Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  It remains to be seen now how much or how little uneasiness these three stories will arouse in an audience that has lived through the turbulence of the intervening decade—and how much or how little pleasure they may provide.

  The Newark Public Library*

  What will the readers of Newark do if the City Council goes ahead with its money-saving plan to shut down the public library system on April 1? Will they loot the stacks the way Newarkers looted appliance stores in the riot of 1967? Will police be called in to Mace down thieves racing off with the Encyclopaedia Britannica? Will scholars take up sniping positions at reference-room windows and schoolchildren seize the main Washington Street building in order to complete their term papers? If the City Council locks up the books, will library card holders band together to “liberate” them?

  I suppose one should hope not. Apparently there must be respect for Law and Order, even where there is none for aspiration and curiosity and quiet pleasure, for language, learning, scholarship, intelligence, reason, wit, beauty, and knowledge.

  When I was growing up in Newark in the forties, we assumed that the books in the public library belonged to the public. Since my family did not own many books, or have the money for a child to buy them, it was good to know that solely by virtue of my municipal citizenship I had access to any book I wanted from that grandly austere building downtown on Washington Street, or from the branch library I could walk to in my neighborhood. No less satisfying was the idea of communal ownership, property held in common for the common good. Why I had to care for the books I borrowed, return them unscarred and on time, was because they weren’t mine alone, they were everybody’s. That idea had as much to do with civilizing me as any I was ever to come upon in the books themselves.

  If the idea of a public library was civilizing, so was the place, with its comforting quiet, its tidy shelves, its knowledgeable, dutiful employees who weren’t teachers. The library wasn’t simply where one had to go to get the books, it was a kind of exacting haven to which a city youngster willingly went for his lesson in restraint and his training in self-control. And then there was the lesson in order, the enormous institution itself serving as instructor. What trust it inspired—in both oneself and in systems—first to decode the catalogue card, then to make it through the corridors and stairwells into the open stacks, and there to discover, exactly where it was supposed to be, the desired book. For a ten-year-old to find he actually can steer himself through tens of thousands of volumes to the very one he wants is not without its satisfactions. Nor did it count for nothing to carry a library card in one’s pocket; to pay a fine; to sit in a strange place, beyond the reach of parent and school, and read whatever one chose, in anonymity and peace; finally, to carry home across the city and even into bed at night a book with a local lineage of its own, a family tree of Newark readers to which one’s name had now been added.

  In the forties, when the city was still largely white, it was simply an unassailable fact of life that the books were “ours” and that the public library had much to teach us about the rules of civilized life, as well as civilized pleasures to offer. It is strange (to put it politely) that now, when Newark is mostly black, the City Council (for fiscal reasons, we are told) has reached a decision that suggests that the books don’t really belong to the public after all, and that what a library provides for the young is no longer essential to an education. In a city seething with social grievances there is, in fact, probably little that could be more essential to the development and sanity of the thoughtful and ambitious young than access to those books. For the moment the Newark City Council may have solved its fiscal problem; it is too bad, however, that the councilmen are unable to calculate the frustration, cynicism, and rage that this insult must inevitably generate, and to imagine what shutting down its libraries may cost the community in the end.

  My Baseball Years*

  In one of his essays George Orwell writes that, though he was not very good at the game, he had a long, hopeless love affair with cricket until he was sixteen. My relations with baseball were similar. Between the ages of nine and thirteen, I must have put in a forty-hour week during the snowless months over at the neighborhood playfield—softball, hardball, and stickball pick-up games—while simultaneously holding down a full-time job as a pupil at the local grammar school. As I remember it, news of two of the most cataclysmic public events of my childhood—the death of President Roosevelt and the bombing of Hiroshima—reached me while I was out playing ball. My performance was uniformly erratic; generally okay for those easygoing pick-up games, but invariably lacking the calm and the expertise that the naturals displayed in stiff competition. My taste, and my talent, such as it was, was for the flashy, whiz-bang catch rather than the towering fly; running and leaping I loved, all the do-or-die stuff—somehow I lost confidence waiting and waiting for the ball lofted right at me to descend. I could never make the high school team, yet I remember that, in one of the two years I vainly (in both senses of the word) tried out, I did a good enough imitation of a baseball player’s style to be able to fool (or amuse) the coach right down to the day he cut the last of the dreamers from the squad and gave out the uniforms.

  Though my disappointment was keen, my misfortune did not necessitate a change in plans for the future. Playing baseball was not what the Jewish boys of our lower-middle-class neighborhood were expected to do in later life for a living. Had I been cut from the high school itself, then there would have been hell to pay in my house, and much confusion and shame in me. As it was, my family took my chagrin in stride and lost no more faith in me than I actually did in myself. They probably would have been shocked if I had made the team.

  Maybe I would have been too. Surely it would have put me on a somewhat different footing with this game that I loved with all my heart, not simply for the fun of playing it (fun was secondary, really), but for the mythic and aesthetic dimension that it gave to an American boy’s life—particularly to one whose grandparents could hardly speak English. For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, and who had no experience, such as a Catholic child might, of an awesome hierarchy that was real and felt, baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.

  Not that Hitler, the Bataan Death March, the battle for the Solomons, and the Normandy invasion didn’t make of me and my contemporaries what may well have been the most patriotic generation of schoolchildren in American history (and the most willingly and successfully propagandized). But the war we entered when I was eight had thrust the country into what seemed to a child—and not only to a child—a struggle to the death between Good and Evil. Fraught with perilous, unthinkable possibilities, it inevitably nourished a patriotism grounded in moral virtue and bloody-minded hate, the patriotism that fixes a bayonet to a Bible. It seems to me that through baseball I was put in touch with a more humane and tender brand of patriotism, lyrical rather than martial or righteous in spirit, and without the reek of saintly zeal, a patriotism that could not so easily be sloganized, or contained in a high-sounding formula to which you had to pledge something vague but all-encompassing called your “allegiance.”

  To sing the National Anthem in the school auditorium every week, even during the worst of the war years, generally left me cold. The enthusiastic lady teacher waved her arms in the air and we obliged with the words: “See! Light! Proof! Night! There!” But nothing stirred within, strident as we might be—in the end, just another school exercise. It was different, however, on Sundays out at Ruppert Stadium, a green wedge of pasture miraculously walled in among the factories, warehouses, and truck depots of industrial Newark. It would, in fact, have seemed to me an emotional thrill forsaken if, before the Newark Bears took on the hated enemy from across the marshes, the Jersey City Giants, we hadn’t first t
o rise to our feet (my father, my brother, and I—along with our inimical countrymen, the city’s Germans, Italians, Irish, Poles, and, out in the Africa of the bleachers, Newark’s Negroes) to celebrate the America that had given to this unharmonious mob a game so grand and beautiful.

  Just as I first learned the names of the great institutions of higher learning by trafficking in football pools for a neighborhood bookmaker rather than from our high school’s college adviser, so my feel for the American landscape came less from what I learned in the classroom about Lewis and Clark than from following the major-league clubs on their road trips and reading about the minor leagues in the back pages of The Sporting News. The size of the continent got through to you finally when you had to stay up to 10:30 p.m. in New Jersey to hear via radio “ticker-tape” Cardinal pitcher Mort Cooper throw the first strike of the night to Brooklyn shortstop Pee Wee Reese out in “steamy” Sportsmen’s Park in St. Louis, Missouri. And however much we might be told by teacher about the stockyards and the Haymarket riot, Chicago only began to exist for me as a real place, and to matter in American history, when I became fearful (as a Dodger fan) of the bat of Phil Cavarretta, first baseman for the Chicago Cubs.

  Not until I got to college and was introduced to literature did I find anything with a comparable emotional atmosphere and aesthetic appeal. I don’t mean to suggest that it was a simple exchange, one passion for another. Between first discovering the Newark Bears and the Brooklyn Dodgers at seven or eight and first looking into Conrad’s Lord Jim at age eighteen, I had done some growing up. I am only saying that my discovery of literature, and fiction particularly, and the “love affair”—to some degree hopeless, but still earnest—that has ensued, derives in part from this childhood infatuation with baseball. Or, more accurately perhaps, baseball—with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategies, its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its “characters,” its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate—was the literature of my boyhood.

  Baseball, as played in the big leagues, was something completely outside my own life that could nonetheless move me to ecstasy and to tears; like fiction it could excite the imagination and hold the attention as much with minutiae as with high drama. Mel Ott’s cocked leg striding into the ball, Jackie Robinson’s pigeon-toed shuffle as he moved out to second base, each was to be as deeply affecting over the years as that night—“inconceivable,” “inscrutable,” as any night Conrad’s Marlow might struggle to comprehend—the night that Dodger wild man, Rex Barney (who never lived up to “our” expectations, who should have been “our” Koufax), not only went the distance without walking in half a dozen runs, but, of all things, threw a no-hitter. A thrilling mystery, marvelously enriched by the fact that a light rain had fallen during the early evening, and Barney, figuring the game was going to be postponed, had eaten a hot dog just before being told to take the mound.

  This detail was passed on to us by Red Barber, the Dodger radio sportscaster of the forties, a respectful, mild Southerner with a subtle rural tanginess to his vocabulary and a soft country-parson tone to his voice. For the adventures of “dem bums” of Brooklyn—a region then the very symbol of urban wackiness and tumult—to be narrated from Red Barber’s highly alien but loving perspective constituted a genuine triumph of what my English professors would later teach me to call “point of view.” James himself might have admired the implicit cultural ironies and the splendid possibilities for oblique moral and social commentary. And as for the detail about Rex Barney eating his hot dog, it was irresistible, joining as it did the spectacular to the mundane, and furnishing an adolescent boy with a glimpse of an unexpectedly ordinary, even humdrum, side to male heroism.

  Of course, in time, neither the flavor and suggestiveness of Red Barber’s narration nor “epiphanies” as resonant with meaning as Rex Barney’s pre-game hot dog could continue to satisfy a developing literary appetite; nonetheless, it was just this that helped to sustain me until I was ready to begin to respond to the great inventors of narrative detail and masters of narrative voice and perspective like James, Conrad, Dostoevsky, and Bellow.

  Cambodia: A Modest Proposal*

  Only a few weeks before Prince Sihanouk was ousted as Chief of State last spring, and the way was open for the brutal war in Vietnam to spread westward into Cambodia, I was a visitor in that unlucky country. I’d come to see the temple ruins at Angkor, but during my stay also traveled some fifteen miles south to the great inland lake that looks on the map, at least these days, like a large tear falling across the face of Cambodia. The lake is about fifty miles long and five feet deep and empties into the Tonle Sap River, which joins at Pnompenh with the Mekong flowing down from Laos. In the summer, Mekong flood waters cause the Tonle Sap to flow backward, and the water and the fish of the Great Lake of Cambodia to spread over hundreds of square miles of dry land. The thousands of Cambodians who fish these waters for a livelihood dwell only a few feet above their prey in small bamboo huts raised up on stilts.

  The day I drove down to the Great Lake the temperature was over a hundred, and once off the main road, the Land Rover had to dig for several miles through a path deep with dust before it emerged onto the soft mud of a village of forty or fifty of these bamboo huts. When the rains came, the villagers would be moving from house to house by sampan rather than on bare feet through the slime.

  In the village I hired two local boys and their boat and went out with them onto the lake. From the muck of the landing we moved down a narrow brownish channel between a few “stores” up on stilts, past some houseboats that had window boxes with flowers growing in them and were obviously the dwellings of the village affluent, and then onto the vast motionless body of water, whose farthest encampment of bamboo huts looked from that distance like a brown insect skimming between water and sky. There was nothing but that encampment to separate the water from the sky. Where a horizon should have been, there was a seamless, gray intensity of light.

  The farther out on the lake we went, the greater the distance between the little settlements that were arranged, some twenty huts in a row, on either side of what on land we call a street. Occasionally we passed a hut set completely off by itself, looking in its isolation as though it might be the habitation of the last member of the human race, or the first. The possessions of each household appeared to consist of a sampan, fishing nets, straw baskets for fish and rice, and a water jug. Some houses were fronted by small open platforms serving as porches; on a few of these platforms greens of some sort were growing in tubs.

  And that was it. That was all. No telephone wires, no electric power lines, no cars, no garages, no lawn mowers and no lawns, no screens or screen doors, no carpeting, no sofas, no armchairs, no washers, no dryers, no flameless electric water heaters, no ping-pong tables, no sauna-belt waistline reducers, no Norelcos, no golf carts, no Today show in the morning, no Tonight show at night, no wardrobes for summer, winter, spring, and fall, no maxis, no minis—instead, a dry season and a rainy season, the sun and a stretch of horizonless water.

  That was it—life as spare and barren and repetitious as it must have been when the ancestors of these villagers first raised their dwellings up on piles in order to survive the monsoon flood. Millions of Cambodians live this way, if not in the fishing settlements along the fifty-mile stretch of lake, then equally unblessed on the rice field that is the Cambodian plain.

  And sure as hell, I thought, the day is going to come when the bombers fly in over the heads of these lake dwellers in order to “save” them. From what? Watching the solitary fishermen push by in their sampans, I could not imagine what there was that could be taken away from them, other than their toil and their arduous lives. Their freedom? They are the slaves of the sun and the monsoon, and always have been. Who in his right mind would plunge this country of peasants into yet another
battle for “minds and hearts”? Who in his right mind would ever drop anything on these people other than food, medicine, and clothing?

  And then it occurred to me: Why don’t we try it?

  * * *

  Here is a modest proposal for winning the war in Indochina that came to me while drifting out on the Great Lake of Cambodia only weeks before that country too began to bleed: instead of bombs, how about dropping goods on Southeast Asia? Wasn’t it for the welfare and well-being of these impoverished Asians that we entered this fray to begin with? And if goods are not at the heart of the matter, what is? “Democracy”? Why not just give them what they need, rather than what we want them to need, which often appears largely to be us. To be sure, we have our winning ways: the free-fire zone, the relocation camp, the search-and-destroy mission, the defoliants, the napalm, etc. At times one wonders how they can possibly resist us—but then these are inscrutable people.

  Admittedly, if the government were to adopt my proposal and commence bombing with food and refrigerators, vaccines and shoes, it would very likely make the United States the laughingstock of Asia, for we would be dropping this stuff on people who don’t start off loving and admiring us very much, and who, from the way they are behaving, look as though they are stubbornly determined to refuse to learn how. To some we might even appear to be the biggest fools in the history of the world; yet isn’t that preferable, speaking strictly in terms of our image abroad, to being considered the world’s biggest scourge? Of course, there will be those who laugh when the guerrillas enter a village we have bombarded with goods and haul them away to their encampments. Let them: we’ll just fly in the next day with another payload. We can pound away at a village for days on end if that’s what it takes to inundate the place with goods. Furthermore, a thousand pairs of boots dropped daily for a week is still cheaper than a single one-thousand-pound bomb. So not only will we be shodding these barefooted Indochinese but there will be an enormous dollar-saving—and thereby certainly the last laugh will be ours.