Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  And then the pianist, Yefim Bronfman, walks onto the stage and begins to play Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. And all morbidity is swept away:

  Bronfman the brontosaur! Mr. Fortissimo!… Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person who is going to play the piano than like the guy who should be moving it. I had never before seen anybody go at a piano like this sturdy little barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew. When he’s finished, I thought, they’ll have to throw the thing out. He crushes it. He doesn’t let that piano conceal a thing. Whatever’s in there is going to come out, and come out with its hands in the air. And when it does, everything there out in the open, the last of the last pulsation, he himself gets up and goes, leaving behind him our redemption … Our own lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is dying, nobody—not if Bronfman has anything to say about it!

  But Bronfman, of course, has nothing to say about it. Silk’s funeral, a few months later, concludes with the last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, reducing everyone to tears. (“They pulled out all the stops. They played Mahler.”) Although not even this great adagio, unfolding with “all of life’s unwillingness to end,” can prevent the cemetery from being the next stop.

  The finale of The Human Stain is one of the most powerful scenes in Roth’s work—terrifically tense, starkly beautiful, a clean and fully earned payoff to the story. Unlike the finale of American Pastoral, it’s spare: the players are two men, Nathan Zuckerman and the man who murdered Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley, and who very likely knows that Zuckerman knows he did it. The place is a frozen lake on top of a mountain, a lonely outpost off the backcountry road where Zuckerman has parked his car in order to approach the killer—who is hunkered down in the middle of the lake, ice fishing. In part, Zuckerman approaches simply because he wants to be able to finish his book. But he is also compelled to look directly at the human extreme, the reality of evil. “Here he is,” he thinks to himself, the way that “Philip Roth” in Operation Shylock thought about seeing John Demjanjuk in an Israeli courtroom. “Here is the killer,” Zuckerman thinks. “He is the one. How can I go?”

  But the face-off on this empty, ice-whitened stage is extremely dangerous. The men talk desultorily, about fish, about the lake, about the techniques of fishing. The killer sounds off about politics. (“That scumbag son of a bitch gettin’ his dick sucked in the Oval Office on the taxpayer’s money.”) And then he lifts the steel-bladed auger that he uses to cut holes through eighteen inches of ice, to show Zuckerman—“You always gotta keep your blades sharp”—right up level with his eyes. And Zuckerman slowly, politely, begins to back away toward the shore, not entirely certain he will get there. When he feels safe, he looks back to see, in the last words of the book:

  The icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate’s signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America.

  The Human Stain was very well received—it won a host of awards, national and international—both in itself and as the final work in Roth’s grand American trilogy. Whatever the individual criticisms, the trilogy is the fulfillment of an epic literary dream begun for Roth by Thomas Wolfe and fostered by writers from Dos Passos through Bellow. Perhaps because these books are more broadly “serious”—being about History—they are often taken to be the capstone of Roth’s career, although it is equally possible to favor some of the more unruly and ecstatic earlier books, as I do. Yet to compare the snow scene at the climax of The Anatomy Lesson—the driving storm, the slapstick tragedy, the tumultuous energy and youthful power and the creative joy that spills out in the writing—with the still and frozen whiteness of this late winter scene, with its ominous control, its buried tragedy, its tensile energy and mature power and the creative joy that spills out in the writing, is to be stunned at a writer’s development, and at a writer’s persistence, and to be grateful to have both.

  The Human Stain will give you a fair education in boxing, dairy farming, and ice fishing. In these late books, Roth has become a stickler for the material stuff of the old-fashioned novel, the real-world labor and activities that Zuckerman longed to be absorbed in, years ago—“everything the word’s in place of.” Talking with David Remnick for the BBC after the trilogy was completed, Roth expressed unusual enthusiasm for the long-disparaged Edwardian novels of John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, precisely because they include the kind of material heft that he now found useful in binding his creatures to the earth. Material heft but also unrelenting energy: he spoke, at the same time, about being inspired by the paintings of Jackson Pollock, in both their “pictorial substance” and the way they are “dramatized in every square inch.” It’s an odd pair of examples, combining the most traditional and the most abstract, matter and mind. Roth seems willing to grab hold of whatever works to bring the maximum life onto the page.

  And what, finally, does the American trilogy say about America? That’s a hard question to ask of a writer who builds his art from so many particulars and who likes to argue both sides of every question. The Swede’s Johnny Appleseed dreams, Merry’s anti-war fury, Ira’s Stalinist delusions, Eve’s betrayal and ethnic shame, Lorraine’s young bravery, Coleman Silk’s secret, Faunia’s down-and-out dignity, Les Farley’s derangement: and all bound together by Nathan Zuckerman—boy patriot, determined enlarger of the category of the human, and anguished recluse from real human beings. “The fantasy of purity,” renewed over and over again—from the extreme anti-war Left, from the extreme anti-Communist Right, from the hypocritically puritanical everybody, to take the three books in order—is appalling. “But that’s the great American blessing,” Roth tells me when I ask how this phrase applies to the country. “It’s a radically impure society.” Coleman Silk’s genealogical history, elaborated in two long pages of near Old Testament begats, includes runaway slaves, Lenape Indians who married Swedish settlers, and mulatto brothers from the West Indies who brought Dutch sisters from Holland to be their wives. And still, like most of the others, he made himself up. And still he was hounded and murdered for what he was and for what he wasn’t. It’s an unusually peaceful vision that concludes the trilogy: an arcadian landscape and the word America. And fear and danger and no sign of justice.

  The Breasts

  It is not surprising that Roth had death increasingly on his mind, although at sixty-seven he appeared to be the Yefim Bronfman of American literature. Ever since The Ghost Writer nearly two decades earlier, he had published one significant book after another, at a remarkable pace. Contrary to the examples of his great American predecessors—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner—he expanded his range and his power as he aged, so that in his fifties and sixties he was producing some of his best work. Much of this productivity is attributable to absolute discipline; he had taken to calling himself, in the press, “a monk of writing.” True, the American literary culture of alcoholism that compromised the careers of those earlier giants was largely gone (John Cheever aside). But it is difficult to imagine Herman Roth’s son ever becoming a drunk, even though Roth claims to fully understand the need to ease the pain of work when it is going badly, which is much of the time. (When I ask him what he has instead of alcohol, he replies without missing a beat: “The misery.”) Fueling the discipline is the feeling of how much he has to say and how urgently he needs to say it; and this was true no less after he completed the American trilogy than before.

  But it seemed time to say things in a different way; to take a break from big, complicated books, and do something lean and direct, on the order of the short novels that Bellow had been writing in his later years. Roth says that he went to Bellow—the admired master, even then—to ask how he did it, but that Bellow only laughed. So he
re was a new challenge, just as writing a big book had been a challenge with The Counterlife. The economies of the shorter form, once so familiar, now felt to him like “fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” he told Benjamin Taylor in an online video interview. And the question was, “How do you get a knockout punch?”

  There’s no doubt that with The Dying Animal he punched hard. For some readers, too hard: this book may have aroused more anger than any other work of Roth’s career, particularly among female readers—beating out even My Life as a Man, although some adjustment should probably be made for the amount of attention given anything he published by this time. As the Yeatsian title suggests, the book is about death. And given Roth’s view of life’s most powerful opposing force, it is also about sex: he had been stressing the conjunction since Sabbath’s Theater, in which goatish Mickey Sabbath arises from prose so sulfurously rich and a context so vastly tragic that he becomes a kind of Dionysian hero, exasperating yet noble in his refusals and his rage. Not so David Kepesh, a far more ordinary protagonist, whom Roth resurrected for the purpose from two earlier books. It is Kepesh—the Kafkaesque David K.—who, in The Breast, awakens one day to find that he’s been turned into a one-hundred-and-fifty-five-pound mammillary object (or, rather, subject). The Professor of Desire filled in his life story before the transformation, concluding with his awful realization that long-term love and sexual desire are mutually exclusive and that he is on the verge of a torturous choice. In the years since we have seen him, he has gone on teaching—the trauma of breasthood apparently forgotten—and has even become a minor celebrity, appearing as a “cultural critic” on educational TV. But he has also undergone another metamorphosis, nearly as alarming as the first: Kepesh is seventy, transformed by white hair, a little potbelly, and a wattle. Still, he is a man who made his choice long ago, and he has stuck by it—until the crisis that prompts this book.

  Sex and only sex and more sex, sex with new women every year, sex with his twenty-something female students of the present and his forty-something female students of the past, sex with no emotional attachments and with no threat, ever, of the torments of romantic longing or the imprisonment of marriage. Following a series of books in which Nathan Zuckerman was reduced to what he termed a “harmless eunuch,” it’s no wonder that Roth decided to return to Kepesh, the most relentlessly sexual of his serial heroes, for a book that he considers the third in a series of “dreams, or nightmares, about sex”: the Kepesh trio.

  The overall subject, Roth says, is “the sexual side of the sixties”—not Kathy Boudin’s sixties but Janis Joplin’s—and Kepesh is its living product, despite the fact that he, like Roth, came of age well before the liberating call. The anxiety of coming late to the party is, in fact, key to the desperate importance the new freedoms have for a man—for a generation of men—who spent his formative years, as Kepesh says, as “a thief in the sexual realm”:

  You “copped” a feel. You stole sex. You cajoled, you begged, you flattered, you insisted—all sex had to be struggled for, against the values if not the will of the girl. The set of rules was that you had to impose your will on her. That’s how she was taught to maintain the spectacle of her virtue. That an ordinary girl should volunteer, without endless importuning, to break the code and commit the sex act would have confused me. Because no one of either sex had any sense of an erotic birthright. Unknown.

  So, in 1956, Kepesh got married, and had a son, and was living the only life that seemed to be available—caged and miserable and sneakingly adulterous—when the revolution hit. His son was eight at the time of the divorce. “It was a difficult escape,” he remembers, “and I knew I could take only myself over the wall.”

  The Dying Animal is a coda to the American trilogy in the way that The Prague Orgy was a coda to the earlier Zuckerman books, but it’s a more ambitious work, pungent and tough—an after-dinner digestif made of bitter herbs. Like his predecessors, Kepesh has been sideswiped by history; he was as unprepared for the sixties as Swede Levov. And, like Coleman Silk, he refuses to accept the limitations he was born to: in this case, sexual limitations rather than racial. His decision to change his life is hardly as poignant as Silk’s. He knows that he appears a bit of a clown (especially at his age). But he sees his struggle as part of a larger historical quest for personal freedom, and he’s done his homework, tracing the origins of these kinds of freedoms back to an eighteenth-century Massachusetts settlement called Merry Mount, where the drinking and the dancing and the copulation with Indian women so enraged the righteous Puritans of nearby Plymouth that the settlement’s leader was jailed. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about this essential American conflict, declaring, “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.” And they still are. The sixties were not an aberration but part of a tradition that was expunged from history. It came back, however, as it always must. The current problem, as Kepesh sees it, is that there is no spokesman representing “emancipated manhood.” Poor potbellied Kepesh will have to do the best he can.

  And he does, in a number of very explicit sex scenes. Roth has lost none of his desire to shock, or, rather, to keep the reader from becoming complacent: hence a scene of Kepesh roughly shoving his penis into a lover’s not entirely welcoming mouth, and another of him drinking menstrual blood. (Zuckerman’s old lesson from Kafka could serve as a legend: “If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?”) Still, The Dying Animal is not really about sex but about the ways we find to accommodate its disruptive power—and, indeed, about personal freedom. Nearly allegorical in its brevity and bareness, it verges on becoming a tract about the alternative sexual careers of modern heterosexual men.

  The immediate alternative to Kepesh’s example is provided by his son, Kenny, now forty-two, who hates his father and has determined to be everything that he was not: a loyal husband, a devoted father, a man who “must be admirable,” as Kepesh sees it, “whatever the cost.” And the cost is killing him. Sex, of the conjugal variety, has become “a heinous duty” long before it ceases entirely. Out of the bed, “arguments abound, irritable bowel syndrome abounds, placation abounds, threats abound,” but the virtuous son cannot accept his father’s advice and walk away. Nor can he indulge in the kind of casual adultery that his father practiced, so the mistress he has finally taken has become a virtual second wife—he recently flew down to Florida to meet her parents. Kenny is a prig, he is in agony, and all because of the father who failed him. “The consequences of my being what I am are long term,” Kepesh observes, as though he had been born to an inalterable condition, like a hunchback or a psychopath or a king. “These domestic disasters are dynastic.”

  There is also the example of Kepesh’s closest friend, the distinctly unsuffering George O’Hearn, a poet and a teacher at The New School, who has been married to the same woman all his life and is the father of four unalienated children. George keeps his lovely family tucked away in suburban Pelham, so that, at large in Manhattan, he can screw around with every woman he meets. “Marriage at its best,” Kepesh observes, “is a sure-fire stimulant to the thrills of licentious subterfuge.” No literary news here, of course, yet it is a message that no one ever seems to want to hear. It has been put forward, and assailed, at least since Tolstoy’s attack on romantic love in The Kreutzer Sonata (“Every man experiences what you call love for every pretty woman”) and Gide’s The Immoralist, two tract-like stories about sex and marriage published a century and more ago. A book that Roth read and reread while he was writing The Dying Animal is Camus’s The Fall, published in 1956, about a man whose several moral quandaries include a “congenital inability to see in love anything but the physical.” Like so many of Roth’s books, these are all in some measure tales of civilization and its discontents, of physical desire and social hypocrisy.

  Yet if Roth seems to be arguing a case, he is not presenting a solution. He is presenting a problem, or a series of questions, and to critics who complain that he has sex (or anarc
hic male desire) too much on his mind, it might be pointed out that his questions are reasonably pertinent even now, when sex scandals are our only bipartisan political activity and such a large percentage of American marriages end in divorce. What is the way to balance sex and love, family and freedom? How should one live? Once again, readers will project an answer onto the page, if necessary—but Roth declines to come through. “The goal,” he says, “is to position the book so that you can’t answer these questions.” Who, after all (apart from Tolstoy), has answers? The solution for the writer is the articulation of the book. But then, Roth is never content to leave a problem well enough alone: however thoroughly Kepesh justifies his philosophy, The Dying Animal is predicated on the fact that it has come crashing down.

  For Kepesh has fallen in love. (He recalls Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” when he is at his lowest: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is.”) It began eight years earlier, when he was sixty-two and the girl, Consuela Castillo, was twenty-four, one of the students he regularly picks out from the seminar he teaches. And it began no differently with this girl, who displayed any number of attractive qualities: a smoothly polished Brancusi forehead, a reverential attitude toward culture, perfect posture—“She’s not a slouching, unkempt, ‘like’-ridden girl”—and the oddly formal manners that are a result of her Cuban émigré upbringing. But Consuela’s most remarkable feature is her breasts: “gorgeous breasts,” “a D cup,” “round, full, perfect,” “the type with the nipple like a saucer … the big pale rosy-brown nipple that is so very stirring.” It’s enough to make one think that Kepesh must dimly remember his earlier transformation. The affair lasted a year and a half; even while it was going on, he found himself plagued by possessiveness and jealousy of younger men. After she left, it took him three years to recover, and no other woman has made up for her loss.