The savagery of history erupting into people’s lives is a familiar subject in Roth’s work by now. And even if the history did not happen, it is treated in the same way: not as a grand epic but as the chaos and disaster that ordinary people go through. The book is also clearly responsive to Roth’s sore awareness of having grown up safe in America, at a time when Jewish children in Europe were suffering and dying, an awareness that runs from his earliest stories right through The Ghost Writer. On September 12, 2001, Roth published Shop Talk, a collection of previously published conversations with and essays about writers he admires. Given the publication date, and the fact that the slender book was not a novel, it received scant attention. But it is remarkable how many of its long, thoughtful discussions about history and literature are with people, or about people, whose counterlives he might have led: Primo Levi (Auschwitz, February 1944–January 1945); Aharon Appelfeld (deported with his father to a camp in Transnistria after the murder of his mother, in 1941, when he was eight; escaped and spent the next three years hiding in Ukrainian forests); Ivan Klíma (Terezín, December 1941–May 1945, aged ten through thirteen and a half); Isaac Bashevis Singer (fled Poland for America, 1935); Bruno Schulz (executed by a Nazi officer while walking through his village in Poland, 1942).
“I still remember my terror as a nine-year-old when, running in from playing on the street after school, I saw the banner headline CORREGIDOR FALLS on the evening paper in our doorway and understood that the United States actually could lose the war,” Roth writes in The Facts. The Plot Against America presents a different counterhistory, with potentially similar results for a Jewish family. In 1941, President Lindbergh signs nonaggression pacts with Germany and Japan; the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop is an honored guest at the White House; and American Jews are subjected to a resettlement program reassuringly titled Just Folks, administered by the Office of American Absorption, which dispatches city Jews to the heartland to learn how real Americans live. Many Jews view the program as a design to break their ties as a community. Some Jewish families pack up and move to Canada; before long, others are killed in spontaneously occurring pogroms across the country. And much of this is seen through the eyes of young Philip Roth—looked back on by his older self, narrating unobtrusively—only seven years old when Lindbergh is elected, and nine when, in 1942, in a sudden deliverance, the president’s plane mysteriously disappears. As a result, Vice President Burton K. Wheeler introduces martial law, the citizenry rebels, Roosevelt returns to office in a special election, and the country is set back upon the real and glorious way that made it possible for Philip Roth to grow up to be the man he is and the American he is, and to write this book. If the deliverance is disconcertingly abrupt and seems almost careless, one has the sense that Roth had already accomplished all he wanted, in the onset of historical mayhem and its effect upon people who would remain just as quietly ennobled when the world reverted to its proper course.
He never wanted to write this kind of a book, he says, “with Jews sitting around the kitchen table complaining about anti-Semitism.” He shakes his head. “What am I, Neil Simon?” Even worse, “it’s exactly the kind of book the rabbis once wanted me to write.” He kept putting away the unfinished manuscript, thinking that he could not go through with anything so obvious. But then he’d take it out again and do some work, and little by little he began to feel that it was getting good. Part of what saved it for him was the restraint: Lindbergh is not turned into Hitler or into any sort of caricature—in fact, he departs in no significant way from his real political positions and recorded words. There are no American concentration camps, no murderous Nazi policies put into place. (Just Folks, which takes Philip’s brother, Sandy, off to a Kentucky tobacco farm for a summer—a summer that he loves—has much the same intent as the real Philip did in going off to Bucknell.) The outright discrimination that occurs—the Roth family is turned out of a Washington, D.C., hotel when they are recognized as Jews—is, like the random anti-Jewish riots, the result of the ordinary worst coming out in ordinary people when their lowest instincts have been sanctioned.
But the real salvation of the book was Roth’s invention of his family’s downstairs neighbors, the tragically afflicted Wishnows, in every way a contrast with the hilariously afflicted Portnoys, who were also invented as neighbors to the strong and stable Roths. Mr. Wishnow dies horribly of cancer; Mrs. Wishnow goes to work and is ultimately transferred via the Just Folks scheme to Kentucky, where she is murdered by an anti-Semitic mob. Their son, Seldon—the smartest boy in Philip’s class, lonely, hapless, too eager to please, and terribly frightened—has his childhood ruined, not unlike a European victim of the war. From a literary point of view, the Wishnows allowed for the diversion of pathos from the Roths, and especially from little Philip. Poor Seldon’s desperate desire to be Philip’s friend drives Philip crazy and gives him the opportunity to be bad—just the kind of opportunity Roth required. Philip is embarrassed by Seldon, he tries to avoid him, he plays mean tricks on him: he steals Seldon’s clothing from his room, piece by piece (“How could I lose a pair of shoes?” Seldon wails; “How could I lose a pair of pants?”), and packs it into a cardboard suitcase, awaiting his escape to a non-disastrous, non-Jewish life in the Catholic orphanage a few streets away. But the most unbearable thing about Seldon is the tragedy that envelops him. Philip keeps Seldon from talking about his “terrifyingly dead father” by bombarding him with toilet jokes he learned at school. Nothing like a good toilet joke to fend off both the piety of victimhood and the sentimentalization of childhood.
Philip is a marvelously honest and practical child. (Roth’s notes about the book contain the admonition “Read Huck Finn.”) No matter what goes on in the larger world, he remains focused on his stamp collection; his fear of the Nazis is on a par with his fear of the ghosts lurking in the cellar. Forced to share a room with his cousin Alvin, whose leg was shot off in the war—Alvin volunteered for the Canadian army—Philip is horrified at having to see the artificial leg and, worse, the stump. (Roth had no cousin Alvin in reality; he based this particular childhood horror on the experience of sharing a room with his mother’s dying, cancer-riddled older sister.) The transfer of Mrs. Wishnow to Kentucky, and her death, is the result of one of Philip’s harebrained schemes to get rid of Seldon. Philip certainly didn’t mean this to happen—he is overcome by remorse: “Let my family raise her son as their son from here on out. He could have my bed. He could have my brother. He could have my future.” (Philip himself plans to run away, again, and get a job with the deaf-mutes who he’s heard bend the pretzels at the New Jersey Pretzel Factory, and never speak another word.) This guilt is something that the grown-up Roth, narrating the book, carries for the rest of his life: “I did it. That was all I could think then and all I can think now.” Even here he cannot escape his sense of astonishing luck at having lived the childhood that he lived and his feeling for those who were not so lucky.
Roth had doubts that he was writing this book for his usual audience. The “what if” historical genre was not his métier, and he’d read hardly any of the books that critics cited in comparison. (There was one exception: Sinclair Lewis’s fascist takeover tale of 1935, It Can’t Happen Here, had been a favorite of his ever politically vigilant father. Swede Levov’s father invokes it in American Pastoral in relation to Nixon—“The idea,” Lou Levov says, “couldn’t be more up-to-the-moment.”) Much of the book has the quality of an old-fashioned adventure story, with cliff-hanging breaks that suggest a popular serial: “Don’t you see, Uncle Herman…,” cries cousin Alvin. “He just guaranteed Roosevelt’s defeat!” Although there are a number of the long and coiling half-page sentences that had become a kind of trademark—“It’s like taking a ride on the subway,” Roth says with a laugh, “you get on at one place and get off at another”—the writing, overall, is quick, supple, and unshowy. (“Shorten the sentences,” his notes instruct; “relax the language.”) It’s the story that counts. Of course
, there are striking turns of phrase: an insulting stranger in a Washington restaurant has a “holiday-goose of a belly,” which Herman Roth is inclined to stab with his fork and knife. (The dangers of silverware in these books!) Roth has never failed to adjust his language to his subject: compare a sentence from When She Was Good with one from Portnoy’s Complaint or Sabbath’s Theater. So it isn’t surprising that the central subject here—Roth’s earnest, sincere parents—has touched the writing, too.
It’s a far cry from the cheerful vulgarity of the Patimkins or the hysterical worry of the Portnoys or even the serene remove of the Levovs to this sober, essay-like explication of just who the Jews of the Roths’ acquaintance were, as a community:
These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language—they had one, their native tongue, whose vernacular expressiveness they wielded effortlessly and, whether at the card table or while making a sales pitch, with the easygoing command of the indigenous population. Neither was their being Jews a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be “proud” of. What they were was what they couldn’t get rid of—what they couldn’t even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American.
The final point, about Jews as Americans, is one that Roth had been getting at all along, in endlessly varied voices and guises, beginning as a tormented question in his early work and ending here, with an emphatic answer. There’s a telephone conversation in the book, between Mrs. Roth and little Seldon, that restores an undreamed-of dignity to the figure of the Jewish mother offering food; Philip, listening, compares her saving strength with that of a “combat officer.” And Herman Roth—in his last appearance in print—responds to the suggestion that the family move to Canada with the full-hearted declaration: “This is our country!”
What is Jewish writing? Does such a phenomenon exist? Roth took a crack at answering these questions in his Paris Review interview, in the mid-eighties, by denying that “the Jewish quality of books” had anything to do with subject matter. Rather, there was a certain recognizable sensibility: “the nervousness, the excitability, the arguing, the dramatizing, the indignation, the obsessiveness, the touchiness, the play-acting—above all the talking,” he said, clearly enjoying himself as he described the stylistic qualities of his most recently published book at the time, The Anatomy Lesson. “It isn’t what it’s talking about that makes a book Jewish—it’s that the book won’t shut up. The book won’t leave you alone.” (Every Jewish writer who doesn’t find the categorization ridiculous—or offensive—probably has his or her own definition. For Bellow, Jewish stories were those in which “laughter and trembling are so curiously mingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two”—in other words, a Bellow story.)
For all the outsized torment the characters undergo just for being Jews—there is more torment, in real terms, than in any other of Roth’s books—The Plot Against America keeps its voice down. What need to shout when the enemy is real and near? By Roth’s own definition, he hadn’t written a “Jewish book” in years, and this very Jewish story is no exception. Indeed, it turned out to be one of his most broadly accessible books—direct, deeply engrossing, invoking both laughter and tears, without sex and with minimal masturbation, a book written by a genius although not a work of his genius, lacking the fire and the edge that Roth displays when he soars.
Roth took care in fitting his inventions to historical facts, and appended to the book both a twenty-page “True Chronology of the Major Figures” and the text of the entire Lindbergh speech mentioned by Schlesinger, from September 1941, in which he denounced the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration as “war agitators.” But The Plot Against America hit the bestseller list in 2004 because of its implications for the present. Even the title, which Roth had lifted from a 1946 political pamphlet, seemed to have a post-9/11 ring. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani—who found the book “provocative but lumpy”—noted that the novel could be read as “either a warning about the dangers of isolationism or a warning about the dangers of the Patriot Act and the threat to civil liberties.” But it was a column by Frank Rich, also in the Times, that really got things going. Announcing that the book was “riveting from the very first sentence: ‘Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear,’” Rich compared this atmosphere to the “‘perpetual fear’” that defined “our post-9/11 world” and to “the ruthless election-year politics of autumn 2004.” Others saw Lindbergh’s flight suit as a reference to Bush’s getup for his “Mission: Accomplished” speech. And in The New York Review of Books, J. M. Coetzee asked whether Roth’s novel of “America under fascist rule” wasn’t really “about” America under Bush.
Roth, in his own essay in the Times, insisted that he had not written the book as “a roman à clef to the present moment”—even if he did consider George W. Bush “a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one.” Still, he noted that Kafka’s books had served as political inspiration to Czech writers who opposed Soviet rule in the sixties and seventies; this wasn’t the way Kafka had meant his work to be read, but “literature is put to all kinds of uses.” In conversation, Roth is careful to distinguish between fascism and Bush’s merely “right-wing government.” But he understands why his book was taken up as it was, politically. “There was this feeling of powerlessness we had about Bush,” he recalls, “and no one of any consequence in the Democratic Party was speaking out. They grasped at this book as an articulation of their anger and frustration.”
The Plot Against America, Roth concluded in the Times, had twin messages. First, that in spite of the general anti-Semitic discrimination by the Protestant hierarchy in the thirties, and despite the virulent Jew-hatred of the German American Bund, the Christian Front, Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and, yes, Charles Lindbergh, it had not happened here—“How lucky we Americans are.” And second, that our lives as Americans are “as precarious as anyone else’s.” It might have happened like this. “All the assurances are provisional,” he wrote, “even here in a 200-year-old democracy.” The election of George W. Bush had affirmed, for him, the lesson not just of this book but of all the books that he had been writing for years: “We are ambushed, even as free Americans in a powerful republic armed to the teeth, by the unpredictability that is history.”
Ghosts
After winning two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus; Sabbath’s Theater), two National Book Critics Circle Awards (The Counterlife; Patrimony), two PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock; The Human Stain), Time magazine’s Best American Novel of the Year (Operation Shylock), the Pulitzer Prize (American Pastoral), the National Medal of Arts, the WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year in the United Kingdom (The Human Stain), the Prix Médicis étranger for the best foreign book of the year in France (The Human Stain), honorary degrees from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, and any number of other awards and prizes, Roth was back at the top of the bestseller list—right behind Stephen King and Dan Brown—for the first time since Portnoy’s Complaint (which had won nothing). But a more durable honor was now coming his way: publication of his complete works by the Library of America, in its beautifully matched set of the canon of American literature, ushering Roth into a company that includes Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, and Saul Bellow. The first two volumes of the works of Philip Roth were published in the fall of 2005, and six more were scheduled, to conclude when Roth turned eighty, in 2013. Only Welty and Bellow had previously received the honor in their lifetimes. And Roth hardly seemed to be slowing down. Indeed, his continuing rate of production meant that another volume eventually had to be added to the series.
Although the Library of America volumes contain no prefaces or critical commentary, there was new information to be gleaned from the appended chronol
ogy of the author’s life and works. Assembled by the volumes’ editor, Ross Miller, with the substantial aid of Roth himself, the usual list of publications and prizes was expanded and given emotional color by the frequent mention of friends he had made over the years. “1965: Begins to teach comparative literature at University of Pennsylvania … Meets professor Joel Conarroe, who becomes a close friend.” “1976: In London resumes an old friendship with British critic A. Alvarez and, a few years later, begins a friendship with American writer Michael Herr (author of Dispatches, which Roth admires) and with the American painter R. B. Kitaj.” “1980: Milan and Vera Kundera visit Connecticut on first trip to U.S.; Roth introduces Kundera to friend and New Yorker editor Veronica Geng, who also becomes Kundera’s editor at the magazine.” “1982: Corresponds with Judith Thurman after reading her biography of Isak Dinesen, and they begin a friendship.”
This last entry offers a glimpse of a rather surprising habit of Roth’s, considering his fame: often, when he reads something he admires, he sends a letter to the writer, who is just as often a total stranger. Thurman recalls her shock at receiving an enthusiastic note typed on a plain sheet of paper and signed “Philip Roth,” and her reply, which began, “If you are Philip Roth the candlestick maker…” He is also a tireless champion of young writers and of struggling, not so young ones: Joel Conarroe, who went on to become Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn and later the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, has a thick file of Roth’s recommendations for various jobs and awards. In sum, these entries hint at concerns very different from those of the notoriously solitary writer. One can’t laugh as much as Roth has laughed in his life without accumulating friends.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 34
