Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  These few lines on the positive value homicide has for the psychopath should make it clear why Jewish cultural audiences, which are generally pleased to hear Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud identified by critics as Jewish writers, are perfectly content that by and large Norman Mailer, with all his considerable influence and stature, should go forth onto the lecture platform and the television talk shows as a writer, period. This is obviously okay too with the author of The Deer Park and An American Dream, to name just two of his books with heroes he chooses not to call Cohen. It is pointless to wonder what Jews (or Gentiles) would have made of those two books if the author had had other than an O’Shaugnessy as the libidinous voyager or a Rojack as the wife-murderer and spade-whipper in his American Gomorrah, for that an identifiably Jewish hero could perpetrate such spectacular transgressions with so much gusto and so little self-doubt or ethical disorientation turns out to be as inconceivable to Norman Mailer as it is to Bernard Malamud. And maybe for the same reason: it is just the Jew in one that says, “No, no, restrain yourself” to such grandiose lusts and drives. To which prohibition Malamud adds, “Amen,” but to which Mailer replies, “Then I’ll see ya’ around.”

  I cannot imagine Mailer having much patience with the conclusion of the violent hoodlum—defenseless shopkeeper scenario as Malamud realizes it in The Assistant. Some other lines from “The White Negro” might in fact stand as Mailer’s description of just what is happening to Frank Alpine, who dons Morris Bober’s apron, installs himself for eighteen hours a day behind his cash register, and from the tomb of a dying grocery store takes responsibility for the college education (rather than the orgasmic, no-holds-barred, time-of-her-timish education) of Morris’s Jewish daughter: “… new kinds of victories,” Mailer writes, “increase one’s power for new kinds of perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage.…”

  It is precisely with an attack upon the body—upon the very organ with which Alpine had attacked Bober’s daughter—that Malamud concludes The Assistant. Whether Malamud himself sees it as an attack, as something more like cruel and unusual punishment than poetic justice, is another matter; given the novel’s own signposts, it would appear that the reader is expected to take the last paragraph in the book as describing the conclusive act of Frank’s redemption, the final solution to his Gentile problem.

  One day in April Frank went to the hospital and had himself circumcised. For a couple of days he dragged himself around with a pain between his legs. The pain enraged and inspired him. After Passover he became a Jew.

  So penance for the criminal penis has been done. No cautionary folktale on the dangers of self-abuse could be any more vivid or pointed than this, nor could those connections that I have tried to trace in Bellow’s novels be more glaringly apparent than they are here: Renunciation is Jewish and renunciation is All. By comparison to the tyrannical Yahweh who rules over The Assistant, the Bellow of Mr. Sammler’s Planet seems like a doting parent who asks only for contraceptive common sense and no hard drugs. The Assistant is a manifestation of ethical Jewhood with what one might legitimately call a vengeance. Beneath the austerity and the pathos, Malamud, as we shall see again, has a fury all his own.

  The Fixer, page 69: “The fixer readily confessed he was a Jew. Otherwise he was innocent.” Page 80: “I’m an innocent man.… I’ve had little in my life.” Page 98: “I swear to you I am innocent of any serious crime.… It’s not my nature.” What isn’t his nature? Ritual murder and sexual assault—vengeful aggression and brutal lust. So it is for the crimes of Frank Alpine and Ward Minogue, the two hoodlum goyim who prey upon the innocent, helpless Jewish family of The Assistant, that Yakov Bok, the helpless, innocent Russian-Jewish handyman of The Fixer, is arrested and imprisoned, and in something far worse even than a dungeon of a grocery store. In fact, I know of no serious authors whose novels have chronicled physical brutality and fleshly mortification in such detail and at such length, and who likewise have taken a single defenseless innocent and constructed almost an entire book out of the relentless violations suffered by that character at the hands of cruel and perverse captors, other than Malamud, the Marquis de Sade, and the pseudonymous author of The Story of O. The Fixer, the opening of Chapter V:

  The days were passing and the Russian officials were waiting impatiently for his menstrual period to begin. Grubeshov and the army general often consulted the calendar. If it didn’t start soon they threatened to pump blood out of his penis with a machine they had for that purpose. The machine was a pump made of iron with a red indicator to show how much blood was being drained out. The danger of it was that it didn’t always work right and sometimes sucked every drop of blood out of the body. It was used exclusively on Jews; only their penises fitted it.

  The careful social and historical documentation of The Fixer—which Malamud’s instinctive feel for folk material is generally able to transform from fiction researched into fiction imagined—envelops what is at its center a relentless work of violent pornography in which the pure and innocent Jew, whose queasiness at the sight of blood is at the outset almost maidenly, is ravished by the sadistic goyim, “men,” a knowledgeable ghost informs him, “who [are] without morality.”

  To be sure, a few paragraphs from the end of the book, the defenseless Jew who has been falsely accused of murdering a twelve-year-old boy and drinking his blood, and has been unjustly brutalized for that crime for almost three hundred pages, has his revenge offered him suddenly on a silver platter—and he takes it. If it’s murder they want, it’s murder they’ll get. With his revolver he shoots the Czar! “Yakov pressed the trigger. Nicholas”—the italics are mine—“in the act of crossing himself, overturned his chair, and fell, to his surprise, to the floor, the stain spreading on his breast.” And there is no remorse or guilt in Yakov, not after what he has been through at the hands of Czar Nicholas’s henchmen. “Better him than us,” he thinks, dismissing with a commonplace idiom of four simple words the crime of crimes: regicide, the murder of the Goyische King.

  Only it happens that all of this takes place in Yakov’s imagination. It is a vengeful and heroic daydream that he is having on the way to the trial at which it would seem he is surely doomed. Which is as it must be in Malamud’s world: for it is not in Yakov’s nature, any more than it is in Morris Bober’s (or Moses Herzog’s), to press a real trigger and shed real blood. Remember Herzog with his pistol? “It’s not everyone who gets the opportunity to kill with a clear conscience. They had,” Herzog tells himself, “opened the way to justifiable murder.” But at the bathroom window, peering in at his enemy Gersbach bathing his daughter Junie, he cannot pull the trigger. “Firing this pistol,” writes Bellow in Herzog (though it could as well be Malamud at the conclusion of The Fixer), “was nothing but a thought.” Vengeance then must come in other forms for these victimized Jewish men, if it comes at all. That vengeance isn’t in his nature is a large part of what makes him heroic to the author himself.

  In Pictures of Fidelman Malamud sets out to turn the tables on himself and, gamely, to take a holiday from his own obsessive mythology: he imagines as a hero a Jewish man living without shame and even with a kind of virile, if shlemielish, forcefulness in a world of Italian gangsters, thieves, pimps, whores, and bohemians, a man who eventually finds love facedown with a Venetian glassblower who is the husband of his own mistress—and most of it has no more impact than the bullet that Yakov Bok fired in his imagination had on the real Czar of Russia. And largely, I think, because it has been conceived as a similar kind of compensatory daydream; in Fidelman, unfortunately, natural repugnance and constraints, and a genuine sense of what conversions cost, are dissolved in rhetorical flourishes rather than through the sort of human struggle that Malamud’s own deeply held sense of things calls forth in The Assistant and The Fixer. It’s no accident th
at this of all the longer works generates no internal narrative tension (a means whereby it might seek to test its own assumptions) and is without the continuous sequential development that comes to this kind of storyteller so naturally and acts in him as a necessary counterforce against runaway fantasy. This playful daydream of waywardness, criminality, transgression, lust, and sexual perversion simply could not have stood up against that kind of opposition.

  There are of course winning and amusing pages along the way—there is a conversation between Fidelman and a talking light bulb in the section called “Pictures of the Artist” that is Malamud the folk comic at his best—but after the first section, “Last Mohican,” the bulk of the book has an air of unchecked and somewhat unfocused indulgence, which is freewheeling about a libidinous and disordered life more or less to the extent that nothing much is at stake or seriously challenged. What distinguishes “Last Mohican” from all that comes after is that its Fidelman, so meticulous about himself, so very cautious and constrained, is not at all the same fellow who turns up later cleaning out toilets in a whorehouse, shacking up with prostitutes, and dealing one-on-one with a pimp; the author may have convinced himself that it was the experience with Susskind he undergoes in “Last Mohican” that, as it were, frees Fidelman for what follows, but, if so, that comes under the category, as a little too much does here, of magical thinking. Wherever the unconstraining processes, the struggles toward release, might appropriately be dramatized, there is a chapter break, and when the narrative resumes, the freedom is a fait accompli.

  Of “Last Mohican’s” Fidelman it is written: “He was, at odd hours in certain streets, several times solicited by prostitutes, some heartbreakingly pretty, one a slender, unhappy-looking girl with bags under her eyes whom he desired mightily, but Fidelman feared for his health.” This Fidelman desires unhappy-looking girls bearing signs of wear and tear. This Fidelman fears for his health. And that isn’t all he fears for. But then this Fidelman is not just a Jew in name only. “To be unmasked as a hidden Jew,” which is what frightens Yakov Bok in the early stages of The Fixer, could in fact serve to describe just what happens to “Last Mohican’s” Fidelman, with the assistance of his own Bober, the wily shnorring refugee Susskind. “Last Mohican” is a tale of conscience tried and human sympathy unclotted, arising out of very different interests from the fiction that comes after—and it abounds with references, humble, comic, and solemn, to Jewish history and life. But that is it, by and large, for the Jews: enter sex in Chapter 2, called “Still Life,” and exit Susskind and Fidelman, the unmasked Jew. What is henceforth to be unmasked in Fidelman in this book—which would, if it could, be a kind of counter-Assistant—is the hidden goy, a man whose appetites are associated elsewhere with the lust-ridden “uncircumcised dog” Alpine.

  And if there should be any doubt as to how fierce and reflexive is the identification in Malamud’s imagination between renunciation and Jew, and appetite and goy, one need only compare the pathetic air of self-surrender that marks the ending of “Last Mohican”—

  “Susskind, come back,” he shouted, half sobbing. “The suit is yours. All is forgiven.”

  He came to a dead halt but the refugee ran on. When last seen he was still running.

  to the comic and triumphant ending of “Still Life.” The second chapter concludes with Fidelman’s first successful penetration, which he is able, after much frustration, to accomplish upon a strong-minded Italian pittrice by inadvertently disguising himself in a priest’s vestments. There is both more and less to this scene than Malamud may have intended:

  She grabbed his knees. “Help me, Father, for Christ’s sake.”

  Fidelman, after a short tormented time, said in a quavering voice, “I forgive you, my child.”

  “The penance,” she wailed, “first the penance.”

  After reflecting, he replied, “Say one hundred times each, Our Father and Hail Mary.”

  “More,” Annamaria wept. “More, more. Much more.”

  Gripping his knees so hard they shook she burrowed her head into his black-buttoned lap. He felt the surprised beginnings of an erection.

  But really it should not have come as such a surprise, this erection that arrives while he is dressed in priest’s clothing. What would have been surprising is if Fidelman had disguised himself as a Susskind, say, and found that working like an aphrodisiac, maybe even on a Jewish girl like Helen Bober. Then would something have been at stake, then would something have been challenged. But as it is written, with Fidelman copulating in a priest’s biretta rather than a skullcap, the scene moves the novel nowhere, particularly as the final line seems to me to get entirely backward the implications of the joke that is being played here. “Pumping slowly,” the chapter ends, “he nailed her to her cross.” But isn’t it rather the Jew who is being nailed, if not to his cross, to the structure of his inhibitions?

  The trouble with lines like the last one in that chapter is that they settle an issue with a crisp rhetorical flourish before it has even been allowed to have much of a life. At the very moment that the writer appears to be most forceful and candid, he is in fact shying away from his own subject and suppressing whatever is psychologically rich or morally troublesome with a clever, but essentially evasive, figure of speech. Here, for instance, is Fidelman’s detumescence described earlier. Premature ejaculation has just finished him off, much to the pittrice’s dismay, and though he hasn’t as yet stumbled unwittingly upon the clerical disguise that will make him fully potent and desirable, we note that the figure for erotic revitalization is, as usual, Christian; also noteworthy is that, generally speaking in Fidelman, where the sex act is, there shall whimsical metaphor be. “Although he mightily willed resurrection, his wilted flower bit the dust.” And here is the hero discovering himself to be a homosexual. “Fidelman had never in his life said ‘I love you’ without reservation to anyone. He said it to Beppo. If that’s the way it works, that’s the way it works.” But that isn’t the way it works at all. That is a dream of the way it works, and all of it neatly koshered with the superego and other defense agencies, with that reassuring word “love.”

  “Think of love,” says Beppo, as he leaps on naked Fidelman from behind. “You’ve run from it all your life.” And, magically, one might say, just by thinking of it, Fidelman instantaneously loves, so that between the homosexual act of anal intercourse—an act which society still generally considers a disgusting transgression indeed—and its transformation into ideal behavior, there is not even time for the reader to say ouch. Or for Fidelman to think whatever perplexing thoughts might well accompany entry into the world of the taboo by the tight-assed fellow who at the outset, in the marvelous “Last Mohican” chapter, would barely give the refugee Susskind the time of day.

  One wonders why the taboo must be idealized quite so fast. Why must Fidelman dress up as a priest merely to get himself laid right, and not only think of love but fall in love, the very first time he gets buggered? Why not think of lust, of base and unseemly desire? And surrender himself to that? People, after all, have been known to run from it too all their lives, just as fast and as far. And when last seen were still running. “In America,” the book concludes, “he worked as a craftsman in glass and loved men and women.”

  Recall the last lines of The Assistant. Frank Alpine should have it so easy with his appetites. But whereas in The Assistant the lusting goy’s passionate and aggressive act of genuinely loving desire for the Jewish girl takes the form of rape, and requires penance (or retribution) of the harshest kind, in Pictures of Fidelman, the Jew’s most wayward (albeit comfortingly passive) sexual act is, without anything faintly resembling Alpine’s enormous personal struggle, converted on the spot into love. And if this is still insufficiently reassuring about a Jew and sexual appetite, the book manages by the end to have severed the bisexual Fidelman as thoroughly from things Jewish as The Assistant, by its conclusion, has marked the sexually constrained, if not desexed, Alpine as a Jew forevermore. Of
all of Malamud’s Jewish heroes, is there any who is by comparison so strikingly un-Jewish (after Chapter 1 is out of the way, that is), who insists upon it so little, and is so little reminded of it by the Gentile world? And is there any who, at the conclusion, is happier?

  In short, Fidelman is Malamud’s Henderson, Italy his Africa, and “love” is the name that Malamud, for reasons that by now should be apparent, gives in this book to getting finally what you want the way you want it. Suggesting precisely the disjunction between act and self-knowledge that accounts for the light-headed dreaminess of Fidelman, and that differentiates it so sharply from those wholly convincing novels, The Assistant and The Fixer, where no beclouding ambivalence stands between the author’s imagination and the objects of his fury.

  * * *

  And now to return to Portnoy’s Complaint and the hero imagined by this Jewish writer. Obviously the problem for Alexander Portnoy is that, unlike Arthur Fidelman, nothing inflames his Jewish self-consciousness so much as setting forth on a wayward libidinous adventure—that is, nothing makes it seem quite so wayward than that a Jewish man like himself should be wanting the things he wants. The hidden Jew is unmasked in him by the sight of his own erection. He cannot suppress the one in the interests of the other, nor can he imagine them living happily ever after in peaceful coexistence. Like the rest of us, he too has read Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Norman Mailer. His condition might be compared to Frank Alpine’s, if, after his painful circumcision—with all that it means to him about virtuous renunciation—Alpine had all at once found his old disreputable self, the uncircumcised dog and Maileresque hoodlum of the forbidden lusts and desires, emerging from solitary confinement to engage his freshly circumcised and circumscribed self in hand-to-hand combat. In Portnoy the disapproving moralist who says “I am horrified” will not disappear when the libidinous slob shows up screaming “I want!” Nor will the coarse, antisocial Alpine in him be permanently subdued by whatever of Morris Bober, or of his own hard-working, well-intentioned Boberish father, there may be in his nature. This imaginary Jew also drags himself around with a pain between his legs, only it inspires him to acts of frenzied and embarrassing lust.