth, associated with a train of political thought. The repellent gets in the way of “ideal plans,” he wrote in the notes for several classes that he taught about his own books, at Bard College, in the late nineties. “If only we could get rid of the repellent Jews, or the repellent rich,” the notes continue—and we are back in the historical catastrophes of the twentieth century: “If we can just slay the repellent, we will be pure.” There is probably not another category that Roth holds up to such suspicious scrutiny as “the pure.” But if Mickey Sabbath in some ways wins our admiration for not being “big on oughts,” the friends whose lives he disrupts see things differently. And Roth—ever the moral pugilist—puts real weight behind the counterargument, in favor of the normal, the peaceful, and the pleasures of living by the oughts.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 24
