In Rough Country

by Joyce Carol Oates

  [The people of Florence] did not deserve him…The pain that had coursed through his body was not pain but knowledge. It was an educational pain followed by confession followed by death. The people had wanted his death, or at least had not cared if he lived or died. In the city that gave the world the idea of the value and freedom of the individual soul they had not valued him…

  An old man at forty-four yet Machiavelli too falls under the predictably hypnotic spell of Qara Koz and experiences a temporary respite from his gloom; when the Mughal princess departs Florence, his depression returns. In the wan hope of regaining favor at court Machiavelli immerses himself into “his little mirror-of-princes piece, such a dark mirror that even he feared it might not be liked” this is The Prince, though Rushdie doesn’t name it, and the year must be about 1518; Machiavelli would die in 1527.

  Though The Enchantress of Florence includes a densely printed six-page bibliography of historical books and articles and is being described as an “historical” novel, readers in expectation of a conventional “historical novel” should be forewarned: this is “history” jubilantly mixed with post-modernist magic realism. The veteran performer-author is too playful and too much the exuberant stylist to incorporate much of deadpan “reality” into his ever-shifting, ever-teasing narrative of the power of enchantment of cultural opposites: “We are their dream…and they are ours.”

  PHILIP ROTH’S TRAGIC JOKES

  The landscape of Philip Roth’s America is a familiar one—mostly urban New Jersey and New York City, more recently suburban or semi-rural Connecticut. Yet, as in some of those eerie paintings of Eric Fischl in which the real is permeated by the surreal, especially where adolescent males are involved, the landscape is honeycombed with land mines and to traverse it is to enter a realm of peril. In this world outside the close-knit family unit “the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences”—as the increasingly deranged father of Roth’s Indignation (2008) warns his nineteen-year-old son Marcus. As in a 1950s American recrudescence of Old-Testament biblical foreboding, it’s the male issue that is most at risk for Jews, for hasn’t Mr. Messner the kosher butcher been warned by his friend Pearlgreen the plumber: “Mark my words, Messner: the world is waiting, it’s licking its chops, to take your boy away.” At its high-pitched mock-hysterical climax Indignation expands its focus to take in the riveting political oratory of an Ohio politician in his guise as the president of a small liberal arts college wonderfully named Winesburg College, in whose fury at the transgressions of undergraduate boys caught up in the frenzy of a panty raid there is struck the note of 1950s Cold War America, the very font of comic-patriotic paranoia:

  We as a nation are facing the distinct possibility of an atomic war with the Soviet Union, all the while the men of Winesburg College are conducting their derring-do raids on the dresser drawers of [their female classmates]…How’s it going to serve you when a thousand screaming Chinese soldiers come swarming down on you in your foxhole, should these negotiations in Korea break down?

  In Roth’s earlier novel of counter-factual America The Plot Against America (2004) this alarming prophetic note is struck in its opening passage:

  Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.

  (Here is a bold opening worthy of Franz Kafka whose “The Metamorphosis” famously declared its young male protagonist changed overnight into a gigantic beetle—another inspired variant upon a joke.) If the proposition at the heart of The Plot Against America is something like a joke—that aviation hero/Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh is elected in a “landslide victory” over Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election—it quickly becomes a menacing joke as young Jews begin to be recruited, so to speak, under the auspices of a federal program called “Just Folks”—a creation of Lindbergh’s newly created Office of American Absorption as a “volunteer work program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life”—and at last a tragic joke, a nightmare-joke as “resisting” Jews are killed by patriotic “just folks” and the rightward-leaning United States prepares to enter into what will be World War II not on the side of England and En gland’s allies but on the side of Hitler and Hitler’s allies, Italy and Japan. Indeed, there may be war with Canada. FDR is “detained” along with so-called Roosevelt Jews and rabbis are arrested in the frenzied months before, as Roth’s narrator Philip informs us in a hurried aside in the last chapter, Lindbergh’s politics are discredited and Roosevelt is back in the White House.

  At the heart of The Human Stain (2001) is the joke as exemplum: a joke of the most absurd “political correctness” in the context of the media hysteria of 1998 when President Bill Clinton was vilified for months as an adulterer and as a liar in contempt of court in his disclaimer of having had no “sexual relations” with the twenty-one-year-old White House aide Monica Lewinsky; this “time of nausea” as Roth’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman describes it. As in The Plot Against America, “some sort of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered, ‘Why are we so crazy?’” but here, in the late 1990s, the craziness isn’t right-wing Nazi fanaticism but a leftist tyranny of manners in which the most casual, innocent, and utterly trivial of remarks can bring down an academician as distinguished as Coleman Silk—lovely name for a very suave man!!—who’d been “one of the first of the Jews permitted to teach in a classics department anywhere in America” and, more notably, “the first and only Jew to ever serve as a dean of the faculty at Athena College”—a small prestigious New England college not unlike Amherst. Allegedly, the incident is based upon an actual “political correctness” case investigated at Princeton University in the 1990s, though this fact, if it is a fact, has not been verified by the author, nor should it be; the incident is exemplary, illustrative of the shibboleths of the era:

  It was about midway into [the] second semester that Coleman spoke the self-incriminating word that would cause him voluntarily to sever all ties to the college—the single self-incriminating word of the many millions spoken aloud in his years of teaching and administering at Athena…

  The class consisted of fourteen students. Coleman had taken attendance at the beginning of the first several lectures so as to learn their names. As there were still two names that failed to elicit a response by the fifth week…Coleman opened the session by asking, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”

  As Coleman utters the word “spooks”—in a mangled interpretation a racist insult directed at the two students who happened to be not only absent but black—his fate is determined: he is vilified as a racist at the college by a majority of students and his enemies among the faculty, so excessively that his sixty-four-year-old wife Iris dies of a cerebral hemorrhage—the joke as curse. In Zuckerman’s eyes “political correctness” is risible—ridiculous—even as, like the “Just Folks” patriots of The Plot Against America, it is deadly serious, and dangerous. Even Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), for many readers the most famous of Roth’s novels and very likely recalled as a protracted adolescent joke of obsessive-compulsive sexual behavior, is, in essence, a desperate plea for help; a frantic confession to a (faceless) psychoanalyst; a candid acknowledgment of, not sexual potency, but sexual impotence; though an adult, eager to lead an adult life, Alex Portnoy is never other than Mrs. Portnoy’s son.

  More clearly the “Tricky Dick” narrator of Our Gang (1971)—the weasely master of hypocrisy President Richard Nixon—is an extended, boldly orchestrated joke, as The Great American Novel (1973), a chronicle of the misadventures of a 1940s professional baseball team that has been expunged from baseball history, is a joke of another, less portentous kind, in the playful 1970s mode of Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. In an abashed echo of Kafka the hapless narrator of The Breast (1972) c
an describe himself—his altered self—in pseudo-scientific terms that strike a note of pure wacky jokiness, absurdity:

  I am a breast. A phenomenon that has been variously described to me as “a massive hormonal influx,” “an endocrinopathic catastrophe,” and/or “a hermaphroditic explosion of chromosomes” took place within my body between midnight and 4 A.M. on February 1971 and converted me into a mammary gland disconnected from any human form…They tell me that I am now an organism with the general shape of a football, or a dirigible; I am said to be of spongy consistency, weighing one hundred fifty pounds…and measuring, still, six feet in length. [I am a] breast of the mammalian female.

  My Life as a Man (1974) and The Professor of Desire (1977) are memoirist fictions of the utmost seeming sincerity, narrated by young male writers resembling Roth in salient ways; here, if there are jokes, they are not so much nightmare-jokes as riddles. In My Life as a Man the novelist Peter Tarnopol is confounded by his ill-advised marriage to a “rough” young woman named Maureen and his musings upon the nature of male-female relations are as funny as anything in Roth, though underscored by gravity verging upon despair:

  Unattached and on her own (in the 1950s), a woman was supposedly not even able to go to the movies or out to a restaurant by herself, let alone perform an appendectomy or drive a truck. It was up to us then to give them the value and the purpose that society at large withheld—by marrying them. If we didn’t marry women, who would? Ours, alas, was the only sex available for the job: the draft was on.

  Peter Tarnopol, a reader of serious literature—Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Gustave Flaubert—dismisses mere happiness with a woman in favor of something more demanding and problematic, thus more “literary”—

  What I liked…was something taxing in my love affairs, something problematical and puzzling to keep the imagination going… I liked most being with young women who gave me something to think about…

  So Maureen was a rough customer—I thought about that. I wondered if I was “up”—nice word—to someone with her history and determination.

  Tarnopol is devastated by both the wreck of his marriage and his stupidity in entering into it; his inability to cope with married life, and his failure to comprehend how he’d come to such a pass at the age of twenty-six. A year previously

  I would have laughed had anyone suggested that struggling with a woman over a marriage would come to occupy me in the way that exploring the South Pole had occupied Admiral Byrd—or writing Madame Bovary had occupied Flaubert.

  Maureen is a seasoned liar, outrageous, funny, disarming; the reader perceives her helplessness and desperation even as her slightly younger husband Tarnopol, fuming like a TV situation-comedy husband, is deceived by the ways in which she inventively casts herself as a “victim”—Maureen is a would-be actress, after all. She’s provocative, and Tarnopol is a foil to be provoked. Roth gives Maureen the most dramatic crises:

  “Do it! Kill me! Some man’s going to—why not a ‘civilized’ one like you! Why not a follower of Flaubert!” Here she collapsed against me, and with her arms around my neck, began to sob. “Oh, Peter, I don’t have anything. Nothing at all. I’m really lost, baby…”

  Shrewd Maureen takes advantage of Tarnopol’s naiveté by pretending to be pregnant; she knows how to play upon his sympathies as a “civilized” person even as she funnily berates him:

  “I’ve taken enough from men like you in my life! You’re going to marry me or I’m going to kill myself! And I will do it…This is no idle threat, Peter—I cannot take you people any more! You selfish, spoiled, immature, irresponsible Ivy League bastards, born with those spoons in your mouths…With your big fat advance and your high Art—oh, you make me sick the way you hide from life behind that Art of yours! I hate you and I hate that fucking Flaubert, and you are going to marry me, Peter, because I have had enough!”

  In true literary fashion, Tarnopol berates himself: “I could not be the cause of another’s death. Such a suicide was murder. So I would marry her instead”—though in fact he hates her, having been “blackmailed, threatened, and terrorized” by her.

  Yes, it was indeed one of those grim and unyielding predicaments such as I had read about in fiction, such as Thomas Mann…“All actuality is deadly earnest, and it is mortality itself that, one with life, forbids us to be true to the guileless unrealism of our youth.”

  It seemed then that I was making one of those moral decisions that I had heard so much about in college literary courses. But how different it all had been up there in the Ivy League, when it was happening to Lord Jim and Kate Croy and Ivan Karamazov instead of to me. Oh, what an authority on dilemmas I had been in the senior honors seminar!…I expected to find in everyday experience that same sense of the difficult and the deadly earnest that informed the novels I admired most. My model of reality, deduced from reading the masters, had at its heart intractability.

  In Maureen, who is pure intractability, the aspiring young literary man is overmatched: reduced to a “twenty-six-year-old baby boy.”

  But it’s in Indignation that the tragic joke is most evident, and most devastating. Roth has so constructed this short, deftly narrated novel that the background of the Korean War is always evident yet in a way invisible, like scenery—it’s the petty, vexing concerns of Marcus Messner that preoccupy him as a transfer student to Winesburg College where, like an undergraduate Everyman, inappropriately serious, devoted to his studies, unwilling to compromise his beliefs, a young man of unusual integrity, he’s exploited by his roommates and abused as a waiter—“More than a few times during the first weeks, I thought I heard myself being summoned to one of the rowdier tables with the words, ‘Hey, Jew! Over here!’ But, preferring to believe the words spoken had been simply, ‘Hey, you! Over here!’ I persisted with my duties.” Despite his high intelligence and his wish to graduate as valedictorian of his class and enter law school—his wish to please his father, for whom he has such ambivalent feelings—Marcus makes one comical blunder after another at folksy Winesburg; he is literally if obliquely done in by failing to satisfy the college’s compulsory chapel attendance. Expelled from college, Marcus is vulnerable to the draft and within a few breathless paragraphs he has been killed in Korea, along with one hundred eighty-eight young men, out of two hundred, in his company. After our intimacy with Marcus, the cruel abruptness with which his life ends is jarring, distressing. The entire text of Indignation has been a lament, or a rant; in a featureless nether world resembling the Hades of antiquity, though without the comfort of fellow ghosts of that Hades, Marcus Messner cries out forlornly for his father, his mother, his girlfriend; he berates himself—“If only he had gone to chapel!”

  A PHOTOGRAPHER’S LIVES: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

  Annie Leibovitz

  A Photographer’s Life

  1990–2005

  All photographs are memento mori.

  —SUSAN SONTAG, ON PHOTOGRAPHY

  Ours is an age of memoir—inevitably, faux-memoir: the highly selective and enhanced employment of “historic” individuals, events, and settings in the creation of a text; or, in the case of Annie Leibovitz’s massive A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005, a text with photographs arranged to suggest an elegiac narrative of loss, rebirth, and spiritual transcendence. After the death in December 2004—as depicted here in harrowing, painfully graphic images some observers may find offensive, not an easy death—of her longtime companion Susan Sontag, Leibovitz set herself the task of compiling photographs for a memorial book which gradually evolved into a larger memoir of the previous fifteen years of the photographer’s life: “Going through my pictures to put this book together was like being on an archaelogical dig,” Leibovitz says in her introduction. Initially, the memoir was going to include only personal photographs, encompassing the lingering illnesses and deaths of Sontag and of Samuel Leibovitz, the photographer’s father who died in January 2005, but the project grew in size, scope, and ambition, to include highly stylized commercial work origi
nally commissioned by such glossy publications as Condé Nast Traveler, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. As if to defend herself against the charge of exploiting her commercial work, with its notable emphasis upon such media celebrities as Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, Johnny Depp and Kate Moss, to draw attention to the more modest personal material, Leibovitz has said: “I don’t have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.”

  In the Brooklyn Museum exhibit of 197 photographs, most but not all included in the book, the glitzy, theatrically staged celebrity portraits are showcased while the smaller, black-and-white personal photographs, many of Leibovitz’s extended family, are marginalized; the Brooklyn Museum poster for the exhibit is a reproduction of Leibovitz’s Vanity Fair photograph of Nicole Kidman as a Hollywood fantasy concoction, while the cover of the book consists of shadowy, somber, resolutely unglamorous photographs of Annie Leibovitz in repose, taken by Susan Sontag, and a sequence of mist-shrouded, unidentified landscapes. Where the Brooklyn Museum exhibit is high-decibel, self-aggrandizing, and frequently meretricious, the book is subdued, meditative, and intimate; where the museum exhibit is aggressively glamorous, the book yields small, subtle moments of humanity, particularly in close-ups of the photographer’s parents who emerge as distinct and admirable personalities. Though none of Leibovitz’s intensely personal photographs of individuals from her private life, including her three very young daughters Sarah, Susan, and Samuelle, rises to the level of the intimate memoirist art of Leibovitz’s contemporaries Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin (whose Ballad of Sexual Dependency would seem to have been a strong influence), nor to the level of Leibovitz’s friend and mentor Richard Avedon (whose photographs of his dying father have become classics of twentieth-century photography), yet these are poignant and touching, as they are resolutely unpretentious, “pictures” of ordinary life.