Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  An early reader of my book, meaning to offer praise, told be, “This is what America is really like.” I would have been happier had he said, “This is what a farce written in America is really like.” Now that is praise. I don’t claim to know what America is “really like.” Not knowing, or no longer knowing for sure, is just what perplexes many of the people who live and work here and consider this country home. That, if I may say so, is why I invented that paranoid fantasist Word Smith—the narrator who calls himself Smitty—to be (purportedly) the author of The Great American Novel. What he describes is what America is really like to one like him.

  I do not mean by this to disown the novel, or to pretend, defensively, that it is what is called a put-on. Whom would I be trying to put on? And why? By attributing the book to Smitty, I intended, among other things, to call into question the novel’s “truthfulness”—to mock any claim the book might appear to make to be delivering up the answer—though in no way is this meant to discredit the book itself. The idea is simply to move off the question “What is America really like?” and on to the kind of fantasy (or rewriting of history) that a question so troublesome and difficult has tended of late to inspire. I would not want to have to argue that Smitty’s is the true dream of our lives, his paranoia a wedge into the enigmatic American reality. I would claim, however, that his are not so unlike the sort of fantasies with which the national imagination began to be plagued during this last demythologizing decade of disorder, upheaval, assassination, and war.

  I finally anchored this book in the investigations into Communist activities conducted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in order to give Smitty a break, too. As far off in an American never-never land as he may sound with his story of the destruction of the imaginary Ruppert Mundys of the imaginary Patriot League, his version of history has its origins in something that we all recognize as having taken place, and moreover, at a level of bizarre, clownish inventiveness similar to much of the “real” American history that Smitty has obviously invented out of whole cloth. I was trying, then, at the conclusion of the book, to establish a kind of passageway from the imaginary that comes to seem real to the real that comes to seem imaginary, a continuum between the credible incredible and the incredible credible. This strikes me as an activity something like what many of our deranged countrymen must engage in every morning, reading the newspaper on the one hand and swooning over the prophetic ingenuity of their paranoia on the other. Truly, America is the Land of Opportunity—now even the nuts are getting an even break.

  So, to conclude: Smitty is to my mind correct in aligning himself with Melville and Hawthorne, whom he calls “my precursors, my kinsmen.” They too were in search of some encapsulating fiction, or legend, that would, in its own oblique, charged, and cryptic way, constitute the “truth” about the national disease. Smitty’s book, like those of his illustrious forebears, attempts to imagine a myth of an ailing America; my own is to some extent an attempt to imagine a book about imagining that American myth.

  On My Life as a Man*

  In My Life as a Man, as in other books of yours, there is an important relationship between a character and his psychoanalyst. Why is that a recurring situation in your work? Of what particular interest is it to you and what uses do you put it to?

  I take it you’re referring to four books: Letting Go, where Libby Herz, a frantic young woman in despair over her husband’s increasing remoteness and gloom, spends a hapless hour with an analyst in Chicago; Portnoy’s Complaint, a novel cast in the form of an analytic monologue by a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor; The Breast, in which David Kepesh, an intelligent professor of imaginative literature who has turned overnight into an enormous female breast, engages in a daily dialectic with his former analyst about his new condition; and My Life as a Man, in which Peter Tarnopol, a baffled writer and humiliated husband, suffers a breakdown following the collapse of a disastrous marriage and, during the long effort to make sense of what happened, struggles with his doctor over fundamental differences of opinion (and values and language), a struggle that eventually destroys their genuine, therapeutic friendship.

  All of these characters, in pain and in trouble, turn to doctors because they believe psychoanalysis may help them from going under completely. Why they believe this is a subject I haven’t the space to go into here, nor is it what I’ve given most thought to in these books. I’ve mainly been interested in the extent to which unhappy people do define themselves as “ill” or agree to view themselves as “patients,” and in what each then makes of the treatment prescribed. The connection between patient and analyst varies considerably from one book to the next, as do the relationships, say, between the lay Catholics and their priests in the stories of J. F. Powers.

  Until My Life as a Man, the psychoanalyst in my fiction hasn’t been much of a character, in the conventional novelistic sense. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Dr. Spielvogel was nothing more than he for whom Portnoy re-enacted the drama, or vaudeville skit, of his life. Much like the priest discreetly hidden away in the confessional (or the audience beyond the footlights), Spielvogel is silent until the last mortifying detail (or routine) has been extracted from the babbling sinner/showman seeking absolution/applause. Moreover, it is a highly stylized confession that this imaginary Spielvogel gets to hear, and I would guess that it bears about as much resemblance to the drift and tone of what a real psychopathologist hears in his everyday life as a love sonnet does to the iambs and dactyls that lovers whisper into one another’s ears in motel rooms and over the phone.

  What I was looking for when I wrote Portnoy’s Complaint was a stratagem that would permit me to bring into my fiction the sort of intimate, shameful sexual detail, and coarse, abusive sexual language, that had largely been beside the point of my first three books. One would just as soon not—if one has a sense of propriety, that is—serve vodka out of a milk carton: what I wanted was the appropriate vessel for the unpalatable stuff that I was ready to dispense. And I found it, I thought, in the idea of the psychoanalytic session, wherein pile driving right on through the barriers of good taste and discretion is considered central to the task at hand. In Portnoy’s Complaint I did not set out to write a book “about” an analysis, but utilized the permissive conventions of the patient-analyst situation to get at material that had previously been inaccessible to me, and that in another fictional environment would have struck me as pornographic, exhibitionistic, and nothing but obscene.

  In The Breast, another analyst appears, this time one who speaks, and does so more or less in the voice of enlightened common sense. Dr. Klinger favors the cadences and vocabulary of psychotherapeutic demystification. The difficulty is that the affliction confronting him—Kepesh’s transformation into a human-sized mammary gland—is bottomlessly mysterious and horrifying. But to the suffering patient, what affliction isn’t? Then too, in the course of a day, a doctor in Klinger’s line of work dutifully hears out half a dozen patients who, if they do not consider themselves to be breasts, imagine with some degree of conviction that they are testicles, or vaginas, or bellies, or brains, or buttocks, or noses, or two left feet, or all thumbs, or all heart, or all eyes, or what-have-you. “I’m a prick! She’s a cunt! My partner is an asshole!” Granted, say the doctors Klinger, but nonetheless what shall you do out in the great world where you are obliged to call yourself (and may even wish others to refer to you) by another name?

  Dr. Klinger prevails. By attending to the doctor’s homely, anti-apocalyptic, demystifying view of things (“Come off it, Mr. Kepesh,” he has the nerve to say to the surreal sexual object), David Kepesh manages to maintain a tenuous hold, not only on his sanity—which is just the half of it for this former literature professor—but on his moral dignity.

  The Dr. Spielvogel who turns up as the analyst in My Life as a Man has no such luck with his patient—nor does the patient (in this case Peter Tarnopol) with his doctor. In the end there is no meeting of minds or capitulation on eith
er side to the other’s sense of reality. And not because Spielvogel is a fool and a tyrant—he is neither the All-Knowing Analyst out of patient fairy tales, nor is he the Big Bad Idiot Analyst out of anti-Freudian folklore—or because Tarnopol lacks sympathy for the man or the method. If Tarnopol cannot agree to see himself as Spielvogel sees him, it is partly because Tarnopol cannot for any length of time see himself as Tarnopol sees Tarnopol either. Tarnopol the patient finally rejects Spielvogel’s version of him and his world as so much fiction; but as a novelist who takes himself and his personal life as his subject, so too does he reject his own fictions as so much fiction.

  Now, how Portnoy conceives of Portnoy is not much of an issue in that book (at least not until the doctor delivers, at the conclusion, his one and only line). Portnoy knows precisely how to present himself—a good part of his complaint is that his sense of himself, his past, and his ridiculous destiny is so fixed. In The Breast, Kepesh must be educated to understand what he is, and very much against the grain of his own defiant hopefulness. Only by the end of the book does he capitulate and take the doctor’s word for what has seemed so utterly impossible all along, accepting finally both the preposterous description of what he’s become and the equally preposterous prescription as to what now to do about it (“Tolerate it”). But for Tarnopol the presentation or description of himself is what is most problematical—and what remains unresolved. To my mind, Tarnopol’s attempt to realize himself with the right words—as earlier in life he attempted realizing himself through the right deeds—is what’s at the heart of the book, and accounts for my joining his fictions about his life with his autobiography. When the novel is considered in its entirety, I hope it will be understood as Tarnopol’s struggle to achieve a description.

  After Eight Books*

  Your first book, Goodbye, Columbus, won the most distinguished American literary honor—the National Book Award—in 1960; you were twenty-seven years old at that time. A few years later, your fourth book, Portnoy’s Complaint, achieved a critical and popular success—and notoriety—that must have altered your personal life, and your awareness of yourself as a writer with a great deal of public “influence.” Do you believe that your sense of having experienced life, its ironies and depths, has been at all intensified by your public reputation? Have you come to know more because of your fame? Or has the experience of enduring the bizarre projections of others been at times more than you can reasonably handle?

  My public reputation—as distinguished from the reputation of my work—is something I try to have as little to do with as I can. I know it’s out there, of course—a concoction spawned by Portnoy’s Complaint and compounded largely out of the fantasies that book gave rise to because of its “confessional” strategy, and also because of its financial success. There isn’t much else it can be based on, since outside of print I lead virtually no public life at all. I don’t consider this a sacrifice, because I never much wanted one. Nor have I the temperament for it—in part this accounts for why I went into fiction writing (and not acting, which interested me for a while in college) and why writing in a room by myself is practically my whole life. I enjoy solitude the way some people I know enjoy parties. It gives me an enormous sense of personal freedom and an exquisitely sharp sense of being alive—and of course it provides me with the quiet and the breathing space I need to get my imagination going and my work done. I take no pleasure at all in being a creature of fantasy in the minds of those who don’t know me—which is largely what the fame you’re talking about consists of.

  For the solitude (and the birds and the trees), I have lived mostly in the country for the last five years, right now more than half of each year in a wooded rural region a hundred miles from New York. I have some six or eight friends scattered within a twenty-mile radius of my house, and I see them a few evenings a month for dinner. Otherwise I write during the day, walk at the end of the afternoon, and read at night. Almost the whole of my life in public takes place in a classroom—I teach one semester of each year. I began to earn my living teaching full-time in 1956, and though I can now live on my writing income, I have stayed with teaching more or less ever since. In recent years my public reputation has sometimes accompanied me into the classroom, but usually after the first few weeks, when the students observe that I have neither exposed myself nor set up a stall and attempted to interest them in purchasing my latest book, whatever anxieties or illusions about me they may have had begin to recede and I am largely allowed to be a literature teacher instead of Famous.

  “Enduring the bizarre projections of others” isn’t just something that famous novelists have to contend with, of course. Defying a multitude of bizarre projections, or submitting to them, would seem to me at the heart of everyday living in America, with its ongoing demand to be something palpable and identifiable. Everyone is invited to imitate in conduct and appearance the grossest simplifications of self that are mercilessly projected upon them by the mass media and advertising, while they must, of course, also contend with the myriad expectations that they arouse in those with whom they have personal and intimate associations. In fact, these “bizarre projections” arising out of ordinary human relations were a concern of mine in My Life as a Man—a novel that might have been called “Don’t Do with Me What You Will.”

  Since you have become fairly well established (I hesitate to use that unpleasant word “successful”), have less-established writers tried to use you, to manipulate you into endorsing their work? Do you feel you have received any especially unfair or inaccurate critical treatment? I am also interested in whether you have come to feel more communal now than you did when you were beginning as a writer.

  No, I haven’t felt, nor have I been, “manipulated” into endorsing the work of less-established writers. I don’t like to give “endorsements” for advertising or promotion purposes—not because I’m shy about my enthusiasms, but because I can’t say in fifteen or twenty words what I find special or noteworthy about a book. If I particularly like something I’ve read, I write the writer directly. At times when I’ve been especially taken by an aspect of some writer’s work which I think is likely to be overlooked or neglected, I’ve tried to help by writing longish paragraphs for the writer’s hardcover publishers, who always promise to use the endorsement in its entirety. However, eventually—since it’s a fallen world we live in—what started out as seventy-five words of critical appreciation seems to wind up on the paperback-edition cover as a two-word cry of marquee ecstasy.

  Since becoming “fairly well established” I’ve written paragraphs on behalf of books by five writers: Edward Hoagland (Notes from the Century Before), Sandra Hochman (Walking Papers), Alison Lurie (The War Between the Tates), Thomas Rogers (Pursuit of Happiness and The Confession of a Child of the Century), and Richard Stern (1968 and Other Men’s Daughters). In 1972, Esquire, for a feature they were planning, asked four “older writers” (as they called them), Isaac Bashevis Singer, Leslie Fiedler, Mark Schorer, and me, each to write a brief essay about a writer under thirty-five he admired. Singer wrote about Barton Midwood, Fiedler about Bill Hutton, Schorer about Judith Rascoe, and I chose to write about Alan Lelchuk.* I’d met him when we were both guests over a long stretch at Yaddo, and afterwards had read in manuscript his novel American Mischief, which I admired considerably. I restricted myself to a description and a somewhat close analysis of the book, which, though it hardly consisted of unqualified praise, nonetheless caused some consternation among the Secret Police. One prominent newspaper reviewer wrote in his column that “one would have to go into the Byzantine feuds and piques of the New York literary scene” to be able to figure out why I had written my fifteen-hundred-word essay, which led the reviewer to describe me as a “blurb writer.” That I might simply have enjoyed a new writer’s novel, and like Singer, Schorer, and Fiedler, taken Esquire’s invitation as an occasion to talk about his work, never occurred to him. Too unconspiratorial.

  In recent years I’ve run into somewhat
more of this kind of “manipulation”—malicious hallucination mixed with childish naïveté and disguised as Inside Dope—from marginal “literary” journalists (the “lice of literature,” Dickens called them) than from working writers, young or established. In fact, I don’t think there’s been a time since graduate school when genuine literary fellowship has been such a valuable and necessary part of my life. Contact with writers I admire or toward whom I feel a kinship is precisely my way out of isolation and furnishes me with whatever sense of community I have. I seem almost always to have had at least one writer I could talk to turn up wherever I happened to be teaching or living. These novelists I’ve met along the way—in Chicago, Rome, London, Iowa City, at Yaddo, in New York, in Philadelphia—are by and large people I continue to correspond with, exchange finished manuscripts with, try out ideas on, listen to, and visit, if I can, once or twice a year. By now, some of us whose friendships go back a ways have fallen out of sympathy with the direction the other’s work has taken, but since we seem not to have lost faith in one another’s integrity or good will, the opposition tends to be without the mandarin superiority, or academic condescension (or theoretical hobbyhorsing, or competitive preening, or merciless gravity), that sometimes tends to characterize criticism written by professionals for their public. Novelists are, as a group, the most interesting readers of novels that I have yet come across.