Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  Do you remember Charlie Chaplin and Jack Oakie as Hitler and Mussolini in The Great Dictator? Well, in their performances there’s something, too, of the flavor I hoped to get into the more outlandish sections of Our Gang.

  All I’m saying, of course, is that the level of comedy in Our Gang isn’t exactly what it is in Pride and Prejudice—in case anybody should fail to notice. Our Gang is out to destroy the protective armor of “dignity” that shields anyone in an office as high and powerful as the Presidency. It was no accident, for instance, that President Nixon took it into his head a few years ago to tart up the White House police staff in the imperial garb of Junkers out of The Student Prince. He knows better than anybody how much he needs all the trappings of dignified authority—or authoritarian dignity. But rather than accept his “official” estimate of himself, which we see for Mr. Nixon is very regal indeed, I prefer to place him in a baggy-pants burlesque skit. It seems to me more appropriate.

  Clearly, satire of this kind has no desire to be decorous. Decorum—and what hides behind it—is often just what it’s attacking. To ask a satirist to be in good taste is like asking a love poet to be less personal. Is The Satyricon in good taste? Is A Modest Proposal? Swift recommends the stewing, roasting, and fricasseeing of one-year-old children so as to unburden their impoverished parents and provide food for the meat-eating classes. How nasty and vulgar that must have seemed, even to many who shared his concern for Ireland’s misery. Imagine how this went down in polite society: “A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends; and when the Family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable Dish, and seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt will be very good Boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter.”

  Now that’s considered Literature. It’s called “Swiftian.” Back in 1729 it probably seemed, to a lot of Swift’s contemporaries, bad taste, and worse. Similarly, Rabelais is no longer an obscene writer who can’t resist a joke about feces, urine, or the apertures—four hundred years in the grave and he’s “Rabelaisian.” The trick, apparently, is to turn yourself from a proper noun into an adjective, and the best way to accomplish that is to die.

  Imagine if today you were to write a satire modeled upon Swift’s Modest Proposal about our “involvement”—nice euphemism, that—in Southeast Asia. As it turns out, under orders from Presidents Johnson and Nixon, our armed forces have been following Swift’s advice for some time now, boiling and fricasseeing the children in Vietnam and Laos, and lately roasting succulent Cambodian infants. Suppose someone were to propose in print to President Nixon that instead of killing these Asian children for no good reason, as we do now, we adopt a policy at once more practical and humane. Since statistics prove that x number of children are going to die anyway, why not slaughter them for food for the Vietnamese refugees? The proposal might be written in the style of the Pentagon Papers. This fellow named McNaughton could probably have drafted a first-rate contingency plan on how to barbecue with napalm, sprinkle with soy sauce, and serve—including a breakdown in Pentagonian percentage points of the various minimum daily vitamin requirements fulfilled by the liver, lungs, and brains of an Asian infant, when mixed with a bowl of rice.

  We can safely conclude that few American newspapers would rush to publish such a piece. “Swiftian” it is, if it’s about what Englishmen were doing to Irishmen in 1729; if, however, you were to employ similar means to indict our country for what it has done to the Vietnamese now—which is a thousand times more vicious than anything the British could hope to do in the eighteenth century with their limited arsenal of torture devices—you would find your satire unpublishable in most places because of bad taste.

  Which it is. All the works I’ve mentioned, by ordinary community standards, or whatever the legal phrase is to describe the lowest common denominator of social conformism, are in execrable taste. By ordinary community standards they are shocking—just in order to dislocate the reader and get him to view a familiar subject in ways he may be unwilling or unaccustomed to. You know how people taking offense will sometimes say, “Now, stop kidding around, this is serious.” But in satire it is by kidding around that one hopes to reveal just how serious. This is illustrated by the modest proposal to use Asian infants for barbecued spareribs instead of “wasting” them as cannon fodder.

  A distinctive characteristic of shocking and tasteless satire is its high degree of distortion. On the whole, Americans are more familiar with distortion and exaggeration in the art of caricature than in literary works. Newspaper readers deal with distortion every day in political cartoons, and are not only untroubled by it but easily grasp the commentary implicit in the technique. Well, the same techniques of distortion apparent in the work of Herblock, Jules Feiffer, and David Levine—or, to invoke the names of giants, in the satirical drawings of Hogarth and Daumier—are operating in prose satire. Distortion is a dye dropped onto the specimen to make vivid traits and qualities otherwise only faintly visible to the naked eye.

  You’ve begun to touch upon the impulses behind writing Our Gang. Can you be more specific about motives? Previous to this, you have written and published four books of fiction; is it clear to you why you have chosen to write political satire just now in your career?

  Well, at Bucknell University, where I went to college and edited a literary magazine in the early fifties, I spent nearly as much time writing satire as I did trying to write fiction. Then in the middle fifties I began to publish pieces in The New Republic, most of them ostensibly movie reviews, but with the appeal—in that they had any—of satirical comedy. I once did a parody in The New Republic of President Eisenhower’s religious beliefs (and prose style) inspired by a Norman Vincent Peale sermon that had revealed to Reverend Peale’s parishioners that Ike was on a first-name basis with Jehovah. By the way, Oliver Jensen wrote a very funny version back then of the Gettysburg Address as Eisenhower might have composed and delivered it. The first sentence went, “I haven’t checked these figures, but eighty-seven years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual.”

  My own first book of fiction, Goodbye, Columbus, was described by Alfred Kazin as “acidulous,” suggesting a satiric intention. To a degree that’s true, but in retrospect that book seems to me very mild comedy, in turn ironical and lyrical in the way of books about sensitive upstarts in summer romances. Nothing since would seem to qualify as satire, unless you call Portnoy’s Complaint a satirical lament.

  Why have I turned to political satire? In a word: Nixon.

  What triggered—that’s the word for it, too—what triggered Our Gang was his response to the Calley conviction back in April 1971. Do you remember what the army lawyer, Joseph Welch, said to Senator McCarthy at the Senate hearings after McCarthy had gratuitously insinuated that a junior member of Welch’s Boston law firm had a Communist background? “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” Well, when Nixon announced that Calley, who had been convicted of murdering four times as many unarmed civilians as Charles Manson, would not have to await his appeal in the post stockade (alongside the monsters who go AWOL and the Benedict Arnolds who get caught snoozing on guard duty) but need only be restricted to quarters until such time as Nixon (with his nose to the wind) reviewed the decision of the appeals court, I thought: Tricky, I knew you were a moral ignoramus, I knew you were a scheming opportunist, I knew you were fraudulent right down to your shoelaces, but truly, I did not think that even you would sink to something like this.

  I am, like so many satirists, just a naïf at heart. Why shouldn’t he sink to that? But what that statement of his on Calley “made perfectly clear” was that if it seemed to him in the interest of his career, he would sink to anything. If 50.1 percent of the vote
rs wanted to make a hero out of a convicted multiple murderer, then maybe there was something in it—for him.

  Look at him today [Fall 1971], positively gaga over his trip to Red China, as he used to like to call it when he was debating Kennedy. Now he says the “People’s Republic of China” as easily as any Weatherman. Doesn’t he stand for anything? It turns out he isn’t even anti-Communist. He never even believed in that. I remember joking back in 1968 that if Rockefeller got the Republican nomination, Nixon would divorce Pat, remarry, and try again in ’72. But who, even in his most cynical wisecracks, could have imagined that the Nixon who gave it to Khrushchev about “freedom” in that kitchen would one day be delirious with joy about visiting a “tyrant” who had “enslaved” eight hundred million Chinese? Talk about bad taste. Doesn’t his heart bleed for “enslaved peoples” any more? Or did they take everybody’s shackles off over there? If so, he neglected to mention it on his two-minute spot commercial for the People’s Republic of China. No more explanation from Nixon about his ideological turnabout than from the rulers in 1984, when they interrupt news broadcasts every other day to inform the people that their enemies are now their friends and their friends their enemies. You would think that the people—here, not in Orwell’s Oceania—might want their Commie-chasing President to explain to them what it is about godlessness, totalitarianism, and slavery that is less repugnant to him today than it was ten years ago, or even ten months ago. And if it’s suddenly okay with the United States for eight hundred million people in China not to be able “to determine their own future in free elections,” why isn’t it okay for a mere thirteen million more in Vietnam? By comparison, that’s only a drop in the enslavement bucket. But nobody asks, and he doesn’t tell. The liberal newspapers even praise him for his “flexibility.”

  Then you’ve also been inspired to write this book out of frustration with the ways in which popular spokesmen—newspaper columnists, TV commentators, even congressmen and senators—respond to Nixon?

  Only to a small degree. Nixon is sufficient unto himself to make the steam rise. Of course, the high seriousness with which “responsible” critics continue to take his public statements does tend to increase frustration. There is this shibboleth, “respect for the office of the Presidency”—as though there were no distinction between the man who holds and degrades the office and the office itself. And why all the piety about the office anyway? A President happens to be in our employ.

  The best journalists I’ve read on Nixon are Tom Wicker, Nicholas von Hoffman, Murray Kempton, and Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes. They don’t seem to consider it a setback to the species to point up how utterly bizarre this guy is. And then, in public life, there’s the Arkansas Traveler, Senator William Fulbright. Cross-examining Laird, after that Terry and the Pirates raid on the POW camp in North Vietnam, he was as beautifully droll—his timing as perfect, his assumed innocence as effective—as Mark Twain. When Fulbright retires, he ought to go around the country, the way Twain and Artemus Ward and Will Rogers used to, doing humorous monologues about his experiences as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He and Eugene McCarthy could be a very dry comic duo, on the order of Lum ’n’ Abner.

  Do you actually think Our Gang will do anything to restrain or alter Nixon’s conduct? Affect his conscience? Shame him? What do you expect to accomplish by publishing a satire like this one?

  Do I expect the world to change? Hardly. True, when we all first learned about satire in school, we were told that it was a humorous attack upon men or institutions for the purpose of instigating reform, or words to that effect about its ameliorative function. Now, that’s a very uplifting attitude to take toward malice, but I don’t think it holds water. Writing satire is a literary, not a political act, however volcanic the reformist or even revolutionary passion in the author. Satire is moral rage transformed into comic art—as an elegy is grief transformed into poetic art. Does an elegy expect to accomplish anything in the world? No, it’s a means of organizing and expressing a harsh, perplexing emotion.

  What begins as the desire to murder your enemy with blows, and is converted (largely out of fear of the consequences) into the attempt to murder him with invective and insult, is most thoroughly sublimated, or socialized, in the art of satire. It’s the imaginative flowering of the primitive urge to knock somebody’s block off.

  Of course, you have the villainous President in your book murdered, don’t you? The next-to-last chapter of Our Gang begins with the announcement that Trick E. Dixon has been assassinated, and for the next thirty pages or so you give us everything exuded by the television networks in the wake of that announcement. Do you think there will be readers who will accuse you of advocating or encouraging the murder of President Nixon?

  If so, it will be because they have failed to read the chapter—and the book—with even a minimal amount of comprehension. I’m not saying the chapter is in good taste. But I just can’t imagine that the ludicrous manner in which Trick E. Dixon is disposed of would serve to fire the will of a would-be Presidential assassin. The President of Our Gang is found stuffed in a Baggie in the fetal position, so that he resembles one of those “unborn” for whose rights he speaks so eloquently throughout the book. That he meets his end in a Baggie is just satiric retribution, parodic justice.

  And in the next chapter he’s alive and well anyway. In Hell, admittedly, but debating the pants off Satan, whom he’s running against for Devil. I subtitled that last chapter “On the Comeback Trail” to suggest that you can’t hold a Trick E. Dixon down, even by stuffing him into a Baggie and turning the twister seal.

  Back in 1966, Max Hayward edited and translated a chilling, depressing document that he called On Trial. It was the transcript of the Moscow trial of the Soviet writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, who were given five- and seven-year sentences in a forced-labor camp for “slandering” the state in their literary works. Andrei Sinyavsky’s final plea to the judge, prior to the sentencing, was particularly memorable. Throughout the trial the judge had brutally chastised Sinyavsky for “lecturing the court on literature”—of all things—whenever the writer tried to explain his intentions in The Makepeace Experiment, a fantastic novel, or fable, in which (among other funny things) the people in a provincial Russian town eat toothpaste and think they’re dining on caviar because their leader tells them it’s so. The judge didn’t want to hear about satire or fantasy or hyperbole or playfulness or humor or the make-believe aspect of literature; he didn’t want to hear any comparison to Gogol or Pushkin or Mayakovsky—all he wanted to know was: “Why do you slander Lenin?” “Why do you slander the Russian people who suffered so in the war?” “Why do you play into the hands of our enemies in the West?” Yet, when the time came for Sinyavsky to speak his final words to the court—or to anyone in the outside world for a long, long time—he proceeded, with incredible determination, to say: “I want to repeat a few elementary arguments about the nature of literature. The most rudimentary thing about literature—it is here that one’s study of it begins—is that words are not deeds…”

  I hardly presume to compare myself to Andrei Sinyavsky, or my situation as a writer to his, or Daniel’s, in Russia. I am wholly in awe of writers like Sinyavsky and Daniel, of their personal bravery and their uncompromising devotion and dedication to literature. To write in secrecy, to publish pseudonymously, to work in fear of the labor camp, to be despised, ridiculed, and insulted by the mass of writers turning out just what they’re supposed to—it would be presumptuous to imagine one’s art surviving in such a hostile environment, let alone coming through with the dignity and self-possession displayed by Sinyavsky and Daniel at their trial.

  I use the case of Sinyavsky because it is an extreme and horrifying example of the kind of “misunderstanding” one’s adversaries might wish to encourage in order to defame a work that makes fun of them. In other words, I am aware of the problem that you raise, and I don’t take it lightly. I expect some readers will miss the point,
clear as it seems to me. But all I can say to those who will fear for the President’s life is that they would do better to lobby for a strong federal gun-control bill than to worry about the influence of Our Gang on potential assassins. Admittedly, it might be easier to get Attorney General Mitchell to push for a bill outlawing literature than for one making it impossible to buy a rifle through the mail for fifteen bucks, but the fact remains, more people are killed in this country every year by bullets than by satires.

  What is your purpose then in writing the chapter entitled “The Assassination of Tricky”?

  Well, to me it seems so obvious that I feel uncomfortable having to explain it … What’s ridiculed here is the discrepancy between official pieties and the unpleasant truth. On the one hand, I have tens of thousands of people flocking to Washington to confess to assassinating Trick E. Dixon, and on the other, the television commentators who persist in describing these self-avowed killers as though they were the mourners who thronged to Washington after President Kennedy was killed—or President Charisma, as he is called in the book. It really isn’t Nixon and his friends who are being mocked in this chapter so much as the platitudinous mentality of the media. (Pardon the Agnewesque rhetoric; I assure you, there’s no similarity between the Vice President’s attitude toward TV and my own. That he should find this utterly conformist medium, these mammoth corporations like NBC and CBS, to be heretical and treasonous is a perfect measure of his powers of social observation.) Partly, the point is that Tricky, living or dead, in the White House or in the grave, is unworthy of such tribute, but the joke in that chapter entitled “The Assassination of Tricky” is largely at the expense of network blindness. The implication is that the mass media are purveyors of the Official Version of Reality and, for all their so-called criticism of the government, can be counted on, when the chips are down, to cloud the issue and miss the point.