Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  Lastly, the chapter is concerned with the fine art of government lying, but then so is the entire book.

  Let me press you further on “The Assassination of Tricky” with a question that some people might want to raise about it. Won’t certain details about that chapter be particularly disturbing, if not repellent, to those who continue to grieve over the death by assassination of the two Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King?

  I expect that even Mrs. Martin Luther King and Senator Edward Kennedy would agree that every time we allude to an act of criminal brutality, such as the murder of a national leader, it is not necessary to draw a long face and make pious testimony to our abhorrence of violence.

  I think, really, whatever there might be that is disturbing or unsettling here arises out of the imaginative exploration of a violent fantasy. To give an extreme and well-known literary example: what could be more unsettling than reading Crime and Punishment? I recently assigned it to a literature class and found those students whose habit it is to read a novel straight through the night before the class meeting in a state of anxiety that had to do with something more than just going without their sleep. Reading Crime and Punishment is a disgusting, if not repellent, experience, among other things; so is watching Othello. Even Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, which just toys with the theme of parricide, has been known to cause audiences in Ireland to riot.

  In Our Gang, the farcical style seems to me to work to becalm whatever anxiety might be aroused in the reader by a parricidal (or, I suppose, regicidal) fantasy made “real.” It doesn’t dilute it as much as a Bugs Bunny cartoon—where the violence is morally inconsequential because of the utter silliness of the situation—but there is a similar kind of relief felt as a result of the comedy. However, simultaneous with the pleasure taken in the harmless, make-believe, sadistic fun, the reader probably can’t help remembering that Presidents of the United States have been assassinated—and knowing that it is possible for President Nixon to be assassinated too. So suddenly it’s not so funny after all—and I think what is then most disturbing to the reader is that he has found himself enjoying a fantasy that he has known in reality to be terrible.

  The President Addresses the Nation*

  My fellow Americans:

  I have an announcement to make to you tonight of the greatest national importance. As you know, the Senate has voted this afternoon to remove me from the Office of the President. That, of course, is their right under the Constitution of the United States of America, and as you know, I have not interfered in any way with their deliberations on this matter, as I did not interfere some weeks ago when the House of Representatives arrived at their decision after their own deliberations. They have a right to express their opinion, as does any American, without Presidential interference or pressure of any kind from the Executive branch. That is what is known as the separation of powers. You probably know by now that there were even members of my own political party among those in the Legislative branch who voted to remove me from the Presidency. I consider that to be a vigorous and reassuring sign of their independence of mind, and of their personal integrity. I applaud them for their actions, which can only strengthen the democratic process here at home, and enhance the image of American democracy abroad.

  However, according to the doctrine of the separation of powers, the Executive branch has an equal voice in the management of government, along with the Legislative and the Judicial branches. That, after all, is only fair. It is what is meant by the “American Way.” Moreover, the President has the sole responsibility for safeguarding the security of the nation. That responsibility is spelled out in the oath of Office, which, as you all know, every President takes on Inauguration Day. President Washington, whose picture you see here, took that oath. So did President Lincoln, pictured here. And so did our great President Dwight David Eisenhower, whose grandson has just completed serving his country in the United States Navy and is married to my daughter Julie, whom you see pictured here. My other daughter, Tricia, is pictured here, in her wedding dress. And of course standing beside Tricia is my wife Pat. My fellow Americans, I owe it not only to these great American Presidents who preceded me in this high Office but to my family, and to you and your families, to respect and honor that oath to which I swore on the Holy Bible on my Inauguration Day. To speak personally, I just couldn’t live with myself if I went ahead and shirked my duty to safeguard the security of the nation.

  And that is why I have decided tonight to remain in this Office. My fellow Americans, though I respect the sincerity and the integrity of those Senators who voted earlier in the day for my removal, I find, after careful study and grave reflection, that to accept their decision would be to betray the trust placed in me by the American people, and to endanger the security and the well-being of this nation.

  As you all know, there has never been an American President yet who has stepped down in the middle of his term of Office because of Congressional pressure of any kind. That is something for which there is just no precedent in American history—and let me tell you, straight from the shoulder, I don’t intend to break the record my predecessors have established of standing up under fire.

  You know, no one, I don’t care which party he belongs to, expects this Office to be a bed of roses. If he does he shouldn’t run for the Presidency to begin with. As the late President Harry Truman put it—and you remember, Harry Truman didn’t always see eye to eye on everything with us Republicans—“If you can’t take the heat, you shouldn’t be in the kitchen.” Well, I happen to pride myself on the amount of heat I’ve taken over the years—some of it, as you older folks may remember, in a kitchen in the Soviet Union with Premier Khrushchev. But in the name of the American people, I stood up to Premier Khrushchev in that kitchen; and in the name of the American people, I am standing up to the Congress tonight.

  Richard Nixon is not going to be the first President in American history to be removed from Office by the Legislative branch. I am sure that is not the kind of President that the American people elected me to be. Frankly, if I were to give in to this Congressional pressure to remove me from Office, if I were to come on television tonight to tell you, yes, President Nixon is quitting because he can’t take the heat, well, that to my mind would constitute a direct violation of my oath of Office, and I would in fact voluntarily step down from the Presidency, out of a sense of having profoundly failed you, the American people, whose decision it was to place me in Office in the first place.

  My fellow Americans, during my years as President I have, as you know, devoted myself to one goal above and beyond all others: the goal of world peace. As I talk to you here tonight, negotiations and discussions are being conducted around the globe by Dr. Kissinger, Secretary Rogers, and key members of the Department of State to bring peace with honor to America, and to all of mankind. These negotiations are taking place at the highest diplomatic level and necessarily in secret—but I am pleased to report to you tonight that we are pursuing them with every hope of success.

  Now I am sure that no one in Congress would willingly or knowingly want to endanger the chances of world peace, for us, for our children, and for generations to come. And yet, by calling upon the President to pack up and quit just because the going is a little rough, that is precisely what they are doing. And that is precisely why I will not quit. I happen to care more about world peace now and for generations to come than about making myself popular with a few of my critics in the Congress. Oh, I am sure that the easier choice would be to retire to San Clemente and bask there in the honors and tributes that we Americans lavish upon our former Presidents. But I prefer to take the hard road, the high road, if that is the road that leads to the end of warfare and to world peace for our children and our children’s children. My fellow Americans, I was raised to be a Quaker, not a quitter.

  Now I have to say some things to you that you may not care to hear, especially those of you who try to think the best of our country, as I do myself. But t
onight I must speak the truth, unpleasant as it may be; you deserve no less. My fellow Americans, I understand there are going to be those in Congress who will not respect the decision I have announced here tonight, as I respected theirs, arrived at earlier in the day. We have reason to believe that there are those who are going to try to make political capital out of what I have said to you tonight from the bottom of my heart. There are even going to be some who will use my words to attempt to create a national crisis in order to reap political gain for themselves or their party. And, most dangerous of all, there are some elements in the country, given to violence and lawlessness as a way of life, who may attempt to use force to remove me from Office.

  Let me quickly reassure you that this Administration will not tolerate lawlessness of any kind. This Administration will not permit the time-honored constitutional principle of the separation of powers to be subverted by a disgruntled, ambitious, or radical minority. This Administration intends to maintain and defend that great American tradition that has come down to us unbroken from the days of the Founding Fathers—the great tradition of a President of the United States, duly elected by the people of the United States, serving out his Office without violent interference by those who disagree with his policies. Disagreement and dissent are, of course, in the great tradition of a democracy like our own; but the violent overthrow of the elected government is something that is repugnant to me, as it is to every American, and so long as I am President, I promise you that I will deal promptly and efficiently with those who advocate or engage in violence as a means of bringing about political change.

  In order to discourage those who would resort to violence of any kind, and in order to maintain law and order in the nation and to safeguard the welfare and well-being of law-abiding American citizens, I have tonight, in my constitutional role as Commander-in-Chief, ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to place the Armed Forces on a stand-by alert around the nation. The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have also been advised to take all necessary steps to ensure domestic tranquillity. The National Guard has already been notified, and throughout the fifty states units are being mobilized for duty. Furthermore, state and local police have been encouraged to request whatever assistance they may require, in the way of personnel or equipment, in order to maintain law and order in your communities.

  My fellow Americans, I swore upon taking this Office to safeguard this nation and its citizens, and I intend to stand on my word. No one—and that includes your Congressman and your Senator, just as it does the armed revolutionary—is going to tell the American people that they cannot have sitting in the White House the President they have chosen in a free and open election. And I don’t care whether that President happens to be myself, President Washington, President Lincoln, or President Eisenhower. I give you every assurance tonight that the President you, the American people, elected for a second four-year term will not permit the votes you cast so overwhelmingly in his favor to have been cast in vain.

  God bless each and every one of you.

  Good night.

  On The Breast*

  I’d like to ask about the origins of The Breast. How do you account for the idea itself? Do you think this is a strange or unusual book for you to have written? Do you see any connection between The Breast and your previous work, or do you consider it a work really a little out of your line?

  Thinking back over my work, it seems to me that I’ve frequently written about what Bruno Bettelheim calls “behavior in extreme situations.” Or until The Breast perhaps what I’ve written about has been extreme behavior in ordinary situations. At any rate, I have concerned myself with men and women whose moorings have been cut, and who are swept away from their native shores and out to sea, sometimes on a tide of their own righteousness or resentment. For instance, in an early story, “The Conversion of the Jews,” a little Jewish boy finds himself playing God on a synagogue roof; now he may not be in such dire straits as Kepesh in The Breast, but he is definitely in a new and surprising relationship with his everyday self, his family and his friends. Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good, Gabe Wallach and Paul Herz in Letting Go, Alex Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint—all are living beyond their psychological and moral means; it isn’t a matter of sinking or swimming—they have, as it were, to invent the crawl.

  Kepesh’s predicament is similar—with a difference: his unmooring can’t be traced (much to his dismay, too) to psychological, social, or historical causes. His longing to be at one again with his fellows and his old self is, to my mind, far more poignant and harrowing than Lucy Nelson’s or Portnoy’s. Those two characters, at the same time that they yearn for a more sociable and settled existence, are hell-bent on maintaining their isolation with all the rage and wildness in their arsenals. They are two very stubborn American children, locked in prototypical combat with the beloved enemy: the spirited Jewish boy pitted against his mother, the Cleopatra of the kitchen; the solemn Gentile girl pitted against her father, the Bacchus of Hometown, U.S.A. Kepesh strikes me as far more heroic than either of these two: perhaps a man who turns into a breast is the first heroic character I’ve ever been able to portray.

  What problems did you face while writing The Breast? Were there any special pitfalls you worried over while you were at work? Or did the story unfold more or less of a piece?

  One difficulty in writing this kind of story is deciding what sort of claim to make on the reader’s credulity: whether to invite him to accept the fantastic situation as taking place in the recognizable world (and so to respond to the imagined actuality from that vantage point, with that kind of concern) or whether to ignore the matter of belief and move into other imaginative realms entirely—the worlds of dream, hallucination, allegory, nonsense, play, literary self-consciousness, sadism, and so on.

  In “The Metamorphosis” Kafka asserts at the outset that the catastrophe is happening to his hero in the very real, believable, mundane world of families, jobs, bosses, money, and housekeepers. If you don’t accept this, if you read “The Metamorphosis” as if it were Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman,” and think of Samsa as someone trapped in an insane hallucination, then you will not be on the right wave length to receive the full impact of the story. Kafka doesn’t go more than a dozen sentences before he tells you, point-blank, “It was no dream.” On the other hand, Gogol, in “The Nose,” is intermittently provocative and teasing about Kovalev’s misfortune. There is a playful, sadistic imagination back of the story that keeps expressing itself in farcical and satiric turns and, in that way, keeps alive and unresolved the question of the story’s “reality.” As Gogol says in the end, maybe it’s only a cock-and-bull story anyway—then again, maybe not. Clearly he can’t have it both ways, but perverse trickster that he is here (Chichikov-as-writer), that suits him to a T.

  I refer to these masters of fantasy to illustrate possibilities, not to lay claim to similarities of accomplishment or stature. In The Breast my approach to the outlandish seems to me to be something like a blending of the two methods that I’ve just described. I want the fantastic situation to be accepted as taking place in what we call the real world, at the same time that I hope to make the reality of the horror one of the issues of the story. “Is it really happening? Can I believe this?”—the questions that Kafka settles (or suppresses) on the very first page by asserting that the metamorphosis is “no dream,” and that Gogol is so prankish about at the reader’s expense, are absorbed into The Breast by Kepesh himself. Whether it is or isn’t a dream, a hallucination, or a psychotic delusion, is no small matter to my hero (or to me)—consequently, I didn’t choose to render the problem unproblematical by a wave of the author’s magic wand.

  “The Nose” and “The Metamorphosis” are both cited by Kepesh in the story, part of his desperate struggle to make some sense out of what’s happened to him. I thought it was fitting for a serious, dedicated literature professor to think of Gogol and Kafka when his own horrible transformation occurs; i
t also seemed a good idea not to leave it to the reader to speculate on his own about my indebtedness to “The Nose” and “The Metamorphosis,” but instead to make that issue visible in the fiction. The Breast proceeds, in fact, by attempting to answer the objections and the reservations that might be raised in a skeptical reader by its own fantastic premise. It has the design of a rebuttal or a rejoinder, rather than a hallucination or a nightmare. Above all, I thought it would be in the story’s best interest to try to be straightforward and direct about this bizarre circumstance, and for the protagonist to be no less intelligent than the reader about the implications of his misfortune. No crapola about Deep Meaning; instead, try to absorb that issue, the issue of meaning, into the story—along with the issues of literary antecedents and the “reality” of the horror.

  You say you wanted to be straightforward and direct. Yet one critic has complained that “on the metaphorical level the fantasy remains rather opaque.”

  First off, that a fiction is clear and straightforward about itself on the narrative level, and opaque or difficult on the metaphorical level, is not necessarily a bad thing. To use Kafka again as an illustration—it isn’t the transparency of “The Metamorphosis” that accounts for its power; Kafka’s strategy (and brilliance) is to resist interpretation, even of a very high order, at the very same time that he invites it. Whatever intellectual handle you use to get a hold on a Kafka story is never really adequate to explain its appeal; and to address yourself primarily to the “meaning” has always seemed to me the way to miss much of his appeal.