Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  The premise of the book is another “what if” situation, another counterlife. What if Roth’s hectoring, continually worried, overprotective father had been right? What if Roth’s magazine satire at Bucknell had got him expelled from school? The pages are filled with conscious portents:

  I envisioned my father’s knives and cleavers whenever I read about the bayonet combat against the Chinese in Korea. I knew how murderously sharp sharp could be. And I knew what blood looked like, encrusted around the necks of the chickens where they had been ritually slaughtered, dripping out of the beef onto my hands when I was cutting a rib steak along the bone, seeping through the brown paper bags despite the wax paper wrappings within, settling into the grooves crosshatched into the chopping block by the force of the cleaver crashing down.

  The language itself inflicts violence—the double “sharp,” the almost Germanic snap of consonants (“encrusted around the neck,” “the cleaver crashing down”), the buildup of “dripping” and “cutting” and “seeping,” so that, in the end, even an innocent word like “crosshatched” seems ominous.

  Marcus has good reason to worry about his fate, despite being a prudent, responsible, hardworking boy and an A student. In Ohio, he’s traveled so far from his familial element that he’s barely aware of his own maladaptation to the larger American world. Roth had never before depicted quite this sort of gropingly innocent outsiderness, or as pained a view of the poor Jewish boy’s commitment to unstinting work. Marcus has to scrape and strain for everything: he has a single good set of clothes that he bought to match the clothes of a student in a photograph in the college catalogue; he works all weekend waiting on tables, and he isn’t sure if the beer-sodden kids demanding his attention are calling out “Hey, you!” or “Hey, Jew!” He is so fearful of breaking the rules and being cast out—which means, in this case, Korea—that he won’t masturbate in the school bathroom. But it isn’t sex that finally does him in. Marcus is enraged when he has to sit through a sermon in chapel about “Christ’s example”—enraged not because he’s a Jew, he insists, but because he’s a wholly rational atheist. It’s typical of Roth that the college dean who is ultimately responsible for Marcus’s dreadful death is not a villain: an ex-football star and a devout Christian, he is simply a man at home in a world where Marcus, fighting with his roommates and changing from room to room, literally cannot find a place. Their confrontation reveals not only the older man’s sanctimony but his attempted fairness; not only the youth’s independent-minded bravery but his inability to master his indignation and save himself.

  So there’s another “what if” situation: what if Roth, in college, had been unable to bear attending chapel, as Marcus, on a gut level, is unable to? Indeed, Roth tells me that he couldn’t bear “the pieties and banalities of those clergymen who spoke to us.” (He adds, however, with what seems an old and protective reflex, “the rabbi was the worst—he pronounced God with three syllables.” It seems that to limit criticism to the Christians still implies resentment and a wholly repugnant sense of victimhood.) So did Roth refuse to attend? Did he pay someone to forge his name on the attendance sheet—apparently as common a practice at Bucknell as it is at Winesburg? “No,” he replies to the question. “I went.” He read in the pew—Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea and Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, he recalls. (“If a smart person mentioned a book, I read it.”) But he didn’t flash the covers: “I was defiant enough to read them but not defiant enough to advertise it.” And while he says of chapel that at times “I thought it would kill me!”—it didn’t. And he didn’t always have such a bad time, either, given that “the girls were there en masse: long skirts and Peter Pan blouses and cashmere cardigans; they wore full slips.” Now he is following the memory down a happier path: “Betty”—his girlfriend at Bucknell—“wore a full slip…” There were other things to think about. It’s another lesson in the difference between autobiography and the raising of the stakes that is fiction. Marcus dies because he refuses to sit through Christian sermons—dies, in the simplest sense, of being a much less compromising and more defiant Jew than Roth ever was.

  Despite the book’s brevity, Roth doesn’t hesitate to take on an entire era, casting a cold eye on its sexual repressiveness, its habits of surveillance, its provincial rectitude. Yet Indignation appeared to have a grim timeliness when it came out, in the fall of 2008, amid the public outcry over military casualties in Iraq and the government’s refusal to allow the publication of photographs of homecoming coffins—both facts mentioned in the review by Charles Simic in The New York Review of Books. Roth had been inspired by a very different war, but this time he did not disclaim the parallels, as he had with the contemporary reading of The Plot Against America. “If you look in the newspaper at the names and ages of the soldiers getting killed in Iraq now,” he said in an interview in the Barnes & Noble Review, “you find these terrifying ages like 19 and 22; it’s just awful. And it was that particular awfulness of young death that engaged me.” The college president’s denunciation of students, following the panty raid—“A world is on fire and you are kindled by underwear”—seemed to some critics a fair rebuke to a citizenry as oblivious and as anesthetized by trivia as the Winesburg students, who are warned that “history will catch you in the end.”

  Marcus’s address from the dead seems a strange venture into the uncanny. The dark, interior world in which he continues to exist, disembodied and alone, is to him an uncertain location between heaven and hell:

  It’s not memory that’s obliviated here—it’s time. There is no letup—for the afterlife is without sleep as well … here there is nothing to think about but the bygone life. Does that make “here” hell? Or heaven?… You can’t go forward here, that’s for sure. There are no doors. There are no days. The direction (for now?) is only back. And the judgment is endless, though not because some deity judges you, but because your actions are naggingly being judged for all time by yourself.

  Is this a refutation of Marcus’s atheism? A proof of it? Was Roth going soft and metaphysical in his later years, allowing for suggestions from beyond the grave? (And what of the voices that Everyman hears at his parents’ graves? Maybe they were not, after all, only in his head?)

  As we learn near the book’s end, Marcus was wrong about being dead, although not about the battle. Suffering horribly from bayonet wounds that have nearly severed a leg and shredded his intestines, he has done all this remembering in a morphine haze: the drug hit his brain like a “mnemonic fuel.” (The book’s first chapter—almost as long as the book itself, extending straight through until this point—is titled “Under Morphine”: we were told and still we didn’t know.) And then, in chapter 2—barely seven pages long and titled “Out from Under”—Marcus really does die. Memory ceases, the medics pull his poncho over his face, and there is nothing more to be heard, except for his father’s sobbing at the news, back in Newark. Absolutely nothing.

  For Roth, who tells me that the book began with being “fed up with the politicians spouting about God,” this nothing was an essential point, maybe the essential point. He remains as much a rational atheist as his nineteen-year-old hero. And while he has a warm appreciation for what he gained on an American college campus in the fifties—a solid education, lifelong friends—the social and sexual mores of the era is a subject that has yet to exhaust his indignation. (He sent a copy of Indignation to the woman he credits with “the only blowjob performed at Bucknell between 1950 and 1954.” Roth says that he himself was flabbergasted, at the time—“This wasn’t even on my list of fantasies”—and the girl, appalled at what she’d done, refused to go out with him again. More than half a century later, she replied with a gracious letter about her knee operation and her granddaughter, and reminded him that on their first date he had told her to read Thomas Wolfe.) A concluding “Historical Note,” a single paragraph long, relates that, twenty years after Marcus’s death, as a result of the student movement of th
e sixties, “virtually all the strictures and parietal rules regulating student conduct,” including mandatory chapel, were eliminated at Winesburg. If it’s possible to intensify a sense of nothing—of futility, of the sheer randomness of fate—Roth does it here.

  * * *

  Even after he finished Indignation, Roth was feeling discontented, because he was having trouble getting something new under way. (“How long can you go without working on a book?” I asked him at the time. “Psychologically,” he replied, “about two hours.”) With shorter books, the gaps between were getting more frequent (“I hate the void”), and it was ever harder to summon the energy needed to start anew. He returned to the pages he’d written about a failing actor that he had put aside to write Everyman, and by late 2008 he had finished a very brief book, The Humbling, in which, for the first time in Roth’s work, the protagonist commits suicide. (Mickey Sabbath spends an entire book trying to do himself in, but he is too bound to life to carry out the deed.)

  It was a difficult time for Roth, with deaths and illnesses continuing to accumulate. William Styron, a close friend for decades, died in November 2006. Roth’s brother, suffering a miserable array of illnesses, was in constant pain and not expected to live long. And in January 2009, John Updike died, at the age of seventy-six; he was precisely one year and one day older than Roth. They had started out nearly simultaneously: Goodbye, Columbus appeared the same year, 1959, as Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair. A decade later, they had profitably scandalized the country with Couples (1968) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). The two men had not talked in some ten years, however, since the falling-out over Claire Bloom’s book. Maybe, Roth says now, he was a little “too raw” in his feelings then. In any case, he feels Updike’s death as a serious loss—not so much personally but for the culture; he would like to have been able to read Updike on Obama, for example. In the weeks afterward, he speaks with great admiration about the way Updike spent his final months: “He was writing poetry!” Most impressive, he wrote a poem called “Spirit of ’76” for what turned out to be his final birthday. (“Be with me, words, a little longer…”) “Not complaining or whining in the end,” Roth says, “but writing.” One day that winter, I asked Roth if he regretted having let so many years go by without resuming contact, and he replied, without elaboration, “Yes.”

  Not that they were ever close. Rather, they were what Roth calls “friends at a distance,” a description that seems to fit Updike’s sense of the relationship, too. (Asked if he and Roth were friends, in an interview in London’s Telegraph just months before he died, Updike reportedly gave a cryptic smile and answered, “Guardedly.”) They were mutual admirers, wary competitors who were thrilled to have each other in the world to up their game: Picasso and Matisse. That’s a very loose analogy, in which Roth would have to be Picasso—the energy, the slashing power—and Updike would be Matisse: the color, the sensuality. (Roth calls Updike the only American writer who ever approached the guiltless sensuality of Colette—a tremendous tribute.) The essential difference in their perspectives isn’t so much Christian versus Jewish, or believer versus nonbeliever, or small town versus city, although it involves all of these. As writers, their greatest virtues seem to arise from different principal organs of perception, which might be crudely categorized as the eye and the ear. Updike was a painter in words—he studied art for a year at Oxford—although the bleak loneliness of his vision is often closer to Hopper than to Matisse. Roth is the master of voices: the arguments, the joking, the hysterical exchanges, the inner wrangling even when a character is alone, the sound of a mind at work. There’s not a page by one that could be mistaken for a page by the other. But they are united in having spent a lifetime possessed by America. To go from Rabbit Angstrom to Nathan Zuckerman is, literally, to go from A to Z in the history of the country in the years after the Second World War—the years in which, as Roth has said, “America discovered itself as America.”

  The day that I asked Roth about regrets, he was reminiscing about times he had spent with Updike and other friends on Martha’s Vineyard in the sixties, arguing about the war. Updike wrote in some detail about those arguments—first, transformed into fiction in Rabbit Redux (1971), and then in his memoir, Self-Consciousness, published in 1989. In the memoir, Roth is portrayed as “on the dizzying verge of publishing ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’” and as looking “puzzled” by Updike’s defense of “Johnson and his pitiful ineffective war machine.” At pains to understand his now embarrassing hawkishness, Updike recalls his revulsion at the anti-war extremists of the era, particularly “the totalitarian intolerance and savagery epitomized by the Weathermen.” For years, he carried in his wallet a slip of paper printed with a Weathermen slogan, the same lines (with small grammatical changes) that Merry Levov puts up on her wall: “We are against everything that’s good and decent in honky America. We will loot, burn, and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.” Broadening the subject to the morality of war, Updike notes that some religious systems recognize that merely to be alive is to kill: “The Jains try to hide this by wearing gauze masks to avoid inhaling insects.” It’s a startling conjunction of subjects: Roth, the Weathermen, and the Jains, all within six pages, published about five years before Roth began American Pastoral. It’s hard not to see the tiny seed of Merry’s terrible development here, and certainly it doesn’t detract from Roth’s monumental fictional construct to say so, or from the details that give it life: wretched Merry, in order to “do no harm to the microscopic organisms that dwell in the air,” makes a mask from the foot of an old stocking. Yet it seems that Roth and Updike had a nourishing exchange, even from a distance.

  Updike, who didn’t review any of Roth’s books after Operation Shylock, confessed his competitiveness in the Telegraph interview, implying that he felt it especially keenly at the time—October 26, 2008—“since Philip really has the upper hand in the rivalry as far as I can tell.” It had not always been so. “I think in a list of admirable novelists there was a time when I might have been near the top, just tucked under Bellow,” he went on. But it seemed to him that Roth’s reputation had advanced, and that Roth “seems more dedicated in a way to the act of writing as a means of really reshaping the world to your liking.” Whether this is meant as a virtue or a fault is not entirely clear. He admits that he has not read everything but considers himself “more of a partisan of the earlier books than the later.” Still, Roth has been “very good to have around.” One senses the earth-moving, bone-grinding effort behind this kind of lifelong production when Updike explains that, after fifty years of writing, he has recently begun to work on Sundays (it had been his only day off, “as a churchgoer”) and then describes Roth as “scarily devoted to the novelist’s craft.”

  For Roth, Updike’s finest works are the third and fourth Rabbit books—Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest—and the early stories. (Like Updike, he doesn’t claim to have read everything.) The books he likes least—“If he were here,” Roth remarks, “he would say, ‘Of course you do’”—are the ones about the Jewish writer Henry Bech. (“He puts all of his writing experiences into the life of this Jewish writer,” Roth says, in his Web of Stories interview. “I’m not convinced.”) But Roth is a tremendous admirer of Updike’s whole career: the fortitude, the industry, the sentences, the fluency—the “gush of prose” that he believes Updike (like Bellow) had at his command. “I don’t have the gush of prose,” Roth tells me. “I have the gush of invention, dialogue, event … but not of prose.” It’s a distinction he seems to have thought about carefully. “Many days I was delighted to accept one page after six hours of work. On days when I’d have four or five pages they would not be fluent, and I’d have to spend four or five days working on them.”

  A listener must be careful not to take the mood of a moment as a sign of settled judgment; on other occasions, Roth describes the writing of some of his books—Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral—as an “outpouring.” But ultimately
he is serious about how hard he works for what he gets and how different his process has been from Updike’s or Bellow’s. On the wall of his Connecticut studio, he keeps a chart of the alphabet, “to remind myself that it’s only the alphabet, stupid—it’s just the letters that you know and they make words.” Still, he says, “I have to fight for my fluency, every paragraph, every sentence.” And then he sits back and imagines a series of books he might have written in the Updike manner—Rabbi, Run; Rabbi Redux; Rabbi Is Rich—and he roars with laughter.

  * * *

  There would have been little question about the winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2009 if Updike had not died two months before the committee met. The award, given to “a distinguished living American author whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which places him or her in the highest rank of American literature,” was established by PEN and funded, in Bellow’s honor, by private donors. It had been given for the first time in 2007, two years after Bellow’s death, to Philip Roth. And because of the way the award is administered, Roth was part of the very small committee (along with Benjamin Taylor, then editing the Bellow letters, and me) assigned to determine the second winner. Roth takes this award very seriously. The fact that it’s in Bellow’s name is important to him. There was also the matter of some recent, stinging comments from the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, criticizing the entire field of American writers as “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” and denouncing the culture itself as “too isolated, too insular” to allow for a role in “the big dialogue of literature.” Roth was understandably incensed by the remarks. During committee meetings, he talks about how many great American writers there are and have been, saying, “It’s amazing, in the company, that one can write at all.” But he has never been much troubled by competition. The only real competitor of his generation, he says, was Mailer, who took his attitude from Hemingway. And, by the way—we are off and running now—he says he is immensely pleased to have discovered the word “papaphobia” in the thesaurus, when he was looking up “evil.” It means “fear of the pope,” although he likes the idea that it might also be used to mean “fear of Hemingway.”