Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  In order, however, to make it as difficult as possible for the revolutionary bands to appropriate the peasants’ goods for themselves, I suggest that we hunt out the enemy and bomb him with goods first. Keep the Communist soldiers busy opening their packages, and meanwhile move swiftly in and dump a load on the villagers. As for that odd Asian peasant we read about in the papers, who is said to take flight when an American plane swoops low over his rice paddy in order to start saving him, let’s make him feel like the fool he is to flee his Uncle Sam. Instead of spraying him with bullets, drop a sack of flour at his feet. That’ll make him stop and think.

  Of course there is no denying that if the government adopts my proposal there are going to be casualties. This is still war, and somebody is bound to be hit on the head with a pair of shoes, or, what’s worse, with a bag of rice, which could hurt. To be wholly candid, it is not unlikely that, given the massive nature of the bombardment I have in mind, somewhere in Southeast Asia a child is going to be crushed to death by an air conditioner dropped from the sky. Our pilots are the most highly skilled in the world, and needless to say every precaution would be taken to avoid this sort of tragic mishap—leaflets beforehand to warn of an air-conditioner drop, and perhaps even specially demarcated air-conditioner drop zones. But in the end we must recognize that those in the air are no less human than those on the ground, and human beings make errors. I could not in good conscience make this proposal without also making perfectly clear the serious risk that is involved.

  As a consequence, I do not expect this proposal to go unopposed. Ours is a compassionate republic that detests violence, and there will be those in public life who will contend that I have impugned the national honor by suggesting that our nation would assume responsibility for the death of a single innocent child, regardless of how magnanimous our overall mission. Let me say that I do not doubt the sincerity of those who for religious, moral, and patriotic reasons take such a position. I would want quickly to assure them that I too am opposed to the crushing and killing of an innocent Asian child under an American air conditioner. I would go even further and say that I am categorically opposed to the crushing of any child anywhere under an air conditioner, even a Communist child. I like to think that I am a humane man. Nonetheless, we must be steadfast in our high national purpose, which has not to do with saving some child somewhere from a falling air conditioner but rather with saving all the people of Indochina from a foe whose viciousness and inhumanity exceed the imagination of the American public. And chances are that, with something as heavy as an air conditioner, the child would never know what hit him anyway.

  Our Castle*

  Like any number of stunned citizens, I have in recent days been looking for something to help me understand the latest shock to the political system and the national conscience, the “full, free, and absolute pardon” granted by President Ford to former-President Nixon, “for all offenses against the United States.” Now where are we? It has occurred to me that at least for the moment, and perhaps for some years to come, we are in something like the world of Kafka’s Castle.

  To be sure, Franz Kafka’s novels, The Castle and The Trial, have come to provide a model that is frequently overworked or misapplied. At the popular level, the novels have given way to a word, “Kafkaesque,” which by now is plastered indiscriminately on almost any baffling or unusually opaque event that is not easily translatable into the going simplifications. Kafkaesque has certainly never seemed, until now, a word that might add appreciably to an understanding of the Watergate years, even if any number of the characters and events that have surfaced along the way have partaken of that eerie mix, formerly associated with dreams, of the grave and the bizarre, the horrifying and the ridiculous, that gives Kafka’s novels their special resonance and saliency.

  Likewise, the attempt to determine President Nixon’s culpability did not, strictly speaking, have much to do with the plight of Joseph K., the accused isolate of The Trial. Nixon protested his innocence no less vehemently, and his talent for self-delusion and self-pity undoubtedly enabled him to see himself in a predicament very like Joseph K.’s, as it is described in the opening sentence of The Trial: “Someone must have traduced [Richard N.], for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Nonetheless, unlike Kafka’s doomed hero, the former President was never without the power to defy and obstruct the tribunals that would call him to judgment. And “‘The End’” that President Ford has told us he “must write” for Richard N.’s suffering is the very one that eluded poor Joseph K., despite his equally fervent efforts to bring his own famous case to precisely this conclusion.

  And yet it is just this seemingly un-Kafkaesque ending that has now given to Watergate its Kafkaesque dimension. President Ford, so very deliberate about closing the Watergate story—“My conscience tells me that only I, as President, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book”—has actually, like some latter-day Kafka, imagined a final chapter wholly in the modernist literary tradition that scorns conventional unravelings and clarifying judgments as so much Mother Goosery, and insists instead upon the ungraspable, the impenetrable, on all that is tediously ambiguous. That human affairs can be settled and managed, even to some large degree understood, is an idea that is as uncongenial to the imagination of the good-natured Middle Western President as it was to the depressed and tormented Prague Jew. Story writing, it now seems, makes even stranger bedfellows than politics. Kafka! thou shouldst be living at this hour: the White House hath need of a new Press Secretary.

  As I see it, there is still another telling Kafkaesque dimension to Watergate now that President Ford has written his version of The End. It is the enormousness of the frustration that has taken hold in America ever since Compassionate Sunday, the sense of waste, futility, and hopelessness that now attaches to the monumental efforts that had been required just to begin to get at the truth. And along with the frustration, the sickening disappointment of finding in the seat of power neither reason, nor common sense, nor horse sense—and certainly not charity or courage—but moral ignorance, blundering authority, and witless, arbitrary judgment.

  It is as though the American public, having for a decade been cast in one painful or degrading role after another—Kennedy’s orphans, Johnson’s patriots, Nixon’s patsies—has now been assigned to play the part of the Land Surveyor K. in Kafka’s Castle. In this novel, the Land Surveyor, full of hope and energy, enters a village under the jurisdiction of a labyrinthian bureaucracy whose headquarters is a rather inaccessible castle looming over the landscape. How eager the Land Surveyor is to get permission from the Chief of the Castle bureaucracy—a Mr. Klamm of unascertainable competence—to get down to work and achieve a purposeful social existence. How willing he is to bend over backward to live on friendly terms with the powers that be, imperfect as they are. His early hours in the Castle village bring to mind the touching atmosphere that prevailed in these parts during the thirty-day honeymoon with our Mr. Klamm. How willing! How eager! And how innocent.

  For, with all the will in the world to get on with the job, what the Land Surveyor discovers is that he can’t—the Castle won’t let him. He is blocked at every turn by authorities to whose inscrutable edicts and bizarre decrees he is beholden, but whose motives and methods defy his every effort to make sense of them. And that the Klamm who is running the whole bewildering operation happens not to be a criminal does not make the Land Surveyor’s frustrations any less enervating to the body or the spirit.

  Imagining the Erotic: Three Introductions*

  1. Alan Lelchuk

  For half of its five hundred pages, Alan Lelchuk’s first novel, American Mischief (which I have just read in manuscript), is a brilliant and original comedy on the subject of the immediate present: i.e., what disheartens Bellow in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, what provokes Kate Millett in Sexual Politics, what causes Malamud to cry “Mercy” for half a page at the conclusion of The Tenants. The fresh and intriguing a
spect of Lelchuk’s book is obviously not the concern with obsession, extremism, outlandishness, and injustice; it is, rather, the robust delight that the contemplation of confusion arouses in him. Like the Cambridge professor and “erogonist” Dean Bernard Kovell, whose creation is Lelchuk’s triumph—like Basil Seal in Waugh’s comedy of cultural breakdown, from which the author borrows the ironic (and mischievous) noun of his own title—it appears to be Alan Lelchuk’s great good luck to be on hand for the Dissolution. He gets a kick out of it all, which isn’t to suggest that he is simply malicious or perverse, that he is anything like cynical or nihilistic, or that the blood coursing through this book is cold, thin, or blue. Since this is a birth notice and not a eulogy, I will record that the newborn possesses a mean, pricky streak that at times leads him to be contemptuous in excess of the evidence. But by and large, like another Brooklyn Jew and literary roughneck whose ferocity tends to obscure his sweetness (often enough by design), Lelchuk is voracious rather than vicious; and rude and gruff as his appetite for the contradictory and the bewildering can make him, he is not at all a novelist to gloat over our uncertainties. Rude and gruff, he can also be nicely ironic (and, in the next breath, perfectly innocent), and therein lies much of this cocky snake charmer’s charm, as is the case too with the sword swallower of the literary bazaar, Mr. Mailer.

  The first half of American Mischief—the comic and remarkable half—consists almost entirely of the words (some sixty thousand well-chosen ones) of Dean Bernard Kovell of Mass (or as he would have it) Ass Ave. No novelist has written with such knowledge and eloquence of the consequences of carnal passion in Massachusetts since The Scarlet Letter (Updike and his Tarbox cunnilinguist notwithstanding). Hawthorne gave us Hester Prynne, the brave adulteress of Puritan Boston, whose cunt, to paraphrase an ancient, was her fate. Lelchuk introduces us to Kovell and Cambridge Now: the feverish literary dean (author of a book on Gissing), whose stupendous appetite for girls with hapless lives and specialized needs leads him to establish a family, or harem, of six damaged mistresses (a desolate young mother, an analyst-seduced analysand, and assorted Radcliffe graduates with wires crossed and fuses blown); and then there is the brainy, Brahmin town, America’s Alexandria, turned brothel, opium den, and open mental ward, the “Shanghai of New England,” to hear the reeling dean describe it.

  Lelchuk, who so revels in contradiction, and for whom contrast provides the organizing principle of his work, should take special delight in the comparison of his accomplishment to Hawthorne’s; let him enjoy it. Very soon now the charge of “sexism” will be leveled at him by the Feminist Right, inevitably for demonstrating in his fiction that there are indeed women in America as broken and resentful as the women in America are coming to proclaim themselves to be. Admittedly, Dean Kovell’s solution to his mistresses’ problems would not necessarily be NOW’s or Shirley Chisholm’s, but then Humbert Humbert’s is not necessarily the most responsible solution to his little female orphan’s predicament, nor is Clyde Griffith’s the most humane approach to the problem raised by a pregnant proletarian girl friend. Yes, Kovell is a male chauvinist pig, and so is Grushenka a ballbuster and Oblomov a dropout. As Delmore Schwartz once wrote, “Literary criticism is often very inneresting.”

  Lelchuk’s dean is also a campus hero, elevated by the students themselves to a deanship on the strength of his derring-do, as illustrated by the incident in which he is caught in his office going down on a graduate assistant. The Kids love him for the risks he takes. Some seventy pages of the manuscript are bravely given over to excerpts from a four-hour Castroesque (but anti-revolutionary) speech that “Kove” makes to the revolutionary students of Cardozo College when they occupy the college’s prestigious art museum, with its collection of de Koonings, Nevelsons, and David Smiths, and the Picassos, Matisses, Kandinskys, and Mirós on loan that month from the Boston Museum. It is an elegant, playful, heartfelt speech, crackling with intelligence and charm, and particularly marvelous because the wild sexual extremist preaches so eloquently to the rebels in behalf of order, restraint, and moderation, reducing himself to tears in the end with his plea for “belief in the species.” Thereupon the undergraduates proceed to defecate on the de Koonings and cut the Matisses into ribbons.

  Thus ends the remarkable half of American Mischief. In what follows, Lelchuk’s imagination runs away with him, though not far enough. Events are suddenly momentous and catastrophic: mood darkens; motive darkens; we are in a world of blood and flames—and yet the somber reverberations are too faint, the prose is undistinguished, and the human side of it all is somewhat strained and transparent.

  The subject here is not the dean and his family of women but a young student, Lenny Pincus, Cardozo College’s Cohn-Bendit, who emerges from the museum uprising with a plan for revolution that earns him a Time cover story and the editorial wrath of The New York Times (the paper Pincus loathes the way a P.T.A. president loathes Screw). Even more extreme in the political realm than is Kovell in the sexual, Pincus, after taking a fourteen-year-old runaway for his moll, murders Norman Mailer (firing the fatal bullet up the author’s determinedly virginal anus) and burns down the Widener Library and the Fogg Museum, He then establishes a kind of prison camp on a remote New Hampshire farm, to which he brings, in chains, eminent literary intellectuals for the purpose of brainwashing. They are snatched at gunpoint from the platform of a Hofstra literary symposium (what a sly dreamer this Lelchuk is) and transported in U-Haul trucks by Pincus’s Cambridge guerrilla band. And then still more, before Pincus, always a bookish Trotsky to the blacks and Puerto Ricans he commands, is betrayed by his cadre to the FBI and apprehended in a Cambridge hideout.*

  American Mischief ends with Pincus in jail. “And whoever claims that criminals are interesting men,” the young murderer writes in his diary, “should be condemned to live among them…” These final pages on the subject of pain are genuinely poignant, but as of this date, Lelchuk is not quite Dostoevsky. His imagination, relentless and extreme—and, one feels, accurately prophetic—when it comes to dreaming up offenses against society, is not equal to the task of dreaming up the offender himself. Pincus the political revolutionary is only intermittently in focus and of a piece, and never so thoroughgoing an ironist, or so convincing a philosopher and psychologist of his own conduct, as is the sexual revolutionary Kovell. But in praise of Lelchuk’s ambitiousness, it must be said that Pincus’s turbulence is grander and more harrowing than Kovell’s, and his spiritual yearnings are meant to be more mysterious and incomprehensible even to himself. Nonetheless, he is neither a Peter Verhovensky or a Raskolnikov.

  To judge a thirty-three-year-old first novelist by such standards may at first appear wildly unjust and silly—one thing to flatter him with Hawthorne, another to hang him for not having written Crime and Punishment or The Possessed. I only draw this comparison because the scrappy first novelist, leading with his chin, would have it that way: Pincus repeatedly mentions Dostoevsky’s two monstrous youths, partly to provide himself and the reader with a point of reference, but also, I think, in order to place his own name in nomination for the Bad Boys’ Hall of Fame.

  However: inconclusive as the second half of American Mischief may be (though it, too, has its felicitous pages, as when Pincus compares horrendous passages in Sophocles and Herman Kahn; when Pincus plans and executes the Mailer murder; and when he befriends—if that is the word—the fourteen-year-old innocent named Nugget), there seems to me, in the fictional impulse to join Pincus’s story to Kovell’s, the sign of the natural. To be sure, the impulse is of the kind that makes brave prose writers tremble: quirky, daring, wrong-headed, but perhaps inspired; it is the kind of impulse that the writer who tries simultaneously to be dreamy and alert realizes may as easily undermine the entire project as turn up those riches that perhaps—perhaps—lie buried in his talent. What is so engaging to me about Lelchuk is that in the midst of his very first book he is already impatient with himself, already so arrogant about what he does well as to be
exuberantly hacking and tearing away at himself (before our very eyes, in fact), trying to see what else he can do. I don’t doubt that he’ll find out, though the battlefield be strewn with chunks of his own tough hide.

  2. Milan Kundera*

  The book that made Milan Kundera famous, and infamous, in Czechoslovakia is a political novel entitled, unjokingly, The Joke. A direct and realistic book, openly reflective about the issues it raises—proceeding by means of philosophical thoughtfulness and accurate observation of a fairly broad spectrum of “politicized” citizens, it is something like a cross between Dos Passos and Camus—The Joke is largely concerned with the absurdities that wreck the life of a skeptical young Czech party intellectual during the bitter postwar years of Stalinist purges, trials, and other dogmatic enthusiasms. The Joke was published in Prague in 1967, at the time when pressure from writers and intellectuals like Kundera against official government repression was building rapidly toward the spirited national uprising that would become known (at first somewhat romantically, then altogether accurately) as the “Prague Spring.” “An attempt,” Kundera called the doomed reform movement that lasted little more than a season, “to create a socialism without an omnipotent secret police; with freedom of the spoken and written word; with a public opinion of which notice is taken and on which policy is based; with a modern culture freely developing; and with citizens who have lost their fear.”