Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  In a sharp and elegantly angry little essay called “Reviewing,” Virginia Woolf once suggested that book journalism ought to be abolished (because 95 percent of it was worthless) and that the serious critics who do reviewing should put themselves out to hire to the novelists, who have a strong interest in knowing what an honest and intelligent reader thinks about their work. For a fee the critic—to be called a “consultant, expositor or expounder”—would meet privately and with some formality with the writer, and “for an hour,” writes Virginia Woolf, “they would consult upon the book in question.… The consultant would speak honestly and openly, because the fear of affecting sales and of hurting feelings would be removed. Privacy would lessen the shop-window temptation to cut a figure, to pay off scores.… He could thus concentrate upon the book itself, and upon telling the author why he likes or dislikes it. The author would profit equally.… He could state his case. He could point to his difficulties. He would no longer feel, as so often at present, that the critic is talking about something that he has not written.… An hour’s private talk with a critic of his own choosing would be incalculably more valuable than the five hundred words of criticism mixed with extraneous matter that is now allotted him.”

  A very good idea. It surely would have seemed to me worth a hundred dollars to sit for an hour with Edmund Wilson and hear everything he had to say about a book of mine—nor would I have objected to paying to hear whatever Virginia Woolf might have had to say to me about Portnoy’s Complaint, if she had been willing to accept less than all the tea in China to undertake that task. Nobody minds swallowing his medicine, if it is prescribed by a real doctor. One of the nicer side effects of this system is that since nobody wants to throw away his hard-earned money, most of the quacks and the incompetents would be driven out of business.

  As for “especially unfair critical treatment”—of course my blood has been drawn, my anger aroused, my feelings hurt, my patience tried, etc., and in the end, I have wound up enraged most of all with myself, for allowing blood to be drawn, anger aroused, feelings hurt, patience tried. When the “unfair critical treatment” has been associated with charges too serious to ignore—accusations against me, say, of “anti-Semitism”—then, rather than fuming to myself, I have answered the criticism at length and in public. Otherwise I fume and forget it; and keep forgetting it, until actually—miracle of miracles—I do forget it.

  Lastly: who gets “critical treatment” anyway? Why dignify with such a phrase most of what is written about fiction? What one gets, as far as I can see, is what Edmund Wilson describes as a “collection of opinions by persons of various degrees of intelligence who have happened to have some contact with [the writer’s] book.”

  * * *

  What Edmund Wilson says is true, ideally, yet many writers are influenced by the “critical treatment” they receive. The fact that Goodbye, Columbus was singled out for extraordinarily high praise must have encouraged you, to some extent; and the critics, certainly, guided a large number of readers in your direction. I began reading your work in 1959 and was impressed from the start by your effortless (effortless-seeming, perhaps) synthesis of the colloquial, the comic, the near-tragic, the intensely moral … within wonderfully readable structures that had the feel of being traditional stories, while being at the same time rather revolutionary. I am thinking of “The Conversion of the Jews,” “Eli, the Fanatic,” and the novella, “Goodbye, Columbus,” among others.

  One of the prominent themes in your writing seems to be the hero’s recognition of a certain loss in his life, along with a regret for the loss, and finally an ironic “acceptance” of this regret (as if the hero had to go this way, fulfill this aspect of his destiny, no matter how painful it might be). Consider the young girl in Goodbye, Columbus and her twin in My Life as a Man, both of whom are eventually rejected. But the loss might have broader emotional and psychological implications as well—that is, the beautiful too-young girl must have represented qualities that were also transpersonal.

  1. You correctly spot the return of an old character in a new incarnation. The Goodbye, Columbus heroine, inasmuch as she existed as a character at all or “represented” an alternative of consequence to the hero, is reconstituted (reappraised?) in My Life as a Man as Tarnopol’s Dina Dornbusch, the “rich, pretty, protected, smart, sexy, adoring, young, vibrant, clever, confident, ambitious” Sarah Lawrence girl he gives up because she’s not what the young literary fellow, in his romantic ambitiousness, recognizes as a “woman”—by which he means a knocked-around, on-her-own, volatile, combative, handful like Maureen.

  Furthermore, Dina Dornbusch (incidental character that she is) is herself reconstituted and reappraised by Tarnopol, in the two short stories preceding his own autobiographical narrative (the “useful fictions”). First in “Salad Days,” she appears as the licentious, childish, slavish, nice suburban Jewish girl whom he buggers under her family ping-pong table, and then, in “Courting Disaster,” as the altogether attractive, astute, academically ambitious college senior who tells Professor Zuckerman, after he has severed relations with her—to take up with his own brand of “damaged” woman—that under all his flamboyant “maturity” he is “just a crazy little boy.”

  Both these characters are called Sharon Shatzky, and together stand in relation to Dina Dornbusch as fictional distillations do to their models in the unwritten world. These Sharons are what can happen to a Dina when a Tarnopol sets her free from his life to play the role such a woman does in his personal mythology. This mythology, this legend of the self (the useful fiction frequently mistaken by readers for veiled autobiography), is a kind of idealized architect’s drawing for what one may have constructed—or is yet to construct—out of the materials actuality makes available. In this way, a Tarnopol’s fiction is his idea of his fate.

  Or, for all I know, the process works the other way around and the personal myth meant to reveal the secret workings of an individual destiny actually makes even less readable the text of one’s own history. Thereby increasing bewilderment—causing one to tell the story once again, meticulously reconstructing the erasures on what may never have been a palimpsest to begin with.

  Sometimes it seems to me that only the novelists and the nuts carry on in quite this way about living what is, after all, only a life—making the transparent opaque, the opaque transparent, the obscure obvious, the obvious obscure, etc. Delmore Schwartz, from “Genesis”: “‘Why must I tell, hysterical, this story/ And must, compelled, speak of such secrecies?/… Where is my freedom, if I cannot resist/So much speech blurted out…?/How long must I endure this show and sight/Of all I lived through, all I lived in: Why?’”

  2. “… loss, along with a regret for the loss, and finally an ironic ‘acceptance’ of this regret.” You point to a theme I hadn’t thought of as such before—and that I’d prefer to qualify some. Of course Tarnopol is relentlessly kicking himself for his mistake, but it is just those kicks (and the accompanying screams) that reveal to him how strongly determined by character, how characteristically Tarnopolian, that mistake was. He is his mistake and his mistake is him. “This me who is me being me and none other!” The last line of My Life as a Man is meant to point up a harsher attitude toward the self, and the history it has necessarily compiled, than “ironic ‘acceptance’” suggests.

  To my mind it is Bellow, in his last two pain-filled novels, who has sounded the theme of “loss … regret for the loss, and … ironic ‘acceptance’ of the regret”—as he did early on (and less convincingly, I thought) at the conclusion to Seize the Day, whose final event I always found a little forced, and then further schmaltzed-up with its sudden swell of Urn-Burial prose to elevate Tommy Wilhelm’s misery. I prefer the conclusion of “Leaving the Yellow House,” with its moving, ironic rejection of loss—no “sea-like music” necessary there to make the elemental human feeling felt. If there is an ironic acceptance of anything at the conclusion of My Life as a Man (or even along the way), it is of the determine
d self. And angry frustration, a deeply vexing sense of characterological enslavement, is strongly infused in that ironic acceptance. Thus the exclamation mark.

  I have always been drawn to a passage that comes near the end of The Trial, the chapter where K., in the cathedral, looks up toward the priest with a sudden infusion of hope—that passage is pertinent to what I’m trying to say here, particularly by the word “determined,” which I mean in both senses: driven, resolute and purposive—yet utterly fixed in position. “If the man would only quit his pulpit, it was not impossible that K. could obtain decisive and acceptable counsel from him which might, for instance, point the way, not toward some influential manipulation of the case, but toward a circumvention of it, a breaking away from it altogether, a mode of living completely outside the jurisdiction of the Court. This possibility must exist, K. had of late given much thought to it.”

  As who hasn’t of late? Enter Irony when the man in the pulpit turns out to be oneself. If only one could quit one’s pulpit, one might well obtain decisive and acceptable counsel. How to devise a mode of living completely outside the jurisdiction of the Court when the Court is of one’s own devising? It is the ironic acceptance of the loss that follows that struggle that I would point to as a theme of My Life as a Man.

  Was it you, or someone more or less imitating you, who wrote about a boy who turned into a girl…? How would that strike you, as a nightmare possibility? (I don’t mean The Breast: that seems to me a literary work, rather than a real psychological excursion, like other writings of yours.) Could you—can you—comprehend, by any extension of your imagination or your unconscious, a life as a woman?—a writing life as a woman? I know this is speculative but had you the choice, would you have wanted to live your life as a man, or as a woman (you could also check “other”).

  Answer: Both. Like the hero-heroine of Orlando. That is, sequentially (if you can arrange it) rather than simultaneously. It wouldn’t be much different from what it’s like now, if I weren’t able to measure the one life against the other. It would also be interesting not to be Jewish, after having spent a lifetime as a Jew. Arthur Miller imagines the reverse of this as a “nightmare possibility” in Focus, where an anti-Semite is taken by the world for the very thing he hates. However, I’m not talking about mistaken identity or skin-deep conversions, but magically becoming totally the other, all the while retaining knowledge of what it was to have been one’s original self, wearing one’s original badges of identity. In the early sixties I wrote (and shelved) a one-act play called Buried Again, about a dead Jewish man who, when given the chance to be reincarnated as a goy, refuses and is consigned forthwith to oblivion. I understand perfectly how he felt, though, if in the netherworld I am myself presented with this particular choice, I doubt that I will act similarly. I know this will produce a great outcry in Commentary, but alas, I shall have to learn to live with that the second time around as I did the first.

  Sherwood Anderson wrote “The Man Who Turned Into a Woman,” one of the most beautifully sensuous stories I’ve ever read, where the boy at one point sees himself in a barroom mirror as a girl, but I doubt if that’s the piece of fiction you’re referring to. Anyway, it wasn’t I who wrote about such a sexual transformation, unless you’re thinking of My Life as a Man, where the hero puts on his wife’s undergarments one day, but just to take a sex break.

  Of course I have written about women, some of whom I identified with strongly and, as it were, imagined myself into, while I was working. In Letting Go, Martha Reganhart and Libby Herz; in When She Was Good, Lucy Nelson and her mother; and in My Life as a Man, Maureen Tarnopol and Susan McCall (and Lydia Ketterer and the Sharon Shatzkys). However much or little I am able to extend my imagination to “comprehend … life as a woman” is demonstrated in those books.

  I never did much with the girl in Goodbye, Columbus, which seems to me apprentice work and weak on character invention all around. Maybe I didn’t get very far with her because she was cast as a pretty imperturbable type, a girl who knew how to get what she wanted and how to take care of herself, and as it happened, that didn’t arouse my imagination much. Besides, the more I saw of young women who had flown the family nest—just what Brenda Patimkin decides not to do—the less imperturbable they seemed. Beginning with Letting Go, where I began to write about female vulnerability, and to see this vulnerability not only as it determined the lives of the women—who felt it frequently at the center of their being—but the men to whom they looked for love and support, the women became characters my imagination could take hold of and enlarge upon. How this vulnerability shapes their relations with men (each vulnerable in the style of his gender) is really at the heart of whatever story I’ve told about these eight woman characters.

  In parts of Portnoy’s Complaint, Our Gang, The Breast, and most recently in your baseball extravaganza, The Great American Novel, you seem to be celebrating the sheer playfulness of the artist, an almost egoless condition in which, to use Thomas Mann’s phrase, irony glances on all sides. There is a Sufi saying to the effect that the universe is “endless play and endless illusion”; at the same time, most of us experience it as deadly serious—and so we feel the need, indeed we cannot not feel the need, to be “moral” in our writing. Having been intensely “moral” in Letting Go and When She Was Good, and in much of My Life as a Man, and even in such a marvelously demonic work as the novella “On the Air,” do you think your fascination with comedy is only a reaction against this other aspect of your personality, or is it something permanent? Do you anticipate (but no: you could not) some violent pendulum-swing back to what you were years ago, in terms of your commitment to “serious” and even Jamesian writing?

  Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends; it is with them that I take those walks in the country at the end of the day. I am also on friendly terms with Deadly Playfulness, Playful Playfulness, Serious Playfulness, Serious Seriousness, and Sheer Sheerness. From the last, however, I get nothing; he just wrings my heart and leaves me speechless.

  I don’t know whether the works you call comedies are so egoless. Isn’t there really more self in the ostentatious display and assertiveness of The Great American Novel than in a book like Letting Go, say, where a devoted effort at self-removal and self-obliteration is necessary for the kind of investigation of self that goes on there? I think that the comedies may be the most ego-ridden of the lot; at least they aren’t exercises in self-abasement. What made writing The Great American Novel such a pleasure for me was precisely the self-assertion that it entailed—or, if there is such a thing, self-pageantry. (Or will “showing off” do?) All sorts of impulses that I might once have put down as excessive, frivolous, or exhibitionistic I allowed to surface and proceed to their destination. When the censor in me rose responsibly in his robes to say, “Now look here, don’t you think that’s just a little too—” I would reply, from beneath the baseball cap I often wore when writing that book, “Precisely why it stays! Down in front!” The idea was to see what would emerge if everything that was “a little too” at first glance was permitted to go all the way. I understood that a disaster might ensue (I have been informed by some that it did), but I tried to put my faith in the fun that I was having. Writing as pleasure. Enough to make Flaubert spin in his grave.

  I don’t know what to expect or anticipate next. My Life as a Man, which I finished a few months ago, is a book I’d been writing, abandoning, and returning to ever since I published Portnoy’s Complaint. Whenever I gave up on it I went to work on one of the “playful” books—maybe my despair over the difficulties with the one book accounted for why I wanted to be so playful in the others. At any rate, all the while that My Life as a Man was simmering away on the “moral” back burner, I wrote Our Gang, The Breast, and The Great American Novel. Right now nothing is cooking; at least none of the aromas have as yet reached me. For the moment this isn’t distressing; I feel (again, for the moment) as though I’ve reached a natural break of sorts in my
work, nothing nagging to be finished, nothing as yet pressing to be begun—only bits and pieces, fragmentary obsessions, bobbing into view, then sinking, for now, out of sight. Book ideas usually have come at me with all the appearance of pure accident or chance, though by the time I am done I can generally see how what has taken shape was spawned by the interplay between my previous fiction, recent undigested personal history, the circumstances of my immediate, everyday life, and the books I’ve been reading and teaching. The shifting relationship of these elements of experience brings the subject into focus, and then, by brooding, I find out how to take hold of it. I use “brooding” only to describe what this activity apparently looks like; inside I am actually feeling very Sufisticated indeed.

  Two

  Writing American Fiction*

  Several winters back, while I was living in Chicago, the city was shocked and mystified by the death of two teenage girls. So far as I know, the populace is mystified still; as for the shock, Chicago is Chicago, and one week’s dismemberment fades into the next’s. The victims this particular year were sisters. They went off one December night to see an Elvis Presley movie, for the sixth or seventh time we are told, and never came home. Ten days passed, and fifteen and twenty, and then the whole bleak city, every street and alley, was being searched for the missing Grimes girls, Pattie and Babs. A girl friend had seen them at the movie, a group of boys had caught a glimpse of them afterward getting into a black Buick, another group said a green Chevy, and so on and so forth, until one day the snow melted and the unclothed bodies of the two girls were discovered in a roadside ditch in a forest preserve west of Chicago. The coroner said he didn’t know the cause of death, and then the newspapers took over. One paper ran a drawing of the girls on the back page, in bobby socks and Levi’s and babushkas: Pattie and Babs a foot tall, and in four colors, like Dixie Dugan on Sundays. The mother of the two girls wept herself right into the arms of a local newspaper lady, who apparently set up her typewriter on the Grimeses’ front porch and turned out a column a day, telling us that these had been good girls, hard-working girls, average girls, churchgoing girls, et cetera. Late in the evening one could watch television interviews featuring schoolmates and friends of the Grimes sisters: the teenage girls look around, dying to giggle; the boys stiffen in their leather jackets. “Yeah, I knew Babs, yeah, she was all right, yeah, she was popular…” On and on, until at last comes a confession. A skid-row bum of thirty-five or so, a dishwasher, a prowler, a no-good named Benny Bedwell, admits to killing both girls, after he and a pal cohabited with them for several weeks in various flea-bitten hotels. Hearing the news, the weeping mother tells the newspaper lady that the man is a liar—her girls, she insists now, were murdered the night they went off to the movie. The coroner continues to maintain (with rumblings from the press) that the girls show no signs of having had sexual intercourse. Meanwhile, everybody in Chicago is buying four papers a day, and Benny Bedwell, having supplied the police with an hour-by-hour chronicle of his adventures, is tossed in jail. Two nuns, teachers of the girls at the school they attended, are sought out by the newspapermen. They are surrounded and questioned, and finally one of the sisters explains all. “They were not exceptional girls,” the sister says, “they had no hobbies.” About this time, some good-natured soul digs up Mrs. Bedwell, Benny’s mother, and a meeting is arranged between this old woman and the mother of the slain teenagers. Their picture is taken together, two overweight, overworked American ladies, quite befuddled but sitting up straight for the photographers. Mrs. Bedwell apologizes for her Benny. She says, “I never thought any boy of mine would do a thing like that.” Two weeks later, maybe three, her boy is out on bail, sporting several lawyers and a new one-button-roll suit. He is driven in a pink Cadillac to an out-of-town motel where he holds a press conference. Yes, he is the victim of police brutality. No, he is not a murderer; a degenerate maybe, but even that is changing. He is going to become a carpenter (a carpenter!) for the Salvation Army, his lawyers say. Immediately, Benny is asked to sing (he plays the guitar) in a Chicago night spot for two thousand dollars a week, or is it ten thousand? I forget. What I remember is that suddenly, into the mind of the onlooker, or newspaper reader, comes The Question: is this all public relations? But of course not—two girls are dead. Still, a song begins to catch on in Chicago, “The Benny Bedwell Blues.” Another newspaper launches a weekly contest: “How Do You Think the Grimes Girls Were Murdered?” and a prize is given for the best answer (in the opinion of the judges). And now the money begins to flow; donations, hundreds of them, start pouring in to Mrs. Grimes from all over the city and the state. For what? From whom? Most contributions are anonymous. Just the dollars, thousands and thousands of them—the Sun-Times keeps us informed of the grand total. Ten thousand, twelve thousand, fifteen thousand. Mrs. Grimes sets about refinishing and redecorating her house. A stranger steps forward, by the name of Shultz or Schwartz—I don’t really remember—but he is in the appliance business and he presents Mrs. Grimes with a whole new kitchen. Mrs. Grimes, beside herself with appreciation and joy, turns to her surviving daughter and says, “Imagine me in that kitchen!” Finally, the poor woman goes out and buys two parakeets (or maybe another Mr. Shultz presents them as a gift); one parakeet she calls Babs, the other Pattie. At just about this point, Benny Bedwell, doubtless having barely learned to hammer a nail in straight, is extradited to Florida on the charge of having raped a twelve-year-old girl there. Shortly thereafter I left Chicago myself, and so far as I know, though Mrs. Grimes hasn’t her two girls, she has a brand-new dishwasher and two small birds.