Shop Talk

by Philip Roth

  O'Brien: Yes, certain things have been changed for the better—women are not chattel, they express their right to earn as much as men, to be respected, not to be "the second sex"—but in the mating area things have not changed. Attraction and sexual love are spurred not by consciousness but by instinct and passion, and in this men and women are radically different. The man still has the greater authority and the greater autonomy. It's biological. The woman's fate is to receive the sperm and to retain it, but the man's is to give it and in the giving he spends himself and then subsequently withdraws. While she is in a sense being fed, he is in the opposite sense being drained, and to resuscitate himself he takes temporary flight. As a result, you get the woman's resentment at being abandoned, however briefly; his guilt at going; and, above all, his innate sense of self-protection in order to refind himself so as to reaffirm himself. Closeness is therefore always only relative. A man may help with the dishes and so forth, but his commitment is more ambiguous and he has a roving eye.

  Roth: Are there no women as promiscuous?

  O'Brien: They sometimes are but it doesn't give them the same sense of achievement. A woman, I dare to say, is capable of a deeper and more lasting love. I would also add that a woman is more afraid of being left. That still stands. Go into any women's canteen, dress department, hairdresser's, gymnasium, and you will see plenty of desperation and plenty of competition. People utter a lot of slogans but they are only slogans and what we feel and do is what determines us. Women are no more secure in their emotions than they ever were. They simply are better at coming to terms with them. The only real security would be to turn away from men, to detach, but that would be a little death—at least for me it would.

  Roth: Why do you write so many love stories? Is it because of the importance of the subject or because, like many others in our profession, once you grew up and left home and chose the solitary life of a writer, sexual love inevitably became the strongest sphere of experience to which you continued to have access?

  O'Brien: First of all, I think love replaced religion for me in my sense of fervor. When I began to look for earthly love (i.e., sex), I felt that I was cutting myself off from God. By taking on the mantle of religion, sex assumed proportions that are rather far-fetched. It became the central thing in my life, the goal. I was very prone to the Heathcliff/Mr. Rochester syndrome and still am. The sexual excitement was to a great extent linked with pain and separation. My sexual life is pivotal to me, as I believe it is for everyone else. It takes up a lot of time both in the thinking and in the doing, the former often taking pride of place. For me, primarily, it is secretive and contains elements of mystery and plunder. My daily life and my sexual life are not of a whole—they are separated. Part of my Irish heritage!

  Roth: What's most difficult about being both a woman and a writer? Are there difficulties you have writing as a woman that I don't have as a man? And do you imagine that there might be difficulties I have that you don't?

  O'Brien: I think it is different being a man and being a woman—it is very different. I think you as a man have waiting for you in the wings of the world a whole cortege of women—potential wives, mistresses, muses, nurses. Women writers do not have that bonus. The examples are numerous: the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Carson Mc-Cullers, Flannery O'Connor, Emily Dickinson, Marina Tsvetayeva. I think it was Dashiell Hammett who said he wouldn't want to live with a woman who had more problems than he had. I think the signals men get from me alarm them.

  Roth: You will have to find a Leonard Woolf.

  O'Brien: I do not want a Leonard Woolf. I want Lord Byron and Leonard Woolf mixed in together.

  Roth: But does the job fundamentally come down to the same difficulties then, regardless of gender?

  O'Brien: Absolutely. There is no difference at all. You, like me, are trying to make something out of nothing and the anxiety is extreme. Flaubert's description of his room echoing with curses and cries of distress could be any writer's room. Yet I doubt that we would welcome an alternative life. There is something stoical about soldiering on all alone.

  An Exchange with Mary McCarthy

  141 rue de Rennes

  75006 Paris

  January 11, 1987

  Dear Philip:

  Thank you for sending me your book [The Counterlife], which I started reading with excitement and enthusiasm that continued to mount through the section in Israel and the El Al part, too, but that left me in England at Christmastime, not to return, and I don't know why exactly. Perhaps you have a better guess than I. It is probably never wise to give an author a negative or "qualified" opinion of his book, but I am moved to do so because I liked your last book, all the parts of it, very, very much and I guess because I assumed that if you sent me your book it was because you were interested in my opinion of it.

  So I will try to say what I think. The high point, for me, was the Hebron chapter, brilliant in every way and laying the whole problem—Israel—out with honesty and clarity. As I read, I kept contrasting it with an imaginary novel by Bellow. I also liked the earlier, dentist's office parts, the bifurcation of the Zuckerman figure, and the independent existence, like an angleworm's, achieved by the separate pieces. It seems to me a pity that this idea (unless I failed to understand) seems to have been lost sight of in Gloucestershire and Christendom, which, on their own, wearied me. With what feels to me like pathology—a severe case of anti-anti-semitism.

  I remember Philip Rahv saying that all Gentiles, without exception, were anti-semitic. If so, that is an awful problem for a Jewish novelist who wants to have Gentile characters in his work. Maybe the English sections of The Counterlife won't offend Jewish readers, but they irritated and offended. I'm not a Christian (I don't believe in God), but to the extent that I am and can't help being (just as a "nice Jewish boy" can't help being Jewish), I bridle at your picture of Christianity. There's more to Christmas, that is, to the idea of the Incarnation, than Jew-hatred. True, I've sometimes thought that all our Christmas-caroling must be offensive to non-sharers in the bliss of that wondrous occasion. But perhaps non-sharers, those outside the Law, can get the general idea or try to, as I hope I would try to get the idea of the Wailing Wall, repellent as it is to me, if I were taken to it. And I confess that the crib with angels and animals and a star is to me a more sympathetic idea than the Wailing Wall; as a non-believer, I greatly prefer it. The residual Christian in me probably looks forward happily to the millennium and the conversion of the Jews, including Philip Roth. Philip Rahv too.

  Then all that circumcision business. Why so excited about making a child a Jew by taking a knife to him? I have nothing against circumcision; the men of my generation were all circumcised—a de rigueur pediatric procedure—and my son's generation, too. It must have been Freudian influences somehow that in the Forties persuaded educated people that circumcision was a superstition (I even heard it called a dirty Jewish superstition) which robbed the male of full sexual enjoyment in the pretended interest of hygiene. So then it became unchic to have a baby boy circumcised. Religion did not enter into any of this, any more than it did into the breast-feeding, anti-breast-feeding discussion. And if Nathan Zuckerman isn't a believing Jew, why is he so hung up on this issue?

  Forgive me if all this is disagreeable to you. It is strange to me that The Counterlife should remind me so forcibly that I am a Christian whatever I choose to imagine. The last time in my adult life that I felt anything like that was in Hanoi in 1968 with U.S. bombers overhead when I reacted, in the privacy of my thoughts, against the Marxist-Buddhist orthodoxy that I felt in the local leaders.

  I am sorry that we never got together with Leon [Botstein] this past fall. Next year, I hope. I last saw him at a Christmas-carol singing, just before we flew back here.

  Happy New Year, sincerely,

  Mary

  15 Fawcett St.

  London SW10

  January 17, 1987

  Dear Mary:

  Thanks for writing at such length about
the book. Of course I would want to know what you thought and that is indeed why I sent you the book, and I'm delighted that you have been so candid with me.

  To begin with, it sounds as though you were held by an awful lot of it, virtually everything up to the last two chapters. I won't go into a discussion of why the structural idea was not abandoned in the last two chapters but in fact sealed and reinforced, since I think that would take too long and probably sound like a lecture, which I don't intend to deliver to you, of all people.

  I happen to be known (to Jews) for having "a severe case of anti-anti-Semitism," as you claim to have yourself, as does Zuckerman. I think here all these issues seem to have struck you outside the narrative context and the thematic preoccupations of the book.

  Let me take up your points one at a time.

  1. Rahv's statement that all Gentiles are anti-Semitic. This is, of course, exactly what Zuckerman hears at Agor [a Jewish settlement on Israel's West Bank]. He is hardly sympathetic to that assertion. How could he have married Maria Freshfield if he were? Though that's the least of it: it simply runs counter to his experience, period. The irony, it seemed to me, was that, having been exposed to a kind of rhetoric he finds profoundly unpersuasive, he then comes back to London and runs smack into Maria's sister, her hymn of [anti-Semitic] hate, and her insinuations about [the anti-Semitism of] Maria's mother. There is then the [anti-Semitic] incident at the restaurant and the conversation with Maria [about English anti-Semitism] that gets so hopelessly out of hand. None of this is evidence that all Gentiles are anti-Semitic. But it does force Zuckerman—the very same fellow so skeptical, to put it mildly, of Lippman's [Agor] manifesto—to have to deal with a phenomenon previously unknown to him, though hardly unknown in the world (or in England, for that matter). I wanted him astonished, caught off-balance, educated. I wanted him threatened with the loss of this woman he adores because of this stinking, hideous old problem that seems to have turned up right at the heart of the family into which he has married. Truly, I don't see what there is to be offended by there, and maybe it wasn't this that offended and irritated you.

  2. "There's more to Christmas, that is, to the idea of the Incarnation, than Jew-hatred." But Zuckerman doesn't say there isn't. He does, however, articulate (for the first time anywhere in fiction, as far as I know) how many a Jew happens to feel when confronted with this stuff. Whether justified or not, he is mildly affronted, and what he says is not quite what you suggest he says. "But between me and church devotion [not the Incarnation] there is an unbridgeable world of feeling, a natural and thoroughgoing incompatibility—I have the emotions of a spy in the adversary's camp and feel I'm overseeing the very rites that embody the ideology that's been responsible for the persecution and mistreatment of Jews ... I just find the religion ... profoundly inappropriate, and never more so than when the congregants are observing the highest standards of liturgical decorum and the clerics most beautifully enunciating the doctrine of love." (I've added the italics.) Now, you may not think such reasoning is sound, but that even an intelligent Jew is capable of reasoning in just that way is a fact. I was trying to be truthful.

  3. "...as a non-believer, I greatly prefer it," you say, meaning "the crib with angels and animals and a star" to "the Wailing Wall." That is again where you and Zuckerman part company. As a non-believer, he prefers neither. He finds little to recommend the sanctification of either set of icons or symbols or whatever they all are taken together. Furthermore, Zuckerman behaves beautifully at the carol service and therefore looks at least as you might look at the Wailing Wall, where you say you would try to get the idea, repellent as it is to you. I think you have—a word I hate—overreacted to these few observations, which he himself knows are determined by his Jewishness and nothing more. "Yet, Jewishly, I still thought, what do they need all this stuff for?" His objections really are aesthetic, aren't they? "Though frankly I've always felt that the place where Christianity gets dangerously, vulgarly obsessed with the miraculous is Easter, the Nativity has always struck me as a close second to the Resurrection in nakedly addressing the most childish need." You say you bridle at my picture of Christianity, and if you bridle at this, so be it. But you do see it has nothing to do, or not much to do, with "Jew-hatred."

  Now to speak only as a novelist (which I am far more than I am a Jew). If Zuckerman hadn't gone to [Agor in] Judea and heard what he heard there I would never have had this scene in the church or have had him think these thoughts. But it seemed to me only fair that—no, I don't mean that: it seemed to me simply that the one scene called forth the other. I didn't want all his skepticism focused on Jewish ritual and none of it on Christian. That would have had all the wrong implications and made him see what he is not, and that is a self-hating Jew who—to borrow a phrase—casts a cold eye only on his own.

  4. "Why so excited about making a child a Jew by taking a knife to him?" Context, context, context. This is his response, his aggressive and angry response, to the suggestion that his child will have to be christened in order to please Maria's mother. The paean to circumcision arises out of that threat. If you won't listen to me on this subject, listen to Maria. In her letter (written in fact by Z., but that subject I'm not going into) she writes, "If it's this that establishes for you the truth of your paternity—that regains for you the truth of your own paternity—so be it." Here I was thinking thoughts that the reader can hardly be expected to follow. I was thinking about Zuckerman and his own father, and the word bastard that the old man Zuckerman [in Zuckerman Unbound] whispers to Nathan from his deathbed. The circumcision of little English-American Z. is big American Z. settling that issue at last. That is my business, I suppose, but it figured in the thing.

  I think you also fail to see how serious this circumcision business is to Jews. I am still hypnotized by uncircumcised men when I see them at my swimming pool locker room [in London]. The damn thing never goes unregistered. Most Jewish men I know have similar reactions, and when I was writing the book, I asked several of my equally secular Jewish male friends if they could have an uncircumcised son, and they all said no, sometimes without having to think about it and sometimes after the nice long pause that any rationalist takes before opting for the irrational. Why is N.Z. hung up on circumcision? I hope that's clearer now.

  5. "Forgive me if all this is disagreeable to you." I would have had to forgive you if you had been "agreeable."

  Yours,

  Philip

  Pictures of Malamud

  "Mourning is a hard business," Cesare said. "If people knew, there'd be less death."

  —From Malamud's "Life Is Better Than Death"

  [1986]

  In February 1961 I traveled west from Iowa City, where I was teaching in the Writers' Workshop of the university and finishing a second book, to give a lecture at a small community college in Monmouth, Oregon. A buddy from my graduate school days was teaching there and had arranged the invitation. I accepted not only because of the opportunity the trip afforded me to see, for the first time in five years, my friends the Bakers, but because Bob Baker promised that if I came he'd arrange for me to meet Bernard Malamud.

  Bern taught nearby at the state university in Corvallis. He'd been in Corvallis, Oregon (pop. 15,000), since leaving New York (pop. 8,000,000) and a night-school teaching job there in 1949—twelve years in the Far West instructing freshmen in the fundamentals of English composition and writing the unorthodox baseball novel The Natural; his masterpiece set in darkest Brooklyn, The Assistant; as well as four or five of the best American short stories I'd ever read (or I ever will). The other stories weren't bad either.

  In the early fifties I was reading Malamud's stories, later collected in The Magic Barrel, as they appeared—the day they appeared—in Partisan Review and the old Commentary. He seemed to me to be doing no less for his lonely Jews and their peculiarly immigrant, Jewish forms of failure—for those Malamudians "who never stopped hurting"—than was Samuel Beckett, in his longer fiction, for misery-ridden
Molloy and Malone. Both writers, while bound imaginatively (though not communally) to the common life of the clan, severed racial memories from the larger social and historical setting and then, focusing as narrowly as they could on the dismal daily round of resistance borne by the most helpless of their landsmen, created parables of frustration steeped in the gravity of the grimmest philosophers.

  Not unlike Beckett, Malamud wrote of a meager world of pain in a language all his own, an English that appeared, even apart from the idiosyncratic dialogue, to have been pulled out of what one might have thought would be the most unmagical barrel around—the locutions, inversions, and diction of Jewish immigrant speech, a heap of broken verbal bones that looked, until he came along and made them dance to his sad tune, to be of use no longer to anyone other than a Borscht Belt comic or a professional nostalgist. Even when he pushed his parable prose to its limits, Malamud's metaphors retained a proverbial ring. At his most consciously original, when he sensed in his grimly told, impassioned tales the moment to sound his deepest note, he remained fixed to what seemed old and homely, emitting the most unadorned poetry to make matters even sadder than they already were: "He tried to say some sweet thing but his tongue hung in his mouth like dead fruit on a tree, and his heart was a black-painted window."

  The forty-six-year-old man whom I met at the Bakers' little house in Monmouth, Oregon, in 1961 never let on that he could have written that or any such line. At first glance Bern looked to someone who'd grown up among such people like nothing so much as an insurance agent—he could have passed for one of my father's colleagues at the district office of Metropolitan Life. When Malamud entered the Bakers' hallway after having attended my lecture, when he stood there on the welcome mat removing his wet overshoes, I saw a conscientious, courteous workingman of the kind whose kibitzing and conversation had been the background music of my childhood, a stubborn, seasoned life insurance salesman who does not flee the snarling dog or alarm the children when he appears after dark at the top of the tenement stairwell. He doesn't frighten anyone but he doesn't make the place light up with laughter either: he is, after all, the insurance man, whom you can only beat by dying.