Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  What gave those acts and offenses the special meaning they had for Portnoy, what made them so rich for him with danger, pleasure, and shame, and so comically inappropriate even in his estimation, is very like what I now believe made Portnoy himself as intriguing as apparently he was to the book’s large audience of Jews and Gentiles alike. In brief: going wild in public is the last thing in the world that a Jew is expected to do—by himself, by his family, by his fellow Jews, and by the larger community of Christians whose tolerance for him is often tenuous to begin with, and whose code of respectability he flaunts or violates at his own psychological risk, and perhaps at the risk of his fellow Jews’ physical and social well-being. Or so history and ingrained fears argue. He is not expected to make a spectacle of himself, either by shooting off his mouth or by shooting off his semen, and certainly not by shooting off his mouth about shooting off his semen. That pretty much takes the cake. And in fact it did.

  “As the paradigmatic outsiders of Western society, Jews have, of course, been masters of social adaptation,” writes David Singer, in an essay on the subject of “The Jewish Gangster” published in the winter 1974 issue of Judaism. It is no wonder then, says Singer, that “the American Jewish establishment—the defense agencies, the scholars, the historical societies” along with “American Jews [generally] have systematically denied any awareness of [this] important aspect of their history,” whose major figures, according to Singer, constitute “… a veritable Who’s Who in the annals of American crime, comparable to that contributed by any other ethnic group.”

  Of course an Arnold Rothstein, a Lepke Buchalter, a Bugsy Siegel, or a Meyer Lansky (to name only the supervillains on Singer’s list) Portnoy is not. Yet his sense of himself as a Jewish criminal is a recurrent motif in his ambivalent seizures of self-excoriation; witness the book’s last pages where, in concluding his manic aria, he imagines the cops out of a grade-B movie closing in on him, a grade-B racketeer named Mad Dog. It needs no Jewish “defense agencies” other than his own to impugn Portnoy for his conduct, and to make it seem to him that a preoccupation with the flesh is as compromising to the safety and well-being of a Jew in America as was Arnold Rothstein’s fixing—of all the stupid things for a Jewish boy to go and fix—a whole World Series.

  That not even a Jew—perhaps society’s most outstanding student of maneuvering and negotiation, whose most valued possession, envied even by his enemies, is his Kissingerian sechel—that not even a Jew could put up a successful fight any longer against non-negotiable demands of crude antisocial appetite and vulgar aggressive fantasy … this, it seems to me, may well have been precisely what engaged the attention of any number of middle-class readers whose own mastery of social adaptation had been seriously challenged by the more unsettling experiences of the decade. Surely to many it must have come as a kind of revelation to hear a Jew, of all people, and one whose public life had entirely to do with enforcing social justice and legal controls, admit in italics and caps that, rather than shoring up his defenses and getting on with the business of being better (in all senses of the word), his secret desire was really to give way and be bad—or at the least, if he could manage it, worse. That in particular was something they may not have heard, or read much about recently in American novels written by Jews about Jews.

  2. Heroes Jewish Writers Imagine

  To see just how strongly the Jew in the post-holocaust decades has been identified in American fiction with righteousness and restraint, with the just and measured response rather than with those libidinous and aggressive activities that border on the socially acceptable and may even constitute criminal transgression, it might be well to begin with the novels of Saul Bellow, by now the grand old man of American-Jewish writers, and to my mind the country’s most accomplished working novelist. And reading Bellow, what does one find? That almost invariably his heroes are Jewish in vivid and emphatic ways when they are actors in dramas of conscience where matters of principle or virtue are at issue, but are by comparison only faintly marked by their Jewishness, if they are Jews at all, when appetite and quasi- or outright libidinous adventure is at the heart of a novel.

  Bellow’s first Jewish (as distinguished from non-Jewish) Jew was Asa Leventhal in his second book, The Victim. Bellow himself now judges this excellent novel a “proper” book, by which I take him to mean, among other things, that it did not bear his particular stamp so much as convention’s. To be Jewish in this novel is to be accessible, morbidly so, to claims made upon the conscience, and to take upon oneself, out of a kind of gruff human sympathy and a responsiveness bordering dangerously at times on paranoia, responsibility for another man’s pain and misfortune. Being a Jew, to Asa Leventhal, is a burden at most, an irritation at least—and writing about such a Jew would appear after the fact to have been something of both to Bellow too, as though the enclosure of a victimized Jewish conscience happened also to constrain his inventiveness, and to exclude from imaginative consideration much that was pleasurable and exciting, involving appetite and the exuberant, rather than the ethical, life.

  There is Bellow’s own word “proper” to argue for this, and there is the next book, The Adventures of Augie March, where surely the least important ingredient in the lively and seductive hero’s make-up is his sense of himself as a Jew. You could, in fact, take the Jew out of the adventurous Augie March without doing much harm to the whole of the book, whereas the same could not be said for taking Chicago out of the boy. (Whereas the same couldn’t be said for taking the Jew out of the Levantine-looking Leventhal.) One can only speculate about how much writing The Victim may have served to settle the author’s own conscience about touchy matters of survival and success (the bedeviling issue for Leventhal, right along with the issue of Jewish self-defense) and to open the way for the unambiguous and loquacious delight in his own winning attractiveness that is Augie’s charm. But what couldn’t be clearer is that, while Bellow seems largely to locate in Leventhal’s Jewishness the roots of his morbidity, gloom, uncertainty, touchiness, and moral responsiveness, he connects Augie’s health, cheeriness, vigor, stamina, and appetite, as well as his enormous appeal to just about everyone in Cook County, if not in all creation, to his rootedness in a Chicago that is American to the core, a place where being Jewish makes of a boy nothing more special in the Virtue Department than any other immigrant mother’s child. Though it might be argued that it is the sensibility and verbal energy that in some essential way encompass the book’s “Jewishness,” this is an argument that would probably be given shortest shrift by Augie himself: “Look at me,” he cries triumphantly at the book’s conclusion, “going everywhere!” Essentially the sensibility and the energy are those of an exuberant and greedy eclectic, a “Columbus of those near-at-hand,” as he describes himself, perpetually outward-bound.

  The movement away from the obsessively Jewish Jew Leventhal to the relatively non-Jewish Jew Augie, away from claustrophobic bondage to the Chosen People toward heady, delight-filled choosing, culminates in Bellow’s next big novel, Henderson the Rain King, whose hoggish and greedy hero, hearty in an altogether different sense from Leventhal, is so much a creature possessed by strange ravenous hungers of the senses and the spirit that Bellow cannot see his way to making him even the most attenuated of Jews. To hang from his Jewishness by no more than a thread—that will do very nicely for Tommy (né Adler) Wilhelm, who wants more than anything his daddy. But it will not do at all for a hero who wants, in the way he wants it, what this hero wants.

  Which is? To do good, to be just? No, that would be more like Leventhal’s ambition, and one that seems to have less to do with “heart” than with a deal he has made to square it with the vengeful gods—playing ball with the superego. What then? To be adopted, abducted, and adored? No, that is more in brainy, handsome, egotistic Augie’s line (Augie, who is, when you stop to think about it, everything that Tommy Wilhelm had in mind but hadn’t the Chicago in him to pull off; his is the story of ego quashed). What then is Henderson
after? “I want!” Exclamation point. “I want!” And that is it. It is the voice of the id—raw, untrammeled, uncompromising, insatiable, and unsocialized desire.

  “I want.” In a Bellow novel only a goy can talk like that and get away with it. As indeed Henderson does, for by the conclusion of the book he is said actually to have been regenerated by this quest he has been on for intensity and orgasmic release. Is there anyone happier in all of Bellow’s books? No punishment or victimization for this unchosen person. To the contrary, what makes Henderson the Rain King a full-scale comedy is that what the clown wants he gets, if you will, in spades—“It’s the richness of the mixture!” cries Henderson, swooning in Africa with pleasure. What he had not enough of, if he had any, he now gets more of than he knows what to do with. He is the king of rain, of gush, of geyser.

  If the goy gets more than enough to burst his spirit’s sleep, Bellow’s next two heroes, very Jewish Jews indeed, get far less than they deserve. Desire or appetite has nothing to do with it. What is denied here are ethical hopes and expectations. Others should act otherwise, they don’t, and the Jewish hero suffers. With Moses Herzog and Artur Sammler, Bellow moves from Henderson all the way back to the world of the victim—and, ineluctably, it would seem, back to the Jew, the man of acutely developed sensibilities and a great sense of personal dignity and inbred virtue, whose sanity in the one book, and whose human sympathies in the other, are continuously tried by the libidinous greed of the willful, the crazed, and the criminal.

  Henderson’s hoggish “I want!” is in fact something like the rallying cry of those others who make Herzog moan, “I fail to understand,” and cause Sammler, who has seen and survived nearly everything, to admit at last in 1968 in New York City, “I am horrified.” The pig-farmer goy as a noble Yahoo in black Africa—the morally elegant Jew as a maimed and grieving Houyhnhnm on a darkening Upper West Side. Augie, the Chicago adventurer, returns as a bleeding, punished Herzog, the irresistible egoist who has been bitten by what he had chewed off—the Moses-trainer Madeleine having had better luck with her bird in the Berkshires than the eagle-trainer Thea in Mexico—and Leventhal, he of the bilious temper and the brooding conscience, is reincarnated as the moral magistrate Sammler, whose New York is no longer simply “as hot as Bangkok” on some nights, but has become a barbarous Bangkok, even on the Broadway bus and in the Columbia University lecture hall. “Most outdoor telephones were smashed, crippled. They were urinals, also. New York was getting worse than Naples or Salonika. It was like an Asian or an African town.…”

  How remote, how metaphorical—how “proper” indeed—Leventhal’s suffering seems beside Mr. Sammler’s. And what a mild, mild nuisance is Allbee, the insinuating down-and-out goy who ruins Leventhal’s summer solitude, who sullies his marriage bed and embarrassingly strokes his Jewish hair—how mild he is compared to the lordly and ominous dude of a black pickpocket, whose uncircumcised member and “great oval testicles” are unveiled in all their iridescent grandeur for consideration by the superego’s man in Manhattan. And yet, despite the difference in degree (and context and meaning) between the assault in the early book and in the later one, it is still the Jew who is aggressed against, the Jew who is on the receiving end when appetite and rage run wild: “the soul in its vehemence,” as Sammler calls what horrifies him most, or, less delicately and more specifically, “sexual niggerhood.” As opposed to what might similarly be described as “ethical Jewhood.”

  Now, there are obviously other ways to go about reading Saul Bellow: the intention here is not to diminish his achievement by reducing his novels to just this pile of bare bones but rather to trace the characteristic connection made in his work (and, in Bernard Malamud’s work as well) between the Jew and conscience, and the Gentile and appetite—and thereby to point up how conditioned readers had become (one might say, how persuaded, given the imaginative authority of the writers in question) to associate the sympathetic Jewish hero with ethical Jewhood as it opposes sexual niggerhood, with victimization as opposed to vengeful aggression, with dignified survival rather than euphoric or gloating triumph, with sanity and renunciation as opposed to excessive desire—except the excessive desire to be good and to do good.

  To the degree that Saul Bellow has been a source of pride or comfort (or at least has been little or no trouble, which can amount to the same thing) to what David Singer calls the “American Jewish establishment,” I would suggest that it has had more to do with these bare bones I’ve laid out here than with the brimming novels themselves, which are too deliberately ambiguous, too self-challenging, too densely rendered and reflective to be vehicles of ethnic propaganda or comfort. The fact is that Bellow’s deeply ironic humanism, coupled as it is with his wide-ranging sympathy for odd and dubious characters, for regular Chicago guys, for the self-mockery and self-love of the down-on-his-luck dauphin-type, has actually made him a figure of more importance to other Jewish writers than he is to the Jewish cultural audience—unlike, say, Elie Wiesel or Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, as they relate to the lost Jewish past, have a somewhat awesome spiritual meaning for the community-at-large that is not necessarily of pressing literary interest to their fellow writers. But Bellow, by closing the gap, as it were, between Damon Runyon and Thomas Mann—or to use loosely Philip Rahv’s categories, between redskin and paleface—has, I think, inspired all sorts of explorations into immediate worlds of experience that American-born Jewish writers who have come after him might otherwise have overlooked or dumbly stared at for years without the ingenious example of this Columbus of those near-at-hand.

  * * *

  If Saul Bellow’s longer works* tend generally to associate the Jewish Jew with the struggles of ethical Jewhood and the non-Jewish Jew and the Gentile with the release of appetite and aggression (Gersbach, the Buber-booster and wife-stealer in Herzog, is really no great exception, since he is a spurious Jewish Jew who can’t even pronounce his Yiddish right; and Madeleine, that Magdalene, has of course worn a cross and worked at Fordham), in the work of Bernard Malamud these tendencies are so sharply and schematically present as to give Malamud’s novels the lineaments of moral allegory. For Malamud, generally speaking, the Jew is innocent, passive, virtuous, and this to the degree that he defines himself or is defined by others as a Jew; the Gentile, on the other hand, is characteristically corrupt, violent, and lustful, particularly when he enters a room or a store or a cell with a Jew in it.

  Now, on the face of it, it would seem that a writer could not get very far with such evangelistic simplifications. And yet that is not at all the case with Malamud (as it isn’t with Jerzy Kosinski in The Painted Bird), for so instinctively do the figures of a good Jew and a bad goy emerge from an imagination essentially folkloric and didactic that his fiction is actually most convincing the more strictly he adheres to these simplifications, and diminishes in moral conviction and narrative drive to the extent that he surrenders them, or tries, however slyly, to undo their hold on him.

  His best book—containing as it does the classic Malamudian moral arrangement—is still The Assistant, which proposes that an entombed and impoverished grocer named Morris Bober shall by the example of his passive suffering and his goodness of heart transform a young thieving Italian drifter named Frank Alpine into another entombed, impoverished, and suffering Jewish grocer, and that this shall constitute an act of assistance, and set Alpine on the road to redemption—or so the stern morality of the book suggests.

  Redemption from what? Crimes of violence and deceit against a good Jewish father, crimes of lust against the father’s virginal daughter, whom the goy has spied upon naked and then raped. But oh how punitive is this redemption! We might almost take what happens to the bad goy when he falls into the hands of the good Jews as an act of enraged Old Testament retribution visited upon him by the wrathful Jewish author—if it weren’t for the moral pathos and the gentle religious coloration with which Malamud invests the tale of conversion; and also the emphasis that is clear to the author througho
ut—that it is the good Jews who have fallen into the hands of the bad goy. It has occurred to me that a less hopeful Jewish writer than Malamud—Kosinski, say, whose novels don’t put much stock in the capacity for redemption but concentrate rather determinedly on the persistence of brutality and malice—might not have understood Alpine’s transformation into Jewish grocer and Jewish father (with all that those roles entail in this book) as a sign of moral improvement but as the cruel realization of Bober’s revenge. “Now suffer, you goy bastard, the way I did.”

  To see how still another sort of Jewish writer, Norman Mailer, might have registered the implications of a story like The Assistant, we can look to his famous essay “The White Negro,” published first in Dissent magazine in 1957, the very year Malamud’s novel appeared. Imagining all of this independently of Malamud, Mailer nonetheless comes up with a scenario startlingly similar to the one with which The Assistant begins. In the Mailer version there are also two hoodlums who beat a defenseless shopkeeper over the head and take his money; however, quite characteristically for Mailer—and it is this that invariably distinguishes his concerns from Malamud’s or Bellow’s—he appraises the vicious act as it affects the well-being of the violator rather than the violated.

  “It can of course be suggested,” writes Mailer parenthetically, about “encourag[ing] the psychopath in oneself,” “that it takes little courage for two strong eighteen-year-old hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper, and indeed the act—even by the logic of the psychopath—is not likely to prove very therapeutic, for the victim is not an immediate equal. Still, courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.”