Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  Again and again, Roth introduces a figure who, in outline, suggests a comic pawn or a sociological stereotype—the chic young department head with her academic jargon; a long-abused woman who works as a janitor at the college; a disturbed Vietnam vet who is the janitor’s ex-husband—and then adds layers of complexity that give them breath. Silk’s young French nemesis, Professor Delphine Roux, turns out to be almost as brave a self-creation as Silk himself, and (equally surprising) more caring toward the students, more humane. If she is an ideologue, she is a disarmingly inept and uncertain one—no Rita Cohen, she is painfully if stumblingly open to change. Murray Ringold, in I Married a Communist, admits that he was unable to follow the Shakespearean counsel that “you cannot relax your imaginative sympathy for any character.” In this book, Roth takes the lesson to heart.

  While The Human Stain is an advance in social amplitude, it is also something of an old-fashioned novel. There are no narrative adventures, no doubling of characters, no battles with reality. The world is what it is, as firm and clear as the language Roth uses to describe it: straightforward language, with little patience for lyric lingering—the landscape poetry of American Pastoral is nowhere to be seen—yet both forcefully intelligent and shaped with ease. There’s the fresh idiom of an old man finding himself “down to the last bucket of days”; of a young woman’s “American flashbulb radiance.” The typically unassuming use of terms like “string along” tempers even Nathan’s mountaintop pronouncements: “The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions.” Roth has accumulated a lot of wisdom over the years, and, if his tone has become more sober than ebullient, the results have their own satisfactions. Meticulously plotted, and with a climax of thriller-like tension, The Human Stain is characteristically Rothian only in that its hard-won wisdom is unapologetically shaped as a page-turner.

  As a catchphrase, “the human stain” might initially be thought to refer to the evidence on Monica Lewinsky’s notorious blue dress, so often is the affair discussed by various people in the book. (“She had the goods. Collected a sample. The smoking come.”) And it does relate to Clinton, or, at least, to the banner that Nathan wants to drape across the White House. The person who comes up with the phrase is the book’s heroine, Faunia Farley, who is the janitor at the college and the woman with whom Coleman Silk is having an affair. Tall, blond, from a rich and privileged background, Faunia isn’t beautiful; she’s drawn, thin-lipped, with an unsettling hardness to her gaze. But she was a beautiful child. She has become who she is—“exiled from the entitlement that should have been hers”—after being sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of five and, at fourteen, running away; at twenty, she married a dairy farmer, a Vietnam vet who started beating her when the farm went broke. (With painful irony, Silk uses the phrase “a gift of the molestation” to describe both Faunia’s sexual skills and her emotional damage. It’s a sign of the tendentiousness of present-day assumptions about Roth’s attitude toward women that the often admirable professor Amy Hungerford, teaching a course at Yale on “The American Novel Since 1945,” in 2008—it’s available on YouTube—ignores both character and context to present Silk’s words as flatly literal. Reminding her students—at Yale!—that “molestation is never a gift,” she offers the phrase as proof that “Roth, in case you haven’t noticed, is a very misogynist writer.”)

  If anything, Roth tries too hard to make Faunia an interesting woman; although she draws us in repeatedly—she’s mocking, wounded, smart—the various aspects of her character never quite cohere. But this may be the result of the extreme nature of her life’s experience, far outside both the everyday norm and the norm of Roth’s fiction. Roth based her on a woman he knew in Connecticut, who, like Faunia, had been abused as a child and had run away to nothing. He tells me that he has come across many women with such stories in the countryside, women whose lives were stunted by family abuse or violent mates and who work at whatever jobs will pay the rent. The model for Faunia worked in an electrical supply store and lived, toward the end of her abbreviated life, in dingy industrial Torrington—in a “Torrington motel,” two words that Roth says he cannot put together “without aching.”

  Roth made his heroine’s situation even worse—“That’s what novelists do,” he says, shrugging—giving her two children who died in a fire when a space heater tipped over while she was parked out front in a pickup truck with a man. Two years and a couple of suicide attempts later, she keeps their ashes in a canister under her bed. Yet if Faunia is broken, she remains very much alive—Roth also gives her a stoic calm that is not exactly the same as strength but will do in its place. Faunia loves birds, especially crows, and she has a long and striking inner aria about what these widely unbeloved birds mean to her. “No crow goes hungry in all this world. Never without a meal. If it rots, you don’t see the crow run away. If there’s death, they’re there. Something’s dead, they come by and get it. I like that. I like that a lot. Eat that raccoon no matter what. Wait for the truck to come crack open the spine and then go back in there and suck up all the good stuff it takes to lift that beautiful black carcass off the ground.” Faunia would very much prefer to be a crow.

  When Faunia needs to secure her sense of calm she drives to the local Audubon preserve, where she communes with a caged, misfit crow, a bird that was hand-raised by humans and, when freed, is attacked by other crows because he doesn’t know how a crow should sound; he learned to caw by imitating the schoolchildren who stood outside his cage imitating crows. “That’s what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain,” Faunia says, without a hint of condemnation. “That’s how it is.” Like Roth, for whom this clear-eyed acceptance is one of life’s great virtues, Zuckerman admires Faunia for acknowledging what other people pretend not to see, and he elaborates her thoughts into a near theology of impurity:

  We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling.

  The fantasy of purity: it’s an even more explicit version of the idea of “letting in the repellent” that Roth exemplified in Mickey Sabbath. Seen in a historical context, it’s about the suffering that has been caused by this “insane” fantasy: sexual purity, racial purity, religious purity. (Primo Levi, in The Periodic Table, also praises impurity, for giving rise to “changes, in other words, to life,” and to the dissension and diversity that fascism forbids.) It shouldn’t come as a surprise by now that the most famous Jewish writer of our time is a devoted pagan. With no less an affinity for the Greeks than Coleman Silk—or Faunia Farley—Zuckerman continues to think about the human stain, and the image in which all of us were made:

  Not the Hebrew God, infinitely alone, infinitely obscure, monomaniacally the only god there is, was, and always will be, with nothing better to do than worry about Jews. And not the perfectly desexualized Christian man-god and his uncontaminated mother and all the guilt and shame that an exquisite unearthliness inspires. Instead the Greek Zeus, entangled in adventure, vividly expressive, capricious, sensual, exuberantly wedded to his own rich existence, anything but alone and anything but hidden. Instead the divine stain.

  And what is the quest to purify, he asks, but more impurity?

  Faunia loves the creature with the imitated voice and the fabricated life, as she loves Coleman Silk. Faunia, too, is a self-fabricated being, an impersonator: she pretends to be illiterate so that she can live untouched by expectations, at the bottom
of the heap. And Silk loves Faunia. Not only her body, although that is plenty—there is a wry yet shimmering scene in which she dances naked for him, to Gershwin. He also loves her dignity and her gameness: “Because that is when you love somebody,” he says, “when you see them being game in the face of the worst.” Despite the difference in social status, she is his spiritual mate and his comrade-in-arms, so uninterested in judging that he’s free to tell her his secret. And, at last, really to be free. Free from a lifetime of observing conventions and campaigning for legitimacy and preserving respectability: all the restrictions that he bought into when he took up full-time pretending. Faunia is the real “onslaught of freedom, at seventy-one”—barely in time.

  And then Silk receives an anonymous letter: “Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age.” It has obviously been written by the tremendously addled Delphine Roux, in whose view the lowly janitor can signify no more to the professor than “a misogynist’s heart’s desire”: “the perfect woman to crush.” For everyone else in town, it’s an easy leap from remembering that Silk was called a racist to believing him a misogynist now: “Simply to make the accusation is to prove it.” We are back in the atmosphere of I Married a Communist. But we are also sited squarely in the summer of 1998, when “the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band.”

  “Everyone knows.” These words, in Roth’s work, are almost guaranteed to mean that what follows is outrageously wrong. Because most of what we know about anyone is wrong. If there is a great repeating theme in the American trilogy, this is it. But it’s a theme that has long been embedded in Roth’s work, in the matter of counterlives and counterarguments, in the multiplicities that we turn out to contain. “You must change your life.” And if we hardly know ourselves, “what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people?” Zuckerman poses the question in American Pastoral, after he realizes how wrong he has been in assessing Swede Levov—“That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong”—and decides to take up the Swede’s story. To make up the Swede’s story. It’s a narrative technique and a philosophy: Zuckerman continually spinning a wholly convincing hypothesis about a character, then discovering his error and spinning it around another way. “Nobody knows,” he insists, in The Human Stain. “You can’t know anything. The things you know you don’t know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don’t know is astonishing.” So, again, he makes up a story, filling in the parts that are plainly blank. (Did Faunia really know Silk’s secret?) “For better or worse, I can only do what everyone does who thinks that they know. I imagine. I am forced to imagine. It happens to be what I do for a living.” Zuckerman does what we all do, only better. And the rest of us don’t get paid.

  When The Human Stain appeared, in 2000, everyone seemed to know that Roth’s hero was based on Anatole Broyard, a New York Times book reviewer who was known for his critical acumen before he became even better known as a black man who had passed for white, thanks to an essay by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., published in The New Yorker in 1996, a few years after Broyard’s death. Like Silk, Broyard had made a painful break with his family and kept his secret even from his children, although, Roth points out, these were not uncommon elements in the history of “passing” in America, and Roth read many such histories before writing his book. (Roth never uses the word “passing” in The Human Stain, in order to stay as far as possible from these often told tales.) Roth had met Broyard a few times—oddly, he’s pretty sure that Broyard was Maggie’s writing teacher in a course at The New School, after she and Roth separated—and it’s easy to see why his description of Silk as “an outgoing, sharp-witted, forcefully smooth big-city charmer” brought the critic to mind. But Coleman Silk’s dilemma was inspired by somebody else.

  The Princeton sociologist Melvin Tumin was not as glamorous a figure as Broyard, but he was a close friend of Roth’s. A Newark-born Jew, Tumin worked in Detroit as the director of the Mayor’s Commission on Race Relations before he went to Princeton, where, in the fifties and sixties, he wrote well-regarded books about racial segregation and social inequality. He was an old friend of Saul Bellow’s—they were of the same generation, and both had studied anthropology at Northwestern. Tumin had endeared himself to Roth by fighting to end discrimination against Jews in the dining clubs at Princeton, where Roth taught in the early sixties. Over the years, Tumin was also a research consultant for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and he directed a national task force on violence. And then one day in 1985, at Princeton, he used the word “spooks” in asking about two students who had failed to show up for class—two students he had never seen—and because, as it turned out, they were black, he was charged by the university with racism.

  The irony could hardly have been greater if Tumin had been black himself—or so it seemed to Roth. The idea was also fostered, he explains to me, by Tumin’s appearance, “with heavy lips and frizzy hair.” (Just the kind of Jewish appearance that was useful to Coleman Silk as camouflage. In his physique, Tumin was big and heavy, nothing like agile, Pan-like Silk. But then, as Roth likes to say, making things up is what writers do.) After several disruptive and disheartening months of what Roth calls a “witch hunt,” Tumin was vindicated of the charges. He retired from teaching in 1989. On his death, in 1994, the headline of the Times obituary was, “Melvin M. Tumin, 75, Specialist in Race Relations.” Roth spoke at the funeral, paying tribute to his friend’s lifelong battles for tolerance. The following year, Sabbath’s Theater was published, with a joint dedication: “For Two Friends: Janet Hobhouse (1948–1991) and Melvin Tumin (1919–1994).”

  Roth is not reluctant to talk about the research he puts into his books, whether learning how to make a glove for American Pastoral (“It could have fit on my foot”), visiting zinc mines for I Married a Communist—“This is the best part of the work, it’s like a vacation”—or going to a VA hospital to talk with Vietnam vets for The Human Stain. There was already a huge literature about Vietnam vets, of course, even larger than the literature of “passing,” and that made it even harder to avoid overfamiliar scenes and stories. (Roth considers Michael Herr’s Dispatches of 1977 to be “a masterpiece” and has taught it several times.) True as the memories of battle in Roth’s book may be to memories he heard firsthand, they are uncomfortably close to accounts we’ve read elsewhere, and battle scenes are clearly not his forte. But other scenes go beyond the realm of common knowledge into the dramatically unexpected—for example, a scene of vets and families of the dead visiting the “Moving Wall,” a half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington that travels around the country. Roth went to see the aluminum-paneled replica several times in Yonkers—he says that setting a scene at the big wall, in Washington, risked cliché—and he listened to local veterans who came to search out names in letters that are also half the original size. He asked questions, sometimes, of groups of two or three, and he wrote down the answers. He didn’t have to embellish or even to “write it,” he tells me: “Their speech was music.”

  Even more startling is a scene in which a group of crippled, shaking veterans makes a trip to a Chinese restaurant. Roth remembers how disturbed he was to learn about such restaurant visits from a friend who works in a psychiatric program for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. As therapy, how ridiculously prosaic it seemed; yet how difficult to undergo. The primary aim is not to eat but to stay calm. In the scene, the men are there to coach the newest, rawest, most incorrigibly violent member of the group—Faunia’s ex-husband, Les Farley—in how to stay in his chair despite the Asian people all around him and the unbearable Asian food. (“The agony of the steam. The agony of the smells.”) Victory means getting through the entire meal without running outside or vomiting in the bathroom or trying to kill the waiter as he softly approaches to refill the water glasses.

  The specter of death is stron
g in The Human Stain. The reader learns early on that both Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley are dead; the book is conceived at Silk’s graveside. And because Zuckerman himself has been so ravaged by disease, the defiant pleasures and the balm of sex are no longer open to him. In its place—as far as anything can replace sex—he has music. All kinds of music: the Sinatra song that he dances to with Silk, the Gershwin number that Faunia dances to—with trumpet by Roy Eldridge, it is a real black-and-white mélange—and the music that Zuckerman listens to, alone, every evening, which sounds to him like “the silence coming true.”

  Above all, there is the music on the last occasion that he sees Silk alive. Zuckerman has gone to Tanglewood on a Saturday morning, to an open rehearsal. The fact that he is there at all attests to the yearning for contact that his friend has roused. Silk has pulled away from him; a man in Silk’s position can’t risk too much closeness, especially with an inquisitive novelist who grew up perilously near to Silk’s forsaken New Jersey home. But Silk is at the concert, too, with Faunia, sitting a few rows ahead. Zuckerman can sense that Silk has some great secret, although he does not yet know what it is. As he looks around at an audience filled with elderly tourists and retirees, Zuckerman’s mind fills with thoughts of death. Not just his death, or Silk’s: everybody’s death. He visualizes “the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down.” He can’t stop himself. “The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it?”