by Philip Roth
And what is the moral of the story? Simply this: that the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s one meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. Who, for example, could have invented Charles Van Doren? Roy Cohn and David Schine? Sherman Adams and Bernard Goldfine? Dwight David Eisenhower?
Several months back, most of the country heard one of the candidates for the Presidency of the United States say something like. “Now if you feel that Senator Kennedy is right, then I sincerely believe you should vote for Senator Kennedy, and if you feel that I am right, I humbly submit that you vote for me. Now I feel, and this is certainly a personal opinion, that I am right…” and so on. Though it did not appear this way to some thirty-four million voters, it still seems to me a little easy to ridicule Mr. Nixon, and it is not for that reason that I have bothered to paraphrase his words here. If one was at first amused by him, one was ultimately astonished. Perhaps as a satiric literary creation, he might have seemed “believable,” but I myself found that on the TV screen, as a real public figure, a political fact, my mind balked at taking him in. Whatever else the television debates produced in me, I should point out, as a literary curiosity, they also produced professional envy. All the machinations over make-up and rebuttal time, all the business over whether Mr. Nixon should look at Mr. Kennedy when he replied, or should look away—all of it was so beside the point, so fantastic, so weird and astonishing, that I found myself beginning to wish I had invented it. But then, of course, one need not have been a fiction writer to wish that someone had invented it, and that it was not real and with us.
The daily newspapers, then, fill us with wonder and awe (is it possible? is it happening?), also with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanity, the idiocy, the piety, the lies, the noise … Recently, in Commentary, Benjamin DeMott wrote that the “deeply lodged suspicion of the times [is] namely, that events and individuals are unreal, and that power to alter the course of the age, of my life and your life, is actually vested nowhere.” There seems to be, said DeMott, a kind of “universal descent into unreality.” The other night—to give a benign example of the descent—my wife turned on the radio and heard the announcer offering a series of cash prizes for the three best television plays of five minutes’ duration written by children. It is difficult at such moments to find one’s way around the kitchen. Certainly few days go by when incidents far less benign fail to remind us of what DeMott is talking about. When Edmund Wilson says that after reading Life magazine he feels he does not belong to the country depicted there, that he does not live in this country, I understand what he means.
However, for a writer of fiction to feel that he does not really live in his own country—as represented by Life or by what he experiences when he steps out the front door—must seem a serious occupational impediment. For what will his subject be? His landscape? One would think that we might get a high proportion of historical novels or contemporary satire—or perhaps just nothing. No books. Yet almost weekly one finds on the best-seller list another novel which is set in Mamaroneck or New York City or Washington, with characters moving through a world of dishwashers and TV sets and advertising agencies and senatorial investigations. It all looks as though the writers are turning out books about our world. There is Cash McCall and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Marjorie Morningstar and The Enemy Camp and Advise and Consent, and so on. But what is noteworthy is that these books aren’t very good. Not that the writers aren’t sufficiently horrified with the landscape to suit me—quite the contrary. They are generally full of concern for the world about them; finally, however, they just don’t imagine the corruption and vulgarity and treachery of American public life any more profoundly than they imagine human character—that is, the country’s private life. All issues are generally solvable, suggesting that they are not so much awe-struck or horror-struck as they are provoked by some topical controversy. “Controversial” is a common word in the critical language of this literature, as it is, say, in the language of the TV producer.
It is hardly news that in best-sellerdom we frequently find the hero coming to terms and settling down in Scarsdale, or wherever, knowing himself. And on Broadway, in the third act, someone says, “Look, why don’t you just love each other?” and the protagonist, throwing his hand to his forehead, cries, “God, why didn’t I think of that!” and before the bulldozing action of love, all else collapses—verisimilitude, truth, and interest. It is like “Dover Beach” ending happily for Matthew Arnold, and for us, because the poet is standing at the window with a woman who understands him. If the literary investigation of our era were to become solely the property of Wouk, Weidman, Sloan Wilson, Cameron Hawley, and Broadway’s amor-vincit-omnia boys it would be unfortunate indeed—like leaving sex to the pornographers, where again there is more to what is happening than first meets the eye.
But the times have not yet been given over completely to lesser minds and talents. There is Norman Mailer. And he is an interesting example of a writer in whom our era has provoked such a magnificent disgust that dealing with it in fiction has almost come to seem, for him, beside the point. He has become an actor in the cultural drama, the difficulty of which is that it leaves one with less time to be a writer. For instance, to defy the civil-defense authorities and their H-bomb drills, you have to take off a morning from the typewriter and go down and stand outside of City Hall; then, if you’re lucky and they toss you in jail, you have to give up an evening at home and your next morning’s work as well. To defy Mike Wallace, or challenge his principle-less aggression, or simply use him or straighten him out, you must first be a guest on his program*—there’s one night shot. Then you may well spend the next two weeks (I am speaking from memory) disliking yourself for having gone, and then two more writing an article attempting to explain why you did it and what it was like. “It’s the age of the slob,” says a character in William Styron’s new novel. “If we don’t watch out they’re going to drag us under.…” And the dragging under can take many forms. We get, from Mailer, for instance, a book like Advertisements for Myself, a chronicle for the most part of why I did it and what it was like—and who I have it in for: his life as a substitute for his fiction. An infuriating, self-indulgent, boisterous, mean book, not much worse than most advertising we have to put up with—but, taken as a whole, curiously moving in its revelation of despair so great that the man who bears it, or is borne by it, seems for the time being to have given up on making an imaginative assault upon the American experience, and has become instead the champion of a kind of public revenge. However, what one champions one day may make one its victim the next; once having written Advertisements for Myself, I don’t see that you can write it again. Mailer probably now finds himself in the unenviable position of having to put up or shut up. Who knows—maybe it’s where he wanted to be. My own feeling is that times are tough for a fiction writer when he takes to writing letters to his newspaper rather than those complicated, disguised letters to himself, which are stories.
The last is not intended to be a sententious, or a condescending remark, or even a generous one. However one suspects Mailer’s style or his motives, one sympathizes with the impulse that leads him to want to be a critic, a reporter, a sociologist, a journalist, or even the Mayor of New York. For what is particularly tough about the times is writing about them, as a serious novelist or storyteller. Much has been made, much of it by the writers themselves, of the fact that the American writer has no status, no respect, and no audience. I am pointing here to a loss more central to the task itself, the loss of a subject; or, to put it another way, a voluntary withdrawal of interest by the fiction writer from some of the grander social and political phenomena of our times.
Of course there have been writers who have tried to meet these phenomena head-on. It seems to me I have read several books or stories in the past few years in which one character or another starts to talk about “The Bomb,” and the conversation usually leaves me feeling less than convinced, and in some extreme instances, with a certain amount of sympathy for fallout; it is like people in college novels having long talks about what kind of generation they are. But what then? What can the writer do with so much of the American reality as it is? Is the only other possibility to be Gregory Corso and thumb your nose at the whole thing? The attitude of the Beats (if such a phrase has meaning) is not entirely without appeal. The whole thing is a joke. America, ha-ha. But that doesn’t put very much distance between Beatdom and its sworn enemy, best-sellerdom—not much more than what it takes to get from one side of a nickel to the other: for is America, ha-ha, really any more than America, hoo-ray, stood upon its head?
Now it is possible that I am exaggerating the serious writer’s response to our cultural predicament and his inability or unwillingness to deal with it imaginatively. There seems to me little, in the end, to prove an assertion about the psychology of a nation’s writers, outside, that is, of their books themselves. In this case, unfortunately, the bulk of the evidence is not books that have been written but the ones that have been left unfinished, and those that have not even been considered worth the attempt. Which is not to say that there have not been certain literary signs, however, certain obsessions and innovations, to be found in the novels of our best writers, supporting the notion that the social world has ceased to be as suitable or as manageable a subject as it once may have been.
Let me begin with some words about the man who, by reputation at least, is the writer of the age. The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that perhaps he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture. The Catcher in the Rye and the recent stories in The New Yorker having to do with the Glass family surely take place in the immediate here and now. But what about the self, what about the hero? The question is of particular interest here, for in Salinger, more than in most of his contemporaries, the figure of the writer has lately come to be placed directly in the reader’s line of vision, so that there is a connection, finally, between the attitudes of the narrator as, say, brother to Seymour Glass, and as a man who writes by profession.
And what of Salinger’s heroes? Well, Holden Caulfield, we discover, winds up in an expensive sanitarium. And Seymour Glass commits suicide finally, but prior to that he is the apple of his brother’s eye—and why? He has learned to live in this world—but how? By not living in it. By kissing the soles of little girls’ feet and throwing rocks at the head of his sweetheart. He is a saint, clearly. But since madness is undesirable and sainthood, for most of us, out of the question, the problem of how to live in this world is by no means answered; unless the answer is that one cannot. The only advice we seem to get from Salinger is to be charming on the way to the loony bin. Of course, Salinger is under no obligation to supply advice of any sort to writers or readers—still, I happen to find myself growing more and more curious about this professional writer, Buddy Glass, and how he manages to coast through life in the arms of sanity.
There is in Salinger the suggestion that mysticism is a possible road to salvation; at least some of his characters respond well to an intensified, emotional religious belief. Now my own reading in Zen is minuscule, but as I understand it from Salinger, the deeper we go into this world, the further we can get away from it. If you contemplate a potato long enough, it stops being a potato in the usual sense; unfortunately, however, it is the usual sense that we have to deal with from day to day. For all his loving handling of the world’s objects there seems to me, in Salinger’s Glass family stories as in The Catcher, a spurning of life as it is lived in the immediate world—this place and time is viewed as unworthy of those few precious people who have been set down in it only to be maddened and destroyed.
A spurning of our world—though of a different order—occurs in the work of another of our most gifted writers, Bernard Malamud. Even when Malamud writes a book about baseball, The Natural, it is not baseball as it is played in Yankee Stadium but a wild, wacky game, where a player who is instructed to knock the cover off the ball promptly steps up to the plate and does just that: the batter swings and the inner core of the ball goes looping out to center field, where the confused fielder commences to tangle himself in the unwinding sphere; then the shortstop runs out and, with his teeth, bites the center fielder and the ball free from one another. Though The Natural is not Malamud’s most successful book, it is at any rate our introduction to his world, which is by no means a replica of our own. There are really things called baseball players, of course, and really things called Jews, but there much of the similarity ends. The Jews of The Magic Barrel and the Jews of The Assistant are not the Jews of New York City or Chicago. They are Malamud’s invention, a metaphor of sorts to stand for certain possibilities and promises, and I am further inclined to believe this when I read the statement attributed to Malamud which goes, “All men are Jews.” In fact, we know this is not so; even the men who are Jews aren’t sure they’re Jews. But Malamud, as a writer of fiction, has not shown specific interest in the anxieties and dilemmas and corruptions of the contemporary American Jew, the Jew we think of as characteristic of our times. Rather, his people live in a timeless depression and a placeless Lower East Side; their society is not affluent, their predicament is not cultural. I am not saying—one cannot, of Malamud—that he has spurned life or an examination of its difficulties. What it is to be human, and to be humane, is his deepest concern. What I do mean to point out is that he does not—or has not yet—found the contemporary scene a proper or sufficient backdrop for his tales of heartlessness and heartache, of suffering and regeneration.
