Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  I do not care to go at length here into what a good many readers take for granted are the purposes and possibilities of fiction. I do want to make clear, however, to those whose interests may not lead them to speculate much on the subject, a few of the assumptions a writer may hold—assumptions such as lead me to say that I do not write a story to make evident whatever disapproval I may feel for adulterous men. I write a story of a man who is adulterous to reveal the condition of such a man. If the adulterous man is a Jew, then I am revealing the condition of an adulterous man who is a Jew. Why tell that story? Because I seem to be interested in how—and why and when—a man acts counter to what he considers to be his “best self,” or what others assume it to be, or would like it to be. The subject is hardly “mine”; it interested readers and writers for a long time before it became my turn to be engaged by it too.

  One of my readers, a man in Detroit, was himself not too engaged and suggested in a letter to me that he could not figure out why I was. He posed several questions which I believe, in their very brevity, were intended to disarm me. I quote from his letter without his permission.

  The first question: “Is it conceivable for a middle-aged man to neglect business and spend all day with a middle-aged woman?” The answer is yes.

  Next he asks: “Is it a Jewish trait?” I take it he is referring to adultery and not facetiously to the neglecting of business. The answer is: “Who said it was?” Anna Karenina commits adultery with Vronsky, with consequences more disastrous than those Epstein brings about. Who thinks to ask, “Is it a Russian trait?” It is a decidedly human possibility. Even though the most famous injunction against it is reported as being issued, for God’s own reasons, to the Jews, adultery has been one of the ways by which people of all faiths have sought pleasure, or freedom, or vengeance, or power, or love, or humiliation …

  The next in the gentleman’s series of questions to me is: “Why so much shmutz?” Is he asking, Why is there dirt in the world? Why is there disappointment? Why is there hardship, ugliness, evil, death? It would be nice to think these were the questions he had in mind when he asks, “Why so much shmutz?” But all he is really asking is, “Why so much shmutz in that story?” This is what the story adds up to for him. An old man discovers the fires of lust are still burning in him? Shmutz! Disgusting! Who wants to hear that kind of stuff! Struck as he is by nothing but the dirty aspects of Epstein’s troubles, the gentleman from Detroit concludes that I am narrow-minded.

  So do others. Narrow-mindedness, in fact, was the charge that a New York rabbi, David Seligson, was reported in The New York Times recently as having brought against me and other Jewish writers who, he told his congregation, dedicated themselves “to the exclusive creation of a melancholy parade of caricatures.” Rabbi Seligson also disapproved of Goodbye, Columbus because I described in it a “Jewish adulterer … and a host of other lopsided schizophrenic personalities.” Of course, adultery is not a characteristic symptom of schizophrenia, but that the rabbi should see it this way, as a sign of a diseased personality, indicates to me that we have different notions as to what health is. After all, it may be that life produces a melancholy middle-aged businessman like Lou Epstein, who in Dr. Seligson’s eyes looks like another in a parade of caricatures. I myself find Epstein’s adultery an unlikely solution to his problems, a pathetic, even doomed response, and a comic one too, since it does not even square with the man’s own conception of himself and what he wants; but none of this unlikeliness leads me to despair of his sanity, or humanity. I suppose it is tantamount to a confession from me of lopsided schizophrenia to admit that the character of Epstein happened to have been conceived with considerable affection and sympathy. As I see it, one of the rabbi’s limitations is that he cannot recognize a bear hug when one is being administered right in front of his eyes.

  The Times report continues: “The rabbi said he could only ‘wonder about’ gifted writers, ‘Jewish by birth, who can see so little in the tremendous saga of Jewish history.’” But I don’t imagine the rabbi “wonders” about me any more than I wonder about him: that wondering business is only the voice of wisdom that is supposed to be making itself heard, always willing to be shown the light, if, of course, there is any; but I can’t buy it. Pulpit fair-mindedness only hides the issue—as it does here in the rabbi’s conclusion, quoted by the Times: “‘That they [the Jewish writers in question] must be free to write, we would affirm most vehemently; but that they would know their own people and tradition, we would fervently wish.’”

  However, the issue is not knowledge of one’s “people.” At least, it is not a question of who has more historical data at his fingertips, or is more familiar with Jewish tradition, or which of us observes more customs and rituals. It is even possible, needless to say, to “know” a good deal about tradition, and to misunderstand what it is that tradition signifies. The story of Lou Epstein stands or falls not on how much I know about tradition but on how much I know and understand about Lou Epstein. Where the history of the Jewish people comes down in time and place to become the man whom I called Epstein, that is where my knowledge must be sound. But I get the feeling that Rabbi Seligson wants to rule Lou Epstein out of Jewish history. I find him too valuable to forget or dismiss, even if he is something of a grubber yung and probably more ignorant of history than the rabbi believes me to be.

  Epstein is pictured not as a learned rabbi, after all, but as the owner of a small paper-bag company; his wife is not learned either, and neither is his mistress; consequently, a reader should not expect to find in this story knowledge on my part, or the part of the characters, of the Sayings of the Fathers; he has every right to expect that I be close to the truth as to what might conceivably be the attitudes of a Jewish man of Epstein’s style and history toward marriage, family life, divorce, and fornication. The story is called “Epstein” because Epstein, not the Jews, is the subject; where the story is weak I think I know by this time; but the rabbi will never find out until he comes at the thing in terms of what it wants to be about, rather than what he would like it to be about.

  Obviously, though, his interest is not in the portrayal of character; what he wants in my fiction is, in his words, a “balanced portrayal of Jews as we know them.” I even suspect that something called “balance” is what the rabbi would advertise as the most significant characteristic of Jewish life; what Jewish history comes down to is that at long last we have in our ranks one of everything. But his assumptions about the art of fiction are what I should like to draw particular attention to. In his sermon Rabbi Seligson says of Myron Kaufmann’s Remember Me to God that it can “hardly be said to be recognizable as a Jewish sociological study.” But Mr. Kaufmann, as a novelist, probably had no intention of writing a sociological study, or—for this seems more like what the rabbi really yearns for in the way of reading—a nice positive sampling. Madame Bovary is hardly recognizable as a sociological study either, having at its center only a single, dreamy, provincial Frenchwoman, and not one of every other kind of provincial Frenchwoman too; this does not, however, diminish its brilliance as a novel, as an exploration of Madame Bovary herself. Literary works do not take as their subjects characters and events which have impressed a writer primarily by the frequency of their appearance. For example, how many Jewish men, as we know them, have come nearly to the brink of plunging a knife into their only son because they believed God had demanded it of them? The story of Abraham and Isaac derives its meaning from something other than its being a familiar, recognizable, everyday occurrence. The test of any literary work is not how broad is its range of representation—for all that breadth may be characteristic of a kind of narrative—but the depth with which the writer reveals whatever he has chosen to represent.

  To confuse a “balanced portrayal” with a novel is finally to be led into absurdities. “Dear Fyodor Dostoevsky—All the students in our school, and most of the teachers, feel that you have been unfair to us. Do you call Raskolnikov a balanced portrayal of studen
ts as we know them? Of Russian students? Of poor students? What about those of us who have never murdered anyone, who do our schoolwork every night?” “Dear Mark Twain—None of the slaves on our plantation has ever run away. But what will our owner think when he reads of Nigger Jim?” “Dear Vladimir Nabokov—The girls in our class…” and so on. What fiction does and what the rabbi would like it to do are two entirely different things. The concerns of fiction are not those of a statistician—or of a public-relations firm. The novelist asks himself, “What do people think?”; the PR man asks, “What will people think?” But I believe this is what is actually troubling the rabbi when he calls for his “balanced portrayal of Jews”: What will people think?

  Or, to be exact: What will the goyim think?

  2

  This was the question raised—and urgently—when another story of mine, “Defender of the Faith,” appeared in The New Yorker in April 1959. The story is told by Nathan Marx, an army sergeant just rotated back to Missouri from combat duty in Germany, where the war has ended. As soon as he arrives, he is made first sergeant in a training company, and immediately is latched on to by a young recruit who tries to use his attachment to the sergeant to receive kindnesses and favors. The attachment, as he sees it, is that they are both Jews. As the story progresses, what the recruit, Sheldon Grossbart, comes to demand are not mere considerations but privileges to which Marx does not think he is entitled. The story is about one man who uses his own religion, and another’s uncertain conscience, for selfish ends; but mostly it is about this other man, the narrator, who, because of the ambiguities of being a member of his religion, is involved in a taxing, if mistaken, conflict of loyalties.

  I don’t now, however, and didn’t while writing, see Marx’s problem as nothing more than “Jewish”: confronting the limitations of charity and forgiveness in one’s nature—having to draw a line between what is merciful and what is just—trying to distinguish between apparent evil and the real thing, in one’s self and others—these are problems for most people, regardless of the level at which they are perceived or dealt with. Yet, though the moral complexities are not exclusively a Jew’s, I never for a moment considered that the characters in the story should be anything other than Jews. Someone else might have written a story embodying the same themes, and similar events perhaps, and had at its center Negroes or Irishmen; for me there was no choice. Nor was it a matter of making Grossbart a Jew and Marx a Gentile, or vice versa; telling half the truth would have been much the same here as telling a lie. Most of those jokes beginning “Two Jews were walking down the street” lose a little of their punch if one of the Jews, or both, is disguised as an Englishman or a Republican. Similarly, to have made any serious alteration in the Jewish factuality of “Defender of the Faith,” as it began to fill itself out in my imagination, would have so unsprung the tensions I felt in the story that I would no longer have had left a story that I wanted to tell, or one I believed myself able to.

  Some of my critics must wish that this had happened, for in going ahead and writing this story about Jews, what else did I do but confirm an anti-Semitic stereotype? But to me the story confirms something different, if no less painful, to its readers. To me Grossbart is not something we can dismiss solely as an anti-Semitic stereotype; he is a Jewish fact. If people of bad intention or weak judgment have converted certain facts of Jewish life into a stereotype of The Jew, that does not mean that such facts are no longer important in our lives, or that they are taboo for the writer of fiction. Literary investigation may even be a way to redeem the facts, to give them the weight and value that they should have in the world, rather than the disproportionate significance they obviously have for some misguided or vicious people.

  Sheldon Grossbart, the character I imagined as Marx’s antagonist, has his seed in fact. He is not meant to represent The Jew, or Jewry, nor does the story indicate that the writer intends him to be understood that way by the reader. Grossbart is depicted as a single blundering human being, one with force, self-righteousness, cunning, and, on occasion, even a little disarming charm; he is depicted as a man whose lapses of integrity seem to him so necessary to his survival as to convince him that such lapses are actually committed in the name of integrity. He has been able to work out a system whereby his own sense of responsibility can suspend operation, what with the collective guilt of the others having become so immense as to have seriously altered the conditions of trust in the world. He is represented not as the stereotype of The Jew, but as a Jew who acts like the stereotype, offering back to his enemies their vision of him, answering the punishment with the crime. Given the particular kinds of humiliations and persecutions that the nations have practiced on the Jews, it argues for far too much nobility to deny not only that Jews like Grossbart exist but that the temptations to Grossbartism exist in many who perhaps have more grace, or will, or are perhaps only more cowed, than the simple frightened soul that I imagined weeping with fear and disappointment at the end of the story. Grossbart is not The Jew; but he is a fact of Jewish experience and well within the range of its moral possibilities.

  And so is his adversary, Marx, who is, after all, the story’s central character, its consciousness and its voice. He is a man who calls himself a Jew more tentatively than does Grossbart; he is not sure what it means—means for him—for he is not unintelligent or without conscience; he is dutiful, almost to a point of obsession, and confronted by what are represented to him as the needs of another Jew, he does not for a while know what to do. He moves back and forth from feelings of righteousness to feelings of betrayal, and only at the end, when he truly does betray the trust that Grossbart tries to place in him, does he commit what he has hoped to all along: an act he can believe to be honorable.

  Marx does not strike me, nor any of the readers I heard from, as unlikely, incredible, “made-up”; the verisimilitude of the characters and their situation was not what was called into question. In fact, an air of convincingness that the story was believed to have, caused a number of people to write to me, and The New Yorker, and the Anti-Defamation League, protesting its publication.

  Here is one of the letters I received after the story was published:

  Mr. Roth:

  With your one story, “Defender of the Faith,” you have done as much harm as all the organized anti-Semitic organizations have done to make people believe that all Jews are cheats, liars, connivers. Your one story makes people—the genera. public—forget all the great Jews who have lived, all the Jewish boys who served well in the armed services, all the Jews who live honest hard lives the world over.…

  Here is one received by The New Yorker:

  Dear Sir:

  … We have discussed this story from every possible angle and we cannot escape the conclusion that it will do irreparable damage to the Jewish people. We feel that this story presented a distorted picture of the average Jewish soldier and are at a loss to understand why a magazine of your fine reputation should publish such a work which lends fuel to anti-Semitism.

  Clichés like “this being Art” will not be acceptable. A reply will be appreciated.

  Here is a letter received by the officials of the Anti-Defamation League, who, because of the public response, telephoned to ask if I wanted to talk to them. The strange emphasis of the invitation, I thought, indicated the discomfort they felt at having to pass on messages such as this:

  Dear —,

  What is being done to silence this man? Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.…

  The first two letters I quoted were written by Jewish laymen, the last by a rabbi and educator in New York City, a man of prominence in the world of Jewish affairs.

  The rabbi was later to communicate directly with me. He did not mention that he had already written to the Anti-Defamation League to express regret over the decline of medieval justice, though he was careful to point out at the conclusion of his first letter his reticence in another quarter. I believe I was supposed to take it as an act o
f mercy: “I have not written to the editorial board of The New Yorker,” he told me. “I do not want to compound the sin of informing.…”

  Informing. There was the charge so many of the correspondents had made, even when they did not want to make it openly to me, or to themselves. I had informed on the Jews. I had told the Gentiles what apparently it would otherwise have been possible to keep secret from them: that the perils of human nature afflict the members of our minority. That I had also informed them it was possible for there to be such a Jew as Nathan Marx did not seem to bother anybody; if I said earlier that Marx did not seem to strike my correspondents as unlikely, it is because he didn’t strike them at all. He might as well not have been there. Of the letters that I read, just one mentioned Marx, and only to point out that I was no less blameworthy for portraying the Sergeant as a “white Jew,” as he was described by my correspondent, a kind of Jewish Uncle Tom.

  But even if Marx were that and only that, a white Jew, and Grossbart a black one, did it in any way follow that because I had examined the relationship between them—another concern central to the story which drew barely a comment from my correspondents—that I had then advocated that Jews be denationalized, deported, persecuted, murdered? Well, no. Whatever the rabbi may believe privately, he did not indicate to me that he thought I was an anti-Semite. There was a suggestion, however, and a grave one, that I had acted like a fool. “You have earned the gratitude,” he wrote, “of all who sustain their anti-Semitism on such conceptions of Jews as ultimately led to the murder of six million in our time.”

  Despite the sweep there at the end of the sentence, the charge made is actually up at the front: I “earned the gratitude…” But of whom? I would put it less dramatically but maybe more exactly: of those who are predisposed to misread the story—out of bigotry, ignorance, malice, or even innocence. If I did earn their gratitude, it was because they failed to see, even to look for, what I was talking about … Such conceptions of Jews as anti-Semites hold, then, and as they were able to confirm by misunderstanding my story, are the same, the rabbi goes on to say, as those which “ultimately led to the murder of six million in our time.”