The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth (Bloomsbury Handbooks) 9781501380242, 9781501380280, 9781501380259, 9781501380266, 9781501380273, 1501380249

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO PHILIP ROTH

ii

THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO PHILIP ROTH Edited by Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2024 Copyright © Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer, 2024 Each chapter copyright © by the contributor, 2024 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xv–xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Philip Roth, Newsweek, October 1, 2007, New York City © Ethan Hill / Contour / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pozorski, Aimee L. (Aimee Lynn) editor. | Scheurer, Maren, editor. Title: The Bloomsbury handbook to Philip Roth / edited by Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth provides a comprehensive, must-have survey of interdisciplinary scholarship on one of the major American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023025277 (print) | LCCN 2023025278 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501380242 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501380280 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501380259 (epub) | ISBN 9781501380266 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501380273 (ebook other) Subjects: LCSH: Roth, Philip–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PS3568.O855 Z586 2024 (print) | LCC PS3568.O855 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54–dc23/eng/20230719 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025277 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025278

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CONTENTS

L ist

of

F igures viii

L ist

of

C ontributors ix

A cknowledgments xv A bbreviations xvii Introduction1 Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer Part One  Roth through the Genres 1 Philip Roth’s Novels: A Matter of Ventriloquism Pia Masiero

15

2 Divided Selves in Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories Victoria Aarons

25

3 “Begging the Question”: Philip Roth’s Life Writing Melissa Schuh

35

4 Liberalism, Autonomy, and the Open Mind in Philip Roth’s Drama of the 1960s Joshua Powell

47

5 Philip Roth’s Nonfiction: A Personal Unmasking Elèna Mortara

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6 “By Now What You Are Is a Walking Text”: Philip Roth’s Editorial Contexts, Roles, and Imagination Jack Knowles

67

Part Two  Roth across Disciplines 7 Dream a Little Dream: Music as Counternarrative in Philip Roth’s Fiction Matthew Shipe

81

8 Roth’s Existential Lesson in Identity and Irony Valérie Roberge

91

9 Safe at Home? Philip Roth and Sports Mike Witcombe

101

vi CONTENTS

10 Philip Roth and Fine Art David Brauner

113

11 Roth and Religion: Nemesis, or Roth’s Quarrel with God Timothy Parrish

125

12 “Anagramists and Manure-Spreaders”: Philip Roth and the Academy David Gooblar

135

Part Three  Reading History through Roth 13 Roth and Politics: The Representative Writer Masquerading as Bartleby the Citizen Claudia Franziska Brühwiler 14 The Deception of Democracy in Philip Roth’s Fiction Dean Franco 15 “Our Fathers’ Sons and Our Neighborhoods’ Creatures”: Upward Mobility and the Welfare State in Roth’s Fiction Daniel Dufournaud

147 157

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16 “Slipping the Punch”: Philip Roth and Racial Passing Aimee Pozorski

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17 How History Uses Us: Philip Roth, the Holocaust, and American History James Wigren

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18 The Many Diasporas of Nathan Zuckerman Bryan Cheyette

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Part Four  New Directions in Roth Studies 19 Countering Pastoral: Philip Roth and Ecology Eric Leonidas 20 Suburb, Settlement, Village: Roth on Whiteness and Landscape in the United States and Beyond Naomi Taub

215

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21 Philip Roth’s Anatomy Lessons Ira Nadel

239

22 Jews That Matter: Philip Roth and the Body Joshua Lander

249

23 The Counterlife: On Roth’s Queers RL Goldberg

259

CONTENTS vii

24 Against the “Terror of Seeing”: Old Age and Disability in Philip Roth’s Later Novels Maren Scheurer

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Part Five  Adaptations and Influences 25 Roth’s Legacy and Cancel Culture Miriam Jaffe

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26 Counter-Roths: Nicole Krauss, Lisa Halliday, and Roth’s Legacy Michael Kalisch

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27 Roth Abroad Brett Ashley Kaplan

303

28 Roth and Adaptation Debra Shostak

317

29 Roth Exhibited: An Interview with Bryan Zanisnik Bryan Zanisnik, Aimee Pozorski, and Maren Scheurer

327

Part Six  Shop Talk 30 Philip Roth and a Pedagogy of Compassion Maggie McKinley

337

31 Nemeses: Roth and His Biographers Jesse Tisch

347

32 Censorship and Translation in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, The Breast, and The Professor of Desire Gustavo Sánchez Canales

359

33 The Philip Roth Personal Library in Newark: Genesis, Purpose, and Contents Timothy J. Crist, Nadine Giron, and Rosemary Steinbaum

369

A ppendix O ne : Annotated Bibliography

379

Connor E. Dombal A ppendix T wo : Uncollected Published Stories: An Annotated Inventory

386

James D. Bloom A ppendix T hree : A Guide to Film and Television Adaptations of Roth’s Fiction

391

Debra Shostak I ndex 

397

FIGURES

27.1 Shoes on the Danube Promenade, Budapest, Can Togay and Gyula Pauer. Photo by author

304

27.2 Holocaust Memorial, Budapest. Photo by author

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27.3 Hungarian translation of Portnoy’s Complaint. Photo by author

305

27.4 Philip Roth visiting Primo Levi in September 1986 at his home in Turin, Italy. Courtesy of La Stampa and the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi, Turin, Italy

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29.1 Philip Roth Presidential Library, site-specific installation, 2016, Locust Projects, Miami, FL

328

29.2 Every Inch a Man, site-specific installation and performance, 2012, Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY

329

29.3 Philip Roth Presidential Library, site-specific installation, 2017, Queens Museum, Queens, NY

332

CONTRIBUTORS

Victoria Aarons holds the position of Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author or editor of twelve books, including A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction, recipients of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title; The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction; The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow; ThirdGeneration Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (co-authored with Alan L. Berger); Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction; The New Jewish American Literary Studies; Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory; The Palgrave Handbook on Holocaust Literature and Culture (co-edited with Phyllis Lassner), and most recently Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women’s Graphic Narratives (Wayne State UP, 2023). James D. Bloom is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College. His books include Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture, Hollywood Intellect, Gravity Fails, The Literary Bent, Left Letters, The Stock of Available Reality, and Roth’s Wars: A Career in Conflict. His essays and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, American Studies, American Quarterly, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Contemporary Literature, European Journal of American Culture, Style, the New York Times Book Review, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Studies in Jewish American Literature, Philip Roth Studies, and the rock monthly Creem. David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading (UK). He is co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction (2015) and the author of four books: Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001); Philip Roth (Manchester University Press, 2007); Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); and Howard Jacobson (Manchester University Press, 2020). He was Executive Co-Editor of Philip Roth Studies from 2014 to 2019 and has co-edited special issues of The Journal of American Studies, Jewish Culture and History, and European Judaism. His essays have appeared in a wide range of journals, from Studies in the Novel to Studies in Comics. Claudia Franziska Brühwiler is a professor of American Political Thought and Culture at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, from where she obtained a PhD (Dr. rer. publ.) in political science and a venia legendi in American Studies. Her publications on Philip Roth include Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth (Bloomsbury, 2013) and A Political Companion to Philip Roth (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), co-edited with Lee Trepanier. She is also the author of Out of a Gray Fog: Ayn Rand’s Europe (Lexington Books, 2021), and she regularly comments on US politics in Swiss and German media.

x CONTRIBUTORS

Bryan Cheyette is Professor Emeritus in Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading. He has published eleven books, most recently Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (Yale University Press, 2014) and The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2020). A Series Editor for Bloomsbury (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing), he has been a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds fellowships at the Universities of Leeds, Southampton, and Birkbeck College, London. Timothy J. Crist has been a trustee of the Newark Public Library since 2004; he was president when Philip Roth first approached the Library in 2013 with his proposed bequest. He also serves as president of the Newark History Society. Tim retired from Prudential in 2016 after a 37-year career, mostly with its quantitative equity investment subsidiary. A graduate of Yale, he earned his PhD in history at Cambridge University. Connor Edward Dombal is a graduate student in English at Central Connecticut State University and holds a BA in English with a minor in Japanese Language. He is an aspiring academic and amateur fiction writer. Daniel Dufournaud is an independent researcher. He is currently at work on his first monograph and has work published or forthcoming in such journals as Philip Roth Studies, Poetics Today, JML: Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of American Studies, and Studies in the Novel. Dean Franco is the Winifred W. Palmer Professor of literature at Wake Forest University, where he teaches classes on Comparative Race Studies and American literature. His books include The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and Los Angeles (Stanford, 2019); Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969 (Cornell, 2012); and Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing (Virginia, 2007). His critical writing on Jewish American and other literatures appears in American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, NOVEL, and Prooftexts, among other journals. Nadine Giron is the supervising librarian of the Philip Roth Personal Library and is responsible for developing programs, assisting researchers, and hosting tours. She oversaw the transfer and cataloging of Roth’s collection and assisted in curating the inaugural exhibit. Giron holds degrees in Museum Studies and Library and Information Science. She has worked at the Newark Public Library since 2007, first in the General Reference Department and then in the Special Collections Division. RL Goldberg is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College. Their first book, I Changed My Sex! Pedagogy and Trans Narrative, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Recent writing can be found in The Paris Review Daily, ASAP/J, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Philip Roth Studies, and elsewhere. David Gooblar is an assistant professor of English and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Missing Course: Everything They

CONTRIBUTORS xi

Never Taught You about College Teaching (Harvard UP, 2019) and The Major Phases of Philip Roth (Continuum, 2011). He co-edited, with Aimee Pozorski, Roth after Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination (Lexington, 2016). Miriam Jaffe is Associate Teaching Professor at Rutgers University. Her Roth publications focus on autobiographical gestures, automortography, narrative medicine, Black-Jewish relations, and gender. A New Jersey native, and Roth Society program director, Miriam is engaged in projects with the Philip Roth Personal Library at the Newark Public Library. Michael Kalisch is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Bristol. He has published essays on Roth in Studies in American Fiction and Philip Roth Studies, and he is the author of The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (Manchester University Press, 2021). Brett Ashley Kaplan is a professor of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois. She is the author of articles and reviews in Haaretz, The Conversation, Salon.com, Asitoughttobemagazine, AJS Perspectives, Contemporary Literature, Edge Effects, and The Jewish Review of Books. Her books include Unwanted Beauty, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth, and Rare Stuff (a novel). Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches (an edited collection) is out with Bloomsbury, and she is at work on a second novel, Vandervelde Downs, about Nazi-looted objects found in a Vietnamese Refugee Center. Please see brettashleykaplan.com. Jack Knowles received his PhD in English from the University of British Columbia in 2020. He has previously published articles on different aspects of Philip Roth’s career, including his prize-winning essay “Yeatsian Agony in Late Roth.” He lives in London. Joshua Lander is an independent researcher and writer, who specializes in twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish literature. Lander has published on Philip Roth, Howard Jacobson, Judith Kerr, and Eva Tucker, and he is currently working on his monograph, Philip Roth and the Body: Jewishness, Gender, and Race. His work is mostly focused on representations of bodies and embodiment. Eric Leonidas is an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, where he teaches classical, early modern, and contemporary literature. His research focuses on epistemology, environment, and the construction of competing ways of knowing in a range of literatures. Pia Masiero is Professor of North American Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research interests include modernist and contemporary literature, literary theory at the intersection of cognitive sciences and second-generation post-classical narratology. She has published, among others, on Philip Roth, William Faulkner, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Alice Munro, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roberto Bolaño. Maggie McKinley is Professor of English at Harper College, where she teaches courses in American Literature and Composition. She is the author of Masculinity and the Paradox

xii CONTRIBUTORS

of Violence in American Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Understanding Norman Mailer (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), and has published several articles on Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Joan Didion. She is also editor of the collections Philip Roth in Context and Norman Mailer in Context (both Cambridge University Press, 2021). Elèna Mortara, a Fulbright scholar at Brandeis and Columbia Universities in 1979, taught American Literature at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” She is the author of numerous studies on twentieth-century Jewish American writers and of a book on Jewish American literature from its beginnings until the Shoah, Letteratura ebraico-americana dalle origini alla shoà (2006), considered a central contribution to the field. She edited the Meridiani Mondadori Italian critical edition of Philip Roth’s early work, Romanzi, 1959–1986 (2017), and published her December 2017 New York interview with Roth in Philip Roth Studies (2019). Her book Writing for Justice (Dartmouth College Press, 2015), on “the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations,” was awarded the “American Studies Network Book Prize” by the European Association for American Studies (EAAS). Ira Nadel, Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia, is the author of Philip Roth: A Counterlife, as well as Joyce and the Jews and biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, and David Mamet. Singapore Flings: Literary Stopovers from Chekhov to Tagore appeared in 2023, as well as the essay “Roth and Poetry.” His study Love and Russian Literature: from Benjamin to Woolf will be published in 2024. Timothy Parrish is a writer and critic who teaches at the University of California, Davis. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. His Pushcart Prize-nominated story, “Philip Roth’s Final Hours,” appeared in Raritan. His novella “The Critic” appeared in Ploughshares. His most recent critical book concerns the democratic vision of Ralph Ellison. His fiction and critical work have appeared in American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, Vestal Review, Sonic Boom, The Raw Art Review, and Equinox, among other places. Josh Powell is a lecturer in the English Literature department at Cardiff University. His doctoral thesis focused on Samuel Beckett’s relationship with experimental psychology, and a monograph based on this project was published in January 2020, as part of Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism series. He has published articles on Philip Roth’s writing in the Journal of Literature and Science and Philip Roth Studies. Aimee Pozorski has authored Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (Continuum, 2011), Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2014), and AIDS-Trauma and Politics (Lexington, 2019). She has edited or co-edited volumes on the topics of Philip Roth, American Modernism, and HIV/AIDS representation. With Maren Scheurer, she co-edits the peer-reviewed journal, Philip Roth Studies. She is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, where she also coordinates the certificate in Racial Justice. Valérie Roberge is a lecturer in philosophy at Université Laval, Québec (Canada), while completing her doctoral dissertation at the same university on The Seducer’s Diary by Søren

CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Kierkegaard. She is interested in the link between philosophy and literature and has presented and published papers on the subject related mostly to the writing of Kierkegaard, Knausgaard, Kundera, and Roth. Gustavo Sánchez Canales teaches English and Children’s Literature at the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. From 1999 to 2010 he taught English and US literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. As regards his research, it focuses on contemporary Jewish-American Literature such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and Michael Chabon, among others. Maren Scheurer is a researcher and lecturer at the Department for Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. She is the author of Transferences: The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship (2019) and co-editor of Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter: Psychoanalysis, Talking Therapies and Creative Practice (2020), Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss” (2021), and Entanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South (2022). She has published widely on psychoanalysis, literature, and other media as well as late-nineteenthcentury transformations of realism. With Aimee Pozorski, she serves as Executive Co-Editor of Philip Roth Studies. Melissa Schuh completed her PhD in English Literature titled “The (Un-)Making of the Novelist’s Identity” at Queen Mary University of London in 2019 and is a lecturer in English Literature at Kiel University. She is deputy editor for C21 Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings. Publications include “Lateness, Memory, and Imagination in Literary Autobiography” (The European Journal of Life Writing, 2020) and “The Autofictional in Serial, Literary Works,” co-authored with Ricarda Menn (2022). Matthew Shipe is a senior lecturer and director of advanced writing in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Understanding Philip Roth and the co-editor, with Scott Dill, of Updike and Politics: New Considerations. He is the president of the Philip Roth Society and serves on the executive board of the John Updike Society. Debra Shostak is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor Emerita of English Language and Literature at the College of Wooster. The author of Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives (2004) and Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel (2020), and the editor of Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot against America (2011), she has published on numerous contemporary American novelists and on film. She served from 2014 to 2019 as Executive Co-Editor of Philip Roth Studies. Rosemary Steinbaum is a trustee of the Newark Public Library. She worked closely with Roth on “Photos from a Lifetime,” his eightieth birthday exhibit at the Library, and was instrumental in launching the Philip Roth Lecture series. She also worked with Roth on plans for the Philip Roth Personal Library, helped guide the project to its opening, and continues to assist in its programs today. She is retired from her career directing teacher education and teacher development programs. She earned her doctorate in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

xiv CONTRIBUTORS

Naomi Taub is a postdoctoral scholar with the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Initiative to Study Hate at UCLA. She recently received a PhD in English, as well as certifications in Jewish Studies and Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies from the University of Illinois. Her scholarship juxtaposes post-1948 fiction from the United States, South Africa, Israel, and Britain to demonstrate how contemporary Jewish literature de- and re-constructs identity through a constellation of multi-layered encounters that transcend national boundaries, revealing crucial connections between liberal internationalism, post/ coloniality, and transhistorical fantasies of whiteness in the post-WWII Jewish Anglosphere. Jesse Tisch is a writer, editor, and researcher. He lives in New York City. James Wigren earned history degrees from Central Connecticut State College and The George Washington University. He taught history at independent schools for thirty-four years in Maryland, Arizona, and Connecticut. For the most part, his teaching focus was on United States History and Modern World History. After retiring in 2019, he has rededicated himself to being a lifelong learner. Mike Witcombe is an independent scholar specializing in contemporary fiction. He has published widely on American Literature: most recently, a chapter on Don DeLillo’s depiction of sports in Don DeLillo in Context. Mike is the Book Reviews Editor for Philip Roth Studies and was co-editor of the open access essay collection New Voices in Jewish-American Literature. He has additional research interests within Jewish Studies and the history of psychoanalysis, and he is an avid fan of the Washington Nationals. Bryan Zanisnik was born in Union, New Jersey, and currently lives between the Catskills, New York, and New York City. He received an MFA from Hunter College and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has recently exhibited and performed in New York at MoMA PS1, Sculpture Center, and the Brooklyn Museum. Zanisnik’s work has been widely featured in the New York Times, National Public Radio, Art in America, Artforum, ARTnews, Modern Painters, Time Out New York, and is included in Art21’s awardwinning documentary series New York Close Up.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the team at Bloomsbury Academic for imagining and supporting this project: Haaris Naqvi for inviting us to propose groundbreaking work on Philip Roth, as well as Amy Martin, Rachel Moore, Hali Han, the typesetters, designers, and marketing department at Bloomsbury. We would like to thank the leaders and members of the Philip Roth Society and the executive board of Philip Roth Studies. We learn so much from you every day. Thank you to our contributors for saying yes when we asked for their most provocative work at the height of a global pandemic. Thank you to Jessica Rabin, associate editor at Philip Roth Studies, who helped us with copyediting, and to CCSU English MA student, Connor E. Dombal, who read dozens of books about Philip Roth in a very short amount of time so we could produce the best annotated bibliography out there. Thank you to Nadine Giron who could answer any question ever asked about the personal library of Philip Roth. Aimee would like to thank her colleagues at Central Connecticut State University who almost never say no when she asks for time, space, encouragement, or conference funding. Thank you to Paula, Terry, Phyllis, Rachel, and Uncle Tom for sometimes asking about Philip Roth. Thank you to Jason B. Jones, who took over the household when I got sick with latestage Lyme Disease halfway through this project and has read every word I ever wrote, twice, and to Eliot Krzysztof Jones, who started a new life at Stanford the same year we started this Handbook. Thank you to Finn for being the cuddliest emotional support animal and most intuitive dog and to Athena the boxer, who died one week shy of her thirteenth birthday after spending an entire day sitting with me working on this incredible book. Thank you, especially, to Maren. The week we submit the manuscript for this Handbook will mark an entire decade of knowing each other and working together. We have always seen the world so similarly—including, but not limited to, the world of Roth. During our conversations about this work, you have talked me through so much more than scholarship. Launching Eliot, burying Athena, recovering from Lyme Disease, processing a serious accident. You were there for all of it, helping me to see past the impossible in order to produce this book. Maren would like to dedicate this volume to Edgar Pankow who died in August 2022 after a long illness. He was the first to support my work on Philip Roth when, as a student, I decided to write a course paper on psychoanalysis as a narrative device in Portnoy’s Complaint. Enthusiastically, he welcomed the idea and told me it was one of the funniest books he had ever read—little did I know what that meant, having skimmed only the first chapter at that point! But that moment of heartfelt encouragement stuck in my mind as I continued to read and as the paper led to an MA project and eventually to a PhD thesis under his supervision. He would continue to look out for all Roth-related news for me when I took over the co-editorship of Philip Roth Studies, and he would have loved to hold this book in his hands.

xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my colleagues and friends who listened and offered advice whenever needed. I am forever grateful to Martin Säurle, my greatest supporter in my life and in my work (even though he doesn’t think Portnoy’s Complaint is funny at all), and to Rafael Friedrich Säurle, who was born in August 2022 and is my greatest source of strength and joy. A big thank you also goes out to his four dedicated grandparents who helped out when sleep was elusive. And finally, thank you, Aimee. For ten years, we have read, written, and talked together; we have laughed, cried, and fumed over Roth, over this book, over everything else. It seems that we have covered an entire life cycle during the work on this project: we shared our worries; we mourned our losses; and we celebrated a marriage, a pregnancy, a birth. You remind me continually why we do this work: because we love the written word and because we believe in promoting insight and empathy.

ABBREVIATIONS

For ease of reference, in-text abbreviations are used throughout this volume to refer to Philip Roth’s published books. In their chapters, the authors indicate which edition they have used in the References, and these may vary from first editions with various publishers to the widely used Vintage editions to the Library of America collection of Roth’s works. A key to the Library of America editions is provided below. AL

The Anatomy Lesson

AP

American Pastoral

B

The Breast

C

The Counterlife

D

Deception

DA

The Dying Animal

E

Everyman

EG

Exit Ghost

F

The Facts

GAN

The Great American Novel

GC

Goodbye, Columbus

GW

The Ghost Writer

H

The Humbling

HS

The Human Stain

I

Indignation

IMC

I Married a Communist

LG

Letting Go

MLM

My Life as a Man

N

Nemesis

OG

Our Gang

OS

Operation Shylock

P

Patrimony

PAA

The Plot against America

PC

Portnoy’s Complaint

PD

The Professor of Desire

PO

The Prague Orgy

RMO

Reading Myself and Others

xviii ABBREVIATIONS

ShT

Shop Talk

ST

Sabbath’s Theater

WSG

When She Was Good

WW

Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013

ZU

Zuckerman Unbound

KEY TO THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA EDITIONS: Novels and Stories 1959–1962: Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, Letting Go Novels 1967–1972: When She Was Good, Portnoy’s Complaint, Our Gang, The Breast Novels 1973–1977: The Great American Novel, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy & Epilogue 1979–1985: The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy, Previously Unpublished Television Screenplay for The Prague Orgy Novels & Other Narratives 1986–1991: The Counterlife, The Facts, Deception, Patrimony Novels 1993–1995: Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theater The American Trilogy 1997–2000: American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain Novels 2001–2007: The Dying Animal, The Plot against America, Exit Ghost Nemeses: Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, Nemesis Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013: Selections from Reading Myself and Others, Shop Talk, and later pieces first collected in this volume

Introduction AIMEE POZORSKI AND MAREN SCHEURER

This Handbook begins with a knock on the door of a room in the historic Robert Treat Hotel, now a part of the Best Western Franchise. Named for Newark’s founder, New England Puritan, and Colonial leader, the Robert Treat Hotel is where Philip Roth’s parents spent their honeymoon and where the Philip Roth Society hosted a conference commemorating Philip Roth’s eightieth birthday. And lest you think it was the kind of hotel-room knock represented in a Roth novel about the troubled and salacious David Kepesh, for example, it was actually quite the opposite. When Aimee Pozorski, one of the co-editors of this volume knocked on the door of Claudia Franziska Brühwiler, it was to follow up on the latter’s offer to host the next international Philip Roth Conference at her home institution in St. Gallen, Switzerland. During that 2013 meeting, ten years before the writing of this introduction, we had a sense that a new approach to Roth Studies was afoot—an approach that values collaborations among women, international scholarship, interdisciplinary methods, and support of emerging scholars. Pozorski’s keynote address at the St. Gallen conference embodies some of these ideals. A close reading of Roth’s representation of vulnerable women with cancer, the paper sparked the kind of exchange Pozorski had hoped for as whispered conversations began to speculate on Roth’s own tormented relationship with women. Maren Scheurer, also a co-editor of this volume, attended the conference commemorating Roth’s eightieth birthday in Newark and had, consciously or unconsciously, worked tirelessly to build a coalition of Roth scholars finishing their terminal degrees in English, American Studies, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, to name a few disciplines newly engaged with Roth’s work. She also happened to be working on representations of women and illness in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature when the Roth Society reconvened in St. Gallen. What started as a conversation about Roth, women, and illness between two scholars, Scheurer and Pozorski, extended in St. Gallen to include many other scholars, all working on different approaches to understanding such topics as terminal and mental illness, anxiety, and other various physical and emotional crises in Philip Roth’s fiction. After guest-editing a special issue of Philip Roth Studies devoted to Roth’s transdisciplinary translations, we were asked to follow in the footsteps of Debra Shostak and David Brauner as executive co-editors of the journal, which put us in an ideal position to observe the field’s development and continue our conversations with Roth readers around the globe. Such exemplary conversations within the last ten years reveal that there is so much more to understanding Philip Roth than the twentieth-century American context and Roth’s Jewish origins—although those approaches that dominated critical conversations in Roth Studies from the 1950s to the early 1990s are extremely important, too. When Bloomsbury approached us with the idea of producing a handbook on Philip Roth, one

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth

geared specifically toward anticipating, maybe even establishing new trends in Roth Studies, there was another knock on a proverbial door, a hand extended to continue this work. We hope that the Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth reveals Roth’s twenty-first-century relevance to scholars inside and outside of the United States—as well as inside and outside of the field of Literary Studies—to embrace approaches to his life and work as diverse as the Visual Arts, Archival and Library Studies, French Philosophy, Disability Studies, and Critical Race Theory. Our premise is that a life and mind as wide-ranging and broad as Philip Roth’s deserve a critical study equally broad and wide-ranging. For the same reason, we place greater emphasis on texts around Roth—such as biography, writers influenced by or writing about Roth, and film and television adaptations—in order to survey both Roth Studies and the multiple new fields Roth himself has generated. We also believe that Roth Studies as a formalized scholarly field is not simply a thing in and of itself. In our view, Roth Studies is a practice—an action, a verb that takes many possible forms in the world. It is perhaps significant that the contemporary American literary canon shifted and progressed in tandem with Roth’s biography, a life that both informed and was informed by his unparalleled literary output. Roth was born on March 19, 1933, the year German nationalism took root in the election of Adolf Hitler, setting the stage for the Second World War. The circumstances surrounding this war—in particular, the Nazi genocide in ­Europe— dominated Roth’s imagination as a child. Roth would go on to engage with significant historical forces during his fifty-three-year writing career captured in an oeuvre boasting thirty-two books. Philip Roth was raised in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, and he identified as a Newarker his entire life. He attended Weequahic High School—whose marching band performed at his eightieth birthday party at the Newark Museum—as well as the Newark campus of Rutgers University before transferring to Bucknell to complete his bachelor’s degree. He then began graduate work at the University of Chicago, where he taught for two years as an instructor and earned his master’s degree in English. His teaching career was only beginning, however. He went on to teach writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Princeton University, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the University of Pennsylvania. After leaving the University of Chicago, Roth lived briefly in Washington, D.C., and then in New York City, ultimately combining two apartments into a single condo on the upper west side near the American Museum of Natural History. In 1972, he bought, restored, and added on to property in the Western part of Connecticut, where he spent long weekends and the summer months doing laps in his pool. He lived in London and visited regularly Prague, where he had the idea to launch “Writers from the Other Europe” with Penguin Books, a series that he worked on from 1974 to 1989. He would likely have traveled more if not for a back injury he sustained during a brief stint in the US Army—an injury that would affect him for the rest of his life. While Roth was attached to many accomplished and notable women, the two names most eternally associated with him are Margaret Martinson, his first wife whom he married in 1959 and who died in a car accident in New York City in 1968 following their 1963 separation, and Claire Bloom, the famous English actress he was with for seventeen years. They were married from 1990 to 1995. Philip Roth had no children. One of Roth’s final public appearances was at his eightieth birthday party at the Newark Museum in March 2013. At the time of his death from congestive heart failure on May 22, 2018, Roth had amassed numerous literary awards and continues to this day to be respected

INTRODUCTION 3

as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is buried in the Bard College Cemetery, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. His papers are collected at the Library of Congress and Princeton University, and his personal library is archived in the Philip Roth Personal Library, a recently renovated space in the Newark Public Library. As Roth’s body of work and unpublished papers attest, his interest in history and the human condition was wide-ranging and perpetually relevant. After the Second World War, Roth wrote about European Jewish refugees and the flight of upper-middle-class Jewish families to the suburbs of Newark in his first collection, Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories (1959). During the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), the novel about a masturbating Jewish navel-gazer that put him on the map. As a result of these two books, Roth was criticized by prominent reviewers, intellectuals, and Jewish leaders—critics of his early works he wrote into subsequent novels of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1979, he introduced in The Ghost Writer his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who narrated two trilogies—six magnificent books about the problem of writing itself. During the experimental, self-referential decade of the 1990s, Roth, too, wrote experimental, self-referential books exemplified by Operation Shylock (1993). After living in England and returning to the United States in the mid-1990s, Roth’s creative output surged, with his greatest work, Sabbath’s Theater (1995), followed by the American Trilogy, each novel in that trilogy taking on a significant aspect of American life and times. Roth’s Plot against America (2004) and Nemesis (2010) both seem uncannily to anticipate dominant global traumas in the form of the rise of proto-fascist leaders and the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time of his death—a death that followed his rage against democratic elections of autocrats around the world—it felt like the death of Roth marked the end of a certain way of writing and seeing the world. As we have discovered in our work on Roth, however, Roth’s retirement in 2012 and death in 2018 may mark two significant endings, but the question of Roth’s legacy remains. In the summer of 2020, the United States and the world experienced a new zeitgeist registered in historical tremors in the wake of the #BLM and #MeToo movements—a history Roth would surely have marveled at. On some level, Roth’s death coincided with the death of a certain way of understanding world history and global politics with a focus on anti-fascism, anti-authoritarianism, and cosmopolitanism. As recent works on Roth written after the 2020 movements claim, perhaps this is not enough to remain relevant in a newly awakened world that demands we also consider how literary representations affect the daily lives of women, Black people, LGBTQIA people, and other minorities. Certain 2021 readings of Roth’s life—for example, Ira Nadel’s Roth: A Counterlife and Blake Bailey’s authorized Philip Roth: The Biography, and even Jacques Berlinerblau’s The Philip Roth We Don’t Know—call into question Roth’s relevance in his afterlife. We hope that this Handbook reinforces the need for keeping the question open—not only for reading Roth’s fiction but also for honoring his legacy as a significant chronicler of contemporary life. In an attempt to open fresh avenues of thinking, the Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth invites new readers as well as experienced Roth scholars to reread and rediscover Roth. We have asked all our authors to dedicate some space in their chapters to a survey of the field they discuss in order to provide guidance and information for readers unfamiliar with the field or looking for texts to get started on their own journey through Roth’s oeuvre. Following this survey, the authors pursue their own argument through critical readings of selected material, so that their chapters will not only review past research but also move the debate toward new questions and new areas of research.

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth

The first section, entitled Roth Through the Genres, is designed to introduce readers to Roth’s oeuvre—including his lesser known or less studied work, like his unpublished theater pieces, his nonfiction writing, and his editing work for the “Other Europe” series. Unlike other collections, this volume does not single out individual works or groups of works, but rather focuses on genre in order to highlight experimentation and the influence of earlier texts on subsequent novels throughout Roth’s writing; the place of Roth’s work in the debate around memoir and life writing; and potential sources for further research in the less wellknown drafts in the archives. Many readers have encountered Roth primarily as a novelist, and so this is where we start our journey, too. In “Philip Roth’s Novels: A Matter of Ventriloquism,” Pia Masiero approaches Roth’s vast output as a novelist through narratology, inviting us to consider “voice” as the defining formal feature of Roth’s literary style in his twenty-six novels. Roth’s art of inventing embodied, raw voices, Masiero argues, creates an immersive reading experience that asks readers to participate in Roth’s signature ventriloquism. Victoria Aarons turns to Roth’s one published short story collection in her chapter “Divided Selves in Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories.” For Aarons, the conflicted selves and the conflicted Jewishness depicted in Roth’s first publication build the ground for the performative and theatrical exploration of selfhood that characterizes Roth’s later oeuvre. Roth’s explorations of his own self, his experiments with the genres of autobiography and autofiction, are the subject of Melissa Schuh’s “‘Begging the Question’: Philip Roth’s Life Writing.” Through a survey of the different ways in which Roth has employed “Roth” as a character throughout his books, Schuh reads his life writing as a serial, experimental project that relies on performative contradiction, creating ambiguous autobiographical texts that expose the ethical difficulties of writing about the self in relation to others. For “Liberalism, Autonomy, and the Open Mind in Philip Roth’s Drama of the 1960s,” Joshua Powell goes to the archives to excavate different, and mostly unknown, Rothian experiments: his unpublished dramatic works. Through a reading of Roth’s plays “Buried Again” and “The National Pastime,” Powell not only demonstrates the value of paying attention to these neglected texts but also enhances our understanding of Roth’s interrogation of the liberal discourses of the 1960s, complicating their celebration of autonomy and open-mindedness. In “Philip Roth’s Nonfiction: A Personal Unmasking,” Elèna Mortara offers a guide to Roth’s nonfiction collected in Reading Myself and Others (1975), Shop Talk (2001), and Why Write? (2017). For Mortara, the combination—or tension—between fiction and nonfiction is the driving force for all of Roth’s writing, which is why nonfiction texts in which Roth allows himself to play with the “hybrid essay-story” deserve particular attention. Jack Knowles closes the first section of the volume by considering Roth’s role as an editor in “‘By Now What You Are Is a Walking Text’: Philip Roth’s Editorial Contexts, Roles, and Imagination.” While Roth’s editorship of the Penguin series “Writers from the Other Europe” has long been acknowledged as an important part of Roth’s work as a writer, Knowles also shows us how Roth’s editorial acumen, shaped by professors and his own editors, was a significant influence on the writing of his novels and, via his biographers, the writing of his life. Roth across Disciplines, the following section, brings together a range of essays that address arts and disciplines Roth himself was interested in. Roth’s short stories and novels overflow with references to the visual arts, music, and sports. Philosophical, ethical, religious, and academic debates pervade Roth’s work in often controversial ways that still need unpacking. What we offer in this volume is, of course, not exhaustive: Roth’s own extensive, almost

INTRODUCTION 5

ethnographic research into such various fields as taxidermy, butchery, or pageantry suggests there are many more fields that might enter productive dialogues with Roth’s oeuvre. With “Dream a Little Dream: Music as Counternarrative in Philip Roth’s Fiction,” Matthew Shipe explores the role of both popular and classical music in Roth’s work. Shipe argues that music fulfills an important narrative function in Roth’s fiction, shaping his protagonists’ sense of their past and present worlds but also serving as a counternarrative that calls into question the stories they tell us about themselves. “Roth’s Existential Lesson in Identity and Irony” by Valérie Roberge draws us into the world of philosophy—approaching the “self” from a different direction. But unlike the other chapters in this section, which focus on how Roth depicted and used other disciplines, Roberge is more interested in how Roth practiced philosophy. Through the Kierkegaardian lens of irony, Roberge reads Roth’s novels as philosophical texts in their own right that draw readers into a Platonic dialogue, unsettling the characters’ and the readers’ foundations and leading them to what Roberge refers to as “unexpected ground”, changing their perspectives on norms, identity, and will. Mike Witcombe, in “Safe at Home? Philip Roth and Sports,” follows Roth’s well-known and wide-ranging interest in sports through his oeuvre, homing in on the neglected text The Great American Novel (1973). For Witcombe, understanding how sports represent the seldom-achieved possibilities in life and the tensions between participation and spectatorship offers a fruitful way to approach important themes that run through Roth’s work. Roth’s somewhat similar interest in visual arts is the subject of David Brauner’s “Philip Roth and Fine Art.” Brauner’s reading of “Goodbye, Columbus” and The Dying Animal (2001) offers insights into Roth’s own aesthetics: for Roth, art represents the possibility of transcendence, but he also uses it to navigate the discourse of seeing and being seen, and sometimes problematically so, in the aestheticization of ethnic Others in both texts. Timothy Parrish explores Roth’s relationship to religion and, more specifically, his lifelong struggle with Judaism in “Roth and Religion: Nemesis, or Roth’s Quarrel with God.” Focusing on the bookends of Roth’s career, Goodbye, Columbus and Nemesis, Parrish demonstrates how Roth moves from a critique (or attack, as many perceived it) of the Jewish community to a reconciliation with this community, its rituals, and beliefs in his last work, while at the same time probing the continuity of Judaism and the terror of the Holocaust. As much as Roth was skeptical of religion, he was also mistrustful of the academy, especially when it turned into dogma, as David Gooblar shows in “‘Anagramists and Manure-Spreaders’: Philip Roth and the Academy.” Throughout his career, Roth portrays academics and creative writers as opposed in their understandings of literature, the first being stuck in pretentious theories about literature and liberal overreaction, while the second understand that literature is only meaningful if we acknowledge its human element—with the dangerous conclusion, drawn by protagonists like Kepesh and Sabbath, that the classroom may also become a site of sexual predation. The next section, Reading History through Roth, addresses the central importance of history and politics in Roth’s work. Interested not just in an increasingly incredible “American reality,” Roth has sought to understand American history and politics in relation to global historical events and developments and has contributed to critical memory work regarding the history of democracy and class, diaspora, and the Holocaust. It is by now a common understanding that Roth “rediscovered” America for all its complexities when he returned from London to write Sabbath’s Theater; the authors here put pressure on such an easy timeline and consider Roth within the global range of history and politics throughout his entire career. Claudia Franziska Brühwiler opens this section with a general inquiry into the relationship of

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth

Roth’s novels to politics. In “Roth and Politics: The Representative Writer Masquerading as Bartleby the Citizen,” Brühwiler asks what we may draw from Roth’s sense of literature as a “particularizer” to better understand the political, including his probing of the liberal myths of inclusivity and sameness, class, race, and gender tensions, and his postmortem reception in light of new readings of his life. The following chapters build on Brühwiler’s contention that we may learn about the political from Roth and approach specific concepts and historical moments through Roth. In “The Deception of Democracy in Philip Roth’s Fiction,” Dean Franco explores the paradoxes and ambiguities of democracy—its counterlives—as depicted in Roth’s work. For Franco, Roth is neither a democratic theorist nor a writer with a specific democratic agenda, but his engagement with fundamental social questions and political grammars and, importantly, his complex sentence construction allow us to delve deep into the discontents of democracy, on the one hand, and dissolve narrative and epistemological certainties, on the other, building a new grammar of social understanding. Daniel Dufournaud considers Roth’s evaluation of class in the intersections of ethnicity and socioeconomic realities in “‘Our Fathers’ Sons and Our Neighborhoods’ Creatures’: Upward Mobility and the Welfare State in Roth’s Fiction.” As Dufournaud observes, for Roth, thinking about Jewishness often involves thinking about upward mobility through the welfare state, while at the same time observing the violence committed by the same state in its failure to support social advancement in racialized communities. While Roth’s depiction of Black characters is not limited to The Human Stain and often problematic, as many authors in this volume point out, his 2000 novel is his most intense exploration of racial constructions and the subject of Aimee Pozorski’s “‘Slipping the Punch’: Philip Roth and Racial Passing.” Through a comparison with other passing novels in the American tradition and a close reading of the analogy of storytelling, identity construction, and boxing through Roth’s inextricable motifs of the counterconfessional and the counterpunch, Pozorski examines the complications written into the idea of racial passing in the novel, the violence of passing, and the fantasy of purity that underlies its discourse. In “How History Uses Us: Philip Roth, the Holocaust, and American History,” James Wigren takes on the difficult legacy of the Holocaust in Roth’s work. Building on Timothy Snyder’s argument that the Holocaust was made possible by creating lawless zones in which people were orphaned from history without protection or identity, Wigren highlights how Roth invites us to consider the singularity of the Holocaust alongside a different genocide that builds the foundation of US history, the destruction of Indigenous life. With “The Many Diasporas of Nathan Zuckerman,” Bryan Cheyette moves us outside the US American sphere proper and considers the meanings of diaspora in Roth’s writing. Building on two different definitions of diaspora, one denoting the center/periphery juxtaposition of home and exile, the other a disruption of such binaries, Cheyette argues that while Roth’s celebrated later work is more focused on a traumatic notion of diaspora and national history, his earlier work, and Zuckerman Bound (1979–85) in particular, offers a more creative theatrical, transgressive, and cosmopolitan vision. New Directions in Roth Studies seeks to present a few examples of new interests emerging in Roth Studies in the current moment. As editors of Philip Roth Studies, we have seen new topics and concerns being addressed more and more frequently in the submissions that reach us, and we have asked the authors in this section to situate Roth in these conversations. Increasingly, for example, Roth is viewed as a voice that has much to contribute to the pressing debates surrounding Ecocriticism, Critical Race Theory, and various fields of critical study that focus on the body, sexuality, and identity—even though these contributions may at times be controversial.

INTRODUCTION 7

That Roth’s work has recently received more attention in Ecocriticism may at first, as Eric Leonidas points out in “Countering Pastoral: Philip Roth and Ecology,” seem surprising, given Roth’s focus on urban spaces. However, as Leonidas shows in his readings of American Pastoral (1997) and Sabbath’s Theater, Roth’s novels complicate the easy distinction between civilization and nature, finding the logic of the natural world even in the most populated, cosmopolitan, or suburban areas. Naomi Taub, in “Suburb, Settlement, Village: Roth on Whiteness and Landscape in the United States and Beyond,” evaluates these Rothian spaces from the perspective of Critical Whiteness. More specifically, Taub studies the potential of Roth’s explorations of Jewishness for Comparative Whiteness Studies, elucidating how different national spaces are organized around whiteness structures and how the Jewish whiteness of Roth’s characters emerges through global networks, revealed through Roth’s construction of “real” and imagined landscapes. Through his explorations of the human body, illness, and therapeutic practices such as psychoanalysis and medical care, Roth has also sparked debate within the Medical Humanities and research into Embodiment. The many ways in which Roth’s life and work may provide fruitful ground for a Medical Humanities approach are detailed in Ira Nadel’s “Philip Roth’s Anatomy Lessons.” Nadel recounts Roth’s encounters with pain, illness, and death throughout his life and shows how these experiences shaped his writing, which is frequently an exploration of pain and a critique of medically abstracted responses to the existential experiences of illness and death. That our messy embodiment is a central focus of Roth’s work is also emphasized in Joshua Lander’s “Jews That Matter: Philip Roth and the Body.” Situating Roth within Body Studies and other American and British Jewish writing, Lander’s close reading of Portnoy’s Complaint reads in particular the abject mother’s body as a fulcrum of gender and race, exposing Portnoy’s anxieties over masculinity and Jewishness. While Roth’s complicated representation of gender has been tackled numerous times in reference works to his fiction clause,1 his depiction of queerness has so far received far less attention, and hence RL Goldberg’s “The Counterlife: On Roth’s Queers” offers a muchneeded survey of Roth’s queer characters. Noting a strange “presence-absence” of queerness in Roth’s work, Goldberg discovers that queer characters often invoke silence in Roth’s heterosexual protagonist, an impossibility of speech that is revealing not just of Roth’s response to homosexuality but also of silence and miscommunication in Roth’s vision of heterosexuality. Similarly, while it has long been acknowledged that Roth has written extensively on age, his work has seldom been tackled from the critical perspective of Age or Disability Studies. In “Against the ‘Terror of Seeing’: Old Age and Disability in Philip Roth’s Later Novels,” Maren Scheurer considers the intersection of old age and disability in Roth’s work. While Roth is well known as a writer who explored aging masculinity, the importance of disability in his work has only recently been recognized, and Scheurer argues that while the depiction of both rests on a problematic narrative of decline, Roth uses his narrators to inquire more deeply into the experiences of aging and disability than our cultural narratives usually allow. Adaptations and Influences, the next section of the Handbook, delves further into the work Roth has inspired, focusing on creative responses to Roth. Much work has already been done in exploring Roth’s influences from Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, and Henry James to contemporary writers.2 This section focuses instead on the field of influence Roth himself has created. What kind of literary legacy has Roth left to American and World Literature? What is Roth’s place in the “canon”? How successful have adaptations of his work into film and television been so far? And how has he inspired new generations of writers and other artists in America and abroad?

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth

Miriam Jaffe addresses Roth’s posthumous reputation and reception in “Roth’s Legacy and Cancel Culture” through readings of The Human Stain, The Dying Animal, and his last works, books that explicitly address cancel culture, sexual misconduct, and an individual’s personal legacy—the themes that have so far pervaded the media coverage of Roth’s “afterlife.” Discussing both the notorious Bailey biography and the Philip Roth Personal Library in Newark, Jaffe complicates the inspiring legacy of Roth’s literary work with a careful appraisal of Roth’s investment in systemic male privilege and private selfhood. A different way to address Roth’s legacy and his alleged misogyny is suggested in Michael Kalisch’s “CounterRoths: Nicole Krauss, Lisa Halliday, and Roth’s Legacy”: reading women writers who have been inspired by Roth to find their own interpretation of Rothian themes. Strikingly, Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark (2017) and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry (2018) do not primarily respond to Roth’s feted American Trilogy but instead emphasize his exploration of identity and history beyond ethnicity and the nation state, finding their own innovative means to go along with, beyond, and against Roth. That Roth’s legacy is not limited to his examination of American history and identity is also Brett Ashley Kaplan’s starting point in “Roth Abroad,” where she examines Roth’s appeal around the world, and in France and Italy specifically, through an analysis of Roth’s own engagements abroad as well as his curious depiction of international settings. While the latter often juxtapose reflections on genocide with the depiction of male sexual exploits, highlighting the twin themes Roth explores through settings outside the United States, his appeal to readers around the world, Kaplan finds, rests in his ability to address universal topics in his uniquely skillful writing. In “Roth and Adaptation,” Debra Shostak examines the wealth of film and television adaptations of Roth’s oeuvre and asks how filmmakers have translated Roth’s distinctive writing into the codes of the filmic medium, thereby submitting their own interpretations of Roth’s texts. Shostak identifies Roth’s emphasis on the verbal as the greatest challenge for the primarily visual medium of film, which may account for the great number of unsuccessful adaptations that lack the provocative energy of Roth’s writing and, in contrast, the success of those adaptations that dare stray from Roth’s original and find their own visual language to replace Roth’s. In “Roth Exhibited: An Interview with Bryan Zanisnik,” we are in conversation with Bryan Zanisnik, a New Jersey-born artist who engaged Roth in two different works, the 2012 performance Every Inch a Man (involving Zanisnik silently reading The Great American Novel and followed by a cease-and-desist letter from Roth’s lawyers) and the 2016 installation Philip Roth Presidential Library. In this interview, Zanisnik shares with us the appeal of working with (and against) Roth, the particular inspirations offered by Roth’s fiction, and the challenges of adapting and exhibiting literature as a visual artist. Shop Talk, the volume’s final section inspired by Roth’s own volume investigating his craft, looks toward a range of academic and non-academic practices emerging around Roth’s work and may be the first substantial investigation of this (posthumous) engagement with the writer. After Roth’s death, archiving Roth’s work or presenting it in museums will have an increasing impact on Roth Studies, as will Bailey’s and Nadel’s 2021 critical biographies. The section also investigates the ongoing and often challenging practices of translating and teaching Roth. In “Philip Roth and a Pedagogy of Compassion,” Maggie McKinley asks what almost everyone who has taken Roth into the classroom must have asked themselves: How is it possible to teach an author whose complex historical contexts, ironic style, and offensive voices seem ever more distant from students? McKinley argues that the difficulties of teaching Roth may be part of a pedagogy of compassion, as Roth’s challenging contexts and characters require the development of critical thinking and emotional intelligence in teachers and

INTRODUCTION 9

students. Jesse Tisch surveys Roth’s puzzling relationship to biography in “Nemeses: Roth and His Biographers.” From his fictionally expressed worries over privacy and exposure to Roth’s ardent desire to be remembered as “interesting,” from fictionalizations of Roth’s life to the memoirs of friends and foes, from his relationship to journalists to scholars and biographers, from unofficial biographies to Bailey’s controversial official biography, Tisch investigates the difficulty of writing Roth’s life, suggesting future biographies may benefit from a skeptical approach. Yet another profession—and cultural practice—that has been challenged by Roth is tackled in Gustavo Sánchez Canales’s “Censorship and Translation in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, The Breast, and The Professor of Desire.” Looking at a specific period in Spanish history and a specific political response to critical writing—the Franco dictatorship and its practice of censorship—Sánchez Canales allows us an insight into changing attitudes to Roth’s work in Spain and asks questions about the difficulties of translating Roth more generally. Finally, Newark Public Library trustees Timothy J. Crist and Rosemary Steinbaum, in collaboration with archivist Nadine Giron, invite us to visit “The Philip Roth Personal Library in Newark,” a special collection of the Newark Public Library that exhibits the books Roth owned and annotated, making them available to interested readers and researchers. Outlining its “Genesis, Purpose, and Contents,” the authors offer insights into Roth’s private book collection and discuss their ideas on how such material can be made attractive and available to the public. The volume concludes with an appendix designed to facilitate and inspire further research. In an “Annotated Bibliography,” Connor E. Dombal glosses widely cited monographs and collections on Philip Roth published so far—a guide into the field for students and emerging Roth scholars. James D. Bloom shares his overview of Roth’s less well-known short stories in “Uncollected Published Stories: An Annotated Inventory,” pointing even the seasoned Roth scholar to new material for research. And finally, as a supplement to her chapter on adaptations, Debra Shostak provides film scholars and movie enthusiasts with “A Guide to Film and Television Adaptations of Roth’s Fiction.” This Handbook both begins and ends with a knock on the door. It both is and isn’t written in the spirit of the proverb, “Many hands make light work.” A handbook is, by definition, a book to have at hand to consult, to find new entry points into a rich and significant topic, one to keep at one’s bedside or on one’s desk. The work of the hand knocking on a door, the work of a hand as it writes and types, revises, edits, turns pages, sifts through the archives—that is the work of this book. It is, however, not at all light work. We recognize all of the hours put into making this volume what it is—if not a literal knock on the door, then an invitation, an arm outstretched, a hand reaching out to invite new readers and Roth scholars in. Much like Roth’s hand extending on the cover of this volume—in both invitation and hesitation—we extend a hand to you, welcoming in readers from around the world.

NOTES 1. We have therefore decided not to include a chapter on “Gender” in this volume and refer interested readers to Shostak (2007) and McKinley (2021). 2. A helpful overview of Roth’s intertexts can be found in Berlinerblau, Michael, and Walters (2021).

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth

REFERENCES Berlinerblau, Jacques, Bethania Michael, and Heather Walters (2021), “Intertexts and Influence: A Comprehensive Table of Intertexts in Philip Roth’s Fiction, 1952–2010,” Philip Roth Studies, 17 (2): 89–121. McKinley, Maggie (2021), “Masculinity,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 275–86, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shostak, Debra (2007), “Roth and Gender,” in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 111–26, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

INTRODUCTION 11

TIMELINE 1933 Born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 19 1954 BA in English Literature from Bucknell University 1955 MA in English Literature from University of Chicago Enlists in the US Army 1959 Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories 1960 National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus 1962 Letting Go Speaks at Yeshiva University’s 75th Anniversary Symposium 1964 First Residency at Yaddo Artists’ Colony 1967 When She Was Good 1969 Portnoy’s Complaint 1971 Our Gang 1972 The Breast 1972 Visits Prague each spring for the next five years 1973 The Great American Novel 1974 My Life as a Man Launches Penguin’s “Writers from the Other Europe” series 1975 Reading Myself and Others 1976 Moves to London 1977 The Professor of Desire 1979 The Ghost Writer 1981 Zuckerman Unbound 1983 The Anatomy Lesson 1985 The Prague Orgy 1986 The Counterlife 1988 The Facts 1990 Deception 1991 Patrimony 1993 Operation Shylock 1994 PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock 1995 Returns to the US full time Sabbath’s Theater National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater 1997 American Pastoral 1998 I Married a Communist Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral 2000 The Human Stain 2001 Shop Talk, The Dying Animal PEN/Faulkner Award for The Human Stain 2002  National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters 2004 The Plot against America 2006 Everyman 2007 Exit Ghost PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman

12

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2014 2018

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth

PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction Indignation The Humbling Nemesis National Humanities Medal awarded by US President Barack Obama Man Booker International Prize Prince of Asturias Award for Literature Announces retirement in the French Magazine Les Inrockuptibles Inaugural Yaddo Artist Medal Dies of heart failure in New York on May 22

PART ONE

Roth through the Genres

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CHAPTER ONE

Philip Roth’s Novels: A Matter of Ventriloquism PIA MASIERO

“Who are you?” “I am myself.” “How—?” “Don’t ask me how. I’ll worry about how.” —Philip Roth, Deception

In a rightly famous passage of his Paris Review interview with Hermione Lee, Philip Roth states, “Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything” (WW 142). The how is everything, because “when understood properly, [it] takes us a long way to understanding why” (149). Roth’s subjects began to take shape as early as his first published book in 1959—the short story collection Goodbye, ­Columbus— and kept returning up to his last novel, Nemesis (2010): Jewishness and its familial and communal strictures, the (male) body and its limitations, history and its tolls on individuals, storytelling as the ever-present human need to understand oneself and others, all presented with “playfulness and seriousness” (WW 120), to borrow his own terms. The self as linguistically constructed is the ever-present thematic core that emerges as connected to the minutiae of embodiment, as a performative act grounded in “the specificities of the locale” (132), be it Newark, the Berkshires, Europe (Prague and London), or Israel. The concern with the self as an act provides the bridge that connects the what—the subject— to the how—the main elements of Roth’s long battle with the form(s) his subject(s) required. Unpacking the how that illuminates Roth’s counterlives—that is, lives that speak to each other upending respective existential and ethical positionings—requires an interrogation of the most basic of writerly hows, namely, the way in which Philip Roth envisions the act of writing itself. This exploration starts from two fundamental premises: firstly, the focus on the how I propose here is a matter of foregrounding, as there is no such thing as a how-without-awhat; secondly, if the how is “finally everything,” it means that it hides important traces of Roth’s authorial agency. I would argue that focusing (solely) on the how may help outline what a Roth reader recognizes as a (typical) Roth novel because his (formal) choices not only sustain and magnify his themes but reveal his authorial intentional system as well.1

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The acts that gave Roth the most pleasure and condense his authorial agency are encapsulated in a set of very vivid explanations Roth took pains to clarify in various interviews. Here they are: A writer is a performer who puts on the act he does best—not the least when he dons the mask of the first-person singular. That may be the best mask of all for a second self. (WW 147) [Literature’s] power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts. (WW 147) Impersonation and masking are ever-recurring performative metaphors that coalesce into the most famous image Roth uses to describe his art of fiction: Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all. His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else. (WW 146) Once we couple this image with the famous recapitulative statement that Roth’s most cherished alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, pronounces in I Married a Communist—“whatever the reason, the book of my life is a book of voices” (606)—we come up with a poetics that revolves around creating and listening to voices. Intriguingly enough, Richard Aczel (2005) ends his entry “voice” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory with an unexpected reference to ventriloquism: “One might do better to think of voices less as given qualities present within texts and more as constructs of the readers who interpret these texts. Literary works are perhaps best seen as acts of complex ventriloquism, where the ultimate ventriloquist is the reader” (636). It is difficult to say what Aczel means exactly, as what precedes this closing paragraph is an excursus starting from Genette’s classical distinctions to poststructuralist takes. Be that as it may, the employment of the same metaphor Roth uses cannot go unnoticed. To explore the Rothian how, therefore, I propose to reflect on the notion of voice by juxtaposing the standard analysis of voice as narrating instance, with what Aczel provocatively presents here as ventriloquistic endeavor. In the pages that follow, thus, I will measure what Roth says about writing in various interviews against his choices in representing voices in key novels: on the one hand, I will focus on the writer’s ventriloquizing as the instantiation of an authorial intentional system concretized textually by specific narratological decisions; on the other, I will show how these decisions invite and guide the reader to create an (embodied) space to let each text’s specific voices resound: counterlives do not happen only in Roth’s narrator’s bodies—via voices—but in his readers’ bodies too. I would argue that ventriloquism as Roth defines it is the blueprint for what he does as a writer and for what he wants his readers to do. Philip Roth wrote twenty-six novels. Macroscopically speaking, fifteen out of twenty-six present a first-person narrator, six present a third-person narrator, four present both, with

PHILIP ROTH’S NOVELS 17

uneven distributions, one, Deception (1990), does not stage a narrator as it is pure dialogue. Once we delve deeper into this macroscopic distinction,2 we discover that only two out of the six books presenting a third-person narrative situation showcase an authorial—that is, omniscient—narrator. The other four and (almost)3 all the sections depending on a thirdperson voice in the four novels that present both first-person and third-person narrating instances revolve around internally focalized narrative situations.4 A narration that employs the first-person pronoun or a limited internal perspective restricts the conveyance of information. This cursory mapping, therefore, provides a first indication of Roth’s way of conceiving his storyworlds, namely, his (dominant) preference for a presentation of the narrated events as filtered through a specifically colored perspective.5 As the first-person singular is “the best mask of all for a second self” (WW 147), this preference does not come as a great surprise. Interestingly, restriction passes through the conjuring of a mask: one’s first self is to be hidden, but the second self cannot be free-wheeling. Significantly, the two preferred formal choices are very similar in one rather important respect: they both allow the author to mobilize double-vision: in the former case thanks to the bifurcation of the two positionings available to the first-person pronoun—the experiencing and the narrating; in the latter case thanks to the consonance or dissonance of the character’s perception and the narrator’s presentation of that perception. This becomes much more significant once we add a further crucial detail: the filtering consciousnesses Roth privileges belong to characters who have, for different reasons, authorial6 traits. Roth’s novels, my argument goes, depend heavily on narrators ventriloquizing an authorial voice, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, on readers accepting the challenge of inhabiting these voices as well. The simplest interpretation of these data is that Roth wants to present his materials from up close, as they impact his protagonists (be they narrators or focalizers) not as bystanders, but in the trenches of their first-person singular. He is not interested in providing an alleged truthful account, in the journalistic sense of the word, but rather an account that renders the emotional and existential landscape of the character that narrates (or perceives) in the most authentic way.7 Well in keeping with the metaphor of the ventriloquist, we may say that Roth is interested in matters of refraction: how the materials, the facts, are deflected and thus change once they pass through an embodied life with all its unique specificities. What I called “the trenches of the first-person singular” provide the deictic frame that sustains the textual structure for the writer to imagine a life from within a specific existential and emotional positioning. The textual “I” establishes itself as a correlative in the reader’s consciousness8 and the reader is able to ventriloquize that existential position, which is both present and absent simultaneously, insofar as that position is experientially recognized as believable. In this way, both writer and reader are engaged in an immersive activity, immersion-asinvention for the former, immersion-as-recognition for the latter. The internal landscape the text evokes mobilizes what-if strategies. Agreeing to ventriloquize implies accepting the challenge of “siphon[ing] through your being qualities that are alien to your moral makeup” (WW 148). It is important to stress that readers do not become a prosthesis for the writer as they are not immersing themselves in his imagination but measuring the result of his imagination—a given character caught in a given predicament—against their life experience. Roth’s novels mobilize these ventriloquistic activities in their own peculiar ways. One such way that complements Roth’s interest in the first-person singular is his incredible attention to details. Roth’s realist brand of fiction is rooted in “something solid under [his] feet” (WW 159): his “fervor for the singular” and “the scrupulous fidelity to the blizzard

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of specific data that is a personal life” (WW 393) explain his unrelenting focus on getting a specific existential positioning organically straight by exploring it from within: moral predicaments, unacceptable situations, and desires as they devour, sink, or explode the firstperson pronoun. Each predicament—be it flying to Israel to meet your double (Operation Shylock, 1993), facing celebrity for an infamous book (Zuckerman Unbound, 1981), or trying to make sense of your life after it has been blown up by a bomb (American Pastoral, 1997) or the accusation of racism (The Human Stain, 2000)—is confronted with a “beyond oneself” that must be imagined by both the writer and the reader to be understood. The biographical details that have caused endless questioning concerning alleged autobiographical postures represent only the first move to mobilize the formal answer we have described so far: inside views that in centering on what is known, palpable, and embodied, provide cogency and urgency to the invented storyworld. The second stylistic move Roth employs is to change the perspective on what has been established as solidly rooted: “I read fiction to be freed from my own suffocatingly boring and narrow perspective on life and to be lured into imaginative sympathy with a fully developed narrative point of view not my own. It is the same reason that I write” (WW 127). Roth the writer works to create the kind of textual space that might shape for his readers what he himself looks for when he reads: a shift in perspective. The vocabulary Roth uses here is revealing: the perspective he asks literature to free himself from does not concern something circumscribed but is, broadly, “on life”—that is, his perspective is “narrow” and “suffocating” and “boring” because it is the result of a precise cultural and existential positioning that concerns everything: a different perspective in real life is not possible because real life depends on the deictic field of Roth’s “I.” The attraction of writing is the possibility of dispelling the stifling boredom of his “I” through the creation of a distinct point of view that has to be “fully developed” to replace his entrenched view “on life.” The cause-effect chain depends on which side of the communicative relationship one considers: Roth the reader is “lured into imaginative sympathy” as long as the point of view is “fully developed”; Roth the writer works with obsessive discipline so as to reach that level of development capable of triggering an “imaginative sympathy.” Roth’s wording makes clear that imagination belongs to both sides of the literary transaction. The Zuckerman Books comprise the novels that most readily allow us to gauge all the ventriloquistic effects Roth deems vital to his life as a writer. Even more explicitly than in the Roth Books, we find here the interplay of absence and presence we started off with. Roth has his most cherished alter ego speak in his own voice and treat the protagonists of his books in a manner similar to the one we will see at work in Sabbath’s Theater (1995), but also experiments with distancing effects by having Zuckerman referred to in the third person, in the first section of The Counterlife (1986) and in Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson (1983). But let us begin at the beginning. Philip Roth’s long novelistic journey begins with a letter a mother writes to her son, the first-person narrator, before dying. It is 1962, and Letting Go inaugurates Roth’s long list of first-person narrators. Intriguingly, the first act the first-person narrator, Gabe Wallach, engages in is reading. Some sixty pages later, the very short Chapter Two made up of another letter Gabe receives, ends with a peremptory notation—“I did not answer” (GC 296). Presiding over the threshold of a long list of novels, we find a nice reminder of two interrelated concepts: our lives are inevitably enmeshed in the stories of others and our lives depend on the room we make for those stories in our own life. Whether

PHILIP ROTH’S NOVELS 19

we accept these stories or not, the result is the thematization of the very object of the ventriloquistic effort: the instantiation of otherness, to be appraised in its perspectival embodied uniqueness. More specifically, Roth’s first novel presents several interesting ingredients: Roth’s ear for vocal details that emerge in the comic colloquial language of peripheral characters, traces of autobiographical materials, not the least being the selection of a narrator who has something to do with writing and reading. Voices, well before the explosion of Alexander Portnoy’s brash and explicit language, are already important fictional tools: microscopically speaking, they convey a sort of unmediated sense of the characters’ belonging to a place and an ethnically inflected tribe; macroscopically, they put center stage the dialogic component of both characterization and plot. The smooth handling of the fictional structure may not be fully in place, but what Debra Shostak (2004) calls “the dialogic method” (4), together with a protagonist whose life is vicariously lived through the distorted glass of Jamesian storyworlds, is already there. These two distinct interpretations of the notions of voice—voice as deeply individualized and idiosyncratic and voice as the medium through which distancing effects are tested and gauged—become two full-fledged centerpieces in two subsequent novels: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and My Life as a Man (1974). The two books amplify, in fact, these two ventriloquistic feats and pave the way for two kinds of invitations (or requirements?) concerning the reader’s own ventriloquistic alignment a Roth novel triggers: either immersing oneself in an existential positioning that poses ethical problems or getting lost in the mirroring effects of counterlives that short-circuit each other. Alexander Portnoy and Peter Tarnopol use their voices—the first on a therapeutical couch, the second, in useful fictions—to come to terms with their lives. The “I” is intrinsically confessional and requires an organic handling, the choice of a voice with the appropriate—that is, coherent—coloring. As Roth reminds us, “Portnoy’s obscenity is intrinsic to his predicament, not to my style. I have no case to make for dirty words, in or out of fiction—only for the right of access to them when they seem to the point” (WW 124). In Tarnopol’s case, what is organic concerns his being a writer: he engages in a twice-told tale about his own life testing the effects of using an alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, with different distancing effects only to wonder whether “just another other” is enough to handle his life.9 In both cases, the how is a formal necessity that stems from a given existential situation: it is not Roth’s “life, red hot, untransformed,” it is the creation of “the illusion of reality more like the real than our own” (WW 135). What Roth says about the intrinsic necessity of Portnoy’s obscenity reaches its peak in The Breast (1972) and Sabbath’s Theater. These two books, in fact, condense Roth’s most extreme forays into the chaos of desire as it impacts two male characters from within. The problems these books may pose to readers are a consequence of the immersive choice Roth has operated. The Breast (1972) stages a first-person narrative in the present tense: the here is a hospital room, in a hammock, the now concerns the fifteenth months of Professor Kepesh’s condition. From within this immersion, he recounts the stages of his dramatic transformation into a huge breast: the past tense concerns the history of this metamorphosis, but the distancing inherent in the past tense cannot but be partial as the situation remains unchanged in the present of the narrating moment. Kepesh’s confronting “this ghastly thing” (B 613) that has happened is raw, in progress, and is presented—explicitly—to a reader right from the first paragraph. The hammering presence of (very literal) direct reader addresses not only magnify the vocal (and confessional) dimension of this novel and its dialogic component: the reader

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth

is repeatedly asked to participate in the sense-making effort of the speaking-I, and to align with his perspectival position. Kepesh’s “I” is deeply immersed in a misogynous masculine self that revolves around a systematic demotion of his (female) desired objects. It is not a matter of mere political correctness: Roth’s ventriloquistic endeavor nudges readers toward an exploration of mined ground. Asking ethical questions from within is different from addressing them from without, and here the “I” imposes its own worldview as there is no room for any diegetic authorial distancing. Everything in The Breast is “absorbed … by Kepesh himself”: not only is the decision whether Kepesh’s predicament is due to a dream, a hallucination, or utter insanity not solved “by a wave of the author’s magic wand” (Searles 1992: 57), but the whole set of culturally superior postures of the male self dominates the picture. It is easy to consider The Breast as a peripheral book in Roth’s macrotext,10 but its exaggeration, so to speak, drives home the typical way in which Roth does not want to provide his readers with authorial safeguards. In The Dying Animal (2001) readers face the same situation: the more Roth endows Kepesh’s voice with verbal and rhetorical skills, the less we can escape the force of this perspective and its ethical underpinnings. This, with the obvious distinctions, is what happens with readers of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and is the consequence of Roth’s dependence on voice to occupy center stage in his novelistic endeavor. The “necessity” Roth insists on to give Nathan Zuckerman’s adversaries the best lines so as not to weaken the book (WW 137) is the same that sustains bequeathing magnetic voices that shout their “whole unpretty truth” (WW 136) with no (safety) distance between the ethics of the told and the ethics of the telling (see Phelan 2017: 8–9). In first-person narrative contexts, the two levels are temporally and thus existentially distinguishable once we focus on the “I” who experiences and the “I” who narrates. The distinction is even more macroscopic once we consider the situations in which the telling and the voice in charge are foregrounded because characters are no longer in the position to act. I am referring to what I termed the “narratological quicksands” of the Nemeses Tetralogy in which the issue of voice, and more specifically the question of who speaks from where, creates a polarization between the telling and the told “revolving around violations … of the mimetic code of verisimilitude” (Masiero 2013: 44–5). To return to David Kepesh’s unpalatable posture toward women, readers may or may not agree to go all the way down in and develop sympathy for a point of view not their own, but the mirroring of the ventriloquistic path is sustained by textual traces that allow and actually invite that possibility because of the structural lack of perspectival distance inherent in Roth’s choice of a highly idiosyncratic voice. Readers may accept the invitation to free themselves from the boredom of their own biography so as to enjoy the pleasure of Roth’s own “excite[d] verbal life” (WW 146); but Roth’s proposal aims at sharing his imaginative journey in both its inebriating effects and its learning dimension. As Nathan Zuckerman makes repeatedly clear, imagination and invention are instrumental in understanding, his privileged way to know. Zuckerman’s comment in The Human Stain when he meets Coleman’s daughter at his funeral is exemplary in this respect: “‘Why did this happen?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Did he go mad? Was he insane?’ ‘Absolutely not. No.’ ‘Then how could all this happen?’ When I didn’t answer (and how could I, other than by beginning to write this book?) her arms dropped slowly away from me” (986, emphasis added). Ever since he entered Roth’s fictional stage—that is, with The Ghost Writer (1979)— Nathan Zuckerman has displayed this deeply entrenched attitude: learning by imagining. In that first installment, the imagination invests Amy Bellette. Later it concerns wearing the

PHILIP ROTH’S NOVELS 21

shoes of a pornographer in The Anatomy Lesson, or the father of a murderer in American Pastoral, or a Vietnam veteran, a sophisticated literary theorist, and an illiterate woman in The Human Stain. The actualization of the text along ventriloquistic lines comprises this aspect too: even when the existential landscape viewed from within may be difficult to sympathize with and result in one “feeling more like a sword-swallower than a ventriloquist” (WW 148), it is difficult to argue against its instructive dimension. Let us consider Nathan Zuckerman’s version of Swede Levov, the one he famously defends against the vying opinion of the Swede’s brother, Jerry: “Of course the Swede was concentrated differently in my pages from how he’d been concentrated in the flesh. But … whether the Swede and his family came to life in me any less truthfully than in his ­brother—well, who knows? Who can know?” (AP 73). This moment has been read as one of the many instances (especially in the American Trilogy) riffing on the issue of not-knowing. Here, I would rather highlight Zuckerman’s defense of his effort to align his story with whom he believed the Swede to be.11 This is not merely because “everything one invents is true” (WW 363), but because Zuckerman obsessively searches for the kind of perception—that is, the kind of interpretation—of the world that must have produced the Swede’s tragic existential outcome. Zuckerman’s unrelenting voicing of what he does with his materials provides the textual signposts that allow readers to do their own share of ventriloquizing. The Swede “came to life in [the writer]” and may come to life in the reader too. The precision with which Zuckerman lists and orders the raw materials upon which he has exercised his writerly faculties—both in American Pastoral and in The Human Stain— not only consigns to the reader a writer who is much more committed to the realistic than to the postmodernist mode, but a writer who believes in the necessity that invention be steeped in (individual) history. Facts and invention are inextricably interwoven: the lists testify to the anchoring and the missing links that dominate the picture. The compulsion to invent is as clear as the need to start from verifiable traces. This is the blueprint of the actualization of the text, the trajectory the reader is invited to live: ventriloquism with a difference. While “in the writing clinic” (WW 150) facts belong to the biographical, or more broadly, to history, as far as the reader is concerned, facts belong to the text. The reader’s ventriloquizing implies accepting the challenge of closeness: if, on the one hand, the heavy reliance on internal perspectives Roth chose for his novels may be said to pave the way for an immersive reading experience, the interplay between absence and presence calls for the reader’s active verification, if we may use the word, of the existential meaningfulness of what is textually presented. The impersonation of an “other” to be successful has to be experientially believable—this is, as we have seen, “what counts”; it must be recognized as truth from within the reader’s own life. Commenting upon The Anatomy Lesson, Roth said, “When I was writing, I said to myself, ‘I want someone who has known chronic pain to be able to read this book and say, “That’s it, that’s what it’s like.”’ I wanted to be as realistic and unsymbolic as possible” (WW 137). Belief depends on recognition, so much so that belief is presented as recognition. Juxtaposing The Breast with Sabbath’s Theater allows us to explore what happens when the “unpardonable” protagonist is not the narrator who speaks in his own voice, but the focalizing character. I would argue that this is only superficially a different way of handling voice and that, actually, the third-person pronoun hides (in plain sight) what we have described so far.

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth

As we have seen, the standard format of this narrative situation stages an extradiegetic narrator who conveys the events as the focalizing character perceives them. This kind of narrator can be more or less audible in a continuum that goes from inaudible and consonant to audible and dissonant. Typically, audibility bespeaks dissonance, which emerges when the narrator manifests his own distance; hearing clearly the narrator’s voice as distinguished from the character’s (mediated) voice implies being offered a position to formulate ethical judgments on the character. Roth, however, stretches the narrative situation to create the kind of voice he wants to sustain such an irreverent, energetic, obscene, at times distasteful protagonist and to pave the way for a specific kind of engagement on the reader’s part. The stretching concerns a configuration that bends the narrator’s voice to display both audibility and consonance. This results in a reading experience that, in a way, has it all: apparent un-mediation and explicit mediation. This is possible thanks to the juxtaposition of two formal choices. On the one hand, the narrator grants Sabbath the first-person pronoun in many intensely emotional moments; on the other hand, he goes as far as to plead for him with a direct address to the reader. We thus are plunged into passages that incrementally dissolve any kind of distance, moving from third person to second person to first person: “he sat a while longer in the car … remembering … how that guy … had given him a book of poems … The guy’s silences gave you the creeps. Another American type. One met all our American types at sea … I remember one who looked like Akim Tamiroff” (ST 595, emphasis added). And passages that convey authorial commentaries: “Sipping at the dregs in his own cup, Sabbath at last looked up from the submerged blunder that was his past. The present happened also to be in progress …—this always beginning, never-ending present was what Sabbath was renouncing” (557, emphasis added); or the most authorial of features: “Not too hard on Sabbath, Reader. … Reader—don’t be hard on Sabbath if he gets things wrong” (583). The result is so powerful as to lead Shostak (2004) to comment in a note: “Sabbath gains tremendous power in narrating a self” (278). This is the impression we have despite the fact that Sabbath does not, technically speaking, narrate his self. Interestingly (and as a demonstration that Roth is doing the same thing in different guises), this is very similar to what we can see in first-person contexts when the “I” belongs to a writer, namely, Nathan Zuckerman. Here is an example of the sliding toward Delphine’s first person in The Human Stain: “Through Faunia Farley he was striking back at her. Who else’s face and name and form does she suggest to you but mine—the mirror image of me, she could suggest to you no one else’s” (885).12 And a peculiar instance of the transgression of narrative levels (to which reader addresses belong) in American Pastoral: “How he managed to get to that woman’s house for tea is another story—another book—but he did it, he did it” (201). The third-person pronoun in Sabbath’s Theater, therefore, is another facet of the same prism: we may venture to say that this voice employing the third person is not a first person in disguise (as, in a nutshell, was the case with the “Basel” chapter in The Counterlife and The Anatomy Lesson), but a voice which draws its power from the incorporation of the voice of an other (the protagonist). The narrator, thus, inhabits the same position that readers themselves are invited to share. What implied, formally, the possibility to create dissonance, becomes the very place of a ventriloquistic consonance. The how I have tried to map—ventriloquistically immersive, nakedly embodied—is the signature of Roth’s life as a writer. The readers fond of his novels who have accepted his invitation to do their share of ventriloquizing believe that this is the most important key to understanding his life as a man.

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NOTES 1. I am well aware that ever since Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) everyone has become an anti-intentionalist. Suffice it to say that, unless we espouse a hard-core poststructuralist take on the absolute indeterminacy of any kind of linguistic endeavor, I do not see how we can do without a minimal hypothesis of intentionality in reflecting on the specific shape (among the many possible others) a given text has and on the ways in which that shape may reveal the text’s communicative objectives. We go about reading as we go about living: interpreting the data that come from other fellows of our species as pertaining to (more or less) fathomable intentional systems—a cluster of actions whose concatenation can be predicted through an ingrained, culturally specific structure of attributions. 2. I start from the standard distinction which stems from Gérard Genette’s initial definition of “voice” in his Narrative Discourse (1980), namely, homodiegetic (first-person) and heterodiegetic (third-person) narrators. The debate on focalization has developed in a number of different ways: I use the distinction for its heuristic benefits as it is easily available to readers. 3. The “almost” refers to Our Gang (1971), which relies on a narrator with clear authorial privileges to sustain its heavily dramatic form. 4. “Internally focalized” may otherwise be termed as “close-third-person”: the crucial distinguishing feature is the reliance on inside views. 5. The similarities between the first-person narrative situation and the close-third are rather intuitive. Dorrit Cohn’s treatment of the matter in her now classic book, Transparent Minds (1978), remains illuminating. 6. I am using the term in a very broad sense, namely, as bespeaking a good dose of awareness of the dynamics or (more broadly) narrating. The former is obviously the case of writers (Tarnopol and Zuckerman) or professors/scholars (Gabe Wallach, David Kepesh), the latter—we could argue—is the case of someone sitting on the psychoanalyst’s couch (Alexander Portnoy) or someone wearing the shoes of the spokesperson for a community (Arnie Mesnikoff). 7. In the long diatribe about whether characters can be narrators spawned by Genette’s seminal proposal, I side with those who think they can. For a succinct survey of the conversation and of this position, see Phelan (2005: 110–19). 8. I am here borrowing the vocabulary Wolfgang Iser employs in his seminal book The Act of Reading (1978). 9. For a detailed account of this twice-told tale, see Masiero (2011: 27–35). 10. Its peripherality and digressiveness are amplified by the fact that the next two installments of the Kepesh Books, namely, The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Dying Animal do not refer to anything that happened to Kepesh in The Breast. 11. We could, rather obviously, enter the rabbit hole of an infinite regression and argue that who the Swede is (both Jerry’s and Zuckerman’s versions of him) has been itself created by Zuckerman. The point I am trying to make has nothing to do with demonstrating the ontological reality of fictional characters, but with my wish to direct attention to Roth’s poetics. 12. This stylistic pattern—speaking about his protagonists from without, then from within in the third person, then granting them the singularity of their first-person voice—concerns all the protagonists of The Human Stain; in American Pastoral we have similar examples in which the Swede’s obsessive probing of his life is conveyed with the first-person singular.

REFERENCES Aczel, Richard (2005), “Voice,” in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 634–6, New York: Routledge.

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Cohn, Dorrit (1978), Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Genette, Gérard (1980), Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Levin, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Iser, Wolfgang (1978), The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Masiero, Pia (2011), Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld, Amherst: Cambria Press. Masiero, Pia (2013), “Narratological Quicksands in the Nemeses Tetralogy,” in Aimee Pozorski (ed.), Critical Insights: Philip Roth, 43–60, Ipswich: Salem Press. Phelan, James (2005), Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Phelan, James (2017), Somebody Telling Someone Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative, Columbus: The Ohio State University. Roth, Philip (2005a), Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories, Letting Go, New York: Library of America. Roth, Philip (2005b), Novels 1967–1972, New York: Library of America. Roth, Philip (2010), Novels 1993–1995, New York: Library of America. Roth, Philip (2011), The American Trilogy, New York: Library of America. Roth, Philip (2017), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013, New York: Library of America. Searles, George J., ed. (1992), Conversations with Philip Roth, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Shostak, Debra (2004), Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

CHAPTER TWO

Divided Selves in Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories VICTORIA AARONS

Philip Roth’s 1959 debut collection Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories introduces a series of characters whose nascent efforts at embattled self-construction form the collective ethos of the emerging Rothian protagonist, one whose latent neuroses and nemeses are realized throughout Roth’s long and prolific career. The stories in Roth’s inaugural collection establish the recurrent tropes, rhetorical structures, literary conceits, and conflicted characters that have preoccupied Roth’s fiction ever since Neil Klugman fled Newark for Short Hills to reinvent his life. As Michael Gorra (2021) writes of “Goodbye, Columbus,” in a piece published in The New York Review of Books, “Roth’s entire future is there” (8). Indeed, even though, as Gorra suggests, “its characters are only half-realized” (8), the early collection of stories establishes the structural framing for Roth’s embryonic protagonists who forever make their way through his work—“a troupe of players,” as Roth’s fictionalized alter ego Nathan Zuckerman would have it, “a permanent company of actors … trying to get a handle on [their] own subjectivity” (C 366–7). The plotlines of these early stories are motivated and performed by characters whose symptomatic evasiveness shapes the contested spaces of their subjected selves. Roth’s protagonists, from the very beginning, are at war with themselves. Their ingenious and disingenuous self-doubling creates inevitable stand-offs between possible selves. Each, like Eli Peck in the short story “Eli, the Fanatic,” is undone by “the strange notion that he was two people … a mixed-up condition” and one that plagues all of Roth’s emerging characters in their attempts to locate, navigate, and reinvent themselves (GC 289). “Is it me?” Ozzie Freedman shrills, as he scampers up on the religious school roof in “The Conversion of the Jews”: “Is it me Me Me Me Me! It has to be me—but is it!” (GC 148). Such transferential doubling and the heady, if fraught, conditions of the conflicted self expose an uneasy ambivalence about fixed notions of identity for Roth’s characters: whom they fear themselves to be and whom they may become. In Roth’s fiction, the unrestrained id battles the punitive, correcting superego in a tumult of dissembling collisions. His characters, at this early point in his career, are not yet fully formed; their ego functions are still largely impulses. Their unchecked compulsions are still embedded in the unconscious but rise to the surface in uncanny moments in which they act out their internal conflicts in unrepressed and uncontrollable expressions of defiance and defense. The novella and short stories in Goodbye, Columbus thus set the stage for the amplified spectacle of performative selfhood

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enacted throughout Roth’s novels in precarious landscapes of his characters’ own making. Indeed, were it not for Neil Klugman, Nathan Marx, Eli Peck, and even Ozzie Freedman caterwauling on the roof, there would be no Nathan Zuckerman, no Mickey Sabbath, no Bucky Cantor, characters who parade and masquerade through their fictional worlds. Roth’s early characters thus act out their ambivalences and contradictory impulses in a debacle of doubling that presents symptomatically as the dismantling of the self. “This doubleness or splitness” is, as Jennifer Glaser (2021) suggests, not only a constant “feature of Roth’s literary work,” but defines Roth’s at times contradictory relation to his perceived role as an American Jewish writer, a category that Roth has both disavowed and been preoccupied with throughout his career (208). As Glaser rightly points out, Roth’s persistent undermining of such an essentializing category of identity is undercut by his fiction’s ironic foregrounding of the very complications his characters experience as they mediate their sense of American and Jewish identities. As Glaser puts it, “Roth’s recurrent representation of Jewish identity complicates his rejection of the role of Jewish American writer, evincing an author who is (often productively) at odds with himself” (208). And, I would add, his position is further problematized by his continual insistence on repudiating such determining labels, having, as he famously, repeatedly, and in a variety of ways contended, “never conceived of myself for the length of a single sentence as an American Jewish or Jewish American writer … As a novelist, I think of myself, and have from the very beginning, as a free American … as irrefutably American” (Roth 2017a: 47). That said (and much has been said on it), Roth has been and continues to be read as an American Jewish writer, and for good reason. His fiction is preoccupied with characters for whom American and Jewish are, if not embattled, then contested concepts. For Roth’s early characters, in particular, not only are they uncomfortably aware of their split identities as Americans and Jews, but their Jewishness is on comic and transgressive display. Such performative embodiment results in comically enacted situations that, inexorably, as the apprehensive old-world figure of Yakov Blotnik in “The Conversion of the Jews” intones, “were either good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews” (GC 150). The doubling of selves and the anxious adjudicating of identity for Roth’s emerging characters are, in large part, a response to what it means—or might yet mean—to be a Jew and an American at a particularly fertile and transformative time in American history. The years following the end of the Second World War in America witnessed a period of regeneration, reinvestment, and realignment, an intoxicatingly volatile historical moment in which, as Roth has said, “Everything had repositioned itself” (Roth 2017a: 47). For American Jews, in particular, the atmospheric, economic, and dispositional shift of the postwar years signaled the possibility of renegotiation, of imaginative reinvention, and expansive, if unstable, possibilities for self-expression. As Roth put it, there was “a great disturbance to the old rules. One was ready now as never before to stand up to intimidation and intolerance, and, instead of just bearing what one formerly put up with, one was equipped to set foot wherever one chose” (Roth 2017a: 47). For Roth’s generation of American Jews, the cultural ethos of the postwar years confirmed the diasporic aspirations of his immigrant forebears, that finally “one’s American claim was beyond question” (Roth 2017a: 47). Roth’s inaugural collection of stories was, of course, affected by the times into which he and his characters were born. As Roth has said of his literary beginnings, In my own earliest work I attempted to transform into fiction something of the small world in which I had spent the first eighteen years of my life. The stories did not draw so much upon immediate personal experience or the history of my own family as upon the ethos

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of my highly self-conscious Jewish neighborhood, which had been squeezed like some embattled little nation … baffled and exhilarated by the experience of being fused into a melting pot. (RMO 228) “Goodbye, Columbus” draws in part from Roth’s childhood, the Newark neighborhoods that gave birth to him and to his fiction. As Jessica Lang (2021) suggests, “Newark made Roth” (123). And Roth, too, made Newark the locus of his first and his last works of fiction. Both protagonists, Neil Klugman and Bucky Cantor, will begin and end their lives in the enclave of Newark’s Jewish neighborhoods, although the former returns from a deeply rooted sense of belonging and the latter because of defeat. There is a kind of longing for Newark’s gritty streets in the early stories that, by the time we get to Roth’s final novel, Nemesis (2010), Newark, like the novel’s protagonist, is in regressive ruin. As Mark Shechner (2016) has pointed out, “Newark for Roth has been home base from start to finish” (168). Roth’s own emotional attachment to the place of his origins extends throughout his fictional worlds. Newark, for Roth, is associated with belonging, with the Jewish community in which he grew up; it is, for him, the playground of memory. In “Goodbye, Columbus,” Neil Klugman’s sense of Newark in many ways would seem to evoke Roth’s own connection to place. Neil, on the precipice of change, reflects on the comfort and familiarity of place: “I felt a deep knowledge of Newark, an attachment so rooted that it could not help but branch out into affection” (GC 31). It’s not enough to prevent him from leaving, from attempting to join the Patimkins in their move out of Newark, but enough to bring him back at the story’s close. His protagonist’s affection for home is, no doubt, a measure of the defining influence of Newark on Roth’s own sense of identity: “A Newark Jew? Call me that and I wouldn’t object. … All this contributed enormously to a child’s self-definition, his sense of specialness … Newark was my sensory key to all the rest” (Roth 2017a: 47). Roth, however, is the ironist, not the sentimentalist. Lang (2021) points out that Roth’s own “deep sense of belonging to the small city of Newark and the Jewish neighborhood that comprised his world … was tempered” by the realities of Jewish life. As Lang notes, “The yawning gap between … the sense of comfort and belonging provided by his working-class upbringing in Jewish Newark, and … the understanding that this same quality of Jewishness was being targeted for destruction in Europe … creates the tension in Roth’s earliest writing” (124). The emotional and dispositional terrain of Roth’s early fiction is situated directly at a moment of transition, of the open destiny of autonomous self-invention inspired by, as Roth (2017a) has said, “a collective sense of America as the center of the most spectacular of the post-war world’s unfolding dramas” (47). Goodbye, Columbus is in many ways a period piece; its stories are a response to this “highly charged” historical moment into which Roth’s nascent characters apprehensively and unsuspectedly awaken and attempt to rearrange themselves (Roth 2017a: 47). What for Roth and his generation of American Jews was the source of intoxicating possibility, the sense of belonging and purchase—although not without its obvious menacing antecedents—is for his protagonists the stuff of anxious self-assessment and uneasy negotiations. The characters in Roth’s early works are caught between the past and the present. They are caught, that is, in the moment of transition, arrested, in large part, by the proximate realities of their histories—both distant and immediate, collective and individual—the actualities of, as Roth acknowledged, birth and circumstance, “born into the situation of being a Jew, and … aware of its ramifications” (Finkielkraut 1981: 95). For Roth’s protagonists, the assimilated

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self is a source of contention, clashing obligations, and conflicting loyalties. The conflict comes at them from two related directions: the changing conditions for Jews at the threshold of a new era in postwar America and the all-too-recent presence and implications of that war for Jews everywhere. Their lives are enacted against both proximate and remote historical events. While Roth’s characters and settings are indelibly American, situated in the American moment, they are not inured from history. Indeed, the traces of the immediate past materialize, as they do in “Eli, the Fanatic,” intruding upon the pastoral calm of Woodenton, NY, in the form of a yeshiva inhabited by displaced refugees, children who have lost everything. The presence of the yeshiva and, in particular, the man with payes, wearing the black coat and hat, “the round-topped, wide-brimmed Talmudic hat,” is seen as a material, visual extension of otherness, the embodiment of difference and thus a threat to the “progressive suburban community whose members, both Jewish and Gentile … live in comfort and beauty and serenity … beside each other in amity” (GC 253, 261–2). In other words, the Jews of Woodenton live with the constant fear that such negotiated harmony is, as the long history of Jewish survival suggests, conditional, liable to crumble yet again, as one of Roth’s final narrators acknowledges, by the “tyranny of contingency” (N 242). Roth’s characters emerge in the immediate aftermath of genocide, with an awareness of, as Roth has said, “the monstrous truth of the Holocaust” and the lingering specter of antisemitism (WW 344). As Roth notes of his experience growing up in America during and in the direct aftermath of the war, it was in the “disparity between this tragic dimension of Jewish life in Europe and the actualities of our daily lives as Jews … that I found the terrain for my first stories” (Finkielkraut 1981: 96). While Roth’s protagonists ironically enjoy the safety and security of life as Jews in America— “no pogroms in Woodenton” (GC 277), as Eli is anxiously reminded—nonetheless their sensibilities are not inappreciably “bound up with these ghastly events” (GC 277). As Roth has pointed out, the Holocaust “is simply there, hidden, submerged, emerging, disappearing, unforgotten. You don’t make sense of it—it makes use of you” (RMO 136). While for Roth, “one’s American connection overrode everything,” his characters are not let off so easily. They remain tangled in a residual sense of displacement and otherness. As Timothy Parrish (2007) suggests, “Roth’s work imagines Jews specific to their situations as Americans … descendants of those immigrants who have found in America something they never imagined in Europe: the opportunity to define how they perceive or do not perceive themselves to be Jews” (130). Yet, in these early stories, in particular, Roth’s characters find themselves ambushed by conflicting impulses and allegiances, and thus they are unable to align competing identities, to reconcile their divided selves. In Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories the drama that was America is ironically played out in the faltering attempts of Roth’s early protagonists to adjust to the open possibilities for reinvention, for repositioning themselves externally and internally as both Americans and Jews. For Roth’s characters, all such assurances are provisional and negotiable. Roth takes this historical moment and upends it for his characters who find themselves, not unsympathetically and not uncomically, in moments of transition, in being in two ethical and perspectival places at once. As Parrish (2010) notes, the protagonists in Roth’s early stories find themselves in a situation in which they “test, rather than destroy, the boundaries of cultural identification” (26). As such, they stretch negotiations of past and present: what it means to be a Jew and an American at a transitional time in history. As one of Roth’s characters admits in the short story “Defender of the Faith,” “It’s a hard thing to be a Jew. But … it’s a harder thing to stay one” (GC 189).

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It would be an understatement to say that the stories in Goodbye, Columbus, given the National Book Award in 1960, were received with no little consternation. The objections came in part from critical reviews in the mainstream cultural press, most notably from Norman Podhoretz, but more vociferously from rabbinical voices who protested Roth’s caricature of Jews and his failure to depict “the accomplishments of Jewish life” and the “overwhelming contributions” made by Jews historically and in contemporary society (qtd. in RMO 205). Roth was chastised for disparaging Jews and for exposing hostile stereotypes. Despite the acclaim of Jewish critics and writers, such as Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler, and Saul Bellow, for Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, the collection came under considerable disapprobation. Roth was accused of antisemitism, Jewish self-loathing, an unbalanced representation of Jews, and very simply “too much shmutz” by a reactive and provincial Jewish readership (RMO 209). Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories was, according to the rabbinical consensus, “no-good-for-the Jews” (GC 150). But, of course, what the combative and largely compensatory posture of these other “defenders of the faith” failed to recognize, as Roth unapologetically points out in his defense, is the way his fiction provoked their own anxious dread, too busy worrying about and anticipating, as Roth put it, what “the goyim think” (RMO 212). It is not at all surprising, as Glaser (2021) points out, that “the collection’s satirical look at postwar Jewish American life” evoked such a response (205). The proximate memory of the Holocaust, the pressures of assimilation, and the realities of continuing antisemitism were among the looming nemeses of postwar American Jewish life. History shapes these stories: American history, both past and contemporaneous; Jewish history, remote and proximate; and individual histories being played out against these defining historical circumstances. Roth’s early characters are very much aware of their place in history. They are engulfed in negotiating those histories that complicate their sense of diasporic—if only in memory—identity. Thus, when Eli, “the fanatic,” undone by history—both the history of the Jews and his own immediate circumstances—is asked, “You know you’re still Eli, don’t you?” he is not at all sure (GC 297). Neither is he sure what it might mean to be Eli. Like the cast of characters in Roth’s early fiction, Eli is uncertain about the character of his own changing circumstances as well as his own character, that is, the ethical possibilities and consequences of self-reinvention. Roth’s emerging protagonists are, indeed, attempting to get a handle on their own subjectivity. But the self, for Roth’s characters, is a slippery, wily construct. Thus, when the dissembling, manipulative Sheldon Grossbart, in the short story “Defender of the Faith,” defends himself to his infuriated commanding sergeant Nathan Marx by insisting, “I can’t stop being me, that’s all there is to it” (GC 188), it is inevitable that he will attempt to refashion himself, as Roth’s characters always do, and involve others in the act. But Grossbart is more insightful here than even he imagines himself to be, for in attempting to become someone else, he shows himself to be exactly who he is: an unscrupulous, opportunistic pretender, who will use his Jewishness, his difference from the other non-Jewish recruits, for self-serving purposes. He will pretend to be the Jew who, in fact, he is. Ironically Grossbart will try to reinvent himself as the Jew he is not, pious and observant, like his fellow Jewish soldier Mickey Halpern, a counter to Grossbart’s disingenuousness. Grossbart thus surrenders willingly to his own base motives, to his uncontrollable impulses and compulsions, a “blundering human being,” as Roth defines him, “one with force, self-righteousness, cunning … 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” (RMO 214). Grossbart convinces himself that he is acting in his best interests all the while ambushing himself, securing the fate that he

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wishes at all costs to avoid. Grossbart is the “bad Jew,” the antithesis to his adversary and foil, Nathan Marx, the “good Jew,” who will be forced, after all, to defend the faith. In “Defender of the Faith,” Marx plays the superego to Grossbart’s display of aggressive and unrestrained drives. In other words, Grossbart plays the antagonistic straight man to Marx’s corrective. In this bifurcation of loyalties and ethical comportment, Sergeant Marx, the “good Jew,” will square off with Grossbart, exposed as the “bad Jew,” not, as Roth says, because Grossbart is “represented … as the stereotype of The Jew, but as a Jew who acts like the stereotype, offering back to his enemies their vision of him … He is a fact of Jewish experience and well within the range of its moral possibilities” (RMO 215). In other words, it is not Marx who is Grossbart’s enemy, any more than it is the blustering antisemites with whom Grossbart and the other Jewish military personnel will have to contend. Rather, Grossbart is his own dissembling worst enemy, and Marx functions as the punitive, chastising, and correcting double to Grossbart’s unchecked self. In “Defender of the Faith,” the good Jew will remind the bad one of his obligations and responsibilities as a Jew but also as an American. The conflicting, adversarial doubling that we see in Roth’s early characters comes to embody the all-too recognizable alter egos and divided selves who reoccur throughout Roth’s later fiction. As Glaser (2021) notes, “Nathan Zuckerman, his most frequent narrator and purported novelistic alter ego, functions not only as double or sorts for himself, but also as a character who embodies the experience of being divided or split” (208). In referring to an interview with Hermione Lee, Glaser quotes Roth’s observation that Zuckerman has “two dominant modes: his mode of self-abnegation, and his fuck-’em mode. You want a bad Jewish boy, that’s what you’re going to get. He rests from one by taking up the other; though, as we see, it’s not much of a rest” (208). From the very beginning, Roth’s characters find themselves in strategic modes of invention, “strategies of aggression,” as Nathan Marx recognizes in himself and others, but “strategies of retreat, as well” (GC 194). Roth’s characters, throughout his fiction, vacillate between flight and retreat. They vacillate between the desire to step out of the life bequeathed to them only to find themselves pulled back into the self that, finally, is always there. Lou Epstein, for instance, in the self-named short story in Goodbye, Columbus, wants to be the good father and husband; he wants to do what is right, but he is drawn to something he can’t quite articulate, some urge, some whim of possibility, of second chances, that he might rearrange his fate. His transgressive behavior, taking up with a woman outside of his marriage—“nobody he loved or ever could love”—results in a comic catastrophe of his own making (GC 209). Surrendering to his unrestrained impulses, Epstein will, indeed, disarrange his life. His reckless behavior, the precipitous moment of believing that he might enjoy a counterlife, will, of course, backfire. His brief but ill-conceived affair leaves him with a communicable rash and a heart attack. Epstein is frightened by his own actions, by the overpowering acts of aggression, aggressive exactly because they require action on his part, on the part of a man who has capitulated all his life to the contingencies and limitations of his own experience. Acting out of character, he, like Eli Peck and Ozzie Freedman, can no longer recognize himself. As he bewilderingly agonizes, “Me, Lou Epstein … I don’t even feel any more like Lou Epstein” (GC 218). He is unnerved by how quickly his life got out of control, although, ironically, of course, Epstein was never in control of the events that came to define him, unable even to determine “how far back [one] must … go to discover the beginning of trouble” (GC 208). Thus, he will retreat into himself and the life that, without thinking, he tried to circumvent. As the doctor reassures Epstein’s wife, “All he’s got to do is live a normal life,” that is, a life limited by character and by personal history (GC 229).

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But Roth’s characters, throughout his career, fight against their limitations and their histories in the attempt to live counterlives, counterhistories. In these early stories, they generally get it wrong. Roth’s early characters are deeply ambivalent, torn between competing desires and fears, anxious ambivalences played out through the satiric performance of identity. Thus, the posture of flight and retreat reflects the split self and divided loyalties that determine the fate of such characters. Such ambivalence finds them running from their own histories and identities as Jews, because being Jews for them is the source of trouble, the embodiment of difference, “better, maybe not,” as Grossbart assures Marx, “But different” (GC 188). And they attempt to circumvent the past in large part as a reaction to the push and pull between American and Jewish histories and identities. Nathan Marx, for example, believes himself to be hardened against his emotions, inured to the pull of the past. It’s significant that “Defender of the Faith” begins, “In May of 1945, only a few weeks after the fighting had ended in Europe” (GC 162). Marx having rotated back to the United States, to Camp Crowder, Missouri, where he and the other soldiers await their orders, believes himself to have protectively developed “an infantryman’s heart,” a numbness to what he has witnessed that allows him to fulfill his obligations “without feeling a thing” (GC 162). Being confronted by the interests of the Jewish soldiers in his company, however, threatens to undo all his hard-won neutrality and impartiality. A collision of competing histories, expectations, and requirements confronts Marx: the conflicted position of being an American and a Jew in the alleged neutrality of the military setting. “Stop closing your heart to your own!” the unrelenting Grossbart will demand of his uncooperative sergeant, determined not to grant special requests to the Jewish recruits (GC 189). But Marx, like Eli Peck, is not at all sure who his “own” are, that is, where exactly his allegiances lie. Very clearly aware of which side he was on battling the Nazis in Europe, Marx is uncertain on his own turf. Being an American and being a Jewish American are, for Marx, at odds. The sense of obligations and expectations imposed upon him as an American are complicated and challenged by what seems to Marx to be an equally inconvenient imposition impressed upon him, as Grossbart says, by “a sense of his Jewishness” (GC 173). In “Goodbye, Columbus,” “Defender of the Faith,” and “Eli, the Fanatic,” the young Roth seems to associate the heart with a sense of Jewishness or with a longing for a fantasized past that has its ethical and familial center in Jewishness. Thus Jewishness, for Roth’s nascent protagonists, is tangled up in feeling, a structure of feeling linked to identity. Neil Klugman, in transgressive delight, will resist the pull of his past, of his place in Jewish Newark, for the competing pull of his love interest, the indulgent and indulged Brenda Patimkin. Thus, Neil Klugman will temporarily flee Newark in a hoped-for exchange of existences. But, as he discovers, he’s not made of the same stuff as the Patimkin children, who grew up not in the Jewish-defined neighborhoods of Newark, but in the rarified air of gentile Short Hills, where, as Neil’s Aunt Gladys guarantees, “They couldn’t be real Jews, believe me” (GC 58). Ben Patimkin can remove his family from Newark in a caricature of cultural adaptation, but Neil cannot shake his identity nor his inheritance so easily. This clash of identities is made apparent throughout the novella but is perhaps most fundamentally exposed in the scene in which Neil makes the trek back down from Short Hills to Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks in Newark at the behest of Brenda’s mother. On his own turf, Neil familiarly recognizes the defining language of his ancestors, a language informing of the culture and ethos of Yiddishkeit, a world of which the Patimkin progeny have no knowledge. “You know what that means … Gonif?” Patimkin demands of Neil, whose ready assent makes clear the distance between Neil and the object of his desire. “Then you know more than my own

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kids … goyim, my kids,” Patimkin ruefully but also proudly cautions Neil (GC 94). This is inadvertent advice that Neil should take seriously, for he cannot reinvent himself or change his fate. Yiddish here is a marker of the old neighborhoods but also a symbolic return to the past and to his own inescapable identity. Similarly, it’s the mameloshn that pulls Nathan Marx back into memory in “Defender of the Faith.” The cadences of “Good shabbus,” called out to him in anticipation of the sabbath, draws an unsettled Marx back into the past, the rhythmic intonation having, as he admits, “touched a deep memory … as though a hand were reaching down inside me … and came to what I suddenly remembered was myself” (GC 170). In other words, the evocation of the past—the emotional language of the past—brings him back to himself, back, that is, to family and community, and a sense of belonging. The call to memory is enough to follow the sounds to the chapel on base to join the Jewish congregation in prayer, as he acknowledges, “in search of more of me” (GC 170). The pull of the heart, the emotional connection to his history and to a defining sense of Jewishness, brings him to a felt recognition of his “communal attachment,” and that, for better or for worse, as he accepts, “like Karl and Harpo, I was one of them” (GC 169, 165). For Marx, the ethos of his Jewish origins will bring him, ultimately, to defend the faith, to reaffirm the position of the Jewish personnel, in fact to insist on the rightful place of the Jewish soldiers along with the other young American men going back into war, defending the country alongside one another. To defend the faith, ironically, is to bridge the uneasy gap between American and Jewish difference, an otherness that the Jew in him both acknowledges and resists. Thus, Marx, as Roth has said of his young protagonist, is the story’s “consciousness and its voice” (RMO 215). And, I would add, Marx is the story’s Jewish consciousness, its Jewish voice. His character ultimately represents communal and cultural alliance and adaptation in the story. As Claudia Roth Pierpont (2013) suggests, at the time of publication, the early stories in the collection “appeared to be about Jewish cultural adjustments (or maladjustments) to contemporary American life” (32). And, to be sure, while the central character in “Defender of the Faith” struggles with his conscience to align the seemingly oppositional Jewish and American selves he inhabits, for Eli Peck, the protagonist of “Eli, the Fanatic,” the divided self is not as easily repaired. His adjustment to postwar American Jewish life is destabilized by the materialized past. Indeed, while the sounds of Yiddish evoke in Nathan Marx the self he had temporarily lost and nostalgically regains, for Eli, the sounds of the children playing on the grounds of the Yeshiva, orphans and refugees from the devastation of Europe, resonate not with the warmth of his own history, but rather as unintelligible, foreign, and “mysterious babble” (GC 250). Instead of calling him back to his own past, their words are, for Eli, only noise, intrusive and accusatory sounds that “caught up against Eli’s flesh and he was unable to restrain a shudder” (250–1). Eli is so disenfranchised, so distanced from Jewishness, from his own inheritance, that he initially fails to recognize even the yarmulke worn by Leo Tzuref, headmaster of the Yeshiva, eerily mistaking its blackness for the missing crown atop Tzuref’s skull. Eli, ensconced in a “progressive suburban community … both Jewish and Gentile” in the immediate aftermath of the devastation of Europe’s Jewish communities, is concealed not only by the seemingly well-defended buttress of zoning laws, of cultural assimilation, and of a willed obliviousness to proximate history, but disastrously, if comically, from himself (GC 261). When asked by Tzuref to acknowledge his consanguinity with those who have nothing, to acknowledge the mutuality of suffering, and his obligations as a Jew, Eli can only flee back into the darkness of his unconscious. In running from the past, from his obligations to

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others, from his identity as a Jew, he runs from himself. When confronted by Tzuref, who demands that he acknowledge his identity, Eli can only prevaricate. Tzuref, in his relentless accusations, makes demands of Eli to which he cannot, will not, concede. “But you, Mr. Peck, how about you?” Tzuref persists. Eli is uncertain, divided by his loyalties, but more to the point, by fear, fear, that is, that he will be seen as, targeted as, The Jew. Indeed, as Tzuref insistently reminds him, “Aach! You are us, we are you!” (GC 265). And so, ultimately, Eli will run, he will scuttle from the grounds of the yeshiva and the figure of the DP, the embodiment of all that reminds Eli and the Woodenton Jews of the ultimate consequences of persecution, of antisemitism, and exclusion, only to wear his fear—his Jewishness—in an exhibitionistic exchange of identities, wandering around Woodenton in the traditional garb of the displaced person. Eli, having exchanged suits with the DP, in an uncanny moment of self-recognition sees himself in the other man and thus is somehow brought forth by the hour itself, as if his entire life had been but a preparation for that moment. In these stories, we find characters whose notions of Jewish identification are performed in an interior tug-of-war that spills out onto their exterior lives. The Rothian protagonist has been engaged in this struggle, to one extent or another, throughout Roth’s literary career. They impulsively and impetuously escape the prescribed contours of the self only to return. Ozzie, prancing frantically on the roof, at the end of “Conversion of the Jews” will leap into the net that he knows in his heart will catch him below. Marx, Grossbart, and the other Jewish recruits, at the close of “Defender of the Faith,” will “accept their fate” (GC 200). Neil Klugman will return to Newark, to his job at the library, and to his own “image,” his “gaze” reflected back at him in the window (GC 136). Unable to alter the course of history and character, unable, that is, to write a new ending to the story, Roth’s early characters are brought back to themselves ironically by the self-betraying fantasy that they have somehow evaded the lives they have been bequeathed. Roth’s protagonists, from first to last, are not only influenced by the histories that shape them, but, like Bucky Cantor, are “those people taken to pieces by [their] times” (N 274). The stories in Goodbye, Columbus evoke a time when Jewish American life was on a precipice of transition, poised to bump over the edge into the rush of mainstream America, leaving the past behind, which is something that Roth, as a writer, really never did: it’s there in the ironic Jewish humor, in the satiric imprint of assimilated life, in the fixation throughout his career with counterlives, a reminder of where we came from and where we’ve landed.

REFERENCES Finkielkraut, Alain (1981), “The Ghosts of Roth,” Esquire, September: 92–7. Glaser, Jennifer (2021), “Roth as ‘Jewish American Writer,’” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 205–14, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gorra, Michael (2021), “Philip’s Theater,” The New York Review of Books, April 8: 4–8. Lang, Jessica (2021), “Newark,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 123–31, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Parrish, Timothy (2007), “Roth and Ethnic Identity,” in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 127–41, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Parrish, Timothy (2010), “A Comic Crisis of Faith: Philip Roth’s ‘Conversion of the Jews’ and ‘Eli, the Fanatic,’” in Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio (eds.), Playful and Serious: Philip Roth as a Comic Writer, 25–34, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Pierpont, Claudia Roth (2013), Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Roth, Philip (1966), Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, New York: Modern Library. Roth, Philip (1985), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Viking Penguin. Roth, Philip (1988), The Counterlife, New York: Penguin Press. Roth, Philip (2010), Nemesis, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Roth, Philip (2017a), “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names,” New Yorker, June 5 & 12: 46–7. Roth, Philip (2017b), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013, New York: Library of America. Shechner, Mark (2016), “Newark: The Sthetl,” in David Gooblar and Aimee Pozorski (eds.), Roth after Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination, 167–79, Lanham, MD: Lexington.

CHAPTER THREE

“Begging the Question”: Philip Roth’s Life Writing MELISSA SCHUH

As a matter of fact, the two longish works of fiction about you, written over a decade, were probably what made me sick of fictionalizing myself further, worn out with coaxing into existence a being whose experience was comparable to my own and yet registered a more powerful valence, a life more highly charged and energized, more entertaining than my own … which happens to have been largely spent, quite unentertainingly, alone in a room with a typewriter. —Philip Roth, The Facts But why suppress the imagination that’s served you so long? Doing so entails terrific discipline, I know, but why bother? Especially when to strip away the imagination to get to a fiction’s factual basis is frequently all that many readers really care about anyway. Why is it that when they talk about the facts they feel they’re on more solid ground than when they talk about the fiction? The truth is that the facts are much more refractory and unmanageable and inconclusive, and can actually kill the very sort of inquiry that imagination opens up. —Philip Roth, The Facts This exchange between an autobiographical Philip1 and his fictional protagonist Zuckerman The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988) encapsulates the most central aspects of Philip Roth’s engagement with questions of life writing. First, both Philip and Zuckerman address an assumption by readers that Roth is always writing about himself and that, therefore, all of his work may be interpreted autobiographically. Second, by mentioning this autobiographical perception through both Philip and Zuckerman, Roth showcases a clear awareness of, and self-conscious interest in, this prominent dimension of his reception. Third, the very dialogue between Philip and Zuckerman—between an autobiographical subject and his fictional alter ego—blatantly enacts an intermingling of fiction and autobiography, creating a space in which the fictional and the autobiographical inseparably reflect on one another. In light of these observations, Roth’s oeuvre has an intricate and complex relationship with life writing. According to Smith and Watson’s (2010) Reading Autobiography, life writing is “a general term for writing that takes a life, one’s own or another, as its subject” (4). It can be traced back to Virginia Woolf, who uses the term in “Sketch of the Past,” a fragment of

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her own autobiographical writing, in an attempt to describe how difficult it is to capture one’s own experience: “[A]nd how futile life-writing becomes. I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream” (Woolf 2002: 92).2 Echoing Woolf’s concerns with the complexities and ambiguities of writing a life, life writing has become an umbrella term which, according to Hermione Lee (2008), “is sometimes used when the distinction between biography and autobiography is being deliberately blurred, or when different ways of telling a life-story—memoir, autobiography, biography, diary, letters, autobiographical fiction—are being discussed together” (100). Lee recognizes that life writing can acknowledge how writing about oneself is often closely connected to writing about others, with the term also stressing that various forms of biographical and autobiographical writing are closely related with authors working across these forms. Life writing can therefore describe both established and more hybrid forms of auto/biographical expression. Since life writing encompasses different and overlapping categories of autobiographical and biographical writing, it is a fitting lens to consider Roth’s engagement with autobiographical and biographical questions, especially because his work transgresses the conventions of, and boundaries between, different forms deliberately and self-reflexively—as demonstrated by the exchange between Philip and Zuckerman. Although life writing can be used to include explicitly fictional texts, such as autobiographical novels, it more commonly describes acts of presenting a life that use nonfictional frames of reference to a significant degree. Since many, if not all, of Roth’s novels have been considered as autobiographical to some extent, I will focus on those of his works that explicitly allude to an autobiographical pact. The autobiographical pact, as theorized by the critic Philippe Lejeune, describes a common assumption in autobiographical contexts that the author, the narrator, and the protagonist of a text all refer to the same—usually verifiably “real”—person, as shown by a correspondence between the book’s content and the author’s name on its cover (Lejeune 1989: 1, 5, 14). Novels in which the protagonist may be interpreted as an alter ego for the author, such as Roth’s Zuckerman books, do not enter such a pact. Five of Roth’s later works explicitly engage in nonfictional, autobiographical frames of referentiality by featuring a protagonist who is identified as “Philip” or even “Philip Roth”: The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), Deception: A Novel (1990), Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), and The Plot against America (2004). After summarizing some of the existing approaches to Roth’s relationship with autobiography, I will survey each of these books and offer brief accounts of their individual interventions into the autobiographical and biographical dimensions of life writing. Finally, I will comment on the overall autobiographical project of these works as expressing an autofictional sense of self, suggesting that these texts explore the fraught nature and impossibility of ethical life writing through the use of performative contradiction.

PHILIP ROTH AND “PHILIP ROTH” Throughout Roth’s literary career, readers have commented on a significant degree of overlap and similarity between the author and his protagonists, leading to the popular assumption that he is always writing about himself. As Jacques Berlinerblau (2021) comments, “Philip Roth relentlessly grafted Philip Roth into his own storyworld … He gleefully made it difficult for his readers to figure out where his fiction ended and where he began” (12). This suggests that Roth’s interest in complicating the relationship between the author’s identity and its

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fictional counterparts in novels is evident throughout his oeuvre. In Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, Debra Shostak (2004) traces this preoccupation with autobiographical assumptions back to the initial reception of Roth’s early work when some readers harshly criticized Goodbye, Columbus (1959) in terms of its supposedly autobiographical exposure, accusing him of anti-Semitism and self-hatred (159).3 Some scholars further argue that part of Roth’s success derives from responding to this early criticism by deliberately inviting readers to attempt autobiographical interpretations of his work.4 Roth’s oeuvre is therefore infused with questions of the autobiographical and the author is known for creating ambiguity about “facts” and “imagination,” “life” and “story,” “identity” and “performance.” More recently Roth’s biographers have also reflected on his stance toward autobiography and identity. In Roth’s authorized biography, Blake Bailey (2021) recounts that “Roth deplored the misconception that he was essentially an autobiographical writer, while making aesthetic hay of the matter with lookalike alter egos that include a recurring character named Philip Roth” (3). Ira Nadel (2021) sees interactions between “history, biography, and fiction” in Operation Shylock as “all part of his resistance to fame by employing slippery voices and multiple personalities” (8). Considering criticism levelled at Roth about his characters, Berlinerblau (2021) observes, “It certainly doesn’t help that many of Philip Roth’s fictional bad boys greatly resemble Philip Roth; some of his characters actually bear his name. This tendency to write fictionalized autobiography—a tendency that he denied until his d ­ eath— imbues debates about his work with a certain ferocity” (2). These biographical remarks also acknowledge a duality in Roth’s relationship to the autobiographical: a refusal and denial of undifferentiated autobiographical readings on the one hand, and on the other hand an inclination to feed into and reflect on the “confusion” between his biographical self and its representations in writing. In the following, I will give a brief overview of the five “Philip Roth” books and their connections to issues of life writing before discussing more specifically a commitment to ethical questions that emerge in all of these works.

THE FACTS: “[Y]OU, ROTH, ARE THE LEAST COMPLETELY RENDERED OF ALL YOUR PROTAGONISTS” As the first explicitly autobiographical work in Roth’s oeuvre, The Facts largely adheres to established and traditional autobiographical conventions. It chronicles the author’s childhood, youth, his first marriage and its decline, and his early literary career up to the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. Observing the coming-of-age theme, Hana Wirth-Nesher (2007) describes the account as “the portrait of the artist alongside his tale of Americanization” (162). As David Gooblar (2008) notes, “it would have seemed a conventional, almost boring, book from such a notoriously adventurous writer, had it not been for its prologue and epilogue” (33). By metafictionally framing the autobiographical manuscript of The Facts with an epistolary exchange between Philip and Zuckerman, Roth creates a dialectic space of autobiographical inquiry. As reflections on the autobiographical process, the letters allow Roth to pose Philip’s reasons for distinctly autobiographical selfrepresentation, such as older adulthood, illness, and a need for creative affirmation of the self: “Over fifty you need ways of making yourself visible to yourself” (F 4). Crucially, they also enable Roth to subvert, question, and challenge the autobiographical impulse in favor of fictionalization and imagination through Zuckerman’s criticism of the manuscript: “As

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for characterization, you, Roth are the least completely rendered of all your protagonists. Your gift is not to personalize your experience but to personify it, to embody it in the representation of a person who is not yourself” (F 162). The autobiographical self-reflexivity of Philip and Zuckerman’s correspondence ironizes autobiographical readings of Roth’s work and enacts the impossibility of separating the nonfictional from the fictional in life writing.

DECEPTION: “EXCUSE ME, PHILIP, DO YOU HAVE AN ASHTRAY?” Deception consists exclusively of dialogue that seems to be recorded in the notebooks of an author who is named as Philip once (when his secret lover requests an ashtray from him) and resembles Roth in personal circumstance and detail. Most of the conversations are between Philip and his lover who meets him at his studio. Very little actually happens in terms of narrative progression, but the records of the affair culminate in an intense fight between Philip and his wife when she accuses him of adultery after finding the notebook we have supposedly been reading up to this point. Philip claims that he has invented his mistress and their conversations, that he “[has] been imagining [himself], outside of [his] novel, having a love affair with a character inside [his] novel” (D 178). He manages to convince her, but the notebook’s mention of the name “Philip” in the pivotal line about the ashtray becomes a point of contention as she vehemently opposes the notebook’s publication with his real, referential name in it: “But if one day it should be published … people aren’t going to know that it’s just a little story of an imagination in love, any more than I did” (D 185–6). After Philip has affirmed his right as a writer to publish what he chooses, the book concludes with a phone call between him and his lover where they discuss the now published novel he was writing alongside the notebook during their time together. Much like The Facts, Deception creates an autobiographical space that is rife with contradictions, suspending two possible autobiographical interpretations in unresolvable tension: either Philip is telling the truth and the affair and the phone call are therefore invented, or his wife’s suspicions are correct, and Philip is lying to her. Although Roth’s wife at the time, Claire Bloom, attests to their conversation in her own autobiography Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), Deception’s mingling of supposedly factual and supposedly fictional impressions makes it impossible to confirm either interpretation as verifiably “true.” As Richard Tuerk (2005) suggests, “Perhaps readers will never know with certainty just how much Deception deceives them” (136). The book’s subtitling as “A Novel” also underlines this autobiographical indeterminacy.

PATRIMONY: “‘I WON’T TELL ANYONE,’ I SAID” In contrast to the ironically playful autobiographical mirrors and mazes of The Facts and Deception, Patrimony is a distinct foray into the biographical and takes on the more straightforward form of a memoir that recounts the final two years of Herman Roth’s life from the perspective of his son, Roth. As a memoir that very clearly takes the life of another

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as its central subject—or rather the end of this life due to age and illness—Patrimony is the only book amongst Roth’s life writing that engages the autobiographical pact unambiguously and without metafictional flourishes that might challenge its biographical faithfulness and commitment. It is, as Wirth-Nesher (2007) notes, “[a]n elegy for Herman Roth, as individual and as representative of [Roth’s] father’s generation” that is concerned with lateness, mortality, and memory—traditional and enduring themes of autobiographical life writing (164). Due to its significant biographical dimension, Patrimony most ostensibly amongst the autobiographical books broaches the ethical issue of telling someone else’s life and therefore infringing on their privacy and agency over their own story. In this context, life writing scholars comment on one scene in particular, where Herman soils himself and asks his son not to tell “the children” (Herman’s grandchildren and Philip’s nephews) or Philip’s wife about the incident, with Philip assuring him: “I won’t tell anyone … Nobody” (P 173). The very record of this conversation in the book constitutes a betrayal of Herman’s wishes and privacy. Nancy K. Miller (2000) observes that Patrimony occupies “the space between two contradictory injunctions: not to forget and not to tell,” describing the conflict between “that compulsion to record and bear witness” and the obligation (of a Jewish writer in particular) not to forget as a central issue in the “family memoir” (28–9). Considering Patrimony, John Paul Eakin (1999) argues that “transgression of privacy is not incompatible with the most profound respect for the integrity of the person” (182). He poses that “[w]hen Roth claims his father’s shit as his ‘patrimony,’ he calls on us, in effect, to acknowledge that the circumstances of relational identity challenge our familiar notions of privacy and ownership” (186). Patrimony shows the writer’s central ethical dilemma in life writing: what to tell and what not to tell in the service of testimony and witness bearing.

OPERATION SHYLOCK: “THIS CONFESSION IS FALSE” Although it is subtitled “A Confession” and uses some conventions of nonfictional works— such as a disclaimer in the preface that “[f]or legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book”—Operation Shylock is commonly regarded as fictional (OS 13). This is because the book presents a rather outlandish premise in which a character, named Philip Roth, must pursue a doppelgänger who has taken on Philip’s identity in Israel to promote his bizarre political agenda of “Diasporism,” a movement to resettle Israeli Jews of European background in Europe (OS 40–1). Alongside his confrontations with the imposter, whom he names “Moishe Pipik” after a childhood nickname, Philip experiences a string of strange events, such as witnessing the trial of John Demjanjuk (for his crimes as Treblinka’s Ivan the Terrible) and going on a secret intelligence mission to Athens for the Mossad, Israel’s secret service agency (OS 115, 60, 357). Critics have analyzed Operation Shylock’s allusions to autobiography and its dizzying use of doubles with not just one but two “Philip Roths” as an exercise in postmodern playfulness.5 However, considering its commentary on life writing, Gooblar (2008) emphasizes the novel’s contribution to “Roth’s investigation of the potential costs and conflicts that arise from non-fiction writing” (46). The note to the reader at the end of the book, which declares “[t]his confession is false” and “a work of fiction” directly opposes the preface’s statements about veracity (OS 399). Like The Facts and Deception, Operation Shylock pits contradictory frames of autobiographical referentiality against one another to create an ambivalent space.

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THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA: “WHERE HISTORICAL FACT ENDS AND HISTORICAL IMAGINING BEGINS” The Plot against America shares some of Operation Shylock’s interest in imagining the political and is also regarded as clearly fictional due to its portrayal of an alternate American history in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and negotiates a nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler, leading to increasing antiSemitism and fears of state persecution by Jewish Americans. Given this premise, the book has been read as political allegory and satire in response to contemporary politics and as postmodern reflection on the representation and construction of history.6 Jason Siegel (2012) poses that The Plot against America functions as historiographic metafiction, since “Roth submits his counterfactual history, not as a tendentious fictional commentary on ‘real life,’ but as a true history that challenges and supplements our notion of American identity as defined by the cause and effect of actual events that comprises its factual history” (132).7 What moves this novel toward a life writing context, positioning it in concert with the other examples, is that the experiences of another “Philip Roth” character and his family are embedded into this counterfactual historical setting. The Roths of the novel share their names and biographical details with Roth’s actual family and Roth (2004) himself has commented on the way in which his actual memories of his family at this time fed into the novel, giving him the “opportunity to bring [his] parents back from the grave and restore them to what they were at the height of their powers in their late 30’s.” The Plot against America deliberately evokes autobiography alongside alternate history. Stefanie Boese (2014) analyzes it as a “hybrid” of both Holocaust autobiographies and alternate histories, arguing that “[b]y representing alternate history as autobiography, The Plot asks us to consider both tropes alongside each other while paying attention to their inherent contradictions” (276). At the end of the book, Roth offers an extensive “Postscript” in which he labels the novel as “a work of fiction” but proceeds to provide historical notes and documents “for readers interested in tracking where historical fact ends and historical imagining begins” (PAA 264). The Plot against America explores the life writing themes of history, memory, family, and childhood in another contradictory amalgamation of the autobiographical and the fictional.

“BY NOW WHAT YOU ARE IS A WALKING TEXT”: AUTOFICTION, SERIALITY, AND PERFORMATIVE CONTRADICTION You are not an autobiographer, you’re a personificator. You have the reverse experience of most of your American contemporaries. Your acquaintance with the facts, your sense of the facts, is much less developed than your understanding, your intuitive weighing and balancing of fiction. You make a fictional world that is far more exciting than the world it comes out of. My guess is that you’ve written metamorphoses of yourself so many times, you no longer have any idea what you are or ever were. By now what you are is a walking text. (F 162)

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In this quotation from The Facts, Zuckerman characterizes Philip as a text of indeterminable complexity due to the various versions, inventions, doubles, and alter egos—“metamorphoses” of himself—that he has created: be they fictional, autobiographical, or a mix of both (like this very exchange between Philip and Zuckerman). Critics have widely regarded the manifold twists, turns, and double bottoms in Roth’s autobiographical self-representations as part of a postmodern inquiry into the permeability of boundaries, categories, and truths, be they related to genre, self and other, history and memory, life and story or autobiography and fiction.8 Roth’s playful manipulation and dismantling of epistemological certainty through the transgression of fictional and nonfictional narrative frameworks within the autobiographical act clearly reflect a postmodern sense of self-consciousness. Considering ways in which Roth’s self-conscious engagement with life writing broaches autobiographical ethics, this section will expand on Gooblar’s (2008) analysis of “ethical dilemmas” across Roth’s autobiographical project (39) and on Stefan Kjerkegaard’s (2016) suggestion that in Roth’s use of fictionality, “an ethics of telling … overrides the ethics of the told” to create “uncompromising self-scrutiny” (137–8). I argue that the staging of contradictions in the autobiographical texts between the form of this telling and what is told showcases the novelist’s challenges in autobiographically portraying a life spent writing fiction. In doing so, Roth attests to the powers of fictionality but crucially he also exposes autobiography as an inevitably flawed ethical endeavor. Recent developments in Life Writing Studies suggest the term “autofiction” as a concept to explore distinct intersections of autobiographical and fictional writing.9 Because there is no single agreed upon definition, autofiction can be applied to a range of texts, spanning from novels that contain few autobiographical allusions to more self-reflexive works that are explicitly positioned in an autobiographical context. It is sometimes framed as a clearly postmodern and contemporary style or genre, although examples of autofiction can be traced back to earlier periods.10 Its foregrounding of hybridity between fictional and autobiographical modes of self-representation and its opposition to the tradition of a unified and coherent autobiographical subject make autofiction clearly applicable to Roth’s work. Marjorie Worthington (2017) reads Operation Shylock as autofiction that calls readers to consider the boundaries between world and story-world: “The autofictional nature of the novel—the fact that ‘Philip Roth’ is its main character—demands that the reader pay simultaneous attention to both the textual and the extra-textual worlds. … [T]he inter-textual protagonist ‘Philip’ ensures that readers must repeatedly consider the extra-textual Roth” (477). Similarly, Todd Womble (2018) reads Deception as a novel in which “autofictive metafiction” creates confusion between the two narrating agents of (the autofictional character) Philip and (the author) Roth, leading to an autofictional ambiguity of implied authorship (227). What these readings attest to is that Roth’s life writing tests and transgresses the limits of the autobiographical, usually through its varied use of fictionality. Autofiction’s interest in such transgressions from an autobiographical perspective makes it a suitable concept to consider Roth’s contributions to life writing discourse and its ethical dimensions. To explore a particular technique that may be regarded as autofictional, I will focus on “performative contradiction” as an aesthetic strategy. Performative contradiction is at first a rhetorical act “which claims one thing and does another,” much like an oxymoron or paradox (Currie 2011: 79). As I have also argued elsewhere, analyzing a broader use of performative contradiction—as an autobiographical aesthetic in which the autobiographical act is constantly affirmed as impossibly complex and difficult—can illustrate how novelists’ autobiographies, in particular, ethically engage with a life spent writing fictions (see Schuh

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2020). To return to the quotation at the beginning of this section, Zuckerman’s inclusion into The Facts, into what is ostensibly marked as an “autobiography,” draws attention to certain ways that the novelist Roth performs a persona distinctly characterized by an affinity with fictionality and imagining. Superficially, this may seem opposed to the serious claims of the genre of autobiography. Yet the novelist’s work is steeped in fiction, as a life spent in writing. In contrast to the quotation’s explicit statement against autobiography, Zuckerman’s outspoken presence in The Facts does not so much undermine as consolidate the character’s autobiographical position within Roth’s “text.” It is this inclusion of Zuckerman’s fictional voice that counterintuitively makes Roth both an autobiographer and a “personificator”; the incorporation of something less-than-true conveys an existential truth about Roth as autobiographical subject (F 162). This apparent dichotomy between Philip and Zuckerman is what allows the autobiographical subject of the novelist to emerge within a “text” fraught with contradictions. Zuckerman provides an example of this when he responds to a question that the autobiographer Philip poses, of whether The Facts “is any good” (F 10), with the clear mandate: “Don’t publish” (161). As a reader can clearly discern from the fact that they are reading this text, it has been published against Zuckerman’s advice. As Gooblar (2008) has argued, “Roth gets to have it both ways” by presenting the reader with this text as well as Zuckerman’s reservations against it (41). Given that Zuckerman’s words are obviously written by Roth himself, the very existence of a published book contradicts Zuckerman’s refusal of the manuscript. This contradiction both destabilizes Philip’s autobiographical authority (with Zuckerman calling it into question) and affirms it through Roth’s authorial ownership of the published text. In performative contradiction, the juxtaposition of contradictory notions creates a tension that can be read as subverting seemingly stable conventions or structures of language, thought, and narrative. Recognizing this, Judith Butler uses the term “performative contradiction” to explain a practice that has subversive qualities: “performativity has been re-theorized at some distance from the problem of parody, but also how performativity might be thought against the assimilationist drift in the discourse of universality” (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000: 171–2). In comparison with the rhetorical figure of an oxymoron, performative contradiction encompasses a broader conceptual practice which has implications beyond the immediate effect of a rhetorical device. It can therefore clarify how instances of fictionality in the autobiographical writing of novelists constitute an autobiographical act, rather than a violation of the autobiographical pact. The productive tension between Philip and Zuckerman as autobiographical subjects for Roth encapsulates the entanglement of the novelist’s life in both fiction and autobiography, but it also exposes the ethical implications of life writing that claims to tell an unambiguous, coherent, and linear “truth” as an impossible construction. Building on this idea of performative contradiction, the five books of life writing can also be read as serially connected works within a continuous and complex engagement with autobiographical self-representation throughout Roth’s oeuvre. Comparative readings of these books are already common in Roth scholarship. Furthermore, as manuscripts from Roth’s archive in the Library of Congress show, the author himself also considered publishing the first four of them, which were written in quick succession, as parts of a single volume he thought about titling as “Two-Faced: An Autobiography in Four Acts” (Gooblar 2008: 35). Although these texts were not published or marketed as a serial, the (largely) consecutive publication of five autofictional books, all featuring an autobiographical “Philip Roth” character, permits a serial interpretation. Roth’s blatant use of fictionalization across all of these texts contains a kind of sincerity about his writing life, and it promotes a sense of self

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that is contingent, multi-faceted, unstable, and subject to revisions. As Ricarda Menn and I have argued, this refusal of traditional autobiographical unity constitutes an “autofictional sense of self” that is common to literary, serially published life writing (Menn and Schuh 2022: 102). Reading the books as a series of experiments with life writing also supports a view of autobiography as a continuous and open-ended process. I suggest that Roth’s entire autobiographical project is shaped by an aesthetic of performative contradiction that is enhanced by serial structures. The reoccurrence of a “Philip Roth” character and of possible alter egos, such as Zuckerman, in varying degrees and contexts of autobiographical, fictional, and historical representation speaks to a seriality of self-representation that connects the different works across generic differences, furthering a conception of life and self as complex and contradictory, but also incomplete and subject to constant revision. In each of the “Philip Roth” books, Roth creates unstable and ambiguous autobiographical spaces which foreground ethical contradictions of writing about oneself and others—such as doing justice to history and memory, to testimony and privacy, to witnessing and imagining. Performative contradiction exposes the ethical position of both the novelist and the autobiographer. It unmasks the illusion of transparency in life writing, furthering instead a sincerity of dialogue between fictionality and factuality that is constantly aware of the limitations in fiction and life writing. This awareness also becomes apparent in the serial repetition and variation of autobiographical questions in these books. In doing so, Roth’s autobiographical works perpetually question—and in turn encourage readers to question— how the story of a life is told. As Philip muses in The Facts, “I suppose that calling this book The Facts begs so many questions that I could manage to be both less ironic and more ironic by calling it Begging the Question” (F 8). As “a walking text” that is radically indeterminable and self-reflexive, Roth deliberately draws attention to the contradictions that are inherent in the autobiographical act, thus showcasing the genre’s ethical paradoxes.

NOTES 1. To distinguish between different authorial subjects, I will refer to the autobiographical character “Philip Roth” as “Philip” and to the author as “Philip Roth” or “Roth.” 2. See also Lee (2009: 73), who comments on Woolf as a source of this term. 3. See also Hana Wirth-Nesher (2007), who observes how this tendency in Roth’s reception intensified after Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and describes an “aura of scandal as JewishAmerican readers have insisted upon reading his satires as autobiographical works that betray his community by exposing Jewish warts to gentile eyes” (159). 4. See Gooblar (2008), who comments that “Roth has thrived for decades upon playing with the temptation of readers to read his protagonists as thinly veiled autobiographical portraits of himself” (34). Shostak (2004) also poses that the later, more explicitly autobiographical books build on an obvious interest to make “capital out of his readers’ inclinations toward biographical interpretations of his work,” suggesting that a preoccupation with “self-performance,” “impersonation and ventriloquism,” and “self-exposure” is evident throughout Roth’s oeuvre (158–9). See also Joe Moran (2000) who observes in Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America that “Roth’s experiments with ‘autobiographical’ fiction have created a kind of ‘hall of mirrors’ effect which has only added to the public confusion about the relationship between the author and his characters” (104). 5. See for example Shostak (2004), who sees Operation Shylock as engaging in “postmodern metaphysics of identity” (142); David Brauner (2007), who comments on the book’s “selfparody …, a parody of both realism and postmodernism” (101); or Patrick Hayes (2014), who

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interprets it as a work at the limits of political fantasy, making “an uncanny jump … [into] a comedy thriller” to “confessional narrative” back to “a comedy caper” (192–3). 6. See also Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (2005), who suggests that The Plot against America resonates with “dangers facing America in the wake of the terrorist Attacks of 911 and the war in Iraq,” arguing that “[i]n portraying the United States becoming a fascist-like state under the administration of an ill-qualified, naïve, and incompetent president, Roth offers a not-so-thinly veiled critique of the United States under the administration of President George W. Bush” (155–6). 7. For more on historiographic metafiction as a concept, see Hutcheon (1988: 5). 8. See also Peter J. Bailey (1991), who argues that The Facts employs “postmodernist narrative deflection and self-referentiality” (216), Robert Greenberg (1997) who observes the postmodern idea of experience and imagination as inseparable in Roth’s work (505), and Tuerk (2005) who suggests that The Facts and Deception can be regarded as postmodernist because “they blur the distinction between fact and fiction” (136–7). 9. See also Jones (2010), Dix (2018), Effe and Lawlor (2022), and Worthington (2017 and 2018). 10. See Berlinerblau (2021), Womble (2018), and Worthington (2017) for autofiction as a postmodernist concept; see Menn and Schuh (2022) for Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–35) as an example of autofiction.

REFERENCES Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Bailey, Peter J. (1991), “‘Why Not Tell the Truth?’: The Autobiographies of Three Fiction Writers,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 324: 211–23. Berlinerblau, Jacques (2021), The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bloom, Claire (1996), Leaving a Doll’s House, Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Boese, Stefanie (2014), “‘Those Two Years’: Alternate History and Autobiography in Philip Roth’s The Plot against America,” Studies in American Fiction, 41 (2): 271–92. Brauner, David (2007), Philip Roth, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (2000), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, London, New York: Verso. Currie, Mark (2011), Postmodern Narrative Theory, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dix, Hywel (2018), “Introduction: Autofiction in English: The Story so Far,” in Hywel Dix (ed.), Autofiction in English, 1–23, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Eakin, John Paul (1999), How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Effe, Alexandra and Hannie Lawlor (2022), “Introduction from Autofiction to the Autofictional,” in Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor (eds.), The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms, 1–18, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Gooblar, David (2008), “The Truth Hurts: The Ethics of Philip Roth’s ‘Autobiographical’ Books,” Journal of Modern Literature, 32: 33–53. Greenberg, Robert (1997), “Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth,” Twentieth Century Literature, 43 (4): 487–506. Hayes, Patrick (2014), Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutcheon, Linda (1988), A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London: Routledge. Jones, E.H. (2010), “Autofiction: A Brief History of a Neologism,” in Richard Bradford (ed.), Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature, 174–84, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kjerkegaard, Stefan (2016), “Getting People Right: Getting Fiction Right: Self-Fashioning, Fictionality, and Ethics in the Roth Books,” Journal of Narrative Theory, 46 (1): 121–48. Lee, Hermione (2008), Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing, London: Pimlico. Lee, Hermione (2009), Biography: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Lejeune, Philippe (1989), On Autobiography, ed. John Paul Eakin, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Menn, Ricarda and Melissa Schuh (2022), “The Autofictional in Serial, Literary Works,” in Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor (eds.), The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms, 101–18, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, Nancy K. (2000), Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Moran, Joe (2000), Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America, London, Sterling: Pluto Press. Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenfeld, Gavriel D. (2005), The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roth, Philip (1994), Operation Shylock: A Confession, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1999), Patrimony: A True Story, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2004), “The Story behind ‘The Plot against America,’” New York Times, September 19. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/books/review/the-story-behind-the-plotagainst-america.html (accessed July 28, 2022). Roth, Philip (2005), The Plot against America, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2007), The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2016), Deception: A Novel, London: Vintage. Schuh, Melissa (2020), “‘Which I Presume Is Permitted, since We Are Talking about a Writer’: Lateness, Memory, and Imagination in Literary Autobiography,” The European Journal of Life Writing, IX: 111–30. Shostak, Debra (2004), Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Siegel, Jason (2012), “The Plot against America: Philip Roth’s Counter-Plot to American History,” MELUS, 37 (1): 131–54. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (2010), Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed., London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tuerk, Richard (2005), “Caught between The Facts and Deception,” in Derek Parker Royal (ed.), Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, 129–42, Westport: Praeger. Wirth-Nesher, Hana (2007), “Roth’s Autobiographical Writings,” in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 158–72, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Womble, Todd (2018), “Roth Is Roth as Roth: Autofiction and the Implied Author,” in Hywel Dix (ed.), Autofiction in English, 219–36, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Woolf, Virginia (2002), Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind and Hermione Lee, London: Pimlico. Worthington, Marjorie (2017), “Fiction in the ‘Post-Truth’ Era: The Ironic Effects of Autofiction,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 58 (5): 471–83. Worthington, Marjorie (2018), The Story of “Me,” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Liberalism, Autonomy, and the Open Mind in Philip Roth’s Drama of the 1960s JOSHUA POWELL

It has been suggested that a discourse of open- and closed-mindedness rose to prominence in America between the end of the Second World War and the late 1960s.1 This discourse pitted a flexible, autonomous, and ultimately desirable “open mind” against an ideologically affiliated and rigid “closed mind.” The open mind, as Jamie Cohen-Cole (2014) puts it, “meant a respect for individuality, tolerance of difference, appreciation of pluralism, and appreciation of freedom of thought” (2). The closed mind, by contrast, “rejected new ideas and people, and, because of compulsive adherence to ideology, lacked his or her own thoughts” (4). The valorization of the open mind, in Cohen-Cole’s account, was essentially a liberal response to a selection of anxiety-producing historical events: the rise of fascism in early twentieth-century Europe; the emergent stories of life in Stalin’s Soviet Union; the inquisitions of McCarthyism; the homogenizing potential of rampant consumerism. Defining and fostering the “open mind” was enlisted, “on the one hand, to help keep the Communists without, and on the other, to eradicate the racists and conformist robots of the crowd within” (4). Reading Philip Roth’s little-known drama of the 1960s alongside key works in this discourse of open-mindedness, this chapter rethinks Roth’s relationship with mid-twentieth-century American liberalism. The last few decades have seen a great deal of critical and cultural debate about Roth’s perceived liberalism. Much of this criticism has focused on readings of Roth’s later work as evidence of his adherence to a mid-century liberalism that privileged individual autonomy over group identity.2 But there is also a body of critical literature that emphasizes Roth’s limited interest in the liberal project—his position as a writer for whom sociopolitical and ethical concerns were always secondary to the challenges and pleasures of putting twentieth-century American life into fiction.3 Across the literature, Roth’s association with mid-century liberalism is rarely in doubt. The debate, though, seems to converge on whether Roth’s writing is open—or narrow-minded in its engagement with liberalism. Some suggest that Roth’s writing was, for the main part, inhibited by mid-century liberalism, that is unable to see beyond its narrow confines. Others highlight Roth’s capacity to stand outside the crowd and think beyond the dominant assumptions of mid-century liberalism.4 Much of the critical literature on Roth’s liberalism is insightful and persuasive, but the existent debate on the topic is a little overly reliant on the novels that Roth produced from the late 1990s onwards, particularly the American Trilogy of American Pastoral (1997),

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I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). This is understandable. These are important works in Roth’s oeuvre that reflect upon some of the key moments in twentieth-century politics. But the focus on these novels, at the expense of the earlier work, can give the impression that Roth’s concern with mid-century liberalism was primarily retrospective. Building on the work of Patrick Hayes (2014), this chapter reveals how Roth’s writing interrogates the discourses of mid-century liberalism as they were emerging in the early 1960s. Equally, the degree to which the critical literature is weighted toward the American Trilogy can belie the diverse ways in which Roth wrote about liberalism. Much has been said about the extent to which Roth engages with liberalism through realist fiction structured around significant historical events and figures; the engagement with liberalism that we encounter in his more formally experimental work needs further consideration. With this in mind, the following chapter illustrates how liberalism figures in two of Roth’s dramatic works of the 1960s: “Buried Again” (1964) and “The National Pastime” (1965). These little-known plays emerge in close historical proximity to the discourses of mid-century liberalism and engage with these discourses in a way that is more abstract than much of Roth’s other work. Thus, they are well positioned to add to our understanding of Roth’s liberalism. Roth’s archives contain drafts of plays written for theater and television as well as scripts for television series and films, revealing his interest not only in drama but also televisual and filmic adaptations of his own works (particularly 1985’s The Prague Orgy) and the works of other literary writers, specifically Anton Chekhov. Roth attempted original dramatic writing most frequently in the early part of his career, the early 1960s being the highpoint of his creative entanglement with drama. The plays under consideration in this chapter were written in these years, as was “The Nice Jewish Boy” (1965), one of the failed projects out of which Roth later suggested Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) emerged (RMO 36). In the middle and later part of his career, Roth was more occupied by work on dramatic adaptation, but there were still forays into original drama in the 1980s (1988’s “Journey into the Whirlwind,” for example), and drama emerges as a key theme in later novels such as Sabbath’s Theater (1995), I Married a Communist, and The Humbling (2009). In short, Roth’s interest in dramatic writing was strong and longstanding. However, little of Roth’s drama has been published or produced.5 Generally, as Mike Witcombe (2014) has noted, Roth’s dramatic works are “shrouded in obscurity” (108). With the exception of Witcombe, no other critic has discussed Roth’s dramatic works in any detail, and I wager that most general readers would be surprised to learn that Roth devoted so much energy to the writing of drama. In some ways, it is unsurprising that little attention has been paid to Roth’s plays. They are strange and uneven in places, and the fact that most were written in the early years of Roth’s career may lead some to see them as apprentice pieces that paved the way for more polished and resonant works of literary fiction. However, there is good reason for placing a spotlight on Roth’s drama. Rowdy, provocative, and ambitious, the plays can entertain us and inform our thinking on Roth’s writerly practice, particularly (as Witcombe [2014] has argued) regarding his formal experimentation (110). They can also help us to place Roth in relation to the political, sociocultural, and academic developments of his day. This chapter juxtaposes Roth’s plays with two works that are key to the mid-century liberal discourse of open-mindedness: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and

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Milton Rokeach’s The Open and Closed Mind (1960). Roth’s plays, I suggest, share with these works of social science a preoccupation with the individual’s capacity to adapt to a changing environment whilst exhibiting a sense of autonomy. The works of both Riesman and Rokeach construct an ideal open-minded subject who can adapt to new situations, whilst showing the capacity to think independently about them. Roth’s plays interrogate these idealizations by focusing upon stubborn, middle-aged men as they respond to sudden, dramatic, and often surreal changes to their lives. In the first part of this chapter, I suggest that the tribulations of Harold Weingast in “Buried Again” serve to scrutinize the model of autonomy that Riesman sets out. The next part of the chapter considers “The National Past Time” alongside the experiments described by Rokeach. Like Rokeach, Roth is interested in the capacity of the open-minded subject to “play along” with emergent worlds that are governed by novel rules and belief systems. But, Roth’s plays, I argue, are less willing to valorize this “playing along” than are the experiments of Rokeach. Ultimately, then, the chapter aims to better define Roth’s liberalism by determining the degree to which his plays participate in the valorization of autonomy and open-mindedness that took place in midcentury liberal America.

SCRUTINIZING AUTONOMY IN “BURIED AGAIN” Cohen-Cole suggests that autonomy and its inverse, conformity, were key terms in discourse about American life in the middle of the twentieth century. Pointing to texts written by “elite” social critics such as David Riesman, as well as mass-market magazines such as Reader’s Digest, he identifies a widespread anxiety that the “corporatization of work and suburban homogeneity” was producing “conformity and therefore weakness in American culture” (38). Roth’s theater of the 1960s, and particularly 1964’s “Buried Again,” can be seen to scrutinize this cultural desire to rescue the autonomous individual from the conformity of all things corporate and suburban. The play is concerned with the potential reincarnation of one deceased Jewish male, Harold Weingast, a middle-aged Newark businessman who died of a heart attack on the golf course. After an unspecified amount of time deceased, Weingast is presented with the opportunity to return to Earth in a new form. However, this return depends on his being successfully “processed” by a committee of four anonymous specialists (Roth 1964: 5). The play presents a single scene in which the four specialists, occupying high wooden booths and dressed in different-colored academic robes, interview the confused Weingast about the form he wishes to take on his return to Earth. The key subject of this interview is whether Weingast’s new form is going to occupy the same identificatory categories as he did (heterosexual, male, American, Jewish). Weingast’s continued existence will depend on his making genuine and considered choices about his future identity. As one of the specialists puts it, “I want you to be what you want to be, but I want to be sure you want it, after having given full consideration to the other choices open to you” (9). If he is incapable of making these choices, he will be “buried again.” The specialists, thus, ask Weingast to showcase the kind of autonomy that much of the midcentury discourse identified by Cohen-Cole advocated. In particular, the autonomy that the specialists attempt to elicit from him resounds with that advocated by Riesman, Roth’s onetime college professor,6 in his influential work, The Lonely Crowd (written in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer). Riesman takes as his starting point the observation

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that certain people will be more or less suited to the societies in which they exist, considering this in relation to three key terms: adjustment, anomie, and autonomy. For Riesman (2001), adjustment is about being endowed with a character structure that is well suited to your society and social place. The “adjusted,” as he puts it, “are those who reflect their society, or their class within the society, with the least distortion” (242). At the other extreme, there are those who Riesman labels anomic (people who are incapable of conforming to the ideals of their society). But Riesman is particularly interested in the autonomous—“those who on the whole are capable of conforming to the behavioral norms of their society … but are free to choose whether to conform or not” (242). In Riesman’s account, autonomy involves having a strong sense of self but also an openness to the possibility of self-transformation. On the one hand, Riesman’s autonomous person makes an effort “to recognize and respect his own feelings, his own potentialities, his own limitations” (259); on the other, “he is aware of the possibility that he might change, that there are many roles open to him, roles other people have taken in history or in his milieu” (246). Thus, the autonomous person can play along with the ideal of a certain place and time, but also think beyond them. Like Riesman’s model autonomous subject, Weingast is being asked to consider “that there are many roles open to him” (Riesman 2001: 246) and decide on a role that accords with “his own feelings, his own potentialities, his own limitations” (259). In a sense, the play can be seen as a thought experiment structured around Riesman’s model of autonomy. Much of the dramatic and comedic impact of “Buried Again” rests on the hopelessness of Weingast’s attempt to understand his situation and make the required decision. He is unable seriously to consider unfamiliar roles and identities and seems more interested in making the decisions that please the authorities before him than in contemplating change or satisfying his own desires. However, “Buried Again” does not simply satirize the narrow-minded obedience of Weingast. It also places scrutiny on those who attempt to elicit autonomy from the befuddled protagonist. There is undoubtedly something seductive about the specialists’ desire to make sure that candidates for reincarnation carefully consider their options before choosing their new identity. Roth’s play, though, scratches at the gloss of this rhetoric in three main ways. First, the play is mindful of the contradictions inherent in the attempt to coerce an individual into autonomy. Even if one recognizes inherent value in the autonomy that Weingast is asked to show, the set-up still forces him to adopt this autonomy on pain of death. Second, there is an almost comic rigidity to the way in which the committee ask Weingast to choose between a narrow selection of discrete identities. In the case of gender and sexuality, for instance, Weingast is told: “You may choose one of the following: Male, or man; Female; Male homosexual; Female homosexual” (Roth 1964: 8). Third, as the play goes on, it becomes apparent that the specialists are nudging Weingast in particular directions with regards to his choices. One is peculiarly keen for Weingast’s reincarnation to come from the north of Canada (18–9); another seems to steer Weingast toward womanhood (9– 10); and, most troublingly, one insists that Weingast choose a non-Jewish identity because “mankind has had enough of Jews” (41). “Buried Again” imagines a systematic process that works to elicit Riesmanian autonomy, but characterizes it as contradictory, inhibited, and vulnerable to the whims and biases of its executors. The play, thus, shows the degree to which Roth was steeped in Riesmanian ideals of autonomy and understood their appeal. However, the play ultimately emphasizes the problems inherent in the attempt to elicit autonomy. The systematic tendency to bring about autonomous decision-making is cast as flawed and violent.

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EXPERIMENTING ON THE OPEN MIND As we have seen, “Buried Again” presents a world in which an individual’s continued existence depends on their playing along with a rigid, if mysterious, set of rules structured around notions of autonomy derived from mid-century social science. The connection between Roth’s drama and social science becomes tighter, though, when one turns to 1965’s “The National Pastime,” later titled “The Penetrator.” “The National Pastime” has a more familiar setting than “Buried Again.” We are taken into a contemporary suburban American living room in which Al, a “strongminded husband,” turns on the television. Things take a strange turn, however, when Al discovers that all the channels on his television transmit the same pictures: a man and a woman fornicating to the accompaniment of Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No 2” (Roth 1965: 16). Horrified by this, he tries to hide the footage from his young son Gregory. Eventually, Al’s wife, Isabel, intervenes. She is afraid that Al’s horror at televised sex will make Gregory frightened “about you-know-what” and eventually explains to her son that “two people are having intercourse on television” (54). At this point, a “nice young couple from next door” appear at the door. Their television is showing the same images, and the group speculate on the reasons for this, deciding to continue watching in the hope that all will be explained (54–5). When the intercourse ends, the much-anticipated explanation arrives. A voice emerges from the television set and a “distinguished-looking man” appears (56). Speaking from the corridors of a “scientific building,” as scientists move back and forth behind him in white jackets, he explains that the television-viewing public have just been given a “front-row seat at a history-making scientific experiment” (56). The experimenters have found that if “trillions of microscopic dots” are presented at an appropriate frequency “then a vast storehouse” of sequential images will be “placed at the disposal of each and every television viewer” (56). This will effectively mean that those looking at the television screen will see whatever they want to see. This scientific innovation serves the democratic dream, we think, by penetrating beyond fad and fashion, beyond what the sponsors believe the public wants, and what those rating systems believe they may be willing to watch—penetrates right down through the dangerous layers of me-tooism and conformity to the true and genuine television needs of every man, woman and child in this land. (56) Here, Roth’s play undoubtedly continues the work of “Buried Again” in scrutinizing social scientific notions of autonomy. Roth’s fictitious experiment aims to enable individuals to transcend the norms and expectations of their society—“me-tooism and conformity”— and to seek cultural experiences that fulfill their “true and genuine” needs. However, the problems with the experiment are clear. If it was aiming to elicit individual autonomy rather than conformity, the experiment seems to have been unsuccessful; as Al points out, all its subjects seem to have seen the “same thing” (18). Equally, it is difficult not to question the experiment’s assumption that an individual’s true and genuine needs can be met without careful consideration. How much stock can we put in an autonomy that elides conscious decision-making?

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“The National Pastime,” though, is not merely a critique of social scientific understandings of autonomy. It also engages with the experimental approach to open-mindedness that developed within social psychology in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the work of Milton Rokeach. In the experiments documented in The Open and Closed Mind, Rokeach and colleagues investigated the way that individuals respond to a “world wherein the rules of the game are in contradiction” to those of their “everyday world” (Rokeach 2015: 171). Rokeach’s experiments relied on scales used to measure levels of rigidity, opinionation, and dogmatism. In the case of dogmatism, for example, subjects were asked whether they agreed with a series of statements that the experimenters judged to be dogmatic, with a particular score being derived from their answers. Someone who tended to agree with the “dogmatic” statements would score highly on the Dogmatism Scale. Experimental groups were then asked to participate in a range of complex and unfamiliar experimental tasks, with the performances of those that measured highly on the scale being compared with the performances of those with lower scores. Those whose views were adjudged dogmatic, the experimenters hypothesized, would be less willing and able to adapt to novel environments. Essentially, then, the experiments set out to show a link between dogmatic opinions and inflexible performance in order to distinguish between the “closed-minded” person and the “open-minded” one. Many of the experiments described in The Open and Closed Mind are structured around a specific “fictitious world wherein the rules of the game are in contradiction to those of our everyday world” (Rokeach 2015: 171). This is primarily the world of “Joe Doodlebug.” Joe, subjects are told at the beginning of experiments, is “a strange sort of bug” whose physical capacities do not conform to familiar rules. For example, Joe does not have to “face” food in order to eat it and is “trapped facing north” (172–3). Rokeach and his colleagues tested the capacity of their subjects to adapt to the rules of this fictitious world by asking them to solve a range of problems involving Joe’s attempts to move around and eat. They also continually tweaked the rules that governed Joe’s “miniature cosmology” to see whether subjects could repeatedly play along with new belief systems (171). In general, the results of the “Joe” experiments accorded with the hypothesis of The Open and Closed Mind. Those whose beliefs scored highly on the Dogmatism Scale were less able to adapt their minds to the novel rules of Joe’s fictitious world (398). The experimenters concluded that those who scored highly on the Dogmatism Scale were less able to quickly understand and “play along with” new systems of belief (398). “The National Pastime” is comparable to the “Joe” experiments in the degree to which it is concerned with the ability of its protagonists—as well as a potential audience—to play along with the unfamiliar rules and belief systems that govern fictitious worlds. As the voice of the scientist explaining the experiment makes clear, in the everyday world of the characters in question, television viewing is governed by things like social convention, advertising revenue, and rating systems. The experiment asks the characters of “The National Pastime” to understand and play along with a new system of television viewership in which the programming will recognize and conform exclusively to the deepest desires of the individual viewer. Here, it is important to note the divide between the characters in terms of their responses. Most of the individuals represented in the play are able to understand and “play along” with this new system. The “nice young couple” accept that what they have seen reflects their own desires. Bradley, the husband, even deems the experiment “the most exciting advancement in decades” (17). Similarly, Isabel grasps the idea behind the experiment, drawing an interesting, if comically partial conclusion from its results: “it means that down deep in our subliminal souls, all of us have a deep unsatisfied desire to have more semi-classical music on TV” (18).

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The play, though, offers an alternative response through the figure of Al. Al has voiced his disgust at the broadcast from the outset of the play and, on hearing the explanation, refuses to play along. For Al, sex on television is simply wrong, and so are those who watch it—regardless of how “true and genuine” their needs are. He has loosely grasped the conceit behind the experiment—that they have all seen what they wanted to see—but cannot accept a world of television viewing in which individual desires are privileged over established norms and values. Al would sooner “live without television” than watch it on the terms of this experiment; the play concludes with his throwing out the television set in a fit of anger (17–19). Like Rokeach’s experiments, Roth’s play seems to draw a division between openand closed-minded subjects. Those who are open to a new set of rules are separated from Al who is, in the words of Isabel, “against new things” (18). Roth’s play, though, strays from the ethos that drives Rokeach’s experiments in terms of the degree to which it valorizes the open-minded subject. Rokeach’s experiments clearly assume that we should want to stand on the “open” side of the open/closed divide. “Closed” persons are defined in terms of their incapacities—by having “greater difficulty than open ones in forming new conceptual and perceptual systems” (Rokeach 2015: 284). “The National Pastime” constructs a different, less hierarchical relationship. Certainly, Roth’s closed-minded subject is not very sympathetic. Al is violent toward his son, dismissive of his wife’s opinions, and seemingly unable to confront his own desires. He denounces the others as “rot-ridden” for what they have seen on the television whilst glossing over the fact that he has seen the same thing (17). At the same time, though, he is the one who articulates the evident problems with the experiment: he points out the problem that all the subjects of the experiment have seen the same thing, and he asks the reasonable ethical question of whether “those people down in Washington” have a right to conduct this sort of experiment “without warning the public” (17). Where the others seem inclined to play along with the experiment because, as Bradley says, “it’s science” (18), Al offers a valid critique. Roth’s play, then, seems to perceive a value in closed-mindedness that is lost amidst the idealization of “playing along” that characterizes The Open and Closed Mind.

CONCLUSION Roth’s plays put significant pressure on the rhetoric of open-mindedness that was valorized in American culture in the middle of the twentieth century. And Roth would continue with this project in his most famous prose work of his early career, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). There is, for instance, a critique of the mid-century valorization of open-mindedness in the way in which Alexander Portnoy derides the “Jewish narrow-minded minds” (PC 76) of his local community, whilst harboring, in the words of Jacques Berlinerblau (2018), “cringingly illiberal sentiments about women, minorities, and just about everyone else” (99).7 Like that of the specialists of “Buried Again” and the scientists of “The National Pastime,” Roth’s presentation of Portnoy asks us to be skeptical of the discourse of open-mindedness—able to see that an excessive tendency to privilege and foster autonomy and open-mindedness has the potential to bring about hypocrisy, cruelty, and, indeed, narrow-mindedness. This has consequences for perceptions of Roth’s later writing. Certainly it troubles the view, put forward most notoriously by Norman Podheretz, that works of the late 1990s such as American Pastoral marked Roth’s sudden turn away from an enthusiastic adherence to mid-century liberalism. Instead, considering the plays alongside liberalist social scientific theory allows us to see the degree to which later works extend Roth’s sustained interrogation of liberalism. The

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mooted identity shifts of “Buried Again,” for example, might allow us to see an interrogation of Riesmanian liberalism in Coleman Silk’s attempts to “achieve a greater level of personal autonomy by passing as white” (Connolly 2017: 177) in The Human Stain (2000). This is not to say that Roth completely transcended or defied the mid-century liberal discourse of open-mindedness. Here it is useful to return to where we began, with CohenCole’s (2014) description of this discourse as one that privileged “a respect for individuality, tolerance of difference, appreciation of pluralism, and appreciation of freedom of thought” (2). There is nothing in the plays (or Portnoy) to suggest that society should not celebrate individual autonomy, difference, pluralism, or freedom of thought. Indeed, the outlandish and abstract fictitious environments of Roth’s early works demand an audience able to “play along with” what may be peculiar and different. The plays ultimately further highlight the complexity of Roth’s relationship with liberalism. They interrogate the way in which liberal ideals of open-mindedness are valorized and elicited by certain institutions (those in academic robes and white coats); they also, to a large extent, ask us to appreciate the open mind and be open-minded.

NOTES 1. Thanks go to Mike Witcombe for making me aware of Roth’s plays and sharing materials with me. 2. Anthony Hutchinson (2007), for instance, outlines Roth’s defense of a “paleoliberalism” that placed emphasis on “the relationship of the individual to the republic or broader national collective rather than any ethnic subgroup” (167). Similarly, though in more hostile terms, John Carlos Rowe (2011) views Roth’s later work as “neoliberal” in the degree to which it defends individualism, attacks post-1960s identity politics, and attempts to revive the “middle class liberalism” of mid-century writers such as Lionel Trilling (189–90). 3. Patrick Hayes (2014) and Andy Connolly (2017) both produce studies that foreground Roth’s departure from Lionel Trilling’s liberalism. In particular, these studies highlight the degree to which Trilling and his followers endorsed literature’s capacity to cultivate a particular type of mind—one that, in Hayes’s (2014) words, has a “refined breadth and many-sidedness” (12). In the accounts of both Hayes and Connolly, Roth had little interest in this project; he was a writer for whom sociopolitical and ethical concerns were always secondary to the challenges and pleasures of putting twentieth-century American life into fiction. 4. This is particularly evident in the obituaries written for Roth. Eric Homberger (2018), for example, notes that Roth was “in theory an upper West Side liberal,” before concluding that he “declined to fit himself into predictable categories, liberal or otherwise.” Similarly, Laura Tanenbaum (2018) suggests that Roth’s works “could only have been written by someone who came of age in the heyday of postwar liberalism” but also “recognized many of its limits, hypocrisies, and, especially, its ultimate fragility.” Even Norman Podhoretz, who characterized Roth as a long-time adherent to the “old-time liberal religion,” suggested, in a 1998 Commentary article, that works such as American Pastoral “changed sides” to offer a neoconservative critique of received liberal wisdom. 5. Looking to the texts considered in this article, “Buried Again” has not been published or staged. “The National Pastime” was published in Cavalier magazine but has never been staged or produced. 6. In the middle of the 1950s, as a postgraduate student at the University of Chicago, Roth audited a series of social science classes given by Riesman on mass culture. Roth describes these classes in a 2006 radio interview with Christopher Lydon (Radio Open Source 2018).

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7. Some readers have been inclined to conflate the perspectives of Portnoy and Roth. In a 1972 Commentary editorial, for instance, Norman Podhoretz (1972) deemed Roth the “laureate” of an emergent “professional and technical intelligentsia” for whom the majority of Americans (Jew and gentile alike) were “vulgarians, materialists, boors, and bores.” For Podhoretz, “the authorial point of view in the work of Philip Roth claims for itself a singular sensitivity to things of the spirit” and looks down at the rest of America with derision. Portnoy, Roth, and the “intelligentsia” are seen as one in their complacent contempt for the narrow-minded American crowd. The ire of Roth’s novel, though, is clearly as much directed at the hypocrisies of the “open-minded” Portnoy as the narrow-mindedness of his compatriots.

REFERENCES Berlinerblau, Jacques (2018), “Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition,” Philip Roth Studies, 14 (1): 97–9. Cohen-Cole, Jamie (2014), The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Connolly, Andy (2017), Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition, Lanham: Lexington. Hayes, Patrick (2014), Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Homberger, Eric (2018), “Philip Roth Obituary,” The Guardian, May 23. Available online: https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/23/philip-roth-obituary (accessed May 5, 2022). Hutchinson, Anthony (2007), Writing the Republic: Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press. Podhoretz, Norman (1972), “Laureate of the New Class,” Commentary, December. Available online: https://www.commentary.org/articles/norman-podhoretz/laureate-of-the-new-class/ (accessed May 5, 2022). Podhoretz, Norman (1998), “The Adventures of Philip Roth,” Commentary, October. Available online: https://www.commentary.org/articles/norman-podhoretz/the-adventures-of-philip-roth/ (accessed May 5, 2022). Radio Open Source (2018), “Remembering Philip Roth,” Recorded 2006 in Cornwall Bridge Connecticut. Available online: https://radioopensource.org/philip-roth/# (accessed May 5, 2022). Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney (2001), The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, New Haven: Yale University Press. Rokeach, Milton (2015), The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems, Mansfield, CT: Martino University Press. Roth, Philip (1964), “Buried Again,” Box 248, The Philip Roth Papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC. Roth, Philip (1965), “The National Pastime,” Cavalier, May: 16, 54–7. Roth, Philip (1995), Portnoy’s Complaint, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Vintage. Rowe, John Carlos (2011), Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique. Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Tanenbaum, Laura (2018), “Philip Roth (1933–2018),” Jacobin Magazine, May 26. Available online: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/05/philip-roth-obituary-liberalism-world-war-ii (accessed May 5, 2022). Witcombe, Mike (2014), “Goodbye, Goodbye, Columbus: Experimental Identities in Philip Roth’s Early Dramatic Works,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 34 (1): 108–25.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Philip Roth’s Nonfiction: A Personal Unmasking ELÈNA MORTARA

NONFICTION: AN INTRODUCTION Defining nonfiction in Philip Roth’s writing causes a provocative challenge, since part of this author’s narrative—particularly his “Roth Books,” that is, his books having a character named “Philip Roth” as their protagonist—is consciously based on the tension between fiction and nonfiction, that is, on the creative interplay between nonfictional autobiography and narrative invention. The extension of Roth’s nonfiction category is made explicit in a revealing passage by Roth himself, in his preface to his last book, Why Write? (2017). Here, before reflecting on what has spurred his own nonfiction, Roth sums up the whole of his writing career, stating that of his “thirty-one published books, twenty-seven have been works of fiction.” He then adds a sentence introducing nonfiction as a category, explaining that, within his list of four books of nonfiction, he includes not only his two past collections of nonfiction, Reading Myself and Others (1975) and Shop Talk (2001), but also two—and only two—of his five “Roth books”: “Aside from Patrimony (1991) … and The Facts (1988),” he specifies, “what nonfiction I have written has arisen mainly …” (WW xi). While we shall later consider the conclusion of this statement, for our purposes here it is important to note that Roth joins, under the definition of nonfiction, two of his “Roth Books”—two autobiographical narratives—and his two past collections of nonfiction previously, since 2001, listed as “Miscellany,” thus modifying and questioning the authorial categories classifying his oeuvre, in the list titled “Books by Philip Roth” appearing in the frontispiece of all his last books since The Human Stain (2000). In this chapter on Roth’s nonfiction, following Roth’s own example, I shall also put the two autobiographical narratives “aside” and will deal with the rest of his nonfiction writing, a very productive field of texts for gaining an understanding of his work. The relevance of this body of texts is made manifest in the conclusion of Roth’s preface to Why Write? Here, referring to his last essay in the collection, “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction” (2013), ending with a long quotation from his 1995 novel, Sabbath’s Theater, Roth picks up the protagonist’s inner sentence “Here I am,” which seals a moving cemetery scene in that novel, and, by expanding its meaning in personal terms, winds up with this fundamental statement: Here I am, out from behind the disguises and inventions and artifices of the novel. Here I am, stripped of the sleight of hand and denuded of all those masks that have conferred such imaginative freedom as I have been able to muster as a writer of fiction. (WW xiii)

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What one finds concisely condensed in this clarifying statement is the writer’s poetics, a strenuous defense of the “imaginative freedom” conferred on him as a writer of fiction by what he calls his disguises and inventions, and all his masks. Within this vision, the writer’s nonfiction becomes his unmasking, the offering of his real self to the reader’s view—a fascinating opportunity for all of us.

THREE BOOKS OF COLLECTED NONFICTION: FROM READING MYSELF AND OTHERS TO WHY WRITE? If Roth’s collected nonfiction is a selected body of texts where the writer takes off his masks, it will be interesting to explore this part of his literary production and see what one can find there, and what impulses or occasions have prompted these public “exhibitions” of oneself and one’s thoughts. There is no doubt, considering the coherently converging titles of his three collections of nonfiction—Reading Myself and Others, Shop Talk, and Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013—that Roth’s mental “obsession,” the focus of his essential nonfiction, has been on writing, including the reading of one’s texts and those of others, and musings on the reasons for writing: an issue well summarized by the interrogative title of his final collection. As a matter of fact, the theme of “writing about writing” (Bloom 2021) has an important role in Roth’s fiction as well, if we consider the number of novels, from My Life as a Man (1974) to the cycle of “Zuckerman Books,” where the subject is imaginatively thematized, with a writer as their protagonist. It is in Roth’s nonfiction that he faces this question directly. In the “Author’s Note” of his first collection of nonfiction, Reading Myself and Others, Roth says: “Together these pieces reveal to me a continuing preoccupation with the relationship between the written and the unwritten world” (RMO 1975: xi). This important declaration―which has lately inspired several critical assessments (see Stowe 2004, Hughes 2005, and Edholm 2012)—proves that it was by collecting his own texts that Roth came to a “revelation” about himself as a writer: the realization that his primary concern was “the relationship between the written and the unwritten world.” These are “the worlds,” he adds in that note, “that I feel myself shuttling between every day” (RMO 1975: xi). The problem is how to get “fresh information” and carry the “unwritten” world (an expression he prefers to the more commonly used “reality” or “life”) into the “written” world. Writing is at the center. And the writer is a sort of “courier” (an image Roth takes from Kafka), carrying messages from the former, the “unwritten world,” to the latter, “Back and forth, back and forth” (RMO 1975: xi–xii).1 Roth’s occasions for his nonfiction are listed in that first statement from Why Write? that we quoted only partially and promised to complete later, as we shall do now. “Aside from Patrimony (1991) …, and The Facts (1988) … what nonfiction I have written,” says Roth, “has arisen mainly from a provocation―responding to the charges of anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred―or to answer a request for an interview by a serious periodical or to acknowledge my acceptance of an award or to mark a milestone birthday or to mourn the death of a friend” (WW xi). This is how the older writer at the very end of his career summarizes his occasions for writing nonfiction, in a complete list underlined by the repetition of “or … or.” But at the start of his career it was the first motivation, “a provocation—responding to the charges,” that prevailed. Controversies, initially mostly from within the Jewish world, accompanied Roth’s literary successes from the very beginning and made him a public figure in the literary world, one who felt he needed to take a stand and respond publicly to what he felt was a

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provocation. This is how he reflects upon this matter in his “Author’s Note,” opening Reading Myself and Others in its original edition of 1975: Because recognition—and with it, opposition—came to me almost immediately, I seem (from the evidence here) to have felt called upon both to assert a literary position and to defend my moral flank the instant after I had managed to take my first steps; of late I have tried to gain some perspective on what I’ve been reading and writing since. (RMO 1975: xi)2 The way in which Reading Myself and Others is internally organized confirms this premise. After the author’s note, the book is divided into two parts. Part “One” in the first edition collects ten texts, mostly interviews devoted to specific novels of his, which were written from 1969 (when Portnoy’s Complaint was published) to 1974. At the start of each essay, there is a note underneath specifying where the text was originally published. If the text was unpublished, the date when it was written is specified. As we learn from the initial author’s note, all “the interviews reached their final form in writing, though some began in conversational exchanges that roughly laid out the terrain and suggested the tone and focus of what appeared in print” (RMO 1975: xii). The whole sequence of texts is not chronological. Both the interview on “Writing and the Powers That Be” conducted by the Italian critic Walter Mauro, placed at the beginning, and the last one of part “One” conducted by Joyce Carol Oates, titled “After Eight Books,” are dated 1974 and deal with the whole of the writer’s literary production up to 1974, thus creating a general frame for the other texts dealing with individual novels. Three of these texts are on Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), his greatest success, which also caused him the greatest controversy, two are on the political satire Our Gang (1971), one is on The Breast (1972), one is on The Great American Novel (1973), and one is on My Life as a Man. The interviewers, beside Walter Mauro and Joyce Carol Oates, are George Plimpton, Roth’s friend Alan Lelchuk with two interviews, and Martha Saxton. The conversational exchange seems quite congenial to Roth, who prefers to discuss these works in conversation with another novelist or critic. In one interview, the “other” he answers to is … himself! Playing with oneself and creating doubles, these typical features of Roth’s fiction are therefore sometimes present in his nonfiction too. Besides, even when the texts don’t take the form of an interview, one can feel the presence of an “other,” mostly antagonist voice—a single critic or a collectivity of readers—to which Roth responds. In the new expanded edition of Reading Myself and Others published by Penguin Books, New York, in 1985, this first section of the book was enriched with three more interviews, conducted for three important foreign periodicals, Le Nouvel Observateur (1981), The London Sunday Times (1984), and The Paris Review (1984), respectively, by Alain Finkielkraut, Ian Hamilton, and Hermione Lee; and a further interview on Zuckerman (originally published by Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson, 1985) was added in the 2001 Vintage edition of the collection. The increase of foreign interviews and the international relevance of the publishing houses (the first edition had been published in New York by the more Jewishsounding Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) certify the growing international success of Roth’s fiction, particularly since the 1980s, after the beginning of his “Zuckerman books” series. All the interviews, both the original ones and the new ones, offer a wealth of comments by Roth on his own fiction. In this first part, the main subject is, as he admits, “myself—as reader

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and read—” (RMO 1975: xii): that is, Roth presents himself as a reader of his own work responding to the way his work is read. While in part “One” of Reading Myself and Others one finds Roth as a reader of himself, in part “Two” of his collection Roth becomes the reader of “others” as well, expanding his exploration on a larger cultural landscape. The texts of this second part, mainly essays and articles prompted by “an invitation—to give a talk, to oppose an adversary, to introduce a writer, to mark an event” (RMO 1975: xii), were written between 1960 and 1974, without any addition made in the editions following the original one. The essays are organized partially chronologically and partially thematically. One starts from “Writing American Fiction,” the written version of a speech delivered in 1960 at Stanford University in a symposium on “Writing in America Today,” and one ends with a 1973 piece on Kafka, one of Roth’s favorite texts. This section is particularly interesting because it captures the voice of the young artist reflecting on the American writing predicament and judging the literary scene of his time. It is the voice of a young ambitious novelist, who, after his first rather successful collection of stories published in 1959, looks at the contemporary literary scene with a defiant eye, criticizing his older peers, mentioned name by name individually, for “the writer’s loss of the community—of what is outside himself—as subject” (RMO 1975: 131) and for their inability to really describe the American reality. Roth also criticizes severely the “New Jewish Stereotypes” emerging in a country in which, he says, “I find that I am suddenly living,” where “the Jew has come to be—or is allowed for now to think he is—a cultural hero” (RMO 1975: 137), and in a series of essays he reflects about the challenge of “writing about Jews” (RMO 1975: 149), with reference not only to his own work and the reactions it has provoked, but also to the way this issue has been faced by two other most famous American Jewish fiction writers of the time, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, addressed in depth in his later essay “Imagining Jews,” of 1974. The contemporary literary figure Roth admired the most at that time was Saul Bellow, to whom he dedicated the collection, with the following strong initial inscription (here transcribed in the format of the book’s first edition): To Saul Bellow, the “other” I have read from the beginning with the deepest pleasure and admiration Roth’s admiration for Bellow is confirmed in such passages as the one where Roth openly describes him as “by now the grand old man of American-Jewish writers, and to my mind the country’s most accomplished working novelist” (RMO 1975: 224), or where he proclaims this novelist’s historical role for the following Jewish writers (including himself) in such meaningful terms: 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. (RMO 1975: 229–30)

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This is an important recognition from “Imagining Jews.” It is particularly important if we consider that one year earlier, in the 1973 interview with himself “On The Great American Novel,” Roth admitted his own belonging to this new category of writers, “who have to some degree reconciled what Rahv described as this ‘disunity of the American creative mind’” (RMO 1975: 83). According to Roth, these writers of postwar America were “a tribe of redskins like myself, from the semiliterate and semiassimilated reaches of urban Jewish society,” who had gone “off to universities and infiltrated the departments of English, till then almost exclusively the domain of the palefaces”; in his opinion, the “cultural exchanges” encouraged by “the weakening of social and class constraints accelerated by World War II” had produced a number of writers who, while bringing about a “reconciliation” of the American creative mind, shared “a feeling of being fundamentally ill at ease in, and at odds with, both worlds” (“although, one hopes, ill at ease with style,” added Roth with his signature humor) (RMO 1975: 83). “In short,” Roth concluded, this is what they had become: “neither the redskin one was in the days of innocence, nor the paleface one could never be in a million (or, to be precise, 5,733) years” (where the high figure in brackets refers to the Jewish counting of time), “but rather, at least in my own case, what I would describe as a ‘redface’” (RMO 1975: 83). This is how, moving from the description of a generation of postwar writers, Roth came to a definition of himself as an American hybrid figure, in a creative reformulation of Rahv’s categories. And the leader of this literary revolution had been Saul Bellow. Yet, in the same essay on “Imagining Jews” where Roth acknowledges the historical role of his older peer, he shows his intellectual and artistic independence by subtly criticizing even Bellow, this literary “Columbus” opening new routes within the American cultural scene and leading others in the exploration of new worlds, for the kind of Jewish heroes he has imagined. In fact, while expressing his admiration for Bellow, Roth stresses in critical terms “the characteristic connection made in his work (and, in Bernard Malamud’s work as well) between the Jew and conscience” and their associating “the sympathetic Jewish hero with ethical Jewhood” (RMO 1975: 229), an abstract entity for Roth, devoid of connection with his characters’ full reality: “almost invariably his heroes,” he remarks, speaking about Bellow’s fiction, “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” (RMO 1975: 224). Here, the author of Portnoy’s Complaint marks his difference, underlining the novelty introduced by his own fiction in the way Jewish writers could “imagine” their heroes. Besides the reading of his own books and others’—a structure or guiding principle that forms the bulk of Roth’s first collection of essays—the other most important themes one finds there, in shorter essays, are the rather nostalgic autobiographical recollections (such as in “The Newark Public Library” and “My Baseball Years”) and the political articles, commenting sarcastically on contemporary events of foreign policy and presidential decisions. One should finally remark that, as a reader of “others,” Roth appears not only interested in the most famous authors of his time, but also ready to appreciate younger writers, whom he feels as akin and whose knowledge he wants to promote. Such is the case of at least two of the three texts collected under the title “Imagining the Erotic: Three Introductions,” where, besides his introduction to Milan Kundera’s collection of stories Laughable Loves (1969, originally published in English in 1974), there is his introduction to the French edition of Fredrica Wagman’s novel Playing House (1973), and his contribution to a 1972 Esquire colloquium entitled “Which Writer under Thirty-Five Has Your Attention and What Has He Done to Get It,” where he praises Alan Lelchuk’s first novel American Mischief, which he had

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read in manuscript and would come out only one year later. Roth particularly appreciates Lelchuk, a great friend of his at that time, for what he defines as “the robust delight that the contemplation of confusion arouses in him,” which constitutes the “fresh and intriguing aspect of Lelchuk’s book,” and even compares Lelchuk to Hawthorne for his eloquent description in American Mischief “of the consequences of carnal passion in Massachusetts” (RMO 1975: 195–6), though he later somehow criticizes him for not achieving the heights of … Dostoevsky—an ambitious comparison—in the second, more somber part of his novel. The friendship and deep conversation with fellow writers, already evident as a theme in Reading Myself and Others, are the substances of Roth’s Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, his second collection of nonfiction. The book is dedicated to C. H. Huvelle, a friend from Litchfield County, Connecticut (Roth’s summer retreat), and his past physician (Bailey 2021: 456, 627), who died just one year before this publication. On the cover of the hardcover first edition one can see aligned, one next to the other, the photographed faces of the ten co-protagonists of these literary conversations: Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Ivan Klíma, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Milan Kundera, Edna O’Brien, Mary McCarthy, Bernard Malamud, Philip Guston, and Saul Bellow. The first nine pieces date back to the decade between 1980 and 1990; only the last one, on Bellow, was written in the year 2000. The first six texts are all titled “Conversation,” followed by the city where the conversation took place (“in Turin,” “in Jerusalem,” “in Prague,” “in New York,” twice “in London”), and then by the name of the “other” writer, introduced by “with” (“with Primo Levi,” “with Aharon Appelfeld,” and so on). Each of these texts takes the form of a long interview, preceded by an introduction by Roth, detailing the circumstances of the encounter and introducing the writer he interviewed. The subject of these interviews is always the work of the other writer, never Roth’s work. Only in one case, in the encounter with Singer, the conversation is about a third writer, the Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and this is clearly specified in the title. Once again Roth proves to be a great reader of other writers’ fiction, deeply interested in their writing experiences and generous in making their work known. All the writers selected as subjects of these conversations are originally Europeans who were sometimes forced to emigrate to foreign countries, such as Appelfeld, who moved from Bukovina to Israel, and Kundera, from Czechoslovakia to France and then the United States. In most cases, with the exception of the Irish novelist O’Brien, their lives were crossed by great collective tragedies—mainly, the Shoah against the Jews (for Levi, Appelfeld, Singer, and Schulz), and Soviet-backed totalitarian power in Eastern European countries (for Klíma and Kundera). The writer’s predicament in situations in which one is confronted with dramatic historical and political events seems to provoke Roth’s interest, as he seeks to explore what a fiction writer can make out of adversity. Out of the ten texts collected in Shop Talk, only two deal with Roth’s fiction, and even these take the form of a dialogue with another artist. In “An Exchange with Mary McCarthy” (1987), Roth simply publishes his epistolary exchange with this friend-writer concerning his recent novel The Counterlife (1986), which McCarthy had criticized politely, in a private letter, for the way Roth portrays the Christian world. Roth declares he is “delighted” (ShT 115) by her candidness and gives his counterarguments in his epistolary answer. The other essay partially Roth-centered, “Pictures of Guston,” is the only one not dealing with a writer, but with a visual artist, Philip Guston, who illustrated eight scenes from Roth’s novel The Breast for his own, and Roth’s, private enjoyment. As a matter of fact, the essay, which reproduces three of these drawings (that Roth enjoyed having on the walls at the entrance of his New York apartment), is a moving eulogy for his friend who died in 1980.

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Starting from the exchange with McCarthy, all the four final texts of Shop Talk, including the one on Guston, have American friends as co-protagonists. The other two texts in this last part of the book deal with “two of his seniors” (Bernstein 2001) among the Jewish American writers of the time, Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, offering in “Pictures of Malamud” (1986) a touching portrait of the writer as a man, published shortly after his death (a recollection that caused much pain to Malamud’s family for the description of the man’s frailty and of his weakness as a writer, at the end of his life), and offering in the last essay of the book, simply titled “Saul Bellow” (2000), a detailed critical reappraisal of all his works up to Humboldt’s Gift (1975). While Roth’s first collection of nonfiction was partially self-focused and written in defense of his own work, this second collection, written mainly in the 1980s, shows a writer deeply interested in the works of other writers, one who had become an active member of a “global literary network” (O’Brien 2021: 28), engaged in a lively debate with his colleagues. In his first collection, Roth is the writer interviewed about his own writing. Here, Roth interviews his colleagues about their work. His international network of literary friendships had developed since 1972, when he had begun traveling once a year to communist Prague, first as a passionate reader of Kafka, and then to meet with some of the leading dissident Czech writers he had befriended there—writers he promoted by collaborating with Penguin as general editor on a series called “Writers from the Other Europe.” Because of these generous and risky activities, in 1977 he was refused a visa to return to Czechoslovakia. Yet, since that year, his living half of the year in London with his then partner Claire Bloom made it easier for him to meet with other non-American writers, increasing his network of literary contacts, so necessary for him as a writer and an intellectual—as a man who felt the need, as he said in various forms, to vividly “transform himself out of himself” (RMO 1985: 170), coming out of that isolation which was so necessary to him for writing.3 The interviews collected in Shop Talk are the selected and most visible written records of the conversations developed in that series of fruitful encounters. They show us the intellectual background of thoughts, out of which the series of Roth’s novels on the experience of writing, the “Zuckerman Books,” developed. They also indicate the more political and historically minded direction that Roth’s fiction would take in the 1990s, when his creative mind turned again to the United States, his own beloved and yet criticized country, and, digging into some crucial moments of its contemporary history, birthed his momentous “American Trilogy.”

WHY WRITE? Significantly, Roth’s last published book is a work of nonfiction, published as the tenth and last volume in the Library of America series, the only one with a new title of its own because its contents had not been published in book form before. This striking fact should emphasize the relevance of this literary genre for the writer, despite Roth’s absolute defense of fiction as an instrument of investigation and creative liberty. In fact, among his peers, no one published a first collection of essays as early in their careers as Roth, and no one else concluded their literary production with such a definitive work of nonfiction. It is also remarkable that in the last years of his life, after his decision to retire from writing fiction in 2010 (made public by him only two years later), in 2011 Roth confessed that he had stopped reading fiction, preferring to read history and biography, that is, nonfiction. I can personally confirm that the

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small table next to his armchair was crowded with a pile of volumes of this kind when I met with him for an interview in late December of 2017 (Mortara 2019). Allow me to confess now, on a personal note, the emotion I feel in holding Roth’s last collection of essays in my hands and writing about it, for this is the book that Roth insisted on giving to me as a gift with a personal inscription when I visited him in New York, although I told him I already had a copy of that volume. In our conversation, we also talked about this work, so the echo of his words and of his voice and the feeling of having been offered by him a task of transmission to be performed are on my mind while writing. Roth’s last publication, with its evocative interrogative title focused on Roth’s lifelong concern, the why of writing, is divided into three parts, preceded by a preface. In the first part, one finds a selection of texts from Reading Myself and Others: only thirteen (some of them slightly revised) of the original twenty-five texts are there. In the second part, there is the whole second collection of his, Shop Talk: a sign of respect for his professional peers and of the importance given by him to those literary conversations (the section significantly omits the dedication to Bellow and retitles the essay on him as “Rereading Saul Bellow”; the interview with Primo Levi, commented at length in the preface, remains the first in the section). The third part, titled “Explanations,” is totally new, containing thirteen texts on various themes, previously published between 1992 and 2014 and never collected before. It begins with “Juice or Gravy?” (1994), a piece that with its interrogative title and its content, a mixture of autobiography and fiction on his early adult life and on his beginnings as a writer, seems to foresee and mock the title of the whole volume. Reading onward, one finds more personal recollections as a young man and as a writer (such as in “Yiddish/English,” “Eric Duncan,” “Czech Education”), final comments and counter-information on his own fiction, mixed with more recollections (as in “Patrimony,” “My Uchronia,” “Forty-Five Years On,” “Interview on The Ghost Writer,” “Tyranny Is Better Organized Than Freedom,” “The Primacy of Ludus,” and “Errata,” an open letter to Wikipedia), an interview to defend himself against the new charge of misogyny (“Interview with Svenska Dagbladet”), and moving reflections on his own Americanness, as a grandchild of immigrants from old Europe (in “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names”). Despite his fictional stress on the irrational forces mostly overwhelming human plans and desires, Roth’s organization of Why Write? shows his strong need for rational order, an order containing a variety of directions within.4 Let us consider the sequence of the collected texts, which does not simply follow a chronological order, as one can see from the choice of the texts that open and close the whole collection. In his selection from Reading Myself and Others, Roth reorganized the sequence of the texts, placing his favorite Kafka piece, “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” no longer at the end of the volume (as in Reading), but as the first in the whole new book. Why this? The piece starts as a biography of Kafka, written for his university students, which then, in its second part, develops into an imaginary version of Kafka’s later life as a post-Shoah survivor imagined as young Roth’s melancholy Hebrew teacher in his American Hebrew school. In his preface, Roth stresses the “hybrid” nature of this text, which he defines as a “hybrid essay-story.” He also explains that this was his first attempt at writing an alternate-history, “imagining history as it not actually occurred” (WW xi), an approach that he would later expand in his “Uchronia” novels, The Ghost Writer (1979) and The Plot against America (2004). In both remarks, the author’s stress is on the combination of fiction and nonfiction—a fundamental driving force for the whole of Roth’s writing.

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When I mentioned to Roth the hybrid nature of this first text in the context of its important placement in the book—a placement emphasizing its value as the nonfiction work of a fiction writer—he consented, adding: “Yes, and the book ends in that way too. The last piece ends with that long piece from Sabbath’s Theater” (Mortara 2019: 6). This was intentionally the book’s structure: having a hybrid text at both ends of his collection. Such was the consciously constructed frame of his last book. The essay Roth was referring to in our conversation is “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction” (2013), the last piece of the collection, an essay commented upon at length in the author’s preface. This complex essay, a talk delivered on a special occasion as we shall see, starts with a long recollecting detour in Roth’s early life memories, justified by the fact that—as he explains in his own “defense”—his vocation as a fiction writer depended on remembering apparently mundane details of reality, what he also defines as “a passion for local specificity” and “a profound aversion to generalities,” which is in his view “fiction’s lifeblood”: “It is from a scrupulous fidelity to the blizzard of specific data that is a personal life, it is from the force of its uncompromising attentiveness, from its physicalness, that the realistic novel, the insatiable realistic novel with its multitude of realities, derives its ruthless intimacy. And its mission: to portray humanity in its particularity” (WW 393). So, this is the fundamental why of writing, a writer’s “verbal task” (393): to portray reality in its peculiarity, in its infinite variety, and, one could add, in its “impurity,” another keyword of Roth’s “storyworld” (Masiero 2011); and this is also the how of writing realistic fiction, by way of adhesion to reality and of “impersonation”— again a keyword of his—which is also what he partially performs in the last part of this essay. Roth ends his essay with a long extract from Sabbath’s Theater. The pages Roth quotes appear toward the end of this novel, when, as he explains in his Why Write? preface, the old puppeteer protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, “as isolated and bereft as he has ever been, visits the seashore graveyard where all of his beloved family members are buried.” “This cemetery scene,” concludes Roth in the preface, “winds up with Sabbath placing a pebble atop each of their gravestones and, after having been flooded with the tenderest memories of them all, saying to his dead, quite simply, ‘Here I am.’” It is at this point in his preface that Roth comes back to his personal predicament, and, tearing off his character’s mask, abruptly adds in a new paragraph: “I say the same now” (WW xiii), immediately afterward describing his own present condition, and the disclosing role of his nonfiction, in that enlightening passage we quoted before, with its double “Here I am” leitmotif.5 Toward the end of his life, like Prospero at the end of The Tempest (1611), the writer-as-creator eventually divests himself of his screens, and, “death-haunted” (WW 396) like Sabbath, presents himself to his readers as a man, with his own voice and naked face. “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction” chronologically is not the last published text in this third section, for there are two other pieces included, two interviews published in 2014. Yet what is striking is that, even in the title of the volume, the final year Roth wanted to have mentioned in its subtitle is the year of that dense essay, 2013. In his preface to Why Write? Roth recollects his eightieth birthday party at the Newark Museum, an event shared with friends, colleagues, peers, and members of the Philip Roth Society, commenting: “I have never enjoyed a birthday more” (WW xiii). That last piece is the talk he gave there on March 19, 2013, at this eightieth birthday celebration, “his de facto retirement party” (O’Brien 2021: 33). And it is with that hybrid, partially “unmasking” address, mixing memory and fiction in nonfiction, delivered on an occasion of joy and public recognition, that in his final book he wished to offer his last farewell.

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NOTES 1. The publication date is added to differentiate between the two different editions of Reading Myself and Others used in this chapter. 2. In the book’s second edition of 1985, the sentence quoted above was slightly revised: the phrase “of late I have tried” became “lately I tried” (RMO 1985: ix), reflecting the new temporal perspective. 3. On the importance of reading for Roth (“to be freed from my own suffocatingly narrow perspective on life”) and the way this is also linked to his writing, see RMO (1985: 120, 170). About the role of literary contacts for him, see Roth’s interview with Joyce Carol Oates, originally of 1974: “Contact with writers I admire or toward whom I feel a kinship is precisely my way out of isolation and furnishes me with whatever sense of community I have” (92). On the enormous extension of Roth’s literary contacts, see O’Brien (2021). 4. The same need for order is expressed in the way Roth’s works started being classified in groups by him, under the title “Books by Philip Roth,” in the frontispiece of his books, since the time this order-in-variety became clear to him in the year 2000. 5. According to James D. Bloom (2021: 91), Roth’s “Here I am” phrase is inspired by the famous biblical “Here I am” (Hebrew “Hineni”) of Exodus 3.4, uttered by Moses in response to God’s call.

REFERENCES Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, Norton: New York. Bernstein, Richard (2001), “Books of The Times: Thinking Man’s Talk with Thinkers,” New York Times, September 26, Section E: 8. Bloom, James D. (2018), “Philip Roth: Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013,” Book Review, Philip Roth Studies, 14 (2): 90–6. Bloom, James D. (2021), “Writing about Writing,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 48–58, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edholm, Roger (2012), The Written and the Unwritten World of Philip Roth: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Borderline Aesthetics in the Roth Books, Örebro: Örebro University. Hughes, Darren (2005), “The ‘Written World’ of Philip Roth’s Nonfiction,” in Derek Parker Royal (ed.), Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, 255–69, Westport: Praeger. Masiero, Pia (2011), Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld, Amherst: Cambria Press. Milbauer, Asher Z. and Donald G. Watson (1985), “An Interview with Philip Roth,” in Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson (eds.), Reading Philip Roth, 1–16, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mortara, Elèna (2019), “Philip Roth, December 2017: A Meeting and an Interview,” Philip Roth Studies, 15 (1): 3–26. O’Brien, Dan A. (2021), “Literary Conversations,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 27–36, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oates, Joyce Carol (1992), “A Conversation with Roth,” in George J. Searles (ed.), Conversations with Philip Roth, 89–99, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Roth, Philip (1975), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1985), Reading Myself and Others, exp. edn, New York: Penguin. Roth, Philip (2001a), Reading Myself and Others, new and exp. edn, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2001b), Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2017), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013, New York: Library of America. Stow, Simon (2004), “Written and Unwritten America: Roth on Reading, Politics, and Theory,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 23: 77–87.

CHAPTER SIX

“By Now What You Are Is a Walking Text”: Philip Roth’s Editorial Contexts, Roles, and Imagination JACK KNOWLES

INTRODUCTION When Adam Gopnik (2017) commemorated the publication of Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013 (2017), the final volume of Philip Roth’s work produced by the prestigious Library of America, he took the opportunity to reflect on the completed arc of Roth’s career. The theme that Gopnik brings into focus is unsurprising: “Philip Roth, Patriot” examines Roth’s frequent ruminations on the contradictions inherent in an American identity. An explicit commitment in the novelist’s valedictory late essays, an evident fictional focus of the major novels of the 1990s, a defining tension always palpable in the background of the early short stories—the American prerogative, Gopnik persuasively shows, has always powered Roth’s work. Many of the more recent scholarly studies of Roth concur, placing the nation and its discontents at the center of the completed oeuvre.1 But taking the demands of Roth’s collected nonfiction seriously reveals other productive fault lines, some frequently overlooked. Key amongst these is the enveloping significance of Roth’s editorial imagination, and in some sense this imperative is the one more explicitly evoked in that blunt, inquisitive title: Why Write? To look again at Roth’s nonfictional evolutions in tandem with his fictional innovations is to recognize the extent to which Roth has always explored the inherent drama of the editorial situation. As Gopnik points out, Roth produced a number of indelible essays in the early decades of his writing life. Heavily anthologized classics such as “Writing American Fiction” (1960) left their mark on the literary culture; commentators and academics continue to invoke the positions Roth staked out at the dawn of his career. And while Roth became increasingly reluctant to intervene directly in debates, leaving behind the defensive clarifications of texts such as “Imagining Jews” (1974)— positions articulated in response to conservative anxieties over the social responsibility of the Jewish writer in the postwar world—he never abandoned the observational instincts that made him such a compelling, urgent essayist. In fact, Roth folded these features of his writing into his books. “The editorialist in Roth,” Gopnik (2017) aptly notes, is part of his approach

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“even when he’s writing straight fiction.” Look again at the novels, and you see that “the succession of events is presented more as rumination and reverie—as irony overlaid on incident” (Gopnik 2017). Gopnik follows this insight by exploring those moments in Roth’s work that read as opinionated set-pieces, passages that could easily be published as stand-alone texts. The eulogy for George Plimpton laced into Nathan Zuckerman’s melancholy reflections in Exit Ghost (2007) is a paradigmatic example. Roth’s editorial patterns of thought, however, extend far beyond these moments of isolated commentary. Many of Roth’s novelistic modes are actually shaped by similar instincts. In book after book, the engaged mind goes back through the known information, reworking the material in the contemplative search for meaning. The dynamic force of the fiction is frequently realized less in the momentum of the plot than in the impassioned search for interpretive clarity. In My Life as a Man (1974), this drive takes on the explicit form of a continual effort to redraft the story. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), in which Zuckerman critiques his creator’s draft, relies on a similar conceit. But the same impulse is apparent across most of Roth’s novels. Points of confusion are located as part of the compositional strategy, and mental pressure is then applied to what seems opaque. That Roth found increasingly ambitious structures to stage his dramas of critical reflection, culminating in the elaborate framing narratives that intensify the action in the American Trilogy, suggests the breadth of the significance. The very act of editing was an essential part of Roth’s art. This chapter explores the importance of Roth’s numerous editorial interactions, contexts, and roles. It takes the measure of these concerns not only by considering these specific dynamics, but also by looking carefully at the various imprints inside the fiction itself. The following readings explain that the irrepressible wunderkind of Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories (1959) was to a great extent shaped by the editors remaking American literary culture in the postwar years. Roth’s interest in exploring tensions between the individual and the community, a crucial theme across much of his writing life, was not simply the product of his own strident individualism. As recent biographically inflected research has shown, Roth’s early encounters with savvy editors helped to chart this particular course. And Roth, too, edited other writers into categories of enduring political and aesthetic consequence. This chapter considers the importance of Roth’s role as General Editor of the Penguin series “Writers from the Other Europe”—a project that Roth conceived, proposed, and worked on throughout the span of his middle years, from 1974 to 1989. During this time, Roth was responsible for bringing a group of Eastern and Central European writers to the attention of an anglophone readership, assisting in the circulation of the hitherto unrecognized talents of writers as various as Bruno Schulz, Milan Kundera, and Tadeusz Borowski. The story that “Writers from the Other Europe” elected to tell, disrupting received certitudes in the East and the West, opened a range of new spaces of transnational interaction in American letters. Roth’s engagement with the project also decisively shaped subsequent directions in his own work. To identify the editorial situation as a central aspect of Roth’s fictional world is to see the pervasive ways in which it contours the completed oeuvre. It also frames the current controversies surrounding Roth’s reputation. Insofar as the publication, reception, and rapid withdrawal of Blake Bailey’s authorized Philip Roth: The Biography (2021) invite further scrutiny of Roth’s personal treatment of women, the conversation is necessary and ongoing. But untangling Roth’s wider efforts to exert editorial control over his own story has also assumed greater significance in light of the book’s spectacular implosion. The academy is

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poised not only to debate Roth’s literary legacy but also to contest debilitating restrictions on access to important material.2 Further biographical and archival research into Roth’s writing life will have to consider and to engage with these very real struggles. This chapter shows how Roth’s efforts to curate the material of his unwritten life were of a piece with the editorial intensity of his fictional imagination. Roth’s various explorations of the powers of textual scrutiny ruminate on the imperfect representational purchase of literature: the predatory violence, the flattering silences, the distorting optics. Roth’s work also sees through attempts to arrest any single portrait. It is the dynamic collision contained in the editorial situation, the clash and the ensuing contradiction, his novels routinely insist, which move us tentatively toward clarity. And so, the argument goes on.

LEARNING FROM EDITORS Philip Roth’s first years as a writer were decisively shaped by the various editors he encountered. It is striking that, looking back, Roth would come to view his burgeoning literary interests in the 1950s in terms that emphasize the significance of rigorous editorial standards. This was an era of critical exactitude and precision in which the New Criticism held considerable sway across English departments in the United States, a powerful movement that Roth satirizes in his debut novel Letting Go (1962). Isolating the literary text and venerating the autonomy of the aesthetic were not approaches he seems ever to have held much sympathy for. But the necessity of close, attentive reading was a demand that no doubt energized Roth’s critical intelligence from the very beginning. Precision with words truly mattered. Reflecting on his time as an undergraduate at Bucknell University, from which he graduated in 1954, Roth emphasizes the significance of Mildred Martin, his favorite English professor. In his recent biography of the author, Ira Nadel (2021) describes Martin’s senior honors seminar as “for Roth one of the most stimulating experiences of his university life” (74). It was less the content of these sessions, held in Martin’s home late in the afternoons, that captivated Roth, though, than it was Martin’s pedagogical process—a style of teaching that emphasized the importance of editorial critique. Nadel (2021) quotes from a 1981 commemorative booklet published for Martin, in which Roth writes, “‘In that class, the unexamined line wasn’t worth uttering. We were merciless with one another about “unsubstantiated” argument and “subjective” criticism.’ She was the first of his ‘scrupulous editors—the sternest, the most relentless, the best’” (74). Roth’s enthusiasm for such sharp editorial intervention, a predilection that helped fuel a powerful investment in perspectival antagonism, is neatly reflected in one of his earliest published stories, a piece featured in Et Cetera, the student magazine that Roth helped to found and to edit during his time at Bucknell. “The Box of Truths” (1952) is certainly an apprentice effort. However, the story anticipates subsequent directions in Roth’s work in some curious and significant ways. “The Box of Truths” concerns an aspiring young writer’s bristling anger when his story is rejected by a prominent literary magazine. The narrative turns on an epiphanic insight that arrives when the impatient editor doubles down on the magazine’s rejection. The hopeful young author has no subject, he explains, nothing at the center of his art: “you don’t have anything to write about. It’s as easy as that. You haven’t lived” (Roth 1952: 11). Later in a bar, drowning his sorrows, the protagonist feels the full sting: “Why, with some friends he could talk into the lazy hours of the morning of Gatsby, and Eugene Gant, and Carrie, and, sometimes, Lear … what motivated them to do

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this … and … that … But. Had he ever considered so searchingly, so sympathetically, real people? Had he?” (Roth 1952: 12). Crucially, “The Box of Truths” exploits the potential of this kind of intervention in a very particular way. The unexamined object that the editor’s scrupulous eye identifies, to evoke the language of Roth’s influential undergraduate mentor, is life. An external commentary directs the aspiring writer toward the unwritten world; the pathway toward powerful literature points unmistakably toward people. In this early story, Roth makes relatively little of the dynamic. But the underlying logic of this kind of dramatized editorial intervention recurs in many of Roth’s most accomplished later works: Nathan Zuckerman’s quarrels with his father over his story “Higher Education” in The Ghost Writer (1979); the Zuckerman brothers’ competing interpretations of their differing lives in The Counterlife (1986); the formal pyrotechnics ascribed to the secrecy demanded by the Mossad in Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993). It is in the friction between writers and their unforgiving editors, in Roth’s work, that fiction often begins to find its purchase on experience. As his career began in earnest, Roth received especially significant advice from his own editor at his first publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Roth’s debut Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories won the National Book Award. The terms of its success defined Roth’s initial reception and, in fact, much of the rest of his career. Famously, the title novella and the short stories collected alongside it offer a satiric representation of Jewish life in America, mining the ironies and tensions of the story of postwar assimilation. This material, and the buoyant energy of the prose that accompanied it, not only announced Roth as a fresh, vibrant writer, but also introduced him as an ethnically marked voice. In many ways it defined his theme. As Victoria Aarons (2007) writes, “all the stories in Goodbye, Columbus pose … questions of Jewish identity. They collectively reveal a deeply felt ambivalence toward what it means to be Jewish in post-World War II America” (11). This was something undeniably new. But it was George Starbuck, an aspiring poet whom Roth first encountered at the University of Chicago, who truly shaped this focus. While working at Houghton Mifflin, Starbuck collaborated with Roth to bring out his debut collection of stories. Starbuck recognized the likely responsiveness of the market to a unifying subject. Accordingly, he selected Roth’s early stories that deal directly with Jewish characters and themes; several other pieces Roth published in and around this period Starbuck deliberately chose not to include.3 In a very real sense, Roth was consciously edited into a category that would come to define his literary reception: Jewish-American writer. And it was an editorial decision that proved doubly significant. Starbuck’s savvy choice heralded a range of opportunities—he was not alone in providing a venue and encouragement for Roth’s lively new voice.4 However, Starbuck also gifted Roth something that became equally crucial for the internal energy of his fiction—a category to struggle against. Indeed, in some of his earliest published essays in the 1960s, Roth explicitly rejects the calls for ethnic allegiance implied in the imposition of labels. The writer must remain unfettered. Later in his career, he emphasized his position as an American author, drawing attention to the indivisibility of his claim to the national context. In his valedictory essay “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names,” Roth explains, “I have never conceived of myself for the length of a single sentence as an American Jewish or Jewish American writer” (WW 335). But the category he was initially fastened to from the outset actually gave Roth an important boundary to invoke and to contest—the argument of “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names” itself relies on raising the prospect of the very description the author goes on to reject. In Roth’s fiction, the struggle against the demands of the group is often similarly

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filtered through the scrutiny of labels. From Nathan’s family quarrels throughout Zuckerman Bound (1985) to Coleman Silk’s efforts at audacious self-fashioning in The Human Stain (2000), identity is achieved, in Roth’s work, in a certain tussle with the explanatory limits of language itself. Roth changed editor and publisher many times after the startling success of Goodbye, Columbus. For all that Starbuck graciously facilitated the fledgling young writer with his first book, it was in many ways the productive clashes of the editorial situation that provided the more enduring lesson. Control, resistance, antagonism, freedom—themes that would come to occupy a significant space in Roth’s imagination—were all sharpened against his experiences with his editors. From Starbuck, Roth moved to work with Joe Fox at Random House, a collaboration that swung from generous friendship toward unanticipated acrimony. At Farrar, Straus & Giroux, he collaborated with Aaron Ascher and then worked with David Rieff, whose conciliatory patience in sounding out a late draft of The Counterlife would prove especially important to the book’s combination of formal experimentation and compulsive readability. He, too, was dropped. When preparing the publication of The Ghost Writer in the New Yorker in 1979, Roth valued the unsparing attitude of Veronica Geng, whose ruthless directness in dealing with a given manuscript echoed his earlier experiences of critical exactitude. In his editors he unerringly sought out a spirit of unsparing attention to detail. Roth eventually came to rely, too, on soliciting the responses of a circle of trusted readers when a new novel was nearing completion, seeking out sharp commentary on a nascent text. An abrasive candor was actively encouraged. Suggestions from these figures—a shifting group that began with close confidants such as Ted Solotaroff and that grew to include literary luminaries like Hermione Lee and Judith Thurman—were not necessarily adopted in the final draft. But the dynamic proved instrumental to Roth’s compositional approach. Finding the necessary friction to illuminate the words on the page was ultimately key.

“IT WAS MY OWN LITTLE HOGARTH PRESS” When Roth began visiting Prague in the 1970s, his experience of editorial intensity took on a different order of magnitude. In 1972, Roth took a trip to visit Kafka’s city. What he discovered, though, was the extraordinary literary culture of Eastern Europe. During a meeting with his foreign publishers, Roth learned about the pervasive crackdown directed from Moscow and imposed by the Husák regime through the 1970s and 1980s as a consequence of events during the Prague Spring.5 During this period, known as “normalizace” (normalization), military force and strict cultural censorship combined to constrain channels of dissent in a country small and compact enough for everything to be monitored. Writers were deemed to represent a persistent and meaningful threat to this enforced atmosphere of social obedience—a fact ironically confirmed years later by the remarkable ascendency of the self-consciously bookish Václav Havel, propelled to the presidency by the signatures behind Charter 77.6 In the offices of his foreign publishers, Roth discovered the brutal extent of censorship inside Czechoslovakia when he learned that he was talking with the passive appeasers of Husák’s administration. Subsequently, he sought out the literary dissidents, befriending a diverse group of writers, including Ivan Klíma, Rita Klímová, and Ludvik Vaculík, who were all being actively persecuted. He also encountered the flourishing samizdat culture in Prague, where literary manuscripts obtained a powerful, clandestine charge. Writing about

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Czechoslovakia under Husák at a PEN Literary Gala in 2013, Roth described his memories of the period as a lasting “education”: This education included visits with Ivan to the places where his colleagues, like Ivan stripped of their rights by the authorities, were working at the menial jobs to which the omnipresent regime had maliciously assigned them. Once they had been thrown out of the Writers’ Union, they were forbidden to publish or to teach or to travel or to drive a car or to earn a proper livelihood each at his or her preferred calling. … So it was, so it is, in the clutches of totalitarianism. Every day brings a new heartache, a new tremor, more helplessness, more hopelessness, and yet another unthinkable forfeiture of freedom and free thought in a censored society already bound and gagged. (WW 368–9) Roth’s own experiences in Prague concluded with a palpable demonstration of the realities of state control. During his final trip to Czechoslovakia during the Cold War in 1977, his hotel room was bugged and his telephone monitored. Roth was then approached and questioned by the Státní bezpečnost (StB), the notorious secret police, and, clearly shaken, left the country the following day. His entry visa was subsequently revoked; Roth would not return to Prague until after the Velvet Revolution. During this period, Roth became both an avid reader of Eastern European literature and an active advocate of the dissident cause—a fact most clearly demonstrated by his ingenious Ad Hoc Czech Fund, for which he enlisted fifteen literary friends to contribute fifty dollars a month to offer financial support for a corresponding author in Prague.7 Accordingly, several critics note the influence of Roth’s travels in Eastern Europe, focusing mainly on the international settings that shape The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Prague Orgy (1985).8 More expansively, in his rich and sonorous exploration of Roth’s relationship with his literary sources, Ross Posnock (2006) incorporates several Eastern European authors whom Roth first read in this period into the “genealogy of immaturity” that powers his fiction (38–87).9 But Roth’s encounter with occupied Prague also inspired his most significant editorial role. Recognizing that he could best assist the dissident authors he befriended in Czechoslovakia by raising their profiles in the West, Roth conceived and pitched the idea of a new paperback series of Eastern and Central European fiction to an editor at Penguin, Kay Webb, in 1974. Tellingly, the first texts to appear in 1975 were written by Czech writers whom Roth knew personally—Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs and Kundera’s Laughable Loves. However, as Brian K. Goodman (2015) writes, in a perceptive critical discussion of Roth’s landmark series, the project soon grew: The Other Europe would eventually expand beyond Czechoslovakia to encompass Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia and introduce literary intellectuals like György Konrád and Danilo Kiš to Western readers … By the time the series came to an end in 1989, it had published 17 works by 11 different authors, most of whom Roth never met. Although the series sprang from a very specific political context and a particular set of personal relationships, the Other Europe would constitute an alternative literary space that pushed the cultural logic of the Cold War in new directions. (725)

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Roth’s role as “General Editor” was far from ceremonial. Between 1974 and 1989, he was continually reading new candidates, choosing appropriate cover-art, and liaising with the various writers and/or their estates. The project specialized in taking unknown voices and amplifying them, often securing the license on a novel already translated into English but which remained virtually unread. Perhaps most significantly, as Goodman (2015) shows, Roth commissioned an introduction by an esteemed, attention-getting writer for each new volume. With Roth’s considerable encouragement, well-known figures such as John Updike, Carlos Fuentes, Jan Kott, and Angela Carter lent their own reputations in the form of these introductions. Roth wrote the piece for Kundera’s Laughable Loves himself, and his praise of the erotic playfulness of the stories clearly sought to capitalize on his own renown as a scandalizing provocateur on Kundera’s behalf. In this sense, “Writers from the Other Europe” functioned not only as a tool for promotion, but also as an unusually permeable and fertile space for imaginative interaction across political boundaries. Significantly, many of the introductions included in “Writers from the Other Europe” looked to root the texts being published in fairly elastic, improvised artistic contexts, making transnational literary connections rather than offering overtly political readings. Updike’s introduction to Schulz’s Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (1979) is a clear example, expending considerable energy drawing parallels to Proust, Kafka, Borges, Kierkegaard, and Conrad. Updike’s (1979) brief essay then culminates in a bouncy riff on the deep mysteries of the personal struggle, ingeniously transforming the mythopoeic Jewish fabulist brutally murdered at the hands of the Nazis into a more eccentric practitioner of Updike’s own fictional mission of consecrating the everyday: “Being ourselves is the one religious experience we all have, an experience shareable only partially, through the exertions of talk and art” (xix). In Updike’s invented terms, Schulz could almost be understood to spring from the illustrious modern canon decking the shelves in his Massachusetts study, and not a Galician town violently occupied during the war. As editor, Roth endeavored to shield the project from the rigid ideological oppositions that drove an earlier phase of the cultural Cold War. “Writers from the Other Europe” assumed neither the posture of active resistance nor the discursive signatures of literary protest. The note that Roth included on the inside page of each new publication, for instance, consciously emphasized literary merit over political concerns; the texts published in the series, the General Editor insisted, were collected on the basis of aesthetic value. In his own inaugural introduction for Laughable Loves, after assembling the requisite textual collage—“something like a cross between Dos Passos and Camus”—Roth (1975) explicitly sought to free Kundera’s short stories from the heavy political circumstances surrounding their composition: “I would think that like Holub and Vaculík, Milan Kundera too would prefer to find a readership in the West that was not drawn to his fiction because he is a writer who is oppressed by a Communist regime” (xii). Laughable Loves categorically does not derive from political genres of protest or manifesto, Roth claims in a bold gesture of editorial confidence, [b]ut connects in spirit as well as form to those humorous stories one hears by the hundreds in Prague these days, stories such as a powerless or oppressed people are often adept at telling themselves, and in which they seem to take an aesthetic pleasure—what pleasure is there, otherwise?—from the very absurdities and paradoxes that characterize their hardship and cause them pain. (xviii)

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What Kundera offers, above all, is the transmutation of suffering into literary enjoyment. But it was through precisely these kinds of maneuvers that Roth’s landmark series actually made a significant political intervention. At the same time that it announced a concrete intention to uncover material from the oppressed context of the Eastern Bloc, “Writers from the Other Europe” worked to undermine the strictly oppositional structure of the divide. Roth edited his chosen texts, in other words, into a series of porous literary communities that transgressed the notion of a grand, overarching battle between competing worlds. Consistently morally ambiguous, frequently antic and/or absurdist in inclination, and purposefully contextualized alongside modern fiction’s most esteemed innovators, the voices amplified in the “Other Europe” project were tonally distinct from the Western construction of previous formidable Cold War literary reputations, such as those of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Indeed, indomitable displays of ethical courage or prophetic wisdom were conspicuously absent in the texts selected. The ideological logic of the conflict was being evoked only to be routinely ironized and subtly undermined. The intensity of Roth’s commitment to “Writers from the Other Europe” during this period should not be underestimated. “It was my own little Hogarth Press,” he would later remark (Pierpont 2013: 93). Goodman (2015) diligently shows just how engaged Roth was with establishing and expanding the project, urging us to grant “Writers from the Other Europe” more prominence as Philip Roth Studies reexamines the arc of the career. The “counterrealist” tendencies of the material that Roth collated, edited, and distributed—these writers’ “angled and sometimes inverted vision,” as Roth explained it to Pierpont (2013)—provide a striking set of coordinates with which to dissect many of Roth’s own subsequent novels (93). The histrionic form of Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and the counter-factual slant of The Plot against America (2004), for example, show Roth experimenting with aesthetic models initially promoted in the Penguin series. And it was the ironic and disruptive relation to history shaping so much of what made “Writers from the Other Europe” distinctive—an attitude from which its wider legacy can continue to be traced—that would fuel Roth’s own historical turn. To understand the grand, national themes of Roth’s later career purely in terms of a pivot toward America is to neglect the powerful sense in which Roth’s profound engagement with the literature of Eastern Europe propelled his evolving historical imagination.10 His editorial experiences, again, proved crucial. The Prague Orgy is a key transitional text in this regard, where Roth fictionalizes his discovery of the enigmatic stories of Bruno Schulz, a figure who became emblematic of the Penguin project. In writing the novella as the elucidating coda to his Zuckerman Bound sequence, throwing his narrator’s prior struggles into ironic relief, Roth was able to distill the logic that defined his work on “Writers from the Other Europe.” The Prague Orgy deliberately depicts a thoroughly compromised editorial mission—a journey through the divide that proves confusing and unsuccessful. In his novella, Roth exposes the encounter with the “Other Europe,” in other words, as a revelation of murky motivations and ineradicable stains—an act of cultural defamiliarization that is amplified by our reception of the story via notebook scribblings as opposed to polished narrative. With Zuckerman ineffectual and confused as he exits Prague, clarity and received certitudes about the East and West collapse. When he is detained, deported, and stripped of the box of stories he endeavored to circulate at the conclusion of The Prague Orgy, Roth’s surrogate experiences the tidal tug of history in a whole new way. It is a perspective that shaped each of the major historical novels of the 1990s. Zuckerman is swept up into “the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you” (PO 84). Here we meet the bewildered,

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implicated mediator of his own national history who provided the crucial narrative frame for Roth’s American Trilogy. American Pastoral (1997), the first novel in Roth’s series and a text whose origins date back to the years Roth traveled regularly to Prague, relies upon dramatizing a mediatory failure as a site of epistemological uncertainty that opens up the fragile possibility of understanding.11 The exposure of the limits of Zuckerman’s grip on the extraordinary story of Seymour “Swede” Levov, the way in which it slips out of his control, allows him both to highlight and to work through the representational predicament. The phrase “I was wrong” recurs throughout American Pastoral as Roth’s insistent refrain; it comes to signal the demythologization of national experience and the emergence of historical insight (AP 39). Only an editor invested so intimately in the literature beyond his own boundaries and borders could have arrived at such a powerfully disabused perch.

THE LIFE UNRAVELED Nadel’s biography of Roth emphasizes the novelist’s controlling behavior, an aspect of his personality that seems to have moved from precocious ambition for his career toward a significantly more sour, domineering, and litigious attitude in later years, after the damage of various shocks was absorbed—failed marriages, fragile health, fervent attacks from critics. Roth was always a fastidious editor of even the most trivial details surrounding his life and work. In his final decade, controlling the shape of his own story became a particular obsession. Roth appointed a biographer after firing his initial choice, Ross Miller, and auditioning several, and he endeavored to curate the coming text from a distance, preparing lengthy documents and directives in an effort to orchestrate the approach. The oppositional impetus of Nadel’s study, neatly exemplified in his chosen title, Philip Roth: A Counterlife, appears increasingly apposite in the wake of the remarkable implosion of Bailey’s authorized biography and Norton’s subsequent decision to withdraw the text. Roth’s determination to exert editorial control over his life, to codify an official account for the record, clearly failed. Instead of smoothing his posthumous legacy, the scandal surrounding the official biography has precipitated a new kind of editorial drama. A renewed debate over the slants and the omissions of Roth’s self-presentation has begun. The ensuing biographical controversy highlights Roth’s glowering editorial intensity—an aspect of his career that, this chapter has argued, was always a crucial component of his art. On one level, the recent scandal confirms Roth’s lifelong predilection for strict textual control. But that very same imaginative investment in the significance of the editorial situation also led Roth to anticipate and to explore the debates about his literary reputation. In his midcareer masterpiece, The Counterlife, Roth was able to show that the effort rigorously to imbue life with the preferred significance is inherently self-defeating. In the fractured formal structure of The Counterlife, Nathan Zuckerman and his brother, Henry, offer competing, antagonizing interpretations of the significance of each other’s choices—countering visions that work not to cancel the alternative point of view, but to irradiate the stakes underlying the contradiction. And in Henry’s excoriating attack on his brother’s guarded, antiseptic funeral, where all the novelist’s evasions and self-justifying excuses, all the efforts to control real wounds with the balm of literary abstraction are made visible, Roth reaches a point of lacerating reflexive critique. The apotheosis of this exculpation is the ludicrous charade of the author’s selfcomposed eulogy—a strategy that Roth renders hollow and streaks with pathos. The echo

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with the present is uncanny. In The Counterlife, the novelist’s attempts to erase the damage he has caused are exposed as a delusional fantasy: “Where was the rawness and the mess? Where was the embarrassment and the shame? Shame in this guy operated always” (C 219). It is remarkable to think that Roth knew so far ahead of time that he would be unable to resist imposing an anesthetizing shape on the story of his own life. That his work also anticipated the ensuing debacle highlights the extraordinary extent to which his fictional imagination remained alert and beholden to the inevitable editorial challenge.

NOTES 1. See Connolly (2017) for a representative example. 2. In 2021, a list of prominent scholars conducting research on Roth released a statement imploring the executors of the estate not to destroy nor to continue to limit access to material entrusted to the authorized biographer, as per the late novelist’s wishes. “A writer of Mr. Roth’s stature,” the statement reads, “deserves multiple accounts of his life in keeping with the nuance and complexity of his art.” 3. See Nadel (2021): “It would be Starbuck who, in selecting the stories to be in the collection, provided a Jewish focus for the volume. In a way, Starbuck fashioned Roth’s writing future because Roth did not think Jewish life was his subject. At the time, he had no idea what his subject was” (103). 4. Plimpton’s Paris Review would publish Roth’s stories “Goodbye, Columbus,” “The Conversion of the Jews,” and “Epstein” winning the magazine’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Robert B. Silvers also sought out Roth’s ironic, cutting perspective on postwar America, inviting him to serve as theater critic at the New York Review of Books. 5. For a concise discussion of the historical significance of the Prague Spring, see Judt (2010). Judt concludes his analysis thus: “The illusion that Communism was reformable, that Stalinism had been a wrong turning, a mistake that could still be corrected … that illusion was crushed under the tanks on August 21st 1968 and it never recovered” (447). 6. For an account of the Velvet Revolution sensitive to this aspect of Havel’s ascendency, see Ash (1990: 78–130). 7. “It made it more personal if they had a name rather than a fund,” Roth explained to Claudia Roth Pierpont in her biographical study of his writing life: “On that principle, he set up Arthur Schlesinger with a historian and Arthur Miller with a playwright; other writers he enlisted included John Updike, Alison Lurie, John Cheever, William Styron, and John Hersey. On the Czech side, Roth notes, Klíma was on the list the first year but took himself off the next, when his situation improved” (Pierpont 2013: 92). 8. See Gooblar (2011) and Cooper (1996) as representative examples of brief engagements with this material. 9. Posnock (2006) was one of the first critics boldly to insist upon reading Roth’s fiction in an international context, situating his work alongside Eastern European authors such as Milan Kundera and Witold Gombrowicz. 10. See Knowles (2020: 14–32) for a more expansive version of this argument. 11. Roth’s earliest drafts of American Pastoral date to the early 1970s, committed to paper under the imposing working title “How the Other Half Lives.” The long compositional history of the novel reflects the powerful influence of “Writers from the Other Europe” on the shape of Roth’s American turn (Knowles 2020: 14–32).

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REFERENCES Aarons, Victoria (2007), “American-Jewish Identity in Roth’s Short Fiction,” in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 9–21, Cambridge: University Press. Ash, Timothy Garton (1990), The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, New York: Random House. Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, New York: Norton. Connolly, Andy (2017), Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition, Lanham: Lexington Books. Cooper, Alan (1996), Philip Roth and the Jews, New York: State University of New York Press. Gooblar, David (2011), The Major Phases of Philip Roth, New York: Continuum. Goodman, Brian (2015), “Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War,” American Literary History, 27 (4): 717–40. Gopnik, Adam (2017), “Philip Roth, Patriot,” The New Yorker, November 6. Available online: https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/13/philip-roth-patriot (accessed December 4, 2022). Judt, Tony (2010), Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Vintage. Knowles, Jack (2020), “‘How the Other Half Lives’: American Pastoral and Roth’s Other Europe,” Philip Roth Studies, 16 (1): 14–32. Kundera, Milan (1975), Laughable Loves, trans. Suzanne Rappaport, New York: Penguin. Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pierpont, Claudia Roth (2013), Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Posnock, Ross (2006), Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, Princeton: University Press. Roth, Philip (1952), “The Box of Truths,” Et Cetera. Container Number 245, Folder 2, Philip Roth Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Roth, Philip (1975), “Introducing Milan Kundera,” in Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves, ix–xviii, New York: Penguin. Roth, Philip (1988), The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, New York: Penguin. Roth, Philip (1993), My Life as a Man, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1994), The Professor of Desire, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1995), The Ghost Writer, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1996a), The Counterlife, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1996b), The Prague Orgy, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1996c), Sabbath’s Theater, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1997), American Pastoral, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2000), Operation Shylock: A Confession, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2004), The Plot against America, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2008), Exit Ghost, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2017), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013, New York: Library of America. Schulz, Bruno (1979), Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, trans. Celina Wieniewska, London and New York: Penguin. Updike, John (1979), “Introduction,” in Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, trans. Celina Wieniewska, xiii–xiv, trans. Celina Wieniewska, London and New York: Penguin.

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PART TWO

Roth across Disciplines

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Dream a Little Dream: Music as Counternarrative in Philip Roth’s Fiction MATTHEW SHIPE

Although Philip Roth never showcased a musician as a central character in his ­fiction— David Kepesh merely dabbles with playing the piano in The Dying Animal (2001)—music nevertheless maintains a significant, if somewhat underappreciated, presence in his work. Indeed, Roth’s early fiction frequently features music: Ron Patimkins’s nostalgic playing of the Ohio State alma mater in “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959), Martha Reganhart’s listening to Mozart’s The Magic Flute in Letting Go (1960),1 Alexander Portnoy’s fondness for the Chinese National Anthem in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), and David Kepesh’s musings on The Rolling Stones in The Breast (1972) illustrate how music maintains a steady presence in his work. Indeed, “On the Air” (1970), Roth’s bizarre and grotesque short story, which he published in the wake of the commercial success of Portnoy’s Complaint, centers on a radio quiz show and reflects his deep love of the radio programs that he had faithfully listened to during his childhood and adolescence. Music, however, plays a more vital narrative function in Roth’s late fiction as his aging male protagonists frequently turn to it as a means of shaping their sense of both the past and the present. This shift emerges most clearly in American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000), as Nathan Zuckerman returns to the pop songs of his adolescence as a way to revisit his past. Zuckerman’s affinity for midcentury pop—Johnny Mercer’s standard “Dream” (1944) in American Pastoral and Frank Sinatra’s version of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Beholden,” from the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey (1940) in The Human ­Stain—offers a counternarrative that Zuckerman uses as a way of determining the direction his own writing will take in both novels. Later in Exit Ghost (2007), Roth pivots to classical music for his inspiration, as Zuckerman, now suffering from accelerated memory loss that threatens his identity as a writer, finds inspiration in Strauss’s Four Last Songs, composed in 1948 when Strauss was writing at the age of eighty-four his own final work, a play that he entitles He and She. As these references suggest, music would be the art form outside of literature that Roth employed most frequently in his work, and his later fiction explicitly considers the relationship between the two art forms. That said, Roth did not grow up in a musical home. As Ira Nadel (2021) reports, Roth’s family “had no phonograph or records” and his musical education was limited to what he heard listening to his parents’ family radio in the Weequahic

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section of Newark in the 1930s and 1940s (39). In Indignation (2008), that novel’s narrator, the easily outraged college sophomore Marcus Messner, bemoans his roommate’s playing Beethoven on his record player after I got into bed, and at a volume that didn’t seem to bother my other two roommates as much as it did me. I knew nothing about classical music, didn’t much like it, and besides, I needed my sleep if I was to continue to hold down a weekend job and get the kind of grades that had put me on the Robert Treat Dean’s list both semesters I was there. (I 21–2) Marcus’s ignorance, if not his antipathy, toward classical music would seem to reflect Roth’s own perspective during his formative years. As an adult, however, Roth became an avid fan of classical music, especially chamber music, and his appreciation for it can be felt in many of his novels (Nadel 2021: 39).2 Despite citing his fellow New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run (2016), as one of the books he had enjoyed the most since announcing his retirement in 2012, Roth had very little interest in rock music, and it is classical music that appears most frequently in his fiction (see McGrath 2018). Learning to appreciate classical music can be seen as part of the larger cultural education—like the appreciation of Henry James and Gustave Flaubert that informs his early work—that propelled Roth in his twenties, as he refashioned himself into a writer of serious literature and proponent of high art, an image that he would deliberately disrupt with the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint. Roth’s musical tastes not surprisingly can be felt in many of his male protagonists, but particularly in David Kepesh, the erstwhile comparative literature professor who is the central character of The Breast, The Professor of Desire (1977), and The Dying Animal. Of all of Roth’s protagonists, Kepesh most closely reflects Roth’s literary and musical tastes, embracing high culture as a way of buttressing his sense of himself as a serious academic. Grappling with his inexplicable transformation into a giant female mammary gland in The Breast, Kepesh imagines himself as a sort of new Mick Jagger, a sexual celebrity destined to be surrounded by teenaged groupies: And then I will have girls. I want twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls. I want them three, four, five, and six at a time. I want them licking my nipple all at once. I want them naked and giggling, stroking and sucking me for days on end. And we can find them. If the Rolling Stones can find them, if Charles Manson can find them, we can find them too. (B 74–5) Kepesh’s desire for underaged girls here would seem to be a grotesquely comic reflection of the burgeoning rock scene with the emergence of teenaged groupies that surrounded groups like the Stones in the late 1960s. That said, the moment is one of many disturbing references to child sexual abuse that can be found in Roth, including the incestuous kiss between the Swede and his eleven-year-old daughter Merry in American Pastoral, which will be discussed later in this chapter. References to incest or sexual abuse can also be found in When She Was Good (1967), My Life as a Man (1974), The Human Stain, Exit Ghost, and The Humbling (2009). Kepesh’s conflation of the Stones and Manson, who had been an aspiring rock musician before turning into a murderous cult leader, seems typical of Kepesh’s sensibility, grouping them together as the products of an abhorrent culture gone awry. It is a culture that both

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repels Kepesh—who believes his good taste in literature and music can somehow abate his more chaotic sexual urges—and fascinates him as he embraces the inexplicable nature of his condition and of the sexual possibilities that it would seem to portend. The use of music in the following two Kepesh books, The Professor of Desire and The Dying Animal, is more typical of how music appears in much of Roth’s fiction as it becomes a marker of Kepesh’s education and cultural status, a status that Kepesh leans heavily on when defining himself as a man and an intellectual. Toward the conclusion of The Professor of Desire, Kepesh plays classical music with his lover, Claire Ovington, in the serenity of their Catskills retreat: A record of [Bach’s] trio sonatas. We have been listening to it all week. The week before, it had been a Mozart quartet; the week before that, the Elgar cello concerto. We just keep turning over one record again and again and again until we have enough. It is all one hears coming and going through the house, music that almost seems by now to be the by-product of our comings and goings, compositions exuded by our sense of well-being. All we ever hear is the most exquisite music. (PD 252–3) Later in The Dying Animal, Kepesh plays “Haydn trios, the Musical Offering, dynamic movements from Brahms” in his efforts to seduce his former student, the twenty-four-yearold Consuela Castillo (19). “[Consuela] particularly liked Beethoven’s Seventh,” Kepesh observes, and on succeeding evenings she sometimes would yield to the irresistible urge to stand and move her arms playfully about in the air, as though it were she and not [Leonard] Bernstein conducting. Watching her breasts shift beneath her blouse while she pretended, somewhat like a performing child, to lead the orchestra with her invisible baton was intensely arousing, and, for all I know, maybe there was nothing the least bit childish about it and to excite me by way of the mock conducting was why she did it. (DA 19–20) Music, for Kepesh, not only becomes a marker of his informed taste—in The Dying Animal, he relishes in giving Consuela an erotic and musical education—but also offers a serene counterpart to the erotic chaos that threatens to shatter his sense of himself as an intellectual and a serious man. “Like all enjoyable things,” Kepesh confesses early in the book, “[playing piano] has unenjoyable parts to it, but my relationship to music has deepened and that’s essential to my life now. It’s wise to do this now. How much longer can there possibly be girls?” (DA 22). Kepesh’s admission that music’s significance to him had “deepened” with age would seem to reflect Roth’s experience, as music moves more to the forefront in his later work. Music in these novels helps Roth’s aging protagonists evoke a specific past and provides a counternarrative that plays a fundamental role in shaping the historical narratives that Nathan Zuckerman produces in the American Trilogy. Describing in I Married a Communist (1998) his admiration for Norman Corwin, the Jewish-American journalist and writer most famous for the radio dramas which he helped produce during the 1930s and 1940s, Zuckerman recalls how through Corwin’s historically based radio plays specifically, and popular culture more broadly, his sense of national identity had been solidified:

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History had been scaled down and personalized, America had been scaled down and personalized: for me, that was the enchantment not only of Norman Corwin but of the times. You flood into America and America floods into you. And all by virtue of being alive in New Jersey and twelve years old and sitting by the radio in 1945. Back when popular culture was sufficiently connected to the last century to be susceptible still to a little language, there was a swooning side to all of it for me. (IMC 39) Zuckerman’s almost romantic lament for the radio programs of his youth here is striking and remains characteristic of how Roth, vis-à-vis Zuckerman, cherished the popular culture of his youth. Such sentiments, however, should not be viewed as simple nostalgia for a past that now seems more innocent or substantial. Instead, Roth’s use of the music of his youth is part of the historical argument regarding the ultimate meaning of the political and cultural changes that transformed American culture in the decades after the Second World War, an argument that Roth takes up in his fiction as early as Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. Indeed, Roth’s employment of Johnny Mercer’s standard “Dream”—a song that Roth uses both as an epigraph for the novel and as the transition that takes us from Zuckerman’s fortyfifth high school reunion to his fictional recreation of Seymour “Swede” Levov’s life—is the way in which Roth recognizes not only the “persistence” but also the real power that endures within such “innocent” narratives. The song stands as its own sort of narrative, one that contrasts with the “American Berserk,” what the Swede’s brother Jerry calls at one point in the novel “the real American crazy shit” (AP 277). The longed-for innocence embodied in a song like “Dream” becomes an acutely painful reminder of the innocence, both personal and political, lost in the wake of the violence of Merry Levov’s bomb, an incident that Roth uses to symbolize the chaos of the late 1960s. The Mercer song—with its wistful reassurance that “[t]hings never are as bad as they seem”—nevertheless lingers throughout American Pastoral, and even the novel’s horrifically comedic ending—with the Swede’s father being stabbed near his eye by a drunken New Jersey housewife—cannot completely negate the song’s optimistic vision or its appeal to a seemingly more innocent past. Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” serves a similar function in The Human Stain, as the standard not only invites memories of a more vital past but also rejuvenates Zuckerman and Coleman Silk. The song itself operates, in a more oblique fashion, as the novel’s counternarrative, the music moving Zuckerman and Silk to dance together one night after Silk recounts a letter sent by one of his first lovers, a woman named Steena who Silk had met while at NYU. The Sinatra tune ultimately conveys the vitality, or the delicious effects of what Zuckerman later terms “the sexual caterwaul,” that stands in opposition to the puritanical forces that end up crushing Coleman (HS 37). “What the hell, I thought, we’ll both be dead soon enough,” Zuckerman says of the impulse to dance with Silk to “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” “and so I got up, and there on the porch Coleman Silk and I began to dance the fox trot together. He led, and, as best I could, I followed” (HS 25). The sound of Sinatra on the radio becomes the mechanism through which Zuckerman and Coleman access, however briefly, a more sexually vibrant and innocent-seeming past. That is, the music offers a painfully brief respite (at least momentary from Zuckerman’s perspective) from the ravages of the aging body while also encapsulating a more-innocent seeming—seeming being the key word—national history. Later in the novel, Zuckerman last encounters Silk at a classical musical rehearsal at the Musical Shed in Tanglewood in the Berkshires, where “an audience of summer folks who are music lovers and of visiting

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music students, but mainly of elderly tourists, people with hearing aids and people carrying binoculars and people paging through the New York Times” gather to listen to classical music each summer (HS 205). Again, Zuckerman reinforces the restorative nature of the music. Of the Rimskey-Korsakov piece, “with its tuneful fairy tale of oboes and flutes,” he describes how the “musicians had indeed laid bare the youngest, most innocent of our ideas of life, the indestructible yearning for the way things aren’t and can never be” (HS 207). Music, for Zuckerman, once again provides a captivating, if ultimately false, hope that the past can be undone and that, for a moment of time, one can be young again. Beyond being an emblem for a more hopeful version of the American narrative, the music Roth employed in his later fiction is also central to the narrative experiments that make such works as American Pastoral and The Human Stain distinct from earlier postmodern experiments such as The Counterlife (1986) and Operation Shylock (1993). In the American Trilogy, Roth’s interest in music stems from its dream-like quality—the way that music, more than any other art form, can momentarily and inexplicably shape a listener’s emotions or evoke a long-forgotten memory. It’s this quality particular to music that Tolstoy fixated on in his famous novella, The Kreutzer Sonata (1890). Considering the potential power inherent within an evocative musical performance, the murderous husband Pozdnyshev describes how “[m]usic makes me forget myself, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn’t my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feelings things I don’t really feel, of understanding things I don’t really understand, being able to do things I’m not able to do” (Tolstoy 2008: 167). And while Roth certainly presents music in far more positive light than the Tolstoy of The Kreutzer Sonata, Roth’s late fiction consistently emphasizes music’s ability to transform and transfix, his narratives displaying how music contains the curious ability to induce a dream-like state in its audience. Perhaps not surprisingly, the music Roth references in his late fiction reinforces this notion: Johnny Mercer’s “Dream” in American Pastoral; Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” in The Human Stain; and Strauss’s Four Last Songs in Exit Ghost, whose first movement (“Spring”) recalls a dream. To begin with, Roth’s selection of “Dream” as the lynchpin for the narrative that he concocts in American Pastoral helps establish the novel’s complex narrative form. The song, in many ways, propels the novel’s historical reconsideration of the 1960s, as Roth uses the song’s lyrics for one of the novel’s epigraphs and it is the song that Zuckerman is listening to at his forty-fifth high school reunion that inspires his narrative reconstruction of the Swede’s life. “Dream” at first would appear to be a product of a more virtuous past, a past that Zuckerman eulogizes in the opening section of American Pastoral as he reconsiders the Newark of his childhood and what happened to the city in the wake of the 1967 riots. Roth’s use of “Dream” seems even more interesting when we briefly consider the song’s origin and Mercer’s background and prominence as a writer and performer throughout Roth’s formative years. “Just as his songs wove themselves into America’s sensibility during the [Second World] war,” his biographer Philip Furia (2003) writes, “Johnny Mercer’s voice filled the air from jukeboxes, recordings, and radio programs, its folky warmth soothing an anxious nation” (146). Of the great songwriters (Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart) of “the golden age of American popular song,” most of whom hailed from New York City and many of whom were Jewish, Mercer came from a privileged Southern background, in many ways the embodiment of the America that Swede Levov aspires to (Furia 2003: 1). Comparing Mercer to his contemporaries “whose songs radiated the rhythm, energy, and cosmopolitan verve of New York,” Furia remarks that Mercer, “by contrast, was an ‘outdoor’ writer, whose lyrics drew their imagery from the

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world of nature and from the American landscape,” another aspect of Mercer’s career that makes him particularly useful for expressing both Zuckerman and the Swede’s longing for the pastoral in the novel (1). Beyond these aspects of Mercer’s background that make him an especially appropriate figure to include in American Pastoral, the history behind “Dream” is equally interesting. In his biography, Furia (2003) records how Mercer conceived of “Dream” as the theme song for the Chesterfield [Supper Show] and that was the only reason he inserted the line about smoke rings rising in the air. Although Mercer said that “the words didn’t really mean too much; it seemed to go with the melody,” the lyric, while virtually another commercial jingle, gave yet another expression of his longing for a world elsewhere, that home for his heart that he, like the skylark of his song, could never find. (146) I would like to highlight a couple of things from Furia’s account of the song’s history: the first being that “Dream” itself contains a contradiction—the purity of the longing so expressed in its lyric (“Dream, when you’re feeling blue./Dream, it’s the thing to do./Just watch the smoke rings rise in the air/You’ll find your share/Of memories there”) would seem at odds with the commercial impulse that inspired Mercer to write those words. The song’s origins nicely correspond to the tensions between innocence and violence, naïveté and experience, that percolate throughout American Pastoral. It seems only appropriate that it’s “Dream” that inspires Zuckerman to “dream” his “realistic chronicle” of Swede Levov’s encounter with history, a dream from which Zuckerman and the reader never awaken. The song functions as the novel’s important moment of transition as Zuckerman disappears from the novel to reimagine the life of his boyhood idol. “To the honeysweet strains of ‘Dream,’” Zuckerman notes as he exits the novel, I pulled away from myself, pulled away from the reunion, and I dreamed … I dreamed a realistic chronicle. I began gazing into [the Swede’s] life—not his life as a god or a demigod but his life as another assailable man—and inexplicably, which is to say lo and behold, I found him in Deal, New Jersey, at the seaside cottage, the summer his daughter [Merry] was eleven, back when she couldn’t stay out of his lap or stop calling him by cute pet names, couldn’t “resist,” as she put it, examining with the tip of her finger the close way his ears were fitted to his skull. (AP 89) Zuckerman’s language here offers a key to understanding the “realistic chronicle” of the late 1960s that the rest of the novel pursues. First, Zuckerman’s notion of “pull[ing] away from myself” and the reunion suggests that he is not slipping into an easy nostalgia while dancing to the song at the reunion, a falling into nostalgia that would be understandable, but its very opposite: this very nostalgic song becomes the mechanism through which Zuckerman begins to explode the notions of personal and national innocence that characterize his memories of the Newark and the America of his boyhood and adolescence. Indeed, the first event that “Dream” inspires is not a moment of innocence but a moment of sexual corruption as the Swede notices the “hard red bee bite that was [his daughter’s] nipple”

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poking through her swimsuit and kisses her on the mouth, a moment that the Swede will later compulsively return to when attempting to explain his daughter’s transformation into a domestic terrorist (AP 90). It should also be noted that the kiss is completely Zuckerman’s invention—there is no known basis in the Swede’s life for Zuckerman to fashion this event— and illuminates how Zuckerman counterintuitively uses “Dream” to unravel the notion of an innocent past that it would otherwise emblemize. The song may provoke Zuckerman’s nostalgia for the world of his adolescence, but it’s striking how he uses it to help clarify his own mixed emotions about that tumultuous period of history as he attempts to unravel the mystery of what happened to the Swede in the aftermath of his daughter’s violence and, more broadly, what happened to America in the wake of the violence and upheaval of the late 1960s, a period that Roth has cited as being central to refashioning his own political sensibilities. I would like to conclude by considering one last piece of music in relationship to Roth’s fiction: the use of Strauss’s Four Last Songs in Exit Ghost, that thorny novel that brings Nathan Zuckerman’s adventures to an end. Roth’s selection of this piece seems interesting for a few reasons, the most obvious being that it was composed by an artist who was facing the nearness of death, which is the very condition that Zuckerman confronts in the novel. The second reason why Four Last Songs is an appropriate selection is that the music reflects the sexual desire at the heart of Exit Ghost; the first song of the sequence, in which Strauss sets an 1899 poem by Herman Hesse (“Frühling”/“Spring”) to music, reflects the romantic suffering that the impotent writer relishes experiencing once again: In shadowy crypts I dreamt long of your trees and blue skies, of your fragrance and birdsong. Now you appear in all your finery, drenched in light like a miracle before me. You recognize me, you entice me tenderly. All my limbs tremble at your blessed presence! “For the profundity that is achieved not by complexity but by clarity and simplicity,” Zuckerman writes of Strauss in his opening stage directions to his final play, He and She, “For the purity of the sentiment about death and parting and loss. For the long melodic line spinning out and the female voice soaring and soaring … For the ways one is drawn into the tremendous arc of heartbreak. The composer drops all masks and, at the age of eighty-two, stands before you naked. And you dissolve” (EG 124).3 Beyond just capturing Zuckerman’s renewed desire, Roth’s use of late Strauss points toward Roth’s intention in Exit Ghost to create a work of fiction that reflects Edward Said’s notion of late style. Appropriating the term from Theodor Adorno’s study of Beethoven’s final works, Said examines the qualities of art produced late in an artist’s career, focusing on writers and musicians whose final works “tear apart the career and the artist’s craft and reopen the questions of meaning, success, and progress that the artist’s late period is supposed to move

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beyond” (Said 2006: 7). Not surprisingly, Strauss—and in particular Four Last Songs—is one of the subjects that Said takes up in his book. In his analysis of Strauss’s late works, Said notes that they are “undramatic, free of contrast and real tension, unthreatening” (46). “And here we are at the unsettling and disconcerting core of this music,” Said writes in On Late Style, “that from beginning to end it makes none of the emotional claims it should, and unlike late-style Beethoven with its fissures and fragments, it is smoothly polished, technically perfect, worldly, and at ease as music in an entirely musical world” (46). Within Zuckerman’s appreciation of Strauss, we can view the impetus behind his final work. No longer interested (or capable of) sustaining the elaborate fictions that he produced during the American Trilogy, Zuckerman strips all the artifice away from his work and reduces it to its core: a male and female voice talking. Zuckerman’s inspiration for the play is Jamie Logan, a much younger writer with whom Zuckerman becomes infatuated. The play, much like Roth’s 1990 novel Deception, focuses exclusively on the two voices as the older Zuckerman teasingly goads Jamie into revealing her sexual history: her first dalliances with a tennis pro (who “thrust his cock so far down [her] throat in the summer of her fourteenth year that [she] threw up all over him”), the loss of her virginity to her high school history teacher, her decision to marry right out of college, and her affair with an old college friend, Richard Kliman (EG 231). The details that Zuckerman imagines are completely his own invention: Jamie demonstrates no sexual interest in Zuckerman and she remains guarded to him in their actual conversations. The play, in both its form and content, becomes the product of Zuckerman’s renewed sexual desire, a desire that he realizes will not be consummated and that has destabilized his sense of self. “I was learning at seventy-one what it is to be deranged,” Zuckerman confesses of his infatuation for Jamie. Proving that self-discovery wasn’t over after all. Proving that the drama that is associated usually with the young as they fully begin to enter life—with adolescents, with young men like the steadfast new captain in [Joseph Conrad’s] The Shadow-Line—can also startle and lay siege to the aged (including the aged resolutely armed against all drama), even as circumstance readies them for departure. (EG 122–3) He and She mirrors Said’s notion of late style both in form—the way in which Zuckerman strips his art to its most basic elements—and in content as the aging writer confronts his impossible desire for a younger woman. Describing his final text, Zuckerman calls it a “play of desire and temptation and flirtation and agony—agony all the time—an improvisation best aborted and left to die” (EG 146). Zuckerman’s sense of his work, that the play is a text “best aborted and left to die,” not only reflects the impossibility of the situation that the play imagines (that of an impotent man verbally seducing a young woman), but also reinforces Said’s conception of late style as involving a “nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness” (7). As he has done with Swede Levov in American Pastoral and Coleman Silk in The Human Stain, Zuckerman imagines the details of Jamie Logan’s biography (her fling with the tennis pro, her affair with Richard) to suit his own purposes as a writer and a man no longer capable of sex. Not surprisingly, the Jamie that Zuckerman constructs in the play bears little resemblance to the character we witness in the rest of the novel: she seems to have little patience for Zuckerman in reality, but in the play, she becomes the vehicle through which Zuckerman is able to articulate his long-dormant sexual anguish.

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The play concludes with Jamie agreeing to visit Zuckerman in his hotel room, a conclusion that neatly reverses the “real” ending when she turns down Zuckerman’s invitation. However, before she arrives Zuckerman simply disappears before they can consummate their relationship: “Thus, with only a moment’s more insanity on his part—a moment of insane excitement—he throws everything into his bag except the unread manuscript and the used Lonoff books—and gets out as fast as he can. How can he not [as he likes to say]? He disintegrates. She’s on her way and he leaves. Gone for good” (EG 292). Reflecting on Ibsen’s final plays, Said (2006) remarks that the playwright’s late works reveal “an angry and disturbed artist for whom the medium of drama provides an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, and leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before” (7). Exit Ghost ends on a similarly disconcerting note, with Zuckerman depicting himself as caught between fiction and reality, life and death. The absence of resolution would seem to be the point: by simply vanishing, Zuckerman eludes death’s reality and preserves himself forever on the margins of his fiction. What’s perhaps most striking in Exit Ghost, however, is how Roth turned to music not only to provide a counternarrative—the “clarity” of the Strauss competing with Zuckerman’s shattered memory—but also the degree to which Roth has turned to music as a way of imagining his own late work. This is not to say that Roth simply adopts Said’s notion of late style in Exit Ghost; instead, Roth achieves something far more interesting in the way that he employs music to create an extended meditation on the implications of “lateness” as both an artistic condition and a distinctive style.

NOTES 1. Ira Nadel (2021) highlights the musical references peppered throughout Letting Go, noting how Roth uses the “contrasting styles” of classical and pop music to reflect “the characters’ contrasting situations and even social class” (39). As Nadel recalls, “Martha Reganhart and her ‘ex’ listen to Mozart’s The Magic Flute while they decide on the custody of their two children, but when Gabe Wallach drives Theresa Haug (Martha’s friend, who will give up her child to Libby and Paul Hertz) home to Gary, Indiana, Fabian and Frankie Avalon are on the radio” (39). 2. See Nadel (2021: 38–9) for a useful discussion of Roth’s appreciation of music, particularly chamber music. 3. The mistake here would seem to be Roth’s, or it is a reflection of Zuckerman’s diminished memory, as Strauss was eighty-four when he composed the sequence.

REFERENCES Furia, Philip (2003), Skylark: The Life and Times of Johnny Mercer, New York: St. Martin’s Press. McGrath, Charles (2018), “No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say,” The New York Times, January 16. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/books/review/philiproth-interview.html (accessed July 15, 2022). Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roth, Philip (1972), The Breast, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Roth, Philip (1975), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1977), The Professor of Desire, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1997), American Pastoral, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Roth, Philip (1998), I Married a Communist, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2000), The Human Stain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Roth, Philip (2001), The Dying Animal, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2007), Exit Ghost, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2008), Indignation, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Said, Edward (2006), On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain, New York: Random House. Tolstoy, Leo (2008), The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, New York: Penguin Classics.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Roth’s Existential Lesson in Identity and Irony VALÉRIE ROBERGE

In his book on Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of irony, The Isolated Self (2013), Brian Söderquist insists that “if the irony is fully and properly carried out—[one] will never understand it as irony” (92), and that “the key to understand irony is to follow the increasingly inner and hidden alienation of a subject from his or her public environment” (87). This alienation of a subject from his or her public environment is typical of the reading action. Accordingly, reading is an ironic act because it gives the reader the occasion to retreat from the world, to set loose in their consciousness. Söderquist adds, With pure irony, a subject’s momentary alienation from a social order gives way to constant alienation. The unique psychological “something” in the personality, which at moments is incommensurable with the conventional world, starts to dominate one’s consciousness— not just at isolated moments but all the time. (96) This reminds us of how, strangely, we could feel more alive when reading than when living, as if something inside us were for once given space and set free, a moment when “the loose consciousness” is unrestricted, which is itself contradictory: The more we are lost in ourselves and far from the world, the more we feel free. Moreover, it seems that not only the act of reading is ironic, but also that writing a novel is in itself an ironic act. Milan Kundera (2003) defines irony in The Art of the Novel thus: “The more attentively we read a novel, the more impossible the answer, because the novel is, by definition, the ironic art: its ‘truth’ is concealed, undeclared, undeclarable. … Irony irritates. Not because it mocks or attacks but because it denies us our certainties by unmasking the world as an ambiguity” (133–4). This presentation of the ironic experience within the acts of both reading and writing is mirrored by the characters in Philip Roth’s fiction. Without this mirroring, the effect of irony would not be an ironic experience. This chapter will consider Roth’s existential lesson in irony and identity while making the link between Roth and philosophy from the standpoint of subjective truth. It will read Roth as a philosophical writer who explores the terms of our existence and the possibilities for ironic insights. Before getting to the adventures of Roth’s characters, however, here is a short reminder of the perfect example of the ironic experience found in Socrates, who is the constant reference

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for Kierkegaard in terms of irony. The story is well known: In Plato, there is typically a young man who starts a discussion with Socrates or vice versa. As they talk, the young man comes to distrust himself, believe Socrates, and at some point, returns home, confused. A few days later, he again questions Socrates because something feels wrong. This moment when the confused young man goes back home is what could be called the movement of doubt in ironic experience. The instability of the ground—or the uncertainty of his beliefs—is what leaves the young man feeling wrong or anxious, insecure, and lost. Everything starts to blur around him, and he loses his senses. This moment should be called doubt, as the only thing that remains is the sense of the loss of certainty. This doubt is at the very core of Roth’s novels. They all seem to start when the ground begins to feel unstable for one of the characters—the very experience shared by the reader in the act of reading itself. We cannot forget the specific role of interpretation, which involves another individual in the process of building empathy: the reader. This may be the reason why Roth says in his interview with The Paris Review, “The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have to set loose in them the consciousness that’s otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn’t fiction” (RMO 147). All that isn’t fiction—or, in other words, reality, or objective truth, or laws, or obligations—is what each reader will find in Roth’s books in the form of fiction. All the characters in Roth’s novels live in a reality like ours; thus, they must also exist as we do: hemmed inside their consciousness. Thus, Roth’s texts will always alternate between the perspective of the reader and the perspective of the character. Reading unites the two. For irony to work by separating the subject from her environment, it must break with what is taken for granted, that is, what is called the reality, or, more pointedly, reality constructed by the norms in a specific culture in a specific context in a specific family value set. The world is not given to us without rules, laws, ways of doing things, specific prejudices, and common assumptions. Söderquist’s (2013) formulation about “a subject’s momentary alienation from a social order” (96) calls for the subject to separate, tear apart, and alienate herself from “reality” itself. Within this framework, we can see how Roth alienates the reader from the social order through his very fiction and he achieves this by moving the reader through three different stages or what I refer to here as “grounds.” The first ground we are going to explore, the “given ground,” involves the intertwined problems in ethics and existentialism, problems connecting readers and characters, both seeking freedom and the desire to be themselves: norms, identity, and will. When I use the term “ground,” I am implying both the soil on which moral subjects walk and the constructs they base their worldview on. After an exploration of the “given ground” in Roth’s texts, we will shift to “breaking ground,” which exposes how Roth’s work allows his characters and his readers an ironic experience. The final section will cover “unexpected ground,” and, more explicitly, the deconstruction of ironic movement at play. Once the alienation is implemented, meaning that the given ground is no longer stable or relatable, the subject, or reader of Roth’s fiction, finds him- or herself on unexpected ground. This unknown ground is the specific discovery, or gift, of the ironic experience—the new territory in which the ironic experience changes the reader’s perspectives on identity and will, leading to existential problems. Once the alienation is lived, it exposes those ethical questions with the new mindset acquired by reading Roth’s books. Thus, the ironic experience is completed by returning to the main problem of the subject: action.

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THE GIVEN GROUND The given ground is the starting point, what one must have, the construction under which we live our lives before the ironic experience dismantles it. This ground is complex; however, this chapter insists on three specific topics related to the problem of the construction of the self: norms, identity, and will. Is the quest for identity related exclusively to societal norms or should it be linked to how the characters are willing to act–or even how they think they should be? The questions surrounding identity are multiple and studied abundantly regarding the Jewishness of Roth and his characters. Here, the point has to do with the general problem of identity: Could one have an identity? Who are we? Almost all of the characters in Roth’s books are ambivalent toward the expectation of the “should be” that society requires of them: to be a good wife, a good husband, married, dutiful, faithful, responsible, loving, present, careful, etc. Readers know all that beforehand and land in a world of fiction like their own world. However, in the realm of fiction, readers have a special license unapologetically to forget their own “should” (or drop the weight of their “should”). Fiction provides a new, comforting experience that reveals the same problems, hesitations, and difficulties in others. For example, the main character in Everyman (2006) functions as an “every man” who looks back on his life, fearing his upcoming death: As a young man, he’d thought of himself as square, so conventional and unadventurous that after art school, instead of striking out on his own paint and to live on whatever money he could pick up at odd jobs—which was his secret ambition—he was too much the good boy, and, answering to his parents’ wishes rather than his own, he married, had children, and went into advertising to make a secure living. He never thought of himself as anything more than an average human being, and one who would have given anything for his marriage to last a lifetime. He had married with just that expectation. (E 31) Here, the character reflects on how he played the role expected of him; however, this decision and the role weighed on him: “But instead marriage became his prison cell, and so, after much tortuous thinking that preoccupied him while he worked and when he should have been sleeping, he began fitfully, agonizingly, to tunnel his way out” (E 31). The given ground appears under the eyes of the readers, readers who are on the point to be addressed by the next sentence, “Isn’t that what an average human being would do? Isn’t that what average human beings do every day?” (E 31). The existential—as well as ethical—questions are right here: What is an “average” human being supposed to do? How is one supposed to live? How to cohabit with what is expected of us and what we want? Could we even have what we want? To embrace the question of identity one might look at The Human Stain (2000) and Coleman Silk, a Black man passing as a Jewish man, someone who lied all his life to almost everyone about who he was, asking: What is identity and how fixed is it? The addition offered by Silk’s character and by the other characters in this classical debate is to replace the theoretical idea of “man” with the perspective of a fictional human—a fictional character real enough to test the philosophical propositions and to see their limits and conjunctions.

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Operation Shylock (1993) gives a new twist to these considerations by revealing the underlying uncertainty of our identity when Philip describes the effects of Halcion: I privately remained half-convinced that, though the drug perhaps intensified my collapse, it was I who had made the worst happen, … half-convinced that I owed my transformation— my deformation—not to any pharmaceutical agent but to something concealed, … as much me and mine as my prose style, my childhood or my intestine; half-convinced that whatever else I might imagine myself to be, I was that too. (OS 27) This open-ended affirmation places the self in a strange position to be, in fact, outside itself or even other than itself, which would perhaps call for a psychoanalytic approach. Nonetheless, the immensity of our identity or even the possibility of an identity remains a question worth exploring on the grounds of philosophy, especially when Zuckerman asserts in The Counterlife (1986), “All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. It certainly does strike me as a joke about my self” (320). Is identity even possible? Or is it always a kind of lie, a false representation? As Zuckerman continues, What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only to myself—a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required … But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic efforts to have one. Nor would I want one. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater. (C 321) Zuckerman proposes that one can choose what character one is going to play, that one has the possibility to interfere in the sphere of one’s representation in and of the world. Presenting the inside of a self as a theater exemplifies how the question of interiority is as wide open as the question of identity. The problematic uncertainty of the self, the desire to be oneself— or not, or the consideration that one has no self could be linked to Kierkegaard’s interrogation in The Sickness onto Death (1849) where the failed attempts to be a self or to be oneself come hand in hand with despair. The difficulty of tracing the portrait of thyself could be considered in parallel with Michel de Montaigne’s research on his own self in the Essays (1580). In the previously quoted passage, Philip mentions that it is his fault and that it could happen again if he wants it; in the same manner, Zuckerman claims that he does not want an independent self even if it was possible. Those two decisions pull the last string of the given ground beneath us: the question of the will. This “question of the will” can be understood as the capacity to follow through in order to attain a goal, an idea. Will is also what our Everyman character mentions when he relates his experience and his expectation to be married for a lifetime. Will could also be associated with the strong desire to become one with the self, like when Kepesh explains in The Dying Animal (2001) how he decided to change just as the sexual revolution arrives: But I was determined, once I saw the disorder for what it was, to seize from the moment a rationale for myself, to undo my former allegiances and my current allegiances and not

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to do it on the side, not to be, as many my age were, either inferior to it or superior to it or simply titillated by it, but to follow the logic of this revolution to its conclusion, and without having become its casuality. (DA 62–3) Kepesh decides for himself a new way of living and he maintains himself there, one would say by desire, by his own will. As he mentions later, “For me the job was to detach the revolution from its immediate paraphernalia, … to seize and use the idea” (DA 63–4). This idea to allow himself to be who he wants to be and who he feels he is could be seen also in the magnificent example of Mickey Sabbath through Sabbath’s Theater (1995). The question could be taken from the perspective of the problem of the self, or to the most infamous side, the side often viewed more negatively, of the problem of the egoist. In this case, as Sabbath demonstrates, exploring what good derives from this attitude—in addition to what it means—occurs in the context of its opposite: the narcissistic self. As Kepesh points out, “How does one turn freedom into a system? To find out cost plenty. I have a son of fortytwo who hates me” (DA 64). “To find out cost plenty” invokes the cost of his decision if he had stayed with his wife and son. Is it possible to live a life without a cost like that? Are they just extreme examples, unlike the average depicted in Everyman? Is it possible to escape this paradox, that amalgam of norms, identity, and will? Or as much as one wants to be “good,” “oneself,” or “someone,” one is always illuminated, always trapped in an ironic position? How does this ironic position change the perception of the self one has?

THE BREAKING GROUND This part, “the breaking ground,” is about the Socratic ironic experience of the young man mentioned in the beginning of the essay, the man who remains uncertain. It is a time when his sense of right and wrong dissolves, and when, for the first time, the young man feels anxious, insecure, and lost. He longs to go back to Socrates to ask for help finding a new answer and new perspective, but Socrates—much like Roth’s work—doesn’t give answers, only new questions. As the ironic experience from an existential standpoint takes place in time and must be lived, readers and characters must sense and see their perspective of the world crumble before them. The breaking ground involves the exploration of how irony alienates by shattering the given ground of assumptions, where the character, like the young man in Socrates, mirrors the experience of readers. Roth often starts his novels with this breaking ground. In the opening of The Human Stain, Silk is said to have made a racist comment, which sets the narrative in motion and points out the ultimate jest of irony: that he, himself, is Black. The same goes for Faunia, who is believed to be illiterate but writes in a diary. This startling beginning—with Silk being not white as assumed but Black—exposes the lie he has been living but also people’s willingness to believe what seems to fit their prejudices. Silk is a wellestablished university professor who normally—in the mind of the majority, that is, in the cliché propped by what higher education represents—epitomizes dignity, trustfulness, and integrity. The double movement of ironic alienation is already in play with this opening as readers understand straight away that Silk was never who he seems to be. Moreover, society could accuse him of being what he cannot be. In other words, Silk has not been following the

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rules nor the laws by pretending to be someone who he is not, and society does not respect its own rules by accusing someone of something he cannot do. Readers experience through Silk a disruption of the normality, of how life is supposed to be. Slowly those assumptions crack the ground open before them. Fauna also represents this alienation. The beliefs about her are false, and she hides herself behind a mask of ignorance and ruthlessness to protect herself and to keep a distance from her environment. The alienation of Silk is the first one to appear but slowly it’s accompanied by Faunia’s, and readers follow them in this different space letting themselves be alienated too. Another breaking ground appears at the beginning of The Anatomy Lesson (1983), when Zuckerman suffers from an unknown illness and cannot write, while readers discover what “was commonly believed to be a function of great literature: antidote to suffering through depiction of our common fate” (AL 5). Zuckerman is sick, and he has, in order to get out of his situation, actually to break his mouth—to be really hurt, in other words. The one who is always writing, who is always talking, has to be unable to write and speak to start back doing what he normally does. This alienation is one of proximity, the alienation of one’s own body, what is taken naturally for granted. What is an “I” without the normal regulation of the body? Zuckerman is alienated from his body, alienated in himself without any exit. Readers follow him through this labyrinth of thoughts, incapacity, and desperate actions. Nothing works, and his environment and the world become more and more hostile, while Zuckerman and readers retreat far from it. The body’s natural support and functions are the given ground broken this time. And then, there is Sabbath’s Theater starting with a mistress, Drenka Balich, asking for the commitment of fidelity from her clandestine lover of the last thirteen years: “Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over” (ST 3). This book could be said to start with a love affair and to end with a hate affair, or a fidelity proposal, as the last lines of the book go, “And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here” (ST 451). The grand scheme of the book seems to repose in this twisting plot given by the first chapter title: There’s Nothing That Keeps Its Promises even if Sabbath is probably one of the most willful characters in Roth’s oeuvre. Regardless of his will and effort for things to go his way, nothing goes his way. It could also be argued that Sabbath is already an outsider, and when he loses Drenka, he loses his last anchoring in the world around him. He then loses all hope facing the ironic situation directly while still wanting to find his loved one again. This falling in doubt seems to be everywhere in Roth’s novels, and the disruption of the beliefs of the day-to-day is multiple too, revealing Roth’s interest in breaking down the reality of illusions and the possibility to understand something. Related to this idea of understanding, there is the famous passage in American Pastoral (1997) that explains how we are wrong and how there is nothing we can do against it: You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with

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you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? … The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well lucky you. (AP 35) This proposition of no other way than to get people wrong, or simply put to be wrong, could not be more isolating for anyone, and it isolates subjects both from their environment and from themselves, pointing to the ineluctability of our wrongness. This isolation of ourselves from our thought is the perfect example of an ironic experience smashing our beliefs. The same ironic effect is again mentioned clearly in The Counterlife: “Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?” (306), or even in Sabbath’s Theater: “Anyone with any brains knows that he is leading a stupid life even while he is leading it. Anyone with any brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind” (204). Let’s stop here, as all of these quotes imply generality and, we, the readers, accept what we read. Is it possible to imagine anywhere than in a book someone telling you “Anyone with any brains knows that he is leading a stupid life even while he is leading it” (ST 204), and you simply agree? However, when we read, we are immersed in this ironic experience, in this deconstruction, in this process of falling into doubt to such a degree that nothing seems more reasonable than that: “Anyone with any brains knows that he is leading a stupid life even while he is leading it. Anyone with any brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind” (204). Are we simply agreeing to this affirmation because, as readers, we are in this safe retreat where our consciousness can be free? Is this what we escape reality for? Or could it be that there is another mechanism at stake that only an ironic experience could produce?

THE UNEXPECTED GROUND This section is about what it means for characters and readers to live an ironic experience directly or indirectly. How they cope with the given ground that has unexpectedly broken under their feet and what they found under the cracks irony made, and furthermore, how this new set of perceptions changes their way of thinking about their identity. Just as readers retreat into themselves to jump into the book, at the same time, the main character of the book also undergoes this movement of retreat, as he or she is living in this ironic moment too—the alienation from the world. The mirroring experience between the readers liberates their consciousness alongside the character who falls into doubt; the two of them approaching unknown territory makes itself known through the pages of the book. This mirroring effect is even amplified when it is Zuckerman, the writer, who tells a story while he himself observes and describes himself going astray. So when Roth sets his readers

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free, he entraps them in a double irony making the ironic experience complete. However, irony, because it forces retreat and alienates from the world, also gives distance: a separation from norms, identity, and will, even our desires, redefining us as free consciousness, and, ultimately, touching the foundational ground of irony itself. This space is not just a distance from the world outside, but also a distance from the readers’ own perceptions and representations of reality. They are not only free from the world, but they are also free from themselves. It gives them this strange perspective when their reading selves can acquire positions or attitudes without having the feeling of denying themselves. This ironic distance creates a quiet space to experiment and to look at our own selves as another character. All this occurs when we fall into the blur of the mirroring ironic experience that the character simultaneously experiences in the text. The blurrier it is, the more readers reach distance, getting perspective on themselves. Why? Because the blur makes things less stable, reveals the uncertainty among us, and pushes the readers slowly outside their comfort zone. This explains why some people consider the novel an art form with the potential to suspend all moral judgments. Does it follow that novels avoid creating morals of any kind? No. It means that readers must go through the whole book in order to understand what the experience means in terms of morality. As readers of Roth’s fiction, we must take retreat from our usual preconceptions, our preconstructions, by experiencing the constructions at work in the book.1 These constructions are often the only thing left for the character, as everything else has fallen away. American Pastoral is a good example of this construction, where the Swede works through the whole book to repair what his daughter has done; in other words, he tries to make sense of what makes no sense, but in the end, he realizes, “He had seen how improbable it is that we should come from one another and how improbable it is that we do come from one another. Birth, succession, the generations, history—utterly improbable” (418). Whence another conclusion that should normally trigger shock and disagreement, but now after going over the story of the Swede, readers understand that this “crazy thought” makes more sense than their usual thoughts, their usual beliefs, or, at least, they cannot deny this possibility, this “crazy possibility.” Thus, not only are readers confronted with new moral considerations, but also with a greater view of what the world is when its actions begin to blur then disappear. This is not a perfect world, and it’s now even more tenuous when the blur is gone; and yet, this new ground is strangely stable under the readers’ and the characters’ feet. This unexpected new ground brings new reflections like this one from Sabbath’s Theater, namely that “even if nothing is left in the carton, I will come away having learned two things today: the fear of death is with you forever and a shred of irony lives on and on” (399). How could it be any good for the reader? How could ethics find a stance in this shred of irony living on and on? Because a reader could, just like Marcia at the end of American Pastoral, laugh: Marcia sank into Jessie’s empty chair, in front of the brimming glass of milk, and with her face in her hands, she began to laugh at their obtuseness to the flimsiness of the whole contraption, to laugh and laugh and laugh at them all, pillars of a society that, much to her delight, was going rapidly under—to laugh and to relish, as some people, historically, always seem to do, how far the rampant disorder had spread, enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things. (423)

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Or the reader might slightly smile. Whichever of the two happens to them, they will feel new ground under their feet and see a new light going over the world, as Kundera (2005) says in The Curtain: “Humour is not a spark that leaps up for a brief moment at the comical dénouement of some situation or story to set us laughing. Its unobtrusive light glows over the whole vast landscape of life” (109). If the reader laughs or smiles, he or she not only sees humor recovering everything, but will realize that it recovers them too. Nobody is spared from the light of humor. It shines on everyone. Everybody gets it wrong, and everybody gets the shred of irony. Irony doesn’t discriminate; it treats everyone equally, even the reader, who is hidden away from the world. Nobody is better and nobody is the best. It is only when readers become profoundly involved in Roth’s ironic lesson that they can become empathic toward others, recognize themselves in others, feel the sense of togetherness, and everyone together in this ineluctable ironic light feeling that nobody is perfect, and everybody is wrong. This capacity of making readers live an ironic experience vicariously, to point out how we delude ourselves, has always been one of the greatest existential lessons of Roth’s writing. This lesson emphasizes the difficulty of maintaining norms, identity, and will, while pointing out that there is no escape from them either. The only viable stance seems to be the ironic one at its deepest point where everybody is on the same page of wrongness and nobody can deny the force of everybody to get there, their will, their desires, and their unreachable dreams. However, nobody, as Söderquist (2013) points out, can remain forever in this ironic stance. One must return to reality, get out of the isolation, close the book, finish the story, and live one’s life. Living a life with this new perspective, feeling the unstable ground under the feet, maybe more accepting of our wrongness and the wrongness of those around us, feeling freedom in this unexpected way by letting ourselves be deluded, make mistakes, fail at understanding, but ultimately live them more profoundly. This is the exact reason why the ironic lessons in Roth’s novels could only be understood on an individual basis. When put in an objective perspective, they seem to disappear under the pretext of good moral and thoughtful thoughts. Thus, reading Roth is a significant philosophical commitment in which the individual, while retreating from their environment, experiences an ironic standpoint by vicariously feeling their given ground breaking before transforming into something unexpected. In this unexpected ground everything is uncertain except for the certainty that it is uncertain for everybody, thereby creating a new form of empathy giving ground for a new ethical standpoint.

NOTE 1. I’m obviously ignoring the position of deconstruction by taking only the novel as a complete work that creates something, that is, a construction, even if this construction is a deconstructive construction, where the deconstruction remains a construction.

REFERENCES Kundera, Milan (2003), The Art of the Novel, New York: Harper Perennial. Kundera, Milan (2005), The Curtain, trans. Linda Asher, New York: Harper Perennial. Roth, Philip (1994), Operation Shylock, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (1996a), The Anatomy Lesson, New York: Vintage International.

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Roth, Philip (1996b), The Counterlife, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (1996c), Sabbath’s Theater, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (1998), American Pastoral, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2001a), The Human Stain, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2001b), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2002), The Dying Animal, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2007), Everyman, New York: Vintage International. Söderquist, K. Brian (2013), The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.

CHAPTER NINE

Safe at Home? Philip Roth and Sports MIKE WITCOMBE

In his 2021 biography of Philip Roth, Ira Nadel describes some of the many items put up for sale as part of Philip Roth’s estate. Among the motley collection of furniture and mementos are a baseball bat formerly owned by New York Yankees legend Yogi Berra and a “1963 Topps baseball card of Sandy Koufax” (Nadel 2021: 443). Taken together, these items counted among Roth’s valuables represent an interest in baseball, and sports in general, that would become a significant part of his writing career. Roth’s ownership of one of Berra’s bats stems from Berra’s brief tenure at the Yankees AAA minor league affiliate, the Newark Bears, immediately following an honorable discharge from the Navy in 1946. Roth supported the Bears as a child, and games he saw in Newark’s Ruppert Stadium would make a lasting impression. The Koufax card is similarly evocative: 1963 was arguably the best season in Koufax’s career. Koufax is remembered as much for his contribution to American Jewish culture as he is for his pitching, after refusing to play on Yom Kippur during the 1965 World Series. The bat and card in the Roth estate auction speak to the complexities of Roth’s own love of baseball, encompassing personal memories tied to his Newark childhood as well as a marker of major Jewish success. Roth’s sporting interests were rarely partisan, which is reflected in his own history of fandom: growing up rooting for the then-Brooklyn Dodgers, Roth would adopt the Mets as his team, before changing to the rival New York Yankees in the 1990s.1 Blake Bailey’s biography similarly supports the importance of the sport to Roth. Noting that Roth’s childhood love for the Dodgers was shared by many of his Weequahic peers, Bailey (2021) describes how Roth would watch replays of Dodgers games in his retirement, reminiscing with friends about how one game “broke my Dodger heart in 1952” (786). Roth’s conception of baseball as a child and young adult would filter into many aspects of his life— from playing improvised games with his friends, to watching adults play in a recreational game, to travelling to see the Dodgers play in Ebbets Field; from watching the Newark Bears, to listening to Red Barber’s radio commentary (40–1). Roth’s interest in the professional game may have waned with the departures of the Newark Bears (who folded in 1949) and the Brooklyn Dodgers (who relocated to Los Angeles in 1958), but Bailey notes how Roth maintained interest in the sport. Bailey describes how Roth treasured the memory of watching Game 1 of the 1963 World Series, which saw a career-defining performance by Koufax (786). The baseball card sold as part of Roth’s estate may commemorate this treasured memory as much as the apex of Koufax’s career.

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The complexities of participation and spectatorship in these examples show that Roth’s love for baseball was tied to its pivotal role in fostering a masculinized ideal of communal identity. Notable in Bailey’s description is the emphasis placed on male bonding: Roth attended Bears games with his brother and father, and he traveled to Ebbets Field with a male friend. Roth’s own autobiographical writings reflect a similar sense of camaraderie, explicitly intertwined with the mythopoeic forces of American culture itself. In “My Baseball Years,” written to mark Opening Day in 1973, Roth describes the playing of the anthem at Ruppert Stadium as providing unity to the “unharmonious mob” gathered there (RMO 221). Baseball provides access to an external world (in this case, the United States) in a way that reminds Roth of his later devotion to literature. As its title implies, “My Baseball Years” is already nostalgic, conjuring a self-sustaining imaginative world that Roth links to a specific period in his life that has long passed. Roth expanded on this world in The Facts (1988), writing extensively about other sports in the book’s early pages. He introduced the topic with a discussion of the football team that represented his predominantly Jewish high school. The Weequahic Indians are depicted as notoriously hapless, with a rare victory over a rival team prompting a “postgame pogrom” of fury from the opposing fans (27). As with a description of his early interest in boxing that follows, violence is at the core of the sport, and Jewish success is depicted as the exception to the general rule. In contrast, Roth describes baseball as integral part of his emergent identity. In referring to baseball as a “great secularistic national church” featuring items he “ritualistically donned,” Roth recalls the language of democratic unity he had deployed in “My Baseball Years,” while adding metaphors that link to religious worship (32). Baseball is viewed as a space in which the young Jews of Weequahic could inscribe themselves into the American imaginary in the absence of a strongly felt religious identity. Both baseball and boxing recur in Patrimony (1991), Roth’s other explicitly autobiographical book. In Patrimony, boxing is once again depicted as a space in which Jewish success is seen as anathema to Roth’s conception of Jewishness. Roth claims that “the Christian religion was an adversary” for Jewish boxers, and that success was a means of responding to anti-Semitism (203). Crucially, this claim takes place as Roth describes a conversation he has with his father shortly before his death: boxing provides a shared body of knowledge and a means of bonding between the generations. Baseball performs a similar role, in that Roth discusses a successful campaign to get his father interested in the New York Mets. According to Roth, this is the first time his father had been a fan of the sport since he took Philip to Ruppert Stadium as a child, but the density of “he” and “I” in the sentence where this is described may confuse the reader as to whether Roth is referring to his father’s rekindled interest in the sport, or his own (137). Indeed, following intensive early writing about sports, Roth’s autobiographical works signaled a return to prominence for the topic—from participation (childhood and young adulthood) to spectatorship (adulthood and old age). While Roth devoted more time to discussing baseball than any other sport, he maintained a broad interest in sport in general. In Roth’s fiction, sports often represent a normative background to American life. Most references to sport in Roth’s work are brief and seem to discourage the reader from further analysis. For example, an analogy to college basketball in The Professor of Desire (1977) is deployed as a means of sardonically linking the passion generated by sports fandom to sexual ecstasy. The narrator, David Kepesh, dates Marcella “Silky” Walsh, a cheerleader, while at Syracuse University. Kepesh is more interested in the sexual mythology of cheerleading than the team she encourages fans to root for—let alone the sport of cheerleading itself. Sport is a key source of reference in this scene, but the sport

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itself is largely incidental to the main subject: sex. As with many of Roth’s other novels, basic knowledge of American sporting culture on the part of the reader is assumed but inessential to understanding the broader structure of the work. There are few other references to sport in The Professor of Desire: the brief aside about Silky Walsh serves to highlight the subsidiarity of sports as a theme. As someone taking part in a sport who is simultaneously part of the spectacle of sports, Silky exemplifies the tension between participation and spectatorship in Roth’s work. For the most part, sport is associated with youth and young adulthood, resulting in a gradual move from sport as an active interest to something performed either by others or by an earlier version of oneself. Kepesh’s perception of Silky as a sexual object also demonstrates that sport is frequently tied to masculinity and male sexuality in Roth’s work. Roth’s debut novella, “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959), provides a telling example of this by beginning with the image of Brenda Patimkin rising out of a swimming pool. “Goodbye, Columbus” is notable for the centrality of sports to its narrative, and how sporting endeavor frequently serves as a shorthand for interpersonal tensions. The association between sport and eros is consistent throughout. On their first date, Brenda tells the narrator, Neil Klugman, that he will be able to identify her by her sweat, before a description of her “savagely” playing tennis with a friend (14–15). Neil is clearly ill at ease with the sporting prowess expected in this world: when Brenda asks him if his shoulders have been honed through playing sport, he replies, “I just grew up and they came with me” (21). The Patimkins’ lawn features “sportinggoods trees” festooned with the abandoned detritus of at least five sports (24). Brenda’s brother relaxes by listening to a record recounting his triumphs as a basketball player for Ohio State University, providing the novel with its title. Neil’s skepticism is partly a result of the class division between the two lovers as well as the firmly unsporting world of the Newark library he works in. For all that Neil is caustic about the family’s sporting fixation, he finds it increasingly hard to resist the pull of competition. Eventually, sport becomes integrated into the simultaneously adversarial and affectionate relationship between the two lovers. He surprises himself by goading Brenda’s younger sister Julie during a game of ping-pong before describing sex with Brenda by comparing it to the victory that Julie’s temper tantrum denied him. Neil adds to this by holding his breath underwater in competition with Brenda, before noting how the two ran together in the mornings in a vision of pastoral eros: “by the end of the week I was running a 7:02 mile, and always at the end there was the little click of the watch and Brenda’s arms” (60). Little surprise that, when Brenda leaves Neil home alone, he can think of little better to do than try to play sports by himself. The Patimkins are the living embodiment of Nadel’s (2021) claim that, for Roth, “athletic competition is a model for both self-realization and assimilation”: Neil’s clumsy attempts to adopt this mentality provide the novella with much of its comedy and pathos (260). Echoing this, Samuel J. Tindall (1989) argues that Neil’s clumsiness around the use of sporting terminology reinforces his lack of suitability for the Patimkins’ world. “Goodbye, Columbus” is unusual within Roth’s works for how broad its sporting landscape is. Most other references that Roth deploys are either specific to particular sports or consider athleticism more generally. Roth’s American Trilogy (American Pastoral [1997], I Married a Communist [1998], and The Human Stain [2000]) is particularly notable for the athletic prowess of the men at the center of each narrative. Swede Levov is the athletic icon of Weequahic, renowned for his prowess in baseball, basketball, and football. The Swede was based on a historical figure, Seymour “the Swede”

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Masin, whose noted skill in field sports eventually led him to play professional basketball. However, as Carina Staudte (2015) notes, the fictionalized Swede “is not the thinker and decision maker of the game, but the receiver and the enforcer of strategies” (56). The Swede’s prowess in sports both stands in contrast to his passivity off the field, as well as speaking to natural ability rather than sustained effort. The Swede’s athleticism thus exemplifies the limitations in using sports to create self-sufficiency and the capacity to assimilate. This harks back to the tensions seen in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), where baseball represents an ability to partake both in the American everyday and in a community culture lost to time. As Staudte (2015) further illuminates, the pastoral potential of sport engenders a fatal naïveté in the Swede, one which makes him ill-equipped to handle the weight of tragedy that will befall him in the determinedly unathletic form of his daughter Merry (58). As Michele Schiavone (2004) has shown, Roth uses the classic young adult baseball novel The Kid from Tomkinsville (1940) as a countertext, exemplifying both the pastoral potential and brutal demystification that John R. Tunis’s novel depends upon. I Married a Communist has a similar vision of athletic masculinity, albeit reconfigured more in terms of a generalized sense of masculine strength. Ira Ringold is even depicted as being incompetent at sport, although his body and his strength are celebrated throughout the book. As with the Swede, Ira’s abilities do not give adequate preparation for the tragedy that will befall him. Ira’s loss of physical strength is seen as a loss of masculinity, his Stakhanovite capabilities declining in tandem with his ability to impact the world around him. Finally, in The Human Stain, Coleman Silk comes to embody the complexities around how sporting prowess is valued in American culture at large. Silk is an African American boxer who passes as Jewish in order to gain a scholarship, ultimately becoming a university professor before an accusation of anti-Black racism leads to his downfall. John G. Rodwan Jr. (2011) argues that boxing “imparts an outlook and cultivates qualities Silk carries with him into his seventies”— namely, the ability to conceal (88). In addition, Zuckerman’s observation that Coleman’s physique is that of a “cunning and wily competitor at sports rather than an overpowering one” is reminiscent of Staudte’s comment about the Swede in American Pastoral—a form of sporting excellence that emerges from personal qualities and innate ability rather than acquired skill (21). In its refusal of conventional modes of masculine sporting ability, it recalls the separation of Jewish and non-Jewish sports elsewhere in Roth’s work. Some of Roth’s most celebrated writing on sports can be found in Portnoy’s Complaint, a novel whose emphasis on childhood and young adulthood places sport as one of its key subsidiary themes. Portnoy’s father is depicted as a failure in part because of his lack of athleticism, after sports have become a metaphor for his professional inadequacies. Much of Roth’s other sporting references bear strong similarities to descriptions later in his career: in describing the incompetence of the Weequahic High School football team, Portnoy gleefully wallows in the same stereotypes that Roth himself describes in The Facts. This is further supported by a casual observation that the gentile women the teenage Portnoy meets at the ice-skating rink have older brothers who are “clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks” for college football teams (PC 145). For Roth, football is representative of gentile America (“it was for the goyim” [55]), rather than the more democratic vision represented by baseball and, to a lesser extent, athleticism in general. The principal figure representing athleticism in the novel is Alex’s cousin Harold, known to his family as Heshie. Heshie bears distinct similarities to Swede Levov, in that he represents a vision of athletic and masculine power that leaves a lasting mark on the narrator. Similar to the later character of Bucky Cantor in Nemesis (2010), Heshie is also a figure whose successes

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come in the more Olympian track and field traditions rather than the more American sporting model projected by the Swede. What Heshie has in common with both characters is the tragic arc of history: he is killed in combat during the Second World War. Heshie’s prowess on the track becomes an internalized image of masculine sexuality that the young Portnoy aims to emulate, envisaging “shorts with a slit cut up either side to accommodate the taut and bulging muscles of my thighs” (54). The novel generates pathos from this later in the text, where the teenage Alex inherits Heshie’s weights and takes to admiring his own physique (267). It is also significant that Heshie’s doomed romance happens not only with a gentile girl, but with a drum majorette—as with The Professor of Desire’s Silky Walsh, female sexual desirability is a subsidiary correlative of masculine athletic prowess. Given its broad interest in sporting, Portnoy’s Complaint is mostly remembered for its evocative descriptions of baseball. As with Roth’s autobiographical writings, baseball is strongly associated with the narrator’s early experiences growing up in Weequahic. Roth describes the “unruffled nonchalance” of playing the sport as a child (PC 71), leading to perhaps the best-known line about sports in all of Roth’s fiction: “Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder—and nothing more!” (72). Looking back on his childhood, Portnoy describes a sense of identity and ease that comes from understanding his role in the game, a sense of self-assurance he yearns for in his adult life. A similar superfluity of exclamation marks accompanies another description of the sport later in the novel, when Portnoy describes the working men of Weequahic playing a casual game of softball on a Sunday morning. The combination of playful kibitzing and serious competition has a lasting impact on the narrator, for whom—as his plane prepares to land in Israel—it represents the best of diaspora Jewish culture. Portnoy finds himself remembering the softball game “[b]ecause I love those men! I want to grow up to be one of those men!” (245). As Portnoy’s identification with the long-past softball game grows stronger in his memory, even his tenses become confused. As with the idealized game of his youth, baseball/ softball comes to represent a lost pastoral ideal, a vision of Jewish identity that remains tantalizingly out of reach to Portnoy (or so he believes) now he has entered the American upper middle class. This unsteady relationship between athleticism and the body that performs it is most obliquely portrayed in Roth’s final novel, Nemesis. Many of Roth’s sporting themes recur in this novel—most notably, the close association between sport, masculinity, and childhood. Bucky’s motivation to mount a defense against stereotypes of Jewish weakness incorporates a self-consciousness common to Roth’s depictions of sport. The shadow of death looming over the novel is arguably a reflection of Roth’s increasingly morbid preoccupations, though it should be noted that his athletic characters have frequently been associated with death and frailty: this can be traced back to Hymie in Portnoy’s Complaint as well as the tragic figures of the American Trilogy. Youthful idolization turns into a dawning awareness of individual limitations—where Nemesis stands out is in making this seeming realization take place within the idolized figure themself. Bucky is not rejected by the world so much as he rejects the masculinized ethos and pastoral ideals he had lived by—a rejection that leads him to misanthropy rather than knowledge. The life of Bucky following his polio diagnosis stands in contrast to the life of the narrator Arnie, who responds to adversity by improving accessibility for other physically disabled people. Nonetheless, the novel’s lasting image provides a familiar vision of athletic capability in which Bucky enables his charges to “[enter] the historical saga of our ancient gender” (279). The novel’s final lines highlight the significance of what Bucky represented, as well as

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the pathos of his eventual retreat from communal life: “he seemed to us invincible” (280). As Victoria Aarons (2013) argues, Bucky’s isolation represents a determination for self-control that leads him into a destructive reinvention of self that becomes “self-deluding” (235). As with Roth’s work dating back to “Goodbye, Columbus,” sporting excellence can lead characters to delude themselves about their ability to determine their own lives—or yearn for a time when they could do so. When aligned with Roth’s consistent interest in sport and childhood, this yearning places the idealization of sports itself as a synecdoche for the stark realities of an adult life where the clearly defined rules and narratives of sports bear an increasingly warped relation to the messiness of lived experience. The use of sport to demystify the complexities of adult life reached its clearest expression relatively early in Roth’s career. The Great American Novel (GAN) (1973) is Roth’s most exhaustive treatment of sport, and arguably the only Roth novel in which sport functions as a primary theme. GAN is divisive, in part because of its willingness to experiment. That the novel is often seen as an aberration, even by Roth himself, is belied by the links that can be made between the novel and the rest of Roth’s oeuvre. While GAN remains difficult to categorize, and while its satiric thrust depends on extensive knowledge on the part of the reader, Roth’s focus on sport can give additional insight into the development of many of his thematic and stylistic interests. GAN opens with an extended prologue narrated by Word Smith, an aging sportswriter. Smith previously covered the Patriot League, a hypothetical third Major League that he describes as having disbanded following the Second World War. The prologue is explicitly intertextual, beginning with a reference to Moby-Dick (1851)—“CALL ME SMITTY” (11)— and includes extended scenes in which the narrator debates baseball and literature with Ernest Hemingway. The prologue concludes by dismissing existing claimants to the title of Great American Novel, linking their narrative ambitions to the world of baseball in order to make a satirical case for the narrator’s ranking among them. For all the prologue’s thematic interest in intertextual anxieties, the remainder of the novel is more concerned with how fiction can engage with the historical record. The novel’s plot trades on baseball history, but Roth’s references often serve broader themes within the novel. The novel thus begins with a so-called history of the Patriot League, tracing the lineage of the Ruppert Mundys, a team whose decline is precipitated by a demand that their home stadium be turned into an embarkation point for soldiers en route to the European theater of the Second World War. The team thus enacts a tribute to the Newark Bears of Roth’s childhood. The Bears played their final season in Ruppert Stadium in the Ironbound district of Newark in 1949, when Roth was a teenager. By 1952, even that stadium itself had been demolished. While the New York Yankees had rented the stadium for “midget auto races, circuses, and the roller derby” in the intervening years, with a brief announcement that “the park will be torn down and the property offered for sale for real estate” (“Old Ruppert Stadium” 31), minor league baseball left Newark for forty-nine years. At the time of writing, Newark has no professional baseball team, although a reimagined Newark Bears played between 1998 and 2014, disbanding just short of the hundredth anniversary of the only team representing Newark to play in a (self-proclaimed) Major League—the 1915 Newark Peppers, who played in the short-lived Federal League for the 1915 season (Cvornyek 2003: 10). As the Federal League debacle and the sad decline of Ruppert Stadium show, Roth would have been able to draw on local baseball history as well as the broader mythology of the sport when constructing his narrative, skirting closer to historical fact than non-baseball fans may realize. As with much of Roth’s work, GAN continually oscillates between personal and

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communal mythmaking, expanding outwards from Newark to comment on America itself. The remarkable stories underlying Roth’s seemingly excessive plotting serve as a reminder of his famous 1961 claim that contemporary writers are faced with “trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality” (RMO 167). Smith distorts the historical record, but the familiarity of his foundations prevents the novel from becoming pure fantasy. Roth’s text evolves to take in a broader narrative exploring the demise of the league itself and its supposed suppression by baseball authorities. Roland Agni, the team’s star rookie, pleads with the owner of a wealthy team to hire him away from the hapless Mundys. After being rejected, he tries his luck with a team owned by a Jewish family, the Ellises, which enables Roth to parody anti-Semitic tropes. The Ellises live behind the scoreboard in Greenback stadium, are notably frugal, and speak in an exaggerated dialect. The young son of the family, Isaac, is renowned for his intelligence. Under his guidance, the Mundys go on an unexpected winning run. Isaac’s approach to baseball embodies two of the major changes to the game that came in future decades.2 In feeding the Mundys modified Wheaties that propel them to an unexpected winning streak, Isaac preempts the so-called Steroid Era in baseball, where widespread use of performance-enhancing substances brought the game into disrepute. Similarly, Isaac’s reliance on statistical evidence to (successfully) challenge long-standing assumptions in team management recalls the ever-increasing prominence of Sabermetrics in the modern professional game. As Roth notes in his acknowledgments to GAN, the depiction of Isaac Ellis’s statistical genius is indebted to Earnshaw Cook’s controversial 1964 book Percentage Baseball, reflecting nascent debates within the baseball community at the time Roth was writing (7).3 Moreover, as Frank Ardolino (1989) has elaborated, the Ellises represent a commentary on biblical myth and Jewish identity, but also baseball history—a reference to the fact that leftfield stands in the New York Giants’ Polo Grounds stadium contained an apartment used by the groundskeeper and his family. What makes the Ellises distinctive in Roth’s sport writing is the explicit (as opposed to implied) suggestion that anti-Semitism was present in baseball as much as any other sport. Roth’s use of historical figureheads was repeated in his reimaging of Seymour “the Swede” Masin in American Pastoral, but the connections to his other works extend further. In its conspiratorial atmosphere and focus on definitions of American identity in the immediately postwar era, GAN prefigures works such as I Married a Communist and The Plot against America (2004). In its satiric engagement with American culture at large, it is also indebted to the “uncharacteristically freakish” (Roth 2008) satirical works that Roth published following (and in response to) the commercial and critical success of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969, including “On the Air” (1970), Our Gang (1971), and The Breast (1972). Traces of all three of these texts can be detected in GAN: the ribald anti-Semitism in “On the Air,” the self-serving hypocrisy of American leadership in Our Gang, and the intertextual anxieties in The Breast. Our Gang is particularly notable for depicting sport as an emblematic American value: Trick E. Dixon, the satirical parody of Richard M. Nixon, meets his advisors for a “skull session” in full football uniform to mock Nixon’s over-reliance on football analogies, as well as his failure to become a success at the sport while attending Whittier College (27). More tellingly, the plot of the novel is based on the imagined perfidy of Curt Flood, a baseball player who challenged the reserve clause that bound players to the team that had signed them. This allows Dixon to declare that “I do not know of a better way for our enemies to undermine the youth of this country, than to destroy the game of baseball and all it represents” (98).4

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In GAN, Roth depicts the Soviets attempting to do just this. This builds continuity between the books, supporting Judith Paterson Jones and Guinevera A. Nance’s (1981) argument that these works “made a deadly serious attack on the distortions and perversions inherent in the American myth” (157). The parallels with Roth’s other works extend into the final pages of the novel: Roth acknowledges the more problematic uses of language by his narrator by including several letters purportedly sent from potential publishers in the novel’s epilogue, including one that dubs the book “offensive in the extreme” (GAN 408). The attempted apologia is best seen as part of Roth’s long history of metatextual debate, where voices opposed to Roth are incorporated into his novels—most notably in a scene in 1990’s Deception, in which Roth depicts a character who shares his name imagining himself on trial for misogyny. As David Brauner (2005) notes, this strategy originates in the narrator’s self-critique in Portnoy’s Complaint (43). Despite this, GAN has a disputed place in both critical studies of Philip Roth and studies of baseball fiction: it feels emblematic that Nicholas Dawidoff’s 2003 Baseball: A Literary Anthology, a Library of America compilation of fiction and nonfiction mostly consisting of extracts from prominent works in the field, includes an extract of the more sentimental depiction of the sport taken from Portnoy’s Complaint. While noting that Roth has played a “key [role] in defining the genre” of baseball fiction, Tim Morris (1997) describes the novel as “having been written to get an obsession out of [Roth’s] system” (152), although his Guide to Baseball Fiction argues that the novel “still has a claim to be the great satiric novel of baseball literature” (Morris n.d.). It is this process of reimagining baseball that leads Jerry Klinkowitz (1993) to conclude that “when for a 1973 readership Philip Roth tells the story, it is not the real thing or even a representation of the real thing, but rather a sign of what in baseball lore has become a common transaction” (36). GAN is thus an “anti-baseball novel,” in that it “tak[es] the readerly lore of this sport and us[es] it against itself” (39). This is supported by John Bale’s 2007 analysis, which places Roth “in the demythologising school of American sports fiction” in part through GAN’s critique of heroic narrative, as well as its rejection of sports-based colonialism and scientism (113). This would explain why relatively few recent studies of baseball fiction emphasize GAN. Although the historical specificity of its satire may have prevented the novel from maintaining its place in the canon of baseball fiction, it plays a key role in monographs within the academic field of Baseball Literary Studies. Cordelia Candelaria’s landmark 1989 study Seeking the Perfect Game includes a chapter on the novel, citing its rebuttal of “the dominant right-wing national consensus” (143), and DeeAnne Westbrook’s 1996 Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth has a short but persuasive analysis of GAN in light of its association of mothering with prostitution. The Great American Novel has received little sustained attention from scholars of Philip Roth in recent years. The experimental fictions Roth produced in the years following Portnoy’s Complaint sit awkwardly alongside Roth’s more celebrated work, to the extent that many critics seem primarily motivated to pronounce aesthetic judgment—a situation that Thomas Blues bemoaned as early as 1981 (71). For example, Bernard Rodgers’s (1978) early study of Roth’s work describes Our Gang and GAN as “false steps”: attempts to grapple with contemporary public reality when his skill lay in “private confusions and domestic crises” (122), which bears similarities to Debra Shostak’s (2004) argument that the novel enabled Roth to work through issues around literary influences to create more ambitious metafiction in My Life as a Man (1974) (197). Other analyses of the book by Roth scholars expand an

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understanding of the novel’s purpose: Hermione Lee (1982) draws attention to the political question of authority in the novel, following Roth’s analysis of his own works (61), and Stephen Milowitz (2000) views these works as part of a theme of “[using] America to tell a story about both itself and its European relations” (178). Stephen Wade (1996) describes the novel as being pitched between a mockery of heroic narratives and a sincere commentary on collective myth derived from the outsider position granted to Roth as an American Jew (81). More recent analyses have incorporated the novel into a broader range of thematic and stylistic discussions: for example, David Brauner’s (2007) monograph Philip Roth frequently mentions GAN when analyzing Roth’s oeuvre. However, the scale of Roth’s oeuvre has arguably resulted in a smaller canon of core Roth works to the exclusion of more experimental (and exasperating) works like GAN. For all the proliferation of scholarly work on Roth in the twenty-first century, few scholars have made GAN a focal point: Joshua Daniel-Wariya’s (2012) extended analysis of the novel as “a comic spectacle that reveals the sometimes violent class divisions concealed by baseball’s mythic ethos” (149) is a notable exception. The Great American Novel, as with much of Roth’s work, is in a process of continual critical flux. While a strong body of scholarly work analyzes Roth’s use of sports (particularly the work of John Bale and Carina Staudte, which ranges across Roth’s oeuvre), Roth’s sporting interests have been relatively underexplored in recent studies, providing scope for reevaluating the intertextual dialogue around sports within his work in future studies. Even if such analysis is unlikely to elevate GAN to the forefront of baseball fiction—or even of Roth’s fiction—it will give readers a more complete sense of Roth’s use of sports. For Roth, sports represent a promise that our lives rarely live up to. By paying closer attention to how this promise manifests throughout Roth’s career, readers can form a more complex understanding of Roth’s broader literary project.

NOTES 1. For more information on the reaction to Roth’s change in support, see Garner (2004). 2. While discussion of performance-enhancing drugs and statistical baseball analysis predates Roth’s novel, their rise as major cultural phenomena came later, in the 1980s and the 1990s, respectively. 3. As statistician Richard D. Cramer (2019) argues in a memoir tracing his experiences in baseball analytics, “considering its relation to the phenomenon that baseball analytics has become, [Percentage Baseball] might be metaphorically analogous to Leif Erikson’s voyages or John the Baptist’s prophecies” (26). 4. For a more detailed analysis of the satirical use of baseball in Our Gang, see Briley (2018).

REFERENCES Aarons, Victoria (2013), “‘Just as He’d Feared from the Start’: The Treachery of Desire in Philip Roth’s Nemesis,” in Aimee Pozorski (ed.), Critical Insights: Philip Roth, 220–35, Ipswich, MA: Salem Press. Ardolino, Frank (1989), “‘Hit Sign, Win Suit’: Abraham, Isaac, and the Schwabs Living over the Scoreboard in Roth’s The Great American Novel,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 8 (2): 219–23. Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, London: Jonathan Cape.

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Bale, John (2007), Anti-Sports Sentiments in Literature: Batting for the Opposition, Abingdon-onThames: Routledge. Blues, Thomas (1981), “Is There Life after Baseball? Philip Roth’s ‘The Great American Novel,’” American Studies, 22 (1): 71–80. Brauner, David (2005), “‘Getting Your Retaliation in First’: Narrative Strategies in Portnoy’s Complaint,” in Derek Parker Royal (ed.), Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, 43–57, London: Prager. Brauner, David (2007), Philip Roth, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Briley, Ron (2018), “Philip Roth, Trick E. Dixon, and Curt Flood: Baseball as Satire in the Tradition of Jonathan Swift,” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, 26 (1–2): 142–61. Candelaria, Cordelia (1989), Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature, New York: Greenwood Press. Cramer, Richard D. (2019), When Big Data Was Small: My Life in Baseball Analytics and Drug Design, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cvornyek, Robert L. (2003), Baseball in Newark, Charleston: Arcadia. Daniel-Wariya, Joshua (2012), “Philip Roth’s Comic Corrective,” in Ronald E. Kates and Warren Tormey (eds.), Baseball and Social Class: Essays on the Democratic Game That Isn’t, 148–61, London: McFarland & Company. Dawidoff, Nicholas (2003), Baseball: A Literary Anthology, New York: Library of America. Garner, Dwight (2004), “Inside the List,” The New York Times, October 17. Available online: https:// www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/books/review/inside-the-list.html (accessed February 19, 2023). Jones, Judith Paterson and Guinevera A. Nance (1981), Philip Roth, Frederick Ungar: New York. Klinkowitz, Jerry (1993), “Philip Roth’s Anti-Baseball Novel,” Western Humanities Review, 47 (1): 30–40. Lee, Hermione (1982), Philip Roth, London: Methuen & Co. Milowitz, Steven (2000), Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer, New York: Garland Publishing. Morris, Timothy (1997), Making the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Morris, Tim (n.d.), Guide to Baseball Novels: R. Available online: https://tmorris.utasites.cloud/ baseball/adult/rball.html (accessed February 19, 2023). Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford: Oxford University Press. “Old Ruppert Stadium Headed for Junk Heap” (1952), Schenectady Gazette, October 17: 31. Rodgers, Bernard (1978), Philip Roth, Boston: Twayne Publishers. Rodwan Jr., John G. (2011), “The Fighting Life: Boxing and Identity in Novels by Philip Roth and Norman Mailer,” Philip Roth Studies, 7 (1): 83–96. Roth, Philip (1999a), I Married a Communist, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1999b), Patrimony, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2000), The Professor of Desire, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001), The Human Stain, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2005a), American Pastoral, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2005b), Portnoy’s Complaint, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2006a), Goodbye, Columbus, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2006b), The Great American Novel, London: Jonathan Cape. Roth, Philip (2006c), Our Gang, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2007a), The Facts, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2007b), Reading Myself and Others, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2008), “Philip Guston.” Available online: https://www.pwf.cz/archivy/texts/articles/ philip-guston-by-philip-roth_1560.html (accessed February 19, 2023). Roth, Philip (2010), Nemesis, London: Jonathan Cape. Schiavone, Michele (2004), “The Presence of John R. Tunis’ The Kid from Tomkinsville in Malamud’s The Natural and Roth’s American Pastoral,” Aethlon, 21 (2): 79–85. Shostak, Debra (2004), Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, Charleston: University of South Carolina Press.

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Staudte, Carina (2015), “Athleticism and Masculinity in Roth’s American Trilogy and Exit Ghost,” Philip Roth Studies, 11 (2): 55–66. Tindall, Samuel J. (1989), “‘Flinging a Shot Put’ in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus,” ANQ, 2 (2): 58–60. Wade, Stephen (1996), The Imagination in Transit: The Fiction of Philip Roth, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Westbrook, Deeanne (1996), Ground Rules: Baseball & Myth, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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CHAPTER TEN

Philip Roth and Fine Art DAVID BRAUNER

Fine art was an important point of reference for Philip Roth throughout his life. Growing up as the younger brother of an aspiring artist, Sandy, Roth “would wonderingly ‘debrief’ his brother when he returned from life drawing class at the Art Students League, where he’d been sitting in a room with an actual naked woman—‘of all things, drawing’” (Pierpont 2015: 20).1 Although the phrase “of all things” comically suggests that Roth’s awe at his brother’s experiences had more to do with his exposure to the unadorned female form than with his draughtmanship, it is clear, from his descriptions of the fictionalized version of Sandy who appears in The Plot against America (2004), that Sandy’s technical skills also made a lasting impression, offering a template of sorts for the younger brother who had artistic ambitions of his own. Whereas the real-life Sandy “studied to be a painter at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn” (Pierpont 2015: 20) and went on to have a successful career in advertising before devoting himself to painting for the last two decades of his life, his younger brother Philip dedicated his whole adult life to the art of fiction. Later in life, Roth formed friendships with a number of painters, most notably Philip Guston and R.B. Kitaj. These relationships fed into his work in various ways, from Philip Guston’s illustrations for a special edition of The Breast (1982) and Roth’s essay on Guston in Shop Talk (2001),2 to Roth’s use of Kitaj’s term “diasporism” in Operation Shylock (1993) and parts of the painter’s biography in Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and The Human Stain (2000).3 Conversely, Roth’s work has been important to a number of contemporary artists, most notably Bryan Zanisnik and Bernardo Siciliano.4 Despite these connections between Philip Roth and the visual arts, there has been little scholarship on this subject. Ross Posnock devotes a chapter of his monograph on Roth to the relationship between the author and the painter Philip Guston, but the chapter is more about Guston than Roth and has little to say about Roth’s response to Guston’s art, or anyone else’s, in his own work.5 There have been two essays on The Dying Animal (2001) that deal with Roth’s use of art in that work: Zoe Roth’s “Against Representation: Death, Desire, and Art in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal,” in which she argues persuasively that the novel is “a meditation on how art mediates experiences of desire and death” (Roth 2012: 96), and Francesca D’Alfonso’s “The Dying Animal e la lezione dei maestri,” which discusses how “Roth makes use of literary and pictorial references to create an intense and constantly lively dialogism” (D’Alfonso 2016: 55).6 In this essay, I will explore Roth’s engagement with fine art in his late novel The Dying Animal and in his early novella “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959), arguing that in both cases painting in general, and certain painters and paintings in particular, provides a model for understanding Roth’s own aesthetics.

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Fine art in “Goodbye, Columbus” serves two principal functions: it represents the imaginative possibilities of art, in particular its potential to transcend the banalities and vicissitudes of everyday life; and it contributes to what is arguably the dominant discursive field of the story: that of seeing and being seen, looking and being overlooked. The two central relationships of “Goodbye, Columbus”—between the narrator/protagonist, Neil Klugman, and Brenda Patimkin; and between Neil and the unnamed Black boy who frequents the Newark Public Library, where Neil works—are both framed in terms of visual metaphors. “Goodbye, Columbus” begins by juxtaposing the act of looking with the act of not looking. The opening line of the story—“The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses” (GC 2)—emphasizes that the initial impression Brenda makes on Neil is visual, a point that is reinforced when, in response to his Aunt Gladys’s query “How did you meet her?,” he responds pedantically: “I didn’t really meet her. I saw her” (2). In contrast, “myopic” Brenda archly avoids looking at Neil, firstly handing over her glasses so that her vision becomes blurred (Neil looks at her “looking foggily into the pool”) and then, after reclaiming them, having emerged from the pool with “eyes watery though not from the water” (2), deferring putting them back on “until she turned and headed away” (2). As she does so, Neil “watche[s] her move off” and is aroused when Brenda “caught the bottom of her suit between thumb and index finger and flicked what flesh had been showing back where it belonged” (2). Whether or not Brenda’s “finger … flick[ing] … [her] flesh” is, as Neil implies (partly through the alliterative series of fricatives), a provocative gesture performed for his benefit, what is unmistakable is the contrast between his male gaze, intently following all Brenda’s movements, and Brenda’s studied indifference to Neil’s own appearance. This scene signifies on several different levels. It provides an early example of Brenda’s vanity and of Neil’s instinctive indulgence of it. Brenda’s literal short-sightedness, in common with innumerable other examples of impaired sight or blindness in the Western literary canon, also hints at a moral short-sightedness, a suggestion reinforced when, as Neil picks her up for their first date and watches the end of her tennis match with dusk descending, “all [he] could see in the darkness were her glasses” (GC 7).7 Most importantly, it initiates a discourse of visibility and invisibility that runs throughout the novella. This discourse is related to its representation of race, which is in turn mediated through a network of references to the French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, best known for the work he produced during two prolonged visits to Tahiti (from 1890 to 1893 and from 1895 until his death in 1903). Early in the story, arriving for work at the Newark Public Library, Neil notices a “small colored boy” addressing one of the “pale cement lions” who “stood unconvincing guard on the library steps” (GC 22). Later the same day the boy, whom Neil dubs “the lion tamer” (23), appears inside the building to ask him: “where’s the heart section?” (24). He had the thickest sort of Negro dialect and the only word that came clear to me was the one that sounded like heart. “How do you spell it?” I said. Heart. Man, pictures. Drawing books. Where you got them? “You mean art books? Reproductions?” He took my polysyllabic word for it. “Yea, they’s them.” “In a couple places,” I told him. “Which artist are you interested in?” The black boy’s eyes narrowed so that his whole face seemed black. He started backing away, as he had from the lion. “All of them …” he mumbled. (24)

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The portrait that Neil paints of the boy is clearly affectionate but nonetheless inflected by subtle racism. The boy’s “thick … Negro dialect” is at one level a convenient device for drawing attention to the vexed relationship between morality (“heart”) and aesthetics (“art”), a subject to which Roth would return periodically throughout his career. At the same time, taken in conjunction with the ironic nickname that Neil gives him (“the lion tamer”) and the condescension implicit in Neil’s observation that he “took my polysyllabic word for it,” it suggests that, for Neil, the boy is a native version of the exotic primitive figures who populate Western primitivist art, simultaneously idealized and patronized. Like the lion whom the boy goads (“Man, you’s a coward”) in an attempt to overcome his fear, Neil is a figure of authority who metaphorically guards the entrance to the library’s holdings, a cultural gatekeeper whose questions intimidate and confuse the boy (22). The fact that the boy’s appearance somehow appears to become blacker during this exchange (“his whole face seemed black”), coupled with the fact that he remains unnamed throughout the story, suggests that his role in the story is fundamentally symbolic. But what precisely does he symbolize? The answer is complicated. After Neil directs him to Stack Three, assuring him that he can “go look at whichever ones you want,” the boy hesitates and then sets off, “scuffling and tapping up towards the heart section” (GC 24). Neil’s description of the boy’s movements (redolent of minstrel performers) and his wry reference to “the heart section” are faintly supercilious, but when his colleague, John McKee, makes insinuations about the boy (“He’s been hiding in the art books all morning. You know what those boys do in there … Those are very expensive books”) Neil dismisses his concerns: “People are supposed to touch them” (25). When McKee starts to make racist comments (“They’re taking over the city”) Neil turns his satirical wit on him to expose the absurdity of his prejudices: “Just the Negro sections” (25). Later, Neil decides to seek out the boy, in order to prevent another colleague, Mr. Scapello, from “descend[ing] upon” him with his “chalky fingers” (25), the word “chalky” here suggesting both Scapello’s dusty fustiness and his ethnic whiteness. Neil discovers the boy transfixed by a “print, in color, of three native women standing knee-high in a rose-colored stream” in a “large-sized edition of Gauguin reproductions” (25). While the boy looks at the Gauguin paintings, Neil looks at the boy looking: “He was very black and shiny, and the flesh of his lips did not so much appear to be a different color as it looked to be unfinished and awaiting another coat. The lips were parted, the eyes wide, and even the ears seemed to have a heightened receptivity” (26). Once again, the focus of Neil’s gaze here is the boy’s color, an ambiguous term sometimes used as a synonym for Blackness (as in the initial description of the “small colored boy”) and sometimes as something close to its antonym (as in “his lips did not so much appear to be a different color etc.”). The boy’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression seems to invoke racist iconography, yet for Neil the boy’s Blackness is as much an object of aesthetic fascination as a signifier of racial difference. Just as, in the course of their earlier conversation, Neil becomes fascinated by the way that, in his perception, the Blackness of the boy’s face intensifies as he struggles to clarify the nature of his artistic interests, so here Neil becomes preoccupied by the particularities of pigmentation in the boy’s physiognomy. Neil’s impulse to shield the boy from the hostile scrutiny of his colleagues arises from an instinctive sympathy with his status as a member of a disadvantaged minority group, but it also partakes of paternalism, implicating Neil in a colonial history of exploitation that is the queasy backdrop to Gauguin’s paintings. The story sets up an analogy between the boy’s preoccupation with the exotic figures he sees in Gauguin’s paintings and Neil’s preoccupation with the boy himself, an analogy that is reinforced by the fact that the boy takes on the qualities of an “unfinished” painting. At

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the same time, there is an implicit correspondence between Neil and Gauguin: just as the artist arguably objectifies and idealizes the Tahitian women who populate the paintings that entrance the boy in the library, so Neil arguably fetishizes the boy’s appearance, painting his own portrait of him as an exotic other. In the symbolic imaginary of “Goodbye, Columbus,” then, the boy represents both the inner-city deprivation that led, eight years after the story’s publication, to the Newark race riots and a type of noble savage, whose innocent, wholehearted appreciation of the beauty of fine art stands in opposition to the superficial materialism of the Patimkins. Neil has one foot in, and ultimately has to choose between, these two worlds with their contrasting values. His exposure to Gauguin—looking at the pictures through the awed eyes of the boy—changes the way that he looks at the world around him. At first, he associates Short Hills, the suburb where the Patimkins live, with the idealized world of Gauguin’s Tahiti: “I sat at the Information Desk thinking about Brenda and reminding myself that that evening I would [drive to] … Short Hills, which I could see now, in my mind’s eye, at dusk, rosecolored, like a Gauguin stream” (GC 27). Yet as he spends more time there, it comes to represent everything that is inimical to Gauguin’s Edenic vision. Whereas the trees in Gauguin’s Tahiti are lush and laden with fruit, those in the Patimkins’ garden are weighed down with sporting goods. Whereas the “native women” in Gauguin’s paintings are in, and of, a state of nature, entirely unselfconscious, Brenda self-consciously cultivates her beauty, posing to best advantage. The family portraits that adorn the walls of the study in the Patimkin home are “photo-paintings” that represent their subjects with “bud-cheeks, wet lips, pearly teeth, and shiny, metallized hair” (28), their synthetic qualities contrasting with the post-impressionist painterliness of Gauguin’s work. Ultimately, Neil’s encounter with the boy, and more specifically with the boy’s encounter with Gauguin, functions as a sort of epiphany, particularly if we read “Goodbye, Columbus” as a Bildungsroman in the tradition of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). As the boy becomes a regular visitor to the library, returning again and again to look at Gauguin, Neil tries to nourish the boy’s enthusiasm, first by encouraging him to take the book out on loan (the boy tells him that he doesn’t want to, lest “somebody dee-stroy it”) (GC 42) and then by lying to a man who wants to take the book out (claiming that it is already out on loan). In the early stages of the novella there are a number of references to Neil’s vision being temporarily impaired: while sunbathing with Brenda “the colors splintered under [his] closed eyelids” (12); and when he is playing basketball with Brenda’s younger sister, Julie, he falls into “one of those instantaneous waking dreams that … send … deadly cataracts over my eyes” (19). However, the novella ends with a moment of clarity, again framed in terms of looking and seeing. Neil stares at his own reflection in the window of the Lamont Library, “look[ing] hard at the image of me, at that darkening of the glass, until my gaze pushed through it … to a broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved,” before taking a train back to Newark to ensure that he is “back in plenty of time for work” (97). Rejecting Brenda and the Patimkin family fortune that an alliance with her would have entailed, Neil instead chooses to identify himself with books and all that they represent. Instead of the shiny surfaces and sterile orderliness of the Patimkins, Neil opts for the rich, jagged messiness of art, as signified by the “broken wall” of “imperfectly shelved” books; rather than a life of leisure, Neil commits himself to “work” (the final word of the novel), both in the context of his job at the library and in the context of a (subtly suggested) future as a writer. In this respect, Neil provides the template for many of the artist/intellectual protagonists of Roth’s

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later fiction, including David Kepesh in The Dying Animal, the work in which Roth engages most explicitly with the visual arts. On the face of it, The Dying Animal has little in common with “Goodbye, Columbus.” Written more than four decades later, the third in a loose trilogy of fictions sharing Kepesh as a protagonist (after The Breast [1972] and The Professor of Desire [1977]), The Dying Animal focuses on the aging Kepesh’s erotic obsession with one of his former students. Formally, it has more in common with Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) than “Goodbye, Columbus”: like the former, the narrative is addressed to a mysterious interlocutor who remains silent until the final line of the book.8 Whereas the analyst Dr. Spielvogel’s belated intervention takes the form of a punchline to a joke (“Now vee may perhaps to begin?” he offers in broken English, at the end of Portnoy’s lengthy, no-holds-barred confessional monologue [PC 274]), the unnamed addressee of The Dying Animal issues Kepesh with a stark warning: “Think about it. Think. Because if you go, you’re finished” (DA 156). This is a response to Kepesh’s announcement that he intends to go to the bedside of his former student and lover, Consuela Castillo, who is due to have a mastectomy. In rushing to the hospital, Kepesh is reneging on his long-standing resolution not to become emotionally involved with any of his sexual partners, so that the primary meaning of his friend’s prophecy that to do so would mean that he is “finished” refers to Kepesh’s decision to abandon his credo of “emancipated manhood” (112). Yet it also carries a hint that to commit to this relationship will also be the end of him in a more literal sense—that he, rather than, or perhaps together with, the cancerous Consuela, is the dying animal of the title.9 Then again, in existential terms, however, we are all dying animals, and it is this recognition that is at the heart of the novel’s engagement with art. The Dying Animal is suffused with references to fine art—sculpture and painting—to an extent singular in Roth’s oeuvre.10 These references almost invariably cluster around the figure (in both senses of that word) of Consuela: in this respect, there are interesting parallels between the representation of the Black boy in “Goodbye, Columbus” and the representation of the second-generation Cuban immigrant with whom Kepesh becomes obsessed. Just as Neil both looks at art through the Black boy’s eyes and describes him as though he were himself a work of art, so Kepesh participates sympathetically in Consuela’s discovery of art and also objectifies her, reifying his aesthetic theories in the form of her form. Early on, he reflects on her engagement with modern art: She … finds the impressionists ravishing but must look long and hard—and always with a nagging sense of confoundment—at cubist Picasso … Art that smacks of modernity leaves her not merely puzzled but disappointed in herself. She would love Picasso to matter more, perhaps to transform her, but there’s a scrim drawn across the proscenium of genius that obscures her vision and keeps her worshipping at a bit of a distance. She gives to art, to all of art, far more than she gets back, a sort of earnestness that isn’t without its poignant appeal. (DA 4–5) Like Neil witnessing the boy’s enthusiasm for Gauguin, Kepesh is charmed, and loftily amused, by the spectacle of a young person discovering art for the first time (Kepesh’s patronizing judgment that Consuela’s “earnestness … isn’t without its poignant appeal” recalls Neil’s condescending characterization of the boy’s naïve enthusiasm for “heart”). Because she is older and has more formal education than the boy, Consuela’s responses to art are ambivalent,

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or at least are represented ambivalently by Kepesh: she “finds the impressionists ravishing” (a suggestive adjective) but struggles to appreciate Picasso, yearning for an epiphany that remains elusive. The metaphor that Kepesh uses to describe the “distance” that prevents Consuela from fully communing with art that “smacks of modernity” is instructive: he represents Picasso as a performer whose “genius” is obscured from Consuela’s gaze in spite, or perhaps because, of the “earnestness” with which she attempts to penetrate the veil by “look[ing] long and hard” (in contrast to the way that Neil’s “looking hard” at the end of “Goodbye, Columbus” results in a revelation). Kepesh’s characterization of Consuela arguably says more about (the limitations of) his own vision than Consuela’s. For Kepesh, Consuela can never truly appreciate art because her function is to inspire his art (this is, I think, the implication of the otherwise obscure qualification “to all of art” in the final line of the passage above). Rather than representing her as a conventional muse, however, Kepesh insists that she is herself the work of art. At the same time, she attains this status only through the authority of his critical judgment. [T]o get to hear me say “Look at you,” as though she herself were a Picasso, she had merely to undress and stand there. I … the Sunday morning PBS aesthetician, New York television’s reigning authority on what is the current best to see, hear and read—I had pronounced her a great work of art, with all the magical influence of a great work of art. Not the artist but the work of art itself. (DA 37) Here it is Consuela who becomes the performer and Kepesh the audience for the performance. Kepesh insists that she is “[n]ot the artist but the work of art itself” (37), but this does not entirely resolve the ambiguity of the earlier phrase “as though she herself were a Picasso,” which might mean either that she resembles a work by Picasso or that she has become an artist like Picasso. There is a note of self-satire in Kepesh’s characterization of himself as “New York television’s reigning authority” on culture, but at the same time an earnestness reminiscent of the one he attributes to Consuela in his invocation of “the magical influence of a great work of art.” Moreover, he claims that other male admirers of Consuela share this perception of her: “[Carlos] too knows she is a work of art” (46). All this begs the question of who has the power here. Is it Consuela, who has “merely” to strip to elicit Kepesh’s adoration, or is it Kepesh, who invests her with this power through the authority of his gaze, which he instructs her to internalize: “Look at you”? Does Consuela exert a “magical influence” over Kepesh or does he confer this influence on her, depriving her of any real agency by mystifying and objectifying her? In one sense, The Dying Animal might be read as an exemplary case study for Laura Mulvey’s (1975) concept of the “male gaze.” Yet it also might be seen as an implicit subversion of the male gaze. Given his status as a cultural critic, it’s hard not to see an allusion to the title of Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” when Kepesh announces, with reference to his enjoyment of looking at Miranda, one of Consuela’s predecessors: “Just the pleasure of looking was lovely” (DA 8).11 Similarly, in the light of Mulvey’s (1975) observations on how female characters in film are “stylized and fragmented” (14) through the camera’s focus on legs, breasts, and other aspects of actresses’ anatomy, Kepesh’s unapologetic fetishizing of Consuela’s breasts seems to be a self-conscious provocation (it also seems to carry a hidden trace of The Breast, in which Kepesh himself is transformed into a massive mammary gland,

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becoming the object of voyeuristic scrutiny). He also eulogizes Consuela’s vagina, claiming that “Schiele would have given his eyeteeth to paint it. Picasso would have turned it into a guitar” (103). Yet he is simultaneously at pains to explain that the parts are not greater than the whole: “All of her was something to watch” (103–4). Moreover, by repeatedly framing female beauty in terms of the canon of fine art, rather than the cinematic tradition, Kepesh seeks to transcend the voyeur/object of desire dynamic. Kepesh’s allusions to fine art extend beyond Consuela to encompass his other lovers: he compares Miranda to “an incipiently transgressive Balthus virgin” (DA 7),12 and claims that the “monumentality at the base sustaining [the] slender torso” of Caroline Lyons, a former mistress with whom he resumes sexual relations at the same time as he is seeing Consuela, makes him feel “as though I were Gaston Lachaise” (70).13 However, Consuela is the main locus of these references. Sometimes Kepesh invokes modern sculptors to characterize Consuela. In his first description of her he refers to her “polished forehead of a smooth Brâncuși14 elegance” (3); later, he claims that she resembles “a work of idealized sculptural art … like a Maillol” (124).15 Mostly, however, he situates his aesthetic appreciation of her in the classic European tradition of painting. On her first visit to his apartment, Kepesh tells Consuela that “[t]here must [be] a duchess looking like you on the walls of the Prado” before picking out from his library “a large book of Velázquez reproductions” which the two of them peruse, sitting “side by side … [for] a stirring quarter hour” (DA 14–5). Whereas Neil in “Goodbye, Columbus” uses his position as a cultural gatekeeper to provide access to European art for the young boy to whom it is as alluringly exotic as the South Sea islanders were to Gauguin, Kepesh uses his position of cultural authority to encourage Consuela to see herself in the Western canon, thereby implicitly granting himself access to her. To put it more crudely, he uses art here as a kind of foreplay: watching Consuela’s excitement at encountering Velázquez “for the first time,” Kepesh gives himself over to the “delightful imbecility of lust” (15). At the same time, the fact that they “turn … the pages” of the book together, participating in a collaborative act of looking, means that this is not simply the exploitation of a (former) student by her (former) teacher (15). A similar juxtaposition between high art and carnality is invoked when, at Kepesh’s invitation, Consuela presents herself menstruating as a spectacle for her lover’s scopophilic pleasure: “Consuela pulled out her tampon and stood there in my bathroom, with one knee dipping toward the other and, like Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian, bleeding in a trickle down her thighs while I watched” (DA 71). On the one hand, Consuela seems here to subject herself passively to Kepesh’s desires. On the other hand, as was the case when she undressed herself in the earlier scene, her self-possession and the element of self-conscious performance complicate the dynamic between the lovers. As this scene develops, Kepesh himself adopts a submissive position, literally (going down on his knees to “lick her clean” [72]) and figuratively (he feels “intimidat[ed]” and “humbled” [71–2]). While Kepesh ignominiously prostrates himself “at her feet,” kneeling “on the floor,” Consuela maintains a “statuesque equanimity” (73). The power relations between Kepesh and Consuela become even more ambiguous in two key episodes in the novel that both revolve around detailed ekphrastic descriptions of two paintings. The first of these is initiated by Consuela, who, months after the end of their affair, sends Kepesh “a postcard (a Modigliani nude from the Modern)” with a note thanking him for a letter of recommendation, which helps her secure a job in advertising (DA 97).16

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Kepesh convinces himself that the choice of the Modigliani is a coded invitation to resume the affair, reading the nude as a symbolic self-portrait: the cylindrical stalk of a waist, the wide pelvic span, and the gently curving thighs … the patch of flame that is the hair that marks the spot where she is forked … the trademark Modigliani nude, the accessible, elongated dream girl he ritualistically painted …. A nude whose breasts, full and canting a bit to the side, might well have been modelled on her [Consuela’s] own. A nude represented with her eyes closed, defended, like Consuela, by nothing other than her erotic power, at once, like Consuela, elemental and elegant. A golden-skinned nude inexplicably asleep over a velvety black abyss that … I associated with the grave. One long, undulating line, she lies there awaiting you, still as death. (98) This passage begins with a lyrical description of the nude that emphasizes her eroticism and resemblance to Consuela, but the use of the word “forked” introduces a note of tension, denoting the bifurcation of the lower half of the model’s body but also hinting (through its status as a near-homonym for “fucked”) at her vulnerability. Similarly, the term “accessible,” in the following line, might be understood both as a descriptor for the ease with which viewers of the painting might apprehend its subject and as a reference to its subject’s defenselessness. That defenselessness seems at first to be situated in the context of a potential sexual threat that she would be ill-equipped to repel, but the final two lines of the passage radically redefine the painting: instead of a celebration of the male gaze objectifying an oblivious woman into an erotic fantasy of sexual availability, it becomes an ominous portent of death, a memento mori in which the “black abyss” gaping beneath the woman’s torso resembles a grave and the woman’s closed eyes signify neither resignation nor unconsciousness, but the eternal sleep of death. On the narrative level, this shift in emphasis anticipates how Consuela’s diagnosis of cancer transforms her from a symbol of Eros to Thanatos. Just as the Modigliani nude seems to represent the threat of mortality for the viewer as much as for the subject of the painting (“she lies there awaiting you, still as death” [emphasis added]), so Consuela comes to represent the inevitability of death for Kepesh. More radically, there is a suggestion here that the male gaze itself is nothing more than a (futile) attempt to stave off intimations of mortality, a self-deluding celebration of the beauty of the female body and of the heterosexual male desire for it that is in denial of the withering of both the desired and desiring flesh. This Freudian subtext becomes more clearly legible in Kepesh’s discussion of the twentiethcentury British artist Stanley Spencer’s painting, “Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife” (1937): Spencer is seated, squatting, beside the recumbent wife. He is looking ruminatively down at her from close range through his wire-rimmed glasses. We, in turn, are looking at them from close range: two naked bodies right in our faces, the better for us to see how they are no longer young and attractive … For the wife, particularly, everything has begun to slacken, to thicken, and greater rigors than striating flesh are to come …. You could be looking through the butcher’s window, not just at the meat but at the sexual anatomy of the married couple.17 Every time I think of Consuela, I envision that

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raw leg of lamb shaped like a primitive club beside the blatantly exhibited bodies of this husband and wife. (143) There are multiple ironies in Kepesh’s (mis)reading of the painting. While Kepesh emphasizes Spencer’s unflinching gaze and uncompromising representation of decaying flesh (“two naked bodies right in our faces”), he himself becomes uncharacteristically coy when faced with the invocation of death here (referring euphemistically to “greater rigors than striating flesh”). Similarly, he draws attention to the complex chain of looking that the painting initiates: the viewer of the painting looks at the self-portrait of Spencer looking at his second wife, Patricia Preece. Yet there is more going on here. First, Kepesh does not discuss Patricia’s own gaze, which is directed somewhere beyond the frame of the painting. Unlike the quiescent generic Modigliani nude, Preece is fully aware of her surroundings and arguably resists objectification, refusing to meet the eye of Spencer or the viewer and exuding an air of self-possession and detached indifference. In contrast to her relaxed, languid posture, the Spencer of the painting crouches awkwardly, with a strained intensity, his head bent and body bowed in submission like a penitent pilgrim before a shrine. Whereas a slight smile plays on Preece’s lips, Spencer’s expression seems weary and dejected; while Preece seems entirely at ease, Spencer appears to be disgusted with himself. Moreover, the portrait of Spencer is cropped so that only one of his eyes is visible, making it unclear where his gaze is directed: is it at Preece, as Kepesh assumes, or is it at his own flaccid phallus, which rests impotently at the right side of Patricia’s stomach, rather than between her parted legs, where it might promise potential coitus? You don’t have to know anything about Preece’s sexuality and her troubled marriage to Spencer to sense where the power in this painting lies, but it would be odd, given his obvious interest in the painting, if Roth himself hadn’t known something of its context.18 Whether or not there is an ironic distance between Roth and his narrator, Kepesh clearly misreads the painting when he suggests that it is Patricia, “particularly,” for whom a fate worse than “striating flesh” awaits. In fact, this is a portrait of frustrated male desire, and it is primarily Spencer—whose flesh has a grey pallor, in contrast to the warmer, orange hue of Preece’s body—for whom the leg of lamb in the foreground is a fatal portent. Kepesh explicitly associates Consuela with the leg of lamb, but there is also an implicit analogy between Preece’s “striating flesh” and the malignant tumor destroying Consuela’s flesh. However, the more compelling analogy at this stage of the novel is between Spencer and Kepesh—both are impotent voyeurs, able only to look at the object of their desire. When Consuela receives her diagnosis, she asks Kepesh, the great idolater of her body, to worship once more at her shrine, posing for a series of photographs so that he can preserve the beauty of her breasts. She allows him to touch her breasts but no more: she doesn’t, she insists, “want anything sexual” (DA 129). Like Preece, who displays her body for her artist husband but withholds the sexual pleasure that it promises from him, Consuela exposes herself knowingly to Kepesh’s male gaze as a way of affirming her own erotic power, before which Kepesh is powerless. As Zoe Roth (2012) suggests, “[t]he ‘dying animal’ is not … Consuela, but Kepesh” (100); or rather, Consuela is a dying animal, but Kepesh is the dying animal. If “Goodbye, Columbus” is a portrait of the artist as a young man that invokes painting (specifically Gauguin’s exotic vision of a prelapsarian state of pristine beauty) as a model for the transcendent power of art, The Dying Animal is a portrait of the artist as an aging

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man that engages in a dialogue with fine art (particularly Spencer’s double nude portrait) to represent what Kepesh calls the “wound of age” that is fatal to all human animals. Ultimately, however, these two visions of art are not necessarily incompatible: artists and their subjects must die, but through art itself they live on.

NOTES 1. There was another painter in the Roth family, too: an uncle on the maternal side “whose canvases had pride of place in the Roth household, right along with a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence,” according to Claudia Roth Pierpont (2015: 20). 2. Entitled “Pictures by Guston,” it is partly an essay about the trajectory of Guston’s career, partly about the friendship between the men and the collaboration on The Breast that was born of it, and partly about a shared aesthetic: “each of us had begun to consider crapola [Guston’s term for Americana] not only as a curious subject with strong suggestive powers to which we had a native affinity but as potentially a tool in itself” (ShT 135). For Roth, this interest in the iconography of popular culture was primarily a way of facilitating a process of what he calls “self-subversion” (135) and relatively short-lived, whereas for Guston it was central to his life’s work after his turn away from abstract expressionism. 3. Pierpont dismisses the possibility that Kitaj’s art had any influence on Roth, claiming that “[h]e had little feeling for Kitaj’s painting, and Kitaj’s frequent Jewish subject matter did not reflect the kind of Jewishness that was meaningful to Roth” (191). Yet Kitaj’s invention of Joe Singer, an avatar of the artist who appears in a number of his paintings of the 1970s and 1980s (“The Jew etc.” [1976], “The Listener (Joe Singer in Hiding)” [1980], “The Jewish Rider” [1984–5]) seems to me to anticipate Roth’s use of Nathan Zuckerman as an authorial alter ego, beginning in the late 1970s. Kitaj also produced a self-portrait “as Mickey Sabbath” and drew a number of portraits of Roth. Burton Silverman, another near-contemporary of Roth’s, also produced a pencil portrait of the author when he visited him at his Connecticut home in 1983. 4. Zanisnik has mounted two exhibitions engaging with Roth’s work: “Every Inch a Man” (2012) and the “Philip Roth Presidential Library” (2016, 2017). Siciliano’s exhibition, “American Pastoral,” held at the Aicon Gallery in New York in 2021, was named after and partly inspired by Roth’s novel of the same name. For an excellent account of Zanisnik’s engagement with Roth, see Shostak (2021). 5. See Posnock (2006: 236–59). In this chapter (“The Two Philips”), Posnock twice quotes Roth’s claim that his novel The Ghost Writer (1979) “had a lot to do with Philip [Guston]” (249, 256) but offers little in the way of elucidation beyond a sketchy hypothesis that Lonoff and Anne Frank (Amy Bellette) might both have been inspired by different facets of Guston’s art and a rather vague assertion that the novel “honors what Guston achieved coincident with his friendship with Roth—a counterself that was the condition for renovating his art” (257). 6. I agree with much of Roth’s argument, but whereas she claims that her namesake’s representation of Consuela “resists the objectification of women” (Roth 2012: 96), I suggest that it both indulges in and subverts this process of objectification, and whereas she suggests that “[d]esire and art … allow Kepesh to experience death vicariously, to separate himself from his own mortality while enjoying the erotic spectacle” (99), I argue that the erotic spectacle implicates Kepesh in a dynamic of looking that emasculates him, confronting him with the impossibility of separating himself from his own mortality. D’Alfonso’s article is published in Italian and therefore not entirely accessible to me, but her abstract is available in English and summarizes her argument that “the paradigm of mortality (Yeats, Kafka, ecc.) is connected to the subject of the nude and flesh in painting (Modigliani, Spencer, ecc.) which are seen as a metamorphosis that leads to death” (D’Alfonso 2016: 55).

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7. In Roth’s own oeuvre, perhaps the most striking instance of this trope occurs near the end of American Pastoral (1997), when Lou Levov is nearly blinded after his well-meaning but patronizing attempts to feed a drunken Jessie Orcutt are cut short by her stabbing him with her fork. Many thanks to Aimee Pozorski, for reminding me of this. 8. The only information we are given as to the identity of this mysterious “you” is that they “are of the current age” (DA 113). 9. This suggestion is of course implicit in the context of the phrase itself, taken from Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928), which explores the struggle of the aging (male) artist to remain vital. 10. These references extend to the activities of Kepesh’s family: his son, Kenny, “runs a little company that restores damaged works of art” (DA 77). 11. Even in a pre-#MeToo era, Kepesh feels obliged to exercise a degree of restraint, or at least circumspection, in his dealings with his female students, noting that “I haven’t broken this rule [not to make any sexual advances until his students have completed his course] since, back in the mid-eighties, the phone number of the sexual harassment hotline was first posted outside my office door” (DA 5). Nonetheless, Kepesh’s son, Kenny, expresses indignation at his father’s practice of “[s]educing defenceless students” (90). 12. The invocation of Balthus is another provocation, given the controversial nature of the PolishFrench painter’s representation of pubescent girls. Kepesh milks the analogy, repeating the allusion twice more in the passage that follows: “All evening long, much like a young girl escaped from the perilous melodrama of a Balthus painting into the fun of the class party, Miranda had been on all fours with her rump raised … or lounging gleefully across the arms of an easy chair seemingly oblivious of the fact that with her skirt riding up her thighs and her legs undecorously parted she had the Balthusian air of being half undressed while fully clothed” (DA 7–8). 13. Lachaise was a French sculptor best known for his female nudes. 14. Constantin Brâncuși was one of the most influential sculptors of the twentieth century. 15. Aristide Maillol was a French sculptor and painter who worked in the latter half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, focusing on the female form. 16. Although it is unnamed in the novel, readers of the first US and UK editions will infer the painting to be “Reclining Nude” (1919), since it is reproduced on the front of the dustjacket. 17. There is an echo of Kepesh’s reference to the butcher’s window here later in the novel, when Consuela tells him that the doctor in charge of her cancer treatment is “not a butcher” (DA 132). I wonder if there is also a buried allusion to a piece that Roth wrote for the New York Times Review of Books, in which he referred to the imagination of the novelist as a “butcher” (Roth 1988). 18. Preece was a lesbian who continued her premarital relationship with another artist, Dorothy Hepworth, during her marriage to Spencer, refusing to have sexual relations with her husband. It seems to me that it might be Hepworth to whom Preece is directing her gaze and implicitly offering herself.

REFERENCES D’Alfonso, Francesca (2016), “The Dying Animal e la lezione dei maestri,” Merope, 64: 55–78. Mulvey, Laura (1975), “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16 (3): 6–18. Pierpont, Claudia Roth (2015), Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, London: Vintage. Posnock, Ross (2006), Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roth, Philip (1970), Goodbye, Columbus, New York: Bantam.

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Roth, Philip (1988), “That Butcher, Imagination: Beware of Your Life When a Writer’s at Work,” New York Times Book Review, February 14. Available online: http://infoweb.newsbank.com (accessed May 20, 2022). Roth, Philip (2001a), The Dying Animal, London: Cape. Roth, Philip (2001b), Shop Talk, London: Cape. Roth, Philip (2005), Portnoy’s Complaint, London: Vintage. Roth, Zoe (2012), “Against Representation: Death, Desire, and Art in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal,” Philip Roth Studies, 8 (1): 95–100. Shostak, Debra (2021), “Representing ‘Roth,’” Revue Francaise d’etudes americaines, 166: 75–91.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Roth and Religion: Nemesis, or Roth’s Quarrel with God TIMOTHY PARRISH

At the end of his career, Philip Roth did something extraordinary. He offered peace, in his peculiar way, to his literary enemies, that is to say, the Jews. To those religious Jews who read his early stories and, in his mind, effectively accused him of collaborating with Nazis after the fact, Roth left an offering (RMO 205–6). He called it Nemesis (2010), and then he quit writing. For perhaps the first time in his fiction, there are no Jews mortally at odds with Roth’s Jewish protagonist. It is a communal story, one where the community, even when it argues, is united, and religion exists in the novel not as antiquated rituals for satire but as a binding force from which the protagonist is sadly, and arguably tragically, excluded. The Jews depicted range from the devout to the avowedly secular and Roth portrays their views without judgment. In his last novel, Judaism as a living cultural practice is portrayed as being more powerful than the hero’s revolt against it. If we read Bucky Cantor in terms of Roth’s career, the novel may portray the terrible cost Roth paid to have broken with the religious traditions of Jews and seems to acknowledge that his persistent, career-long need to mock the piety of believing Jews earned him nothing but bitterness and grief. For no reason other than his own spitefulness about his self, Bucky Cantor removes himself from his fellow Jews—not because the religious Jews are provincial or narrow-minded but because the hero is so broken he cannot accept their love. It is possibly the truest story Roth ever wrote about his relationship with his tribe, and it only makes sense if we understand that here Roth is explicitly writing from within a Judaic tradition. In Nemesis, Roth writes not as an American or as an exemplar of the enlightenment, but as a Jew who grew up as a Jew and who experiences alienation from the community as the most terrible form of isolation. To fully understand Roth’s gesture, we need to consider how Nemesis completes the arc of his career by engaging its beginnings. In retrospect, it is easy to see how Roth’s early stories angered some of the Jewish community, particularly orthodox rabbis. Stories such as “Defender of the Faith,” “The Conversion of the Jews,” and “Eli, the Fanatic,” all from his first book, Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories (1959), portray American Jewish communities at odds with themselves. At the heart of “Eli, the Fanatic” is the premise that American Jews are both indifferent to and embarrassed by other Jews, among them Holocaust survivors. In the story’s brilliant conclusion, the secular Eli takes on the grief and contradictions of the community by donning the suit that invokes the heritage of Judaism going back through the Holocaust all the way to ancient days. However, this gesture of contrition is singular in Roth’s fiction. Combat is the prevailing plot line. Bucky Cantor’s story may be said to

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begin with “The Conversion of the Jews” when the adolescent Ozzie Freedman questions the “chosenness” of Judaism and is physically punished as a consequence. At the outset of his career, religious Jewish readers were aggrieved with Roth not only for his portrayal of Jews and Judaism, but for writing these stories in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. As Hartmut Heep (2022) points out, the most devastating message of Ozzie’s revolt against Rabbi Binder is less that a child resists the demands of adults than that Roth portrays that the future of Judaism is at stake (39). Ozzie, a child, does not speak as an adult Jew, or even, technically, a Jew initiated into the community. He may not know about the Holocaust, but Roth readers do, and in this respect the story is either an urgent response to its historical moment or tone-deaf. As Roth’s career developed, his plots depended more on resisting the points of view of other Jews than they did warning Jews against the danger of cultural annihilation. Whether it’s Zuckerman in The Counterlife (1986) mocking those at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall for being rock worshippers or the character Philip Roth in Operation Shylock (1993) venturing to Israel not to make aliyah but simply to regain the authority of his own name, the revolt Ozzie stages is one Roth perpetually enacted in his fiction. Roth’s Ozzie became Zuckerman, Kepesh, Roth, and Mickey Sabbath, all of them defiant to the point of deviance. His last, and perhaps most lasting turn, was as Bucky Cantor—a character disabled and disfigured by his rejection of the community’s values. As we shall see, Nemesis reveals the terrible cost that Roth paid for a perpetual adolescent rebellion that began with the stories that first brought him to national attention. If conservative Jews symbolically struck the author for having written stories collected in Goodbye, Columbus, Roth perhaps relished such attacks because it gave him the chance to present himself to his audience as a Joycean artist aggrieved by the provinciality of his origins. In “Writing About Jews,” Roth suggests that his orthodox Jewish critics are bad readers because they read him not for his art but to worry “what will the goyim think” (RMO 212). The truth is, Roth himself cared deeply about what the goyim thought. He wanted their approbation as a serious modernist artist. This orchestrated triangulation between himself, the rabbis, and the educated literary reader gave Roth, in short, a chance to treat Judaism as a shackle he had thrown off—an artistic chastity belt unsuited for his puissant masculine Jewish-American artistry. And with this freedom Roth created his increasingly defiant Jewish heroes beginning with Ozzie and Alexander Portnoy and culminating in the amateur pornographer and sexual stalker, Mickey Sabbath, who is perhaps the climax of the attack on Judaism present in Roth’s early stories. Identifying himself with Mickey Sabbath, as Roth has done, and using “Sabbath” as his character’s surname, is obviously a violation and form of defilement. As a joke on Judaism, it surely would have made Ozzie Freedman laugh. The stories collected in Goodbye, Columbus predicted and encapsulated the themes of his oeuvre: Jews fighting with Jews over the kind of Jew Roth’s protagonist is. In his 1988 memoir, The Facts, he proclaims “to have been astonished as I was at twenty-six when I found myself up against the most antagonistic social opposition of my life” and that this came “not from gentiles” but from “angry and middle-class and establishment Jews, and a number of eminent rabbis, accusing me of being anti-Semitic and self-hating” (113). Discounting criticism a gentile might receive for using the vague phrase, “establishment Jews,” one wonders which establishment he means, Yeshiva College, where he gave an early version of his 1963 essay, “Imagining Jews,” or any minyan at that time praying for one who wrote a story with the premise that American Jews were indifferent to Holocaust survivors. In “Imagining Jews,” he refers to “letters from readers,” “a number of them Jews,” accusing him “of being antiSemitic and ‘self-hating,’” who “argue or imply that the sufferings of Jews throughout history,

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culminating in the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, have made certain criticisms of Jewish life insulting and trivial” (RMO 205). The language from 1963 is consistent with the language of 1988, although by then his fights with Jews were mostly forgotten news to everyone except Roth who apparently felt that when he had raised these accusations twentyfive years earlier no one had listened. In 1972, Irving Howe, Roth’s most prominent Jewish critic, used Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Roth’s best-selling novel concerning the Jewish male whose American Jewish family life has made him a chronic masturbator, as an excuse to wash his hands of Roth. The learned Howe (1986) said Roth possessed “a thin personal culture” (79). Howe’s judgment, however, was wrong—Roth’s family had given him a tremendous cultural inheritance, the gift of Judaism. Roth’s fiction would not exist or possess the edge it carries without Judaism and Roth’s uneasy relationship with it. Howe’s criticism implied that Roth was a Jew who didn’t care about being a Jew. But Roth cared deeply about being a Jew—so much so that he refused to allow any Judaic ritual to be employed at his funeral. I am not being ironic. By making his refusal to be buried a Jew into the headline for his entry into the afterlife, he continued his battle against Judaism into eternity. His conflict with Jews has neither been his refusal to be a Jew nor be a Jew distinct from other Jews, but his denial of Judaism’s continuing existence in a chain of ritual unbroken since ancient time is always the heart, the black heart one might say, of his work. This fact has been hard to see because so much of his career has been seen as Roth’s fight to preserve his autonomy as Philip Roth, a free-born American individual, but this fight is inconceivable without his antagonist, whom Roth most clearly portrayed as the displaced person Eli’s Jewish community asks Eli to remove from their midst. Like Nemesis, which is ostensibly set in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, during the 1944 polio epidemic, “Eli, the Fanatic” also takes place in a terrifying, empty space wherein Roth imagines a confrontation between an ancient-seeming Jew and a modern Jew. The ancient Jew, dressed in the atavistic clothing of the Hasidim, with his “round-topped, wide-brimmed Talmudic hat,” beard, and his side-curls, is nonetheless disturbingly modern (GC 267). He has just survived a world-historical event, the Holocaust. The modern Jew, the lawyer Eli Peck, has survived nothing but his comfortable childhood. The sudden appearance of this un-modern Jew has disturbed the Jewish community. Eli has been asked to persuade these Jews to move elsewhere—as if they were unwelcome vagrants and not fellow Jews who have endured a traumatic event predicated on the fact that they were Jews. What bothers Eli’s community is not the trauma that brought them to their community but their manner of being Jews. They practice a form of Judaism the modern Jews imagine that they have abandoned. The community wants Eli to persuade them to leave in part because they do not want to be associated with that older form of worship. They evoke both the Holocaust and a longer Judaic history unassimilable to American modernity. The community puts Eli into an impossible position: to be the link between modern and ancient Jewish identity in the wake of the Holocaust. He suffers a mental breakdown. The story ends with him, beardless and without side curls, wearing the suit of the man whose dress has so affronted the community. In the hospital where his child is being born, Eli, called “Rabbi” by the hospital attendant, finds himself drugged, but the medication “did not touch down where the blackness had reached” (313). Eli’s mental breakdown possibly reflects Roth’s own trauma as a Jewish writer whenever his fiction runs up against two realities his fiction cannot erase: the history of Judaism and the fact of the Holocaust. Yet, that blackness is the dark hole from which his fiction seemed to perpetually spring.

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Roth’s success as a novelist depended largely on making his fiction about the plight of one Jew attacked or misunderstood by his “family,” the Jews, instead of the Jewish community that gave this character his identity. Like Ozzie in “The Conversion of the Jews,” Roth prefers to say his life began as an American, not a Jew. In “Conversion,” Ozzie asks the Rabbi how the Jews can be “chosen” when everyone knows Thomas Jefferson said all men were created equal (153). In the story, Ozzie’s question is that of a precocious adolescent. In Roth’s oeuvre, however, it’s the writer’s basic assumption. Thus, in a 2014 interview, he notes that “the American republic is 238 years old” and his “family has been here for 120 years or more than half of America’s existence,” having “arrived during the second term of President Grover Cleveland” and were contemporaries of Mark Twain (WW 376). What Roth fails to mention is that his efforts to work out a family history in fiction, specifically “Eli, the Fanatic,” “Defender of the Faith,” and “The Conversion of the Jews,” literally define the boundaries of his imagination in terms of an inner Judaic chasm, or the unreachable “blackness” at the heart of it. “America” is merely a playground for him or his heroes to mock the same ancient Judaic rituals Hitler tried to eradicate. Nemesis is remarkable in that more than any other fiction Roth wrote it seems to acknowledge the Shoah as an event that affected American Jews. Previously, Roth treated the Shoah as an event limited to Europe. In The Ghost Writer (1979), his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, playfully imagines that Anne Frank survived the war to become a sexual playmate for male Jewish writers, while in The Plot against America (2004), Nazism is repelled from America even when a proto-Nazi, ally of Hitler, Charles Lindbergh, is elected President. In Nemesis, as has often been observed, the sudden 1944 polio outbreak that indiscriminately maims and kills Newark’s Jews evokes the Shoah (see Aarons 2013). The analogy is not precise, however. The Shoah was an act of human-made history, not a random event, and the death it levied on European Jews was nearly total. Newark’s polio outbreak was also a historical event, but an act of God not directed at or limited to Jews alone. I say act of God rather than act of Nature because that’s how Roth frames the event. Bucky blames God for what happened to him. Roth evokes the Shoah in Nemesis in order to write an American novel where the health of the Jewish community is at stake. His protagonist tries to protect his community, being hailed as a Jewish hero at one point, but is ultimately broken when he contracts the disease and spreads it to others. While it is difficult to argue that Roth himself was ever perceived as a Jewish hero risking his life, health, or reputation to safeguard the Jewish community, however defined, his life and career made him into a kind of spokesperson for Jewish identity during his lifetime. As such, Nemesis concludes Roth’s public argument about his relationship to Judaism since his early works. Compared to his classic works of Judaic resentment like “The Conversion of the Jews” (Ozzie Freed-man), The Ghost Writer (Lonoff is portrayed as the Jew who got away from the Jews), Sabbath’s Theater, or Patrimony (1991), where Roth is devastated that his father leaves his tefillin to an unknown stranger rather than to him, Nemesis seems almost a quiet admission that going one’s way against the tide of one’s communal expectations damages one. In Patrimony, Roth confesses to violating his father’s wishes by burying him in the shroud of their ancestors. His gesture is hardly pious. It is as if he is simultaneously cursing his father’s religious devotion and freeing himself from the shared burden of their Judaic kinship. Roth’s act is ineffective, even impotent. His father is dead—he cannot know of Roth’s gesture. His strange exploit actually highlights what Roth cannot bury—the religion of his ancestors. Nemesis is remarkable because he unironically tells a story where the escape from that

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religion is impossible. In this way, Roth reveals that at the heart of his avowedly secular work lies a theology he can neither escape nor deny. Bucky too descends into that blackness, while Nemesis seems almost a surrender to the Judaism of Roth’s forebears. It is unusual in having no easy Jewish foils whose narrow religious orthodoxy threatens the individual autonomy of the Roth protagonist. In a sense, the novel is a surrender to a force, a Jewish history, he cannot wish or invent away because it defines his aesthetic gestures more surely than the prefaces of Henry James. Through Bucky’s fall, Roth does not travesty Judaism as he does in Sabbath’s Theater so much as yield before God’s inscrutable power. Arguably, the novel is devout, though Bucky never shows the talent for reading Torah that Roth gives to Ozzie. Bucky’s primary task is both physical and moral. As the Second World War rages and the Shoah winds down, Bucky heroically struggles to defend Jewish children from an irrational, deadly menace. His impossible task is to protect the community from the disease—not even a cartoon superhero could have done it. By giving this impossible ambition to Bucky, Roth invests his hero with a reckless pre-pubescent dreamy self-aggrandizement consistent with both Ozzie’s questions to Rabbi Binder and Roth’s own barely contained anger when he was criticized as a threat to Jews. When foreigners invade his neighborhood intent upon doing harm, Bucky does something Roth never obviously did. He stands up for Jews. Strangers hail his name in the streets, fathers want to shake his hand, mothers tell him their sons worship him. Bucky enjoys their approbation and wants to live up to it. He feels a responsibility toward his charges beyond what is expected. When children under his care die from polio, Bucky is as grief-stricken as a family member. His grief in fact extends to guilt as he wonders why he cannot do more to protect the children. And then his grief turns into shame that he is unequal to the task of protecting them from the deadly illness. When he eventually decides to leave his post to join his girlfriend working at a summer camp across the state line, he cannot surrender the notion that he has failed the community. Upon catching polio and being disabled by the disease, it is as if he has received his punishment for having left his community at its time of crisis. His girlfriend and her family do not abandon him, though. She still wants to marry him and her father, a doctor and a devout Jew, also wants Bucky in the family. Bucky, however, refuses them and chooses a lonely life of bitterness and resentment. He does not quite blame himself for his predicament, however, despite his sense that he has failed his Yiddish-speaking grandfather’s advice that he must “stand up for himself as a Jew” and that “when you have a price to pay, pay it” (25). A grieving father at one point asks Bucky, “where are the scales of justice?” (48). Bucky does not know, and the answer pains him. He feels responsible for the father’s grief and his failure to have done more to prevent it. Ultimately, he answers the father’s question by blaming God for this failure—one that was never his to claim since polio had no known preventive cure. Bucky’s story is not his alone. It’s told through a communal eye, a we, to be more precise, as if he is a prodigal son they can’t bring home. This “we” comes through the fictional narrator, Arnie Mesnikoff, an atheist who still identifies with the community from whom Bucky has exiled himself. One is tempted to say that Arnie too is a version of Philip—a fictional tale-spinner who never experienced the agony that Bucky did when he became divided from his community and blamed God for this division. Arnie speaks for those “North Jersey Jews” from “the Jewish Weequahic section” of Newark where Roth was born. To these Jews, outsiders are suspect and group rituals are deep and binding (1, 7). The Italians who menace the neighborhood with their sputum sneer, “you people” (15), and threaten to “infect the Jews with polio” (19). Describing a father mourning for his son, Arnie aligns his

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gestures with “ancient Jewish rites” that “call for the rending of one’s garments.” The “two dark patches affixed to his colorless face” Arnie understands as an unconscious continuation of ancient rites (44). This community of Jews would not be upset by the presence of displaced Talmudic Jews in their community. The author who began his career by imagining a twelve-year-old boy converting his synagogue’s Jews to Jesus ends his career by portraying how an adult Jewish atheist cannot elide the presence of God in history. The curious twist, though, is that Bucky rages less as an atheist than as a Jew unreconciled with God. The narrator is the truer atheist. Like Bucky, the narrator was afflicted with polio and has had to learn to accept a life of diminished physical expectations. Unlike Bucky, he found happiness in marriage and fatherhood—in the Jewish community. Having known Bucky from the time he was a playground director, Arnie is the communal eye reflecting Bucky’s. Though he was never one of Bucky’s charges, he has become the keeper of his story. It may be that Bucky allows himself to tell Arnie his story because he too is a Jew who abandoned the faith. The narrator, like his author, declares himself beyond the kinds of God-driven questions that haunt Bucky. Arnie does not ask Bucky to rejoin the (Jewish) family, but to relinquish the bitter anguish that his belief in God causes him. One may wonder to what extent Roth retroactively identifies with Arnie’s loyalty to the community. Confronting the possible existence of God, the two characters are equally uncomprehending. The difference is that for Arnie God is an atavism, not worth mocking. Arnie experiences none of the conflict that Eli did. Bucky, though not dressed in tefillin, is a version of Eli, though his story has not a scintilla of Roth’s usual comedy. The novel is as painfully earnest as Letting Go (1962) or When She Was Good (1967). Arnie would reason Bucky’s God out of existence. From his educated, rational, secular perspective, Bucky confuses “God” with “Chance” and thus takes on himself what he will not allow God—as if he wants to excuse God his malevolent indifference by suffering in His place. It’s a remarkable conceit that further suggests that Bucky and Arnie represent Roth’s divided self as a Jewish writer. On the one hand, Roth knows that life does not work out—that’s the point to life. On the other hand, Roth looks for blame—his character cannot keep blaming himself, or chance, so he blames God because that makes his story more individualized. Otherwise, he’s just a Stephen Crane character. In this sense, to blame God is to believe in God and such logic puts Roth in the long line of Judaic questioners that begins with Job. The right to question God, as Robert Alter (2011: 3–10) and Abraham Heschel (1965: in passim) suggest, is, as it were, a God-sanctioned Jewish rite. It’s almost as if Bucky wishes to take unto himself the power of God, but it’s a burden he cannot endure. Thus, he’s left with an unbearable shame that is reinforced by his refusal to accept love from other Jews, many of whom make their belief in God the anchor to their sense of community. “His greatest triumph,” Arnie ironically notes, “is in sparing his beloved from having a crippled husband, and his heroism consists of denying his deepest desire by relinquishing her” (274). Or, as Bucky judges himself, “I wanted to help kids and make them strong and instead I did them irreparable harm” (270). That Bucky feels unequal to his good intentions and his hero status is clear throughout. He feels shame for having been declared 4-F and therefore unable to fight in the war. He feels shame that his father was a thief. He feels shame that he is unequal to his grandparents’ love for him. He feels shame he chose to be safe with his girlfriend rather than staying on the playground with his children—“unexpectedly stung by the thought of all the boys he’d

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abandoned on the playground” (189). That the playground was closed by the mayor and he caught polio in his safe haven does not alleviate his shame. It’s as if the successful part of his life as a paragon of Jewish manhood, loyal to family and community, is only portrayed to underscore the howling emptiness that permeated it. Shame is his most consistent character trait. Bucky’s pain is not rational and comes from a sense of shame so deep, so inexplicable that it seems likely he caught it from his creator. Of particular interest, then, is the parallel the story implies between the polio outbreak in Newark and the Holocaust in Europe. Although the Jews are not the only ones subject to polio, the story is written as if the Jews are its specific target. “Breathing in the breath of life was a dangerous activity in Newark,” Arnie observes, “take a deep breath and you could die” (93). Polio is “war upon the children of Newark” (132). This language is universalist but, according to Arnie, Bucky can only see polio as a war against the Jews. Thus, for Bucky, no less than for Elie Wiesel, the question is, how can God allow this: “Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied Europe with a rifle in his hands and the other in the Indian Hill dining lodge?” (154). The “anti-Semites” in New Jersey “are saying that it’s because they’re Jews that polio spreads there” and therefore “the Jews should be isolated” (193). Obviously, the Holocaust and the polio outbreak of 1944 are not the same events—but in Roth’s novel the events provoke the same trauma. Why is Bucky consigned to protect Jews in Newark rather than fighting in Europe where Jews are dying faster, more efficiently, and in greater numbers? Bucky feels as guilty for not being able to protect the Weequahic Jews as he would have felt being unable to protect the murdered Jewish millions in Europe. Eli tries and fails to run its memory out of town and is left wearing the vestiges of Judaism that Hitler could not erase. Nemesis shows that Roth’s heroes cannot let go of God, even if God is framed as a narcissist genius, a “sick fuck” (265). Like the Jews of the Hebrew Bible, Bucky adduces God’s omnipotence “from irrefutable historical proof” (264). For Bucky history means not the covenant God made at Mount Sinai but what happened “on this planet in the middle of the twentieth century” (264). In other words, what happened when Bucky was struck down by polio—though that’s when the Shoah occurred as well. It’s noteworthy that Bucky discusses God with an atheist—not a believer. His presumed father-in-law, Dr. Steiner, serves as a father figure for Bucky. When he feels down about the cruelty of the disease indiscriminately afflicting the Jews, the doctor calms him with reason and science. However, Bucky can’t bring himself to voice to the good doctor his doubts about God. He can’t confront a righteous Jew with his doubts. Is his temerity because he knows he cannot persuade the doctor to believe otherwise? Is his reluctance because he worries that the doctor will convert him to his own belief? Or is his shame in the face of belief too much for him to overcome? Just as Ozzie cannot truly convert the Jews to Christianity, Roth’s attacks on Judaism are tragic in their impotence. Bucky’s soul sickness is not from polio or the Holocaust but falling away from the faith of his grandmother. While deciding whether to join Marcia at the camp, he hesitates because “I can’t leave my grandmother” (87). She had been the one who “sees that his fees were paid at the synagogue” (27). To leave, in his mind, is to betray both his caregiver and the agent of his entry into Jewish manhood. By then, his grandfather is already dead. This is the moment when he turns to Dr. Steiner for guidance. The decisions he makes are rational, defensible. His grandmother does not experience his choice as an affront. But Bucky experiences his crossing over into what at first seems a paradise as an unforgiveable transgression. It’s as if he’s abandoned his people and senses

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there can be no return. The shame is too great. Pursuing his own ends, like Roth writing his own stories, he has in his mind put his community at risk. Bucky, arguably, is Roth at the end of his career. Rather than portraying the practice of Judaism as a form of atavistic rock worship, as he does in The Counterlife, Nemesis shows the comfort that Judaic ritual may bring its practitioners. Samuel Kessler (2022) argues that Roth’s late fiction often invokes Judaic ritual as a narrative device for his characters to explore their sense of life’s meaning or lack of meaning. At a funeral for one of his boys, Bucky wears a yarmulke and reads along with the prayers. When one of the mourners gives an oration that praises the boy’s life lived rather than lamenting his early death, Bucky marvels that the speaker is capable of communicating joy and gratitude during a moment otherwise so somber. “Alan’s life has ended,” Uncle Isaac declares, but “we should remember that while he lived it was an endless life” (66). In this scene, Roth portrays a traditional Jewish funeral where death is the not mentioned and is not the primary subject for rumination. Life is, because life is a gift from God. It is a view that neither Bucky nor his creator can ultimately affirm. In the car riding to the graveyard, Bucky sits next to an aunt who laments the life the child did not get to live—the future he never had. “Edith,” her husband says, “you’re not saying anything that everybody doesn’t already know” (72). Yet, the fact of life inevitably giving way to death the uncle can accept and Bucky cannot. The aunt does not blame God for the child’s death, but Bucky does, just as he blames God for his paralysis. His shame and his rage at God become so intertwined that they are almost inextricable. Bucky’s view, implied but never stated, is that it would have been better not to have been born. Such is the logic that Nietzsche attributes to the Greeks in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Judaism, however, is not concerned with questions of being, that is, the traditional questions of Western philosophy, but determining best how to live. “A human being,” Heschel (1965) writes, “is a being in fear of pain, in fear of being put to shame” (96). Those words perfectly capture the character of Bucky Cantor, and arguably every other Roth hero as well. The question of life is not “being,” but “what is done with being” (Heschel 1965: 96). Traditionally, Jews have believed that each being comes from God. As Bob Dylan once sang, as great as you are, you’ll never be greater than yourself. Heschel (1965) notes, “I have not brought my being into being,” and therefore “‘Thou art’ precedes ‘I am’” (97–8). Bucky has tried to make the most of his being—he worked hard to serve his community and keep it safe. And when he fails, or believes that he fails, he suffers such excruciating shame that only hatred of the Creator allows him to endure it. Thus, his “outrage with God for His murderous persecution of Weequahic’s innocent children” becomes both exponential and self-directed (N 135). From his perspective, the polio he has contracted makes him a pariah to his community. Bucky rejects any overture that would bind him even to a secular association with the practice of Judaism. Yet, his guilt paradoxically acknowledges the connection he cannot deny. His isolation recalls that of Eli at the end of his story when he appears among his fellow Jews wearing the vestiges of their ancient religion. His community thinks he has lost his mind. Ellen Gerstle (n.d.) suggests that the “story reflects the inability or the refusal of American Jews to know about and to have sufficient compassion for the indescribable suffering of their own people.” In 1959, when Roth dressed Eli up as an atavistic rabbi he likely did not mean to suggest that modern Jews were indifferent to the plight of the Holocaust than to decry the continuing presence of Judaism within modern American secular life. The fact of these Jews being displaced by

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the Nazis is less important or threatening than the fact that their practice of Judaism seems antiquated, anachronistic, and embarrassing to the modern American Jews. Fifty years later, however, Nemesis recalls a past where the Jewish community unselfconsciously practices Judaism. Bucky’s quarrel is not really with the other Jews but with their God whom he cannot disbelieve away. If he experiences a conflict about his relationship to Jews and Judaism, it is the shame of feeling inadequate. The extent to which one may imagine Bucky wearing Eli’s Talmudic hat in his isolation suggests that at the end of his career Roth perhaps did not believe his own denial of Judaism’s relevance to his life and fiction. In any case, Roth made certain that the shadow of that hat attended his burial. In Nemesis, Roth gives voice to the despair of the Holocaust through Bucky’s paralysis. And if Bucky turns inward, Roth shows what he turned away from—that transcendent appeal of Sinai that Heschel (1965) says makes “Judaism [a] way of thinking, not only a way of living” (197). Bucky, like Roth, lives outside that appeal. Both are like Ozzie Freedman were he to jump off the building and not have the safe net of his community to break his fall. Heschel (1965) describes the human being as “a knot between heaven and earth” (103), where “the self is in need of a meaning it cannot furnish itself” (56). Describing the origins of Judaism, Heschel says “there are no substitutes for revelations, for prophetic events” (197). Bucky misses the transcendent appeal, but this one time Roth does not deny its power. Bucky takes the same jump Ozzie did. In his case, he times it to miss the safety net Roth knows that the Jewish community has fashioned for him. In “Imagining Jews” and many of his novels Roth resists the presumption that his fiction should somehow concern or be affected by the Holocaust, just as his fiction resists the notion that the practice of Judaism is something he needs to treat with respect. In Nemesis, however, Roth portrays one who cannot escape the shadows of either the Holocaust or Judaism. Bucky’s polio is in effect the inner illness, or darkness, that Eli experiences when he is confronted with the fact of the Holocaust or the continuity of Judaism and can assimilate neither into his assimilated American life. The stubborn fact of an existing Jewish history and its attendant Judaic rituals drives him mad. Roth, for his part, was not driven mad, but Nemesis shows that his career in effect was a bluff. He was not the Jew that got away. He was the Jew whose fiction came from an inexhaustible shame regarding his isolation from the Jewish community. Why can’t I be like everybody else?, one hears a child’s voice whispering between the lines. In the end, he was. Like his Orthodox critics, Roth in the end summoned the Shoah to address God and ask of Him why. He finally did what his critics wanted him to do, though from afar and utterly alone. He was his own nemesis.

REFERENCES Aarons, Victoria (2013), “Expelled Once Again: The Failure of the Fantasized Self in Philip Roth’s Nemesis,” Philip Roth Studies, 9 (1): 51–63. Alter, Robert (2011), “Introduction,” in Robert Alter (ed.), The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary, 3–10, New York: Norton. Gerstle, Ellen (n.d.). “Eli, the Fanatic,” Reference Guide to Holocaust Literature: Encyclopedia.com. Available online: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ eli-fanatic (accessed June 22, 2022). Heep, Hartmut (2022), “Jewish Conversion Therapy: Philip Roth’s ‘Conversion of the Jews’,” Philip Roth Studies, 18 (1): 28–41.

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Heschel, Abraham J. (1965), Who Is Man? Stanford: Stanford University Press. Howe, Irving (1986), “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” in Harold Bloom (ed.), Philip Roth, 71–88, New York: Chelsea House. Kessler, Samuel (2022), “‘My Father’s Face’: Judaism, God, and Ritual Practice in Philip Roth’s Everyman, Indignation, and Nemesis,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 41 (1): 34–59. Roth, Philip (1959), Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (1985), Reading Myself and Others: An Expanded Edition, New York: Penguin. Roth, Philip (1988), The Facts, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (2010), Nemesis, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Roth, Philip (2017), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013, New York: Library of America.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Anagramists and Manure-Spreaders”: Philip Roth and the Academy DAVID GOOBLAR

Although it is little discussed as a subject in itself, higher education has played a surprisingly significant part in Philip Roth’s writing, from the very beginning of his career. This chapter is an attempt to make sense of all that Roth has done with the subject of academia in his writing—and all that it has done for him. There’s a case to be made that college—specifically the milieu of the University of Chicago in the 1950s—is responsible for putting Roth on the path to literary success. Roth had written stories before the ones included in Goodbye, Columbus (1959), his debut, but nothing he had really been proud of. It was only when he moved to Chicago for graduate school, after serving his stint in the army, that he began to discover what kind of writer he would become. At the University of Chicago, Roth was both student and teacher, but when he reflected on that period in his life in 1991, he spent most of his energy dwelling on his camaraderie with Richard Stern, Tom Rogers, and Ted Solotaroff, all of whom were, like Roth, mad about books. It was the late-night conversations with these men, who all “took a lot of pleasure in having humble origins and high-minded pursuits,” that Roth credits with giving him the courage to try out his own high-minded pursuit of putting the humble story of Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin on the page (McQuade 1992: 283). In particular, Richard Stern heard Roth’s story of a wealthy suburban Jewish family over lunch and urged Roth to make it into fiction. “But it’s nothing,” Roth remembers telling Stern, “It’s stuff. It’s just where I come from.” “That’s something,” Stern replied. “That’s it” (McQuade 1992: 282). Roth went home to write. It wasn’t just the milieu of a university that produced the particularly Rothian amalgam of “humble origins and high-minded pursuits.” In a 1973 interview with himself, Roth famously tried to account for the kind of writer he was by referencing Philip Rahv’s categorization of American writers as either “palefaces” (like Henry James and T.S. Eliot) or “redskins” (like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain). Roth, of course, defined himself as a descendent of both families, a “redface” with a “self-conscious and deliberate zigzag” of a career. What’s often forgotten in the account of this self-identification is that Roth locates the birth of the category of the redface within the university: What happened in postwar America is that a lot of redskins—if not to the wigwam, then to the candy store and the borscht belt born—went off to universities and infiltrated the

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departments of English, till then almost exclusively the domain of palefaces. All manner of cultural defection, conversion, confusion, enlightenment, miscegenation, parasitism, transformation, and combat ensued. (RMO 72–3) Indeed, when writing about his own discovery that he could bring together his redskin attachment to the American vernacular with the paleface attraction to fine shades of moral discernment, Roth again harkens back to his days in graduate school. As “a disciple of certain literature professors and their favorite texts,” Roth spent his days at the University of Chicago library with books like The Wings of the Dove (1902), “as transfixed by James’s linguistic tact and moral scrupulosity as I had ever been by the coarseness, recklessness, and vulgar, aggressive clowning” of his youth among the Jews of Newark (RMO 71). The midcentury university was the witch’s cauldron, where palefaces and redskins, through some mysterious alchemy, emerged as redfaces, ready to transform American literature. College plays a minor, mostly off-screen role in the title novella of Goodbye, Columbus— Brenda attends prestigious Radcliffe College, while Neil is a graduate of the humble Newark campus of Rutgers University; like much else in the book, college is a way for Roth’s Jews to signal to themselves and to others just how far along the path of assimilation they are (or wish to be).1 But it is in Roth’s second book, Letting Go (1962), that Roth dives headfirst into academia. The water is cold. A long, dreary novel of moral deliberation and emotional repression, Letting Go is set in Iowa City, where Gabe Wallach is a graduate student, and then in Chicago, where he is on the English faculty at the University of Chicago. It is in Chicago that Gabe must reckon, between torturous faculty meetings, with how much, or how little, to get involved in the unhappy lives of Paul and Libby Herz, whom Gabe has brought to town by recommending Paul for a job in his department. It is not really an academic novel (Gabe notes that “whatever joy—or whatever misery” he would gain would come “not from my students or my colleagues or my publications, but from my private life, my secret life”), but the university functions as a depressing backdrop to what is mostly a depressing story (230). That backdrop introduces two themes that Roth would return to a number of times throughout his career. First, literature professors, most of the time, don’t know anything about literature. The second theme, building on the first, is that academics and creative writers are opposed in their approaches to literature, with the natural conclusion that it is creative writers who actually understand how literature works. John Spigliano, the chair of Gabe and Paul’s department, comes in for the most mockery. “A member of that great horde of young anagramists and manure-spreaders who [find] a good deal more ambiguity in letters than in their own lives,” Spigliano actually explicates literature at faculty meetings for his colleagues’ betterment—not well, mind you: “‘I think we should point out to the student,’ John says, having compared the number of adjectival clauses in one paragraph with the number in the next, ‘how Gibbon impresses upon the reader the geography of the event with the geography, as it were, of the prose’” (LG 62–3). Spigliano is not the only of Gabe’s colleagues to come off poorly; Gabe describes each member of the department, from Sam McDougall (“a man whose dedication to the principles of grammar could actually cover you with sorrow”) to Cyril Houghton (“who had confided to me once that he had invented most of the footnotes in his dissertation”), in a catalog that takes up no more than two pages, its brevity signaling to readers how little these people matter to Gabe

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beyond their roles as meeting-lengtheners (232–3). “Teaching is a noble profession with a noble history,” Gabe reflects while recounting one such meeting, “and it may simply be that we are living through a slack time” (234). Perhaps the gravest sin of these academics is self-importance; not only do professors get literature wrong, they have the gall to think that what they do actually matters. Often this self-importance is signaled in Gabe’s narration through a mock-serious tone that undercuts the apparent gravity of academic affairs: “We lived forever on the edge of a deep abyss: there was a chance that one of us might give an A to an essay to which another of us had given a B. And, intoned our more pious members, it was the student who paid the penalty” (231). It is these pious members’ earnest belief that they know what they’re doing that distinguishes them, in their minds, from creative writers, who have not had the adequate training to truly understand the literary arts. Creative writers, according to Spigliano, are “apt to be a little too personal about literature.” “Most of them,” he adds, “are without any real critical system” (72). In Roth’s hands, that critical system amounts to little more than the studied use of jargon. In what would be the first of many such observations in his career, Roth has Gabe notice that Spigliano is particularly fond of such terms as “structure” and “form,” “two words that pass from his lips as often as they do from any corset manufacturer’s on New York’s West Side” (63). “Edna is an excellent grammarian,” Spigliano notes of another professor, “but I don’t know how much she’s able to get over to the students about structural principles” (66). Paul Herz, as a would-be novelist teaching English among the academics, clashes with Spigliano over the purpose of a literary education. The terms of their clash, the nature of the apparent opposition between creative writers and those who only study creative writing, would be repeated by Roth, in fiction and in interviews, a surprising number of times over the years. In Paul’s eyes, the academics’ approach to literature and writing turns it into “a kind of construction work”: all of that concern with structure and form makes writing sound primarily architectural. What’s missing is life; such an approach “doesn’t have anything to do with life, with being human—” (297). For what it’s worth, Spigliano, as the representative of pretentious academe, more or less agrees with Paul’s characterization: “we’re not educating their souls,” he quips, defending a low grade on a paper whose structure he finds primitive. “Why not?” shouts back Paul, who adds that “at least there’s a little life in this essay” (235–6). This opposition—between the bad academics pretentiously going on about structure and form and the good academics (usually creative writers) finding the humanity within literature—reemerges in The Professor of Desire (1977), in the classroom monologues of David Kepesh. Kepesh is a literature professor who, in the trilogy of novels that feature him, usually plays the role originated by Paul Herz. He is an aesthete who, although not a creative writer like Herz, seems unmolested by whatever force has turned his colleagues into jargonspouting pedants. “I do not hold,” he tells his students, with certain of my colleagues who tell us that literature, in its most valuable and intriguing moments, is “fundamentally non-referential.” I may come before you in my jacket and tie, I may address you as madam and sir, but I am going to request nonetheless that you restrain yourself from talking about “structure,” “form,” and “symbols” in my presence. (183) In contrast, he tells them, “by the end of the year you may even have grown a little weary of my insistence upon the connections between the novels you read for this class … and what

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you know so far of life” (182–3). What distinguishes Kepesh as a teacher of literature is precisely this insistence, the focus on the ways that books are in conversation with the life of the reader, that one speaks to, and influences, the other. The classroom, as the venue where these connections are brought to the surface and attended to, is a kind of sacred space, a unique environment that Kepesh values to an almost painful degree: “To my mind there is nothing quite like the classroom in all of life” (184). The literature classroom enables students to face the most meaningful matters of existence almost head-on; literature itself is valued as the thing that brings those matters to their attention. “This may be the last occasion you will ever have,” Kepesh continues, “to reflect in any sustained and serious way upon the unrelenting forces with which in time you will all contend, like it or not” (185). When Roth was asked, in an interview, whether Kepesh speaks for him in his rejection of literary theory and over-interpretation, the author—for once—did not insist upon the fundamental difference between himself and his fictional creation. In fact, Roth went even further: “When I teach, I am not so gentle as my professor of desire, Mr. Kepesh: I forbid my students to use those words [‘structure,’ ‘form,’ and ‘symbol’], on pain of expulsion. This results in a charming improvement in their English and even, sometimes, in their thinking” (RMO 102–3). The use of jargon in a way that avoids confronting the fundamental stuff of literature was the assumed context of the academy for Roth, so much so that he felt the need, apparently, to define himself against that context: I may teach, but I’m not one of those professors. Nearly a quarter of a century later, David Remnick (2000) asked Roth what he thought about academic readings of his work, the kinds of responses that fixate on the meaning of the character names or the connections between his novels and the Talmud. Roth responded with a metaphor that gently mocked academics for missing the point of literature. “Suppose you and I went up to the ballpark together,” he says to Remnick, and they witness a man and his son watching the baseball game. Except the man doesn’t watch the baseball game: he just watches the scoreboard. And as he does, he’s educating his son in the ways of scoreboard-watching, teaching him to get excited when the numbers change, comparing the number of changes on one side of the scoreboard versus the other. The kid leaves the game enchanted with this strange game he’s been introduced to. “Is that politicizing the baseball game?” Roth asks, “Is that theorizing the baseball game? No, it’s having not the foggiest idea in the world what baseball is.” He may not have used the terms structure and form, but it’s clear that these are the same jargon-spouting over-interpreters that have been Roth’s imagined academics since the early 1960s. In between Letting Go and The Professor of Desire, which both set in opposition academics who stare discontentedly at the structure of literature and academics who find the life-force therein, stands The Breast (1972), a slim book that aims to split the difference. The Breast introduces us to David Kepesh, who is not yet as fully fleshed out (at least in one sense) as he will be in The Professor of Desire but is recognizably one of Roth’s good academics, a believer in the literature classroom as crucible for the passionate discussion of the most significant subjects. The novella, Roth’s addition to the micro-genre that includes Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (1915) and Gogol’s “The Nose” (1836), is also a fable of literary studies, a fable with the moral that even the good kind of academics are hopelessly lost when turning their interpretive instruments onto real life. If the Kepesh of The Professor of Desire insists to his students that the literature classroom is precisely the venue for reflecting “upon the unrelenting forces with which in time you will all contend,” this Kepesh discovers that those unrelenting forces really do not relent.

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Kepesh awakes one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic female breast, six feet in diameter, with a nipple that extends five inches from the rest of his “body.” From the very opening of the book, Kepesh discusses his predicament with a pedant’s fussiness. The first paragraph, which begins with the sentence “It began oddly,” immediately becomes a treatise on the nature of oddness, on the way in which nearly anything worth discussing also begins oddly, not just the transformation of a man into a giant breast (3). For such a short book, Kepesh does go on, giving us the impression of a professor for whom nothing is beneath rhetorical consideration, for whom the pursuit of the precise formulation of the problem is of the utmost concern. The irony, then, is how little all this consideration helps Kepesh with his predicament, how little it does to even explain his predicament. All Kepesh wants (besides being transformed back into his prior form, of course) is an explanation, an understanding of what has happened to him and what it means. At his most desperate, this desire escapes in all-caps pleading: “WHAT DOES IT MEAN? HOW HAS IT COME TO PASS? AND WHY? IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE, WHY DAVID ALAN KEPESH?” (23). But if Kepesh’s newfound physical form means anything, it is that there are such things in life that escape rational interpretation. “The bulk of my weight,” he tells us, “is fatty tissue” (13). He is “a big brainless bag of tissue, desirable, dumb, passive, immobile, acted upon instead of acting, hanging, there, as a breast hangs and is there” (61). Such a mass of flesh becomes the ultimate reality principle, the primitive that must be accepted rather than explained. Although Kepesh is regularly visited by his therapist, Dr. Klinger, their sessions get him no closer to rational understanding. He conceives of their discussions as a kind of literary study, as he reads and rereads “that anthology of stories that we two had assembled as a kind of text for the course we conducted together for five years in ‘The History of David Alan Kepesh.’ But the stories are of no use, even I have to agree” (64). Hanging over all of this is Kepesh’s suspicion that his inexplicable transformation might somehow be connected to his teaching, to his professional fascination with stories of mysteriously meaningful physical transformation, like Kafka’s and Gogol’s. Maybe he simply overdid it, threw himself into these books and their significance to the extent that he actually became a kind of Kafka character himself. In a moment of hubris, he wonders if he has “out-Kafkaed Kafka. He could only imagine a man turning into a cockroach. But look what I have done” (73). In the end, alas, this potential explanation is of as little help as all the others. Although David Kepesh has spent the better part of his professional life studying transformative experience, although he teaches his students about it and writes about it in his scholarly articles, ultimately he doesn’t have the foggiest idea in the world what transformative experience is. Like Kepesh in The Professor of Desire, Roth himself was apparently quite happy within the college classroom, able to find a home for his view of literature as deeply relevant to his life and the lives of his students. This, it seems, was the case as early as his own undergraduate days at Bucknell, where he “was able to reactivate a taste for inquiry and speculation that had been all but immobilized during my high school years” (RMO 3). Although he only lasted as a graduate student at the University of Chicago for a single quarter, he taught freshman composition there for two years, and remembered his time there fondly, “thrilled by all the kindred souls” (McQuade 1992: 280), thrilled to live in a place “where books seemed at the heart of everything” (283). Even after his books became bestsellers, he continued to teach, usually a semester a year, at the University of Iowa, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Stony Brook, and Hunter College. When asked, in 1977, why he liked to teach, Roth answered that teaching was essential to his reading, which, in turn, was essential to his

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writing: “Teaching a book is the way I have of taking hold of it and getting the most out of it.” In this, the students, and their approach to literature, played a crucial role, for “they read fiction as though it mattered” (Davidson 107). Again, it seems, Roth’s approved academic discourse investigates how literature “matters” to readers’ lives. Roth credited a handful of Jewish students he taught at Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop for helping to inspire Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). These students wrote stories of well-behaved boys nearly asphyxiated by the heat of their mothers’ love and watchfulness. It was “the folktale … that began to enlarge my sense of who these Portnoys might be … or become” (RMO 34–5). Later, at the University of Pennsylvania, Roth taught a course on European literature that “might have been called ‘Studies in Guilt and Persecution.’” Unexpectedly, teaching such gloomy texts as “The Metamorphosis,” Crime and Punishment (1866), and Anna Karenina (1878) activated Roth’s taste for comedy in a way that he saw as essential to the development of Portnoy. “It was all so funny, this morbid preoccupation with punishment and guilt.” Half of the comedy in Portnoy’s Complaint is Alexander Portnoy’s desperate desire to be taken seriously, to stop playing the role of “the son in the Jewish joke.” Despite his dream of seriousness—or because of it—we laugh, as Roth’s students must have laughed when he imagined for them a film adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle (1926) starring the Marx Brothers (RMO 19). In some ways The Human Stain (2000) is a classical tragedy, not unlike those studied and taught by Coleman Silk, the professor of Classics at the novel’s heart. Silk’s secret—that he is a Black man passing as a white Jew—is the key to the tragic irony of his downfall: he refers to a couple of absent Black students as “spooks” and is brought down in a storm of outrage. As Adam Kelly (2010) put it, following many other commentators, the novel has “a plot that reads like an exercise in Sophoclean homage—talented hero doggedly refuses to acknowledge a terrible act he has committed, only to succumb to an ironic and mysteriously inevitable fate years later” (189). But looked at as a campus novel, The Human Stain becomes a different sort of tragedy altogether: the tragedy of the contemporary college campus, with “snowflake” students so oversensitive, and faculty and staff so eager to protect them from discomfort, that they see racism everywhere, even originating from a Black person. This is a tragedy of sanctimony, of liberal overreaction, of people so convinced that they are right—that they are righteous—that they go right past justice and end up in absurdity. Why else does Roth, in the guise of Nathan Zuckerman, begin the tale of Coleman Silk with a three-page virtuosic treatment of “the ecstasy of sanctimony” sweeping the nation in the summer of 1998, the summer of Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and, it turns out, two students who’ve been taught that everybody else is to blame for their own failures (2)? In the heat of his rage against those at Athena College who turned against him in the aftermath of his utterance, Silk seems to reserve special ire for the aggrieved students themselves, or at least for the campus environment that encourages those students to file complaints. In this, Silk—and Roth—anticipates by about fifteen years one of the major narratives of the contemporary campus culture wars. It’s probably been best encapsulated in Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s 2018 bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, which argued that “many parents, K-12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression” (11). That is, that generation of students has been taught to see themselves as fragile, in need of protection from dangers that, according to Haidt and Lukianoff, are not really dangerous. These so-called “snowflakes” see offense everywhere, often in the guise of racism, sexism, and other forms of

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oppression. About one of the Black students who brought charges against him, Silk notes that she has flunked many of her classes: “I thought she flunked because she couldn’t confront the material, let alone begin to master it, but it turned out that she flunked because she was too intimidated by the racism emanating from her white professors to work up the courage to go to class” (HS 17). In response to another student, one who complained that the Euripides plays he was teaching were “degrading to women,” Silk notes that “teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history … I can tell you that a feminist perspective on Euripides is what they least need” (192). What the students need, presumably, is to toughen up, stop being offended by everything, and “confront the material.” Standing up for these students is Delphine Roux, the young French professor who many critics have seen as a caricature of the ivory-tower academic. Roux certainly plays the role of the bad academic in the novel, and although she is aligned with literary theory (Roth has her reading Julia Kristeva and fantasizing about a man reading Philippe Sollers), her biggest sin is that she coddles her students in the name of identity politics. It is Roux who writes of one of Silk’s Black students that “Tracy is from a rather difficult background” (18). It is Roux who Tracy runs to, “close to tears, barely able to speak,” when she learns that Professor Silk referred to her and another student as “spooks.” And it is Roux who lets Tracy move into a spare room in her own apartment, desperately (and unbelievably) trying to prevent this traumatized student from dropping out. Unfortunately, in the end, “the damage done Tracy proved too debilitating for someone so uncertain to begin with,” and she does drop out, disappearing completely (193–4). In the antagonistic conversation between Silk and Roux about the student offended by Euripides, Roux stands up for the offended student, while Silk stands up for nothing less than the Western literary tradition. The student’s “misreading” is “grounded in narrow, parochial ideological concerns,” instead of, presumably, his broader, universal perspective (191). In this, Kasia Boddy (2010) notes, Silk aligns himself with previous Roth academics like Paul Herz and David Kepesh, for whom “high theory and identity politics” (59) threaten a belief in literature as essentially about being human. Throughout the book, Silk, who has been brought down by these students, is portrayed as complex, commonsensical, and brilliant, whereas Roux, who defends the students, comes across as confused, irrational, and naïve. Lorrie Moore (2000), in her review of the book for the New York Times Book Review, notes that “Roth, usually fond of both sides of an argument, fails to extend understanding toward—and only makes fun of—the possible discomfort of minorities or women in settings like Athena, where prejudice may be trickily institutional and atmospheric, causing events like the ‘spooks’ utterance to be seized hold of and overinterpreted.” I find it hard to disagree with Moore—the uncharitable depiction of these students, along with the novel’s seeming disapproval of political correctness, while perhaps a telling reflection of Silk’s (and Zuckerman’s) politics, mars an otherwise brilliant book with the off-putting scent of conservative grievance. College really only figures significantly in the first ten pages or so of The Dying Animal (2001), the final installment in the David Kepesh trilogy, but what is there focuses entirely on Kepesh’s sexual pursuit of his students. “They come to my class,” these female students, “and I know almost immediately which is the girl for me” (2). Despite Kepesh’s insistence that he has a very strict rule about not sleeping with students while they are his students, it does seem to be the case that the largest part of his romantic life is taken up with the young women he meets in his classroom. At the end of each semester, he throws a party for his students at his tony Manhattan duplex, “an open and above-board trick, but … a trick nonetheless” (5). The trick is to subtly show the students that Kepesh is a man—a moderately wealthy, cultured

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man—and inevitably one of the students will want to have sex with him. Kepesh is open with his unnamed interlocuter about the benefits of this system for getting to know young women: “The decades since the sixties have done a remarkable job of completing the sexual revolution. This is a generation of astonishing fellators” (8–9). Consuela Castillo, the young Cuban-American woman with whom Kepesh has a nearly tragic romance, is one of these students. On the first day of class, Kepesh can tell she is this semester’s girl: “As soon as you enter the class, you see that this girl either knows more or wants to” (2). Yes, this slim novel eventually turns around to center on the ways in which Consuela has power over Kepesh, but their romance begins in a context where his institutional and intellectual authority is unmistakable. Kepesh’s policy of waiting until the end of the semester to begin his trysts with his students is in sharp contrast to the policy—if you can call it that—of Mickey Sabbath, the satyric protagonist of Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater. Readers can be forgiven for forgetting that Sabbath’s Theater has anything to do with academia, but the scandal introduced on the book’s second page, the scandal that “publicly disgraced” Sabbath, is indeed an academic scandal (4). Sabbath is an adjunct professor of puppet theater who has developed a habit of having phone sex with his puppetry workshop students. It is only because Kathy Goolsbee, the sixth of these students, has taped one of their sessions and left the tape on a public bathroom sink, that Sabbath’s secret vice is revealed to the public. The transcript of that tape is included in the novel, in a twenty-page footnote, a passage remarkable for its obscenity, even in Roth’s less-than-decorous oeuvre (215–35). The subject of the scandal of the tape is almost the only mention, within the book’s 450 pages, of Sabbath’s time at the college, unless we are to count the last will and testament Sabbath scrawls on the back of a car repair bill right before he urinates on the grave of his dearly departed lover, Drenka Balich. Among the will’s directions is that $7,450 is to be used “to establish a prize of $500 to be awarded annually to a female member of the graduating class of any of the colleges in the four-college program—500 bucks to whoever’s fucked more male faculty members than any other graduating senior during her undergraduate years” (442). Alas, Sabbath’s planned suicide does not come to pass, and so the status of this prize is unconfirmed at the novel’s end. That Philip Roth of all people wrote about older male professors becoming sexually involved with younger female college students will probably not surprise anyone familiar with Roth’s public reputation. Nor will the apparent fact that Roth himself slept with many of his own college students, as alleged by Blake Bailey in his exhaustive, now-recalled 2021 biography.2 But those stories—and the fact that Bailey has since been credibly accused of grooming, dating, and sexually assaulting some of his students when he taught at a New Orleans middle school—shine a harsher light on these parts of The Dying Animal and Sabbath’s Theater. For Jessica Winter (2021), writing for the New Yorker, the commonalities between Roth and Bailey betray “a reflexive belief in a certain kind of male impunity.” The message of both Bailey’s account of Roth’s behavior, and of Bailey’s own alleged behavior, is that only mindless adherence to a kind of sanctimony “impedes a man from doing more or less what he pleases, free of consequences.”3 To read Roth’s many pages about academia is to see the many sides of the academic world, particularly the many aspects of life as a “professor of desire”: the time and space devoted to getting to the very heart of literature, where imaginative fiction allows us access to the most significant of life’s concerns; the dangerous temptations of jargon and theory; access to the red hot center of the culture of liberal overreaction, embodied in students who see offense where there used to merely be provocation; and, of course, the opportunity to have sex with energetic young women. In the wake of Bailey’s biography, and

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the subsequent revelations about Bailey’s abhorrent behavior, it’s far easier now to see yet another aspect of a professor’s life, pointedly absent from Roth’s writing: the recognition of the authority the professor has over his students, and with that authority a duty to discharge it ethically. That absence shouldn’t surprise us either, as academia in Roth’s writing seems to always reflect whatever else Roth is interested in—or uninterested in—probing. College is always there for Roth, a setting wide and elastic enough to furnish his dramas of moral deliberation, literary quarrels, radical transformation, or political correctness. So when an older, more fearless Philip Roth more directly turns his novelist’s gaze to the ferocious male libido, it is only natural that the academy appears yet again to provide the circumstances and the necessary players in the sexual drama. To say that the academy in Sabbath’s Theater and The Dying Animal is a site of masculine predation is merely to say that those books are in some way about masculine predation. And if you are (reasonably) made uncomfortable by that focus, you’ll be uncomfortable with that portrait of the academy as well. All of which seems to say something like Mark Shechner’s (2003) famous dictum: “Roth does what he does because he does what he does” (4). But even more than that, Roth’s various bites of the academic apple show that the myth of the ivory tower is indeed a myth. Colleges and universities are always reflective of their societies: for all the obvious ways that the academic world differs from the world outside the university gates, there are as many points of continuity. If Roth has a blind spot for the ways in which his fictional professors take advantage of their students it’s only because he has a blind spot for such advantage-taking more generally. What to make of that blind spot? Don’t ask me—I’m only an academic.

NOTES 1. It seems no accident that when Neil first ventures out to the suburbs to meet Brenda, leaving the “packed-in tangle” of Newark for the spacious lawns and big houses of Short Hills, he “drove up and down the streets whose names were those of eastern colleges, as though the township, years ago, when things were named, had planned the destinies of the sons of its citizens” (8–9). 2. According to Bailey, “Roth considered sex one of the most desirable aspects of teaching,” and it’s fair to say the biographer centers his narration of Roth’s various stints as a professor on Roth’s attempts to sleep with his students (340–1). 3. Bailey quotes Roth as confiding to Saul Bellow, “You used to be able to sleep with the girls in the old days … and now of course it’s impossible. You go to feminist prison; you serve twenty years to life” (655).

REFERENCES Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, New York: Simon and Schuster. Boddy, Kasia (2010), “Philip Roth’s Great Books: A Reading of The Human Stain,” The Cambridge Quarterly, 39 (1): 39–60. Davidson, Sara (1992), “Talk with Philip Roth,” in George J. Searles (ed.), Conversations with Philip Roth, 100–7, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Kelly, Adam (2010), “Imagining Tragedy: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” Philip Roth Studies, 6 (2): 189–205. Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt (2019), The Coddling of the American Mind, New York: Penguin.

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McQuade, Molly (1992), “Just a Lively Boy,” in George J. Searles (ed.), Conversations with Philip Roth, 280–4, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Moore, Lorrie (2000), “The Wrath of Athena,” Review of The Human Stain, New York Times Book Review, May 7: 7–8. Remnick, David (2000), “Into the Clear,” New Yorker, May 8. Available online: https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2000/05/08/into-the-clear (accessed December 12, 2022). Roth, Philip (1967), Letting Go, London: Corgi. Roth, Philip (1972), The Breast, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Roth, Philip (1986), Goodbye, Columbus, London: Penguin. Roth, Philip (1996), Sabbath’s Theater, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2000), The Professor of Desire, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001a), The Human Stain, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001b), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2002), The Dying Animal, London: Vintage. Shechner, Mark (2003), Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Winter, Jessica (2021), “The Allegations against Blake Bailey and the Shock of the Familiar,” New Yorker, May 4. Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/theallegations-against-blake-bailey-and-the-shock-of-the-familiar (accessed December 12, 2022).

PART THREE

Reading History through Roth

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Roth and Politics: The Representative Writer Masquerading as Bartleby the Citizen CLAUDIA FRANZISKA BRÜHWILER

ROTH AND SCHOLARS OF “THE GREAT GENERALIZER” For all their sharpness and articulateness and savoir-faire … they’d no idea who the great mass of Americans were, nor had they seen so clearly before that it was not those educated like themselves would determine the country’s fate but the scores of millions unlike them and unknown to them who had given Bush a second chance, in Billy’s words, “to wreck a very great thing.” (EG 87) Replace “them,” the young aspiring writers Jamie Logan and Billy Davidoff, with any other well-educated liberal American. Replace “Bush” with the 45th US president who had been given a chance in 2016—and you would still vigorously nod your head. One cannot help but applaud Roth for capturing the disbelief and stupor after a presidential election that would be held nine years after the publication of Exit Ghost (2007), revealing the repetitiveness of political events and the forgetfulness of citizens. More than a decade after the publication of his final novel, Nemesis (2010), Roth is still considered a “representative writer,” as Michael Kimmage once described it (2015), a writer “who embodies national history and whose major works are therefore historical benchmarks, signposts of historical change” (91). And one may specify that his works are signposts of political developments as well, even though Roth always denied being a political writer or a public intellectual (Brühwiler 2017). Apart from his satirical attack on Richard M. Nixon in Our Gang (1971) and to an extent his political scenario novel The Plot against America (2004), none of Roth’s novels are political in the sense that they would focus on, as Joseph Blotner (1965) once narrowly described the genre, “overt, institutionalized politics of the officeholder … or the individual who performs political acts as they are conventionally understood” (2). Yet when we return to Blotner’s earlier work in which he categorizes how novels relate to politics, we find for each category fitting examples from Roth’s oeuvre: as Table 13.1 summarizes, Roth has used fiction as a

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Table 13.1  How Roth’s novels relate to politics: a selection. The relationship between novels and politics according to Blotner (1955)

Select examples in Roth’s oeuvre

Novels as political instruments

Our Gang (1971): With his only political satire, Roth intended to expose the ludicrous and immoral character of President Richard M. Nixon.

Novelists as political historians

Prague Orgy (1985): The novella builds on Roth’s own experience during several visits to Prague and his observations as to how writers cope with and adapt to totalitarian regimes.

Novels as mirrors of national character

The American Trilogy:

Novelists as analysts of group political behavior

The Plot against America (2004):

Novelists as analysts of individual political behavior

Indignation (2008):

The three novels take readers through several decades of recent American history, from the hysterics of McCarthyism in I Married a Communist (1998), the upheavals of the 1960s and the effects of the Vietnam War on US society in American Pastoral (1997) to the persistence of the “persecuting spirit” in the 1990s in The Human Stain (2000). The effects of politics on the individual, the arts, and mass psychology, economic crises, Nixon’s betrayal, race relations, domestic terrorism—few topics of political interest are left out. Roth’s counter-history exposes how the masses can be manipulated by charismatic leaders, how they accept, even welcome, the dissolution of democratic institutions and participate in the persecution of minorities. The behavior of the narrator-protagonist illustrates the consequences of Gesinnungsethik, i.e., an ethic of ultimate ends: Marcus Messner has to accept the risk of being drafted into the US Army during the Korean War as he upholds his principles.

political instrument (Blotner 1955: 10), his work repeatedly provides insight into political history (28), and it can be read as a reflection of national character (48). Moreover, Roth dissects both group (63) and individual political behavior (79), making his novels political in the sense that they “raise the most penetrating questions about the foundations and effects of the political regime, i.e., human nature and its implications for society” (Zuckert 1981: 685). It is thus hardly surprising that not only literary scholars have written about Roth, but that his novels have also inspired political readings (e.g., Brühwiler and Trepanier 2017) and political scientists, me included. At the outset, I was mainly interested in Roth’s adolescent characters such as Neil Klugman in “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959) or Marcus Messner in Indignation (2008), liminal subjects who thought of themselves as grown men but had yet to awaken to adult and political realities. I have tried to think of their political awakenings as an initiation, combining findings from political socialization research and anthropology (Brühwiler 2013). In this endeavor, I drew from the work of Maureen Whitebrook (2001), one of the few political scientists who turned to fiction not just for illustrative purposes but

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to introduce new approaches to questions raised in our discipline. Specifically, Whitebrook demonstrates how the concept of narrative identity allows for a more nuanced and richer understanding of political identity. In this vein, she analyzes how Operation Shylock (1993) complicates our notions of identity, as Roth, the author, plays with “Roth,” his eponymous narrator, and an outspoken impostor. Even the narrator seems to get lost in this literary game of hide-and-seek as the different Roths enter and leave the scene. As Operation Shylock is set in Israel, “Roth’s” identity is further challenged by questions of belonging, of the significance of ancestry and religious ties for a secular American citizen—issues that political science normally tackles through surveys and datasets but that become more layered and vivid through fiction. Like every political scientist working with literary texts, I kept returning to the question as to what we were to draw from fiction to better understand the political—and with that I kept and keep returning to Leo Glucksman, one of Nathan Zuckerman’s college professors. In I Married a Communist (1998), Zuckerman recalls how Glucksman changes his student’s perception of what literature should be for, namely that art should be in the service of art; the moment it serves political ends, it ceases to be art: Politics is the great generalizer … and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other—they are in an antagonistic relationship. … To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself—for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized. (IMC 223) And while Roth kept—coquettishly at times—reiterating Gluckman’s stance in interviews and essays, claiming to have “no greater moral authority than a plumber” (Minkmar 2005: 2),1 his laments that US writers did not enjoy the same status in public life as in some European countries suggest that he wanted to be more than “a plumber.” However, in the one instance when he admittedly weaponized his craft, he produced an “unmitigated failure” (Gooblar 2021: 301): with Our Gang, Roth intended “to destroy the protective armor of ‘dignity’ that shields anyone in an office as high and powerful as the Presidency” (RMO 40), albeit with mixed results. In other words, he did not follow his own tenets to focus on the “written world” and leave its effects on the “unwritten world” up to the reader. Political theorist Simon Stow (2017) thus reads Our Gang as a “knowing text” as opposed to an “unknowing text”; that is, he reads it as a text with a clear intention and position, that, plainly put, lectures the reader. By contrast, for Stow, “unknowing texts” do not follow a line of argumentation and thus are more “likely to generate greater critical political reflection in the reader and, as such, to have a more positive impact upon democratic politics” (Stow 2017: 65). As Roth observed himself, “whatever changes fiction may appear to inspire have usually to do with the goals of the reader and not the writer” (RMO 155)—consequently, he had to consider that some readers would not be shaken by his scathing portrayal of President Nixon. The President himself, though, would retaliate by having Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) removed from the White House library (Hartman 2019: 101). The library of scholarship on Roth may not list that many political scientists, as this short overview shows, but it is ripe with insights into political issues from historians, philosophers, and literary scholars. While the “knowing” text of Our Gang benefits from the latters’ attention, too (e.g., Gooblar 2021), it is Roth’s “unknowing” texts on the American regime that have been subject to a growing scholarship.

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BARTLEBY THE CITIZEN In his memoir of their friendship, writer Benjamin Taylor (2020) recalls Roth describing himself as a “heartbroken patriot” (118), as he wrestled with America’s breach of its founding promise, the nation’s failure to fulfill the covenant with its citizens. And yet Roth also saw in the nation’s impurity a source of inspiration, not just for himself: Our idealism, as embodied in the founding documents, constitutes us. And belying our pride are the brutal racial facts. The disparity between who we are on paper and who we really are is what has dumbfounded American writers and produced, between Emerson and ourselves, a literature second to none. (Taylor 2020: 118) “Unknowingly,” in the sense described by Stow, Roth’s novels have exposed the unraveling of the liberal consensus that Franklin Delano Roosevelt built on myths of inclusivity and sameness. Historian Antony Hutchison (2007) and literary scholar Andy Connolly (2017) both explore in-depth how Roth retraces the changes in US society that bring “into doubt important concepts of cultural commonality and inclusive citizenry that had once glued the Rooseveltian liberal ideal together” (11). As the son of an ardent admirer of Roosevelt and the New Deal—and the creator of literary sons with similar beliefs—Roth, like his characters, constantly struggles with the fact that, unlike Saul Bellow’s Augie March, he would not simply be “American, Newark born.” Readers may at times believe Roth, always resisting a hyphenated identity, to be just as wistful and nostalgic as “the Swede” in American Pastoral, the blond Jewish high school star who longs for the perpetuation of that uncomplicated, though deceptive bliss of the 1950s. But as critical interpretations such as Connolly’s (2017) convey, Roth is conscious of the many tensions within US society prior to the open conflicts of the 1960s, whether they concerned class, race, or gender. The Plot against America makes this evident as Roth exposes how frail social ties and acceptance can be if one is “Othered” and declared to be the enemy. “Philip’s” father in the novel—yes, one of many Rothian admirers of Roosevelt—insists on his belonging, insists on and trusts in America’s goodness, but, ultimately, a trip to the capital, quasi a civic pilgrimage, forces him to recognize that the States had only been united for a fleeting moment and that a front has united against Jews. Roth refused to be considered primarily a Jewish American writer, becoming, as Jennifer Glaser (2021) describes him, “our Bartleby,” as he resisted “to become a representative man, so to speak” (210), representative of Jewish America. “Those kinds of considerations are newspaper cliches. Jewish literature. Black literature. Everyone who opens a book enters the story without noticing these labels,” he explained in an interview with The Guardian (Krasnik 2005). He suspected a “political agenda” behind such labels that are neither of literary nor other consequences: “And identity labels have nothing to do with how anyone actually experiences life” (Krasnik 2005). But like his alter egos, Roth was astutely aware that even Americanness as such is an exclusionary concept, as is any other nationality. Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is not only Roth’s explicit answer to play the part of the representative Jew. It also concerns his struggles as a writing citizen and as the creator of such writing citizens. In the American Trilogy, Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman tries to comprehend what centrifugal forces are tearing America’s social fabric apart. He retraces how this unwinding affects individuals who have constructed personal narratives on their understanding of

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national myths, and, though he may be mostly our (unreliable) observer, he does understand and commiserate with such suffering. In American Pastoral, for instance, Merry rebels against her father’s idyllic sense of Americanness, but her battles in the end deprive her of any notion of self and individuality—a tragedy that Zuckerman is at this stage aware of and that does grieve him. Similarly, Zuckerman follows in disbelief as Coleman Silk, the Classics professor in The Human Stain who passed the color-line and thus rid himself of the burdens he would have to bear as a Black man, becomes the victim of a race-conscious and politically correct culture. In the 1980s and 1990s, an “eruption of ethnicity,” as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger (1998: 20) called it, challenges Zuckerman’s understanding of Americanness—just as it did for earlier generations of Americans. In this context, Zuckerman angrily witnesses how “the persecuting spirit” is no longer aimed at allegedly immoral behavior, such as the extramarital affair of an incumbent president, but has also taken over college campuses and seeks to find offenses where none had been intended (HS 2). Consequently, Zuckerman shields himself from “the theatrical emotions that the horrors of politics inspire” (EG 94). In Exit Ghost, we encounter Zuckerman as the citizen Bartleby who prefers to abstain from any political discussion and is utterly removed from political events. As he admits, “After 9/11 I pulled the plug on the contradictions” (EG 69). He cannot even muster enough interest in visiting the place that marked the beginning of his disengagement; although, once back in New York City after several years, he “started toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin there, where the biggest thing of all occurred; but because I’ve withdrawn as witness and participant both, I never made it to the subway” (15). When he joins Jamie and Billy, the couple referenced in the first quote of this chapter, to follow the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, he hardly feigns interest in the spectacle. For a spectacle is all that it is to him, devoid of any consequences. As he watches his hosts in distress over the incumbent George W. Bush’s unexpected triumph, he suggests that they have been carried away by the pure dramatics of an electoral loss and not a consequential event: I thought to say, It’s bad, but not like waking up the morning after Pearl Harbor was bombed. It’s bad, but not like waking up the morning after Kennedy was shot. It’s bad, but not like waking up the morning after Martin Luther King was shot. … I thought to say, we have all been through it. (86) For Zuckerman is too indifferent to impart his opinion on them and thus get involved: “I did not intrude on the public drama; the public drama did not intrude on me” (95). Gradually, Zuckerman loses his belief in the idea of Americanness, and he withdraws from the political once he sheds all illusions that the liberal consensus might persist after all. He had once been taught by Leo Glucksman to consider politics as “the great generalizer” (IMC 223). But both he and Glucksman ignored the fact that, in the American regime, politics is supposed to serve the particular and the general at the same time—in other words: it is a “great particularizer” as well. The individual is the basic constitutional unit, and it is the individual whose rights are safeguarded by the state. Politics is the “great generalizer” in that it has to work within this constitutional framework and treat all “particulars” in the same manner. Generalization, in a way, serves the individual and guarantees the bedrock of individualism, namely personal liberty. It is only once the regime evolves in the direction

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of favoring so-called “identity politics” and starts regarding “groups rather than individuals as the basic constitutional units” (Schlesinger 1998: 157) that it can no longer fulfill its simultaneous role as a particularizer and generalizer. Many of Roth’s characters, none more so than Zuckerman, struggle all their lives to reconcile their “Otherness” with their Americanness and resist the hyphenation of their identity, always putting a larger emphasis on what ties them to the nation rather than on what sets them apart. But once the general liberal focus shifts from attempts at, albeit flawed, unity and from a national narrative to divergent narratives that highlight Otherness, Zuckerman loses any reason to engage with politics. By contrast, Zuckerman’s inventor would not fall completely silent on political matters when asked, and he would share his views on the last president quite frankly.2 Yet Roth would be oddly reserved regarding those political developments that would be of more consequence for his own legacy.

“BUT YOU KNOW THE TIMES”: READING ROTH IN THE AGE OF PARTICULARIZATION Literature, one can argue, is not only “the great particularizer” in the way Glucksman meant it to be, but also in how it depends on individual reading experiences, the way readers respond to it and relate it to their personal context. While readers may feel a novel addresses “general truths,” they may disagree on their significance and implications. John Whalen Bridge (1998) observed that a novel “does not come with an FDA label listing all its motives, byproducts, and secret ingredients” (75)—and it shouldn’t, for the label would have to consider too many eventualities. Had Roth been asked for an FDA-type label to some of his books, he probably would have smirked. As he told Taylor, he often did intend to offend and provoke his readers, for instance with Sabbath’s Theater (1995): “My grown-up—grownold—purpose was to violate every canon of seemliness and good taste, to affront and affront till there was no one left to affront. I seem to have succeeded. The book has proved to be an equal-opportunity offender” (Taylor 2020: 96). Yet works that are intended to be “generalizers” in their offensiveness may not provoke all readers equally; they may instead only lead to the response of readers who see their shared particularity challenged. While “identity labels have nothing to do with how anyone actually experiences life” (Krasnik 2005), as Roth argued, they have a lot to do with how people organize politically. Early in his career, Roth learned to deal with one such group, namely with conservative and Jewish critics who were easily affronted either by his lustful depictions of all sorts of sexual pleasures and transgressions or by his portrayals of Jews as common sinners, unheroic in their suffering and urges. And he indeed managed to become “an equal-opportunity offender” by garnering opponents on the left as well, as he was repeatedly accused of misogynism. Roth made light of such criticism through his alter egos or his non-fictional writing, observing that the “concerns of fiction are not those of a statistician—or of a public-relations firm” (RMO 200). But Roth had to be painfully aware of the fact that at least one audience may read fiction with the concerns of a public-relations firm at the back of their minds. For while he, as an author, might not shy away from offending everyone, they might: award committees. Though repeatedly considered a logical candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, the time around the announcement of what he started to call the “Anybody-But-Roth Prize” was “the cruelest month” (Taylor 2020: 64). Critic Harold Bloom was one of many who saw one particular reason why Roth was overlooked by the Nobel Committee: “He’s not terribly

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politically correct, you know, and they are” (Bailey 2021: 754). Such suspicions were further nourished by the scandal caused by one of the jury members of the Man Booker International Prize. When the award went to Roth in 2011, publisher3 and critic Carmen Callil (2011) resigned from the panel, voicing her disappointment in The Guardian: “Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. … The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor’s clothes.” The Man Booker Prize scandal further exemplified what Roth had already encountered in resistance to his work, ironically among the type of readers who should be standard-bearers of artistic freedom: academics. Trends that he had depicted in The Human Stain persisted, making Roth skeptical not only of literary criticism but also of academia—universities resembled, in his eyes, “feminist prison[s]” (Bailey 2021, 655). In 1999, he accepted his last prolonged teaching engagement at Bard College where he was confronted with students who, like feminist critics before, challenged him on his depictions of women and sexuality. “We don’t have to have easy moralizing reactions to characters in literature,” was one of his messages to the students (Bailey 2021, 656) as he tried to make them recognize the difference between transgressions in the written and the unwritten world. Civil and still good-humored, but direct with the students, he became increasingly guarded in the defense of his work nearly a decade later when a New York Times journalist broached the #MeToo movement. Roth acknowledged “that none of the more extreme conduct [he had] been reading about in the newspapers lately ha[d] astonished” him as he was “no stranger as a novelist to the erotic furies”: I haven’t shunned the hard facts in these fictions of why and how and when tumescent men do what they do, even when these have not been in harmony with the portrayal that a masculine public-relations campaign—if there were such a thing—might prefer. (McGrath 2018) He did not, however, comment on how he felt about the movement as such—nor did the interviewer dig deeper. The role of Bartleby the citizen was, at least on this question, not just a coquettishly worn mask, but the only resort in a debate all too reminiscent of his work. One could have overwritten the interview with the title Roth had used as a student and cofounder of the satiric magazine Et Cetera: “I’d Like to Be More Definite But You Know The Times.” In that piece, he criticizes those whose silence further aided the stifling culture of McCarthyism—and now the times made Roth share his concerns with the #MeToo movement only in private, too. He was particularly concerned about the movement’s ability to destroy careers and livelihoods without any semblance of due process: “I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal” (Bailey 2021: 794). Put differently and in reference to Glucksman, Roth felt uneasy that a movement of particularization could undermine institutions that should serve all and ascertain the rights of all—that is, that groups could challenge “the great generalizer” and thus harm individuals. Such a scenario was indeed played out in the case of Roth’s own biographer, Blake Bailey. Shortly after Philip Roth: The Biography (2021) was published with many accolades, accusations surfaced that Bailey had groomed students during his time as an eighth-grade teacher. Rape allegations cast a different light not only on Bailey as a person (Levin, Matthews, and Olmstead 2021), but also on his biography of Roth. Bailey’s US publisher W. W. Norton & Company first decided to withdraw the biography from circulation and then took it out of print. Reading or procuring the book suddenly became a transgressive act, as a commentator

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with The Jerusalem Post quipped, evoking parallels to the plot of The Prague Orgy that introduces readers to the practice of underground self-publishing to circumvent censorship, a practice known as samizdat: “This weekend, I secured Philip Roth’s biography via Samzidat American-style, borrowing it from my brother” (Troy 2021). The decision caused a stir, with many reactions reflecting the opinion of The Washington Post: “Norton’s announcement that it would not only walk away from the author, but also that it would effectively erase the book he wrote, is an extraordinary development—the kind of thing that seems more like a Roth plot line than real life” (Bai 2021). And yes, the events would serve well as a plotline: an aging novelist eager to preserve his legacy and protective of his reputation shields his papers from judgmental looks, only to entrust a writer with the task who would become embroiled in a scandal himself. (However, in Roth’s writing, the biographer would supposedly be innocent, while we cannot tell in the actual case.) This latest Rothian scandal suggests that the most important political lesson we can draw from his work is the perpetuity of America’s purity binge. Or as Roth put it, Puritanism never dies. It is immortal, our American malediction, left and right. We know it in its successive guises. We’re surrounded by sanctimonious Endicotts of every stripe. Hawthorne, that visionary pessimist, already had it right: Our enemies are forever the legions of purifiers and pleasure haters. (Taylor 2020: 119) Zuckerman could withdraw from the repetitive circus of politics and renounce his duties as a citizen. Roth wanted literature only to adhere to the rules of its own making, to the rules of “the written world”; sadly, the unwritten world seems to be tightening its puritan grip and subject Roth’s legacy to its own standards.

NOTES 1. My translation. The quote as published: “Es gibt keinen besonderen Respekt für Schriftsteller, keiner versteht, was sie genau machen. Sie haben keine grössere moralische Autorität als der Klempner.” 2. “Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac,” Roth declared in an interview with The New York Times (McGrath 2018). 3. Callil founded Virago Press, which published Claire Bloom’s memoir Leaving a Doll’s House (1996). Bloom’s depiction of her marriage to Roth was anything but flattering and inspired Roth’s portrayal of Eve Frame in I Married a Communist.

REFERENCES Bai, Matt (2021), “Dropping an Author Is One Thing. Vanishing His Book Is Another,” The Washington Post, April 29. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ opinions/2021/04/29/dropping-an-author-is-one-thing-vanishing-his-book-is-another/ (accessed January 31, 2022).

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Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, London: Jonathan Cape. Blotner, Joseph (1955), The Political Novel, Westport, CT: Doubleday & Company, Inc. Blotner, Joseph (1965), The Modern American Political Novel, 1900–1960, Austin: University of Texas Press. Bridge, John Whalen (1998), Political Fiction and the American Self, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Brühwiler, Claudia Franziska (2013), Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth, London: Bloomsbury. Brühwiler, Claudia Franziska and Lee Trepanier, eds. (2017), “Serving His Tour as an ‘Exasperated Liberal and Indignant Citizen’: Philip Roth, a Public Intellectual?” in Claudia Franziska Brühwiler and Lee Trepanier (eds.), A Political Companion to Philip Roth, 41–63, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Brühwiler, Claudia Franziska and Lee Trepanier, eds. (2017), A Political Companion to Philip Roth, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Callil, Carmen (2011), “Why I Quit the Man Booker International Panel,” The Guardian, May 21. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/21/man-booker-internationalcarmen-callil (accessed January 31, 2022). Connolly, Andy (2017), Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Glaser, Jennifer (2021), “Roth as ‘Jewish American Writer,’” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 205–14, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gooblar, David (2021), “Political Satire,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 301–10, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hartman, Andrew (2019), A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, 2nd ed., Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hutchison, Anthony (2007), Writing the Republic: Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press. Kimmage, Michael (2015), “Philip Roth, Thomas Mann, and the Other Other Europe,” Philip Roth Studies, 11 (1): 91–104. Krasnik, Martin (2005), “Philip Roth: ‘It No Longer Feels a Great Injustice That I Have to Die’,” The Guardian, December 14. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/14/ fiction.philiproth (accessed January 31, 2022). Levin, Josh, Susan Matthews, and Molly Olmstead (2021), “Mr. Bailey’s Class,” TheSlate, April 29. Available online: https://slate.com/culture/2021/04/blake-bailey-lusher-journals-teacher.html (accessed January 31, 2022). McGrath, Charles (2018), “No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say,” The New York Times, January 16. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/books/review/philiproth-interview.html (accessed January 31, 2022). Minkmar, Nils (2005), “Der Tag, als Philip Roth anrief,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 8. Available online: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/interview-der-tag-als-philip-rothanrief-1255500-p3.html (accessed January 31, 2022). Roth, Philip (1996), The Prague Orgy, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (1999), I Married a Communist, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001a), The Human Stain, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001b), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2004), The Plot against America, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2005), American Pastoral, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2006), Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends), London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2007), Exit Ghost, London: Jonathan Cape. Roth, Philip (2008), Indignation, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. (1998), The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, rev. ed., New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Stow, Simon (2017), “The Politics and Literature of Unknowingness: Philip Roth’s Our Gang and The Plot against America,” in Claudia Franziska Brühwiler and Lee Trepanier (eds.), A Political Companion to Philip Roth, 64–94, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.

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Taylor, Benjamin (2020), Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, New York: Penguin. Troy, Gil (2021), “Jews for Liberal Values: Critical Thought Not Thought Control,” The Jerusalem Post, May 11. Available online: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/jews-for-liberal-values-criticalthought-not-thought-control-opinion-667880 (accessed January 31, 2022). Whitebrook, Maureen (2001), Identity, Narrative and Politics, London: Routledge. Zuckert, Catherine (1981), “On Reading Classic American Novelists as Political Thinkers,” The Journal of Politics, 43 (3): 683–706.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Deception of Democracy in Philip Roth’s Fiction DEAN FRANCO

At the opening of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000), Nathan Zuckerman responds to the public sanctimony over Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky by indicting all the hypocrites who condemn Clinton by day while dreaming at night of the President’s “brazenness” (3). Nathan, however, dreams of a giant banner, wrapping the White House like a Christo installation, with the simple statement, “A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE” (HS 3). The declaration points out the obvious: the president was subject to the same impulses and overcame the same moral inhibitions as a preponderance of fellow Americans, and the common failure to master our desire is the open secret that the banner would disclose. Far from a claim of dignity (e.g., the “human” in declarations of human rights), the banner would declare the president as unexceptional and as stained as the rest of us.1 Though Christo deemed his building-wraps a “scream of freedom,” Roth reveals how compromised and compromising that freedom really is (BBC 2020). Of course, the novel is not about presidential politics but about the urges and constraints on human behavior that subtend democratic norms, and The Human Stain, largely about Coleman Silk’s leap out of historical identity, is a democratic novel insofar it distributes its critique of repression, evasion, and sanctimony across all of its characters, regardless of background and economic standing. Nathan’s imagined scream of freedom is the banner condition of so many of his characters in this novel and beyond. Those who aspire to belong within a framework of American norms of citizenship—the aspirational standard for Roth’s children of immigrants and their upstart offspring alike—are required to some degree to relinquish freedom, and the categories of belonging—be they cultural, religious, or national— are policed by sanctimony. In The Human Stain sanctimony is a mode of sacralization (with which it shares an etymology), or setting things apart, and the “ecstasy of sanctimony” amounts to an anti-democratic public performance: we want a “philosopher-king,” not a democratic president (HS 2).2 The president’s exploitative relationship with a young intern is exactly the destiny of human rights in Roth’s work: rights of desire traduce the rights of others, freedom edges into domination, and liberal individualism licenses the passionate conflagration of democracy. This is not simply Roth’s jaded view but a constitutive problem in democracy’s articulation in public life.

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DEMOCRACY’S COUNTERLIFE This essay is about democracy’s substrate of concepts and its evanescent appearance in daily public life. While “democracy” is easy enough to define, it harbors paradox and ambiguity in concept and constant contestation in practice. In Plato’s The Republic (c. 375 BC), the governing right of “the demos,” or “the people,” is distinguished from those whose right to govern is secured by their title—the elite vs. the 99 percent, as our contemporary discourse would have it.3 Astra Taylor (2019) summarizes democracy’s difficulty: “who counts as the people, how they rule, and where they do so remain eternally up for debate” (2). “The people” are those who have no special title, and whose right to rule comes simply from their status as common citizens. That commonality generates unease for many of Roth’s characters insofar as they are the “run-of-the-mill Americans. Mr. and Mrs. Nice Guy,” who also turn out to be closet-Nazis, according to Nathan Zuckerman’s father in The Ghost Writer (1979), who will turn around and call you “kike” (GW 92). The line from The Ghost Writer expresses yet another problem with democracy, especially with populist tendencies where “the people” seek identification with—and recognition by—the state. Run-of-the-mill Americans draw exclusionary lines around “the demos” as the fatuous Judge Wapter warns the young Nathan. Similarly, Nathan’s father’s concerns about anti-Semitism relay a broader fear that normal American belonging is limned by racial and religious boundaries. To be clear, Roth himself is not telegraphing that fear but staging a contrast among democracy’s counterlives: freedom’s expansion incurs on the rights of others, the State’s recognition of “the people” as sovereign requires drawing boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, turning the people against itself.4 Equally familiar, and presently agonizing, is the democratic problem of “self-rule,” where a body of people is the sovereign decider of political governance, yet chooses to constitute a government to which it hands over sovereignty. This two-handed gesture of rights and rule is often described as “the paradox of democracy” (Mouffe 2000: 41) and at best is regarded as “a process that involves endless reassessment and renewal, not an endpoint we reach before taking a rest” (Taylor 2019: 4). As Chantal Mouffe (2000) explains, “liberal democracy results from the articulation of two logics which are incompatible”—equality (rule of the demos) and liberty (liberalism’s rights-based destiny)—“a tension that cannot be overcome but which can only be negotiated” (5). This reassessment results in populists claiming to “take our country back,” while how they lost it and to whom is an empty cipher waiting to be filled by whichever out-group sustains their narrative. Jews were and occasionally are the targets of populist attacks, and the fear of that targeting, including its spectacular eruption in The Plot against America (2004), resides with many of Roth’s characters (see Franco 2020). Still, while it is fair to say that Philip Roth was frequently concerned for the state of political democracy in the United States, and while his dedication on behalf of writers living in anti-democratic regimes is well known, we do not typically think of Roth as writing about politics as such.5 Instead, Roth’s fiction deploys what Mouffe (2000) describes as democracy’s “symbolic ordering of social relations” (18). For Mouffe, democracy is “much more than a mere ‘form of government.’ It is a specific form of organizing politically human coexistence which results from the articulation between two different traditions: … political liberalism … and popular sovereignty” (18). Political liberalism’s impulse is to secure individual freedom and popular sovereignty’s impulse is to anchor national belonging, and the tension between the two impulses animates quite a bit of Roth’s fiction. Perhaps most famously, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) takes both impulses to their extreme, with Alexander Portnoy pushing

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every boundary of personal liberty, thus traducing the rights of others, even as his personal prestige and stated rationale for his awful behavior come from his role as an erstwhile civil rights administrator for the city of New York. As an administrator, it is up to Portnoy to confer political recognition for those seeking justice according to their democratic rights, but his own opportunism and cynicism satirize the inefficacy of state-based recognition. Not exactly about democracy, Portnoy’s Complaint nevertheless exposes democracy’s limitations: freedom as vain desire, collective governance as shambolic neglect (see Franco 2009). Thus, while Roth is no democratic theorist, nor can he be said to have a democratic agenda, insofar as his near-constant subject is the difficulty of managing other people, he necessarily engages with the fundamental social questions and political grammars that constitute the paradoxes of modern democracy. It’s clear enough that Roth’s early fiction is about individuals navigating their way through social norms that exert pressure on democratic belonging: antiSemitism, Jewish tribalism, and class elitism are impediments to Roth’s protagonists, and are the objects of satire. We are likewise familiar with Roth’s interest in and work on behalf of European writers living in anti-democratic regimes in the 1960s and 1970s, though even then Roth lamented both the severe restrictions on expression for Soviet-bloc writers and the banality and vulgarity of Western democratic cultures (ShT 93). In the later novels, as Roth’s fiction becomes at once more postmodern and more engaged with national identity and state formation, the work examines the grammars of democracy, with novels evaluating the limits of liberalism and liberalism’s investment in discourses of rights. It’s that examination—not an advocation of one or the other, or a substantiation of one or the other, but a kind of relentless interrogation—that comprises Roth’s engagement with democracy. Especially in those novels where the protagonist is intent on imagining the life of another, including The Counterlife (1986), Operation Shylock (1993), and the latter two novels of the American Trilogy, American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain, Roth demonstrates how imagination is both a political and a moral act. Imagination involves the navigation of public and private spheres, or the known and the unknowable, and while it’s fair to say that all novelists are imaginative, Roth’s novels often depend upon his characters’ efforts to imagine the lives of others, even to imagine the imagination of others. Contemplating fascists and their accusers, the character Philip Roth of Operation Shylock places imagination at the crux of understanding: “And what was I thinking? I was thinking, What are they thinking?” (OS 297). That question, and the express demonstration of how the novelist addresses it, acknowledges the strangeness of the other even as it posits that strangeness as apprehensible. Imagination takes on a critical function for civic life, as Hannah Arendt (1978) observes: [C]ritical thinking while still a solitary business has not cut itself off from “all others.” … [By] force of imagination it makes others present and thus moves potentially in a space which is public, open to all sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kant’s world citizen. To think with the enlarged mentality—that means you train your imagination to go visiting … (257) This sort of imaginative work as the basis of judgment is one of Nathan Zuckerman’s most consistent projects beginning with The Ghost Writer, where Nathan’s imagined Anne Frank allows him to reflect on degrees of hospitality and hostility for Jews in the United States that he is otherwise unable to regard in his own life. Even more sophisticated is Nathan’s use of imagination in The Counterlife, wherein he imagines the life of his brother Henry, including

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imagining Henry’s imagination of him, to explore both the limits of Western liberal tolerance for Jews on the one hand, and the genocidal logic of Jewish nationalism on the other. Of course, this attempt to know what the other is thinking often ends in failure. In both The Human Stain and American Pastoral, Nathan observes that our failure to really know another and thus understand their actions is fundamental to our human condition. In his critique of epistemology as a basis for democracy, philosopher Richard Rorty (1989) similarly observes, “metaphysicians think that human beings by nature desire to know. They think this because the vocabulary they have inherited, their common sense, provides them with a picture of knowledge as a relation between human beings and ‘reality’” (75). Instead, Rorty advocates that we replace knowing with irony: “[The] ironist does not see the search for a final vocabulary as … a way of getting something distinct from this vocabulary right. They do not take the point of discursive thought to be knowing” (75). For Rorty, democracy requires (but cannot wholly subsist on) irony, because irony is the capacity to see otherwise, or to understand that one’s own story is not the only story, that things look different for my neighbor, even if we ostensibly share the same view. One can imagine the aging Nathan Zuckerman, holed up in the Berkshires, nodding along to Rorty as he considers Coleman Silk’s state of mind after Coleman reencounters his first love, Steena Paulson: how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made … on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do. That is, he walked away understanding nothing, knowing he could understand nothing, though with the illusion that he would have metaphysically understood something of enormous importance about this stubborn determination of his to become his own man if … if only such things were understandable. (HS 125–6) This is how Nathan imagines Coleman, who will eventually become an ironic manipulator of misperception. Metaphysics is swapped out for pragmatism for Coleman, and that swap works for most of his life until the certitude of metaphysics boomerangs back as the farce of sanctimony. In contrast, Nathan regards American Pastoral’s Swede Levov as something of an anti-ironist onto whom his wider Jewish community has cathected an American democratic fantasy: “there appeared to be not a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden fit for responsibility” (AP 5).

THE LIMITS OF DEMOCRATIC PLURALISM In The Plot against America, Herman Roth takes his young family to Washington D.C. just after the Republican sweep of Congress and Charles Lindbergh’s defeat of FDR. Prior to the visit, Herman and his nephew Alvin argue about the fate of democracy in a country that worships capitalist increase, but Herman considers Alvin’s “complaints” about capitalism to be mere “kid stuff” (PAA 50). However, the novel reveals Herman’s own faith in American democracy to be child-like, for even with the United States increasingly mirroring Nazi Germany, Herman remains wildly jingoistic. The trip to D.C. is offered as redoubt and rebuff to his family’s growing (and reasonable) fear, but even as they assemble to tour the Lincoln Memorial the Roths suffer anti-Semitic abuse, culminating with their removal from

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their hotel for no apparent reason other than their Judaism. In the face of all evidence of his disenfranchisement, Herman nonetheless insists on calling the police, against his wife’s pleas to simply leave and avoid confrontation: “No, [calling the police] is the right solution. Call the police. … There are laws in this country,” he declares to the hotel manager (PAA 69). Herman believes the police will “remind [the manager] of the words in the Gettysburg Address that [he] read carved up there just today” (PAA 69). Of course, the police take the manager’s side and threaten Herman if he doesn’t leave the hotel grounds immediately. Herman subsequently finds his working-class liberalism violently dismissed by the populist white nationalism. No one tells Herman that America is no longer democratic, simply that the demos no longer includes Jews. Herman’s performance of naïve faith in American democracy depicts what Lauren Berlant (1997) calls “the infantile citizen’s faith in the nation” (27). For Berlant, the figure of the “infantile citizen,” represented most popularly by Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), “is based on a belief in the state’s commitment to representing the best interests of ordinary people” (28). That faith originates in and subsequently generates emotional attachments that, when successful, sustain “a person’s patriotic and practical attachment to the nation and to other citizens” (Berlant 1997: 27–8). But those very attachments depend on the staged performance of that naïvety—think Jimmy Stewart in D.C.—and Roth’s novels regularly betray the performance as either cynical, or in Herman’s case, self-deluding. Though The Plot against America is exceptional among Roth’s novels for its counter-historical depiction of democracy’s merger with fascism, we’ve seen thus far that many of Roth’s novels center on Jewish upstarts and on Jewishness as an anxious form of American belonging. The recurring theme of these novels can be cast as a question about American democracy: are people from a diversity of backgrounds—national origin, religious commitment, racialized experience, etc.—recognized as democracy’s rightful subjects despite their differences? This would be the liberalism of “tolerance” for the other, where belonging is contingent on proximity to whiteness or the self-management of difference; or like with the Patimkin family in Goodbye, Columbus (1959), nose jobs, athletic achievement, and the subordination of a Black servant help secure purchase on the American dream. The alternative liberalism is rooted in pluralism, where identities are inflected by linguistic, religious, and experiential differences. The former would presume a private self and public political identity, while the latter presumes that democracy secures public recognition for diversity. Political theory may sort through these differing modes of belonging as more or less normative for American democracy, but in Roth’s novels, characters typically contend with both liberal tolerance for assimilation and a contentious pluralism, wherein cultural difference is negotiated as a claim on public recognition and acceptance. American Pastoral features these competing modes of democratic belonging wherein American pastoralism itself is the achievement of democratic pluralist belonging, while pluralism’s opposite—depicted as the violent rejection of democracy’s production of insiders and outsiders—is named by Nathan “the indigenous American berserk” (AP 86). The phrase is pegged to the Swede’s daughter Merry, who protests the US war against Vietnam by bombing a local post office and unintentionally killing a bystander. Merry descends into an underground cult-like network, and she seems to represent for the Swede not only the derailment of his family’s tranquil passage into bland (albeit wealthy) American whiteness, but also the derailment of the nation’s postwar liberal consensus. There is nothing liberal about Merry, nor about Rita Cohen, who claims to speak for her and who torments the Swede.

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The “indigenous American berserk” opposes the American Pastoral while also interrogating its romantic illusion. Up until this point in the novel, indigeneity is ironic: the Swede stakes out his American identity on a piece of property that has been occupied by white people for about as long as they have been on the continent, but doing so only doubly highlights his non-belonging, neither as patrician WASP nor—certainly—as somehow native to a land claimed for millennia by the region’s true Indigenous people. The pretense of white autochthony is perhaps signaled by Rita, who slyly asks the Swede if he is a “last Mohican” (albeit of the glove-making business), and while her irony may be lost on him, it’s of a piece with her anti-colonial attacks on what we would now call the Swede’s exploitative racial capitalism (AP 130). Meanwhile, “berserk,” from the Old Norse for “bear skin,” conjures the image of a Viking possessed of supernatural power, who, upon donning the bear’s skin— the etymological root of “berserk”—proceeds to rampage (“berserk” 2022). The power of the phrase, then, is in its harnessing of something born and bred in America—indigenous—which can neither be controlled nor reasoned with, and which rampages and destroys the very sort of life-arrangement the Swede had aspired to. That the etymology of “berserk” pins this rampage to Norse whiteness only heightens the phrase’s ironic incision into the Swede’s facile achievement of white belonging. The Swede discovers that his neighbor, Bill Orcutt, is having an affair with his wife, thus further eroding the patrician foundation of his Rimrock pastoral dream. Where Rita Cohen, in her torment of the Swede, demands that he acknowledge the racist and imperialist implications of his American Dream, the pretentious, wealthy Orcutt dispossesses the Swede of that Dream, as if it was never really his to have after all. This is, of course, all imagined by Nathan, who couldn’t possibly know about the Swede’s intimate terror, nor the details of his wife’s betrayal. Indeed, we recall that when Nathan encounters the Swede early in the novel—just before his death—this great man tells him little of interest about his personal life, and never mentions that he had a daughter or even a previous marriage. By then, the Swede has survived his torment, but he had to swap out his fantasy of American pastoralism for something more crass and opportune. Pastoral liberalism arrives at its destiny, acquisitive, competitive capitalism, which writes off its losses and only claims its gains. Cultural pluralism and deliberative democratic dialogue fare no better in Nathan’s imagined biography of the Swede. At the novel’s close, Nathan conjures the scene that foretold the Swede’s eventual misery: “What had gone wrong for Merry was what her Jewish grandfather had known would go wrong from the morning of the meeting on Central Avenue” (AP 391). Lou predicts the doom and not his son because Lou, like Nathan’s own father in The Ghost Writer, sees clearly the limits of Christian tolerance for Jews in the United States. The meeting between Dawn and Lou, with the Swede as silent witness, parodies the pluralist negotiation of cultural difference depicting Lou’s bargain with Dawn over exactly how much Christianity his anticipated grandchild will engage. The humor comes from the way specific holidays and rituals are traded back and forth like a labor contract, but at its core is a crude version of democratic pluralism, where acknowledging the mystery inherent to different faiths allows for mutual respect. Lou’s refusal to grant his grandchild the Eucharist is worthy of a full quotation: I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE IT UP TO A CHILD TO DECIDE TO EAT JESUS. I HAVE THE HIGHEST RESPECT FOR WHATEVER YOU DO, BUT MY GRANDCHILD IS NOT GOING TO EAT JESUS. I’M SORRY. THAT IS OUT OF THE QUESTION. HERE’S WHAT I’LL DO FOR YOU. I’LL GIVE YOU THE BAPTISM. THAT’S ALL I CAN DO FOR YOU.

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That’s all? AND I’LL GIVE YOU CHRISTMAS. (AP 396) The scene reads like a send-up of theorist William Connolly’s advocacy of engaged pluralism as the basis of a democracy of diversity. Connolly (2005) posits “the possibility of multiple faiths negotiating with dignity on the same territory, [where] each faith minority also amplifies awareness of the element of rupture of mystery already simmering in it” (64). Whatever dignity Lou intends with Dawn, they are never “on the same territory,” and their negotiations of faith are proxy negotiations for belonging in America at large. Typical of Roth’s dramatization of people’s life bargains, it all goes right until it all goes wrong, and though the scene is unabsorbed into the narrative arc of the Swede’s rise and fall, it nonetheless illustrates how porous is the democratic foundation of the Swede’s Rimrock dreams. The negotiation is a memory patched into a longer ending scene in which ostensibly convivial friends and neighbors with contending political views jab at each other, illustrating both the necessity of public and private spheres in democratic theory and, thinking specifically about the form of the novel, the function of imagination for cultivating a meta-critical capacity for the reader. The novel closes with a late afternoon dinner party at the Swede’s house, where personal betrayals and political attacks comingle, and while the scene initially affirms Mouffe’s (2000) claim that “in a democratic polity, conflicts and confrontations, far from being a sign of imperfection, indicate that democracy is alive and inhabited by pluralism” (34), the last, anarchic laugh is given to Marcia Umanoff, the obnoxious wife of the Swede’s oldest friend: [S]he began to laugh at their obtuseness to the flimsiness of the whole contraption, to laugh and laugh at them all, pillars of a society that, much to her delight, was going rapidly under—to laugh and to relish, as some people, historically, always seem to do, how far the rampant disorder had spread, enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things. (AP 423) Roth, too, seems to “relish” the exposure of disorder and the cracking of political and moral foundations. Beyond the political give-and-take of pluralism, “the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things”—and the laughter that accompanies it—clears the ground for seeing the fragile citizen as they really are.

DEMOCRACY’S SENTENCE For as much as this essay has examined the ideas subtending democratic theory as they appear in Roth’s work, we close by noting that those ideas often subsist in Roth’s style, specifically his notably long sentences. Roth’s long sentences are largely absent of metaphor, typically the vehicle for democratic universalism, and they are heavily reliant on metonymy, which is the rhetoric of contingency and uncertainty, but also of connection, the recognition of which is fundamental for public life. Especially in Roth’s late Zuckerman novels, but also in Operation Shylock, The Ghost Writer, and The Counterlife, the long sentence dissolves

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narrative authority and destabilizes epistemology. As is common with free indirect discourse, where a third-person narrator floats in and out of the point of view of a novel’s characters, Roth’s narrator assembles his characters out of the facts he knows and his professionally attuned capacity for imagination. Roth’s particular turn on this style is to collapse the boundary between narrator and character, both in the sentence itself and in the longer arc of a character’s story. It’s frequently impossible to know where Roth’s writer-narrator characters’ perspectives stop and where their objects of attention start. The blurred boundary between fact and imagination yields characters whose lives are otherwise a world apart from Nathan’s, but who nevertheless abide as wholly realized for Nathan. The long sentences are prominent beginning in Roth’s mid-career period, and they appear most frequently in the Zuckerman novels, especially in the American Trilogy where Nathan expressly meditates on how to navigate the public and private, the dignified and the sordid, and the political and the intimate. But before examining late instances of the Rothian democratic sentence, it’s worth noting its earliest appearance, in “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959). That novella’s style is exceptionally well-controlled, with insight and wit largely contained in conventionally clipped prose. Late in the story, however, Neil Klugman has a dream in which several of the story’s threads weave together right before tearing apart, with the dream told in a series of long, compound-complex sentences: For a while it was a pleasant dream; we were anchored in the harbor of an island in the Pacific and it was very sunny. Up on the beach there were beautiful bare-skinned Negresses, and none of them moved; but suddenly we were moving, our ship, out of the harbor, and the Negresses moved slowly down to the shore and began to throw leis at us and say “Goodbye, Columbus … goodbye, Columbus … goodbye …” and though we did not want to go, the little boy and I, the boat was moving and there was nothing we could do about it, and he shouted at me that it was my fault and I shouted it was his for not having a library card, but we were wasting our breath, for we were further and further from the island, and soon the natives were nothing at all. (GC 74–5) Readers will recognize several elements of the story organized through dream work’s condensation and displacement. Though not obviously political, the dream’s metaphors and metonymy align Neil with democracy’s underclass, the part that has no part. Neil’s future with Brenda is troped as the Tahitian island and its inhabitants, which has been relayed into the dream from the Gauguin paintings collected in books in the New York Public Library where Neil works. The young boy, obsessed with Gauguin, stands side by side with Neil, and both long for a foreclosed fecundity, readable as the displacement of the Patimkin’s brimming refrigerator full of fruit (GC 43). The term “negresses” is inescapably racist, though race seems to have no substance here, nor across Roth’s fiction. In this case, Blackness is both desired (the native islanders) and desiring (the young boy), and Blackness in general across Roth’s fiction never has more than symbolic meaning. In particular, the dream’s two Black signifiers melancholically trace if not fully foreclose two modes of democracy’s spread for Jews in mid-century American life: the elevation of the Jewish Patimkin family into the American middle class, on the one hand, and the institutions of democracy represented by the public library, a temple of democracy for the working class, on the other hand. The cleavage gives the novel its poignant melancholy. We never doubt that Neil and the young Black boy have a place in the demos. Indeed, as Bonnie Honig

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(2017) has argued, “public things,” including institutions like the NYPL are signs and sites of democracy’s strength (24). At the same time, the Patimkin family’s rise in class ­status— ostensibly fulfilling the American dream—privatizes pleasure, deracinates ethnic identity, and chauvinistically selects experiences that repudiate the publicness of Neil’s life. With both, proximate Blackness—the boy in the library and the Patimkins’ ubiquitous but silent Black servant Carlotta—signifies white status. The echo of Ron Patimkin’s recording of the Ohio State alumni album hints at the sort of American belonging that the Swede aspires to in American Pastoral, and we see that even that late novel’s satire on American belonging is anticipated in Roth’s earliest writing. Roth’s long sentences have multiple functions, of course, but two of the more prominent functions are to gather disparate objects and ideas through a surprising apposition and to dissolve certainty and connection through repetition. We find this gathering at the beginning of The Human Stain, when Nathan establishes the context for Coleman’s story. Nathan lists events of 1998, beginning with white and brown “gods” of baseball battling for the singleseason homerun record, and while seemingly incidental, the reader infers the reference to Coleman’s professional interest in Classical Greek and Roman gods and his own early struggle with his racial identity. The sentence then poses a string of apposite references including the geo-political serious—mentions of communism, terrorism, and national-security—and the profane: “cock-sucking” (HS 2). Finally, the sentence’s contemporaneity concludes with a throw-back vision of Bill and Monica, acting like “two teenage kids in a parking lot” (HS 2). The long sentence, then, aligns high and low, sacred and profane, public and private, concluding with judgment—the previously mentioned “ecstasy of sanctimony” (HS 2). The endnote of judgment is hardly the interior critique of value described by Arendt as fundamental to democratic life. Rather, it’s about the efficacy of projection and displacement—the very function of metonymy in Freud’s thought—or the attempt to set apart as sanctionable the very same behaviors that the would-be judgers of propriety hide from themselves.6 Here, Roth’s metonymy resurfaces the repressed and joins together social, political, and personal practices that would otherwise be set apart. Doing so, this single sentence established the novel’s wish for comity undercut by the various forces arrayed against its possibility. What remains after democracy’s breakdown? For all the effort Roth’s narrators put into exposing hypocrisy, deceit, and sanctimony, the narrators themselves are inescapably drawn toward the truth of their subjects, so that even a character as menacing and alien to Nathan and Coleman as Les Farley remains a subject worthy of Nathan’s work-horse imagination. Nathan enters Farley’s life with a short sentence that takes stock of his subject, whom Nathan initially only knows as Coleman’s assailant, followed by a long sentence that transitions into Farley’s point of view: The encounter with Farley. The encounter that night with Farley, the confrontation with a dairy farmer who had not meant to fail but did, a road crew employee who gave his all to the town no matter how lowly and degrading the task assigned him, a loyal American who’d served his country with not one tour but two, who’d gone back a second time to finish the goddam job. (HS 64) Nathan dexterously maneuvers from Coleman’s point of view—he is the unspoken subject of “the encounter with Farley”—to Les’s subjective view of himself, resonantly transitioning

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from “lowly” to “loyal American” who served two tours and finished the “goddam job.” What follows is a dense account of Farley’s failed journeyman’s life, alternating between a narrated second-person point of view and self-justifying first-person point of view, concluding ten pages later with, “once again, it was his life” (HS 74). The emphatically blunt sentence brims with irony insofar as the claim of self-possession is authored by Nathan and not Les, and yet it rings as a sincere attempt to take Les’s complexity seriously.7 The novel’s closing pages are both revealing and grim, though still deferring last word. Heading into New Jersey to meet Coleman’s family and ostensibly learn more of his life story, Nathan comes across Les out on a frozen lake. The closing image is a feint; the “peaceful,” “arcadian” image of a man on a lake with a bucket—Les Farley—masks the menace and psychological disfigurement that the novel discloses (HS 361). At the same time, there is another end to be retrieved when we consider the involution of time in the narrative: Nathan hopes to learn about Coleman, and that knowledge is plowed back into the novel as the lengthy history of the Silk’s ancestry, located two hundred pages prior to the novel’s close. Packed into the middle of the novel, across five and a half pages filled with exceptionally long sentences, Nathan recounts the story Coleman’s mother ostensibly told to Coleman, but surely told to Nathan upon his visit after the encounter with Farley. A rebuff to both the deceptive arcadian scene on the ice and to Coleman’s “dangerous” freedom, she tells the intricate, two-hundred-year story of enslaved and free-born Black Americans intermarrying with European-descent people, their migrations and settlement, their labor and education, and their political investiture and communal pride (HS 145, 140–4). The sweep and detail of the passage is Whitmanian, and the compression of information in sentences as long as two hundred words each stands as thick account of collective democratic mobility against the freedom of Coleman’s individuality. Of course, we immediately note that the richly textured story of Coleman’s family and their rootedness in New England skims over the fact of segregation and white-supremacist elimination of Black life from representative politics for almost a century. This is at least a part of the we Coleman escapes by passing, elevating not one sort of democracy over the other but—like with the arcadian scene at the end—revealing the deception of democracy’s spread.

NOTES 1. Or, as Roth would put it in Reading Myself and Others (1975), “There is this shibboleth, ‘respect for the Office of the Presidency’—as though there were no distinction between the man who holds and degrades the office and the office itself. And why all the piety about the office anyway? A President happens to be in our employ” (RMO 45). 2. This is, in fact, Jerry Levov’s dismissive phrase for his brother, the Swede, who nonetheless failed to rule his republic (AP 69). 3. Or, as Plato has it in The Republic, “Such is democracy;—a pleasing, lawless, various sort of government, distributing equality to equals and unequals alike” (Jowett 2010: 94). 4. The famous “Yeshiva battle” wherein Roth, Ralph Ellison, and Pietro di Donato speak on “Conflicts Depicting Race and Ethnicity in Fiction” includes comments from Roth and Ellison largely speaking to the freedom of the artist to represent the entire field of ethnic or simply human experience, with di Donato taking the position similar to Nathan’s father, arguing that beneath the surface of the ordinary citizen is a raving racist and anti-Semite. See Newark Public Library (2021).

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5. Roth’s most prominent elaborations on democracy appear in his interviews with Eastern European authors, published in Shop Talk (2001). 6. Lauren Berlant (1997) says as much: “Now everywhere in the United States intimate things flash in people’s faces: pornography, abortion, sexuality, and reproduction; marriage, personal morality, and family values. These issues do not arise as private concerns: they are key to debates about what ‘America’ stands for, and are deemed vital to defining how citizens should act. In the process of collapsing the political and the personal into a world of public intimacy, a nation made for adult citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children” (1). 7. Nathan admits to getting much about Les wrong when he finally meets him on a frozen lake at the end of The Human Stain (HS 350). Similarly in American Pastoral, Nathan prefaces his story of the Swede by admitting that for all his self-abnegation and devotion to his subject, he likely still got it all wrong (AP 76–7).

REFERENCES Arendt, Hannah (1978), The Life of the Mind, New York: Harcourt. BBC (2020), “Obituary: Christo Javacheff, the Artist Who Wrapped the World,” BBC, June 1. Available online: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-44254036 (accessed July 19, 2023). Berlant, Lauren (1997), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Durham: Duke University Press. “berserk” (2022), OED Online. Available online: https://www-oed-com.wake.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry /17985?redirectedFrom=berserk#eid (accessed July 10, 2022). Connolly, William (2005), Pluralism, Durham: Duke University Press. Franco, Dean (2009), “Portnoy’s Complaint: It’s about Race, Not Sex (Even the Sex Is about Race),” Prooftexts, 29 (1): 86–115. Franco, Dean (2020), “The Jews Are ‘the New Jews,’” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 39 (1): 139–59. Honig, Bonnie (2017), Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, New York: Fordham University Press. Jowett, Benjamin, ed. (2010), Dialogues of Plato, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mouffe, Chantal (2000), The Democratic Paradox, New York: Verso. Newark Public Library (2021), “Conflicts Depicting Race and Ethnicity in Fiction, 1962 and 2021: Roth, Ellison, & di Donato,” YouTube, December 2. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=prQJo78uZ5Q (accessed June 14, 2022). Rorty, Richard (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, New York: Cambridge University Press. Roth, Philip (1987), Goodbye, Columbus, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1993), Operation Shylock: A Confession, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1995), The Ghost Writer, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1997), American Pastoral, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001a), The Human Stain, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001b), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2005), The Plot against America, New York: Vintage. Taylor, Astra (2019), Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, New York: Metropolitan Books.



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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Our Fathers’ Sons and Our Neighborhoods’ Creatures”: Upward Mobility and the Welfare State in Roth’s Fiction DANIEL DUFOURNAUD

When, in The Facts (1988), Philip Roth writes about his penchant for bringing to the study of literature what he and his friends “imbibed eavesdropping on our fathers’ pinochle games,” he extols his Jewishness as an “intellectual resource” while simultaneously locating it within a specific historical and economic context (F 115). Whatever their Jewish identity meant to these readers on religious, ethnic, and existential levels, it did not exist apart from the urban setting of their lower-middle-class origins; these “clever, ambitious city boys” approached the “civilizing” influence of high culture with hermeneutical powers shaped “by being both our fathers’ sons and our neighborhoods’ creatures” (F 115). The heightened ambition born of humble circumstance combined with the heightened self-consciousness generated by ethnic difference made their university education a form of self-discovery and aspiration. Rather than softening them into accepting social hierarchy, the work of patiently scrutinizing literature both crystallized what made Roth and his friends unique as readers and reminded them of the unprecedented opportunity for upward mobility they enjoyed. In constellating class, ethnicity, and ambition, this autobiographical scene speaks to Roth’s preoccupation with socioeconomic issues—with issues pertaining to the intersections of ethnoracial identity, material reality, and economic opportunity. This concern surfaces in several novels over Roth’s long career, but it has attracted less critical attention than Roth’s experiments in numerous genres and styles; his meditations on history, celebrity, masculinity, and the plight of the individual amid conformist pressure; and his humorous accounts of American Jewish life and family dysfunction. Yet as Roth’s recollection of studying literature suggests, thinking about his Jewishness involves thinking about upward mobility. In Patrimony (1991), when Roth mentions the intellectual divide between him and his father, he simultaneously realizes that the age he “prematurely entered high school” is the same age his father “left school for good to help support his immigrant parents and all their children” (P 160). If Roth’s realization that he and his father have not faced the same level of material hardship expresses a classic American story of socioeconomic ascent over successive generations, he subjects this tale to critical examination in his novels, delineating an ambivalent picture of the

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institutional and systemic conditions of economic (in)justice. In his novels, Jewish upward mobility encodes both a critique and a celebration of the welfare state and its attendant forms of assistance. Panoramic attention to Roth’s treatment of upward mobility, moving across his oeuvre at an accelerated pace, reveals not only a consistent narrative of American Jews pursuing social advancement through institutions associated with the welfare state but also his awareness of violence committed by the state as well as its failure to extend opportunity to racialized communities. Arguably, this focus on upward mobility and the welfare state accounts for the paucity of scholarship on Roth and class. After all, he is not an agitprop writer for whom economic inequality constitutes the primary drama of human life. Only dead ends will be found in the attempt to situate Roth’s concern with socioeconomic phenomena in a Marxian framework that understands class inequality as an agonistic battle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The iniquities of capital preoccupy his work less than the consequences of deviating from communal norms or personal routines. In his novels, revolutionaries, activists, and ideologues become sources of mystery, literary curiosities, or objects of satire. That said, Roth’s novels do evince a concern with economic justice. While it may be true that the thematic aspects of Roth’s fiction bespeak, in Debra Shostak’s (2004) estimation, a writer with “no fixed position” (7), focusing on the materialist and political dimensions of his work allows us to home in on something of a fixed position: Roth is more New Deal Democrat than Marxist, more institutionalist than revolutionary, a writer who extols public forms of uplift even as he recognizes their flaws and limits.1 Roth’s early novels feature characters in public-service positions, such as Neil Klugman working at the Newark Public Library and Alexander Portnoy working for the “City of New York Commission for Human Opportunity” (PC 120). His late-phase novels celebrate the beneficent impact of public-school teachers and make frequent references to public forms of assistance such as the GI Bill, which “ushered in unprecedented social mobility by giving veterans access to home and business loans, educational assistance, and employment services” (Parker 2010: 116).2 Furthermore, in an op-ed originally published in the New York Times, Roth laments the municipal government of Newark’s “fiscal” justification for “shutting down its libraries” not long after racially charged riots brought the city to a standstill in 1967 (RMO 177). The libraries were “property held in common for the common good” (176), and Roth sees this blatant disinvestment in Black constituents as a threat to “aspiration and curiosity” (175). Roth’s personal history of striving tinges his criticism of Newark’s public officials, suggesting the difficulty of separating his treatment of American Jewish success stories from his thoughts about the welfare state and its failures. Contributing to the complexity of Roth’s concern with economic justice is the fluid racial status of Jews within the American social imaginary. Matthew Frye Jacobsen (1998: 1–4) begins Whiteness of a Different Color, his study of whiteness as a protean category of identity in America, by citing the argument that Nathan Zuckerman and his English partner, Maria Freshfield, have about race in The Counterlife (1986). To Maria’s insistence that Jews “are a different race,” Zuckerman responds: “I am Caucasian, kiddo. In the U.S. Census I am, for good or bad, counted as Caucasian” (C 71). According to Jacobsen, although Jews began the twentieth century as racialized others, by midcentury they had acceded to whiteness alongside other groups of non-WASP Europeans. These groups were no longer viewed in terms of racial difference but in terms of ethnic difference—a consequential shift in emphasis that did not altogether efface discrimination against these groups but gave them reason to value their ethnic uniqueness. Committed public-school teacher Murray Ringold of I Married a Communist

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(1998) captures this postwar sense of ethnic difference as social capital when he says to Nathan, “To be an American with your own inflection wasn’t that difficult anymore” (163). The socioeconomic boons of the transition from racial to ethnic otherness cannot be overstated. The well-intentioned impulse to celebrate tolerance and multiculturalism threatens to collapse into myopia and political quietism if it remains unleavened by an awareness of the material consequences of racial marginalization and of the histories of dispossession that underwrite life chances in the present. In How Jews Became White Folks, Karen Brodkin (1998) writes that “economic prosperity … played a very powerful role in the whitening process. The economic mobility of Jews and other Euro-ethnics derived from America’s postwar economic prosperity and its enormously expanded need for professional, technical, and managerial labor, as well as on government assistance in providing it” (37). Such expanded need and the forms of assistance it came to underpin were not capacious enough to consistently include groups that did not lose the stigma of racial otherness. Given that Roth’s first major work was published in 1959, this history of opportunity and exclusion has a direct bearing on the lives he subjects to fictional treatment. Whether upward mobility made Jews white or Jews becoming white enabled upward mobility is unsolvable for Brodkin (1998)—she ultimately admits that “both tendencies were at work” (36)—but the imbrication of whiteness and material ease indicates that no analysis of Roth’s preoccupation with the welfare state is complete without attending to the link between discrimination and economic injustice. For all his focus on individuals at odds with their environment, Roth is attuned to the institutional and social conditions of success and failure. Jewish social mobility meets Roth’s belief in the power of public institutions to set the stage for much of the drama in “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959). Roth’s main preoccupation in the novella is class disparity within the American Jewish community. Employed at a Newark public library, Neil Klugman spends much of his summer vacation in suburban New Jersey with his girlfriend, Brenda Patimkin, and her nouveau riche family, a relationship that ends with an argument ignited by Mrs. Patimkin discovering Brenda’s diaphragm. The family’s surname calls to mind a Potemkin village, suggesting that differences in wealth engender a crisis of Jewish authenticity. Neil’s Aunt Gladys contends that the Patimkins “couldn’t be real Jews” if they lived in the suburbs (GC 58). Roth further denaturalizes the grounds of Jewish selfidentification in Neil’s awkward conversation with Mrs. Patimkin. To her question, “are you orthodox or conservative?” he answers, “I’m just Jewish” (88). Neil’s growing selfconsciousness means that the crisis of authenticity strikes no one as much as it does him. He obsesses over Brenda’s nose job—the bump in her nose having been “dropped down some toilet in Fifth Avenue Hospital” (28)—as if to assure himself of his own claim to Jewishness. Tellingly, Neil seems to secure the authenticity of his Jewish identity through his employment at the public library, the very institution that Roth extols in his op-ed. Walking through Radcliffe campus after his breakup with Brenda, Neil pauses to gaze at this reflection in a window of Lamont Library: “[M]y gaze pushed through [my reflection], over the cool floor, to a broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved. I did not look very much longer, but took a train that got me into Newark just as the sun was rising on the first day of the Jewish New Year. I was back in plenty of time for work” (GC 136). If, as David Gooblar (2011: 31) and Ross Posnock (2006: 102) have each pointed out, this final moment marks a celebration of life devoted to literature, it is important to keep in mind the Newark Public Library’s status as a public institution. Passages such as this one lead Mary Esteve (2021) to include Roth in a group of postwar writers she calls “incremental realists,” writers who link the pursuit of happiness to the beneficent impact of welfare-state institutions and to these institutions’

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role in fostering the common good (1–55). Furthermore, in constellating Neil’s professional attention to detail, his comfort in getting to work on time, and his heightened sense of ethnic difference elicited by an awareness of the Jewish New Year, Roth intimates that Neil’s “just Jewish” identity is intimately bound up with public service, that it means very little to him without the institutional ballast of the library. This association of Neil’s Jewish identity with the public library also allows Roth to show how public forms of assistance, and by extension the welfare state, did not serve all Americans equally in the postwar period. This critique of the welfare state is figured through Neil’s relationship with a Black boy who frequents the library in order to look at Gauguin paintings. Neil works with John McKee and Mr. Scapello at the library—names that suggest non-WASP people of Irish and Italian descent, respectively—although he is the only one who encourages the boy’s interest in books. McKee’s unwarranted fear of the boy makes him a metonymic expression of the state’s indifference to Black constituents: “Someone should check on him. … You know the way they treat the housing projects we give them” (GC 35). And yet, even though McKee’s blatant racism fosters Neil’s solidarity with the boy, Neil’s subsequent observations— “the flesh of his lips did not so much appear to be a different color as it looked to be unfinished and awaiting another coat” (36); “[t]he euphoria of his diction” (37)—betray a fetishistic view of Blackness and thereby indicate social distance that neither sympathy nor allyship can bridge. Later, when Neil is in the throes of his alienating relationship with the Patimkins, he has a dream in which he and the boy are sailing together on a ship. Although the dream is “pleasant” at first, the relationship between the sailors soon grows dysfunctional: “[H]e shouted at me that it was my fault and I shouted it was his for not having a library card” (74). Unequal access to the boons of the welfare state seems to lie at the core of their tense exchange. Roth’s focus on Jewish upward mobility and on the socioeconomic disparity between American Jews and Black Americans continues in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), an unlikely inclusion in a list of Roth novels that take economic injustice seriously. The novel’s treatment of socioeconomic phenomena tends merely to serve its humor. Talking to his psychoanalyst, Portnoy reveals his Oedipal hang-ups, his masturbatory misadventures, and his romantic frustrations. In early scenes, the novel’s bawdiest humor originates from the family’s workingclass environment; for instance, the only reason Portnoy is almost caught masturbating is the fact that there is only one bathroom in the apartment (PC 22). Later, when Portnoy travels to Iowa to meet his WASP girlfriend Kay Campbell’s family, he associates their life free of discrimination with their “white clapboard house,” “the swing tied up to the ceiling of the front porch,” and the “goyische curtains” (248). And when he travels to Israel, he is not simply struck by the ubiquity of Jewish people but by the fact that Jews span the entire labor force— “all the people I see—passengers, stewardesses, ticket sellers, porters, pilots, taxi drivers—are Jews” (286)—as if realizing that his desire for social advancement is not something shared by Jews everywhere. If the humor in any one of these examples downplays the thematic importance of upward mobility, then the accumulation of these examples across the narrative does the opposite, striking a serious note about ambition to accompany the novel’s humor. Along the way, moreover, Portnoy explains that his father sells life insurance to impoverished Black people in New Jersey, “people who aren’t even exactly sure they’re alive” (PC 136). Despite being “exploited to the full” by his company, Portnoy’s father retains a sense of altruism in his professional exchanges with customers: “He wasn’t just saving his own soul when he donned his coat and hat after dinner and went out again to resume his work—no, it was also to save some poor son of a bitch on the brink of letting his insurance policy lapse” (4, 5). His father’s effortful combination of industriousness and kindness appears to set an

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example for Portnoy. For if his father was deputized by a private corporation to sell insurance to Black people, Portnoy is deputized by the City of New York to help solve the problems of inequality. Portnoy describes himself as a “Jewish man, who cared about the welfare of the poor of the City of New York” (183) and at one point explains that he is “conducting an investigation of unlawful discriminatory practices in the building trades in New York— racial discrimination” (123–4). Portnoy embodies a generation of American Jews unscathed by the kind of institutionalized anti-Semitism that limited his father’s earning potential, and his path to economic security is linked directly to the welfare state and its purported goal of ameliorating the general quality of life, even though he generates the impression that racism and its socioeconomic consequences are insuperable challenges. Roth’s preoccupation with upward mobility and the welfare state finds expression in the most productive phase of his career, a period in which he wrote three Zuckerman ­novels— American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain (2000)—in quick succession. Arguably, this series of novels bespeaks Roth’s growing neoconservatism; it contains coded denunciations of radical politics, activism, the New Left, and political correctness.3 Yet such a reading overemphasizes reactionary aspects of Roth’s work to the occlusion of his ongoing interest in institutions that are beneficent and harmful by turns—institutions that limit what people can achieve no less than provide opportunities for advancement. In American Pastoral, for instance, Roth examines both institutional privilege and anti-Vietnam War radicalism through the prism of intergenerational conflict. Seymour “Swede” Levov and his Catholic wife, Dawn, lead a comfortable suburban existence, with the Swede in firm control of his family’s glove-making business in Newark, until their daughter, Merry, becomes a domestic terrorist in protest of the war abroad. This personal tragedy unfolds alongside the municipal decline of Newark, as racially charged riots in the late 1960s influence the Swede’s decision to move his factory offshore in search of cheaper labor and less volatile conditions. These juxtaposed conflicts, suggesting an imbrication of the personal and the political, defy the Swede’s understanding. After meeting with Merry and learning that she has committed more murders, been raped, and subsequently taken up Jainism, the Swede repeatedly likens her behavior to “chaos” (AP 238, 281). This description dovetails with the Swede’s “surreal vision” of Newark during the riots, a vision in which “the old ways of suffering are burning blessedly away in the flames, never again to be resurrected, instead to be superseded, within only hours, by suffering that will be so gruesome, so monstrous, so unrelenting and abundant, that its abatement will take the next five hundred years” (268). Just as the Swede can only frame Merry’s actions as lying beyond the pale of reason, so too can he only picture the Newark riots as an apocalyptic event. The Swede’s lack of understanding is due partly to the fact that welfare-state liberalism underpins his patterns of thinking and mode of reason. According to Zuckerman’s narration, the Levovs “flew the flight of the immigrant rocket, the upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory” that paves the way for “the highest highflier of them all, the fourth-generation child for whom America was to be heaven itself” (AP 122). What makes sense to the Swede, in other words, is the social distinction that comes from social climbing, not from radical acts of terrorism or rioting. The Swede’s closest Black ally during the Newark riots is his forelady, Vicky, who also seems to believe in advancement through industriousness. Vicky is “a tiny woman of impressive wit, stamina, and honesty, with twin sons, Newark Rutgers graduates, Donny and Blaine, both of them now in medical school” (161). That Vicky lives a relatively charmed life, an unrealizable life for many denizens of Newark, is tacitly acknowledged later in the novel, when the Swede’s father complains about the city’s deindustrialization and the

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state’s attendant disinvestment in the city (345). Thus, if Merry’s behavior highlights the Swede’s liberalism through the force of contrast, the Newark riots bespeak the failure of the welfare state through juxtaposition with the example of Vicky, the only Black character in the novel apart from the Swede’s oneiric vision of Angela Davis. In I Married a Communist, Roth trains his sights on the 1950s instead of the 1960s, and so issues of racial inequality and terrorism give way to an examination of the anti-Semitism that attended McCarthyism as well as the anticommunist witch hunts pursued by the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Most of the novel unfolds in dialogue between Zuckerman and his former public-school teacher Murray Ringold; they reunite as aged men and subsequently recount the rise and fall of Murray’s radio-star brother, Ira, whose celebrity and communist sympathies made him an easy target for midcentury anticommunists. Murray constitutes the moral heart of the novel, telling Zuckerman that “it seems likely that more acts of personal betrayal were tellingly perpetrated in America in the decade after the war … than in any other period in our history. … It was everywhere during those years, the accessible transgression, the permissible transgression that any American could commit” (IMC 264). For Roth, this passage implies, state-sanctioned anticommunism is a source of sweeping social dysfunction, not simply affecting social life in professional and institutional settings but also in the most intimate of relationships. And yet, although it is tempting to view this novel as an unequivocal indictment of the state, I Married a Communist is in fact a nuanced portrait of midcentury America. Roth balances disdain and respect for the welfare state by offsetting Ira’s decline with Murray’s trajectory. On the one hand, Ira is equal parts victim of anticommunist hysteria, working-class social climber, and object of satire as a communist ideologue. According to Zuckerman, Ira’s radical politics stem from his tenuous relationship to social and welfare-state institutions; he was “an easy mark for the utopian vision” (IMC 217) because he belonged to a “cruel family” and experienced “frustration in school” as well as “headlong immersion in the Depression” (IMC 216). This susceptibility to dangerous influence underpins what Zuckerman calls Ira’s “frenzied, overexcitable group self” (235)—his many personas as an actor and celebrity that do not suggest an individual capable of turning the self into a container of multiple identities so much as bespeak self-estrangement. As Murray puts it, Ira’s “passion was to be someone he didn’t know how to be. He never discovered his life” (319). Murray, on the other hand, overcomes childhood hardship through educational opportunity, failing to reach the heights of his celebrity brother but climbing the social ladder high enough to become a public school teacher whose daily work metonymically enacts the promises of the welfare state. By his own admission, Murray belongs to a group of “[p]rofessionals who’ve spent their energy teaching masterpieces” as well as “literature’s scrutiny of things,” and Zuckerman remembers Murray with the fondness of a student who benefited from the instruction of a dedicated teacher: “All [Murray] wanted all day long was to deal with young people he could influence, and his biggest kick in life he got from their response” (IMC 31). To some extent, then, Patrick Hayes (2014) is correct in pointing out that Murray wants his students “to release their own potency from the depleting will to power of the normalizing institutions that try to mould them into submissive form” (20). But as a public servant who teaches critical thinking, Murray eludes the explanatory reach of a Foucauldian framework that equates institutions with power’s normalizing functions. Murray can only make his impact felt within a public institution that generates opportunities for social mobility. As he puts it, “If there’s any chance for the improvement of life, where’s it going to begin if not in school?” (IMC 317).

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Murray’s commitment to public service ultimately makes him one of the novel’s tragic figures. Years after his wife Doris’s brutal murder on the streets of Newark, he continues to castigate himself for his delusions about public service, the righteousness that kept them in Newark as it became, in his words, “a poor black city full of problems” (IMC 316). He attributes Doris’s harrowing death to his refusal to “betray the disadvantaged of Newark”: “Which is the final delusion. And the one to which I sacrificed Doris” (318). Although Murray’s impulse to blame himself is understandable, his career in public service underscores the limits of the individual will, instead drawing attention to the social interdependence that makes the welfare state function smoothly. As Roth’s aforementioned criticism of Newark’s municipal government intimates, and as academic critics suggest, Newark’s trajectory through the twentieth century, becoming one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in America, is largely the function of the state’s disinvestment in racialized communities.4 Discussing Roth’s feelings about Newark’s socioeconomic decline, Michael Kimmage (2012) calls the closure of public libraries an “act of violence” (26). Murray, then, is a victim less of his own delusions about improving lives than of the welfare state itself—his tragedy being less ascribable to a fatal flaw than to a system rooted in racial inequality. Roth’s examination of systemic racism continues in The Human Stain, a novel about Classics professor Coleman Silk’s swift descent after his use of racially insensitive language in front of his class sparks outrage among students and faculty. At first blush, the trajectory of Coleman’s life up until his fateful utterance is that of a prototypical Roth character: a Jew from a working-class background in New Jersey, Coleman availed himself of the GI Bill after being discharged from the navy and subsequently found his way to Athena College, where he worked to replace effete old-money professors with serious academics. It turns out, however, that Coleman is a Black man passing as a Jew, having exploited his relatively light skin tone in order to abandon his racialized identity for an ethnic one that allows him to embody the “raw I” relieved of unwanted social baggage (HS 108). Jonathan Freedman (2008: 164–208), examining the novel alongside other passing narratives, shows how Roth uses the fluidity of Jewishness, as well as the popular art born of American Jews dabbling in forms of cultural expression associated with African Americans, to dislodge racial and ethnic identities from their epistemological moorings and to thereby denaturalize what it means to be either Jewish or Black. Yet shifting focus from the novel’s cultural backdrop to Roth’s treatment of the state and of social mobility reveals that The Human Stain is just as much about the experiences and institutional conditions that lock individuals into identities. For example, Coleman’s first instance of passing happens when he joins the navy, a coincidence that warrants reading his publicly assisted social mobility against the history of the GI Bill’s unequal distribution of benefits. This is a history that Roth likely knew well. In the immediate postwar period, as white servicemen redeemed the provisions of the Bill to defray the cost of their mortgages and to matriculate in elite universities, their Black colleagues were largely barred from realizing these forms of support on the same level. The denial of mortgage loans to Black applicants was common practice, and to varying extents many northern universities as well as predominately white universities in the South followed a segregationist agenda in resisting African American matriculation, a refusal to democratize higher education that redirected many Black servicemen to overcrowded, underfunded, and sometimes unaccredited colleges.5 Coleman’s decision to leverage the GI Bill as a white man, after dropping out of the historically Black university Howard and joining the navy in the mid-1940s, resonates against this backdrop of disenfranchisement. As a freshman at Howard, Coleman confronts

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racial bigotry beyond the ostensibly comforting domain of the campus, but on campus what he finds most striking is not so much the student body’s racial togetherness as the class divisions running through it: “He was among the very lightest of the light-skinned in the freshman class, lighter even than his tea-colored roommate, but he could have been the blackest, most benighted field hand for all they knew that he didn’t” (HS 106). As a penniless ex-serviceman, memory of this experience—namely, of feeling both deindividualized by racism and alienated on an all-Black campus—causes him to abandon the “tyranny of the we and its we-talk and everything that the we wants to pile on your head” (108) for a “future” that he can mold with “his own hands” (120). His choice to embody the “ersatz prestige of an aggressively thinking, self-analytic, irreverent American Jew” has less to do with the perceived affordances of being Jewish than with the perceived affordances of being non-Black, and so his highly personalized form of upward mobility, no longer limited by racism, highlights the relative ease with which white servicemen could parlay the GI Bill into socioeconomic advancement (131). This point becomes clearer in the contrast between Coleman and his brother, Walt, who remains proud of his racial identity as he leverages the GI Bill to get a subsidized education at Montclair State University, which in turn allows him to become the “first Negro superintendent of schools” in his region of New Jersey (HS 322). Overcoming the systemic racism related to the GI Bill’s extension of benefits, Walt achieves administrative power within the welfare state and thereby marries the individualist narrative of upward mobility to the meta-individual fight for equality. In their sister Ernestine’s words, “even as a student at Montclair State when he came home from the war, he was one of those who were politically concerned—one of those ex-GIs who were already actively fighting for integration of the schools in New Jersey” (324). But if Walt’s path to economic security belies Coleman’s feeling that the power of the “we” is to overwhelm the individual, Walt’s dedication to social justice suggests the identification of his self with the fate of the group, a form of sacrifice that the hyper-individualist Coleman cannot countenance because he believes that his racial identity was not chosen but foisted on him at birth. As Zuckerman realizes after listening to Ernestine, “[h]er point was that Coleman was not one of those ex-GIs fighting for integration and equality and civil rights; in Walt’s opinion, he was never fighting for anything other than himself” (324). Although Coleman’s utopian vision of the self uncorrupted by social determinants leads him, in the end, to tragedy, Walt’s status as the “first” African American superintendent in his school board indicates that blame also lies with the welfare state itself, which has failed to maximize opportunity for racialized constituents despite creating avenues of social advancement for ethnic whites. Roth further highlights the fusion of ethno-racial identity and class politics through the irrational ramblings of Les Farley, a white Vietnam War veteran suffering from PTSD who may or may not be the cause of Coleman’s fatal car crash. Scarred by the experience of war and of losing his children in a fire, Farley attributes the anger he unleashed on his ex-wife, Faunia, to the state, which he only understands vaguely as a power looming over him. His failure to resolve his PTSD through Veterans Affairs leads him to think—or, more accurately, leads Zuckerman, the novel’s center of consciousness, to think that Farley thinks—“fuck the government. Treated him like garbage” (HS 66). Farley’s emotionality undermines his powers of discernment and turns him into an anti-statist ideologue. He fails to recognize, therefore, that what he needs most is a government that will value his well-being and that will extend assistance accordingly. While this hatred of a government that sent him to killing fields in Vietnam is justifiable, his contempt knows no bounds, growing so confused as to find

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targets in restauranteurs of Asian descent (69), in “fucking protesters” on college campuses, and in the “two-bit kike professor” Coleman with whom Faunia is now in a relationship (70). His attitude toward the government finds an outlet in bigotry, as Roth dramatizes the connection between a white-supremacist, anti-Semitic fear of otherness and an anti-statist fear of government overreach. Farley finds his closest ally in Delphine Roux’s economist boyfriend, Arthur Sussman, although they never meet. At dinner with Roux, Sussman “tells her” that “the government is giving nothing back to the taxpayer,” that “Social Security should be given over to private investment analysts” (HS 267). In Roux’s mind, Sussman “seems to hate [President Bill] Clinton most for proposing the Democratic version of everything [Sussman] wanted” (268). If Farley’s attitude toward the government bleeds into explicit discrimination, Sussman’s attitude is much more articulate, remaining formally neutral with regard to identity while encoding a conservative commitment to white hegemony.6 Their affinity captures what David Harvey (2007) identifies as the “unholy alliance” between conservative identity groups and free-market libertarians at the core of neoliberal reform (50).7 Hindsight after Donald Trump’s administration, with its combination of free-market ideology and impassioned appeals to predominately white constituencies, makes Roth’s treatment of the Farley-Sussman connection seem prescient. Yet the neoliberal attack on the welfare state, slashing public budgets through identity-neutral policies of retrenchment, was well underway when Roth wrote The Human Stain; as Roux’s thoughts underline, this programmatic dismantling found an unlikely champion in the Democratic Bill Clinton.8 Pace Freedman, The Human Stain has just as much to tell us about the imbrication of class and identity politics and about the failures and decline of the welfare state as it does about the fluidity of identity. Even though there is nothing in Roth’s fiction to justify recasting him as a writer overly obsessed with class inequality, his novels have a great deal to teach us in our neoliberal moment, as necessary fights for social justice unfold against a backdrop of astounding wealth disparity. In American Pastoral, Roth associates the Swede’s decision to outsource his labor abroad with his personal difficulties, but this kind of business move has become perfunctory for corporations wishing to remain competitive within global markets that favor capital and disadvantage labor. Austerity policies and industrial precarity contribute, moreover, to the casualization of labor and the anxiety engendered by an uncertain future. Under these conditions, Roth’s celebration of the welfare state may seem quietist or conservative, and the argument could be made, as it has, that Roth’s abiding concern with Jewish particularity contributes to a centrist ideology on campuses and among legislators that loves diversity without hating economic disparity.9 Yet Roth’s work reminds us that any history of postwar America must acknowledge the imbrication of ethno-racial identity and economic inequality, and from his recurrent treatment of the welfare state’s boons and failures one can glean an argument for the important role institutions play in opening up avenues for social advancement and in chipping away at economic injustice.

NOTES 1. On the subject of Roth’s feelings about President Roosevelt’s New Deal, it is worth noting that his oeuvre contains frequent references to this sweeping piece of legislation, and he explains, in The Facts, that he and his friends rarely “argued about politics,” because “our fathers were all ardent New Dealers and there was no disagreement among us about the sanctity of F.D.R. and the Democratic Party” (31).

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2. Roth’s own family benefited from the GI Bill; in The Facts, he writes that his father “was spared the expense of my brother’s college education by the GI Bill” (36). 3. Liberal apostate Norman Podhoretz (1998) found this alleged conservatism a cause for celebration and renewed interest in Roth’s work. He contends that Roth’s early work veers toward the “New Left” and “the counterculture” in “g[iving] voice to a hostility as great as theirs to middle-class America and what later came to be called ‘family values’” (32). Accordingly, Roth’s late Zuckerman novels, particularly American Pastoral, evince a writer who has “changed sides in the distribution of his scorn and sympathies” (34; see also Posnock 2006: 106). 4. See Lipsitz (1998: 24–46) for a sobering overview of how systemic forms of racism worked to ghettoize racialized communities in the postwar period. 5. “Though Congress granted all soldiers the same benefits theoretically,” writes Hilary Herbold (1994–5), “the segregationist principles of almost every institution of higher learning effectively disbarred a huge proportion of black veterans from earning a college degree” (107). Herbold goes on to explain that “black veterans who enrolled at historically black colleges discovered an educational system that was vastly unequal” (108). See also Parker (2010: 112–44). 6. As we know from Roth’s criticism of the Newark municipal government, the rhetoric underpinning policy shifts is no less important than the policies themselves. Thomas Piketty (2013) explains that sustaining “extreme inequality” relies “on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification” (330). The transformation of identity-saturated language, like Farley’s bigotry, into identity-neutral rhetoric, like that of Sussman, is one of the ways in which this justification worked to legitimize the dismantling of the welfare state in the United States. 7. See also Brown (2006) for a helpful overview of this “unholy alliance” that precipitated the overturning of policies and beliefs associated with the New Deal. 8. Donald Pease (2009) explains that Clinton’s attempt to “transcend[] what he called the ‘politics of difference’ enabled him to conceal the structural violence at work in his programmatic elimination of welfare state institutions in the name of market imperatives” (73). 9. See Michaels (2006) for a thoughtful critique of Roth within a framework that views celebrations of diversity as drawing attention away from economic disparity.

REFERENCES Brodkin, Karen (1998), How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says about Race in America, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Brown, Wendy (2006), “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and DeDemocratization,” Political Theory, 34 (6): 690–714. Esteve, Mary (2021), Incremental Realism: Postwar American Fiction, Happiness, and Welfare-State Liberalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Freedman, Jonathan (2008), Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press. Gooblar, David (2011), The Major Phases of Philip Roth, London: Continuum. Harvey, David (2007), A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayes, Patrick (2014), Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herbold, Hilary (1994–5), “Never a Level Playing Field: Blacks and the GI Bill,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 6: 104–8. Jacobsen, Matthew Frye (1998), Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kimmage, Michael (2012), In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lipsitz, George (1998), The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Michaels, Walter Benn (2006), “Plots against America: Neoliberalism and Antiracism,” American Literary History, 18 (2): 288–302. Parker, Christopher S. (2010), Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle against White Supremacy in the Postwar South, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pease, Donald E. (2009), The New American Exceptionalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Piketty, Thomas (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Podhoretz, Norman (1998), “The Adventures of Philip Roth,” Commentary, 104 (4): 25–36. Posnock, Ross (2006), Philip Roth: The Art of Immaturity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Roth, Philip (1969), Portnoy’s Complaint, Toronto: Bantam. Roth, Philip (1975), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1992), Patrimony, New York: Touchstone. Roth, Philip (1993), Goodbye, Columbus, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1996), The Counterlife, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1997), The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1998), American Pastoral, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1999), I Married a Communist, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001), The Human Stain, New York: Vintage. Shostak, Debra (2004), Philip Roth: Counterlives, Countertexts, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.



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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Slipping the Punch”: Philip Roth and Racial Passing AIMEE POZORSKI

he was not the first child, either, who’d … grown up to vanish like this—to vanish, as they used to say in the family, “till all trace of him was lost.” “Lost himself to all his people” was another way they put it. —Philip Roth, The Human Stain Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) firmly locates itself in its moment by opening with a reference to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of 1998. This all-consuming public scandal provides context for the personal conflicts of its protagonist, Coleman Silk, a Classics professor who has been shamed and then ousted for referring to absent students—Black students he has never seen before—as “spooks.” Moreover, if apparently unrelated, he has pursued an affair with a much younger local woman who has her own troubling past and a violent husband suffering from PTSD. It is not until Nathan Zuckerman, the novel’s narrator, discovers that Silk is Black himself that the connecting ironies of the novel become clear. At once concerned about “political correctness” in the age of Clinton and the history of trauma at the heart of American foreign affairs, this novel depicts the struggle of one man, Zuckerman, to tell these complicated and interweaving stories. I have read and taught The Human Stain from a variety of perspectives that include its backdrop of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal; the vulnerability of Silk’s lover, Faunia Farley, and the trauma response of her husband, Les Farley; and its references to The Iliad, a text about founding traumas the novel invites us to read alongside the founding trauma of the United States. It was not until the 2020 publication of Brit Bennett’s passing novel, The Vanishing Half, that I began to understand The Human Stain belatedly as about the significant costs of passing and the “vanishing” of Coleman Silk. Bennett’s novel draws on the dual motifs of vanishing and loss, revealing how a desire or plot to pass for white in the wake of racial violence leads to loss of identity. In The Vanishing Half, Stella leaves her small hometown of Mallard, Louisiana, with her twin sister, Desiree, but shockingly leaves her behind in New Orleans one day, disgusted with the ways she is treated as a Black woman. A close reading of Roth’s The Human Stain, published two decades before, reveals a similar interest in the costs of racial passing: we find out that Coleman, too, had grown up “to vanish”—an infinitive verb repeated twice as seen in the above epigraph— and “lost” himself, also repeated twice, to reflect how much of his identity he had to forego in order to pass as a Jewish intellectual at Athena College (HS 144). When The Vanishing Half was published in 2020, it immediately claimed a place on the New York Times bestsellers list and became the subject of a bidding war, with HBO winning

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the rights to adapt it for screen with a seven-figure deal (Kiefer 2020). A year later, Rebecca Hall saw her debut as a director by adapting Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing as a blackand-white period film also featuring diverging paths of two Black women. It stars Tessa Thompson playing Irene Redfield, whose life takes a turn when she crosses paths with her childhood friend, Clare Kendry, played by Ruth Negga, who passes as white. That these two important cultural texts appeared in the United States at the height of a global pandemic and amid racial strife spilling into the streets of major metropolitan areas in the wake of the George Floyd murder was lost on neither historians nor critics. Jasmine M. Sanders (2020) suggests in her review of The Vanishing Half that the “gem” inherent in the novel is its “indictment of white fragility” and its ability to contextualize “a desperate, last-ditch effort at the hands of white people to grip the power whiteness affords” (6). Sanders quotes Bennett as describing her interest in passing as a powerful narrative thread: “The tension within passing stories,” says Bennett, “is between this idea of destabilizing race and then reaffirming race at the same time” (qtd. in Sanders 2020: 7). This renewed interest in passing after 2020 sent me back to The Human Stain to consider it as a passing narrative within a tradition that includes Larsen’s 1929 novel as well as such other important texts as Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of a Life (1933), and Langston Hughes’s “Passing” (1934)—all narratives that reveal race as an unstable category, but more particularly still, that represent racial identity not as biologically determined but constructed through performance. As Bennett (2021) argued for the New York Times T Magazine in an essay dedicated to Larsen’s Passing, “the instability of the text itself mirrors the instability within a story where no identity ever feels certain. Race is remade and reinterpreted and revised.” Such instability is also seen in Roth’s Coleman Silk, a man who is nothing if not a reinvented version of the boy who walked away from his Black family, who found freedom in both the counterpunch and the counterconfessional. As the epigraph from The Human Stain reveals, however, like in Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, performances of racial passing come with costs involving identity, family, and stability. With the tradition of racial passing narratives in mind, this chapter reads Roth’s The Human Stain not alongside other Roth novels—it is singular in its focus on racial passing and the imagined consciousness of a Black man—but with other novels in the passing tradition of American literature. Through a close reading of the novel’s references to “counterpunching”—Silk is, after all, an accomplished youth boxer—this chapter considers how “counterpunching,” like Zuckerman’s notion of the “counterconfessional,” helps us understand the stakes of racially passing as presented in a US tradition of writing that dates back at least to the nineteenth century.

RACE MATTERS The phrase “race matters” conveys not only the more obvious message that our racial backgrounds matter to us—that these backgrounds affect us and how we engage the world and how the world engages us, but “race matters” also invokes important and delicate matters of race and racial identity, matters that remind us that racial background, while a deep and important part of our identities, is actually a fiction, a socially constructed story that allows people in power to perform gatekeeping and marginalization functions that preserve their status. (In other words, even though racial identity is a fiction, it does not mean that it lacks

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real effects!) Our racial backgrounds are composed, in part, by stories that we tell ourselves and other people about our pasts and genetic composition. The enthusiastic popularity of The Vanishing Half in the summer of 2020 and beyond, coupled with the excitement over the new adaptation of Passing, suggests that we in the United States are at a critical moment of reflection about what it takes to hide half one’s identity, to vanish as a self—a life-altering decision with deep personal and political consequences. In her New York Times review of The Vanishing Half, Parul Sehgal (2020) argues that “[n]o nation can lay lasting claim to a genre, save perhaps one. The story of racial passing is a uniquely and intensely American form. … [I]t is a story central to the American imagination, re-examined and retold so regularly it seems to enjoy a perpetual heyday” (C5). I find this perspective illuminating and relevant, not only in terms of the American literary tradition, but also in terms of the unique American culture that produces this form, not only the material context of slavery but a broader resultant culture that could only work if a rhetoric of white supremacy endured. According to Sehgal, US American passing novels have a “singular ability to enact the notion of race as arbitrary, as a performance, as something seen through, all the while inscribing its power as a source of kinship, pain and pride” (C5). As two important novels in this uniquely American genre, The Human Stain and The Vanishing Half balance motifs of performance with the power of pain, juxtaposing the language of freedom used to describe the experience of passing with the language of violence: “vanishing,” “murder,” “killing” in The Vanishing Half, and, in the case of Silk in The Human Stain, “slipping the punch,” a boxing term and motif throughout Roth’s novel. Both novels expose the seemingly liberating idea of race as a fiction through storytelling, an aspect of The Human Stain that critics readily point out. However, for Roth, the idea of passing is not so simple. It is not only a matter of fictions or storytelling, but also a lifetime commitment associated with brute force and survival, of weaving and dodging to avoid being punched in the face. Like The Vanishing Half, which is structured on subplots involving such uses of story as acting and lies, The Human Stain reveals how the construction of stories determines our experience of our identities more than genetic background and inherited lineage can. Its narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, has spent a lifetime reflecting on the virtues and difficulties of telling “the truth” about people. In this case, Zuckerman’s subject is Coleman Silk, a Classics professor who refers often to the powers of language and the written word. He sees a kind of freedom in telling his own story on his own terms. Zuckerman imagines that Silk might call this mode “the counterconfessional”: writing one’s own story, the all-important story of the “I,” and keeping it close, the opposite of a confession. But, like the Vanishing Half, with the focus on vanishing in the title, denoting a sense of loss and disappearance, The Human Stain also looks at the costs of passing. More precisely, the section entitled “Slipping the Punch” draws parallels between the violence and fight of boxing and the violence and fight of racially passing. While the acts of boxing and passing may be connected, at first glance, via a sense of agency or control, The Human Stain makes clear that, unlike boxing, racial violence is not always controllable for the subject choosing to pass. That violence ultimately is described as all-out murder when we learn about the effects of Silk’s decision to pass and to walk away entirely from his family, an act of “murder” in the face of his mother who gave him life. The narrative of Silk’s passing and his self-transformation into a Jew is framed by the Jewish novelist Zuckerman describing the personal and professional downfall of Silk. Silk, Zuckerman’s neighbor in the Berkshires, was discredited as Dean of Athena College for using the word “spooks” in the classroom, asking, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist

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or are they spooks?” (6). As we find out later, this is one of many ironies in the novel: Not only did Silk use the word “in its customary and primary meaning: ‘spook’ as a specter or a ghost,” as the occasion of the utterance is a lament that he has never seen the students attend his classes (6), but also, although he is accused of using a racial slur, Silk himself is revealed as a Black man who had “passed” as Jewish for his entire adult life. With the key word “spooks,” here, a word that literally organizes the novel, I would suggest that the haunting of history is what is at stake, addressing the consequences for individual identity of passing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. Through the motif of boxing, Roth’s novel seems to ask: If racial identity (like so many of our identities) is just a fiction, a fiction that we write for ourselves to achieve freedom, then why does it entail so much loss and violence? In telling Silk’s story, Zuckerman writes for himself a Jewish identity in order to authorize his own freedom, but the novel also undercuts this fantasy by suggesting that, for most Black people, their racial identity is written for them, imposed upon them in a way that leads less to freedom than stereotyping, racist microaggressions, and violence.

SLIPPING THE PUNCH Generally, critics have approached the Coleman Silk passing narrative in three different ways: the first explores The Human Stain in terms of its representation of identity, the second in terms of its representation of traumatic history, and the third in terms of its relationship with the passing tradition.1 But I would suggest that these categories are not mutually exclusive. At the heart of the founding of America is a commitment to white supremacy: the idea that white people are superior to Black people—an idea constructed and perpetuated through stories and other texts. The United States was founded not only on the traumatic structure of slavery—a fractured and unethical foundation—but also on the very denial of this fact. In some important sense, in other words, the founding of the United States is based on this very lie, a lie that is exposed throughout the tradition of passing narratives, and a tradition Roth extends, along with Bennett, twenty years later, by connecting passing with creation. The motif of creation that connects both novels relies on constructing new identities, stories, and literary texts that form counternarratives to our founding documents. In the absence of a white supremacy culture, passing novels would have a completely different impact, arguably more akin to other stories about self-creation for personal gain. In our actual American culture, however, even when these novels imagine passing in this way, there is always an associated cost for everyone, but most especially, for the passing subject. Of the critics interested in reading The Human Stain as depicting the power of shifting identities and exposing race as a social construct, Brett Ashley Kaplan, in a 2005 essay, most provocatively interprets The Human Stain as a veiled retelling of the life of Anatole Broyard considering Broyard’s own literary references to passing. She suggests there are several biographical similarities between the fictional dean and the literary critic and uses this story as an exemplar in showcasing the ways in which race can be performed. This is a reading Roth himself negated, saying he hardly knew Broyard. Roth in fact published a letter addressed to Wikipedia in a 2012 issue of The New Yorker after seeing the entry for The Human Stain alleging that it was inspired by the life of Anatole Broyard. Roth writes, The Human Stain was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years. One day in the

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fall of 1985, while Mel, who was meticulous in all things large and small, was meticulously taking the roll in a sociology class, he noted that two of his students had as yet not attended a single class session or attempted to meet with him to explain their failure to appear, though it was by then the middle of the semester. While Roth here invokes the life of his friend, a sociologist well known for his work in race relations and who was among the first, alongside Roth, to speak out against antisemitism at Princeton (Saxon), I wonder if this letter is as much a way of resurrecting a close friend who had died in 1994 as it is a red herring, preventing critics from seeing all the ways in which The Human Stain draws on, and extends, the genre of the passing novel in the US tradition.2 By all accounts, one difference between Tumin and Silk is that Tumin was not a Black man passing as Jewish. Of the scholars who read The Human Stain within the larger history and context of the passing novel in the United States, Jennifer Glaser’s (2008) “Reading Race and Literary History” argues that “Roth engages race and the interconnectedness of race and literary history in a number of ways in the novel, but most strikingly through the trope of passing” (1468). For Glaser, this is not a one-way street. The power of the passing trope not only helps to better understand Roth’s novel, but also reflects on how “racial and ethnic discourses”— discourses like Roth’s novel itself—“affect the literary sphere” (1471). I would like to extend this reading by thinking about how the novel establishes the motif of boxing and the motif of writing the counterconfessional as both inextricable and equally ambivalent: at once a place to find freedom and strength but also a place of violence. The complexity of this extended metaphor—a metaphor as much about self-creation as it is about violent self-destruction—has been considered far less than is warranted. Zuckerman, a writer himself, considers that Silk found boxing and writing to offer a similar sense of empowerment. In Zuckerman’s imagined retelling of this central moment of his life, Silk wonders, Could it be because who he really was was entirely his secret? He did love secrets. The secret of nobody’s knowing what was going on in your head, thinking whatever you wanted to think with no way of anybody’s knowing. All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves. But that wasn’t where the power was or the pleasure either. The power and pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counterconfessional in the same way you were a counterpuncher, and he knew that with nobody having to tell him and without his having to think about it. (100) In this complex rhetorical moment of the novel, Zuckerman thinks he has figured out Silk, who presumably arrives at what he seems to believe is the road to liberation through the dual protective strategies of the counterconfessional and the counterpunch, both having to do with secrecy. The emphasis on secrets can be seen in its repetition three times here, the empowering and powerful force of no one knowing. In fact, “power and pleasure” are at the heart of this passage, the power and pleasure found in the opposite of what one would expect: not punching but counterpunching; not the confessional but the counterconfessional. At first glance, this logic of this passage seems solid. The opposite of confessing is not confessing, the “counterconfessional.” The opposite of punching is not punching, letting the opponent begin the attack. A counterpunch is a punch in response to an opponent’s attack, a

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seemingly defensive tactic that invites the punch in order to respond with devastating force. The counterpuncher elicits a punch so that the opponent opens up, thereby becoming more vulnerable to attack. It is not “turning the other cheek,” in the Christian phrase, where one responds to violence by accepting it, rather than returning it in kind; it is, by contrast, a ploy to win, to defeat the violent other at their own game. Rather than “blabbing about himself” as a Black man, Silk decides to be passive, to let others inquire after his identity first, if ever they did, just as he sat back and waited for the opening punch. This moment, in other words, invites us to think about the counterconfessional like a defensive response or stance, just as the counterpunch is a response to the punch of the opponent. The counterconfessional, in this reading, can be a defensive response to the social construction of racial identity. It seems to provide a sense of agency even in this passive position. But later in the section, the careful analogy does not seem so simple. It is not a matter of aggressive or passive strategy after all, but about the uncanny anticipation of the assault to come. As such, “Slipping the Punch,” the entire extended section that imagines Silk’s commitment to passing as a young man, is interested in not only the potential that he finds in passing, but also the threat of the oncoming punch—what it means to wait for an aggressive attack and to be poised enough to deliver the decisive blow. “Slipping the Punch” tells us, in other words, not only how Silk learned to “slip the punch” in boxing, but also how he learned to “slip the punch” in life. When Mac Machrone, a policeman with a pistol in West Side Park who believed in “[s]peed and pacing and counterpunching” (90), teaches Silk how to fight, he also unwittingly extends a lesson in racially passing. Zuckerman reflects, He taught Coleman how to win a fight by using only his jab. Throw the jab, knock the punch down, counter. A jab comes, you slip it, come over with the right counter. Or you slip it inside, you come over with a hook. Or you just duck down, hit him a right to the heart, a left hook to the stomach. Slight as he was, Coleman would sometimes quickly grab the jab with both his hands, pull the guy and then hook him to the stomach, come up, hook him to the head. “Knock the punch down. Counterpunch. You’re a counterpuncher Silky. That’s what you are, that’s all you are.” (90) The language here is at once the language of poetry and the language of boxing. The repetition of the /p/ and /b/ plosive sounds hit the ear like a linguistic punch. The assault of such repeated terms as “jab,” “punch,” “slip,” and “counter” makes readers feel as if they are in the boxing ring themselves. Machrone calls Silk a “counterpuncher” because that is how he survives in the ring. But this is also the lesson of the counterconfessional: jab, punch, slip … rhetorically. The boxing model allows Silk to understand that to endure in the social ring where people think they know him, he will be better off to slip the punch and counterpunch—to knock the punch down—rather than to face indignities that he faced growing up in Washington D.C. In fact, boxing at first becomes a way of dealing with the rage Silk experiences when he is in D.C. to see the Washington Monument, which signifies the equality promised in America’s founding documents. Silk recalls during this visit the first time that he was called the n-word and that Woolworth’s would not serve him a hot dog. Here, too, Silk’s racial identity is bound up with his identity as a boxer. The moment at Woolworth’s helps Silk see that he is “unable to divorce himself from his feelings as easily as he did in the ring” (102).

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“The impact,” we learn a page later, “was devastating” (103). Zuckerman still has Silk musing on this foundational moment, a literary primal scene, two pages later, where once again the text equates the language of boxing with the language of racial identity: having the n-word directed at him “infuriated him. And yet, unless he wanted to get in serious trouble, there was nothing he could do about it except to keep walking out of the store. This wasn’t the amateur boxing card at the Knights of Pythias. This was Woolworth’s in Washington D.C. His fists were useless, his footwork was useless, so was his rage” (105). I am interested here in the word “amateur,” as it is used in contrast with “Woolworth’s in Washington D.C.”—possibly to show how inexperienced Silk finds himself against the overt racism in the nation’s capital, a situation young Philip will also confront in The Plot against America (2004). The answer to this rage, the failure of fist and footwork, appears to Silk three pages after that—again, an indication that this identity questioning continues over several pages—when he has his epiphany about the counterconfessional: “Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?” (108). Here, the metaphorical and literal power of the counterconfessional, like the counterpunch, comes into full view: “that was the punch to the labonz” (108). So, when Silk is sitting in the Federal building of Newark enlisting for the US Navy, he decides he could “play his skin however he wanted, color himself just as he chose” (109). And although it feels like a moment of complete and utter freedom, claiming his own racial identity in a way that would allow him to avoid everything from microaggressions to mean and sneering racism, the language that ends this section is literally the language of a crime: “It occurred first to his heart, which began banging away like the heart of someone on the brink of committing his first great crime” (109). Passing and the punch here are once again linked as both a kind of freedom and violence, the realities of which do not come into clear view until Zuckerman meets and imagines the effects of this momentous decision on Silk’s mother, a woman who is excised from Silk’s life from this moment on. It is difficult to tell whether this insight comes from Silk, Silk’s mother, or Zuckerman himself, the author of the chronicle who comes to terms with what it means to refuse to be “unjustly limited by so arbitrary a designation as race” (120) by checking a box. The costs of Silk’s decision, in any case, are represented as irreparable: He was murdering her. You don’t have to murder your father. The world will do that for you. There are plenty of forces out to get your father. The world will take care of him, as it had indeed taken care of Mr. Silk. Who there is to murder is the mother, and that’s what he saw he was doing to her, the boy who’d been loved as he’d been loved by this woman. Murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of freedom! It would have been much easier without her. (138–9) The word “murder” here—the “first great crime” of Silk—is repeated here no less than four times. Significantly, it captures the worry over metaphorically murdering his mother alongside the very literal risk of murder to Black men in America. The passage is structured intricately, beginning and ending with the “murder” of Silk’s mother, who will never have a relationship with him again. But between the beginning and ending sentences that detail the murderous effects on his mother are four sentences about how “the world will take care of” murdering the father through the systematic annihilation of Black men in the United States since 1619. These sentences hit hard in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Like James Baldwin

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before him, Roth here worries about how systemic racism fractures Black American life. This moment of reckoning also looks back to Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which ends not literally with a passing man’s death, but still with a sense that all has been lost: “when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts,” this unnamed narrator reflects, “the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage” (Johnson 2015: 110). Here, too, in this passing novel dating back over one hundred years, the narrator understands the decision to pass in the language of loss: a dream that has vanished, an ambition that has died, talent sacrificed—all for what amounts to nothing more than a thick and useless stew.

THE FANTASY OF PURITY The power of the novel’s title, The Human Stain, has been largely interpreted in light of one of the most powerful speeches in the novel, when Faunia Farley, Silk’s lover, describes why the other crows will no longer associate with a crow she has tamed. Faunia talks to a crow who has been tainted by humans and is therefore excluded from the flock. In Zuckerman’s telling, Faunia provides the most salient lesson of the novel: “we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. … It’s why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify if not more impurity?” (242–3). Faunia’s reflection on the fate of the crow becomes, remarkably here, a new kind of ethics that embraces the stain of impurity; by reversing the common religious notion that human beings come into the world pure, Zuckerman imagines that Faunia has located a commonality between the Greeks of The Iliad and the American people of the 1990s: the only “way to be here” is to leave our human stink, our stain, on others. And while this was made literally manifest by the famous semen stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress that seems to shadow the entire novel, it is also a figurative stain representing humanity’s inherent desires to “fight,” to “hate,” to “murder,” to “fuck.” In so doing, Faunia reflects here on the fact that America was founded on Puritan principles—those that call for punishment for infidelity, in all senses of the word—principles that ruthlessly punish rebellion that takes the forms of fighting, hating, murdering, and even “fucking” outside of socially prescribed norms. But purity, in the context of reading The Human Stain as a passing novel, also speaks to this country’s white supremacist fascination with racial purity, with the fantasy that white people are somehow racially pure and that their blood should not be “tainted” by racially intermixing. Other passages in the novel also invite this reading, using the language of “purity” in references to segregation. One moment includes a reflection on Silk’s childhood in New Jersey, where generally “there existed these rigid distinctions between classes and races sanctified by the church and legitimized by the schools” (122). The word “sanctified” is used ironically here, nodding to the Church’s and schools’ arguments for segregation built on righteousness and self-aggrandizement. By contrast, however, in the Silks’ neighborhood, “ordinary people needed not to be quite so responsible to God and the state as those whose vocation it was to maintain human community, swimming pool and all, untainted by the impurities, and so the neighbors were on the whole friendly with the ultra-respectable, lightskinned Silks” until 1945 when the neighborhood began to integrate and the white people moved away (123). The convoluted nature of this sentence reflects the convoluted nature of

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segregation, based on a false logic of racial purity. I take this to mean that ordinary people on the Silks’ “tree-lined side of the street” did not need to be as “responsible” to God as the people whose job it was to make sure the community swimming pool was “untainted by impurities” and so therefore were at least polite (122). The power of this passage is the fact that it uses the racist language of segregation to allow us another way to read the “stain” of the novel’s title, this time, with an ironic nod to the idea that racial purity—in people, in communities, in families, in pools—was ever possible at all, and, in so doing, revealing the stain at the heart of the country’s founding. In this light, both the Oedipus epigraph that opens the book—“What is the rite/of purification? How shall it be done?”—and the last line of the fourth paragraph—“It was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America” (3)—can be doubly read as mocking the sense that human beings can be morally “pure” and ethnically or racially “pure.” It speaks to the collective sense that, as a country, the United States can reach some kind of “pure” state through institutionally approved segregation, marriage laws, and redlining to name only a few. In asking how literary history intersects with racial history, Glaser (2008) argues that The Human Stain “explores the ethical interpenetration of writing and race” by asking “who has the right to write another’s story?” (1476). This question has stayed with me in my rereading of The Human Stain after 2020, in light of the work of the #BLM Movement. Who has the “right to write” the story of Coleman Silk? Most novels in the passing tradition were written by Black people. What does it mean to read this story from the point of view of a Jewish American author born in 1933 who came of age in the shadow of the Holocaust? Students have asked whether Roth stands up in the age of #BLM. Does reading a narrative about a Black man written by a Jewish man do a kind of violence to the tradition overall? Zuckerman himself seems to “slip the punch” by imagining these stories while also admitting he is getting it wrong. Roth’s imagining of Zuckerman’s imagining of Silk’s life of “counterpunching,” in terms of both narrative and boxing, has me thinking about another famous novel about race and representation in the United States: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). That novel ends with a question that reverberates today: “Who knows but that, on lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (Ellison 1990: 581). And I can’t help but imagine Zuckerman asking the same question, pondering at the end of this difficult and troubling novel the fate of Coleman Silk—another “tragic mulatto” that the narrative punishes with death.

NOTES 1. For readings of The Human Stain interested in how shifting identities expose race as a social construct, see Faisst (2006), Kirby (2006), Godfrey (2017), Omry (2019), and Elliott (2020). For readings of The Human Stain interested in the impact of traumatic history, see Maslan (2005), Dragulescu (2014), and Whitehead (2019). 2. Critics have long been interested in reading The Human Stain as a part of the larger American literary tradition. See Patrice D. Rankine (2005) for comparisons with the Oedipus myth, Lisa A. Kirby (2006) for comparisons with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Matthew Wilson (2006) for comparisons with Charles W. Chesnutt’s passing novels, Ronald Emerick (2007) for comparisons with the Trickster figure and “tragic mulatto” traditions, Donavan Ramon (2012) for comparisons with Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Dyanne K. Martin (2018) for comparisons with W.E.B. Dubois’s understanding of double consciousness in the context of racial passing.

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REFERENCES Bennett, Brit (2020), The Vanishing Half, New York: Riverhead Books. Bennett, Brit (2021), “The Performance of Racial Passing,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine. March 2. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/t-magazine/passing-nella-larsenbrit-bennett.html (accessed February 18, 2023). Dragulescu, Luminita (2014), “Race Trauma at the End of the Millennium: (Narrative) Passing in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” Philip Roth Studies, 10 (1): 91–108. Elliott, Richard (2020), “‘The Fantasy of Purity Is Appalling’: (De)Constructing Identity in The Human Stain,” Philip Roth Studies, 16 (1): 92–110. Ellison, Ralph (1990), Invisible Man, New York: Vintage. Emerick, Ronald (2007), “Archetypal Silk: Wily Trickster, Tragic Mulatto, and Schlemiel in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 26: 73–80. Faisst, Julia (2006), “‘Delusionary Thinking, Whether White or Black or in Between’: Fictions of Race in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” Philip Roth Studies, 2 (2): 121–37. Glaser, Jennifer (2008), “The Jew in the Canon: Reading Race and Literary History in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” PMLA, 123 (5): 1465–78. Godfrey, Mollie (2017), “Passing as Post-Racial: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, Political Correctness, and the Post-Racial Passing Narrative,” Contemporary Literature, 58 (2): 233–61. Johnson, James Weldon (2015), “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” in Jacqueline Goldsby (ed.), A Norton Critical Edition: James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 3–110, New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Kaplan, Brett Ashley (2005), “Anatole Broyard’s Human Stain: Performing Postracial Consciousness,” Philip Roth Studies, 1 (2): 125–44. Kiefer, Hallie (2020), “HBO Wins Brit Bennett’s Best-Selling The Vanishing Half for Upcoming Limited Series,” Vulture, June 30. Available online: https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/hbo-winsbrit-bennetts-novel-the-vanishing-half-at-auction.html (accessed February 18, 2023). Kirby, Lisa (2006), “Shades of Passing: Teaching and Interrogating Identity in Roth’s The Human Stain and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,” Philip Roth Studies, 2 (2): 151–60. Martin, Dyanne (2018), “Racial Passing and Double Consciousness in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” Philip Roth Studies, 14 (1): 55–69. Maslan, Mark (2005), “The Faking of Americans: Passing, Trauma, and National Identity in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History, 66 (3): 365–89. Omry, Keren (2019), “Composing Identities: Passing and Jazz in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” Explicator, 77 (2): 73–7. Ramon, Donovan (2012), “‘You’re Neither One Thing (N)or the Other’: Nella Larsen, Philip Roth, and the Passing Trope,” Philip Roth Studies, 8 (1): 45–61. Rankine, Patrice (2005), “Passing as Tragedy: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the Oedipus Myth, and the Self-Made Man,” Critique, 47 (1): 101–12. Roth, Philip (2000), The Human Stain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Roth, Philip (2012), “An Open Letter to Wikipedia,” The New Yorker, September 6. Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia (accessed February 18, 2023). Saxon, Wolfgang (1994), “Melvin M. Tumin, 75, Specialist in Race Relations,” The New York Times, March 5. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/05/obituaries/melvin-m-tumin-75specialist-in-race-relations.html (accessed February 19, 2023). Sehgal, Perul (2020), “Exploring the Power and Performance of Race,” The New York Times, May 27: C5. Whitehead, Kelly (2019), “Coleman Silk and the Collective Trauma of America: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” Philip Roth Studies, 15 (2): 66–83. Wilson, Matthew (2006), “Reading The Human Stain through Charles W. Chesnutt: The Genre of the Passing Novel,” Philip Roth Studies, 2 (2): 138–50.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

How History Uses Us: Philip Roth, the Holocaust, and American History JAMES WIGREN

Philip Roth once described “consequential moments” as moments he could more easily discern when he had reached his fifties or sixties because he had experienced the “assault of history” (McAuley 2017: 2). In Roth’s case, the “assault of history” seems to include the profound difficulty of understanding the Holocaust. Timothy Snyder, in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015), argues that the Holocaust was the result of lawless zones where sovereignty (both personal and state) did not exist. For Snyder, the people in these zones end up orphaned from history without protection or an identity. Roth takes up similar concerns about an individual’s orphaned history through the literary device of doubling, a device that allows him to investigate “the other,” which, over time, enabled him to examine a central conflict in American history: the majority’s attempt to maintain power in a system that sometimes provided for minority power as long as the minorities were citizens (sovereign). In Roth’s work, this conflict begins with Jewish Americans (citizens with sovereignty) trying to grasp the reality of those orphaned from history, in this case, Holocaust victims who lacked or had lost sovereignty. In “Eli, the Fanatic” (1959), for example, Eli orphans himself by taking on the physical characteristics and clothing of the rabbi’s assistant. Furthermore, Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot against America, investigates the thoughts and actions of citizens trying to understand how to navigate a potential future in which their sovereignty is lost. Roth’s final work, Nemesis (2010), contemplates the enormity of American history in which sovereignty was denied to Indigenous people while their culture is exploited for recreation. Ultimately, by establishing parallels between Jews in quarantine in Weequahic, on the one hand, and the co-opted Indigenous culture at the “Indian Hill” summer camp in the Poconos, on the other hand, Nemesis offers the reader an opportunity to consider that profound difficulty of understanding the Holocaust—the systematic destruction of Jewish life in Europe—alongside the different, if equally, profound difficulty of understanding the consistent destruction of Indigenous life in North America. Snyder argues that to fully understand how some people attempted to eliminate an entire culture, we must go well beyond the arguments that focus on Nazi ideology, German Jews, concentration camps, state power, or the nation. As he points out by way of introduction,

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We rightly associate the Holocaust with Nazi ideology, but forget that many of the killers were not Nazis or even Germans. We think first of German Jews, although almost all of the Jews killed in the Holocaust lived beyond Germany. We think of concentration camps, though few of the murdered Jews ever saw one. We fault the state, though murder was possible only where state institutions were destroyed. (Snyder 2015: xiv) An important part of Snyder’s argument concerns sovereignty, the existence of the state and state power. At length he discusses the Nazi effort to destroy states, which created swaths of lawless areas where there was no protection for individuals. In effect, virtually all of Eastern Europe was turned into an enormous concentration camp, an area devoid of the rule of law. Snyder mentions Hannah Arendt’s early understanding that state destruction was a disaster for Jews: “As Arendt came to realize, the Jews ‘were threatened more than any other by the sudden collapse of nation states.’ Above all, Jews were placed in peril by the collapse of the states of which they were citizens” (Snyder 2015: 117). Snyder also notes that Adolf Hitler was greatly impressed with the American model of colonial conquest, seeing the decimation of Native Americans and use of slave labor as a model to follow for his planned control of Eastern Europe: “‘Who,’ asked Hitler, ‘remembers the Red Indians?’” (Snyder 2015: 21). Once people are pushed into an ungoverned area, they are, in essence, removed (orphaned) from history. The question of sovereignty (both of states and individuals through citizenship) needs to be remembered particularly when reading The Plot against America and Nemesis. The destruction of states liberated the Germans from any legal inhibitions and provided them with the land where Hitler’s notion of lebensraum could be created. Lebensraum, as both a living space and a lifestyle, would ensure the triumph of the German people in the endless competition for survival in which Hitler encased all of human history. For Snyder, “Hitler’s point was not at all that the desirable end justified the bloody means. There was no end, only meanness. Race was real whereas individuals and classes were fleeting and erroneous constructions. Struggle was not a metaphor or an analogy, but a tangible and total truth” (Snyder 2015: 2). Roth’s body of work follows a chronology that mirrors the history of the Holocaust, especially as it was understood by Americans. His first major work Goodbye, Columbus appeared in 1959, shortly after Anne Frank’s diary was published and transformed into a Broadway play and a film. With the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, an “epochal turning point” occurred (Rothberg 2007: 53) as the stories provided by survivors began to enter the mainstream of America’s historical narrative—as did the use of the term Holocaust to explain what happened to Europe’s Jews between 1939 and 1945. During the late 1970s American television aired Holocaust, which enabled the “prime-time Americanization of the Holocaust” (Rothberg 2006: 305), followed shortly thereafter by Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979)—in which Roth’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman dreams of Anne Frank as being alive and in America; The Prague Orgy (1985); and The Counterlife (1986). Finally, in 1993, a year the ABC late-night show Nightline termed “the Year of the Holocaust,” America saw the debut of Schindler’s List, the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Roth’s Operation Shylock, which Michael Rothberg (2007) calls “his major Holocaust novel” (54). There is no question that the Holocaust was a vital part of Roth’s identity as a writer, a Jew, an American, and a human, and there are several scholars who have attempted to look at the Holocaust throughout Roth’s work. In his 1993 article “The Ineluctable Holocaust in

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the Fiction of Philip Roth,” Andrew Furman quotes Roth saying, “it is simply there, hidden submerged, emerging, disappearing, unforgotten. You don’t make use of it—it makes use of you” (120). For Furman, to understand Roth one must start with a question: “how should Jews conduct their lives in the aftermath of the Holocaust?” (109). Similarly, Steven Milowitz (2000) argues that “Roth’s varied works, when studied closely, point to a central-obsessional issue, the issue of the Holocaust and its impact on twentiethcentury American life” (ix). Roth’s focus, Milowitz asserts, is not the camps or necessarily even survivors, but the “concentrationary universe” created by the Holocaust. Milowitz looks at Roth’s work through two constructions, the Holocaust-thematic and the Holocaust-pattern, arguing that the struggle between these two creates a need to understand or question more (Milowitz 2000: 172). To Milowitz, the form of memory that imbues Roth’s work is unheroic memory, “memory without answers and without surrender, memory of what transpired, and what it has done, and what it has cost, and what can be regained” (Milowitz 2000: 190). Unheroic memory, particularly in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, is liberating because it contains chance and choice. Chance and choice as liberating forces allow Roth to employ counterhistories and doubling to understand more than the Holocaust. Confronting the Holocaust as he does evolves into a confrontation with history, which acknowledges the past while refusing to let it dictate the future. Rothberg does believe that the Holocaust is vitally important to Roth, but that Milowitz’s argument overstates the case. He sees the Holocaust as alternately emerging and disappearing from both Jewish American identity and Roth’s work. Rothberg says, “Emphasizing the Holocaust’s distance rather than its overwhelming proximity leads to a formulation of the central paradox of Roth’s quite original perspective on the Shoah: the greater the significance accorded to the Holocaust as an event of modern history, the more distant a role it plays in the lives of American Jews” (Rothberg 2007: 53). Rothberg looks at Roth’s engagement with the Holocaust in four parts: displaced persons (early fiction, in particular “Eli, the Fanatic” and “Defender of the Faith” from Goodbye, Columbus), Anne Frank and Holocaust pornography (largely by looking at The Ghost Writer), triangulating the Holocaust (linking Europe, America, and the Middle East with the main focus on Operation Shylock), and a conclusion focusing on The Plot against America, which Rothberg uses as a test to see if Roth’s use of the Holocaust has changed in any significant way. For Rothberg, in other words, the Holocaust becomes a “counterhistory” of American life, but “its singularity is precisely not American” (Rothberg 2007: 53). However, I will argue in my discussion of Nemesis that Roth’s understanding of the American experience evolved to recognize the existence of a “counterhistory” that was always present if we were willing to acknowledge it. More recent interpretations of Roth and the Holocaust augment the earlier studies in their focus on the question of how much Roth engaged with the Holocaust and its impact on the Jewish or Jewish American experience. For example, scholars such as Brittany Hirth and Hilene Flanzbaum position the Holocaust’s impact on Roth more squarely in the general context of American history. Flanzbaum (2021) stresses Roth’s identification as an American writer (236), while Hirth links the threat of fascism in Plot to the American experience. She says, “In simple and historic terms, America has been the site of acts of genocide such as the Trail of Tears and of systematic oppression such as slavery” (Hirth 2018: 77). She looks beyond Roth’s claim that Plot was about the early 1940s and offers a broad, more historical understanding of the book. For her, the key point of the novel is its “insight into America’s uncomfortable history of oppressing minority groups” (Hirth 2018: 71). Hirth’s view, in line with Roth’s significant reading of American History later in his career, suggests he had

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begun to see events in a different light. With her analysis, we can see some of what Roth was referring to when he said, The impact of the world changes. In order to draw from history in my fiction, I, for one, had first to live through the assault of history and to be able to look back upon decade after decade of eventfulness in order to locate the consequential moments that excited my imagination and that seemed, from the perspective of an advanced age, to have a special salience. What I was able to write about at 50 and 60 was not obtainable at 30. (McAuley 2017: 2) In Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, Roth begins his examination of the “New World” (both the world after the Holocaust and America) with “Eli, the Fanatic.” Roth’s story recounts the impact of eighteen displaced persons (Jewish orphans), a rabbi, and his assistant arriving in a majority Protestant suburb in Westchester County, New York. They are there to start a Yeshiva where the children will also board. The established Jewish citizens of the town worry about the Yeshiva’s influence and hire Eli Peck to persuade them to leave the town. Initially, Eli shares the anti-Yeshiva sentiments of his neighbors, but as he gets more exposed to the people, Eli undergoes a significant change. This occurs initially when, after his first discussion with Rabbi Tzuref, he sees the assistant whose clothes (and hat in particular) so alarm the Jewish residents of the town. Eli’s wife Miriam asks him what he said to the assistant, and Eli says, “He was sleeping.” “Why didn’t you wake him up? Eli, this isn’t an everyday thing.” “He was tired!” (GC 257). Almost immediately after noting the assistant being tired, Eli says to one of his neighbors who called, “Leave it to me, will you Artie? I’m tired. I’m going to sleep” (GC 259). Eli has begun to see himself in the people of the Yeshiva and the deprivation that has landed them in suburban New York. The deprivation is best illustrated by the clothes of the rabbi’s assistant. When running errands for the Yeshiva, he wears his traditional black suit and Talmudic hat in town, drawing the ire of the town’s “respectable” Jewish residents. Focusing on the clothes as a possible resolution to the conflict, Eli gives some of his clothes to the rabbi’s assistant. Soon afterward, Eli is somewhat surprised to find that the assistant’s black suit and hat appear at his front door. Eli puts on the suit and begins to move about town obviously wanting to be seen. Is he having a breakdown as some fear or has he discovered something about himself, the Holocaust, and history? Rabbi Tzuref alludes to this in a subsequent conversation with Eli: “Aach! You are us, we are you!” (GC 265). Eli appears to come to this understanding when looking at himself in a mirror wearing the old black suit, suddenly thinking he is two people or one person wearing two suits (GC 289). By switching clothes with the man, Eli seems to be switching identities or embracing more than one. As Zuckerman’s brother Henry says in The Counterlife, “at the root of my life, the very root of it, I was them. I always had been them” (60). Roth’s use of them and had in this passage suggests he is trying to understand the Holocaust by becoming the victim. Roth similarly addresses the Holocaust indirectly in “The Conversion of the Jews” (a story also collected in Goodbye, Columbus) by becoming the victim. In this case, we are introduced to a seventy-one-year-old character named Yakov Blotnik who is almost certainly a Holocaust survivor. To the boys of the story, Blotnik was “an object of wonder, a foreigner, a relic” (GC 144). The story centers around a religious disagreement between Rabbi Binder and his student Ozzie Freedman. Ultimately, Ozzie, on the roof of the synagogue, threatens

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to jump unless everyone below agrees to kneel and recognize his version of Jesus Christ. Ozzie even demands that Blotnik say that God can make a child without having intercourse: “‘Make him tell me.’ There was no doubt who him was” (158). Ozzie doesn’t need clothes the way Eli does; he needs Blotnik’s approval. Ozzie, when asked to come down from the roof, sounds exhausted like “an old man who has just finished pulling the bells” (158). Comparable to Henry’s admission in The Counterlife, and like Eli, Ozzie has become a version of the Holocaust survivor. Each is tired and exhausted, but, at least, more understood. In his early work, Roth appears to examine the Holocaust through the lens of individual identity rather than through history. As his oeuvre becomes more overtly historical in nature, we will see Roth put victimhood and the Holocaust in the context of American history, which will allow for a view of the Holocaust and the role of history in Roth’s writing in new ways. When we turn to The Plot against America we get, I would argue, the ideal opportunity to examine Roth’s “imagining” of the Holocaust in the context of US history. Plot is ideal for a host of reasons: first, the story is set in the United States at the cusp of a potential fascist dictatorship and an American version of the European Holocaust. The United States in 1940 seems to be much like Germany in 1933 in the sense that it is poised for a major change, and some people (American Jews in particular) are clearly the likely targets. This imaginary setting offers Roth the opportunity to examine the idea that America is “exceptional,” a place where the democratic system is so firmly ingrained that it cannot be eradicated and genocide and cultural exploitation do not happen. A Holocaust in the United States is virtually impossible. Roth (2004) says in “The Story Behind ‘The Plot Against America,’” “I can only repeat that in the 30s there were many of the seeds for its happening here, but it didn’t.” Roth knows America has simply been fortunate. He adds in the same article, “History claims everybody, whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not.” But was America always so fortunate? Thinking back to Snyder’s analysis of the Holocaust, America in Plot never became a stateless territory where genocide could be conducted with impunity. Jewish Americans remained citizens and America from 1940 to 1942 was never the frontier of the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. A key part of the oppression of minority groups in Plot is the relocation westward of selected American Jews. Roth is focused on the Jewish American experience, but he cleverly mixes American myth and history. Seldon Wishnow and his mother are sent to Kentucky (the first western state to be admitted to the United States after the founding of the country) where we are led to believe they can become more like Mr. Mawhinney, in Sandy Roth’s estimation a paragon of the virtues of American growth and expansion. Meanwhile, Roth reminds us that people like Mawhinney have also subjugated, conquered, and enslaved as “a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority” (PAA 93–4). The novel, therefore, can be understood as a more general warning about the threat posed to all minority groups by a dominant narrative that has over centuries justified racial and political oppression in the name of historical progress. One thinks at this point of the hundreds of years of systemic oppression experienced by Indigenous people and African Americans. Jason Siegel (2012), also commenting on Plot, states the case more directly. For him, The Plot against America “does not merely imagine what would have happened if America had become a fascist, antiSemitic, isolationist state; the novel claims that America was such a state to some degree and that we ignore this aspect of history if we limit our definition of historical truth to a factual chronicle of events and outcomes” (134–5).

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In Nemesis, Roth’s use of history subtly links events in Europe with the American genocide of its Indigenous peoples. Initially, the story appears to be about a polio outbreak in Newark’s Jewish section that is spiraling out of control at roughly the same time as the war and the Nazi genocide are peaking. For Victoria Aarons (2013), “Roth’s Newark” thus becomes “the metaphorical point of connection of two menacing historical events” (55). The focus of the story is Bucky Cantor, a Jewish physical education teacher in Newark, New Jersey, during the summer of 1944. Bucky’s world is turned upside down when polio arrives and begins to decimate the young people for whom Bucky feels responsible. In Aarons’s analysis, the disease becomes an allegory for the Nazis and their incessant drive to destroy European Jewry. Polio may require a quarantine of the Jewish section creating, in effect, an American ghetto. Thus, polio acts as a fear-generating force that enables Roth to link the specific events of Newark in 1944 with history both in America and in Europe: “Roth thus both localizes and historicizes fear, the fear of polio opening itself up to that other nemesis— the fear of worsening anti-Semitic fervor, the fear of segregation, of persecution, of, in short, the backward glance” (Aarons 2013: 56). Germs and fear combine to paralyze a minority that itself is the victim. Indeed, Roth has Bucky’s grandmother saying some people are even talking about burning down the Jewish section of Newark (Weequahic as a ghetto) with the people in it as the only way to end the epidemic. In their view, Weequahic is being ravaged by polio because Jews are the source of the illness. Naturally, this suggests to the reader that like the stages of the Holocaust currently playing out across Europe, at some point the ghetto must be liquidated. For Aarons, if these sentiments are even close to the thinking of everyday Americans, then, as Roth intimated in The Plot against America, fascism can indeed “happen here.” Accepting the job at a summer camp in the Poconos, Bucky abandons his post and his past in Newark for a promise of life in a wholesome American setting evoking a past both real and imagined. In doing so, Bucky gives Roth, and the reader, the opportunity to align his understanding of the Holocaust with a wider understanding of American history. Roth’s summer camp is called Indian Hill and it contains all the tropes necessary for a look at a real “American holocaust”: the systematic annihilation and eradication of Indigenous people and culture. The environment is both pristine (pastoral) and suggestive with the American flag alongside teepees and totem poles that appear to stand in for eastern Indigenous cultural artifacts. We also learn that the cabins housing the campers are named for Indigenous tribes. Upon arriving at the camp, Bucky meets the camp director Mr. Blomback. Blomback is a devotee of Ernest Thompson Seton, the person responsible for beginning the Indian camping movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Indian camping movement grew popular when the country was at a crossroads between its rural-agriculturalexpansionist past and its urban-industrial-imperialist present. While Indigenous peoples have been incorporated into American identity at least as far back as the Boston Tea Party, for the people of the twentieth century the question would be what kind of Indigenous people would be recognized and expropriated. What concerned reformers like Seton was “the authentic,” which they identified in the Other. According to Philip J. Deloria (1998), “This Other can be coded in terms of time (nostalgia or archaism), place (the small town), or culture (Indianness)” (101). By putting urban Jewish children and young adults into a camp designed on the model of Seton, Roth seems to suggest that the history of Jews and Indigenous people might be intertwined in some fundamental ways. How Roth depicts “Indianness” then, how he compels us to consider representation of Indigenous genocide, might say something

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important about Indigenous and Jewish American experiences as well as comment on the Holocaust and genocide more generally. For some a main thrust of the story is Bucky repeatedly pondering the inexplicable nature of history: He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this? Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied Europe with a rifle in his hands and the other in the Indian Hill dining lodge in front of a plate of macaroni and cheese? (N 154) Bucky struggles with his good fortune and decides to return to Newark until the innocence of a lone butterfly landing on him conjures up in his mind the thoughts of the “bounteous days to come” (N 181). But maybe history is explicable. Using “Indianness” as our guide, an example of creating the Other through cultural appropriation is the depiction of “Indian Night,” an event which occurs once a week at the camp. (By calling it “Indian Night” could Roth be referencing Elie Wiesel’s 1960 memoir, Night?) Again, there is mention of teepees and totem poles. In discussing the teepee that was the Council Tent, Roth mentions the colors that decorated the tent. The bottom of the border is red and black while the totem’s main colors are black, white, and red, the white and red “being the color for the camp’s color war” (N 205). It is hard not to see these references to color and position (dominant or bottom) to be references to the power dynamics of American history: red and black at the bottom and red and white at war. Symbolic objects like moccasins, feathers, and beaded headbands are mentioned as is Bucky’s face, which has been darkened to connote an Indian’s skin with accompanying war paint (as does his Indian dress). It is interesting that this casual depiction of war and ensuing violence is connected to the current situation in Europe. Not only are the red, black, and white colors associated with the Nazis, we also learn that Mr. Blomback had until recently used a salute “using an upraised right arm with the palm forward” (N 208), which was only jettisoned once the Nazi salute appeared. Drumming and dancing follow, and then the hunt begins: “The campers cheering continued, the delight enormous at finding themselves encompassed by murder and death” (N 214). “Indianness” seems to be a mixture of historical appropriation with costumes, drumming, dancing, and violence. The evening would then end with a singing of “God Bless America” and “Till We Meet Again.” The Indian Night episode concludes with Bucky thinking of his friend Jake who was recently killed fighting in Europe. Roth juxtaposes two realities: “Indianness” without real violence and real war with its very real outcome. A counterhistory and real history allow us to connect present events in Europe with a version of America’s past. The link to America’s past is then reinforced when shortly after Indian Night the polio outbreak begins at Indian Hill and Bucky’s life (like the civilization of the Indigenous peoples after confronting European colonizers) begins to collapse. Jake’s death invades the reverie of Indian Night, and polio invades the innocence of Indian Hill, just as European (and then American) colonization invaded and destroyed the civilization of the Indigenous peoples. But maybe, as Roth suggests, like Jewish civilization, Indigenous civilization was not destroyed. By devoting such a vital part of the Nemesis narrative to Indian Night, Roth offers the possibility of seeing the “concentrationary universe” from the lens of 1492, 1619, or 1776, as much as from a post-1933 perspective.

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To understand the Holocaust (or genocide in any of its forms) we would do well to recall two things. First, it is useful to think of Gerald Vizenor’s idea of survivance: “Survivance acknowledges colonialism and trauma, but it claims more than survival as an ending to this history” (Peterson 2010: 76). Survivance, like the idea of unheroic memory proposed by Milowitz, becomes a vehicle for the other, the counter, the double, and the ghost to transcend the horrors of the past. Second, like the stateless zones where the European Holocaust occurred, it is worth considering the American frontier and the fate of the Indigenous peoples as part of an “ambiguous zone” (Parten 2022: 3) where being orphaned from history was a distinct possibility. Considering the impact of the Holocaust on Roth allows one to see whether and how Roth’s thinking on the matter changed or evolved from the 1950s to the early 2000s. From his earliest work we see characters who seem simultaneously disconnected from the past but want desperately to find meaning. Later, Roth’s investigation widens in scope to include how America and the Holocaust inform each other, especially regarding the place of myth in American history. Finally, if one is going to try to understand the impact of the Holocaust on American Jews, then one is invited to consider the impact of the destruction of the civilization of the Indigenous peoples as a fundamental part of the American story. Ultimately, Roth’s examination of the Holocaust and America is a vehicle to understand personal and national identities, the myth and reality of American history, and how American history is intimately linked to the history of other peoples and nations—how history, in other words, uses us.

REFERENCES Aarons, Victoria (2013), “Expelled Once Again: The Failure of the Fantasized Self in Philip Roth’s Nemesis,” Philip Roth Studies, 9 (1): 51–63. Deloria, Philip J. (1998), Playing Indian, New Haven: Yale University Press. Flanzbaum, Hilene (2021), “Roth and the Holocaust,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 230–40, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Furman, Andrew (1993), “The Ineluctable Holocaust in the Fiction of Philip Roth,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981–), 12: 109–21. Hirth, Brittany (2018), “‘An Independent Destiny for America’: Roth’s Vision of American Exceptionalism,” Philip Roth Studies, 14 (1): 70–93. McAuley, James (2017), “Philip Roth Is France’s Newest Literary Superstar: Why?” The Washington Post, October 27. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/philip-roth-is-francesnewest-literary-superstar-why/2017/10/27/5df0e0e6-b848-11e7-9b93-b97043e57a22_story.html (accessed January 10, 2022). Milowitz, Steven (2000), Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer, New York: Garland Publishing. Parrish, Timothy (2007), “Roth and Ethnic Identity,” in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 127–41, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parten, Bennet (2022), “Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, February 9. Available online: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ crossing-the-blood-meridian-cormac-mccarthy-and-american-history/?mc_cid=c1d07153c5&mc_ eid=e5ddd97d50 (accessed February 13, 2022). Peterson, Nancy J. (2010), “‘If I Were Jewish, How Would I Mourn the Dead?’: Holocaust and Genocide in the Work of Sherman Alexie,” MELUS, 35 (3): 63–84. Roth, Philip (1993), Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (1996), The Counterlife, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2004), “The Story behind ‘The Plot against America,’” The New York Times, September 19. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/books/review/the-story-behind-theplot-against-america.html (accessed January 3, 2022).

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Roth, Philip (2005), The Plot against America, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2011), Nemesis, New York: Vintage International. Rothberg, Michael (2006), “Against Zero-Sum Logic: A Response to Walter Benn Michaels,” American Literary History, 18 (2): 303–11. Rothberg, Michael (2007), “Roth and the Holocaust,” in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 52–67, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Siegel, Jason (2012), “‘The Plot against America’: Philip Roth’s Counter-Plot to American History,” MELUS, 37 (1): 131–54. Snyder, Timothy (2015), Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, New York: Tim Duggan Books.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Many Diasporas of Nathan Zuckerman BRYAN CHEYETTE

The artist R. B. Kitaj has published two diasporist manifestos without quite getting to grips with the word “diasporism.”1 In the final chapter of his First Diasporist Manifesto (1989) suitably called “Error,” he concludes that diasporism “may be a name for the unnamable” (121). In his Second Diasporist Manifesto (2007), he reinforces the association between diasporism and modernism with reference to Marcel Duchamps’s “Fountain” (1917): “This Manifesto is one of my works of art, like a Urinal-In-Constant-Use” (35). Kitaj was Philip Roth’s close friend, and the parodic diasporism in Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) could not have been written without Kitaj’s First Diasporist Manifesto.2 The reason why Kitaj ultimately thought of diasporism as “unnamable” is that “diaspora” is used to designate a variety of histories and experiences. One account of diaspora is deeply conservative and imbricated in historical narratives concerning a timeless exile from an indigenous “homeland.” Roth challenges these assumptions in his two so-called “Israelcentered novels”: The Counterlife (1986) and Operation Shylock (Miller Budick 2007: 71; Cheyette 2014: 161–202).3 In these “experimental” novels, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi (2000) has shown, there is a tension between the location of “the real” in the State of Israel and the “diasporic lure of the imagination” where narrative is unbounded (225). But opposing this conservative version is an experience of “diaspora” that is creatively disruptive and refuses a simple binarism. Here the “other Jewish diaspora” (Liska and Nolden 2008: xix) on the continent of Europe troubles the center/periphery model that juxtaposes Israel and America or home and exile. One definition of diaspora moves in the direction of exilic history, the other in the direction of a disruptive imagination, with the word “diaspora” remaining unstable and elusive. My argument is that Roth’s fiction, through the figure of Nathan Zuckerman, moves between a transgressive diaspora in Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (1985) and its traumatic counterpart in the American Trilogy and his late works.

NATHAN ZUCKERMAN: MY HOMELAND THE TEXT Nathan Zuckerman is introduced in The Ghost Writer (1979), the first part of Zuckerman Bound, after being initially described as a “useful fiction” in part one of My Life as a Man (1974). Arriving at Emanuel Isadore Lonoff’s solitary New England home in December 1956, Zuckerman contemplates the fields of “driven snow” that surround him: “Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for

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the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling. I looked and I thought, this is how I will live” (ZB 5). Here we have the pastoral realm where Zuckerman will aspire to inscribe a new sense of self outside of “the world” (5). Detached from reality, the deracinated and ascetic Lonoff is viewed by Zuckerman as the “Jew who got away” from history: “You got away from Russia and the pogroms. You got away from the purges—and Babel didn’t. You got away from Palestine and the homeland. … You got away from New York” (50). The young Zuckerman perceives Lonoff as the self-transcendent diasporic writer detached from history and at one with his austere textual homeland. But this homeland, as characterized by Lonoff, is noticeably mundane: “That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch” (17–18). Ignoring such realities, the star-struck Zuckerman constructs an identity that does not originate in national and racial descent but is, instead, based on the power of the Lonoffian imagination. At the age of twenty-three, Zuckerman’s homeland is the text: The pride inspired in my parents by the establishment in 1948 of a homeland in Palestine that would gather in the unmurdered remnant of European Jewry was, in fact, not so unlike what welled up in me when I first came upon Lonoff’s thwarted, secretive, imprisoned souls. (ZB 12) Such is the source of Zuckerman’s diasporism, which culminates in The Counterlife and is taken to an absurd extreme by “Moishe Pipik” in Operation Shylock. In detaching himself from a collective identity based on national or communal pride, and the bloodline of fathers and sons, Zuckerman attempts to create an affiliative sense of self and paternal descent founded on the sanctity of art. This is, after all, the plot of The Ghost Writer. The young Zuckerman is in search of a surrogate literary father after being rejected by his actual father and the leaders of the Newark Jewish community when he publishes a short story based on a family scandal. In other words, The Ghost Writer is the beginning of a long and winding road in which “Nathan Dedalus” searches for a history and a sense of self that escapes the nets of religion, nation, and community. At the same time, it should be noted that The Ghost Writer is narrated by a forty-something Zuckerman who turns out to have a rather less idealistic version of diasporism than his younger self. What is significant here, as Clive Sinclair (1988) has shown, is that Nathan Zuckerman is constructed as “the Semite-obsessed writer Roth’s Jewish detractors imagine him to be” (169). That is, Zuckerman is Philip Roth without his “other books,” which are stuffed full of American history whether it be the Korean or Vietnam Wars, McCarthyism, or the Watergate Affair (see Bloom 2022). But such history is downplayed in the Zuckermanic equivalent of “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959) (“Higher Education”) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) (Carnovsky). In confining Zuckerman racially to his “Jewish” books, Roth turns him into a Sartrean Jew who is comically determined by the views of his communal readers. The inability of Zuckerman’s readers to differentiate between tragic and untragic histories in Europe and the United States, respectively, means that the fears and desires of a relatively prosperous postwar American Jewry are elided with the fears and desires generated by the centuries-old “imaginary Jew” (“Shylock”) in Europe. As he recounts in his autobiography, the “fanatical security” of his lower middle-class Newark childhood has, in the monomaniacal misreading of his early fiction, been conflated with the “fanatical insecurity” (F 129–30) engendered by the Holocaust.

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This unresolved “duality” entraps Roth’s fictional alter ego as he must decide what credence to give to a metaphorical collective history of suffering that results in a fanatical response to his fiction even though this history is clearly radically different from his own experience. The problem for Zuckerman is that a vicarious Jewish victimhood, in evoking the trauma of the Holocaust, subsumes the individual to the interests of the collective, which leaves little space for his imagination. That is why his early interpretation of diasporism overdetermines the writerly imagination, so that it is associated with “heroic literary integrity” (RMO 78). The irony of Zuckerman Bound is that Jewish history, which is said by his community to limit Zuckerman’s inventiveness (to the extent that his fiction is deemed to have lethal consequences), happens elsewhere. European Jewish suffering, which the young Zuckerman feels compelled to engage with, is explored initially through the ambiguous figure of Amy Bellette (whose name is a play on “love of belles-lettres” in French). Situated uneasily between myth and history, Amy is a “dark beauty” (17) who, like Roth’s previous dark beauties such as the ironically “Polynesian” (GC 10) Brenda Patimkin, is a means through which Zuckerman can supposedly escape the communal authorities who wish to control him. Amy perceives herself—and is perceived by Zuckerman—as a reborn Anne Frank who has somehow survived Bergen-Belsen death camp. As Hana Wirth-Nesher (1988) argues, Anne/Amy “is the paragon of both Jewish suffering and of renunciation on the holy altar of art” who, more than anyone, is able to absolve Zuckerman of the guilt of “betraying” his family and community (26). The metaphorical use of the history of Anne Frank by Zuckerman and by Amy (in relation to Lonoff) and also Judge Wapter (who recommends that Nathan see the 1955 Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank) points to the nature of the Holocaust “ghosts” that haunt Zuckerman’s quest for a transcendent diasporism. At the same time, the split between “Anne Frank” and Amy Bellette indicates the general disparity between Zuckerman’s Newark Jewish background and a victim-centered construction of diasporic Jewishness. As Zuckerman argues, “Ma, you want to see physical violence done to the Jews of Newark, go to the office of the plastic surgeon where the girls get their noses fixed” (ZB 106). And it is “girls get[ting] their noses fixed” that returns us to the world of Brenda Patimkin’s nose-job and the whitening of postwar American Jews. Only in such an innocent or racially “purified” context can Zuckerman’s homeland be limited to the text.

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANT DIASPORIST Much of Zuckerman Bound concerns the “crisis of solipsism” (WW 163) that besets his eponymous persona who is supposedly excommunicated (pace Spinoza) from his family and community. Zuckerman’s radical alienation means that he is unable to access a diasporic Jewish history that matters. As Roth famously put it, “there [in Eastern Europe] nothing goes and everything matters; here [in the United States] everything goes and nothing matters” (WW 227). Such isolation from nation and community results in Zuckerman’s physical paralysis and inertia as a writer. At one point in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), he considers whether to make his lover Jaga, a Polish refugee, the material for an ameliorative novel, set in Eastern Europe, provisionally entitled The Sorrows of Jaga. But he drops the idea almost as soon as it is considered: Hopeless—and not only because of the grass and the vodka. If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on

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to the personal ingredient any longer you’ll disappear right up your asshole. … You don’t want to represent her Warsaw—it’s what her Warsaw represents that you want: suffering that isn’t semi-comical, the world of massive historical pain instead of this pain in the neck. War, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, literature on which the fate of a culture hinges … Chained to self-consciousness. Chained to retrospection. Chained to my dwarf drama till I die. (ZB 550–1) In contrast to the figure of “Anne Frank” in The Ghost Writer, who is able potentially to transport Zuckerman beyond his communal and familial “dwarf drama,” the suffering Jaga is unable to perform even this fantasized act of redemption. Zuckerman’s would-be femme fatale is no longer the gendered means by which he is able to commune with “war, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism.” His “crisis of solipsism” is caused by an inability to create a counterlife that can transcend his sense of constriction and insularity in the United States. For this reason, The Anatomy Lesson focuses on Zuckerman’s failure to connect with European suffering, crystallized in the word “Holocaust,” which his mother wrote and gave to her son while dying of a brain tumor (ZB 447). Zuckerman can look neither inward (“chained to selfconsciousness”) nor outward (“the world of massive historical pain”). He thus embodies one extreme definition of the diasporist who is a placeless and free-floating luftmensch in the mold of Lonoff, who is outside of history, especially traumatic history, which is located elsewhere. By the time of The Prague Orgy (1985), Zuckerman attempts to engage directly with European history in a bid to transcend his “dwarf drama.” This novella prefigures The Ghost Writer as its precise chronology (which begins on January 11, 1976) takes place before Zuckerman has supposedly written his earlier work.4 The circular relationship of Roth’s epilogue with the start of Zuckerman Bound is reinforced by situating Zuckerman in Czechoslovakia (as it was then called) in a redemptive search for the lost manuscripts of a Yiddish writer killed by the Nazis (based loosely on Bruno Schulz). Here the ideal of an imagined diasporism, first articulated in The Ghost Writer, is given a specific historical terrain. Instead of the redemptive “Anne Frank” we have the “ruined” actress (ZB 715) Eva Kalinova, who played Anne Frank on stage in 1956. Persecuted for her affair with a Czech Jew, the nonJewish Kalinova is dubbed “the Jew’s whore” (711) and is eventually forced to immigrate to the United States. Zuckerman can no longer be saved even by a metaphorical “Anne Frank.” For the diasporist Zuckerman, Kafka’s Prague was “the city I imagined the Jews would buy when they accumulated enough money for a homeland” (760). Once again, it is an unbounded textual homeland rather than a limited and limiting national territory that offers a solution to the young writer’s sense of internal exile and displacement: In this used city, one would hear endless stories being told … anxious tales of harassment and flight, stories of fantastic endurance and pitiful collapse. … [T]he mining and refining of tons of these stories [was] the national industry of the Jewish homeland, if not the sole means of production (if not the sole source of satisfaction), the construction of narrative out of the exertions of survival. (761) The Prague Orgy attempts to redeem the landscape of European Jewish suffering (“the construction of narrative out of the exertions of survival”) whereas The Ghost Writer does not

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go beyond Zuckerman’s diasporist ideal of self-transcendence. It is significant, in this regard, that the “Semite-obsessed” (716) author in Roth’s epilogue is not Zuckerman, wrestling the demons created by his “Jewish” fictions, but the writer of lost Yiddish manuscripts shot by a chess-playing Gestapo officer. This shift from the solipsistic imagination of Zuckerman to the historical terrain of The Prague Orgy takes place at break-neck speed in The Counterlife. At the end of The Prague Orgy, Zuckerman is forced to leave this “nation of narrators” (781) and to return to his “little world around the corner” (784). Here is the first of Roth’s many arguments for the authenticity and weight of the European Jewish diaspora—at the heart of his storytelling—in comparison to either a weightless United States or a hyper-real State of Israel. After all, the accusation that Zuckerman is a “Zionist agent” in the final page of The Prague Orgy is no less part of his “little world” than his self-characterization as an “American citizen” (778).

DIASPORISM BERSERK The Counterlife takes to an extreme the diasporism introduced in Zuckerman Bound as the rival insights of Nathan and Henry Zuckerman—whether situated in the Unites States, Israel, or England—are skillfully undermined and transformed into a superabundance of possible stories. Up until the last pages of the novel, Roth constructs a bewildering series of potential “selves” for the Zuckerman brothers based on deliberate and playful misreadings of texts that willfully lack authority. His transgressive diasporism disrupts those who expect the Jewishness of the Zuckerman brothers to be confined to narratives of family, community, or nation. Such radical game-playing is resolved at the end of the novel not in relation to the authenticity of a single identity but, instead, with recourse to the power of the “imaginary Jew.” Nathan Zuckerman’s sense of Jewish “difference” is, pointedly, “reactivated” in London, rather than Jerusalem or New York, by “sitting here beside the Thames” (C 324) near the Globe Theatre where the figure of Shylock was first introduced to the world. One of the few indisputable facts of The Counterlife is the timeless tradition of English literary antisemitism in the “Gloucestershire” and “Christendom” sections of the novel and its present-day incarnations. Roth contrasts England as a place where Jews are still the objects of racial discourse with the subjective act of circumcision that “confirms that there is an us, and an us that isn’t solely him and me” (324). The connection with a collective history is made in opposition to the “mists and meadows of Constable’s England,” which falsely promotes the “idyllic scenario of redemption through the recovery of a sanitized confusionless life” (322). For Nathan, the antidote to such Christianized and aestheticized notions of pastoralism, exported to the United States via the Pilgrim Fathers, is circumcision, which will force his newborn son to “enter history”: Circumcision is everything that the pastoral is not and, to my mind, reinforces what the world is about, which isn’t strifeless unity. Quite convincingly, circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living “naturally,” unencumbered by man-made ritual. (323) Through circumcision, and the sense of difference engendered by this act, Nathan Zuckerman separates his child from the history of European antisemitism and, equally, disrupts the

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pastoral myths exported from the mother country. Such is the radical difference between Zuckerman’s circumcised diasporism in this novel and Kitaj’s “Urinal-In-Constant-Use” by a male member that may or may not have been circumcised. Roth’s anti-pastoralism, to adopt David Brauner’s (2007) formulation, incorporates Jewish ritual and is profoundly un-English (148–85).5 In The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, Israel is constructed as a mimetic realm where perception and reality are equivalent, and the uncertainties of diaspora are irrevocably banished. Toward the end of Operation Shylock, “Philip Roth” sums up the difference between his modernist diasporic imagination, which dwells in the “house of Ambiguity” (307), and the authoritative certainties of the Israeli Mossad agent known as “Louis B. Smilesburger”: “my mind determines entirely how reality appears to me, but for you the mind works differently. You know the world as it really is, and I know it only as it appears” (392). Earlier, “Roth” had summarized their differences as follows: “he’s swimming in the abrasive tragedies of life and I’m only swimming in art” (378). Nathan Zuckerman and “Philip Roth” are able to imagine countless counterlives and counterselves in the performative space that is Roth’s American diaspora, whereas the Israeli Jew has an ultimate reality, bounded by the fact of war, in which to situate an unambiguous sense of self. Henry Zuckerman summarizes such Israeli singularity, as opposed to the “Oedipal swamp” of the diaspora, as having “an outer landscape, a nation, a world! … [Israel] isn’t some exercise for the brain divorced from reality!” (140). Consequently, the diaspora is reduced to a homeland for luftmenschen (“brain divorced from reality”). According to this logic, the centering of Israel in these novels represents a national space, other than America, where reality is determined by the “abrasive tragedies of life” rather than the vagaries of the untragic imagination. At the same time, both The Counterlife and Operation Shylock resist the idea that a Jewish national space purges “Jewish ambiguity” and is able to drain the “Oedipal swamp” of its messy uncertainties. The redemptive or purifying role of the nation, which aims to subsume the individual within the collective, is merely an instance writ large of Roth’s earlier travails with the American-Jewish community. In these terms, Roth constructs Europe as a disruptive third space that throws into disarray the fixed points of Israel and America. The traumatic experience of the other diaspora, Jewish racial persecution in Europe personified by the figure of Shylock, is radically inassimilable and contrasts starkly with the dream of assimilation in Israel and America. To make this point, the fictionalized “Roth” explicitly compares his own authorial presence with that of the novelist Aharon Appelfeld who, as a child, had survived the Nazi occupation in Eastern Europe by hiding in a forest: We are anything but the duplicates that everyone … supposed to believe you and me to be; because Aharon and I each embody the reverse of the other’s experience; because each recognizes in the other the Jewish man that he is not; because of the all but incompatible orientations that shape our very different lives and very different books and that result from antithetical twentieth-century Jewish biographies; because we are the heirs jointly of a drastically bifurcated legacy. (OS 200–1) The “distinctly radical twoness” (200) of “Roth” and “Appelfeld” fundamentally counters the notion of a unified Jewish self, moving smoothly between the individual and the collective, or imagination and reality. Appelfeld, as a child survivor of the Holocaust, represents an

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insurmountable reality in the novel, which, as Roth showed in his interview with Appelfeld (partly incorporated into Operation Shylock), results in a tragic form of diaspora: “Appelfeld is a displaced writer of displaced fiction who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own” (WW 200). The key point is that the Holocaust, and by extension the history of European antisemitism (“Shylock”), results in an abiding sense of traumatic history being elsewhere and radically other to the experience of “Philip Roth.” The last question “Roth” asks “Appelfeld” in his interview, which remains unanswered, is in what way Holocaust survivors have been “ineluctably changed” (WW 215) by their experience. This is repeated in Operation Shylock (214). Here the unbridgeable gap between change as “artistic transubstantiation” (OS 361) and change as a result of trauma is paramount. The point is reinforced by Roth creating a “Jerusalem counterself,” whom he names comically Moishe Pipik. Pipik is the other “Philip Roth” in the novel and the very personification of the “triumph of the untragic” (132). At the end of the novel, “Roth” dismisses Pipikism as “the antitragic force that inconsequentializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything—our suffering as Jews not excluded” (389). Pipik’s surface version of diasporism, which aims to recreate a post-Holocaust Jewish diaspora in East-Central Europe, is bogus because it is a form of pastoralism that attempts to transcend reality through sheer will power. His diasporism, in other words, is another version of the empty, merely aesthetic transformation of reality that the young Zuckerman believes in. By the time of Operation Shylock, “Roth” repeatedly dismisses Pipik’s “dream” of resettling Israeli Jews of European origin back into East-Central Europe because it ignores the “depths of antipathy” (221) toward Jews: “Of the numerous strong arguments against his [Pipik’s] utopia, none is more of an impediment than the fact that these are countries in which Jewish security and well-being would be perennially menaced by the continuing existence of European anti-Semitism” (104). As if “Roth’s” “numerous strong arguments” against his other self were not strong enough, we are later told that the “depths of antipathy” toward Jews is not merely in “bigoted, backwater, pope-ridden Poland” but even in “civilized, secularized, worldly-wise England” (221) (“Roth” reminds the reader that he “lived eleven years in London” [221] and knows about these things). Here we have a reprise of The Counterlife where the antisemitism he had experienced in England transformed Nathan Zuckerman into a luftmensch or weightless Sartrean Jew: “England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple” (C 324). Echoing the last pages of The Counterlife, David Supposnik (a rare bookseller and possible Mossad agent) argues that Shylock is the “savage, repellent, and villainous Jew, deformed by hatred and revenge” who has, over the past four hundred years, “entered as our doppelgänger into the consciousness of the enlightened West” (OS 274). Such irreducible racial images, which culminate in European antisemitism, are the reason why the Holocaust cannot be simply transcended by resettling Jews back into Europe. Pipik’s caricatured version of diasporism above all dramatizes Roth’s exhaustion with his Zuckermanic fictions—and the figure of Zuckerman as nothing more than a “walking text” (F 162)—which locates the tragedy of the Jewish diaspora, and the conflation of word and deed, beyond the boundaries of the United States. By returning to America in the novels after Operation Shylock, there is, I want to show, a universalization of a traumatized European Jewish diaspora inflected within American history.6 The late fictions, in short, have appropriated a tragic history to shatter a naïvely pastoralized diasporism.

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THE NATIONAL TURN: A TRAUMATIZED DIASPORA COMES HOME In increasingly celebratory readings of Roth’s late fiction, there is said to be a virtuous circle between his return to the United States as a historical subject (worthy at last of “The Great American Novel”) and the best of “democratic America,” as both novel and society are distinguished by a creative appropriation and a “turbulent” quintessentially American pluralism (Posnock 2006: 6, 100). Roth has long since described the “self-conscious and deliberate zigzag” that his “career has taken, each book veering sharply away from the one before” (RMO 83–4).7 My argument is that the remythologizing of postwar America as a locale of death, suffering, war, and terror has finally brought to an end such internal dialectics. Nathan Zuckerman’s untragic diasporism, in other words, is replaced with a tragic emplotment of American history. As Michael Rothberg (2007) puts it, Roth’s late work radically erodes the “distance between history’s victims and those who grow up in the relative peace and security of America” (61). The first two novels of the “American Trilogy”—American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998)—repeat the narrative structure of The Ghost Writer, with the mature Zuckerman looking back with irony at his younger self, but with one crucial difference. In both the earlier and later trilogies, Zuckerman is a young aesthete who goes in search of authority figures who are characterized by their “heroic purity” (IMC 54). But whereas Lonoff is in exile from monumental history and inspires Zuckerman’s diasporism, the mythic heroes in the American Trilogy are tragic figures who evoke the monumental history of postwar America (the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Vietnam, Korean, and Second World Wars, and American racial politics). If we compare Operation Shylock with The Human Stain (2000), for instance, we can see the extent of Roth’s Zuckermanic “zigzagging.” In the earlier novel, the fictional “Roth” speaks of having a “drastically bifurcated legacy” (OS 201) when compared with the biography of an “Appelfeld.” By the time of The Human Stain, the final novel in the American Trilogy, the word “bifurcate” could not be used more differently: “To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America’s story, the high drama that is upping and leaving—and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands” (HS 342). Here is the radical revision of Roth’s previous fiction where there is a move from the insurmountable (“bifurcated”) gulf between different kinds of histories to the domestication of history as part of an American story of individual bifurcation. To be sure, Zuckerman has long since claimed that “the civility and security of South Orange” is a form of “Jewish history” no less than “world-historical event[s]” (C 146).8 By the time of I Married a Communist, however, such diasporic “Jewish history” is universalized when the young Zuckerman (in contrast to The Ghost Writer) argues that “I didn’t care to partake of the Jewish character. … I wanted to partake of the national character” (IMC 39). With this distinction in mind, he characterizes the immediate postwar period as encapsulated in the radio plays of Norman Corwin in the following terms: “History had been scaled down and personalized, America had been scaled down and personalized … You flood into history and history floods into you. You flood into America and America floods into you” (39).9 Zuckerman, in other words, is the passive conduit of postwar American history. But what is missing from this engagement with the “national character” is an acknowledgment of the reduced national stories that are allowed by such a “tragic” vision. The kinds of “tragic”

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stories Roth tells are signaled at the beginning of American Pastoral with a graphic account of the depression-years baseball books that preoccupied the adolescent Zuckerman. These were, according to the mature Zuckerman, akin to the Book of Job as they were conceived out of the “dark austerities” (AP 7) of the 1930s and above all dramatized the “cruelty of life. The injustice of it” (9). Such baseball books and contemporaneous works on “American history” also open I Married a Communist where “heroic suffering” is the young Zuckerman’s “specialty” (IMC 25)—with an imaginary America, rather than imaginary novelists, being associated primarily with renunciation. The refashioning of national space, regarding suffering and injustice, shapes Zuckerman’s childhood memories of the Swede and Iron Rinn. Both, in these terms, are tragic heroes with the Swede described as undergoing a “tragic fall” (AP 88) and Iron Rinn as containing a “tragic flaw” (IMC 275). The “blue-eyed blond” Seymour Irving Levov, known as the Swede, was “born into our tribe” and was the “household Apollo” of Weequahic Jews (AP 3–4). This hero-worship is, we are told, best explained by the “fears” fostered by the “war against the Germans and the Japanese,” which meant that the Swede was “fettered to history, an instrument of history” (4–5). Here the “fears” generated by European antisemitism and the rise of fascism produce the myth of the utterly whitened and Americanized Swede. His sporting prowess follows Ronald Patimkin who, not unlike the Swede, is much more alive as a physical rather than a cerebral being: “He gave one the feeling that after swimming the length of the pool a half dozen times he would have earned the right to drink its contents” (GC 14). But, in contrast to Ronald Patimkin, “the Swede” has to be unwhitened so that he can begin to understand the tragic nihilism of his daughter. Reversing the redemptive power of an imagined “Anne Frank,” in another crucial “zigzag,” the American Trilogy is full of vengeful young women, in the guise of Meredith Levov (the Swede’s daughter), Sylphid Frame (the daughter of Eve Frame in I Married a Communist), and Delphine Roux (the misguided academic in The Human Stain). All of these figures are placed at the heart of postwar American history (whether it be the reactionary 1950s, the revolutionary 1960s, or the puritanical 1990s), and all attempt to destroy what Zuckerman once called the “cleansed and unpolluted” (ZB 153) world of their fathers. Each of these gendered figures, in their different ways, causes the tragic fall of the novel’s heroes by unwittingly exposing their spuriously innocent pastoralism, whether it be the assimilationism of Levov or Coleman Silk or the utopianism of Iron Rinn. Jerry Levov’s description of his niece is representative: “[Merry is] the daughter who transports [Seymour] out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk” (AP 86). According to the Shylockian stereotype, Jessica, the “Jew’s Daughter,” represents the promise of salvation and the transcendence of the grubby materialism and legalism that has led to her father claiming his pound of flesh (Valman 2007; see also Freedman 2008: 164–76). Roth’s daughters, in stark contrast, could not be less redemptive. By the time of Exit Ghost (2007), Zuckerman’s last appearance, “Anne Frank” is reduced to her “half-flayed” (ZB 152) body first articulated in The Ghost Writer. But, unlike the earlier work, her diseased body in Exit Ghost symbolizes the traumatized body politic after 9/11 (Pozorski 2011: 132–46). Many of Roth’s late novels foreground characters with deformed bodies—from Consuela Castillo in The Dying Animal (2001) to Bucky Cantor in Nemesis (2010)—who are, ultimately, irredeemable. Such “zigzagging” is most apparent in The Human Stain. From first to last, words kill in the novel. This is in stark contrast to Zuckerman Bound, which spent nearly a thousand pages demonstrating the ironic distance between Zuckerman’s books and the fears generated

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by them. One cannot take seriously the accusation that Zuckerman has murdered his father by writing Carnovsky or has caused a rise in antisemitism with the publication of his early stories. The plot of The Human Stain, on the other hand, is generated by the lethal use of words, which begins with “spooks” (regarding two absent Black students in Coleman Silk’s class). The novel ends with Zuckerman being forced to move (before publishing his account of Silk) lest the murderous Les Farley discover his whereabouts: “I knew that my five years alone in my house here were over” (HS 360). Playing the role of “the Jew” in The Human Stain, in stark contrast with the game-playing in Operation Shylock or The Counterlife, has lethal consequences. Silk, Zuckerman concludes, was “killed as a Jew. Another of the problems of impersonation” (325). What once was merely theatrical and provisional is here aligned with European histories of antisemitism and the traumatic consequences of the Vietnam War. That Iris, Silk’s wife, is supposedly “murdered” (HS 12) by the accusation of racism (after Silk uses the word “spooks”) can also be related to Kitaj, who accused his London critics of “murdering” his wife in 1994 after a retrospective of his work was poorly received and who, as a result, returned to the United States.10 Such is the precedent for Roth’s tragic emplotment of Kitaj’s diasporism and the lethal consequences of English antisemitism in The Counterlife and Deception (1990). Pastoral innocence (in its many forms) is replaced, in the late work, with an overwhelming sense of traumatic suffering and anguish. This reaches a climax in Nemesis, Roth’s last novel, which refigures the history of antisemitism as a polio epidemic in 1944 and unites the fate of European and American Jews in a single tragedy: “Because this was real war too, a war of slaughter, ruin, waste, and damnation, war with the ravages of war—war upon the children of Newark” (N 132). As with Roth’s version of antisemitism as a foetor judaicus or “Jewish stench” in The Counterlife, the narrator of Nemesis recounts that polio “gets in the air and you open your mouth and breathe it in” (59), which is why the “anti-Semites are saying that it’s because they’re Jews that polio spreads there” (193).11 The impurity of the diaspora, where stories collide and plural versions of history multiply, is replaced in Nemesis by the traumatized nation where, finally, the air that you breathe is indistinguishable from the “disease” that infected the continent of Europe. The same is true of the “fanatical insecurity” (F 129) of the Newark-Jewish community Zuckerman dismisses in Zuckerman Bound as it concerns European rather than American history. But just as words kill in the American Trilogy, such abiding insecurities become the subject of The Plot against America (2004), which can be read as an all too factual (as well as counterfactual) novel. That Roth’s late fiction has had a popular appeal demonstrates the power of nation-thinking rather than diasporism. But, as a European-Jewish reader, I much prefer a transgressive, cosmopolitan Roth to his, and Zuckerman’s, final incarnation as a national éminence grise.

NOTES 1. In the spirit of Philip Roth’s dialectics, this chapter is a reconsideration of Cheyette (2014), chapter 5. With thanks to Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer for their editorial wisdom, and David Brauner for his incisive comments on an early version of this chapter. 2. For an elaboration of Roth’s use of R. B. Kitaj’s life and work see Brauner, “Roth and the Visual Arts” in this volume, chapter 10. 3. Roth mischievously relates Operation Shylock to The Counterlife by describing his “confession” as a “nonfictional treatment” rather than a “Zuckerman sequel to The Counterlife” (OS 359).

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4. Sinclair (1988) rightly argues that “since The Ghost Writer takes place in December 1956 and was composed more than twenty years later, it is clear that Zuckerman must have written it some months after the eponymous visit to Prague” (170). 5. McKinley (2021) inexplicably misses out the English context of Roth’s life and work. 6. See Pozorski (2011) for an account of Roth and trauma in the longue durée. 7. See Shostak (2004) for an account of Roth in these terms. 8. For an elaboration of this view of history, see Roth’s “My Uchronia” (2004) (WW 336–45). 9. For the use of the radio to domesticate American history, see Kalisch (2022). 10. See Brauner (2010: 130–2) and chapter 10 in this volume. 11. For the foetor judaicus and the history of English antisemitism, see Cheyette (2011).

REFERENCES Bloom, James D. (2022), Roth’s Wars: A Career in Conflict, New York: Lexington Books. Brauner, David (2007), Philip Roth, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Brauner, David (2010), Contemporary American Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cheyette, Bryan (2011), “English Anti-Semitism: A Counter-Narrative,” Textual Practice, 25 (1): 18–34. Cheyette, Bryan (2014), Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History, New Haven: Yale University Press. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven (2000), Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press. Freedman, Jonathan (2008), Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press. Kalisch, Michael (2022), “Philip Roth’s Radio Novels: Tuning in to I Married a Communist and The Plot against America,” Studies in American Fiction, 49 (1): 71–97. Kitaj, R. B. (1989), First Diasporist Manifesto, New York: Thames & Hudson. Kitaj, R. B. (2007), Second Diasporist Manifesto, New Haven: Yale University Press. Liska, Vivian and Thomas Nolden (2008), “Introduction,” in Vivian Liska and Thomas Nolden (eds.), Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide, xv–xxxiii, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McKinley, Maggie (ed.) (2021), Philip Roth in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller Budick, Emily (2007), “Roth and Israel,” in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 68–81, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Posnock, Ross (2006), Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Pozorski, Aimee (2011), Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010), New York and London: Continuum Books. Roth, Philip (1959), Goodbye, Columbus, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (1985a), My Life as a Man, New York: Penguin. Roth, Philip (1985b), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Penguin. Roth, Philip (1985c), Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1986), The Counterlife, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1988), The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1993), Operation Shylock: A Confession, London: Jonathan Cape. Roth, Philip (1998a), American Pastoral, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1998b), I Married a Communist, London: Jonathan Cape. Roth, Philip (2001), The Human Stain, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2004), The Plot against America, London: Jonathan Cape. Roth, Philip (2007), Exit Ghost, London: Jonathan Cape.

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Roth, Philip (2010), Nemesis, London: Jonathan Cape. Roth, Philip (2017), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction: 1960–2013, New York: Library of America. Rothberg, Michael (2007), “Roth and the Holocaust,” in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 52–67, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shostak, Debra (2004), Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. Sinclair, Clive (1988), “The Son is Father to the Man,” in Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson (eds.), Reading Philip Roth, 168–79, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Valman, Nadia (2007), The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Wirth-Nesher, Hana (1988), “From Newark to Prague: Roth’s Place in the American-Jewish Literary Tradition,” in Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson (eds.), Reading Philip Roth, 17–32, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

PART FOUR

New Directions in Roth Studies

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Countering Pastoral: Philip Roth and Ecology ERIC LEONIDAS

Philip Roth might seem a strange subject for ecocriticism. Nathan Zuckerman and his creations, especially, are creatures of the schools, streets, synagogues, factories, and all manner of momand-pop businesses of urban New Jersey. When characters stray into rural locales, they most often seem out of place, even impostors, separated from the tight communities and often suffocating families of Roth’s imagined postwar Jewish neighborhoods. But omitting Roth and his typically urban environments from the field of ecocriticism reinforces a constrained sense of the potential of an ecologically minded approach to literature. Initially grounded in some basic Romantic divisions between city and country, and largely still committed to redressing the climactic and social disruptions caused by the ravaging of our global environments, ecocriticism has developed the self-interrogating impulse of mature forms of criticism, summarized by Timothy Clark (2011) as a series of “quandaries.” Among the most searching of these quandaries is a foundational debate over whether the natural environment is metaphysically distinct from culture, preceding us and enabling our concentration into communities (Clark 2011: 94–5). These, in turn, organize themselves through their relation to the land, which then ultimately determines cultural practices, institutions, faiths, and the creation of proper delis. Alternatively, is nature itself a cultural expression—a process—formed and reformed as political and social priorities necessitate? Roth offers little that might be identified strictly as “ecological,” but of course his characters are resolutely products of their environments, and changes in place are often made in resistance to such influence. The intellectual freedom associated with the rural university, for instance, or the lessdeveloped spaces of white Protestant America are the “frontiers” in which individuals can attempt to forge distinct and independent identities. But so much of Roth’s metafictional work involves precisely the question of who’s doing the creating and what is in turn created by that process. Likewise, the sharp ideological distinctions among environments are refracted through characters and, often, multiple layers of authorship. In short, the formal design and authorial irony of Roth’s fiction suggest a phenomenological approach: how do ideas of the natural world influence characters’ perception of their “place,” whether social or spatial? Additionally, to what extent do these perceptions figure in self-mythologizing—in the accounts of how individuals or groups, perhaps even a nation, got to where they feel they are? All of which is to say that a focus on some ecological elements in Roth’s fiction can deepen our understanding of how his characters invent themselves and construct versions of

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America’s ethnic history. With such a focus, moreover, we may glimpse some implications for environment, even where representations of “nature” seemingly have little impact.

FICTIONAL NATURES AND FICTIONAL SELVES The “consumption” of the natural environment for self-invention or self-understanding reveals the depth of our conceptual dependency on versions of the natural. As in the construction of distinct genders, differentiating between human and natural environments offers a fundamental organizational principle: a ground against which to distinguish and privilege human civilization and dignity. Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) depends upon exactly such a distinction, but in its protagonist’s imagined escape from history into a set of discursive ideals it reveals these to be flimsy and self-serving, even as moments of sharp attention to environment provide flashes of meaningful self-knowledge. By contrast, in Sabbath’s Theater (1995), the dissolution of self-gratifying conceptions of the natural world leads Mickey Sabbath to a sense of selfhood through evacuation, a rejection of nature as vehicle for self-consciousness and instead a productive experience of it as an end of our being. In the readings that follow I hope to demonstrate that Roth’s complex ironies reveal the extent to which representations of the natural world can amount to expressions of personal and social delusion, and, alternatively, that abandoning an identity forged through the construction of “the natural” can produce a deep, revelatory, and comic sense of humility. Within American Pastoral, Roth’s Zuckerman frames the story of the Swede as a form of “counterpastoral” (86).1 From this perspective, the allegorical Levov represents not only a warped ideal of immigrant cultural transcendence or a nation fleeing its historical traumas but also an American literary pastoral tradition that emerges as escapist. Zuckerman sees the Swede as exchanging a coherent if marginal ethnic identity for self-ignorance, a disturbing national and global political consciousness for a localized and ahistorical complacency. And these conflicts are realized in the Swede’s division between the urban and the rural, between the cultural friction and transformations of the city and an unchanging and timeless conception of Nature. Hannah Wirth-Nesher (2011) identifies this American version of pastoral as “a retreat from history and society toward a romantic idyllic existence in nature,” which she links to Thoreau and Emerson, and thus argues that the novel criticizes “the very quest for the American pastoral itself” (28). This tracks the general history of critical approaches to literary pastoral, particularly its American forms (see Buell 1989 and Garrard 2012: 37–63). Nonetheless, Zuckerman’s portrait of the Swede’s Rimrock idealism is deliberately contradictory. Given a stone foundation in an Arcadian locale, the Swede’s vision does seem to offer all the simplicity and carefree disconnection from cultural complications he seeks. Zuckerman locating a naïve pastoralism in the Swede reveals his view of environment as largely detached, an atmosphere of comfort rather than a place itself inscribed by the history that his neighbor, the architect Bill Orcutt details. Time and again the Swede imagines generational, economic, ethnic, and political tensions as effects of the city—the factory, the riots, Rita Cohen’s duplicity, and all forms of material struggle. The self-reinvention as a simplistic fiction is neatly realized in his identification with Johnny Appleseed. In the Swede’s conception of him, the figure seems a prototypical effort to pursue William Empson’s (1995) “pastoral process,” an effort to render “the complex into the simple” (23) and in doing so reconcile social differences into an ordered community. So the Swede would celebrate a physical identity—“Big. Ruddy. Happy.”—rather than a culturally religious or national

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one: “No Swede, Dwyer or Levov but Johnny Appleseed, Dawn Appleseed, Merry Appleseed” (AP 316). The actual Appleseed, as Aimee Pozorski (2011) reminds us, was hardly the carefree mythical figure that Levov—and American culture generally—imagines, casually scattering his seed and letting nature do its thing. The figure who became “Appleseed” was a farmer, John Chapman, who deliberately and programmatically cleared land, planted orchards, and protected them by fencing them off against domesticated farm animals and wildlife. The “real” Appleseed shared some values with the Swede’s father and, in his efforts to preserve Newark Maid, of the Swede himself. But to Levov, the history of struggle and change is a phenomenon of the city. Merry’s act of incomprehensible violence comes of those frequent trips into New York. The chaos of political resistance and clashing visions is imported into an otherwise placid and unchanging landscape, and the solution is restoration rather than adaptation or reconciliation. The Swede draws unsustainable distinctions, as in his perception of the trees around his home. Paradoxically, trees that grow, turn color each fall, and eventually die become symbols of fixedness; they convey a sense of rootedness in the same way the home’s stone construction offers the Swede a handy metaphor. Meanwhile the business—despite its own growth, need for constant attention, and economic and social vulnerabilities—is discounted: “It was more astonishing to him that he owned trees than that he owned factories” (325). And yet, he has his four maples cabled together, lightning rods “snaked from the trunk to the topmost point of each tree” (326), and regularly the trees are fertilized and doused with insecticide. The Swede’s bucolic vision takes real work to remain resistant to the actual forces of ecology. Compared to the deep currents of tradition, history, and family that course through the city, Rimrock’s little general store and Orcutt’s dilettante designs seem weightless. But we might go further and suggest that, in his city-dweller’s caricature of rural existence, Zuckerman is less frustrated by a pointlessly suburban existence or the delusions of literary pastoral than by failures to perceive our environments as extensions of our complex experience. The Swede’s version of pastoral, that is, leaves him little room to confront the imperfections and strife that are part of life in Rimrock, nor do they leave the novel’s critics much recourse beyond returning to the complexities and divisions of historical and political life, represented by the city. The result is to reinforce an ambivalence toward nature—pristine but irrelevant—and perpetuate a notion of literary pastoral as composed of little more than the Swede’s nostalgia. In the complexities of environment in Rimrock, however, and by observing the Swede’s occasional exercise of “landscape” in urban settings, we might recognize the Swede’s failure as less a fictionalization of himself and his world than an inability to find the revealing wrinkles in his own myths. In populating Rimrock with ecological vitality, laborious struggle, and traces of a difficult American past, Zuckerman offers his protagonist, and Roth’s audience, opportunity for a more complex vision of nature, one capable of extending the tensions and multivalence the novel identifies with the city and, in turn, encouraging a more responsive and ultimately constructive sense of the environment. One place we can extend into the country the richness of Levov’s urban life is in a human striving common to both. The Swede’s version of pastoral is deliberately past: the rural is a place of arrival, not becoming. Such a vision protects from the depredations of history, such as the stories of urban decay that Lou offers. Likewise, the exhaustive descriptions of the glovemaking process assert the unswervable conviction that the craft is an old-world mystery, transmitted generationally and locked in a faded tradition associated with distant places and men and women who practiced a lost form of artistry. In Rimrock, meanwhile, Levov can romanticize just about anything. Whereas the frontier has historically denoted the

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proving ground of American economic and cultural ambition, all of the consequences have been purged from the countryside and organized in the factory. But beyond the Swede’s static conception of Rimrock or Orcutt’s empty lassitude, we can glimpse elements of ambition. Intended to substantiate herself as something more than a beautiful figurine, Dawn’s own version of the pastoral, for instance, is in fact industrious: the creation of cattle that comes of research into breeds, buying at auction, experimentation, and above all the physical labor involved in managing these huge creatures, perhaps best encapsulated in the Swede’s memory of Dawn and Merry rescuing their prized bull “Count” after he maroons himself in a river (199–200). The supposedly bucolic Morris County is indeed dotted with its own relics of striving: civil war encampments, the traces of old railways, granaries, mills, and other remains of vanished industry. It’s not exactly that the “longed-for pastoral” never existed—which is surely correct—and is solely a reaction formation to the disordered present; it’s that the past the Swede mystifies is one of disciplined and ennobling labor (and often exploitation and violence), and the basis of that striving is represented as an industrial effort to master the natural world, from Merry battling her recalcitrant stutter to the Swede plying his trade on the ballfields, to the Italian craftsmen cutting and sewing animal skins into an unmistakable symbol of success and leisure: the multi-buttoned glove. Perhaps even Zuckerman trying to imagine his way into the impenetrable stolidity of the Swede. The point is that in the novel an existence outside the city is neither a paradise lost nor found, except as a constructed version of the same desires and defeats that we experience any – and everywhere. It’s hardly surprising that the Levov-Zuckerman view of pastoral is an ineffective basis for a restorative ethics, whether social or environmental. But this isn’t all pastoral’s fault. New historicism generally and ecocritics like Jonathan Bate (1991) and Laurence Buell (1995) have long identified strains of social and ecological critique running throughout pastoral; indeed, Ken Hiltner has noted in early modern pastoral a nascent “environmental consciousness” (62–3). Even the Swede’s romanticized view of the rural landscape cannot entirely survive the creeping knowledge of his failures and limitations, which brings some clarity and precision to his place in the natural world. Late in the novel, for example, he imagines Merry “already back in the countryside,” where she identifies, in exquisite precision, the riot of plants flowering around them. The vision climaxes in a notion of Merry feeling “at one with nature” and “imagining that she was the everlasting wind” (AP 420). In inventing a shared moment in the countryside, the Swede seems aware of the natural world as a deliberate concoction intended to comfort him, but in this moment that picture becomes animated with details that convey, paradoxically, a profound desire for communion in the natural, rather than through it. As represented here, his memory is both precise and humbling. The sense of unity is enhanced as he transfers it from his own feelings to Merry’s. Here might lie the restorative power of environment: not in the purchase and ownership of land but in his own subjection to the natural world and an imagined conception of Merry’s dissolution within it. Yet all of this occurs in the Paradise Lost of the last section—not in the Swede’s previous vague and glassy-eyed experience of nature but through a recalled ideal of knowledge of and physical engagement with the material things of the world. Merry’s natural classifications and identifications might echo Lou and Seymour Levov’s immersion in the particulars of gloves and glovemaking. Here the Swede’s engagement—part recollection, part impossible future—necessarily produces a knowledge of complexity, change, division, difference, and erosion. He realizes that Merry cannot come back to find innocence, comfort, or reconciliation in such a conception of environment, any more than she could confess her

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four murders and see any other response in her grandfather than his immediate death (421). The natural world as space for reconciliation and redemption is likely an improvement over an illusory pastoral ideal in that it frames Levov’s desires so clearly, but it is no more practical a means of achieving them. Ultimately, a focus on environment in American Pastoral can offer little by way of progress toward a sustainable relationship with the non-human world. As a novel of disillusionment, however, it rejects the natural environment as escape from history or a space beyond human conflict and striving. Moreover, Zuckerman-Roth offers in Bill Orcutt a powerful critique of the natural world as map of human achievement or justification of place. The tour of Morris County he provides is a triumphalist celebration of the place’s part in American political and economic history, all to manifest the “belonging” of a family that “goes back to the Revolution” (304). The aspects of the non-human that emerge record the damage of ambitious striving for place. Orcutt recounts a history of “rolling mills, nail and spike factories, foundries and forging shops” (302). He points out the sites where TNT was manufactured for mines and munitions (and led to the accidental death of fifty-two workers). Canals dug here, rail lines laid there, and in a church cemetery the county’s first Orcutt (Thomas) who preceded all of this history and now firmly places the family within it (305). At the same time, there are moments of “landscape” in urban settings that seem to expose the naked self-satisfaction of Orcutt or the Swede’s self-indulgent versions of environment.2 Working his way toward the newly discovered Merry, for example, the Swede focuses on the neighborhood’s decay and degradation, much of it enclosed by a railroad viaduct that offers the darker side of a society that, in the country, would lay thirty miles of track “just to transport peaches” (304). Levov’s attention is no less focused or precise than the moments imagined with Merry in the countryside, but where those suggested feelings of unity, the details here record psychological, social, and environmental damage, an “affirmation of a weary industrial city’s prolonged and triumphant struggle to monumentalize its ugliness” (219). Merry’s work at the animal shelter, her life of personal deprivation, and her committed Jainism all seem varying forms of self-punishment, but they stand just as well as rebukes to family fortunes built from animal skins and to all exploitative uses of the non-human world. Here, in the most dilapidated section of Newark, the Swede sees the world around him for what it actually is and consequently winds up painting a detailed landscape of the effects of national and self-mythologization on environment.

FROM IMAGINING THE COUNTRY TO BEING IN IT Despite ecocriticism’s rich evolution from essentially a conservation effort to a global and manifold investigation of the human relationship to the natural, the dominant concerns remain moral and political—understandably so, given the calamitous effects of climate change and the uneven pressure it exerts around the world. Nonetheless, in the last twenty years the discipline has largely followed the trajectory of feminism and other forms of cultural criticism, expanding from an immediate interest in political ends to a more searching inquiry into the historical development of contemporary circumstances.3 Critics working in the area of social ecology have focused in particular on literature’s role in creating norms of social relations and linking these to the cultural formations that sustain today’s models of dominance and exploitation of the realm of the non-human. The corollary, beginning with Lawrence Buell’s Environmental Imagination (1995), proposes that imaginative work can be

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productive in the conservative and restorative effort. Buell’s notion of “dual accountability” acknowledges the problems with the seemingly “objective” literary reproduction of the nonhuman, particularly its reinforcement as object or commodity. Thus, he outlines the need for imaginative forms that record experience of and responsiveness to the natural world, though still “grounded” at some level in the real (Buell 1995: 92). More recently, Timothy Clark (2019) has surveyed the burgeoning diversity of the ecocritical field and observed a gargantuan shared purpose: “environmental crisis demands a reconsideration of society’s basic values, constitution, and purposes, and … art and literature can be vital in that work” (15). The movement beyond the United States and the United Kingdom to examine issues such as migration, global commerce and finance, world agriculture including animal husbandry, extraction, genetics, fisheries, geology, and any number of diverse fields suggests the profound level of human interpenetration and interdependency—on one another as well as on the non-human. The extent to which any of this really challenges “society’s basic values,” however, is an open question. Surely this work points out the necessity of enormous change, even in the face of world-wide political recalcitrance. But the most basic foundation—conservation—is undisturbed as the basis of ecocriticism’s value. I don’t think it’s necessary to get beyond this as a political strategy toward adopting new and desperately needed ecological attitudes and policies. Yet there remains profound social critique possible if we let go of some of the enduring preference for distinct human value. Roth’s Mickey Sabbath issues just such a challenge, and Roth’s pointedly non-ecological use of nature asks just what we’re trying to preserve in our pretenses to a “civilized” humanity. In his influential Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton (2007) argues that a proper ecological response to our current plight necessitates dropping the accumulation of meanings, and the attendant ideological positions, that have grown up around “nature.” He offers a “searching criticism of a term that holds us back from meaningful engagements with what, in essence, nature is all about: things that are not identical to us or our preformed concepts” (7). He takes aim at a nature “set up as a transcendental, unified, independent category” (13). In The Ecological Thought, Morton (2012) replaces the idea of a separate, protectable realm of “the natural” with the conceptual figure of a “mesh.” This entanglement includes all beings and objects, human and non-human, living and non-living (15). The idea implies an obligation: since we are interconnected with everything, no matter how close or near, recognizable or strange, we are compelled to reflect this kinship in our thoughts and actions, especially toward the ugly, threatening, alien, or seemingly unlovable. There is no place or perspective outside the natural from which to objectify it, whether to exploit or conserve. In this light, there is no means to separate ourselves from the “perversity” of Mickey Sabbath, who comes to represent all things entangled. Sabbath’s distasteful conduct—expressed in startling language and imagery, even by Roth’s standards—initially offers a bracing realization of this concept socially, and with the mesh as a frame of reference we can see the importance of his movement from suburban to urban and back, from present to past, from the reasonable to the outrageous. Ultimately, Sabbath paradoxically evolves from a mere provocateur (if an extremely effective one), a man who, dubiously locating his source of being in his erotic assertion, unleashes all manner of “natural” human impulse. By the end of the novel Sabbath, “ankle-deep in the pudding of the springtime mud” (ST 451), is effectively where he belongs, now a man whose loves and hatreds, desires and repulsions enmesh him as autochthonous creature of nature rather than one self-generated by the artful construction of his will as authentic, even as he disdains the fundamental connections and interpenetrations of a mesh.

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Through a deep humility brought on by need and incapacity, and finally realized in an act of evacuation, he discovers himself to be a child not of the Jersey Shore but of the wilderness. Within its extensive account of the history and centrality of Halakha, Deuteronomy includes a set of instructions to the Israelites on how to behave when “encamped.” Among these is an insistence on purity, such that should a man enjoy a “nocturnal emission” he must spend the day outside of the boundaries of the camp. A rudimentary latrine, dug expressly with a shovellike tool, should also be located outside of the bounds, where men may relieve themselves and cover the results (Deut. 23:11–14). These encampments in the Old Testament are more than simple military redoubts; they form protective spaces enclosing the Israelites’ most sacred values, domestic places that enjoy God’s protection. “Let your camp be holy,” Deuteronomy continues, “let Him not find anything unseemly among you and turn away from you” (Deut. 23:15). The camp is the locus of culture, and the leaky body denotes what cannot be reconciled. Outside of camp, then, is the wilderness, a place of extreme disorder and threat. In His ultimate gesture of civilization, God gives Moses the Torah in the Sinai desert to impose value, ritual, and law in a place that has yet to observe any. And it is just such a place that Mickey Sabbath, Philip Roth’s most subversive creation, attempts to colonize in Sabbath’s Theater. The theater itself is his first version: a space within which he can beget his puppets at will—new Adams and Eves—and allow them seemingly uninhibited freedom. They are not, however, distinct creations—neither actors nor even marionettes guided by strings—but his own fingers, physical manifestations of his will unmediated by script or direction. Nor is Mickey’s own little wilderness a self-contained space; his puppetfingers, for instance, seductively beckon young women in his audience. Mickey’s purpose, of course, a purpose shared among many of Roth’s antiheroes, is to invert that binary. The theater becomes the space of a natural impulse: garrulous, polymorphous, and unlimited by all human conventions, codes, and laws apart from the signal boundaries of birth and death. It is a space formed inside the city to represent a dubious form of freedom. Roth’s great insight, however, is that such spaces have to be created, and in this creating, they are shaped in opposition to the outlines of behavior imposed by culture, like the material left behind from a cut-out figure. These spaces are hardly autonomously and naturally “wild.” Once exiled to Madamaska Falls, a small mountain town in rural New York, Mickey continues to indulge his boundless desires in opposition to the artless blandness of “the capital of caution” (295). The Hebrew “wilderness” is midbar, a desolate space and one without speech until God produces it. Mickey’s own expressions of impulse there create a measure of his distaste and a path to gratification, not an authentic response to place. He ignores all that is around him; unlike the Swede, he can’t even name a flower, even though Drenka had identified them for him in multiple languages. Drenka is real, but his environment beyond her is a dull abstraction: “All these things growing were beside the point there” (ST 30). To Mickey, the material world around him registers only to the extent that he can forge an individual or collective human identity from it, and for him that world is elsewhere: “He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime—the light, the dark, the tide, the stars … There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began” (30). The concrete things that he can recall and organize, along with the succession of months he subsequently names, connote “endlessness.” To Sabbath, the ocean’s endlessness is contiguous with an unending idea of America imposed on a place and with the enduring presence of his mother: a unity of personal and political identity found in the natural environment. This is his origin, as he imagines it. But in his brother Morty’s death and

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Mickey’s own suicidal trajectory the “fantasy of endlessness” confronts the “fact of finitude” (31), and Sabbath is left wandering the wilderness of Madamaska with neither the things of his past nor the Croatian or English names that might grant the place meaning in the present. In the light of this sense of displacement, his insatiable demand for bodily pleasure, above all the pleasures of Drenka’s body, amounts to a turning away from a silent emptiness, one more form in which the human is materially valued in opposition to what is projected as natural. And fittingly, the central place of their disport is a “grotto.” It is a secluded space where they play out their sexual fantasies apart from the institutional relationships both are in and where they are free to indulge their exhaustless libidos without moral or legal restraint. Nature, to Mickey, is set apart from the civilization that provides him endless opportunities for sexual subversion but whose limits ultimately force him out. Of course, grottos are artificial constructions of the natural—culture always constructs the natural. Thus, Roth self-consciously provides a manufactured version of nature, a perception of a space of sexual liberation unencumbered by the responsibilities and constraints associated with culture. As always, Mickey’s blunt nature is created and projected through artifice, a grotto that grants moral license, but in the end cannot sustain Mickey beyond the physical limits of arthritic fingers, the declining frequency of his erections, or the mortality that claims Drenka and dogs him throughout the novel. A grotto is a simulacrum of nature built by human beings as an expression not of real formlessness but of alternative (and usually self-gratifying) forms of civilization. Here it is a space constituted by opposition: impure imagination, unholy desires, and uncouth speech. But it is crowded. As cultural construction of a natural freedom, it cannot divide itself from the consciousness that produces it. Sabbath envisions his mother hovering above him and Drenka like a helicopter or peering in at him “like a homeplate umpire” (29). The day in the grotto that Drenka proposes her version of monogamy, “the sweet scent of everything flowering and sprouting and shooting up” reminds him of a barbershop of his childhood: “Nothing was merely itself any longer; it all reminded him of something long gone or of everything that was going” (17). The grotto is fully a place constituted by Mickey’s sense of himself and his past, all things commingled and unruly not in the profusion of nature but in his confusion of memory and desire (such that the ghost of his mother seems to emanate from Drenka’s vagina). His effervescent imagination even self-consciously pictures the grotto within an art catalog: “see plate 4. Detail from the Madamaska vase of dancing nymph and bearded figure brandishing phallus” (216). It is the satyr play to the Swede’s pastoral eclogue.4 If in the woods of Madamaska Mickey constructs an artificially material version of endlessness— his phallus frozen on a Grecian urn or Drenka inexhaustibly improving on her record of thirteen orgasms—it’s hardly surprising that this is no suitable place for his own death after Drenka is gone. The man who has sought an utterly unhindered life of imagination and desire finds himself confined by the enduring materiality of the world he has constructed, in part against a natural environment that is silent and meaningless and contains nothing of Mickey Sabbath. That is, non-being can only be a shutting off of consciousness, not some kind of culmination of desire for a wholeness through addition: mother and Morty and Nikki and Drenka. Debra Shostak (2004) helpfully frames the central problem for Sabbath as “how to invent a self in the face of desire and death,” a self that can be “for himself and others” in the eternity that begins at his demise. She reads his obsessive materiality as an extension of his obsession with mortality, and she concludes that Mickey ultimately fails to transcend this materiality through his reliance on the phallus as a means to “achieve permanence through self-renewal” (48). Its dual associations with life and waste undermine a resolutely masculine form of selfperpetuation. That he urinates on Drenka’s grave, where before he had masturbated, suggests

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an acceptance of his mortality in a “virtual paean to phallic power” that simultaneously enacts “the mutually dependent erotic and thanatic impulses” (Shostak 2004: 57–8). Shostak’s reading is compelling, but the setting in the cemetery emphasizes the regenerative power of decay, the dissolution of selfhood not in the acceptance of limits but in the recuperation of waste, the vitality in rot. Earlier, peering through his window at his wife Roseanne and her lover Christa, he associates a pungent “stink of spoilage” with “the odors that exist only within women” and are generated at least in part by sexually reproductive capacity: “if delirium smelled, it would smell like this; if anger, impulse, appetite, antagonism, ego … Yes, this sublime stink of spoilage was the smell of everything that converges to become the human soul” (ST 440). It is the smell of human vitality. It seems to drive him to his own explosion of Macbeth-like will, though political drive in Shakespeare’s play becomes undirected wildness here: “He was the wildest of the wild gorillas” (441). Only, he has it slightly wrong. The smell isn’t the female brewing of the human soul, answered by the pure display of male animality. It is garbage, strewn around behind the kitchen by some racoons. Importantly, though, his mistake isn’t attributing vitality to garbage; it’s attributing the vitality in garbage to Roseanne and Christa: “He should have known they didn’t have it in them” (441). Mickey remains an allegory of an empowering male self-importance, but it is initially one that establishes itself in opposition to a mute and distinctionless wild, a mesh that privileges neither human order nor a resistance to it. Mickey’s recognition of the reality of his death and his simultaneous inability to enact it, however, lead him to something new: an unmediated and affronting sense of the world around him: “Outside the car the blackness was immense, shocking, a night as challenging to the mind as any he had ever known at sea” (442). Ready to end his life, he dismisses the idea of a note: “There was no bottom to what he did not have to say about the meaning of his life” (442). The suicide he seeks dwindles to a kind of cosmic joke, and like all cosmic jokes it cannot be explained. Confronted—challenged—by the immensity before him, Mickey loses the capacity to assert himself. He wanders and stumbles to Drenka’s grave—“imagine a stone carrying itself.” He struggles to “anoint this sacred ground” with his urine, considered “what is most himself.” He blames “conscience,” a lingering sense of “the laws, the code of conduct” that, in laboring against, he had effectively allowed to define him. But then “a spurt … and then a flow, and then a gush, and then a surge,” which Sabbath compares to the surprising and overwhelming eruption of tears in those who are “strangers to grief.” Though his mind recognizes the impossibility of ever uniting again, the experience of an evacuative mourning is powerfully restorative; in effect, he has forgotten that “nobody dead can live again” (444). When interrupted by Drenka’s son Matthew—simultaneously representing institutionalized family and law—Sabbath, proudly sporting an American flag and yarmulke, the symbols of his nation and his faith, declares his act “religious.” In the end, Mickey Sabbath empties himself into Drenka through the earth. He dissolves all divisions, above all between culture and some form of nature or natural being and even life and death. A life seemingly lived through gestures and ephemeral oral outbursts also takes on materiality. His bouts of sexually uninhibited and impossibly transgressive acts, he learns, have been given words in Drenka’s diary, which thus reproduce vital bits of selfhood in “a record of that with which one cannot part” (447). Likewise, Sabbath declares himself to be “Necrophilio, the nocturnal emission.” The encampment, in effect, has been turned inside-out and Mickey is defined by what escapes him rather than what he can escape. In the few lines that remain, Mickey fully expects to be murdered, and when Matthew and partner dump him, he seems shocked and disappointed: “But I’m going free! … I’m a ghoul! After causing all this pain, the ghoul is running free! Matthew!” (450). And there

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in the wilderness, in the springtime mud, “blindly engulfed by the alien, inland woods, by the rainmaking trees and the rainwashed boulders,” Sabbath lives on. In a final note of ambiguity, the narrator channels Mickey’s consciousness: “How could he go? Everything he hated was here” (451). Is “here” the rain-soaked woods, the stifling and uncomprehending world of Madamaska Falls, or the here of his own consciousness? Environment is hardly backdrop: it has become the literal and figurative ground in which Sabbath empties and reconstitutes himself, having turned the trappings of culture into rich expressions of his humbled humanity. In rejecting the idea of his “natural” impulses as authentic and subversive affronts to the civilized dealings of larger communities, Mickey lets go of a notion of self as spoken into the wilderness. The Swede had set up for himself a cultural idealization of the rural that effectively blinds him to the complexities of his environment. One might add that Zuckerman, in his own reductive use of pastoral, fails to see its sophisticated structures and themes, which cut across environments and offer possibilities for conceptual integration of urban and rural locales. Mickey is hardly satisfied at the close of Sabbath’s Theater, but in letting go of natural elements that, like a grotto, can serve as a vehicle for fulfillment, he recognizes and accepts the incompleteness, indicated by his enduring desires, against an earth that is fulfilled in and of itself.

NOTES 1. On the elements of pastoral in the novel, see Brauner (2004), Gordon (2005), Morley (2009: 84–118), and Houston (2014). 2. For examinations of the role of urban environment in ecocritical approaches, see Bennett and Teague (1999) and Bennett (2001). 3. Cheryl Glotfelty (1996) offers an account of ecocriticism in explicit parallel to Elaine Showalter’s stages of feminist criticism (xxii–xxiv). 4. I find the novel as a whole fundamentally tragicomic, in that Sabbath eventually finds something animating in abandoning culturally oppositional self-conceptions. For an insightful reading of Sabbath’s Theater as subverting especially American forms of political tragedy, however, see Diggory (2016).

REFERENCES Alpers, Paul (1996), What Is Pastoral, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bate, Jonathan (1991), Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, New York: Routledge. Bennett, Michael (2001), “From Wide Open Spaces to Metropolitan Places: The Urban Challenge to Ecocriticism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 8 (1): 31–52. Bennett, Michael and David W. Teague, eds. (1999), The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Brauner, David (2004), “American Anti-Pastoral: Incontinence and Impurity in American Pastoral and The Human Stain,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 23: 67–76. Buell, Laurence (1989), “American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised,” American Literary History, 1 (1): 1–29. Buell, Laurence (1995), The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Cambridge: Belknap. Clark, Timothy (2011), The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Clark, Timothy (2019), The Value of Ecocriticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diggory, Joel (2016), “‘Tragedy Wrought to Its Uttermost’: Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater and the Art of Dying,” Philip Roth Studies, 12 (2): 47–69. Empson, William (1995), Some Versions of the Pastoral: A Study of the Pastoral Form in Literature, New York: Penguin. Garrard, Greg (2012), Ecocriticism, New York: Routledge. Glotfelty, Cheryll (1996), “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, xv–xxxviii, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Gordon, Andrew (2005), “The Critique of Utopia in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” in Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel (eds.), Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth’s Later Novels, 151–9, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Hiltner, Ken (2016), What Else Is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Houston, David (2014), “Counterpastoral,” Philip Roth Studies, 10 (1): 125–39. Jewish Publication Society (2011), Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Low, Anthony (1985), The Georgic Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Morley, Catherine (2009), The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, New York: Routledge. Morton, Timothy (2007), Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Morton, Timothy (2012), The Ecological Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pozorski, Aimee (2011), “American Pastoral and the Traumatic Ideals of Democracy,” in Velichka D. Ivanova (ed.), Reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, 33–45, Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Roth, Philip (1995), Sabbath’s Theater, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (1998), American Pastoral, New York: Vintage. Shostak, Debra (2004), Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Wirth-Nesher, Hannah (2011), “Philip Roth’s Counter-Pastoral: The Return of History,” in Velichka D. Ivanova (ed.), Reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, 27–32, Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail.



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CHAPTER TWENTY

Suburb, Settlement, Village: Roth on Whiteness and Landscape in the United States and Beyond NAOMI TAUB

In his influential 1998 text, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jacobson illustrates the fundamental instability of American Jewish whiteness by explicating a passage from Philip Roth’s 1986 novel, The Counterlife. In the scene, perennial Roth surrogate Nathan Zuckerman argues with his white, gentile British lover Maria about the racial identity of Jews: “It is a racial matter,” [Maria] insisted. “No, we’re the same race. You’re thinking of Eskimos.” “We are not the same race. Not according to anthropologists, or whoever measures these things. There’s Caucasian, Semitic—there are about five different racial groups. … [A]ll I can tell you is that you are a different race. We’re supposed to be closer to Indians than to Jews, actually. I’m talking about Caucasians.” “But I am Caucasian, kiddo. In the U.S. census I am, for good or bad, counted as Caucasian.” “Are you? Am I wrong?” (C 71) As Jacobson explains, “[o]nce the two characters recognize the slippage in what they had each thought an uncompromising natural fact, both scramble to appeal to some higher authority in order to uphold their initial views.” Maria invokes “science” while Nathan invokes “the state,” and in so doing they identify “two key actors in the creation and enforcement of these public fictions called races” (3). Nor is this merely a parochial Jewish matter, Jacobson argues, because “the vicissitude of Jewish whiteness is intimately related to the racial odysseys of myriad other groups … who came ashore in the United States as ‘free white persons’ under … naturalization law, yet whose racial credentials were not equivalent to those of the AngloSaxon ‘old stock’” (3-4).1 Jacobson’s underlying claims—that races are “public fictions,” that whiteness is inherently unstable, and that multiple social institutions have colluded demarcating and defending the boundaries of whiteness—are crucial to any study of Jewish American whiteness. Yet Jacobson overlooks the fact that this argument is not staged between two Americans, but

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rather between an American and a Briton. Nor is this incidental to the respective positions that Zuckerman and Maria take. Coming from the US context, in which racial categories have historically been (at least in theory) dictated by law and civic organization, Zuckerman appeals to the state.2 Maria, on the other hand, appeals to anthropology, a field whose history is inextricable from that of European, and particularly British, imperialism.3 Still, Nathan and Maria’s divergent ways of thinking about race are hardly mutually exclusive. Indeed, as Jacobson’s own invocation of the “Anglo-Saxon ‘old stock’” indicates, the construction of whiteness in the United States has a complex history that extends well past the spatial and temporal boundaries of the contemporary nation-state.4 Nathan’s and Maria’s exchange reflects how US racial imaginaries past and present were and continue to be shaped by overlapping imperialisms,5 waves of immigration driven by global events, and ethno-racial antagonisms and affinities born elsewhere but brought ashore in the same suitcases that carried clothes and keepsakes, photos and family heirlooms.6 This was particularly— though not uniquely—crucial in the evolution of American Jewish identity, and it is certainly reflected in the work of one of the most well-known and prolific American Jewish authors, Philip Roth. Yet, although they both constitute significant categories of concern in his work, neither whiteness nor its inherent globality has been explored consistently or thoroughly by Roth scholars. To understand the nature and scope of this omission, however, we need to sketch the shape of whiteness itself.

WHITHER “WHITENESS”? Another early Whiteness Studies7 scholar who helps illuminate Roth’s approach is BritishAmerican-Jewish sociologist Ruth Frankenberg. In her pathbreaking book, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Race (1993), Frankenberg asserts, “[w]hiteness … has a set of linked dimensions. First, whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. Second, it is a ‘standpoint,’ a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society. Third, ‘whiteness’ refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” (1). “Naming” whiteness, she goes on to say, “makes room for the linkage of white subjects to histories not encompassed by, but connected to, that of racism: histories of colonialism and imperialism, and, secondarily, histories of assimilationism in the United States” (7). Terms like “location,” “standpoint,” “mapping,” and “terrain” emphasize the crucial relationality of whiteness and the constructedness of how we experience it; they also help explain how whiteness operates simultaneously on the global, national, and local scales. Finally, she helps articulate one of the central reasons why whiteness is often left out of even literary criticism that focuses on race: to consolidate and protract its power, whiteness hides in plain sight as a set of cultural practices understood as “normal.” Non-white people are raced—they are different, exceptional, Other. White people are just people; their humanity is never in question because it is implicitly understood as the benchmark against which the humanness of non-white others is measured.8 At the heart of Whiteness Studies is a fundamental shift from an ontological theorization of whiteness to a phenomenological one, that is, from looking at whiteness as a static state of being (something one is) to looking at it as a phenomenon (something one perceives, feels, or does). In her essay, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Sara Ahmed (2007) explains that, instead of a given, whiteness is “that which has been received, or become given, over time … an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting

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how they ‘take up’ space” (150, emphasis added). And just as whiteness can be understood as an “ongoing and unfinished history,” history itself “is made out of what is given … history is what we receive upon arrival.” Thus history, too, is an inheritance that can be translated into the language of movement and space, as “we inherit the reachability of some objects, those that are ‘given’ to us, or at least made available to us.” Whiteness itself is not an object, however, it is rather “an orientation that puts certain things within reach” (154). The familial home is a powerful site for producing these orientations, because it represents a “shared space of dwelling, in which things are shaped by their proximity to other things”—a space where whiteness is generated and shared in familial relation to objects that are familiar, which is to say, already “in place.” Thinking about whiteness as an “unfinished history” one “receives upon arrival” helps illuminate the experiences of many Jews who immigrated to the United States before the Second World War. The (mostly) Eastern European Jews who disembarked in US ports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were (mostly) granted a sort of provisional whiteness. The ongoing and unfinished history they received as part and parcel of this bequest was that of white domination of non-white peoples on the North American continent, which, though they had (mostly) participated in it only abstractly if at all, quickly came to benefit them. This form of American Jewish whiteness has become more stable and ingrained over time, a clear example of whiteness as an ongoing and unfinished inheritance of objects nurtured within the intimate shared dwelling of the family home across generations. And because these immigrant narratives form the core of so much American Jewish culture, it is vital that we parse the inheritance of whiteness as part of our literary analyses. Ahmed’s understanding of whiteness as the orientation of certain bodies toward certain objects and her analysis of how these orientations emerge as products of the “home” clarify how whiteness structures desire and is also a position within a structure of desire and possibility. One may desire to be white; and one may desire other objects because one “is” white, that is, because desiring those objects is part of how whiteness is done. Let us say, that I, a white, American Jewish woman, desire to own a house. Many factors converge in that desire: the deep association between homeownership and good citizenship in US culture, an emotionally inflected wish to fulfill a goal that my mother set for herself but is unlikely to achieve, or the fact that I grew up surrounded by examples of white, Jewish homeowners who proved concretely if unconsciously that this object of desire is reachable. If I am ever lucky enough to own a home, my whiteness will be key in doing so: in being shown certain properties, in making a “good impression” on the realtor and on the bank officer who grants me a loan, and in drawing on accumulated intergenerational wealth to pay it off. Indeed, homeownership is a crucial component of how Roth figures the whiteness of his Jewish characters, particularly in how it intersects with another foundational concept in settler colonial whiteness: pioneering.

ROTH’S SHORT-RANGE PIONEERS The idea of pioneering as a form of white racial manufacture has circulated in US culture for centuries and constitutes a crucial lynchpin in the scholarship on American mythologies of whiteness. As Jacobson (1998) explains, throughout US history, “Frontier contingencies combined with rhetorical indulgences … invest[ed] American nationalism with perpetual appeals to ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery,’ to ‘white’ conquest and the defeat of the (always dark) Other” (156). The best-known mythic image that represents this trope is, perhaps, the

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cowboy. Ruggedly handsome, tough, and fiercely individualistic, the cowboy has an intuitive connection with both land and beast.9 He is often positioned in relation to the Indigenous Other whom he must teach, befriend, seduce, and control—or destroy. Yet the ubiquity of the American cowboy does not mean that pioneering-into-whiteness is a uniquely American cultural construct. Indeed, as will be discussed shortly, frontier mythologies are endemic to most, if not all, settler colonial societies.10 In both the United States and Israel, the frontier continues to be a particularly dense site in the ideation of culturally specific yet overlapping concepts of gender and race. In both contexts, frontier imagery and language generate a vision of white masculinity drawing its strength from conquering the native and its authenticity from a landscape that, at least before the proverbial cowboys arrived, was in some essential way pre-historic and even pre-human.11 Roth ties pioneering to whiteness directly in The Plot against America (2004), a counterhistorical novel in which the openly antisemitic and pro-Nazi Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election. Once elected, Lindbergh begins to institute programs designed to isolate and de-Judaize the Jewish American population. The first of these is called “Just Folks,” which sends Jewish teenagers from urban areas to live with rural families, so that, according to the “Office of American Absorption” they can be introduced to “the traditional ways of heartland life” (PAA 84). As a test pilot for the program, eight-yearold protagonist Philip Roth’s older brother Sandy is sent to spend a summer with a family of tobacco farmers, the Mawhinneys. When he returns, tanned and confident, he is openly disdainful of his family’s cultural attachments. Trying later to understand Sandy’s reverence for the Mawhinney patriarch and his growing hostility toward their father, Philip imagines Mr. Mawhinney as a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land … one of those unassailable … Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it … while my father, of course, was only a Jew. (PAA 93–4) The “Anglo-Saxon Protestants” identified here are the very same “old stock” to which Jacobson refers in Whiteness of a Different Color. Yet it is not only their Northern and Western European origins that make them white. Their whiteness is forged through imperialism: conquering the land, subjugating non-white peoples, building their own infrastructure and agricultural systems, and, finally, cementing their power through political and financial institutions. As Jews, the Roths are locked out of this vision. They arrived too late to secure their own piece of wilderness, and their cultural, religious, and linguistic practices make them unsuitable for power in the world that Anglo-Saxons built. But even though the fictional Philip Roth imagines this particular form of whiteness-through-pioneering as unavailable to Jews in 1941, novelist Roth elsewhere suggests a different path: suburbanization. Over the course of his career, Philip Roth often represented the suburbs as a gateway to a postcolonial pioneer whiteness, a form of whiteness-through-conquest that remains open despite the ever-diminishing availability of an American “frontier.” Throughout American

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Pastoral (1997) in particular, Roth frames the Jewish move into the suburbs in precisely these terms. This motif first emerges in the way narrator Nathan Zuckerman—who may or may not be “the same” Nathan Zuckerman at the center of The Counterlife—describes his postwar childhood in Newark and introduces us to Seymour “the Swede” Levov, the tall, blond, athletic Jew, both respected and respectable, whose downfall is the novel’s central theme. “The Keer Avenue Jews,” Zuckerman recalls, “with their finished basements, their screened-in porches, their flagstone front steps, seemed to be … laying claim like audacious pioneers to the normalizing American amenities. … [T]he vanguard were the Levovs, who had bestowed upon us our very own Swede, a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get” (AP 10). As the Swede, Roth’s paragon of white Jewishness, grows older and more successful, he treks even further into no-Jew’s-land: “[In 1958], the Swede would himself become … a short-range pioneer living on a hundred-acre farm on a back road … in wealthy, rural Old Rimrock” (AP 14). In imagining this quasi-suburban area of Newark as a frontier and the Keer Avenue Jews as “pioneers,” Roth reorganizes the ethos of whiteness-as-conquest for the postwar era and connects it more explicitly to what legal scholar Cheryl Harris calls “whiteness-asproperty.”12 Although the American frontier fondly imagined in spaghetti westerns had, by that point, all but disappeared, Jews in the process of becoming white could still lay claim to a kind of homesteading by striking out into the white, gentile hinterlands of suburbia. To a certain extent, Roth is simply narrativizing the historical record. As Dionne Harris (2006) explains, in the fifteen years after the Second World War, a sizable chunk of the American populace bought their first home and, in so doing, “began to reconfigure and affirm their identities.” Yet “[t]hose identified as ‘white’ made up the vast majority of new home buyers because others were largely excluded from suburban housing through the racist practices of government lending programs, real estate steering, and restrictive covenants.” Hence, she continues, “[n]ew houses were produced primarily for a generically conceived ‘white’ audience of presumed middle-class status … [I]ndustries attendant to domestic building and design became complicit in the formation of good Americans—which in the context of the postwar era meant implicitly ‘white’ Americans—out of every new homeowner in the nation” (127). In keeping with this, Roth focuses on the aspects of the Newark Jews’ lifestyle that most closely correspond to the suburban idyll, in particular the presence of semi-detached, owner-occupied housing, which promises the same hardline division between public and private space as one would find in the suburbs but not the city. In the second passage, however, Roth positions even quasi-suburban Keer Avenue as a waystation on the road to another landscape that presents an even purer and more privileged form of whiteness. “Wealthy, rural Old Rimrock” is the purview of precisely the “unassailable … Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it,” a position to which Plot’s Herman Roth supposedly can never aspire. As I will shortly discuss, this mirrors the racial-spatial narrative at play in The Counterlife’s Britain, in which suburban whiteness is cast off in favor of the theoretically more authentic bucolic whiteness of the “village.”13 Sure enough, as he breathes the pure and purifying air of the country, the Swede feels himself transforming into yet another figure in American settler colonial mythology: Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed, he reflects, Wasn’t a Jew, wasn’t an Irish Catholic, wasn’t a Protestant Christian—nope, Johnny Appleseed was just a happy American. Big. Ruddy. Happy. No brains probably, but didn’t

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need ‘em—a great walker was all Johnny Appleseed needed to be. All physical joy. Had a big stride and a bag of seeds and a huge, spontaneous affection for the landscape, and everywhere he went he scattered the seeds. (AP 316) In imagining Johnny Appleseed as earthy and physical, skin burnished with a healthy blush by the sun, Roth sets up a direct contrast to classic stereotypes of the Jew as urban, swarthy, and cerebral. This passage also indexes two crucial points to which we will return in the following section. First, the Swede’s metamorphosis into a de-Judaized white pioneer demonstrates how white places make white faces, that is, how both built and unbuilt environments demarcated as white serve to whiten those who dwell within them. Second, it gives us a glimpse into how even the most childish and innocent pop cultural figures collude in the reification of the white settler colonial imaginary. There is actually a certain violence in Johnny Appleseed’s story: as in the biblical “Parable of the Sower,” he “scattered the seeds” to remake the landscape to his own liking, transforming it into a space where, centuries later, a man like Seymour Levov could become white.

SUBURB, SETTLEMENT, VILLAGE Because it is structured around the triangulation of Jewish identity across the United States, Britain, and the Occupied West Bank, The Counterlife gives us a model through which to unpack the complexities of Jewish whiteness in a more explicitly global context. In fact, the novel stakes out many of its critiques of Jewish whiteness through its construction of overlapping worlds. Roth’s Ashkenazi Jewish protagonists move between the American suburb, the West Bank settlement, and the English village, all of which turn out to be sites of white racial manufacture. As they rotate chaotically between these spaces, their racialized identities are revealed as the product of a global refraction of multiple, multi-layered understandings of how whiteness is produced through the organization of space. Like Dionne Harris, Mori Ram (2014) contends that, in Israel, “whiteness is not just a question of race but also of space. … [T]he physicality of space embodies the interconnectivity between processes of normalization and whitening only in relation to an other” (748). Even before Israel as such existed, the linkage between race and space—and particularly the idea that constructing white spaces would whiten the Jews who lived within them—had already begun to emerge.14 As with European-style cities like Tel Aviv, rural spaces in Israel and the Occupied Territories became sites of white racial manufacture through spatial mimicry. In Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, Oren Yiftachel (2006) recounts, “For Zionist culture the ‘frontier’ became a central icon, and its settlement was considered one of the highest achievements of any Jew” (61). Its glorification, he adds later, “thus assisted both in the construction of a national Jewish identity and in capturing the physical space on which this identity could be territorially created” (108). At the same time, David Newman (2017) explains, religio-nationalist settler movements that gained power in Israel during the 1970s were successful in large part because they were able to tap into already-existing desires for white middle-class-ness in Israeli culture: “[E]ven the paradigmatic, ideological settlers … were successful because they strategically positioned themselves in relation to the trends of suburbanization” (34). However, “[t]he settler movement always portrayed itself as the continuer of the pre-State pioneering activities. …

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It was important for them to be seen as constituting part of the Zionist enterprise” (37). What’s more, as Sara Hirschhorn (2017) writes in City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement, early attempts to use American Jews to settle the West Bank also introduced an “American rights-based discourse combining religio-political imperatives with utopian suburban pioneering” (15), adding that “[m]any even saw their role as … a bulwark against the encroaching ‘Levantinization’ of Israeli civilization and spoke of a ‘white man’s burden’” (19). Hence, in both the Jewish-American and Jewish-Israeli contexts, pioneering and suburbanization were implicitly (and at times explicitly) understood as interlocking and complementary vectors for the transmission of whiteness. But crucially, these cultural mythologies did not develop in isolation—they developed in relation to one another as well in relation to shared, if seemingly disparate, legacies of British imperialism. The Counterlife captures this complex tapestry of histories, identities, narratives, and ideologies not only in its chaotic structure but also in the way it represents key locations. This is particularly true in its descriptions of Agor, the West Bank settlement near Hebron to which Newark-born Henry Zuckerman flees in “Judea.” His brother Nathan, at this point living in London, travels to Israel to meet with his brother and assess the depths of his upheaval. From the beginning Nathan is struck by the overlaps between the barren and desolate Agor and his and Henry’s upper-middle-class East Coast milieu. Walking to meet Henry at the settlement’s Hebrew language school, Nathan notices the students, dressed in jeans and lounging on the grass, and tells us, “The minaret of an Arab village was clearly visible … yet Agor’s ulpan in December could as easily have been Middlebury or Yale” (C 97). This impression is compounded by his realization that, despite being thousands of miles away and framed by an utterly different landscape, the people of Agor are, in terms of both class position and politics, much like those Henry left behind.15 Still, Agor itself is nothing like the suburbs of Newark: it is unbuilt, undeveloped, unpeopled, even unearthly. And as such it provides the ideal backdrop for these Jewish American suburbanites to play out their frontier fantasies. The figurative language used to describe Agor repeatedly frames it as extra-terrestrial and prehistoric. As Nathan muses, “Up close you couldn’t quite believe that life within was very far from the embryonic stage of human development. Everything … proclaimed a world of bare beginnings” (C 106). “Agor,” he goes on to say, “could have passed for a piece of the moon to which the Jews had been sadistically exiled by their worst enemies rather than the place they passionately maintained was theirs … from time immemorial.” Noting the changes in his brother’s demeanor, he realizes that Agor “is a correlative for the sense of himself he would now prefer to effect, the harsh and rugged pioneer with that pistol in his pocket” (C 113). Because the land is (ostensibly) empty and timeless, it allows Henry to live out a white masculine frontier fantasy. Believing that he has escaped the banal life of a South Orange weekend warrior, the topography of the West Bank lets Henry see himself as the domineering hero he wishes to be. Yet despite Henry’s insistence that he has transcended the petit bourgeois banality of their childhood, while in Agor, Nathan is repeatedly reminded of it. In one particularly telling instance, when Henry takes him to the house in which he is to stay the night, Nathan notices a small bedroom that reminds him of the one he once shared with his brother: “Two beds were squeezed into it, though not a ‘set’ fitted out like ours … whose notches and curves we used to pretend were the defensive walls of a cavalry fort besieged by Apaches” (C 135). With his pistol and Zionist bravado, Henry is still playing this same game, just on a much larger and deadlier scale. What’s more, despite its otherworldliness, Agor is just another suburb. When Nathan sees two twin beds in a darkened room in the Occupied Territories—a

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place so distinct from Newark that it is literally described as a different planet—it triggers a reorganization of history and ideology in which locations, political and racial subjectivities, and narratives of identity that are largely understood as running (pardon the pun) counter to one another are revealed as being mutually and meaningfully co-constitutive. In relocating this American Jewish memory to the West Bank, Roth aligns Palestinians with Apaches as avatars of a transnational, transhistorical indigeneity, and brings into sharp relief the portability of the settler colonial imagination by showing how geographically distant but politically proximate frontier ideologies work to confirm one another, even in the games of children. At the same time, Nathan also contrasts Agor’s roughness with the verdant, cultivated landscapes of England: “[Y]ou could see,” he muses, “how someone might get the impression that [Palestine] had been created in only seven days, unlike England … whose countryside appeared to be the creation of a God who’d had four or five chances to come back to perfect it” (C 113). In the novel’s final installment, “Christendom,” we see Nathan and Maria (who, in this version of the story, are married and expecting their first child) endeavoring to construct their own gateway to a racialized imaginary at the intersection of race and place in post-imperial English culture. In building a (white) life together, they tap into what Alan Mace (2019) describes as “an imaginary of whiteness linked to bucolic Englishness” (1033), harkening back to a fantasized pure and pastoral “Deep England.” While Chiswick, the wellto-do neighborhood just outside of London where Nathan and Maria relocate, could easily be called a suburb, Maria strongly resists this characterization in a manner that reflects “[t]he suburbs are … riven with ambiguity; in relation to the urban and rural, to class and, therefore, to England and, by implication, to whiteness” (1034). What’s more, he notes, in the London suburbs specifically, “differences in constructing whiteness [are] explained by variations in the ability … to misrecognise the respective suburbs as a village and so to connect to an imaginary of whiteness linked to bucolic Englishness” (1033). After attending a Christmas service with Maria and her family, Nathan accompanies them to a reception and attempts to schmooze with the parishioners. Still reeling from his experience at Agor, Nathan is grateful that the new house he and Maria are renovating will provide neutral terrain for conversation: We talked about how Chiswick wasn’t as far out as it seemed … [W]ith the gate closed on the stone wall to the street it had the seclusion of a remote rural village … The elderly gentleman said that it sounded as though for Maria it would be like living in Gloucestershire again while only fifteen minutes by the Underground from Leicester Square. She said, no, no, it wasn’t the country or London, and it wasn’t the suburbs either, it was living on the river … on and on, amiably, amicably, aimlessly. (C 262–3) For Maria, the Chiswick house represents an opportunity to return to the rural, Romantic past that haunts her. For Nathan, on the other hand, the house, as well as the white-English fantasy into which it is being molded, is decidedly alien. Later, Nathan and Maria begin to argue about her family’s antisemitism, which she had for the most part concealed from him up to that point. She tells him passionately that his Jewishness is not as much of a problem for her as it seems to be for him, shouting, “When I go down to see how the house is coming along, do you think I ask myself, ‘Is the Jew going to be happy here? Can a Jew find happiness in a house in Chiswick?’” (C 306). But if, as Maria repeatedly insists, Jews are not white, then the real question is whether someone who is happy in Chiswick can be Jewish. If the entire project of

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renovation is meant to refashion the house in accordance with an aesthetic so heavily coded as white that those who dwell within it are whitened by their very emplacement, if it is meant to resurrect a past version of England in which multiculturalism poses no threat to a world that is endlessly, aimlessly, amicably white, then what is the character of Jewishness in this race-space, if it can exist at all?

CONCLUSION The Counterlife never answers the question of whether a Jew can be happy in Chiswick—or in Agor or Newark, for that matter. But it does go some distance toward illuminating the shape and scope of Jewish whiteness since the Second World War. As we saw earlier, several of Roth’s novels address the way whiteness is “done” and “felt” in the United States and speak meaningfully to the work of Whiteness Studies scholars, even if those connections remain underexplored in “Philip Roth criticism” writ large. Moreover, by producing a triangulated and transnational map of Jewish identity, The Counterlife gives us a way to begin the work of Comparative Whiteness Studies. Specifically, in the novel, the US suburb, the West Bank settlement, and the English village are all presented as spaces organized around the production of whiteness. Despite being emplaced in different cultural and national topographies, all three are constructed as responses to the anxiety of attempting to achieve or take on colonial whiteness in a theoretically postcolonial society where there seem to be, to borrow a phrase, no more worlds to conquer. Thus, in The Counterlife, Jewish whiteness is revealed and represented as global in at least two senses: first, it is shown to emerge through a network of locations that cross multiple national boundaries, and second, it is articulated through the novelist’s construction of worlds, that is, of landscapes both imagined and “real.” These parallels are themselves exciting and educative provocations. What’s more, and finally, looking at these and other instantiations of Roth’s fundamentally transnational conception of Jewish whiteness does more than open new channels for the study of his books. It also teaches us new methods of reading race in Literary Studies writ large, and, even more broadly, helps us understand something vital about how whiteness structures the experience of everyday life.

NOTES 1. This is a reference to the first immigration law passed in the United States, the Naturalization Act of 1790, which reads: “Be it enacted … That any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof, on application … and making proof to the satisfaction of such court, that he is a person of good character, and taking the oath or affirmation … to support the constitution of the United States.” Under this policy, the United States was obligated to naturalize a great many immigrants about whom it was ambivalent, particularly those from Ireland. Although naturalization law was amended several times in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the basic principle of naturalizing only “free white” immigrants stood more or less unchallenged until the first race-based immigration law, the Chinese Exclusion Act, was passed in 1882 to prohibit the naturalization of Chinese laborers. 2. By this I mean that, historically, racial segregation was a matter of law in the United States. Non-whites have been legally constricted in their movements, their use of resources, their family relationships, and so on. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, no laws affirmatively upheld racial

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segregation. The British “colour bar,” though often rigorously enforced, was a social-cultural practice rather than an officially administered one. 3. There are by now countless scholars who have dissected the relationship between anthropology, imperialism, and white supremacy. To my knowledge, one of the earliest and most influential writers on the topic was Talal Asad, who, in his 1973 collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter writes: “We must begin from the fact that the basic reality which made pre-war social anthropology a feasible and effective enterprise was the power relationship between dominating (European) and dominated (non-European) cultures. We then need to ask ourselves how this relationship has affected the practical pre-conditions of social anthropology; the uses to which its knowledge was put; the theoretical treatment of particular topics; the mode of perceiving and objectifying alien societies; and the anthropologist’s claim of political neutrality” (17). 4. To put a finer point on it: Anglo-Saxons, a collective name for the Germanic tribes who settled England and Scotland in the Early Middle Ages, never existed in the United States. Indeed, by the time British privateers established their first North American colony in the early seventeenth century, Anglo-Saxons barely existed in England. Anglo-Saxonism, on the other hand, which refers not to an identifiable group but rather to a construction of white identity based on a theory of British and American history, is traceable through cultural and geopolitical narratives well into the twentieth century. 5. American imperialism itself, of course, but also British, French, Spanish, and even, at a slight remove, Portuguese and Japanese. 6. An American Jewish example might help illustrate this point. By the 1880s, the United States already had a relatively well-established and prosperous German Jewish community. These German Jews had brought with them from Europe a longstanding aversion to the Ostjuden (literally “eastern Jews”), the Jews of Eastern Europe, whom they considered fanatical, provincial, uncivilized, uneducated, unhygienic, and, worst of all, embarrassing. They were thus highly apprehensive when wave upon wave of Ostjuden began arriving in the United States, fleeing the increasingly unbearable restrictions placed on Jews in the Russian Empire in the 1880s and 1890s. Even though concern for their coreligionists eventually won out, early on German Jewish American leaders often attacked these newcomers in what we would easily consider antisemitic terms, and hostility between the groups lingered for some time, evolving as it was woven into the fabric of American race thinking. For a more detailed take, see Sorin (1993). 7. Here I am referring to the academic field of “Whiteness Studies” or “Critical Whiteness Studies,” which cohered into an identifiable branch of critical race theory in the 1990s. It should be noted, however, that scholars of color had already been identifying and critiquing the structural and phenomenological aspects of whiteness for more than a century before Whiteness Studies as such came into being. 8. This flawed perception of race is continually propped up by what Charles W. Mills (1997) describes as a socially enforced system of “structured blindnesses and opacities” that ironically render white people “unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (18). One insight into how this regime of white un-knowing has functioned in contemporary American life can be gleaned from the emphatic parental objections to the teaching of “critical race theory” in K-12 schools. Of course, nothing resembling “critical race theory” as scholars understand it is taught at that level, so we are left to ask what these white parents are actually afraid of their children learning. A large part of it, I would argue, is that they are deeply anxious of what might happen if white children are allowed, even compelled, to consciously think of themselves as white, which would violate the basic rules of what Mills calls the “racial contract” and thus threaten the social order that upholds white dominance. 9. Like many cultural constructions used to represent a pure form of Americanness, the cowboy did not originate in the United States. The figure of the cowboy emerged as a translation of the Mexican vaquero, which itself evolved from the ranching traditions of medieval and early modern Spain. The Israeli analog would be the sabra, a term for native-born Jewish Israelis who share similar defining characteristics with cowboys (tanned, strong, self-sufficient, chauvinistic). The term sabra comes from the Hebrew word for the prickly pear cactus, tzabar, which was originally domesticated in Central America and brought to the Mediterranean by European colonists.

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10. Other meaningful examples of the centrality of the frontier to white settler-colonial cultures include Australia, South Africa, and Canada. 11. In this way, the tropes of the cowboy and the pioneer intersect with that of the absent native. In the Israeli context, one need only look at the early Zionist movement’s slogan advertising Palestine as “[a] land without a people for a people without a land.” Of course, there were people in nineteenth-century Palestine, but by erasing them rhetorically political Zionists could present their project as a victimless act of reclamation for European Jews. In the American context, we might think of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 novel, The Pioneers, which closes with the lines, “This was the last they ever saw of the Leather-Stocking, whose rapid movements preceded the pursuit which Judge Temple both ordered and conducted. He had gone far toward the setting sun—the foremost in that band of pioneers who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent” (Cooper 1988: 217). 12. Likewise, in her seminal work on the subject, How Jews Became White and What That Says about Race in America (1998), Karen Brodkin cites upward social mobility, indexed in large part by Jewish out-migration from cities on the East Coast, as the pivotal factor in the whitening process. 13. But even now it’s worth noting that, as purely American as the suburbs so often appear, they were architecturally and ideologically shaped by late-nineteenth-century British principles of civic planning and theories of domesticity (Harris 2013). Nor did postwar American images of white homeownership in pop culture function as totems in the United States alone. Instead, they circulated all over the world, creating a transnational vision of a global white consumer class. This was a white capitalist imaginary in which, incidentally, Jews were welcome to participate— as long as they could afford it. Hence, to return to an earlier point: should I ever acquire one, my little white (Jewish) house would always already be located on a sprawling topography of racialized subjectivity, ideology, and desire spanning not just my neighborhood, or even just my country, but the whole world. 14. In the Peel Report (1937), commissioned by the British government to ascertain the state of the Jewish and Arab communities in Mandatory Palestine, we see this discourse already taking shape. The Jews, British agents report, are “European for the most part in outlook and equipment, if not in race” (Secretary of State for the Colonies 1937: 121–2), and in their city, Tel Aviv, the “main boulevard … its shops and cafes, and cinemas, above all the busy, active people in the streets already reproduce the atmosphere of … Europe,” making it “essentially European,” which is to say, white (114). Unlike the Arab Other, the Jews of Mandatory Palestine and later Israel consciously fashioned their urban planning, public architecture, and consumer and lifestyle choices to advertise their (white) modernity to the world in general and the Anglosphere in particular. Environments built to resemble European cosmopolitan styles were thus a crucial dimension of the manufacture of white Jewishness in the Middle East. 15. Hirschhorn (2017) cites a report claiming that 65 percent of the first-wave settlers in and around Hebron were of American extraction. Moreover, with the exception of his being middle-aged and married, Henry fits quite well into the demographics of this group, who (at least when they lived in the United States) were largely not the hyper-religious ultra-conservative zealots that many tend to imagine. Rather, they were mostly “young, single, highly educated, upwardly mobile, and traditional but not necessarily Orthodox in their religious practice, voted for Democratic Party candidates, and were politically supportive of and active in the liberal and leftist politics of the 1960s and 1970s” (Hirschhorn 2017: 15).

REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara (2007), “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory, 8 (2): 149–68. Asad, Talal (1973), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Ithaca: Ithaca Press. Brodkin, Karen (1998), How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Cooper, James Fenimore (1988), The Pioneers, New York: Penguin.

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Frankenberg, Ruth (1993), White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (NED-New edition), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harris, Cheryl (1993), “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review, 106 (8): 1707–91. Harris, Dionne (2006), “Race, Class, and Privacy in the Ordinary Postwar House, 1945–1960,” in Richard H. Schein (ed.), Landscape and Race in the United States, 113–26, New York: Routledge. Harris, Dionne (2013), Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hirschhorn, Sara (2017), City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jacobson, Matthew Frye (1998), Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mace, Alan (2019), “Whiteness, Class and Place in Two London Suburbs,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42 (7): 1032–49. Mills, Charles W. (1997), The Racial Contract, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Naturalization Act of 1790 (1790), 1. Stat. 103, chap. 3. Available online: https://govtrackus. s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/1/STATUTE-1-Pg103.pdf (accessed November 25, 2022). Newman, David (2017), “Settlement as Suburbanization: The Banality of Colonization,” in Marco Allegra, Ariel Handel, and Erez Maggor (eds.), Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ram, Mori (2014), “White but Not Quite: Normalizing Colonial Conquests through Spatial Mimicry,” Antipode, 46 (3): 736–53. Roth, Philip (1996), The Counterlife, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (1998), American Pastoral, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2005), The Plot against America, New York: Vintage International. Secretary of State for the Colonies (1937), Palestine Royal Commission Report, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Sorin, Gerald (1993), “Mutual Contempt, Mutual Benefit: The Strained Encounter between German and Eastern European Jews in America, 1880–1920.” American Jewish History, 81 (1): 34–59. Yiftachel, Oren (2006), Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Philip Roth’s Anatomy Lessons IRA NADEL

To us medical men, the human body is just an imperfect machine. As it is to most of us philosophers. And to us gymnasts, of course. —Tom Stoppard, Jumpers When you’re in pain all you think about is not being in pain. —Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson Pain has a life of its own. —Alfonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain Philip Roth’s body plagued him from his childhood until his death with illness, disease, and pain competing for control over his actual and imagined life. From an early hernia operation at ten to an emergency appendectomy at thirty-three and a quintuple heart bypass at fiftysix, Roth found his body in revolt. Or, as he ironically wrote in a 2010 medical narrative entitled “Pain and Illness History,”1 between his vascular system, cardiovascular system, and his musculoskeletal system, he’s been busy (29). This chapter examines his confrontation, treatment, and representation of the body in pain and its impact on his writing. Family history did not help. Roth had two uncles who died of appendicitis, and his father nearly died from the same disease, narrated in The Facts (1988). Roth was named, in fact, after both uncles. His family’s medical history reappears in his fiction (notably in Everyman) as a marker of the inescapability of illness and the ever-present sense of mortality. In his 2006 novel, almost every incident—from the narrator’s hernia to a burst appendix—parallels either Roth’s own medical story or that of his parents. And in the work, the heart becomes the emotional, symbolic, and clinical center of concern as it did earlier in The Counterlife (1986). This, again, reflects Roth’s life: his mother died suddenly of a heart attack, his brother Sandy succumbed to heart failure, and Roth himself died of congenital heart disease. His father, who died of a brain tumor, may have been an exception. Roth’s fiction rewrites his personal record of illness and pain, The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and Everyman being the two most explicit accounts. Other works such as Exit Ghost (2007), with Zuckerman’s prostate cancer and Amy Bellette’s brain tumor, or The Dying Animal

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(2001) focusing on breast cancer, or Nemesis (2010) with its polio could also be cited, but The Anatomy Lesson and Everyman, thirteen years apart, echo Roth’s inescapable absorption with illness, pain, and the body. The Anatomy Lesson addresses the teleology of pain, while Everyman is a descriptive reengagement with pain ending with the narrator’s death while undergoing surgery on his right carotid artery. This chapter expands the nature, form, and importance of illness in Roth’s writing, beginning with “Medical Texts,” an account of how Roth’s medical procedures entered his texts. This section is followed by “Writing Pain” and “Rothian Illness,” which address how illness and pain serve as a catalyst for Roth’s writing. It ends with a section on “Death and Dying,” the nemesis Roth battled, it seemed, all along.

MEDICAL TEXTS Roth’s treatment of pain is a literary meditation on what it means to be sick, besieged by unknown causes echoing Lev Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illyich (1886). Novotny’s pain remains undiagnosed; David Kepesh in his hospital room wonders how he became a breast in The Breast (1972); Henry, Zuckerman’s brother in The Counterlife, succumbs to highrisk coronary bypass surgery believing the procedure is necessary to restore his sex life. “Betrayed all at once by a wonderful body” (AP 29) is what plagues not only the Swede in American Pastoral (1997) but many of Roth’s protagonists.2 Devastating heart attacks (The Counterlife), unexplained cancers (Deception [1990], The Dying Animal), or uncontrollable diseases (Nemesis) suddenly strike. Illness has no reason. The body deceives us into thinking we are untouchable until cancer (Drenka, Consuela), brain tumors (Amy Bellette, Herman Roth), or heart disease (Everyman, but also Roth himself) strike.3 Zuckerman seeks the etiology of his disease realizing, as Roth wrote in his essay “Juice or Gravy,” that “I was no longer governing my body” (WW 315).4 In The Anatomy Lesson, this means going back to the root of pain in a quest for the real thing, the thing in the raw. This was no longer writing but the immediate experience of life and death graphically encountered by Zuckerman in a Chicago hospital (AL 34, 204). Pain never left Roth alone as Zuckerman records: “had he kept a pain diary, the only entry would have been one word: Myself” (AL 232). But Roth did keep a pain diary, first a brief, one-and-a-half-page chronology of his illnesses and then his thirty-page “Pain and Illness History” prepared as a response to his first biographer, Ross Miller, who dismissed his illnesses as either neurosis or hypochondria. The chronology lists almost every medical treatment of Roth’s from a 1943 hernia to a 1967 appendectomy, a 1986 arthroscopy on his left knee, a 1989 emergency quintuple bypass operation, and back surgeries in 2003 and 2005. As late as April 2010, he reported to Jack Miles that for the past four months he had suffered from severe neck pain caused by disc degeneration and cervical arthritis, adding that the problems with his lower spine moved to his upper spine making reading, as well as writing, difficult. Roth relentlessly chronicled the battlefield of his body with its skirmishes, attacks, and often defeats. He was always at war with his body and in the end, his only language became medical as passages in The Anatomy Lesson, The Dying Animal, and Nemesis demonstrate. But the procedures left their marks: scars soon appeared across his legs and chest and when a shocked, fictional lover asked him “Who did this to you?” he comically quips, “Norman Mailer” (Halliday 2018: 9).5

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Three important medical operations occur in Everyman, the first for a hernia that happened in adolescence, Roth recalling his own early experience when ten. The second is a life-threatening appendicitis and then peritonitis that nearly kills the narrator, again an echo of Roth’s own 1967 appendicitis attack. The third is the detailed occlusion of his major coronary arteries that resulted in a quintuple bypass, which Roth underwent in 1989 and described in Patrimony (1991). This event conflates his actual carotid artery procedure of 1999 with his bypass ten years earlier. Concerned with the aging protagonist whose burial opens the novel, Everyman concentrates on this operation to remove the blockage of the carotid artery, which carries blood through the neck to the brain. Untreated, it could cause a stroke. Roth’s own 1999 procedure, where he chose instead of a stent an operation that involved a two- or three-inch incision in the throat, opening the carotid artery, removing the obstructing material, and then closing it up (while blood supply to the brain is tied off), is the model (see E 181–2). But in the novel, it fails, and the patient dies. For Roth it was the reverse: he went off alone to have the successful operation. Peppered with medical terms and procedures, Roth’s litany in his “Pain and Illness History” continues with the names and dates of every doctor he consulted. It is no surprise that Roth became a dictionary of medical procedures, pain killers, and recovery measures transferred to his fiction, while the pain constantly interfered with his writing. He preferred to write standing up, easing pressure on his spine. On a trip to the Jersey shore in the spring of 1994 to scout locations for Mickey Sabbath’s trip home, his back pain became so intense that he had to hire a driver while he stretched out on the back seat of his car each way of the sixty-mile round trip.

WRITING PAIN Pain repeatedly disrupted Roth’s physical and writing life, resulting in the need for drugs, neck braces, and other remedies. His writing encompassed his discomfort, from “Novotny’s Pain” (1962), highlighting the protagonist’s undiagnosed ailment originating in the army (the very origin of Roth’s back pain) to Zuckerman’s search for a perfect pillow to ease his neck pain in The Anatomy Lesson. Pain, in fact, impelled the form of his narratives, Roth implicitly agreeing with Madame Chauchat in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924) (read to Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson) when she announces that “it is my illness that allows me liberty” (Mann 1995: 332).6 Pain overtook Roth’s life and fiction, as Zuckerman claims that if he “could somehow contract with the Source of All Pain to take upon himself, even unto death, the trapezial soreness,” he would be “a happy man” (AL 140). Osteopaths, neurologists, and rheumatologists gang up to alleviate Roth’s actual pain, but they all fail. Drugs don’t help either, whether Percodan, Codeine, or marijuana. Roth needed a steel brace in order to stand when he began to teach at the University of Chicago (Nadel 2021: 12–13). The Anatomy Lesson is quintessentially about pain, which Zuckerman believes “could make you awfully primitive if not counteracted by steady, regular doses of philosophical thinking” (AL 5). Zuckerman’s pain is so debilitating that “just having a neck, arms, and shoulders was like carrying another person around” (3). But pain drives the plot, leading to adventures alternately comic, sad, and baffling. Finding no relief and failing to understand it, Zuckerman decides to give up writing and become a student of pain, a doctor, accompanied by various doses of comedy. At one point, an orthopedist suggests that Zuckerman’s pain is

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caused by his using a manual typewriter; he immediately buys a new electric typewriter, but the Selectric, like his orthopedic collar, offers little relief. Pain even transformed the function of women in Roth from objects of desire to figures of caring as seen in the roles of the multiple women in The Anatomy Lesson. Other helpful figures include Jinx in Operation Shylock (1993) and Pegeen in The Humbling (2009), summarized by Alice’s actions in Lisa Halliday’s Roth-centered novel, Asymmetry (2018). Alice spends most of her time retrieving his prescriptions. Nurses are especially appealing, often leading to romance as the narrator of Everyman summarizes, while hospital rooms become sites of sexual skirmishes (E 50; DA 120–1). But pain can also be devastating. In Everyman, Millicent Kramer constantly suffers from debilitating pain. It overwhelms her and she commits suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. Roth, himself, kept several lethal pills in a safe in his New York apartment should the pain from his back become a torment, as he told Ben Taylor (2020: 154). Earlier, in a response to Miller’s questioning the seriousness of his medical problems, Roth revealed that under remorseless back pain for seven months in 1993 (and suffering in his marriage with Claire Bloom), he had lost both the will to live and the knowledge of how to live (Roth 2011). Roth’s own thirty-page rejoinder to Miller, offering details on his coronary artery disease, vascular disease (both his renal and carotid arteries), knee surgery, back surgery, angiograms, and other problems, especially between 1998 and 2010, also recounts his reactions to Halcion, Vioxx, Vicodin, and Neurontin, the last prescribed by a physician at the Pain Management Clinic at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. But Neurontin interfered with his cognitive abilities, including verbal expression. He stopped. Unlike the other drugs, Vicodin helped, but he took it sparingly to avoid dependency. He even had epidural injections, but they were also ineffective. Next was an orthopedic surgeon who recommended surgery for spinal stenosis and disc deterioration. In March 2002, days before the scheduled back surgery, he was told to take beta blockers to protect against arrhythmia. This was a mistake: the beta blocker with the anesthetic caused a dangerous drop in his blood pressure and pulse. The surgery had to stop after only one part of the procedure. He was then to take morphine which eliminated any post-operative pain, but it brought on hallucinations. Nevertheless, within twenty-four hours, he could walk without pain and within three days he was parading down Columbus Avenue in New York. Between 2002 and 2003, Roth was, miraculously, pain-free and stronger through exercise. But this changed by September 2003 when he experienced shortness of breath. His pulse became erratic. He went to the hospital in Torrington, CT. The next day, Roth was on his way to New York shouting directions from a gurney in the back of an ambulance driven by an attendant and aide who had never been to the city. Unable to find the entrance to Lenox Hill Hospital, the driver deposited him in a crosswalk at 70th and Lexington and went to find parking. Fifteen minutes later they returned; in the interim, no one stopped to acknowledge the Pulitzer Prize winner or ask for his autograph (Nadel 2021: 14). In the hospital, one doctor determined that Roth needed a defibrillator, but another doctor, who had implanted his stents, said the problem was not arrhythmia but rather another blockage. Within a month, Roth had three new stents inserted, making a total of six, although before his death in 2018, the number would increase by ten.7 Simultaneous with the defibrillator episode, Roth’s back problems reemerged and the pain returned (Roth 2010). Two angiograms followed in 2004 and 2005, but the back pain persisted for the next seventeen months, leading to increased doses of Vicodin which brought relief but

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also restlessness, anxiety, and worry. Rereading Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), Roth identified with the hero, worn out by his suffering from gangrene in his leg.8 Roth decided to have more back surgery, which occurred in May of 2005. Choosing not to have morphine, he had several days of excruciating pain. The operation coincided with his breakup with Catherine Steindler, forty-two years his junior. A profound depression followed. A psychiatrist, plus Benjamin Taylor and Joel Conarroe, helped him through it—but a year and a half later, the pain along the iliac crest returned as the nerve grew back. He went in for a second denervation of the facet joints. In 2008, he had cataract surgery; a year later, having twisted his neck while swimming at the New York Athletic Club, where he went for exercise five mornings a week, new neck pain started, something he had not had since the 1970s. A CAT scan determined that he had disc degeneration and facet joint arthritis, which was what he had at his lower spine, now at the top. Epidural shots brought no relief. In his fiction, Roth wanted to see pain plain, in its granular detail, which he achieves throughout his writing, even when the origin of pain remains unknown. This focus becomes his own Anatomy of Melancholy (1638), Robert Burton’s opening comment—“I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy”—echoing Roth’s personal motive regarding his pain and illness: I write to evade it, or at least to diminish it (Burton 2001: 20). Zuckerman even declares that pain is “not interesting and has no meaning—it’s just plain stupid pain,” although “everybody wants to make pain interesting” (AL 200). He sarcastically adds that “it’s impossible just to suffer the pain, you have to suffer its meaning” (200). But documenting these events in his published writing did not mitigate the stents and surgeries, biopsies, and defibrillators Roth endured. The irony of pain is that it cannot be shared and can hardly be expressed, as Elaine Scarry outlined in The Body in Pain (1985). It has no “referential content”; it is “not of or for anything” (4–5). Although “physical pain has no voice, … when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story” (Scarry 1985: 3). Roth found his voice and the result was a series of stories addressing the compelling nature of pain. As Zuckerman follows a Dr. Walsh around a ward in the Chicago hospital, he’s introduced as “Dr. Zuckerman. Our resident humanist” (AL 288). The phrase is not entirely ironic. Roth is our resident humanist in-and-out of hospital settings, sick beds, and sudden attacks, listening, observing, and speaking pain, distancing, and uniting with his own. In the end, Zuckerman understands the suffering of others, replacing his ego with the obligation of duty to others, which reanimates his fiction.

ROTHIAN ILLNESS In some ways, Roth may have been intoxicated by pain, analogous to the experience of Anatole Broyard, who used a variation of that phrase in a November 1989 essay, “Intoxicated by My Illness.” It focuses on his diagnosis and then treatment for metastatic prostate cancer. The essay has much in common with Roth’s conception of pain and illness. Roth knew Broyard, who is often discussed as a possible model for Coleman Silk in The Human Stain (although denied by Roth). Broyard had been diagnosed in August 1989 but, despite the dire prognosis, wrote with urgency about his condition. His illness energized him as he sought to humanize it through irony: “Inside every patient there’s a poet trying to get out”; “I would … like a doctor who enjoyed me,” he explains, a doctor who “could appreciate the comedy as well as the tragedy of my illness, its quirks and eccentricities, the final jokes of a personality that has nothing further to lose” (Broyard 1992: 41, 45).9 “Illness is not all tragedy. Much of it

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is funny” (46), he adds, a grim, black-humored perspective, citing Proust who complained that his doctor “did not take into account that he had read Shakespeare. That after all was part of his illness” (47). But Broyard also realizes that illness is “primarily a drama, and it should be possible to enjoy it as well as to suffer it” (7). With one’s diagnosis, one gets a “hot flash of ontological alertness” (7). Roth displayed a similar acuity in his characters who faced repeated medical challenges. But in a Rothian tone, Broyard also claims that “cancer cures you of irony”; a dangerous illness gives you adrenaline “and makes you feel very smart. I can afford now, I said to myself, to draw conclusions … I see everything with a summarizing eye. Nature is a terrific editor” (6). The imagination and language are Rothian, parallel in tone and sentiment to the expressions of Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson and Exit Ghost or adopted by Kepesh in The Breast and The Dying Animal. “A summarizing eye” is a helpful phrase for Roth’s style, while “nature is a terrific editor” is an oblique way of expressing the freedom disease can bring in Roth’s work. And Roth’s adrenaline did kick in through his accelerated output after his bypass operation in 1989. This was his triumphal period initiated by Deception but followed by Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and then the American Trilogy: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). Two works became a coda: The Dying Animal and The Plot against America (2004), before his envoi, Indignation (2008), The Humbling, and Nemesis. Roth’s bypass and recovery reenergized his writing. A new vigor and urgency emerged, but not without worry. He explained that as early as 1982, when he initially learned of his heart disease, he carefully tidied his desk at the end of each day’s writing, unsure whether his health would permit him to return in the morning: “I was more afraid for the work in progress than for myself,” he confessed (Taylor 2020: 164–5). In conversations with Taylor, Roth explained how his illness impeded but also catalyzed his writing, even if on occasion it set him back. One evening with Taylor in August 2012, he suddenly collapsed into a cold gazpacho in a Litchfield, CT, restaurant, the result of a drug over-reaction (Taylor 2020: 7–8). Most importantly, like Roth, Broyard (1992) wants to own his illness (47). Writing becomes not only therapeutic but the source of a constructive aesthetic to process the meaning of heart disease, depression, appendicitis, knee surgery, arterial disease, aortic stenosis, blocked heart arteries, and the need for stents, medicines, and exercise. Nobody wants an anonymous illness, Broyard writes. Sexualize the illness! Feel that you earned your illness— that will help combat the devastation (Broyard 1992: 47–8). Broyard then wants to reverse the situation, having the doctor become his patient to humanize the process and take the disease away from science and technology. This is the pseudo-role of Zuckerman at the end of The Anatomy Lesson as he accompanies a doctor on his rounds visiting severely ill patients (AL 288). Roth makes a story out of his illness just as he could not help taking notes of his father’s disease to write his story, Patrimony. Such actions confirm Broyard’s (1992) claim that “stories are antibodies against illness and pain” (xiii). Furthermore, both writers realize that “a critical illness is like a great permission, an authorization or absolving. It’s all right for a threatened man to be romantic, even crazy, if he feels like it” (Broyard 1992: xiv). The final necessity is to possess one’s illness, to make it one’s own. Each seriously ill person needs to develop a style for his own disease (Broyard 1992: xiv). Broyard seeks a doctor who listens, who responds to his illness in a personal way. Zuckerman asks for the same (AL 133). Anticipating Broyard, Zuckerman wants a doctor who does not abandon his patient: “a good writer can’t abandon his character’s suffering, not to narcotics or to death” and neither should a doctor. “A writer learns to stay around, has to, in order to make sense of incurable life” (AL 111).

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And yet, Roth’s profile of doctors understands them as dispassionate men of science who can overcome and possibly solve any problems and, at another, uncaring, unemotional technicians. Doctors in Roth are generally insincere and unmedical—they like the status and the money but show very little interest in patients. Empathy is absent. They have other concerns and find the need for immediate medical attention a distraction (E 35–6).10 But the supposed certainty of doctors appeals to Zuckerman. In The Anatomy Lesson, he claims that they do not deal with ambiguity, the bane of writers. Doctors treat life scientifically, objectively, directly. Zuckerman believes that his friend, the anesthesiologist Bobby Freytag, is “somebody who knows how to be right—how to be right quickly. No errors allowed” (AL 202). This is the pull of medicine for Zuckerman: clarity, exactness, precision as he expresses interest in being an obstetrician to bring life into the world. But he will soon learn that clarity, certainty, and exactness are illusions, the lesson of his anatomy lesson. If Broyard is useful as a parallel to Roth’s sense of illness, Kafka is helpful as a source of Roth’s overall outlook on illness. Both Kafka and Roth were long sufferers of the body, Kafka beginning early with incessant fatigue, possibly brought on by his work at the Institute of Insurance, which meant rest in the afternoons but then insomnia at night. Other ailments appeared: furunculosis, asthenia, constipation, and neuro-vegetative disorders. In 1912, he told Max Brod he came close to suicide, as Roth had admitted to Taylor. By February 1924, Kafka’s health deteriorated, and he was taken to a clinic in Vienna; he was declining and was transferred to a small sanatorium in Kierling. Tuberculosis had invaded the larynx and there was little clinical treatment possible. Palliative care was started. The pain from coughing and then the arytenoids made it difficult to eat and sleep, which led to infiltrations of the laryngeal nerve with a solution of 1 percent cocaine plus alcohol. The solution eased the pain, but Kafka’s weakening continued; he died on June 3, 1924.11 Kafka accepted his tuberculosis diagnosis calmly in September 1917, concealing his surprise and shock. He was thirty-four. To Brod he wrote, “I am constantly seeking an explanation for this disease, for I did not seek it,” adding in a Rothian manner, “Sometimes it seems to me that my brain and my lungs came to an agreement without my knowledge” (qtd. in Türk 2019: 49). He took a leave from work and turned intensely to his writing. But illness shaped his complicated relationship with his imagination, as it did for Roth. Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” (1916) prefigures many of the issues Zuckerman confronts in his quest to become a physician. And it contains a lesson Zuckerman learns only in the final pages of The Anatomy Lesson: “To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard” (Kafka 1959: 140). Kafka’s story deals with the duty to heal, but the doctor loses his self-confidence when treating a young boy. The identities of physician and patient merge when, at the end, the naked doctor is carried into the sick bed. The two then speak as one. At the end, the doctor escapes naked on horseback in the snow, the entire story expressing Kafka’s despair at his own doctors’ inability to cure him of his illness. “A Country Doctor” became the title story of a 1919 collection of short stories with Jewish themes, à la “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959).12

DEATH AND DYING Roth’s health chart was not as dramatic as Kafka’s but also not that different. His gradual deterioration from congenital heart disease and arterial illness meant periods of decline and energy, although it was heart disease, not tuberculosis, that was the tyrant. His alignment with Kafka was not the dark humor, or even fables, but the body and its mistreatment by disease.

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Roth’s final days were dramatic in their own fashion. On April 29, 2018, he experienced arrhythmia. That night he called Benjamin Taylor, who came over, but by 2 a.m., Roth knew he was in trouble; Taylor dialed 911 (Taylor 2020: 136–7).13 Paramedics arrived at his Upper West Side apartment and took him to Lenox Hill Hospital and then on to the cardiac unit at New York Presbyterian Hospital where doctors discovered he had several blocked stents from previous angioplasties. They performed another angioplasty and thought he would recover. But shortly after the new procedures, his condition deteriorated, and his kidneys began to fail. By May 20, he decided the fighting was over and went into palliative care. He died two days later, on May 22, 2018. In the end, like the Magistrate in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Roth learned that “pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt” (5). The epigram that opens The Anatomy Lesson is taken from an orthopedic textbook explaining that an obstacle to a correct diagnosis when dealing with pain is that “the symptom is often felt at a distance from its source.” But this was not the case with Roth; he was one with its source. The therapeutic and narrative dimension of transforming illness, pain, and the body into fiction gives it meaning and ownership for Roth. And while the sick body often robs our speech (Zuckerman’s broken jaw stops him from speaking at the end of The Anatomy Lesson), the body can, through gesture and movement, still communicate as Zuckerman does by plunging his arms into the soiled hospital laundry at the close of The Anatomy Lesson. The experience offers him “life. With real teeth in it” (AL 290). Body language becomes Roth’s medicine, fulfilling Edith Wharton’s dictum from The Gods Arrive (1932): “Maybe we haven’t made enough of pain—been too afraid of it. Don’t be afraid of it” (402). For Roth, to know pain is to know life.

NOTES 1. I refer to the chronology and narrative together as Roth’s medical narrative. Roth periodically updated the narrative and supplemental material. The entire medical file includes a list of hospitalizations from 1943 to 2017, a list of medications and health care instructions designating Taylor and Julia Golier as joint Health Care representatives. For a generalized treatment of Roth and pain/illness, as well as the emergence of medical narratives in literary texts, see Muresan (2015). Other useful sources include Frank (1995) and Jaffe-Foger (2014). 2. In American Pastoral, Zuckerman, himself, is old, has undergone heart surgery, and is suffering from prostate cancer. 3. Biographically, many of these diseases afflicted close friends of Roth, notably Janet Hobhouse and Veronica Geng among others. 4. In the essay he also recalls his exposure to a series of young men with disabilities much greater than his own, amputees and paraplegics, at a US Army Rehabilitation Center. The protagonist’s cousin, the amputee Alvin in The Plot against America, is a reminder of these victims. 5. One thinks of the surgical scar on Amy Bellette’s head because of her brain cancer in Exit Ghost (18). Illness inflicts damage. 6. Other literary figures of pain and illness, in addition to Daudet, include Leopardi, Rousseau, Flaubert, and Heine, plus Melville and Orwell (1984), who said in “Why I Write” that “writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness” (12). He suffered from TB. For a summary of literary illnesses, see Ross (2012). 7. The main stent was in the renal artery, the remainder in the coronary arteries and grafts. On the number sixteen, see Remnick (2018).

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8. In a 1983 interview, Roth noted that there are no great medical novels or fiction about illness and disease except for Cancer Ward (1966) and The Magic Mountain and perhaps Malone Dies (1951). “All those great books about adultery and none about diabetes,” he lamented (Brent 1992: 140). 9. Earlier in his account, Broyard (1992) explains that his response to uniting the disconnected shocks from his diagnosis was to bring it under control through narrative (19). The article originally appeared in the New York Times, November 12, 1989. 10. When a surgeon confirms that the narrator of Everyman has appendicitis, he’s in a dinner jacket on his way to a banquet. An operation seems both necessary and an interruption; only the urgency of the situation and the high billing rate force him to change into his scrubs and operate. Jerry Levov, the Swede’s brother, is a renowned cardiologist but short-tempered. He’s blunt, lacks compassion, and just wants to solve the medical problem. 11. For an account of Kafka and disease, see Felisati and Sperati (2005). 12. Two of the stories appeared in two different Jewish magazines. See Kafka (1959: 318). Writing in German, not Czech, Kafka appropriates the language of middle-class Jews in Prague, mixing his identities: he was an Austrian subject living in Prague who spoke German. He was disenfranchised, not at home among the Czechs, nor even Jewish culture, since his father was an assimilated Jewish businessman. Parallels with Roth are clear. Kafka’s well-known 1921 letter to Brod, outlining his ambivalent position, is not unlike that of Roth. Most young writers want to leave their Jewishness behind, but “with their posterior legs they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness” (Kafka 1979: 291–2). This was in part Roth’s behavior in his first collection as he objectified and satirized middle-class Jewishness. 13. Taylor empathetically narrates Roth’s final days and recounts how Roth, like his father, found dying hard work, but he was a worker and would finish the job (Nadel 2021: 330).

REFERENCES Brent, Jonathan (1992), “‘The Job,’ Says Roth, ‘Was to Give Pain Its Due,’” in George J. Searles (ed.), Conversations with Philip Roth, 139–43, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Broyard, Anatole (1992), Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death, ed. Alexandra Broyard, New York: Clarkson Potter. Burton, Robert (2001), Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, New York: New York Review Books. Coetzee, J.M. (2004), Waiting for the Barbarians, New York: Vintage. Felisati, D. and G. Sperati (2005), “Franz Kafka (1883–1924),” Acta Otorhinolaryngologica Italia, 25 (5): 328–32. Frank, Thomas H. (1995), “The Interpretation of Limits: Doctors and Novelists in the Fiction of Philip Roth,” Journal of Popular Culture, 28 (4): 67–80. Halliday, Lisa (2018), Asymmetry, New York: Simon and Schuster. Jaffe-Foger, Miriam (2014), “Roth’s Contribution to the Narrativization of Illness,” Comparative Literature and Culture, 16 (2): n.p. Kafka, Franz (1959), The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, trans. Will and Edwin Muir, New York: Schocken Books. Kafka, Franz (1979), Letter to Max Brod, June 1921, in Erich Heller (ed.), The Basic Kafka, New York: Washington Square Press. Mann, Thomas (1995), The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods, New York: Knopf. Muresan, Laura (2015), “Writ(h)ing Bodies: Literature and Illness in Philip Roth’s Anatomy Lesson(s),” Philip Roth Studies, 11 (1): 75–90. Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orwell, George (1984), The Penguin Essays of George Orwell, London: Penguin.

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Remnick, David (2018), “Philip Roth’s Propulsive Force,” New Yorker 4, June 11. Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/04/philip-roths-propulsive-force (accessed July 19, 2021). Ross, John J. (2012), Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough: The Medical Lives of Great Writers, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Roth, Philip (1983), The Anatomy Lesson, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1998), American Pastoral, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2002), The Dying Animal, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2006), Everyman, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2007), Exit Ghost, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2010), “Pain and Illness History,” Taylor/Roth Archive, Box B-1210 f.20. 25, thirty leaves, Firestone Library, Princeton University. Roth, Philip (2011), “Notes on Ross Miller Interviews,” Taylor/Roth Archive, Box B-1209, f. 10. 177, Firestone Library, Princeton University. Roth, Philip (2017), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013, New York: Library of America. Scarry, Elaine (1985), The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Benjamin (2020), Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, New York: Penguin. Türk, Johannes (2019), “Health and Illness,” in Carolin Duttlinger (ed.), Franz Kafka in Context, 44–53, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wharton, Edith (1932), The Gods Arrive, New York: D. Appleton and Company.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jews That Matter: Philip Roth and the Body JOSHUA LANDER

FORESKIN’S LAMENT Philip Roth’s fiction has always centered around bodies: He explores bodily pain, desire, decay, impotence, incontinence, cancer, aging, self-harm, metamorphosis, shame, guilt, and uncanniness. Roth’s novels abound in semen, scat, and urine, and as Hermione Lee (2010) aptly put it in 1982, Roth is the preeminent novelist of “orifices and blockages” (14). In particular, Roth’s fiction is transfixed by bodies in crisis. One of the most obvious examples of Roth’s preoccupation with the body emerges in his novella The Breast (1972). In this short work, David Kepesh awakens to find he has transformed into a gargantuan breast (parodying Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”). Kepesh—like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa—is exposed to public scrutiny and demarcated as a figure of otherness. The tension of the novella emerges as Kepesh rails against the medicalization and transfiguration of him as a human subject into a grotesque object: “My body was still a body!” (B 56). The possessive pronoun and exclamation mark stress Kepesh’s struggle to affirm his subjectivity, whilst the repetition of “body” symbolizes how Kepesh connects his sense of self to the corporeal. The use of the indefinite article suggests Kepesh’s claim to selfhood exists in a liminal state, reflecting the precarious conditionality between subjectivity and embodiment. As Debra Shostak (2004) notes of this scene, Roth invites us “to ask what a body is and what a body is in relation to the ‘human,’ not just what the mind’s relation to the body is” (33). I would only add that Roth’s literary career has exhibited a recurring interest in this exact question: What is a body and what is body in relation to the “human”? The predicament of Roth’s characters—more often than not—orbits around their corporeal experiences of being identified and labeled through appellatives pertaining to race, gender, and perhaps most prevalently of all, Jewishness. Roth’s career exhibits a fascination with how we define ourselves and others through bodies. The body bookends Roth’s fiction: In “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959), he begins his examination of Jewishness through Brenda Patimkin and her assimilatory desire for a nose job; and in his final novel, Nemesis (2010), the nose is once again a prominent symbol of Jewish difference, encapsulating the corporeal fabric underpinning Roth’s oeuvre. This chapter introduces readers to the role the Jewish body plays in Roth’s fiction, providing a brief summary of what Roth scholarship has addressed in the author’s treatment of the body previously. Thereafter, I offer a new close reading of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) that looks

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at the author’s treatment of the body and the abject. Analyzing two key scenes that center on his mother’s body, I reveal the ways in which the narrator transforms his mother into an abject monster in order to maintain a distance from Sophie that illuminates his insecurities and anxieties over his masculinity, which Roth ties to his character’s “racial” difference as a Jew. Finally, I conclude by considering where in Body Studies (and beyond) Roth scholarship might tilt toward and what possible authors Roth could be read alongside. Before doing any of that, however, I begin with what might seem like a straightforward task: defining what I mean by “body” and—more specifically—the Jewish body. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss (2003) observe, the term body “suggests a bounded and autonomous entity, a universal but at the same time singular, atemporal, and therefore unmarked by history” (1). The body’s supposed ontological unity—as Cohen and Weiss’s Thinking the Limits of the Body goes on to emphasize—is not, of course, as uniform as the term suggests, which presents something of a challenge in constructing a concise introduction to the topic! Fortunately, Margaret Shildrick (1997) offers a useful entry point in Leaky Bodies and Boundaries, arguing “the body is always a discursive construction, marked by environmental process and by power, but given to us only in our text” (15). This is helpful in shaping our view of the body as a metaphorical site or place, one that is never constructed or observed neutrally, but always through specific social and political contexts. As Michel Foucault (1991) has highlighted, the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs … the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. (136) Foucault presents the body here as a writing surface (Grosz 1994: 117), a site that is used to mark, demarcate, and dominate citizens. Foucault’s theory helps elucidate how the body operates as a space identities are mapped onto; indeed, Elizabeth Grosz (1994) explains how bodies “are fictionalized, that is, positioned by various cultural narratives and discourses, which are themselves embodiments of culturally established canons, norms, and representational forms” (118). This codification of bodies has important ramifications, particularly for those marginalized communities. As Ruth Holliday and John Hassard (2001) observe, “if workingclass, female, black and disabled bodies, and bodies configured as queer, are all coded and read as inferior, then this in turn produces effects upon those bodies” (3). This neatly brings us to the subject of the Jewish body, a contested, overloaded space in which an abundance of culturally established forms and images have been drawn. Robert Jutte (2020) highlights how “the belief that the Jewish body must be different thus has a long tradition … to this day it is primarily bodily stereotypes that shape the image of the Jew” (16). Numerous antisemitic conceptualizations have spawned around the body of the Jew, more often than not focused on the mythic Jewish male’s body. Of course, as Sander Gilman (1991) astutely notes, there are “‘realities’ of the Jewish body, such as the practice of infant male circumcision, which also become part of the social construction of the Jew’s body within the mythopoesis of Western culture” (4). Roth’s fiction, I contend, has consistently and repeatedly explored the dialectic between the realities and fantasies surrounding the Jewish body.

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READING OTHERS A number of Roth scholars have been attentive to the manner in which the body manifests in Roth’s fiction. In an important early intervention, Shostak (2004) has examined how Roth has probed connections between male subjectivity and the body (15).1 More recently, Ann Basu (2015) has considered how Roth “test[s] ideas of a wholesome male American body fully integrated with its environment” (6), noting how the author positions the Jewish body as the “key to understanding mid-to-late-twentieth-century American ideas about personal and national identity” (8). Basu’s work, particularly on Operation Shylock (1993), makes an important intervention in Roth Studies by overcoming a frustrating tendency to distinguish Roth’s discussion of Jewishness and Americanness as separate entities.2 On this note, Brett Ashley Kaplan’s Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth (2015) offers a deeply insightful analysis of Roth’s oeuvre. Kaplan examines how Roth’s books “teach us that Jewish anxiety stems not only from fear of victimization but also from fear of perpetration” (1). This important and illuminating work underscores the ways in which Jews inhabit a “doubled view of America” (Kaplan 2015: 10) that is perpetually marked by the “specter of Nazi occupation, the threat of the Holocaust, [which] … haunts numerous characters and heightens the sense of the doubled America” (11). Kaplan’s excellent selection of textual evidence creates a very compelling argumentation that importantly connects Roth’s fiction to W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Soul of Black Folks (1903). This classic of Race Studies hypothesizes that African Americans were “born with a veil, and gifted with a second-sight in this American world … One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (Du Bois 2007: 8). Kaplan uses this framework to great effect in considering how Jews in America are possessed by a doubleness that links them to a history of persecution and violence that they managed to avoid but have to live with and remember. Indeed, Kaplan’s analysis has scope for further analysis and discussion, particularly regarding how this doubleness emerges in the bodies of Jews across American literary and cultural productions. Finally, Jacques Berlinerblau’s The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography (2021) reconsiders Roth in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, highlighting Roth’s career-long obsession with “how wobbly, labile, and unstable our personalities are” (16). If Basu is correct in observing that Roth positions the Jewish body as central to understanding American identities in the aftermath of the Second World War, Berlinerblau addresses the gendered and racial implications such a position presents. As he observes, “Roth did not think carefully about Sephardic Jews and Afro-Jews, nor even his own eastern European ancestors whose racial assignment as ‘white’ in the United States only became commonplace in the mid-twentieth century” (Berlinerblau 2021: 33). Roth’s Jewish body is—as others have noted—male, heterosexual, and Ashkenazi. Berlinerblau’s book is likely to be a divisive and disruptive entry in Roth scholarship, but his monograph makes an important intervention in considering whose bodies matter in Roth’s novels and how he represents people of color and women. Important, too, is Berlinerblau’s point regarding metamorphosis in Roth’s fiction: “If Roth overdid sex in his writing, then he overdid change tenfold (though no one was offended by the excesses of the latter). The subject consumed him from the very beginning of his career to his final fictional words” (90). Transformation always plays out through the body in Roth; it is this very instability that is omnipresent throughout his oeuvre.

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SCREW THE LOCKS! Portnoy’s Complaint is a sticky affair: it abounds in body fluids, insidious male desire, and fantasies of bodily transformation. It is also a novel about mothers—specifically, Jewish mothers. The book’s epigraph contains a fictionalized clinical definition of “Portnoy’s Complaint” as a “disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” According to Dr. Spielvogel, the psychoanalyst in Roth’s book, “many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship” (PC n.p.). Alex Portnoy vents about his overbearing mother, supposedly weak father, and tumultuous relationships with nonJewish women. As David Brauner (2007) has argued, “Portnoy’s Complaint is not simply a prolonged dirty joke, but rather a comic rebuttal of psychoanalysis and a Freudian analysis of its own comic strategies” (64). The importance of Sophie, a key character in this psychoanalytic send-up and Portnoy’s mother figure, has been well documented in Roth scholarship. Olga Karasik-Updike (2022) has recently highlighted how Sophie Portnoy embodies Judaism and its dietary laws. Elsewhere, Melvin Friedman (1973) argues that the mother-son confrontation serves as the text’s thematic kernel (171), whilst Shaun Clarkson’s (2014) “Liver, Lobster, and the Law” identifies the ways in which Sophie controls and regulates her son’s diet, and how this comes to influence the ways in which Alex perceives women. Cultural anthropologists such as Riv-Ellen Prell (2000) and Joyce Antler have highlighted the ways in which Portnoy’s Complaint defined and influenced societal conceptions of Jewish mothers. Antler (2007), for example, laments Roth’s novel for its “misogynist message that coded unacceptable behavior as female rather than Jewish,” arguing that “Roth … projected onto the Jewish mother the negative features of ‘Otherness’—Old World backwardness, loudness, vulgarity, clannishness, ignorance, and materialism” (143). Though Antler conflates author with narrator here, the analysis is otherwise sound: Portnoy sees in his mother a degenerate form of Jewishness that subverts gender norms, and thus threatens his fantasy of becoming an American by confining him to Judaism, which he views as inherently un-American. Alex attempts to become “whole” by repudiating the Jewish traditions his mother and family observe. Alex violates his family’s kosher diet as a renunciation of Judaism, but also uses sex as a means of trying to claim this mythic masculine identity. After being confronted with the Hitlerian hamburger, Alex bolts to the bathroom: I tear off my pants, furiously I grab that battered battering ram to freedom, my adolescent cock, even as my mother begins to call from the other side of the bathroom door. “Now this time don’t flush. Do you hear me, Alex? I have to see what’s in that bowl!” (PC 33) Alex’s rage is comic but violent. The words “tear,” “furiously,” and “battered” express an uncontrollable anger that is directed at his mother, whom Alex identifies as a barrier prohibiting him from freedom. Alex seeks to reverse Walt Whitman’s (2008) famous proclamation, “Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” (48). For Alex, freedom means keeping the doors screwed in their jambs and the locks secured.

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Within the solitary confinement of the bathroom, Alex is able to do what his father cannot: excrete himself—or, to invert yet another Whitman (2008) line, celebrate himself (29). Alex masturbates in an attempt to reenforce the borders his mother seeks to violate; that is, by taking hold of his penis and locking out the overbearing feminine figure, Alex seeks to maintain a gendered separateness inherently tied to the negation of his Jewish identity. Alex’s semen assumes a symbolically significant role for the disobedient son. As Grosz (1994) explains, “Seminal fluid is understood primarily as what it makes, what it achieves, a casual agent and thus a thing, a solid: its fluidity, its potential seepage … is perpetually displaced in discourse onto its properties, its capacity to fertilize, to father, to produce an object” (199). For Alex, ejaculating semen represents a patriarchal solidity that affirms his masculinity, reifying his place within the symbolic order as a man. Alex is always “at it” in Portnoy’s Complaint. Ironically, however, Alex’s excessive masturbatory sessions replicate another antisemitic myth: the sexually hysterical Jew.3 In other words, Alex’s efforts to separate himself from his Jewish family, whom he laments for confusing gender roles, replicate antisemitic conceptualizations of the male Jew as an overflowing “woman.” Furthermore, Sophie’s call from outside the bathroom door reminds Alex his body remains bound to a Jewishness symbolized by both his own circumcised penis and his mother’s loud, excessive voice. Scholars such as Dean Franco have read Alex as a defiler of Sophie’s ordered cleanliness. Franco (2009) describes Sophie as a mother “obsessed with purity and cleanliness, while Portnoy is committed to a defilement, a dialectic internalized and performed in Portnoy’s adult social and professional life as well” (91). This may be accurate, but Alex’s defilement also centers on his desire to reinstate and reinscribe gender norms he perceives his parents’ Judaism to have exceeded and scrambled. Alex’s quest is not only centered against purification, but also a masculinist mythology that reinstates self/other binaries and reinforces gender norms. In other words, Alex wants to purify himself of his mother’s Judaic rituals and culture. Sophie threatens Alex because she lacks a stable identity, which the narrator connects to her bodily excess. Sophie is described and remembered by Alex, meaning the mother’s lack of symbolic cohesiveness stems from the fact that she exists as an infinity within his psyche. The novel’s first chapter is entitled “THE MOST UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTER I’VE EVER MET” and begins with Alex Portnoy recalling his childhood impressions of his indomitable mother. Sophie Portnoy, Alex tells Dr. Spielvogel, “is so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise” (PC 3). Alex identifies Sophie as a figure of excess, meaning that she lacks a stable identity within the narrative, spilling out into every facet of his life. He seeks to expose his mother’s supernatural capabilities but notes how “it was always a relief not to have caught her between incarnations” (PC 3). Alex fears he “might have to be done away with were I to catch sight of her flying in from school through the bedroom window, or make herself emerge, limb by limb, out of an invisible state and into her apron” (PC 4). The mother has no inherent stable body but tellingly enters the symbolic order through the material apron. Alex’s mother is hypervisible but paradoxically invisible, present yet absent, human but inhuman. Sophie represents a limitlessness that Alex identifies as fatal to his subjectivity. The mother’s formless body is central to Alex’s childhood anxieties, as Sophie’s physical lack within the material world is counteracted by her paranormal excess, which Alex connects with their Jewish heredity. While Alex’s ingestions and secretions are the focal point of Roth’s novel, there are two episodes in which the Jewish mother’s body dominates the text. The first of these scenes occurs in the toilet, an important arena within Portnoy’s Complaint that has received much critical attention

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in terms of Roth’s exploration of Alex’s masculinity; it is a site in which the male characters struggle with their masculinities through their bodily expulsions and/or secretions. I wish here to turn our focus to Roth’s portrayal of Sophie Portnoy’s menstruating body and how Alex fears menstruation as a symbol of feminine difference. Alex recalls an incident wherein Sophie frantically calls for her son’s help, demanding he run to the drugstore and buy her sanitary products. Returning home, Alex “[b]reathlessly handed the box to the white fingers that extended themselves at me through a narrow crack in the bathroom door …” (PC 43). Alex’s panting may well reflect his fatigue at having to run to aid his mother, but it could equally reflect his feelings of anxiety and dread at the possibility of glimpsing his mother’s bleeding body. The closed bathroom door once again serves to separate the bodies of mother and son, but the small rupture represents a fragility in the edifice of the framework that threatens to collapse the boundary between Alex and Sophie. The fingers, separately demarcated from the hand, torso, or body itself, are defined as white. The joints’ skeletal coloring seems to represent the threat of death itself. If so, does Sophie’s menstruating body represent a fatality to Alex’s conception of himself as a man? Alex’s anxiety is most aptly symbolized in the final moment of the passage, ending in an ellipsis. This suspension point signals an omission or rupture from speech or language, an unspeakable thought or fear that words cannot articulate. The ellipsis used here represents Julia Kristeva’s abject. In Powers of Horror (1980), Kristeva argues the maternal body threatens patriarchal social order as it produces bodily fluids that transgress boundaries. The abject, Kristeva (2010) writes, “disturbs identity, system, order” and “draws … toward the place where meaning collapses” (2). The ellipsis in Alex’s narrative signifies the very breakdown of language; confronted by the mother’s porous, flowing body, the symbolic order through which Alex constructs himself and his mother fails him. For the briefest of moments, Alex is finally silenced. Though the color white is referred to here, there is no mention of blood or redness. The mother’s body is made invisible; she is erased from language. The door remains closed, as it were. As Tyler Imogen (2009) writes, “when the maternal is no longer recognizable as a body and thus as a subject … it/she becomes abject” (86). For Alex, menstruation represents a gendered difference that must be excluded. Sophie’s expulsions represent a danger to Alex. Kristeva writes (2010), “[e]xcrements and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death” (71). Alex is confronted by his mother’s menstrual blood, that which very obviously signifies a feminine outside, and one that is fundamentally tied to the maternal body. Alex’s anxiety regarding his mother’s menstruations leads him to believe that Sophie should have bled out rather than ask her son for help: Better she should have bled herself out on our cold bathroom floor, better that, than to have sent an eleven-year-old boy in hot pursuit of sanitary napkins! Where was my sister, for Christ’s sake? Where was her own emergency supply? Why was this woman so grossly insensitive to the vulnerability of her own little boy—on the one hand so insensitive to my shame, and yet on the other, so attuned to my deepest desires! (PC 44) In asking where his sister is, Alex seeks to maintain and preserve sexual binaries through gendered roles; the young man should not be charged with buying goods solely meant for the female body, as such an act threatens Alex’s “vulnerable” masculinity. Thus, the menstrual blood exuding from his mother signifies the death of the masculine self. Christine

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Bousfield (2000) writes that the abject is “located wherever there is ambivalence, ambiguity, the improper or the unclean, the overflowing of boundaries, fusion and confusion” (331). Sophie’s menstrual breakdown signifies a bodily overflow that distorts the gap between the masculine and feminine, as the boundary between mother and son threateningly appears to be in jeopardy of being breeched. Alex’s narcissism dismisses the mother as a subject: Sophie’s body, in its most vulnerable, bare, and human form, is almost made visible to Alex, distorting his entire production of Sophie-as-monster whilst simultaneously threatening to rupture his masculinist efforts to maintain this fatuitous division between the “masculine” and “feminine.” Yet Alex’s final reflection that his mother is attuned to his “deepest desires” parodically returns to Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal complex. After detailing his mother’s menstrual sufferings, Portnoy recalls a moment in which “I am so small I hardly know what sex I am” (PC 44). This proclamation serves to make central the carnal uncertainties of Roth’s narrator, immediately highlighting the ways in which Sophie influences the young boy’s sexual self. Basking in the attention of his adoring mother, Alex is “absolutely punchy with delight” as she asks, “[w]ho does Mommy love more than anything in the whole wide world?” (PC 45). The narrator is aware his mother “sleeps with a man who lives with us at night and on Sunday afternoons. My father they say he is” (PC 45). Alex’s father is deferred to with little affection, as he describes how “[t]his man, my father, is off somewhere making money, as best he is able. These two are gone [Alex’s father and sister], and who knows, maybe I’ll be lucky, maybe they’ll never come back” (PC 44). Alex’s desire for his mother combined with Sophie’s flirtatious responses to her son’s affections threatens the gendered and familial divisions between mother and son. Roth parodies Freud’s famous argument that the son “regards his father as a rival in love” (PC 217) for the mother but uses the Oedipal complex to underscore the racial and gendered uncertainties of Jewish identity in postwar America. Portnoy’s Complaint is limited by its satire. Roth’s parody reproduces Freud’s own failures in his production of the maternal figure as a Jewish literary topic. Sophie’s anxieties over her son’s physical and spiritual well-being seem to be intimately concerned with the Holocaust and the loss of Jewish religious and ethnic culture. Yet her consternations are brushed off by the repulsive narrator as mere by-products of her monstrousness. In failing to provide a view of Sophie that extends beyond Alex’s perspective, the novel ensures the Jewish mother remains as a dehumanized object, a monster of Jewish and thus racial otherness that is endless and inescapable. In sum, Portnoy’s Complaint fails to find a way for the mother to take up a subject position; Roth cannot represent the mother beyond abjection. The subject of embodiment in Roth Studies is ripe for further examination. As I have hopefully highlighted in the analysis above, the body is an instrumental facet of Roth’s analysis and critique of how Jewishness has been codified within the American psyche. Moving forwards, I am excited to see the multifarious manner in which the question of the Jewish body is being addressed by contemporary Jewish writers such as Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Jonathan Safran Foer, Charlie Kauffman, Gary Shteyngart, Linda Grant, Shalom Auslander, and Howard Jacobson. Indeed, as Robert Jutte’s (2020) recent monographic study highlights, the Jewish body has reemerged as an important area in Jewish Studies. In terms of literary analysis, more work needs to be done on parsing how British and American Jewish writers’ fictions intersect in their portrayals and depictions of Jewish bodies and how Jewishness is codified vis-à-vis the body. Yet I am aware, too, how blinkered my above suggestions are in that I am focused on Ashkenazi writers. I would be excited to read how Roth and other transatlantic Jewish writers intersect with Sephardic writers and Jewish writers of colour. There needs to be a diversification of Roth Studies that brings this author into conversation with a wider range of writers. Indeed,

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whilst Roth’s fiction has been essential in considering the material conditions of the Jewish male’s experience in postwar America, his work is inadequate in considering non-white Jewish and Jewish women’s positions. This oversight should not, of course, mean we ought to disregard Roth entirely; instead, we should—as scholars and academics—seek to place Roth in dialogue with writers whose literature can complement and challenge Roth. By doing so, we will have a fuller and more complex accounting of Jewish matters throughout Jewish literature.

NOTES 1. Shostak—on a personal note—has been an indelibly influential and an important figure to me; her work has challenged and shaped how I write and think about Roth. 2. Timothy Parrish (2013) asks an important question in “Philip Roth Is Sitting on Your Face: America in the Late Novels”: “why must Roth’s so-called Jewishness be explicitly excused from consideration before such a discussion can begin?” (838). Parrish highlights a disconcerting trend in Roth Studies to “see past Roth’s Jewish subject matter to recognize his artistry” (838). There are, of course, scholars who have resisted this tendency, whom Parrish highlights. Both David Gooblar and David Brauner’s scholarship on Roth have been vital in considering the subject of Roth’s Jewishness in their critical examinations of the author’s writings. 3. For more on the subject of the conceptual Jew’s status as sexual deviant, see Mosse (1985: 133–53) and Lambert (2013).

REFERENCES Antler, Joyce (2007), You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Basu, Ann (2015), States of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America, London: Bloomsbury. Berlinerblau, Jacques (2021), The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bousfield, Christine (2000), “The Abject Space: Its Gifts and Complaints,” Journal of Gender Studies, 9 (3): 329–46. Brauner, David (2007), Philip Roth, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clarkson, Shaun (2014), “Liver, Lobster and the Law: Gastronomic Identification and Rebellion in Portnoy’s Complaint,” Philip Roth Studies, 10 (2): 21–9. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Gail Weiss (2003), “Introduction: Bodies at the Limit,” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss (eds.), Thinking the Limits of the Body, 1–13. Albany: State University of New York Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2007), The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Brent Hayes Edwards, New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel (1991), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin. Franco, Dean (2009), “Portnoy’s Complaint: It’s about Race, Not Sex (Even the Sex Is about Race),” Prooftexts, 29 (1): 86–115. Friedman, Melvin J. (1973), “Jewish Mothers and Sons: The Expense of Chutzpah,” in Irving Malin (ed.), Contemporary American-Jewish Literature: Critical Essays, 156–75, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gilman, Sander L. (1991), The Jew’s Body, London: Routledge. Grosz, Elizabeth A. (1994), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Hassard, John and Ruth Holliday (2001), “Contested Bodies: An Introduction,” in John Hassard and Ruth Holliday (eds.), Contested Bodies, 1–19. London: Routledge. Jutte, Robert (2020), The Jewish Body: A History, trans. Elizabeth Bredeck, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kaplan, Brett Ashley (2015), Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Karasik-Updike, Olga (2022), “‘Momma, Do We Believe in Winter?’ Yiddishe Mama and Judaism in Portnoy’s Complaint,” Philip Roth Studies, 18 (1): 63–79. Kristeva, Julia (2010), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Lambert, Josh (2013), Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, New York: New York University Press. Lee, Hermione (2010), Philip Roth, Abingdon: Routledge. Mosse, George L. (1985), Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, New York: H. Fertig. Parrish, Timothy (2013), “Philip Roth Is Sitting on Your Face: America in the Late Novels,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 59 (4): 833–45. Prell, Riv-Ellen (2000), Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men, Boston: Beacon Press. Roth, Philip (1995), Portnoy’s Complaint, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2016), The Breast, London: Vintage. Shildrick, Margrit (1997), Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics, London: Routledge. Shostak, Debra (2004), Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Syrkin, Marie (1980), The State of the Jews, Washington, DC: New Republic Books. Tyler, Imogen (2009), “Against Abjection,” Feminist Theory, 10 (1): 77–98. Whitman, Walt (2008), Leaves of Grass, ed. Jerome Loving, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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The Counterlife: On Roth’s Queers RL GOLDBERG

“I had a queer for a friend in 1950—before they even existed! I didn’t know what one was, but I had one.” —Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire Few writers were as muscularly, stridently interested in heterosexuality—in its transgressions, banalities, confusions, antagonisms, optimisms, shipwrecks, mythologies, pleasures, and indignities—as Philip Roth was. Roth’s interest was not, however, in the conventional marriage plot, in the simple facts of heterosexual coupling and uncoupling. Instead, the moral vagaries and vicissitudes of heterosexuality form the track around which his plots motor. Indeed, to say his plots motor around heterosexuality would be somewhat misleading; heterosexuality drives right through the novels, creating an enormous, choppy wake. Elevated to a metaphysics, Roth’s corpus scrutinizes heterosexuality with the finest instruments, analyzes it from every angle and in every light. Every heterosexual desire, no matter how fleeting, how impossible, is mirthfully dissected. The question of desire is not a simple one. If Roth’s works elevate heterosexuality to a metaphysics, we must attend, too, to the ways in which metaphysics is political. That is to say: Who is desiring? Who is desired? How is one desired, and through what language? What are the coordinates that make desire possible? Working, as George Shulman (2018) puts it, “in the register of desire,” and, more specifically, as he notes, in the key of male desire, affords Roth the latitude to approach these questions metaphysically and politically, at the fulcrum of their untidy imbrication. Shulman notes that “the great (and psychoanalytic) truth [Roth’s] texts dramatize [is] that our desire does not ‘fit’ into the world and relationships, that desire makes us unfit for sociality, however powerfully compelling our longing for attachment. Not only male desire. Human desire” (69). It is true that desire, for us, and for Roth, does not always “fit.” Our desire is too big, too narcissistic, too grotesque, too needy and superfluous. Surely this is a great theme of Roth’s work, as Shulman argues. But for whatever ways our desire is vexed and vexing, there is a language Roth uses masterfully to capture it. Perhaps it’s not a perfect fit, but desire and language seduce one another, however awkwardly. This was part of Roth’s genius, the ability to name and therefore to harness something as unwieldy as desire. Shulman is right to note that Roth telescopes out from male desire and focuses, more broadly, on human desire. To a large extent I think this is accurate; surely, Roth’s subject is not only male desire. But it’s worth considering the ways in which Roth’s conception of desire is assiduously heterosexual. To escape desire—as

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many of Roth’s characters do, through isolation, philandering, death, or age—is not to escape heterosexuality. His characters never seek to dwell outside heterosexual desire, thrashing and drowning in it as they are wont to do. And for all their thrashing, heterosexuality is a topography they understand. But Roth also sets up queerness as a constitutive outside of heterosexual desire, a foreign adjacency that can hardly be rendered in speech. It is as if Roth can see, from inside an apartment, an outside that is so alien to him, he can only note it, but simultaneously renders it mute because of its inability to “fit” into language. He can see the outlines of emissaries from this world, but he cannot imagine them with clarity. It is surprising, then, to consider the rather frequent incursions into queerness in Roth’s novels—surprising because queerness is present only, itself, in outlines. Though it is curiously named by Roth’s narrators, it seems to be antithetically paired with fleeting narrative attention. In this impulse to name but not to enumerate, queerness has a strange status, a bizarre presence-absence in Roth’s novels. In its being outside the bounds of heterosexuality, queerness might best be described as “eccentric, contemptuous, unaffiliated, and unassailable” (18)—the terms David Kepesh uses to describe his (unknown to him) gay friend Louis Jelinek. It is also surprising that there is a formidable queer cast in Roth’s novels because, with the exception of David Brauner’s article “Queering Philip Roth: Homosocial Discourse in ‘An Actor’s Life for Me,’ Letting Go, Sabbath’s Theater, and the ‘American Trilogy,’” queerness has been largely untreated in Roth scholarship. By some logic, this makes sense: queerness never was a primary point of interest in Roth’s fiction, so, on one reading, its absence in the scholarship might pass as unremarkable. When Roth and queerness are invited to dialogue, discourse tends to be stilted, uncommunicative, and tepid. Following on Eve Sedgwick’s theorization of homosociality in Between Men (1985), a common undercurrent in scholarship tends to suggest that there is something queer about male friendships in Roth’s work, thus attempting to bridge the distance between homosocial and homosexual. That male friendships were significant for Roth is often a subject of his own writing or interviews. In Reading Myself and Others (1975), he notes, for instance, The best of adolescence was the intense male friendship—not only because of the cozy feelings of camaraderie they afforded boys coming unstuck from their close-knit families, but because of the opportunity they provided for uncensored talk. These marathon conversations, characterized often by raucous discussions of hoped-for sexual adventure and by all sorts of anarchic joking, were typically conducted, however, in the confines of a parked car—two, three, four, or five of us in a single steel enclosure just about the size and shape of a prison cell, and similarly set apart from ordinary human society. (4) While one might describe this account as homosocial, and, by proximity, allow that we might extrapolate something queer, I’m not sure that such extrapolation serves useful in understanding Roth’s fictions. Certainly, he describes intimacy in these intense male friendships, whether verbal or proximal. Homointimacy reverberates in the metaphor of the prison cell and in the image of these boys kibbitzing while talking sex, cut off from the rest of the world. There’s something of a sexualized intimacy, too, in his description of boys, crammed together, in the parked car. (Elsewhere in his fiction, and in the larger cultural imaginary, the car is, of course, a site of sexual firsts, from Marcus Messner’s revelation of oral sex in Indignation [2008] to the Swede’s indiscretion in kissing his daughter Merry in American Pastoral [1997] to Lucy Nelson’s tragic capitulation to Roy’s demand in When She Was Good [1967].)

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Alternatively, queer theoretical concepts might be brought to bear on Roth’s work, aiming to “queer” Roth himself. In its tyranny, this latter mode suggests that we might read queerness in various aspects of Roth’s work, over and against authorial intent. Almost no attention has been paid, however, to the individual, present, and perplexing queer characters that inhabit the worlds of Roth’s fiction. These characters are rarely significant; none of Roth’s protagonists, or antagonists, such as they are, identify their desire as meaningfully queer. And yet the presence of a chorus of queer characters that populate Roth’s novels seems to beg commentary. Admittedly relegated to the margins, these queer characters say remarkably little about queerness itself. Rather, focusing on them—their interests, proclivities, antagonisms, and surprises—allows us to gain a new purchase on the contours of heterosexuality in Roth’s fiction. Specifically, the presence of queer characters—nearly all of whom are gay men—shores up the impossibility of talk, the impossibility of uncensored talk. While, on the one hand, this is often literal—Roth’s heterosexual protagonists can rarely communicate efficaciously with queer characters—we might draw out, from these moments of misreading, mishearing, mishandling, and misrecognition, similar problems of miscommunication at the heart of Roth’s vision of heterosexuality. Yet heterosexual miscommunication is categorically different from the queer inability to communicate, the failure to find the language, and to speak. Few things seem more discomfiting, more truly terrifying to Roth and his characters, than the impossibility of speech. If we take Zuckerman at his word, that living is all about getting people wrong—“getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again” (AP 35)—silence and the impossibility of speech, right or wrong, is, at best, a kind of half-life. To be silent, to be a silent witness to language’s faltering is, at its core, the consummate terror of the writer. Silence is an impossibly thick wall that prevents us from recognizing, as the writer can, indeed, must, the inner workings and aims of another (however wrong the writer might find themself). Across Roth’s corpus, queer characters invoke silence. This silence is not their own— Roth’s queers are often surprisingly open, loud, forward, brazen. But Roth’s and Nathan Zuckerman’s and Philip Roth’s and David Kepesh’s and Marcus Messner’s response to gay men is, surprisingly, one of silence; it is the ever-rare moment when they have nothing to say. And this silence is glaring in Roth’s fictions where the problem, so often, isn’t silence, but instead, the inability to stop talking. To borrow from Saul Bellow, “the ‘other’ [Roth] read from the beginning with the deepest pleasure and admiration” (RMO iii), Roth’s characters are all, always and irreversibly, him with his foot in his mouth. Yet the intrusions—and they are almost always described as intrusions—of voluble, unpleasant, sexually eager queer characters bring Roth’s characters to silence. But, as Grace Paley reminds us, silence speaks. “Where is my life?” Cassie asks Faith in “Listening,” the final story in Grace Paley’s third collection Later the Same Day (1985). Disturbed, Faith pulls the car over. “It’s been women and men, women and men, fucking, fucking. Goddamnit, where the hell is my woman and woman, woman-loving life in all this?” (Paley 1994: 385–6). Flabbergasted, Faith admits she simply didn’t think to include Cassie and her life, even though Cassie had been there, even though she loved Cassie as much as Ruthy and Louise and Ann and all of them. Cassie’s characterization of Faith’s work—women and men, women and men, fucking, fucking—would surely be an apt description of Philip Roth’s novels, too. Yet if queerness is a lacuna, wholly absent from Paley’s work in Cassie’s assessment, queerness in Roth’s novels forces recognition of its presence through its lack, impossible to ignore. No surprise, then, that queerness is like a cavity that Roth bothers with his tongue.

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For Roth, each finding and refinding of queerness brings him to silence as he contemplates a space notable only for its lack. Queers are ushered in from the margins often as object lessons, as local color, or as analogical thinking that reveals how small a character’s w ­ orld— predominantly their sexual world—has become. Though an exhaustive survey of Roth’s fiction is beyond the scope of these pages, it is worth preliminarily filling out Roth’s chorus of queer characters, in order to consider the various, though circumscribed, ways queer characters function in his novels: as the silencing aberration; as the marginal but discomfiting outsider; and finally, as a way of talking about—and around—heterosexual impotence.

THE VOW OF CHASTITY The notion of queerness, when introduced into a Roth novel, seems to encourage nothing less than silence. Language falters as if Roth and his antagonists are unable to imagine queer desire, unable, it seems, to render it in words. If heterosexual desire is, for Roth, a knotty entanglement of language, libido, and the affirmation of life, queerness is treated as a kind of loss that borders on death: the loss of a language that might put into words the ecstasy of libidinous desire. Said differently: there is a unique way, in Roth’s corpus, that the queer figure induces an icy, deathly silence. Because, indeed, for Roth, silence is death. What could be more petrifying than the petrification of language? What could be more alienating than being alienated from one’s own sources of pleasure, of intercourse? To be without intercourse— sexual or dialogical—is simply one form of death, Roth’s characters maintain, across his long career. Several of Roth’s novels mention queerness only in passing. In these more marginal invocations, queerness is something repudiated gently, a way to define a relationship in negation (this relationship is not queer, this desire is not queer), or an indirect way to explore existential isolation. This is the immediate framing of, for instance, The Human Stain (2000). Rendered impotent, Zuckerman spirits himself away to Athena College, to “a two-room cabin set way back in a field on a rural road high in the Berkshires” (HS 10), where he declines all invitations and is let alone to live and to do his work. His life is one deprived of intercourse. Intercourse arises for him a bit spontaneously, when, on a regular visit to Coleman Silk, his acquaintance and colleague, Coleman asks him to dance. Zuckerman describes how the dancing—the two men face to face, doing the foxtrot in Silk’s home—had nothing overtly carnal in it, but because Coleman was wearing only his denim shorts and my hand rested easily on his warm back as if it were the back of a dog or a horse, it wasn’t entirely a mocking act. There was a semi-serious sincerity in his guiding me about on the stone floor, not to mention a thoughtless delight in just being alive, accidentally and clownishly and for no reason alive—the kind of delight you take as a child when you first learn to play a tune with a comb and toilet paper. (26) Indeed, there is nothing carnal, nothing that suggests queer desire, strictly speaking, about this moment. Instead, however, it is a moment when Zuckerman recognizes, in their silence, a kind of companionship in their moving together. This is not a moment in which we might suggest that Zuckerman protests too much, that, perhaps, there is sublimated queer desire Zuckerman refuses to name; but Zuckerman’s preemptive repudiation of the possibility of

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something overtly carnal between the men—something he can only name as “nothing”— characterizes Roth’s flirtation with queerness. Immediately, however, the stakes of this intimacy, for Zuckerman, become clear: friendship, conversation, intercourse. I thought, He’s found somebody he can talk with … and then I thought, So have I. The moment a man starts to tell you about sex, he’s telling you something about the two of you. Ninety percent of the time it doesn’t happen, and probably it’s as well it doesn’t, though if you can’t get a level of candor on sex and you choose to behave instead as if this isn’t ever on your mind, the male friendship is incomplete. Most men never find such a friend. It’s not common. But when it does happen, when two men find themselves in agreement about this essential part of being a man, unafraid of being judged, shamed, envied, or outdone, confident of not having the confidence betrayed, their human connection can be very strong and an unexpected intimacy results. (27) In what is clearly a moment of homosocial intimacy, Zuckerman reminds us that heterosexual desire is always triangulated through language, friendship, and dialogue. That is to say, Zuckerman recognizes he found, in Coleman, someone with whom intercourse is possible, intercourse specifically about the force of heterosexual male desire. Only after this revelation is Zuckerman thus open to receiving Coleman’s story. This moment is a strange one to encounter because there is, strictly speaking, little said about queerness: only that the dancing is not defined by a queer carnality. Nothing else need be said: framing their relationship in this way, queerness exists on the margins as something certainly possible, but not as something germane to their relationship. It need not be put into words. Elsewhere, queer figures are not germane to heterosexual desire, but queers are present, and named, if only as ciphers with the ossatures of subjects. Their presence in the text is unremarkable—for the most part, they have little bearing on the plot, or their queerness is incidental—save for the fact that it is remarked upon. In When She Was Good, Roy describes his dissatisfaction with school: And the quality of the faculty, he said, was even more appalling than the quality of the students—particularly one H. Harold LaVoy, who somewhere along the line had got the idea that he was some sort of expert on photographic technique. Some expert. There was more to be learned about composition by flipping through an issue of Look than spending a lifetime listening to a pompous idiot like LaVoy (who some of the guys said might be a fairy, besides. A real queer. For Lucy’s edification, he imitated LaVoy walking down the halls. A bit la-dee-da, didn’t she agree? But even a homo could teach you something if he knew something. But a dumb homo—well, that was just about the end). (195) Besides LaVoy’s vapid pomposity, all that is known about him is that he is queer. He is a figure with whom Roy cannot relate, socially or intellectually. More compellingly, he is a figure Roy can hardly describe. Here he lapses into a performative gesture: a fey walk. Language fails him and he is only able to articulate LaVoy’s difference as “la-dee-da.” But if Roy cannot speak about LaVoy, the narrator doesn’t perform much better: descriptions of LaVoy’s sexuality are parenthetical, as if the text itself offers this character sketch in a faint whisper.

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In The Breast (1972), we see another moment when queerness deadens the possibility of imagination. The failure of imagination is notable, especially, insofar as Roth’s characters characteristically never fail to imagine. In fact, their imaginations often lead to failure— though rarely the failure of imagination itself: So, with Dr. Klinger’s assistance, I set about to extinguish—and if not to extinguish, at least (in Klinger’s favorite word) to tolerate—the desire to insert my nipple into somebody’s vagina. … A battle I won, however, only when the doctors decided, with my consent, to change my nurse. That did the trick. Inserting my nipple into either the mouth or the anus of Mr. Brooks, the new male nurse, is something I just can’t imagine with anything like the excitement I would imagine my nipple in Claire, or even in Miss Clark, though I realize that the conjunction of male mouth and female nipple can hardly be described as a homosexual act. But such is the power of my past and its taboos, and the power over my imagination of women and their apertures, that I am able now, temporarily anesthetized and in the hands of a man—to receive my morning ablutions like any other invalid, more or less. (44–5) Certainly, Roth recognized Kepesh’s paradox: he could imagine himself as a breast—after all, he was, all of a sudden, one—but he could not imagine, because of the power of his past and its taboos, himself engaging in what might be considered a homosexual act. For Kepesh, as for Zuckerman, we see queer desire as, at best, asymptotic; like a chord, it touches their lives, only briefly, and with no lasting engagement. Everything and nothing changes for Kepesh. In The Dying Animal (2001) he is no longer a breast—but he remains congenitally unable to imagine his way into queer desire. Queer marriage, he manages to speak about, though he’s stymied as to why anyone might want that blissless regimentation that marriage promises: Look, heterosexual men going into marriage are like priests going into the Church: they take the vow of chastity, only seemingly without knowing it until three, four, five years down the line. The nature of ordinary marriage is no less suffocating to the virile heterosexual—given the sexual preferences of a virile heterosexual—than it is to the gay or the lesbian. Though now even gays want to get married. Church wedding. Two, three hundred witnesses. And wait till they see what becomes of the desire that got them into being gay in the first place. I expected more from those guys, but it turns out there’s no realism in them either. Though I suppose it has to do with AIDS. The Fall and Rise of the Condom is the sexual story of the second half of the twentieth century. The condom came back. And with the condom, the return of all that got blown out in the sixties. What man can say he enjoys sex with a condom the way he does without? What’s really in it for him? That’s why the organs of digestion have, in our time, come to vie for supremacy as a sexual orifice. The crying need for the mucous membrane. To get rid of the condom, they have to have a steady partner, therefore they marry. The gays are militant: they want marriage and they want openly to join the army and be accepted. The two institutions I loathed. And for the same reason: regimentation. (67–8)

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Though Kepesh seems to have more to say, now, in his later years, about queer desire—which is to say he is able to name it as something of a sociological concern—queer desire is only the occasion for him to comment on its opacity, on his exclusion, and so he moves, as he is wont to do, back to familiar territory: the disappointments of what Adrienne Rich (1980) named “compulsory heterosexuality.” Elsewhere, queer characters are more physically intrusive, though no less opaque. In The Professor of Desire (1977), Kepesh realizes, with shock and no small amount of horror, that his friend and Kierkegaard mentor, Louis Jelinek, “is a ‘practicing’ homosexual” (19). Sissies he has known; Kepesh describes interacting with sissies, those too effeminate to mistake; but sissies are their own ontological category. He continues, in his incredulity, But as for a practicing homosexual? Never, never, in all my nineteen years. Except, of course, that time right after my bar mitzvah, when I took a bus by myself to a stamp collectors’ fair in Albany, and in the Greyhound terminal there was approached at the urinal by a middle-aged man in a business suit who whispered to me over my shoulder, “Hey, kid, want me to blow you?” “No, no, thank you,” I replied, and quickly as I could (though without giving offense, I hoped) moved out of the men’s room, out of the terminal, and made for a nearby department store, where I could be gathered up in the crowd of heterosexual shoppers. In the intervening years, however, no homosexual had ever spoken to me again, at least none that I knew of. (19)1 Years later, a homosexual—Wally—does speak to him, in a manner, periodically ringing the doorbell of the apartment Kepesh rents, shouting up advances and shooting his shot. (“I’m not half-bad, you know. I’m all bad” [111].) One night, Kepesh’s parents, having staged an intervention, are surprised by this queer intrusion of Wally ringing the bell in his usual graphic performance (to them, of course, unusual). As horrified as Kepesh is, the situation is impossible for him to explain, with any directness. His father simply cannot conceive of why Kepesh is being harassed: “Dad,” Kepesh says, “go back to bed. It’s just one of those things that happen in New York. It’s nothing” (111). Though Kepesh ultimately manages to explain, a bit more directly, the strangeness of the situation, it is one his parents cannot assimilate as they oscillate between complete incomprehension and anxious, if insinuated, questions about Kepesh’s own sexuality. Indignation treats queerness as something that is, initially, unspeakable, even as its intrusions into Marcus Messner’s college experience are bookended by one particularly spiteful queer, Bertram Flusser. Because of Bert’s antagonism, the source for which Marcus cannot begin to understand, Marcus moves from his dorm room, the act that arguably sets the stage for his death at the novel’s conclusion. But when Marcus meets Bert, he has no idea that he’s queer. Instead, queerness only later punctures the equilibrium of heterosexuality in Messner’s narrative when, courted by several campus fraternities at Winesburg College, he is visited by two students: “One was a slight, blond-haired boy who I did not know was homosexual—like most heterosexuals my age, I didn’t quite believe that anyone was homosexual—and the other a heavyset, friendly Negro boy, who did the talking for the pair” (I 40). Marcus is able to consider homosexuality so little, insofar as it is so far outside the realm of belief, that he immediately shifts to describing the racial homogeneity of the Winesburg campus. This observation of campus concludes, however, with these lines: “As for the student homosexuals among us, I had

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no idea how many there were. I didn’t understand, even while he was sleeping directly above me, that Burt Flusser was homosexual. That realization would arrive later” (40–1). Time passes. When Marcus does learn of Bert’s queerness, it’s because Bert has squatted in Marcus’s room while the latter was hospitalized and summarily “had been masturbating day and night into almost every item I owned” (194). While one student interprets this as Flusser’s perverse love for Marcus, Marcus reads this as a sign of unearned hatred. Despite their interpretive disagreement, both students are certain of one thing: under no condition would Marcus be able to confide in the dean. Marcus’s classmate notes, Flusser won’t go quietly, Marcus, if you’re the one who fingers him. Talk to the dean and he’ll tell Caudwell you’re the man in his life. Talk to the dean and he’ll tell Caudwell that you had a lover’s spat. Flusser is our abominable bohemian. Yes, even Winesburg has one. Nobody can curb Bertram Flusser. If they throw Flusser out because of this, he’ll take you down with him—that I guarantee. (197) So, naturally, there is only one thing for Marcus to do in the face of Bert’s vindictive queerness: stay silent. Marcus is in the unenviable position of not understanding and having no recourse to learn.

SABBATH’S THEATER, SIMON’S THEATER, AND PORTNOY: A CONCLUSION Whatever powerful icing effect queerness has in the majority of Roth’s novels, three narrators, Mickey Sabbath, Simon Axler, and Alexander Portnoy manage to subvert and speak over prohibition, history, and taboo. In both Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and Sabbath’s Theater (1995), queerness remains only adjacent to Portnoy and Sabbath respectively. Queerness emerges obliquely, in both novels, as it does elsewhere, whether as a turning point in Portnoy’s relationship with The Monkey (thanks to an ill-advised ménage à trois in Rome) or in Sabbath’s relationship with Drenka (and the third they add, Christa, who ultimately leaves them both for an older woman, a professor at Athena). More than the other novels these two contain a significant number of queer intimacies, whether it’s Mickey’s wife Nikki’s friendship with gay men, or the berobed gay man at rehab with Roseanna, or Portnoy’s sense that The Monkey’s comportment is gauche and revealing (to which she replies, the salesman who may have seen her exposed was “a faggot anyway”) (215). In The Humbling (2009), Roth’s penultimate novel, queerness retains a strange status: it is at the heart of the novel insofar as Pegeen Mike, Axler’s love interest is a forty-year-old lesbian trying her hand at dating Simon, a man twenty-five years her senior, and the first man Pegeen has been with since college. Though both Simon and Pegeen reflect on the unlikeliness of the relationship, it is queerness that drives Pegeen into Simon’s arms. A falling out with a lover, a failed queer relationship, primes Pegeen Mike for a detour into heterosexuality. Her lover of six years, Priscilla, returns home one day announcing the fait accompli of gender transition, against Pegeen’s wishes. Unsettled, she soon finds herself with Simon for the better part of a year, where pretty much all they do is discuss her reformed queerness and their shared project of straightening her out, turning her gender into something more attractive to Simon, and her sexuality into something he can fully assimilate into fantasy. Said differently: it is only

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when confronted with the reality of an ill-advised ménage à trois that Simon realizes that Pegeen Mike’s queerness is not something either can fantasize away, in language or otherwise. In this context, queerness is discussed ad nauseam. In the mouths of Pegeen and Simon, queerness is all but Fletcherized. But their relationship also reveals the limits of desire, how heterosexuality is ultimately not able to compass the unnameability of queer desire: Pegeen leaves Simon and is unable to provide a satisfying account as to why. Her queerness is not something she can fully articulate; threatened with a nervous breakdown, Simon too bunches up against the limits of language. But by way of conclusion, I want to suggest that these latter novels accommodate queerness, are capable of assimilating it, in ways other novels do not, because Axler, Portnoy, and Sabbath push the boundaries of what can be excavated from the self, what can be shared, and where the pale side of taboo is. Sabbath is a performer; his performance is one in which queerness is, to say the least, not nearly the most taboo sex act he’s found himself performing. Portnoy, similarly, is perhaps one of literature’s most famous contemporary incitements to speak. And speak he does. In so doing he draws a distinction between queer sex act in which he is beneficiary (with Lina and The Monkey, say) and queer identity. Simon, too, is a performer, though when we encounter him he has debilitating performance anxiety, unable to follow the script as he has done for the prior four decades, needing, as he finds, a new language. Yet where Sabbath and Portnoy ultimately maintain faith in the possibility of performing, of speaking, of connection, Simon does not. He finds himself, at the novel’s conclusion, terminally silenced. When Portnoy speaks of queerness it is, unsurprisingly, as a repudiation of his own family, how he and other nice Jewish boys in their Newark community were raised: Fruitcake, Mother. Little fruitcake is what you saw—and exactly what the training program was designed to produce. Of course! Of course! The mystery really is not that I’m not dead like Ronald Nimkin, but that I’m not like all the nice young men I see strolling hand in hand in Bloomingdale’s on Saturday mornings. Mother, the beach at Fire Island is strewn with the bodies of nice Jewish boys, in bikinis and Bain de Soleil, also little gentlemen in restaurants, I’m sure, also who helped mommies set up mah-jongg tiles when the ladies came on Monday night to play. Christ Almighty! After all those years of setting up those tiles—one bam! two crack! mah-jongg!—how I made it into the world of pussy at all, that’s the mystery. I close my eyes, and it’s not so awfully hard—I see myself sharing a house at Ocean Beach with somebody in eye make-up named Sheldon. (125) But Portnoy does more than repudiate and reject here: he also invokes, once again, the possibility of uncensored talk. For that is Portnoy’s primary subject. And in this schema, the ultimate taboo is not his sharing a house with Sheldon, but ending up like Ronald Nimkin: full of promise, a life silenced too young. For Sabbath, too, imagining queerness isn’t terribly difficult: So. Here we are. The moon is high, somewhere there’s music, Norman’s dead, and it’s just me and this betitted pretty-boy in his flowered kimono. Missed my chance with a man. That Nebraska guy who gave me the books on the tanker. Yeats. Conrad. O’Neill. He would have taught me more than what to read if I’d let him. Wonder what it’s like. Ask her, she’ll tell you. The only other people who fuck men are women. (330–1)

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Had he taken a different path in life, that is to say, he might have had a chance with the Nebraska guy. Yet this is only a tease: for Sabbath’s imagining himself with this “betitted pretty-boy in his flowered kimono” is predicated on the decisive heterosexuality of the prettyboy. She is Norman’s wife. There remains the imagined possibility of intercourse—with her, with the man from Nebraska—but the inability to render it in words. Ask her, she’ll tell you. Unfortunately, she never does. It is touching that Roth’s one protagonist to touch queerness, to see emissaries from this foreign world and to welcome them, even if as aberration, has the most material consequences: investment in queerness, or in defanging queerness, costs Simon his life, not just the symbolic silencing other characters contend with. Of course, for Simon, there is that too. Jilted by Pegeen, who, presumably, returns to her lesbianism along with her boy’s zippered red jacket, Simon kills himself in his attic. His final words, however, are not his own, but are Chekhov’s: “The fact is, Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself” (140). Pegeen was able, Roth would have us believe, to “nullify everything” (127) after all.

NOTE 1. Operation Shylock offers another strange intrusion of queerness. Philip Roth, confronting his impersonator in a hotel, notices a plainclothes officer with a “masklike, inexpressive face.” When the man passes him, this exchange resembles Kepesh’s in the Greyhound terminal that occurs so many years before: “He leaned close to my ear and mumbled something. He spoke in English but because of his accent the softly uttered words were unintelligible at first. ‘What?’ I whispered. ‘Want me to blow you?’ he whispered back. ‘Oh, no—thanks, no. My mistake.’ And I stepped into the room and pulled the door firmly shut. ‘Pardon the intrusion,’ I said” (182).

REFERENCES Brauner, David (2016), “Queering Philip Roth: Homosocial Discourse in ‘An Actor’s Life for Me,’ Letting Go, Sabbath’s Theater, and the ‘American Trilogy,’” Studies in the Novel, 48 (1): 86–106. Paley, Grace (1994), “Listening,” in The Collected Stories, 368–78, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rich, Adrienne (1980), “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs, 5 (4): 631–60. Roth, Philip (1994a), The Breast, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1994b), Operation Shylock, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1994c), Portnoy’s Complaint, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1994d), The Professor of Desire, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1995), When She Was Good, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1996), Sabbath’s Theater, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (1998), American Pastoral, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001a), The Human Stain, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001b), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2002), The Dying Animal, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2008), Indignation, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Roth, Philip (2010), The Humbling, New York: Vintage. Shulman, George (2018), “My Roth,” Raritan, 38 (2): 65–9.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Against the “Terror of Seeing”: Old Age and Disability in Philip Roth’s Later Novels MAREN SCHEURER

“Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre” (156) is the narrator’s conclusion in Everyman (2006) after the nameless protagonist learns that several of his friends battle with disease and death. The line, reflecting how Everyman also suffers from the ravages of aging, must be among the most quoted in the Roth canon, for it has long been a truism that, as Philip Roth continued to write into his later years, he became ever more interested in exploring the indignities of old age and the struggles of aging masculinity. The topic looms large as early as Patrimony (1991), a memoir of Roth’s father’s dying of brain cancer, and plays into Sabbath’s Theater (1995), with Sabbath’s relentless confrontation with life’s losses. Old age also affects the long-standing narrator-protagonists of Roth’s Zuckerman and Kepesh books: Nathan Zuckerman ages from the young and upcoming writer of the early novels to the recluse chronicler of the American Trilogy, who has undergone prostate surgery and lives with impotence and incontinence, which drives much of the plot of the final Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost (2007). And as The Dying Animal (2001) concludes the Kepesh trilogy, David Kepesh confronts not just his younger mistress’s breast cancer but also his friend George’s “slipping away at an agonizingly slow pace” after a stroke at fifty-five (117), as well as the unimaginability of old age in general (35). Finally, Roth’s Nemeses Tetralogy seems almost completely dedicated to the theme of death and dying, with Everyman and The Humbling (2009) focusing on physical and spiritual decline as their protagonists face the inevitable shortcomings of bodily and artistic resources. What seems less obvious is that these aging characters are in dialogue with another set of characters whose importance for Roth’s work has only lately been acknowledged. As Roth’s protagonists age, they face not just illness and death but disability as well, and they are therefore linked to characters we would identify as disabled. Zuckerman, in fact, has always straddled the two categories, as his back pain in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), his incontinence, and his impotence are marked as impairments that change the way he lives, thinks, and writes. Zuckerman, however, is only the most obvious figure. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2000) have previously drawn attention to the fact that characters with disability are often invisible, “screen[ed] out” of our memory “because we are trained to compartmentalize impairment as an isolated and individual condition of existence” (51). If this is true, then we see characters with disability as individual cases that do not warrant closer

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examination in an author’s work, as disability is perceived as a singular occurrence rather than a theme or a pattern. The same has been true for Roth until quite recently, with an increasing number of scholars now recognizing the presence of disability in Roth’s work. Jane Gallop (2019) and David Hadar (2021), for instance, highlight the connections between old age and disability in Exit Ghost and Everyman, and Michael Jardine (2021) reads the polio outbreak in Nemesis (2010) not primarily as an epidemic but as a disability narrative. Kathryn Bloom (2022) further draws attention to the haunting presence of physically impaired characters in Operation Shylock (1993). Most notably, Alvin’s amputation and prosthesis feature in numerous readings of The Plot against America (2004), though, as I have pointed out, often as a symbol of history and discrimination and not as a social and psychological signifier of disability in its own right (Scheurer 2021: 198). Roth’s obsessive investigation of both age and disability thus calls for a more thoroughgoing exploration of the intersection of these experiences in his work. As Gallop (2019) asserts, “disability as a category is entangled with aging” (5). Age, late-onset disability, and disability in general produce very similar cultural narratives that revolve around loss, physical decline (11), and “threats to one’s sexuality and to one’s gender” (15). In that sense, Roth’s work seems deeply entrenched in what Margaret Gullette (2018) terms “decline ideology” (262), the pervasive belief that growing older is inevitably a story of irreversible physical and mental demise, linked with the loss of beauty and sexuality, with pain and death (261). Roth’s novels are unremitting in their exploration of the shame and anger that such decline produces, but, in doing so, they also help unsettle our usual patterns of responding to the decline narrative. In this chapter, I will first trace the decline narrative of old age in Exit Ghost and Everyman before turning to sudden-onset disability in The Plot against America and Nemesis, highlighting how all four novels insist on the “massacre” of old age and disability. Ultimately, however, as I suggest in the final section of this chapter, marginal figures of disability and the narrative constructions through which we approach them offer us an understanding of why Roth insists on these images, not despite but because of their entanglement in a cultural obsession with decline: to look at the embodied experiences we tend to deny and reap the insight of the mental and bodily differences we encounter throughout the life course.

“BODILY DECAY HIS ENTIRE STORY”: EVERYMAN AND EXIT GHOST Everyman can easily be read as an “aging-as-decline … narrative” (Gullette 2018: 262). Having detailed some of the protagonist’s experiences with illness in his youth, the novel focuses on the set of diseases that lead to his death. The narrator notes that “he was still only in his sixties when his health began giving way and his body seemed threatened all the time. … [N]ow eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story” (71). In this evaluation of the protagonist’s life, his “story” is indeed reduced to “decay,” an inevitably declining route leading to death. Similarly, in the painting class the protagonist offers in his retirement community, the students’ “personal biographies hav[e] by this time become identical with their medical biographies” (80), confirming “the narrow concept of aging-as-disease” (Gullette 2018: 259) and once more tying all narrative possibilities in old age to physical deterioration.

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Interestingly, however, the novel goes on to explore further how decline is intertwined with other temporal experiences that undercut the apparently downward and terminal trajectory of growing older. “Always he had been invigorated by stability, never by stasis. And this was stagnation. There was an absence now of all forms of solace … and no way to return to what was” (129), the protagonist laments his condition. Old age is not just decline; it is also stagnation. The protagonist misses both narrative progression toward something new, “[n]othing any longer kindled his curiosity” (130), and the possibility of returning to a previous state of being. Illness in old age appears to be irreversible, as the fantasy of recuperating “the man I once was” and being “a full human being” (130) is radically discounted. What marks age for the protagonist is the impossibility of repetition and return as well as the lack of new narrative possibilities. Along with his health, the protagonist’s artistic creativity seems to be waning, and he refers to his inability to return to his painting as “an irreversible aesthetic vasectomy” (103). His daughter is not so sure: “You’ll get back to it. It’ll happen again. Painting isn’t through with you yet. … Nothing’s vanished and nothing’s altered” (107). The protagonist, however, is not “convinced” (107), and the narrative never returns to his painting, either. This “inexorability” is the “temporal logic of our culture’s construction of aging” (Gallop 2019: 39): potency, whether physical, sexual, or creative, is irrevocably, irretrievably lost. Reading Everyman, it is easy to conceive of aging as a process of inevitable physical and mental decline, and there seems to be little sense of “the complex open-endedness of living and interpreting the life course” that Age Studies have highlighted (Gullette 2018: 257), or even the acknowledgment of other experiences of old age, such as “maturational processes, increased satisfaction, lessened anxiety, retention of core emotional qualities, mentoring and wisdom” (260). Even in Everyman, however, there are countervoices unsettling the dominant decline narrative, and these include the protagonist’s brother Howie, with his “physical impregnability” that seems to shield him from the process of aging that preoccupies his brother (99), or his friend Ezra, whose writer’s block “fell away” when he “got cancer” (154). Inexorability is not the only story, but it is the main narrative that Roth’s characters grapple with, even if they encounter other possibilities along the way. Roth clearly focuses on the indignities of aging, and the protagonist of Everyman is only one, and not even the most poignant, representative of its difficulties. Millicent Kramer, a student in the protagonist’s painting class, suffers from excruciating back pain and wears a back brace that she hides in shame (86), contradicting the protagonist’s clichéd thinking that “[w]hen you get older, it’s what’s inside that matters, and people stop caring how you look” (85). In fact, Millicent fiercely rejects her disability, mourning the times when she was “agile,” “active,” and “free” (88). She notes the “utter otherness” of her pain that makes her “alone” and “shameful”: “She’s embarrassed by what she’s become, he thought, embarrassed, humiliated, humbled almost beyond her own recognition” (91). Millicent eventually ends her life with “an overdose of sleeping pills” (92). While her story, about which she claims “[t]here’s nothing special” (88), further confirms the decline trajectory of Everyman’s construction of age, in highlighting the “utter otherness” of her experience, the novel is at least willing to explore that otherness— unlike the dominant anti-aging narrative that pervades the culture as the belief that if we only behave in a certain way and buy the right products, we will never be touched by age and illness. While Roth’s characters are still aged by their bodies more than “by culture” (Gullette 2018: 260), they offer starting points to investigate the culture’s construction of age and its unpredictability.

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Exit Ghost proposes an even more incisive critique of the culture’s denial of growing older as a transformative experience. The novel begins with Zuckerman’s mission to seek treatment for his postoperative incontinence, and, having met young and alluring Jamie, to regain his sense of sexual potency. This mission, however, is troubled not just by Zuckerman’s setbacks but also by his ambivalence over the desirability of rekindling his sexuality: “in succumbing to the wish to recover something lost—a wish I’d tried to put down long ago—I had opened myself up to believing I could somehow perform again as the man I once was” (EG 104). As Gallop (2019) notes, “Zuckerman’s dilemma … could be seen to stage the confrontation between two different cultural ideologies of old men’s sexuality” (97), a more traditional one that views older men as maturely postsexual and therefore morally superior, and a more recent one that grants them sexual desire but also, in turn, pathologizes sexual dysfunction (96). Roth’s Kepesh explains, Not too many years ago, there was a ready-made way to be old, just as there was a readymade way to be young. Neither obtains any longer. A great fight about the permissible took place here … To be unapologetically an unmonastic old man susceptible still to the humanly exciting? That is not the condition as it was once symbolized by the pipe and the rocking chair. (DA 36–7) As liberating as the “unmonastic” alternative appears, however, it is linked not only to pathologizing but also to a flattening of sexual possibilities, a denial of sexual diversity in old, or any, age. It tends to suggest, as Zuckerman recognizes in Exit Ghost, that “either the old are no longer sexual or they are sexual just like they used to be, just like young people,” and for Zuckerman, “opting for either alternative turns out to be impossible … because neither alternative fits his experience” (Gallop 2019: 100). The new narrative that we can be young forever has apparently opened the “permissible” in a very circumscribed manner, and Roth, for all his concern with aging men’s sexuality, ultimately offers insights into the limitations we still impose on old age. Gallop (2019) argues that “[o]ur new ideal of sexuality is a denial of temporality” (100) and that “[w]hile Philip Roth hardly presents a model for the embrace of sexual diversity, … his post-prostate story is firmly grounded in the recognition that aging is all about temporality” (101). In other words, while Roth’s decline narrative fails to consider alternative sexualities as a potential solution to Zuckerman’s dilemma, in its radical confrontation with sexuality and age, it offers us a way to question the newly pervasive, and equally ageist, notion that we might avoid change as we grow older.

“NOT TO TRIUMPH BUT TO DEFEAT”: THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA AND NEMESIS Roth’s younger characters seem to respond to sudden-onset disability with the same bitterness that Zuckerman and Everyman’s protagonist experience in the face of old age. In The Plot against America, when Philip’s cousin Alvin loses his leg through a war injury, his primary responses seem to be anger and shame. The nurse who accompanies him to meet the Roth family attests that she has not “ever” seen anyone “angry like him” (PAA 130), and Bess Roth explains, “Alvin is ashamed. … When he left he was strong and independent. Now he

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wants to hide and he wants to scream and he wants to lash out, and it’s terrible for him” (131). That we only learn of Alvin’s emotions through other people’s assumptions should make us pause and alert us to Roth’s narrative strategy in relation to disability. The “terribleness” of Alvin’s loss is mainly conveyed through child narrator Philip, who is “overwhelmed” by the “colossal freakishness” of disability. As Philip recounts, “I saw what had become of the upper man since the lower man had been blown apart” (135–6). The amputation has apparently made his cousin seem incomplete, the stump being “the blunt remnant of something whole that belonged there and once had been there” (136). Through Alvin’s anger and Philip’s shocked response to the amputated limb, we are made fully aware of the experience of abjection Roth links to disability: amputation, in particular, threatens our sense of bodily integrity and forces us to renegotiate the limits of the body, especially when, as in Alvin’s case, the stump gets infected, and the prosthesis won’t quite fit (137). Straightforward recovery and adjustment, which would virtually eliminate the disability in the eyes of bystanders, are rendered impossible. Alvin’s stump has usually been read in metaphorical terms, as the “wound of history” (Shostak 2011: 95), for instance, or as “Jewish self-shame” (Duban 2011: 32). Roth himself offers a metaphorical reading that uses disability as a signifier for discrimination more generally: “exclusion is a primary form of humiliation, and humiliation is crippling—it does terrible injury to people, it twists them, deforms them. … In this book it’s the humiliation that helps to tear apart and very nearly disable the family” (Roth 2004). Words like “crippling,” “injury,” “deforms,” and “disable” hammer home the point that we are to understand exclusion as a form of disability. Disability scholars have for good reason objected to such metaphorical uses of disability, given how they imply that disability is a state of utter misery, ever to be avoided (Hall 2016: 36), but I would argue that there is yet another reason to pause before we jump too quickly to the metaphorical dimension of disability in the novel, as prominent as it is. Reading Alvin’s stump only as a metaphor may be just another way to avoid the “colossal freakishness” of disability and keep us from perceiving what is illuminating about Roth’s portrayal of disability. In one sense, Alvin may be seen to conform to a stereotype of disability representation: the bitter amputee who lashes out at others and fails to come to terms with his loss. In another sense, however, Alvin also resists a second stereotype, the “repair of deviance” through cure or rehabilitation that Mitchell and Snyder (2000) identify as a stock feature of disability narratives (53). Narratives with disabled protagonists eventually eliminate the deviance represented by disability to return the narrative world to order, and if the disability is not literally eliminated through death or healing, we expect it to be symbolically eliminated through the protagonist’s reintegration into the psycho-social order. With Philip’s help, Alvin’s physical condition improves, but he remains angry and, embarking on a career as a gambler and racketeer, fails to fulfil the criteria for rehabilitation. As Philip observes, Alvin “couldn’t stop … himself from abandoning the desire to ever again be anyone’s hero” (162), and the novel continues to refuse Alvin to be anything but the conflicted man he is. This authorial decision is particularly striking in contrast with the choices made by David Simon and Ed Burns in their 2020 HBO adaptation of the novel, in which Alvin becomes involved in a British-Canadian plot against Lindbergh and is rewarded with a significant amount of symbolic rehabilitation. In the novel, however, Alvin’s last major appearance is in a fight with Philip’s father Herman, which injures them both: “Alvin’s prosthesis had cracked in two, his stump was torn to shreds, and one of his wrists was broken. Three of my father’s front teeth were shattered, two ribs were fractured” (296). Roth, it seems, will not provide us with

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an ameliorative reading of disability—a move that might problematically signal an inability to participate in the destigmatization of disability but that also refuses to contribute to its euphemistic dissipation into heroic recovery narratives. In many ways, Bucky Cantor of Nemesis is a final and more expansive elaboration of that refusal. Polio has left Bucky disabled: even after “fourteen months in rehabilitation” and surgery (239), “Mr. Cantor still had a withered left arm and useless left hand, and the damage to the muscles in his left calf caused a dip in his gait.” As the leg becomes weaker, he uses a leg brace and a cane, which “help[s] with balance and steadiness” but doesn’t “ease the pain much.” And, “if things continued to deteriorate—as they often do in later years for many polio survivors who come to suffer what is known as post-polio syndrome”—Bucky might need to use a wheelchair in the future (243). However, Nemesis is not just another decline story. Bucky’s acquaintance with disability does not begin with polio at all. What sets his story in motion in the novel is that “because of poor vision that necessitated his wearing thick eyeglasses” (10), he is not drafted into the war and instead serves as the director of a Weequahic playground during the summer. Bucky has learned to compensate for his poor eyesight with athletic prowess, driven by his grandfather whose denial of disability instils in Bucky both a sense of resilience and ableist reliance on inviolability: “he learned how to pit himself against any obstacle” (20), as his grandfather “instructed the unhappy child— when he’d first donned glasses at the age of eight—that his eyes were now as good as anyone else’s” (21) and “saw to the boy’s masculine development, always on the alert to eradicate any weakness” (22). Bucky’s grandfather teaches him the American ideal of selfreliance and liberal individualism, which Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1997) has linked to an ableist vision of the body as “a stable, neutral instrument of the individual will” (42)—an ideal that is forever troubled by the disabled body that represents “the self gone out of control” and is seen as “ungovernable, recalcitrant, flaunting its difference” (43). Without a “regulated” and “compliant” body (43), however, it becomes difficult to fulfil the ideal’s prescriptions for masculine identity and citizenship. Because of this upbringing, Bucky perceives his exemption from military service as a failure that marks him as disabled: “he was still walking the streets while all the able-bodied men his age were off training to fight … He was ashamed to be seen in civilian clothes” (26–7). And it is presumably that same ideology that motivates him to deny “everything he had ever wanted for himself” after he has contracted and possibly spread polio: “should he be weak enough to do otherwise, he would suffer his final defeat” (262). So Bucky ends his career in education and refuses to continue the relationship with his fiancée Marcia: “She hadn’t fallen in love with a cripple, and she shouldn’t be stuck with one” (254–5). In effect, as masculinity and sexuality have been linked to “compulsory able-bodiedness” (McRuer 2006: 2) for him by his grandfather’s teachings, Bucky is neutered: By and large he had the aura of ineradicable failure about him as he spoke of all that he’d been silent about for years, not just crippled physically by polio but no less demoralized by persistent shame. He was the very antithesis of the country’s greatest prototype of the polio victim, FDR, disease having led Bucky not to triumph but to defeat. The paralysis and everything that came in its wake had irreparably damaged his assurance as a virile man, and he had withdrawn completely from that whole side of life. Mostly Bucky considered himself a gender blank—as in a cartridge that is blank. (246)

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Bucky’s response to becoming disabled relies on the stereotypes that The Plot against America similarly examines: in his inability to construct a heroic narrative like FDR’s, Bucky’s only recourse seems to be the adoption of the decline narrative, which marks his “defeat” as “ineradicable” and “persistent” and his gender identity as “irreparably damaged.” The counterpoint to Bucky’s response to disability is the novel’s narrator, Arnie Mesnikoff. Though Arnie himself “contracted polio and was then confined to a wheelchair for a year before protracted rehabilitation made it possible for [him] to locomote [himself] on a crutch and a cane” (241), and though he, too, once railed against the “[l]ife on the sidelines” (266) to which the illness seemed to have confined him, he has eventually remade his life. After his marriage and the birth of his children, “slowly polio ceased to be the only drama” (268). A successful architect, moreover, Arnie managed to derive a successful career from his insight into disability: “I started a company with a mechanical engineer who, like me, had had polio as a kid. We opened a consulting and contracting firm specializing in architectural modification for wheelchair accessibility … at a moment when serious attention was beginning to be paid to the singular needs of the disabled” (242). As Jardine (2021) points out, Arnie’s “strategy of cloaking [disability] with positivity” was “the ‘required’ story” (30): the goal is to “overcome” disability, to reap a positive development from a setback, to “move on and fulfil the American Dream” (31); otherwise the story is not worth hearing. No wonder, Jardine notes, that many critics have berated Bucky for his failure to “conquer” polio and compared him unfavorably to Arnie (31). However, these assumptions are incompatible with the actual nature of the disease with its “lifelong extension” through post-polio syndrome (28), which instigates a “recurrent experience of trauma … at odds with the normalized perception of time as linear and progressive” (31). The comparison of the two different narratives, Arnie’s positive and Bucky’s “negative” one, allows us to evaluate both critically and realize that both are driven by ableist assumptions that draw limitations on our notions of masculinity, productivity, independence, and control. At the same time, the novel’s treatment of disability once again destabilizes our sense of temporality, on the surface emphasizing the inexorability of Bucky’s experience but at a deeper level affirming a “circularity, from wheelchair back to wheelchair” (Jardine 2021: 36) that calls into question any linear trajectory for disability narratives and opens alternative modes of comprehending the embodied life course.

“SO DISQUIETING”: KNOWING AGE AND DISABILITY Roth’s vehicle for complicating such comprehension is the narrative construction through which his novels operate, the way in which they constitute how we look at and understand old age and disability. In The Plot against America and Nemesis, this operation becomes particularly noticeable through two apparently marginal characters whose disabilities are even more visible and, to onlookers, more threatening than Alvin’s, Bucky’s, and Arnie’s. In Plot, this figure of utter abjection is “Little Robert, the living stump” (128), a double amputee who moves about on a platform with roller skates. It is with him that Philip first encounters the “colossal freakishness” of disability, but he has difficulties recalling him precisely. The “fear of gaping merged with the terror of seeing” (128), keeping him from ever looking closely at the man who begs for alms in front of Philip’s father’s office. Garland-Thomson (2009) has aptly described the ambivalences involved in “seeing” people with disabilities. She acknowledges that the most typical response, which Philip tries to avoid here, staring,

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involves stigmatization and othering, but may also lead to a transformation of our vision: “Staring’s pattern of interest, attention, and engagement, the mobilization of its essential curiosity, might be understood as a potential act of be-holding, of holding the being of another particular individual in the eye of the beholder” (194). Not looking, then, may be just as damaging as staring and may preclude an actual engagement with the individuals and the struggles they are facing. With its own marginal figure of abjection, Nemesis contrasts these two responses and, further, extends them to intellectual disability. Horace, “whose mental development had stopped at around six,” is known as “the neighborhood’s ‘moron’” who “stagger[s]” through the streets “drool[ing],” hoping to shake someone’s hand (40). Everyone knows Horace, “largely because it was always so disquieting to find him heading one’s way. When the smaller children saw him they ran to the other side of the street, when adults saw him they lowered their eyes” (39–40). Horace, like Robert, seems to stop people from really looking at or making a connection to him. The juxtaposition of the seemingly impossible renders Horace, like Robert, uncanny, “with the mind of a baby, he also had the beard of man” (41). When Horace enters the playground one day during the polio epidemic, however, the terror he causes is linked to the fear of contagion. One boy, in particular, gets very excited over Horace’s failure to keep clean: “He has shit all over him! … He doesn’t wash and he isn’t clean, and then he wants us to take his hand, and shake his hand, and that’s how he’s spreading polio! He’s the one who’s crippling people!” (118–9). In order to reassure the boy, provide an example at exercising tolerance, and remove Horace from the playground, Bucky shakes Horace’s hand. Jardine (2021) argues that this gesture links Bucky and Horace, as a moment of possible contagion (34) but also of identification: “heroism and abjection meet as Bucky firmly aligns himself with the Other, the walking contagion that is Horace” (33). I would add that the scene also illuminates Roth’s narrative method: whereas figures of disability such as Robert and Horace tend to instill a “terror of seeing” that makes us look away, Roth’s novels look even closer, and they inspect disability and old age despite the terror and abjection that is culturally connected to them. Like Bucky, they risk direct contact and contagion. Philip, who narrates The Plot against America, exemplifies this stance. In Alvin’s recovery, he takes on the “great supporting role” (146) and overcomes his initial horror of the amputated limb. To improve his skills at helping Alvin bandage his stump, he practices on himself, but in the process, “a ragged scab from the ulcerated underside of Alvin’s stump” touches his own leg (138). Philip vomits, expressing his sense of abjection as the safe distance between their bodies is lost and he feels “as if the very loss itself has been translated onto him” (Shostak 2016: 25). Contact, again, risks contagion, but Philip persists and is soon Alvin’s irreplaceable helpmate with invaluable ideas to enhance Alvin’s rehabilitation. Eventually, they start “examin[ing] the stump together” (144), which signifies that Philip has moved on from looking away and staring to beholding—a stance that he transfers to us as readers, as we are, in turn, made to examine the stump in all its details, unable to look away lest we stop reading altogether. What Roth taps into here is a specific knowledge of the body to which we are not often privy because people beyond mid-age and people with disabilities are often “invalidated as a knower” (Wendell 2006: 254). Their particular embodied insights are eclipsed in idealized narratives of the physical and mental life course. While Susan Wendell (2006) warns us that “there is a danger of sentimentalizing disabled people’s knowledge” and thus othering them further, she insists that if “disabled people were truly heard, an explosion of knowledge of the human body and psyche would take place” and give us “access to realms of experience that our

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culture has not tapped” (253). Roth may be faulted for images of age and disability that focus on suffering and failure, confirming, despite a few countervoices, the inexorability of loss through growing older and becoming disabled. However, in centralizing these stories, they countermand other ageist and ableist narratives that demand that we stay healthy and young forever, or else disappear from sight. Against the “terror of seeing,” Roth’s novels hold these abject experiences firmly in view. Far from a sentimental celebration of “other” knowledge, however, the novels show the complications of assimilating the “otherness” of age and disability through their narrative constructions. Everyman is the story of an unnamed protagonist, but it is at the same time the story of his friends and acquaintances, a “community” aligned by their political and social disenfranchisement (Hadar 2021: 106). Exit Ghost is shot through with scenes from Zuckerman’s play He and She, staging the incessancy of desire as well as Zuckerman’s “disintegrat[ion]” (292). Nemesis is told by Arnie, who shares Bucky’s experience of disability but does not identify with Bucky’s way of dealing with his fate. And The Plot against America is filtered through the eyes of young Philip, whose child’s perspective allows Roth to express all the horror an ableist perspective might project on disability and then, slowly, to transform that perspective into another community of suffering and care. What these novels share, then, is a sense that age and disability cannot be sentimentalized into heroic journeys of acquiring wisdom and overcoming obstacles; instead, they tap into their embodied knowledge through dialogic and relational constructions that complicate and expand what readers may discover beyond terror and abjection.

REFERENCES Bloom, Kathryn (2022), “The Operated Roth: Jewish Male Body Image and the Search for Zionist Identity in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock,” Philip Roth Studies, 18 (2): 3–17. Duban, James (2011), “Written, Unwritten, and Vastly Rewritten: Meyer Levin’s In Search and Philip Roth’s ‘Defender of the Faith,’ The Plot against America, and Indignation,” Philip Roth Studies, 7 (1): 29–50. Gallop, Jane (2019), Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus, Durham: Duke University Press. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie (1997), Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie (2009), Staring: How We Look, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth (2018), “Against ‘Aging’: How to Talk about Growing Older,” Theory, Culture & Society, 37 (7–8): 251–70. Hadar, David (2021), “‘Old Age Is a Massacre’: Community Building in the Face of Political Disasters in Philip Roth’s Everyman and Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom,” Philip Roth Studies, 17 (1): 92–109. Hall, Alice (2016), Literature and Disability, London: Routledge. Jardine, Michael (2021), “‘Lashed to the Mast of That Recollection’: Philip Roth’s Nemesis, Polio, and Post-Traumatic Memory,” Philip Roth Studies, 17 (2): 26–43. McRuer, Robert (2006), Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York: New York University Press. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder (2000), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Roth, Philip (2004), “The Story behind ‘The Plot against America,’” The New York Times, September 19. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/books/review/the-story-behind-theplot-against-america.html (accessed January 5, 2022). Roth, Philip (2005), The Plot against America, New York: Vintage.

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Roth, Philip (2006), The Dying Animal, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2007), Everyman, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2008), Exit Ghost, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2011), Nemesis, London: Vintage. Shostak, Debra (2011), “The Plot against America: Introduction,” in Debra Shostak (ed.), Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot against America, 95–7, London: Continuum. Shostak, Debra (2016), “Prosthetic Fictions: Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close through Philip Roth’s The Plot against America,” in Catherine Morley (ed.), 9/11: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature, 21–40, New York: Bloomsbury. Scheurer, Maren (2021), “‘The Blunt Remnant of Something Whole’: Living Stumps and Prosthetic Relations in Thomas Bernhard’s Die Billigesser and Philip Roth’s The Plot against America,” in Erik Grayson and Maren Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss,” 185–210, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Wendell, Susan (2006), “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability,” in Lennard J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed., 243–56, New York: Routledge.

PART FIVE

Adaptations and Influences

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Roth’s Legacy and Cancel Culture MIRIAM JAFFE

What he was forced to undergo—the accusations, the interviews, the inquiry—remains a blight on the integrity of this institution to this day … an American individualist who did not always live in compliance with majority standards of decorum and taste … robbed of his moral authority by their moral stupidity. —Philip Roth, The Human Stain In one of many maneuvers to control his legacy, Philip Roth bequeathed his personal book collection—about 7,000 volumes—to the Newark Public Library. Library visitors will find that Roth owned not one, but two copies of The Scarlet Letter (1850): a 1949 edition and a more heavily marked Signet Classics volume from 1959.1 On the back cover of the latter, Roth underlined “shame and redemption” with thick, black, felt tip pen. Indeed, the “shame and redemption” dichotomy is central to Roth’s fiction as well as his legacy. After all, Roth wrote to battle what Hawthorne called “the persecuting spirit,” a line from “The Custom House” that Roth noted in his 1959 edition—and then cited in his 2000 novel, The Human Stain (2). A “persecuting spirit,” in biblical terms, is one of cruel intolerance and angry ignorance, one that skews the complex truth in favor of extreme violence, often in the guise of morality. In Roth’s experience, the “persecuting spirit” was a fascist regime of any kind, ranging from Communist dictatorships to dictatorial female partners. He vehemently opposed fascism as part of his timely national political identity, but more so, he rejected the idea, like many Americans, that he be excluded from enjoying his personal liberties because of another’s selfserving authoritarian moral judgment. In the modern era, the “persecuting spirit” is another way of thinking about cancel culture. In fact, current definitions of cancel culture refer back to The Scarlet Letter because the Puritan theocracy in America’s colonial origin story (think: stockades and pillories) and Hester Prynne’s suffering are both tropes that explain cancel culture as the regression of liberal democracy. In writing for The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum (2021) compares cancel culture to the Puritans’ “strict conformism, their narrow minds and their hypocrisy” in the doling out of “unfair punishment.” Similarly, Ligaya Mishan (2020), for The New York Times, cites the public jeering and social outcasting of Hester Prynne as an example of what happens when a scapegoat is “demonized, forced to bear and incarnate everyone’s guilt, on top of their own.” Both Applebaum and Mishan question whether cancel culture is a progressive form of justice for the abused and powerless—a radical way to change social codes for the better;

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or whether cancel culture is a cruel vengeance against powerful people whose behavior is of a de-popularized world order, a fascist elision of weakening mechanisms of justice meant to crush one’s public influence and personal reputation, to shame a person out of cultural cachet. Early in his career, when his first short stories were published containing unfavorable Jewish characters, Roth brushed with cancel culture on a small scale. A number of mid-twentiethcentury Jewish Americans, nervous about antisemitism at home and abroad, aimed to deplatform Roth for his provocative irreverence. He was invited to defend himself, alongside Ralph Ellison and Pietro di Donato, in the 1962 Yeshiva University conference entitled, “A Study in Artistic Conscience: Conflict of Loyalties in Minority Writers of Fiction”—an event ingrained in Roth’s small-“t” trauma history, which he remembers as a “trial (in every sense)” (F 127). He imagined this trial as a sort of witch trial, where he was careful to fend “against an interrogator’s altering the context in which [his] argument was being made” (F 127). An audio recording of the conference reveals Roth’s unhinged misreading of the night: while the Yeshiva audience laughed at the humor in Roth’s articulate address and clapped heartily at the close of the recording, Roth’s witch trial narrative casts him as the victim, a scapegoat for Jewish self-hatred and fear.2 Any effort to stifle Roth’s ascension only stoked his all-American identity, one resistant to false moral authority and bent on personal liberties in the land of free speech. He understood the negative attention as “the luckiest break I could have had” (F 130), and he crafted the foundation of his career upon his redemption. Roth’s redemption was important to him, for he desired an authorial legacy, one with historical significance, like the legacy of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the namesake of Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. Yet Roth’s redemption was short-lived. With the rise of feminism in the 1970s, Roth’s sexualized portrayals of women in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and My Life as a Man (1974) incited accusations of misogyny that snowballed for decades. Once again, Roth wrote stories that fought back. Notably, Sabbath’s Theater (1995), from which Roth read aloud to celebrate himself on his eightieth birthday, figuratively urinated on the very concept of sanctity. In more traditionally reflexive later novels—especially The Human Stain (2000), The Dying Animal (2001), Exit Ghost (2007), and Indignation (2008)—Roth makes closing arguments for his redemption in depiction of race, ethnicity, and women. Moreover, nearing the end of his career and obsessed with his posthumous reputation, these novels are Roth’s plea, not for forgiveness, but for empathy, an identification with the baseness and depravity of all humanity. Roth understood, of course, the dangers of the “persecuting spirit,” so he sought to control his reputation from beyond the grave, ordering that his archive be destroyed at his authorized biographer’s behest. Unfortunately, the authorized biography made things worse: Roth revealed a gleeful foray into prostitution, a revel of infidelity, and petty score-settling with ex-wives and women who had rejected him. Nostalgically, Roth recalled to Bailey the good old days when he could sleep with his young female students, lamenting that, nowadays, “you go to feminist prison” (Bailey 2021: 655). Cringeworthy as the nearly ubiquitous social norms reflected in Roth’s male privilege may be, a handful of commentators came to his defense. For example, Hadley Freeman (2021) wrote in The Guardian: “no one can accuse Roth of ever hiding who he was: American, Jewish, obsessed with sex, obsessed with death, funny, angry, wise, profane, imaginative, cruel. That is what readers always liked about him. Reducing him to one aspect of his biography is like reading the York Notes version of his books.” And Suzanne Harrington (2021) declared in The Irish Examiner: “Cancelling people whose views we find revolting is the cultural equivalent of bleaching our house so thoroughly we destroy our immune system and all die of cleanliness. Pressing delete is digital Maoism.”

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In Spectator World, Damian Reilly (2021) refuted the cancel culture impulse “to make artist and art inseparable, and … go after both as one.” Then, allegations of sexual misconduct against Roth’s sanctioned biographer, Blake Bailey, compelled readers to renew the most recent cancel culture debates facing Roth today. Headlines following the release of his biography doubled down on attacks against Roth’s reputation. The Daily Mail ran “Pulitzer Prize-winning author Phillip Roth [sic] could get CANCELED after his biographers posthumously reveal his ‘misogyny and sexual depravity’” (Schrader 2021), while MSNBC said, “Blake Bailey Upheld Philip Roth’s Reputation in the Worst Way” (Gray 2021). The City Journal called out Roth for “Liberal Hypocrisy” (Siegel 2021), and Salon claimed, “From Beyond the Grave, Philip Roth Cancels Himself” (Truscott 2021). The American novelist Sandra Newman said, “[Roth’s] books are on the wrong side of MeToo” (Freeman 2021). And Laura Marsh, in The New Republic, critiqued Roth’s “failures of the imagination—his lack of interest in the inner lives of women, his limited ability to reconcile his own experiences of pain with the co-existence of others’ suffering” (Marsh 2021). Certainly, even Roth’s biggest fans took the media’s cultural criticism to heart: society has prioritized male power and rewarded male entitlement for far too long. For Roth scholars, perhaps the most amusing coverage in the media was the eerie notion that Roth had somehow, dead or alive, purposefully puppeteered the biography and Bailey’s demise. Roth had so fantasized about spinning his post-mortem narrative. Had he pulled it off? Andrew Anthony (2021) wrote, “The themes, the moral issues and the ironies involved in the rise and fall of both the book [the biography] and its author [Blake Bailey] were all so conspicuously pointed, as if they had been conceived by a hack writer seeking to pay homage to a more skilled documenter of cultural conflict like, say, Roth himself.” The real-life plot twists of the biography’s fallout felt like the meta-moves of Roth’s fiction, and given the endless market for cancel culture combat, efforts to blot out Roth’s name may actually incentivize readership. Jacques Berlinerblau (2021) points out that “Roth … virtually pioneered a response to the outrage he provoked: he used his own art to ponder (and ding) people who disliked his art,” lighting the way for other controversial artists, like the comedians Louis C.K. and David Chappelle, to do the same. The public cultural conversations carried out by controversial artists, however “immature,” continue in the deep tradition of America letters begun by Emerson, Melville, and Henry James (Posnock 2008). Perhaps Roth gets the last laugh, for it was in this context that he wanted to be remembered. Roth firmly establishes himself in their tradition of American letters with his end-of-thecentury American Trilogy, the capstone of which was The Human Stain, a novel set against “the persecuting spirit” of Hawthorne’s New England, “most identified, historically, with the American individualist’s resistance to coercions of a censorious community” (HS 310). Fast-forward to the Clinton-Lewinsky-era of “righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish … and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America” (HS 2–3), and here, Roth bouts against cancel culture transformed into an alterego named Coleman Silk, a Black-boxer-turned-Jewish-Classics-professor whose lifework is summed up in a denigrating news headline: “Ex-Dean Leaves College under Racist Cloud” (HS 76). Silk finds himself “engulfed” with “indignation” when he is labeled racist. Because of his Blackness, it seems to him that nothing could be more impossible, more unknowing: “creating their false image of him, calling him everything that he wasn’t and could never be, they had … misrepresented a professional career conducted with the utmost seriousness and dedication” (HS 11).

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These headlines are complicated by an affair with Faunia Farley, a woman half Silk’s age— and the ire of Delphine Roux, whose character represents the feminist backlash against reallife Roth. Silk well-considers the dangers of his rage: “Indignation on such a scale was a form of madness, and one to which he could succumb. He knew that indignation like this could lead to no orderly approach to the problem” (HS 63). This madness and lack of order illustrate Roth’s rejection of “adulthood” (Posnock 2008: 4) and “dogma, authority, bounded form—all that insulates one from a more open, less censored engagement with the moment” (11), that which unites him with earlier American writers. Roth explores the feeling of being canceled, the options that present themselves in a moment of focused blame and revocation. Over and over, he leans on the term “indignation,” the feeling of unfair accusation, which would become the title of a later novel. Silk could have apologized, as his son implored, except that an apology would be an admission of guilt for a crime he felt he did not commit. Anyway, those who cancel usually reject apologies. Anne Applebaum (2021) says, “Instead … they want ‘to punish and purify.’ [An apology] is going to be considered a move in a psychological or cultural or political game— then the integrity of your introspection is being mocked and you feel permanently marooned in a world of unforgivingness.” Silk found himself marooned like Hester Prynne, where “simply to make the accusation is to prove it. To hear the allegation is to believe it. No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or rationale is required. Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic” (HS 290). Silk’s reality is a world without due process, and a world without the mistake/apology/understanding/forgiveness paradigm, where one is ordered to display false contrition. But he wanted “to live beyond the jurisdiction of their enraging, loathsome, stupid blame” (HS 64), and he tried to follow his boxer’s mantra, “don’t get mad, just focus and use it against them” (HS 95). Attempting to make order of the madness, Silk turns to Nathan Zuckerman to write his side of the story, just as Roth himself turned to Zuckerman to do the same. What Roth/Silk wanted from Zuckerman was someone to see “all the million circumstances of the other fellow’s life, of that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of human biography” and a way to remind us “why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong” (HS 22). Zuckerman was to play detective, litigator, and biographer, to make room for possibilities, and to exhaust innocent until proven guilty in a way that Roth’s authorized biographer did not. The difference between Roth/Zuckerman (a figment of Roth’s imagination) and Roth/Bailey (an actual other person) is corporeal and cerebral. Unlike his biographer, Roth has been accused of psychic rage against women who failed to nurture his narcissism, but not rape. Critics of the biography do not sense contrition for Roth’s misogyny because he doesn’t believe he hates women. Roth considers pleasure-seeking as a basic human right for a man in his position, of his time, for this practice was widespread in the second half of the twentieth century. Reading Roth in the 2020s with Generation Z college students, one realizes how drastically social norms have changed since the turn of the century, let alone since the beginning of Roth’s long career. These changed norms make all the more interesting Roth’s cataloging of intergenerational cultural conflicts. For example, in Silk’s time as a young dean, he was a social justice leader, hiring the first (non-passing) Black man in his department, but as an older dean, having hired Delphine Roux “because she was so goddamn enticing,” his behavior is obviously no longer acceptable. Roth self-satirizes the intergenerational conflict in that moment when Roux informs Silk of his “fossilized pedagogy”; she says, “you’ve been out of the classroom for a very long time” (HS 193). And there is no better discipline than the old-fashioned Classics to showcase this lapse of time. When Silk’s female student complains that Euripides’ tragedies

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were “degrading to women,” he insists that her idiocy is beyond correction. Neither party is willing to learn from the other. Both sides have shut down their capacity for empathy. If humanities-style close reading and connective thinking is the foundation for an empathetic and democratic society, then Roth depicts that foundation crumbling. Roth juxtaposes old Classics with new feminism to mourn the loss of historical context gleaned through reading skills. Silk brands his students “far and away the dumbest generation in American history” (HS 192), critically incompetent parrots performing brainwashed activism, without the literacy skills to disarm cancel culture-esque propaganda. Roth gives much of the novel to a discussion of types and causes of illiteracy and mourns illiteracy among young people in the novel’s powerful ending. Silk’s sister ultimately blames poor reading skills for his demise: “Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it’s the classics that are to blame” (HS 330). Essentially, Roth argues that poor reading skills and the lack of historical contextualization are the reasons people misconstrue art. He thematically nods to Hippolytus (428 BC) here to show how societal conflicts that pit chastity against eros are part of an infinite cycle. In Roth’s next novel, The Dying Animal, narrated by his alter ego David Kepesh, Roth takes on the chastity-eros dichotomy, testing readers with a plotline that digs into generational sexual norms. The novel opens with an intentionally sickening farce of the protagonist’s professorial grooming of young female students, which he has been forced to adjust with the times: “I don’t any longer get in touch with them on a private basis until they’ve completed their final exam and received their grade” (DA 5).3 Kepesh says that his behavior changed when someone posted a sexual harassment hotline number outside his office door, but he takes the time to defend and situate his former actions with a history lesson on the sexual revolution. He offers his take on the sexual environment of the 1950s: One wasn’t an enfranchised man in the sexual realm while I was growing up. … One was a thief in the sexual realm. You “copped” a feel. You stole sex. You cajoled, you begged, you flattered, you insisted—all sex had to be struggled for, against the values if not the will of the girl. The set of rules was that you had to impose your will on her. That’s how she was taught to maintain the spectacle of her virtue. (DA 66) He contrasts this culture of male disenfranchisement, where one was apparently obliged to pressure and rape women, with the sea of rights afforded by sexual revolution of the 1970s, an era which Kepesh recalls with nostalgic rapture. He summons the memory of his former female students, whose sexual empowerment was born of women’s liberation: “They weren’t interested in replacing the old inhibitions and prohibitions and moral instruction with new forms of surveillance and new systems of control and a new set of orthodox beliefs” (DA 57). Kepesh basks in an era when women had “democratized the entitlement to pleasure” (DA 58), when he believed women behaved as sexual equals to men. This kind of equality, in Roth/Kepesh’s thinking, most aligned with America’s “key documents … all directed at guaranteeing individual liberty … as long as the behavior is lawful” (DA 81). The historical narrative Roth chronicles in this set of quotes is Roth’s account of his own sexual reckoning and evolution in America. So all-American, Roth again references Hawthorne to ground himself, conjuring the sexual “jollity” among anti-Puritans in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” to justify his pursuit of pleasure (DA 58). Symbolic as the May-Pole, the shock value of Kepesh’s narration compels the reader’s moral judgment so that Kepesh may redeem himself by the end of the story. But an America in which sex is decriminalized

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is the not the same as an America in which men are “enfranchised,” or given “the right to sex” (Srinivasan 2021). Two decades later, America has been rocked beyond the ClintonLewinsky scandal; Elliot Rodger, Brock Turner, R. Kelly, Brett Kavanaugh, and Harvey Weinstein are the results of “entitlement” culture. Kepesh/Roth’s defense, a celebration of women’s right to sex, even lawfully, does not hold up now because we know more than Roth claims to know about how systemic male privilege underwrites violence against women. As Roth dolefully ages out of that system, he paints Kepesh as “the amusing portrait of the profligate wickedness of the shameful father,” meaning he acknowledges his repellence, if only to defend the repellent’s existence in a way that could lead to redemption (DA 79). The story of how Kepesh’s consensual affair with twenty-four-year-old Consuela (note the resemblance of the italicized terms) brought them both a sort of familiar, if not primal comfort (“consuela” in Spanish) is an explanation of human relationships in all their repellence. Consuela, before undergoing a mastectomy at age thirty-two, yearns to be the object of Kepesh’s male gaze. As she poses naked for his camera, she experiences Kepesh’s affirmation of her sexual power. And Kepesh delivers more to her than he thought himself capable: legitimately ethical caring. Kepesh learns to let the pain of love in, an unlikely atonement for his wickedness (Jaffe 2021: 198). After The Dying Animal, Roth’s last novels vacillate between his end-of-life sexual humbling (Everyman [2006], The Humbling [2009]) and a clear departure from eros (The Plot against America [2004], Nemesis [2010]). In his departure from eros, Roth proves that he is more than the cancel culture debate over his work. Still, he is worried about his legacy, and he dwells on how eros has affected life and legacy in Exit Ghost. The novel is set between New York City and the Berkshires, symbolic of public and private, new and old, cell-phone zombies and nature preserve relics. On the streets of New York, Zuckerman is “stunned” that women dressing “with neither shame nor fear … meant that they weren’t there only to be looked at”; they are not freely “available” to men (EG 65–6). If he had his way, he would be “back to the tranquil Berkshires” (66). His reclusivity, he implies, was a deliberate measure taken to keep others out of his affairs. A stay in New York means temptation, the danger of waking his choked eros. Along 71st Street, he reflects, wisened: Of course this is the wrong thing to do, … but … what is the right thing to do, the sane thing, and who am I to claim that I ever knew enough to do it? I did what I did—that’s all one knows looking backward. I made the ordeal that was mine out of the inspiration and the ineptitude that were mine—the inspiration was the ineptitude. (EG 31) At the moment of this reckoning, Jamie Logan appears, a young love interest whose rejection sends Zuckerman emotionally spiraling to his death. Eros wins …. But not before a rant against the media and biographers. In real life, Roth was known for his reluctance with the press and distrust of literary researchers (Bohlen 2011). In Exit Ghost, Zuckerman voices Roth’s complaints. He says, “New York was full of people motivated by ‘the spirit of inquiry,’ and not all of them were ethically up for the job” (EG 51). Zuckerman calls journalistic jabs at a writer’s personal life “sensationalist cultural vandalism masquerading as a responsible newspaper’s devotion to ‘the arts’” (EG 184). The “ethics” of “the arts” is a defining topic of cancel culture that existed beside and before Roth, but the attack on the ethics of biographers is uniquely Rothian—and uncanny given Bailey’s own reputation. Roth referred to biographers as “imposters” who “blemish

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everything and everyone, and pass it off as the truth”—ironic because he invented so many imposters of himself that were interpreted as the real him (EG 195). Would-be biographers are forewarned: “dirt-seeking snooping calling itself research is just about the lowest of literary rackets” (EG 102), and the word “literary rackets” newly confronts recent decisions in “the arts” about who benefits from the writing of criminals. Specifically, Bailey’s literary agent and publisher both unilaterally “canceled” ties to Bailey and the biography (AP 2021), while Roth scholars shouted from the wings to gain access to the biographer-only archive. Meanwhile, as Debra Shostak (2012) points out, Roth’s anxiety about how celebrity would erase the truths of his private selfhood gave him “existential vertigo” (88). In this sense, Indignation reads like a legal fight over the right to selfhood. The young protagonist, Marcus Messner, as defendant, calls to mind his layers of individuation, both child from parent and person from group. First, he faces his overprotective father: “I will not make an inventory of my attributes for people or mention my goddamn sense of duty. I will not take one more round of his ridiculous, nonsensical crap” (I 11). He is only free to be himself, individuated, when he no longer needs approval to be himself, when he accepts that he can go on despite feeling shamed and bound by others’ expectations. Yet finally free of the father, Marcus faces off with fascism on the local and global levels. Away at college in the Midwest, he is questioned by the dean regarding his social reclusivity and religious values. Marcus, lawyer-in-training, sounds off: I object to being interrogated like this. I don’t see the purpose of it. I don’t see why I should be expected to answer questions about my relations with my roommates or my association with my religion or my appraisal of anyone else’s religion. Those are my own private affairs, as is my social life and how I conduct it. I am breaking no laws. (I 99) The courtroom language of objection and “interrogation” dramatize Roth’s fantasy of the right to selfhood and the right to privacy, as well as a general respect for “the law.” These rights are so important that Marcus, drafted into the Korean war, dies fighting against dictatorial regimes. He dies so young because he inanely loses the right to selfhood with the dean at the local level only to die for it on the national level. Marcus’s untimely death, however, facilitates the narrative mechanism that allows his argument for selfhood to continue. And because Marcus can still tell his story even though he is dead, Indignation makes it easy to imagine Roth himself speaking from the grave in response to his critics, which is why the absurd idea that he manufactured the failure of his authorized biography is so tantalizing. If Roth could come back from the other side, he would defend himself in all the ways his doubles do. Coleman Silk, David Kepesh, Nathan Zuckerman, and Marcus Messner all face shame and seek redemption and understanding, which they never experience. All of them entrenched in the academy, they learn to face the predicament that Emerson (1882) anticipates: “Even the scholar is not safe; he too is searched and revised. Is his learning dead? Is he living in his memory?” (221). Emerson elicits a distinction between “dead” as in outdated or “revised”—and “dead” as in “searched” and subsequently canceled. There is no guarantee that writers famous in their time will be canonized in perpetuity. Perhaps “living in his memory,” as Marcus is (“memory” being “the all-embracing medium in which I am being sustained as ‘myself’” [I 55]), is the closest experience of selfhood. But even memory cannot

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be fully trusted. Even memory is a fiction. When the fiction writer loses the ability to tell stories, someone else is authorized to make up the story: The man in control of the words, the man making up the stories all his life, winds up, after death, remembered, if at all, for a story made up about him, his covert brand of baseness discovered and described with uncompromising candor, clarity, self-certainty, with grave concern for the most delicate issues of morality, and with no small measure of delight. (EG 275) The question is, what of Roth’s selfhood will endure? How will Roth be remembered? Even as academics continue their work in Roth Studies—with unsanctioned biographies by Ira Nadel (2021) and Steven Zipperstein (forthcoming); the biannual, peer-reviewed international journal Philip Roth Studies; and recent collections of Roth scholarship (McKinley 2021)—the answer Roth might hope for is that he would have a place on the library shelf with the likes of Hawthorne and Emerson, so that like his Library of America fellows, he sustains postmortem power, his voice climbing from the page into a reader’s mind centuries into the future. In a way, Roth’s collection at the Newark Public Library is the best assurance of that outcome. The library helps to contextualize all that Roth wrote. His library donation directed his critics to engage in due diligence. Imagine Roth gesture: Just read these books. I’ve made notes in the margins. Get back to me about cancel culture when you’re done! The library is Roth’s most fitting legacy because it represents 7,000 volumes, snowflakes in “that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of human biography,” that influenced Roth’s thinking. His place is in his own books, among those volumes that inspired him, which have some connection to everything—tasteful or not— that Roth inspires.

NOTES 1. Many thanks to Nadine Giron, curator of the Philip Roth Library in Newark, NJ, for her dedication to keeping Roth’s book collection accessible. 2. “Conflicts Depicting Race and Ethnicity in Fiction, 1962 and 2021.” November 16, 2021. Philip Roth Personal Library Event. 3. The grooming practices that Roth describes are especially unnerving given the accusations against his authorized biographer, which stipulate that he began grooming students as young as twelve.

REFERENCES Anthony, Andrew (2021), “Philip Roth, Blake Bailey, and Publishing in Post-MeToo Era,” The Guardian, June 27. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/27/philip-rothblake-bailey-publishing-metoo-ww-norton (accessed December 25, 2021). AP (2021), “Publisher Cancels Philip Roth Biography after Sexual Abuse Claims against Blake Bailey,” The Guardian, April 27. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/28/ publisher-cancels-philip-roth-biography-after-sexual-abuse-claims-against-blake-bailey (accessed December 25, 2021). Applebaum, Anne (2021), “The New Puritans,” The Atlantic, August 31. Available online: https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/ (accessed November 18, 2021).

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Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, New York: Norton Berlinerblau, Jacques (2021), “From Philip Roth to Dave Chappelle: How an Artist’s ‘Meta Move’ Fuels an Endless Cancel Culture War,” Salon, November 17. Available online: https://www. salon.com/2021/11/17/philip-roth-dave-chappelle-cancel-culture-meta-move/ (accessed December 25, 2021). Bohlen, Celeste (2011), “The Rare Unfurling of Philip Roth,” New York Times, September 15. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/arts/16iht-Roth16.html (accessed December 26, 2021). Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1882), “The Method of Nature,” in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II, London: George Bell and Sons. Freeman, Hadley (2021), “New Biography Unveils Philip Roth as Misogynist: Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” The Guardian, April 3. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2021/apr/03/new-biography-unveils-philip-roth-as-misogynist-tell-me-something-idont-know (accessed December 26, 2021). Gray, Emma (2021), “Blake Bailey Upheld Philip Roth’s Legacy in the Worst Way,” MSNBC, May 5. Available online: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/blake-bailey-upheld-philip-roth-s-legacy-worstway-n1266340 (accessed December 26, 2021). Harrington, Suzanne (2021), “Cancel Culture Literally Cancels Culture, It Sucks,” Irish Examiner, May 5. Available online: https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-40280132.html (accessed December 26, 2021). Jaffe, Miriam (2021), “Narrative Medicine,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 194–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marsh, Laura (2021), “Philip Roth’s Revenge Fantasy,” New Republic, March 22. Available online: https://newrepublic.com/article/161640/philip-roths-revenge-fantasy-review-blake-bailey (accessed December 21, 2021). McKinley, Maggie, ed. (2021), Philip Roth in Context, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. Mishan, Ligaya (2020), “The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture,” New York Times Style Magazine, December 3. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/t-magazine/cancelculture-history.html?searchResultPosition=8 (accessed November 18, 2021). Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, New York, NY: Oxford UP Posnock, Ross (2008), Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Reilly, Damian (2021), “The Plot against Philip Roth,” Spectator World, March 22. Available online: https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/plot-against-philip-roth-metoo-cancel-culture/ (accessed December 25, 2021). Roth, Philip (1997), The Facts, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001), The Human Stain, New York: Vintage. Roth Philip (2002), The Dying Animal, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2007), Exit Ghost, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2008), Indignation, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Schrader, Adam (2021), “Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Phillip Roth Could Get CANCELED after His Biographers Posthumously Reveal His ‘Misogyny and Sexual Depravity,’” Daily Mail, March 21. Available online: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9384995/Phillip-Roth-face-gettingcancelled-biographers-posthumously-reveal-misogyny.html (accessed December 26, 2021). Shostak, Debra (2012), “‘Into Thin Air’: Roth and Celebrity Culture,” in Aimee Pozorski (ed.), Roth and Celebrity, 85–100, Lanham: Lexington. Siegel, Lee (2021), “Philip Roth, His Biographer, and Liberal Hypocrisy,” City Journal, April 23. Available online: https://www.city-journal.org/philip-roth-blake-bailey-liberal-hypocrisy (accessed December 26, 2021). Srinivasan, Amia (2021), The Right to Sex, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giraux. Truscott, Lucien (2021), “From beyond the Grave, Philip Roth Cancels Himself,” Salon, April 24. Available online: https://www.salon.com/2021/04/24/from-beyond-the-grave-philip-roth-cancelshimself/ (accessed December 26, 2021).

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Counter-Roths: Nicole Krauss, Lisa Halliday, and Roth’s Legacy MICHAEL KALISCH

Speaking at an event in 2013 to mark Roth’s eightieth birthday, the novelist Jonathan Lethem observed that it is the “fate” of a writer such as Roth, whose major phases sprawl across decades, whose work encompasses and transcends modes of historical fiction, metafiction, memoir … the sort of writer who in his generosity half blots out the sky of possibility for those who come along after … to generate in his ambitious followers a sort of army of Counter-Roths. I’ll say it simply: the one certainty in my generation of writers … is that we all have some feeling about Roth. We can’t not. (Lethem 2017: 44) Other “Counter-Roths” agree. For Joshua Cohen—whose 2010 novel Witz is “two-thirds David Foster Wallace to one third Philip Roth” (Sansom 2017)—Roth was “the True Judge … All I could do was … give myself up completely to his power” (Cohen 2018). Arguing that Roth’s work “made possible … a new kind of ‘I’ in the world” (338), Zadie Smith (2018) writes of how she “took from Roth the liberty to create free characters behaving with freedom, independent of obligation” (340). Lethem (2011), meanwhile, acknowledges using “the Philip Roth trick, the Zuckerman trick,” where “Roth allows Zuckerman to know more than he can possibly really be authorized to know” (168), in his novel Chronic City (2009), and Michael Chabon puts the same “trick” to good use in Moonglow (2017). David Brauner (2017) traces an affinity between Roth’s fiction and the “self-satirising, self-incriminating comedy” of recent works by Shalom Auslander and Gary Shteyngart, while Emily Miller Budick (2016) suggests a broader influence in her identification of The Ghost Writer (1979) as “the American text that first establishes the Holocaust as a topic of serious philosophical and cultural discussion” (344), clearing the way for a number of “third-generation” Jewish American writers in whose work the Shoah features prominently as a theme, including Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander—the group that David Sax (2009) labels “the New Yiddishists” and describes as “[o]ne part Isaac Bashevis Singer and one part Roth.” Roth’s influence on younger authors has been more pervasive than that of Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud; of the famed postwar generation of Jewish American writers, perhaps

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only Cynthia Ozick rivals Roth in this regard. As Lethem suggests, because of Roth’s longevity and the stylistic diversity of his work, his reception has been unusually wide-ranging, with an eclectic mix of contemporary writers responding to different aspects of his legacy. Often, his influence emerges in combination with that of other authors; for writers such as Cohen, Lethem, and, as I have suggested elsewhere (Kalisch 2017), Jonathan Franzen, Roth sits alongside precursors including Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Don DeLillo. But though diffuse and varied, Roth’s impact on contemporary writing can nevertheless be broadly schematized. First, as Miller Budick (2016) and Sax (2009) suggest, Roth’s work reveals new possibilities for Jewish American writing and, more generally, represents an important example of what Mark McGurl (2009) calls “high cultural pluralist” literature, his term for fiction that “joins the high literary values of modernism with a fascination with the experience of cultural difference and the authenticity of the ethnic voice” (32). Second, younger writers have been inspired by what Franzen (2013) calls Roth’s “heroic fearlessness of his readers’ moral judgments” (120)—that is, his willingness in his fiction to push an idea or a situation to its limits, often beyond the realm of propriety or good taste. “He’s written things down that seemed unsayable, impossible,” as Zadie Smith (2018) puts it, “and in taking this freedom for himself … passed the freedom down” (337). And third, Roth’s exploration of the boundary between fiction and autobiography—a career-long fascination, but especially important in My Life as a Man (1974) and The Counterlife (1986)—has been important to contemporary literature, not least to so-called “autofiction”; as the influence of overtly experimental “high postmodernist” writing has waned in the twenty-first century (Hoberek 2007), Roth’s brand of metafiction has proven to endure. From this general survey of Roth’s influence, we can move to a more closely focused discussion of two of the more unusual and intriguing “Counter-Roths” in contemporary fiction: Nicole Krauss and Lisa Halliday. Both writers had a personal connection to Roth, and their work bears the hallmark of his influence. But, rather than obscure the “sky of possibility,” to borrow Lethem’s phrase, Roth’s example seems to open up in their work the freedom to experiment with literary form and genre in ways akin to Roth and to pursue and adapt a number of Rothian themes explored elsewhere in this volume—namely those of Jewish and national identity and the legacies of the Holocaust. In their responses to his work, Krauss and Halliday depart from many of their contemporaries in portraying Roth as an international and cosmopolitan writer—a figure of “World” as much as “American” or “Jewish” literature—finely attuned to the complexities of diaspora, exile, and statelessness, concerns that animated Roth’s own times and continue to speak to our contemporary political moment.

THRESHOLDS Prior to the publication of her fourth novel, Forest Dark (2017), Krauss was discussed as a “paradigmatic” (Berger and Milbauer 2013: 64) third-generation Jewish American writer, her work exploring the intergenerational transmission of memory and trauma. Alan Berger and Asher Milbauer (2013) describe the “burden of inheritance” (64), both historical and literary, that third-generation Jewish American writers tend to carry, and this burden seems to have weighed heavily on Krauss earlier in her career. In a review of her most popular book, The History of Love (2005), Laura Miller (2005) calls Krauss “one of fiction’s most dutiful daughters,” suggesting that she has “written almost entirely under the influence of powerful

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literary forefathers,” especially Isaac Babel and Bruno Schulz. James Wood (2005) similarly suggests that the novel resembles a “sentimental pastiche of the kind of Jewish fiction Krauss adores—Singer, Malamud, Schulz, perhaps the Roth of the early stories.” While reviewers praised her work’s formal ingenuity—especially the interwoven narratives of Great House (2010)— Krauss’s “dutiful” engagement with the work of her precursors gave critics the impression of “an earnest A-student” (Miller Budick 2005) rather than an original literary talent. The reception of Forest Dark was markedly different. In her review, Ruth Margalit (2017) rejoices in finding in the novel “not only an insistence on its own formlessness but a general refusal to please.” “From the time I was a child,” writes Nicole, one of Forest Dark’s narrators, “I wanted to please,” and yet she has also always “resented the burden and the contortions it required” (Krauss 2017: 74). In Forest Dark, Krauss attempts to resist the burdens of expectation and obligation that marked her earlier work; no longer dutifully paying homage to her literary heroes, in this novel Krauss creatively responds to her influences—most notably, I will suggest, to Roth. Krauss began reading Roth at age twelve, but her relationship with the writer and his work deepened in 2007, when she wrote him a letter describing the “peculiar, sustaining solace” his fiction and his “lifelong examination of the writing mind” (Krauss 2018) had offered her. The letter inaugurated an “important friendship” (Nadel 2021: 432), and the pair would meet for coffee or at Roth’s Manhattan apartment to talk shop. On his death, Krauss wrote that part of the “complex lesson” Roth had passed on to her concerned the creative possibilities of “plundering from life” to write fiction that was “half exposing and half inventing” (Krauss 2021). She especially praised his exploration of “multiple, competing versions” of reality in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock (1993)—Roth’s “Israel-centered novels” (Budick 2007: 71), both of which shape Forest Dark, set mainly in Tel Aviv. In an interview, Krauss suggests that “Philip’s legacy … was about the valu[e] of wrestling, how far you can take wrestling” (Krauss 2020), a term she also uses in an essay on how Roth’s work is driven by “the desire to seize one’s freedom … without abandoning that to which we owe loyalty and love … to wrestle, and to persevere” (Krauss 2018). Krauss wrestles with the “complex lesson” of Roth’s work throughout Forest Dark, which is divided into two parallel narratives, one in first person, told by Nicole, the second in third person, focusing on Epstein. Nicole is a successful Jewish American writer who resembles Krauss. She is at a crossroads in her life, having “lost faith” (Krauss 2017: 43) in her marriage and hit an impasse in her work. Making a trip to Israel, Nicole takes up residence at the Tel Aviv Hilton, the hotel where she was conceived and spent many happy family holidays. “The idea of being in two places at once goes back a long way with me” (39), she writes, and her trip to Israel seems to intensify her “uncanny” (68) state of dislocation. But she also seeks to embrace a sense of uncertainty. Rather than begin with a coherent plan for her time in Israel, she sets herself the task of “swimming against the forceful current of understanding” (92). Nicole is something of a literary celebrity in Israel, stopped in the street by a woman who informs her that “reading my book was, for her, as good as spitting on Hitler’s grave (never mind that he doesn’t have one)” (76). She is told that she is “adding to the Jewish story” (74) with her work but finds the keen proprietorial pride of her Jewish audience stifling. “[T]he very first Jewish child was bound and nearly sacrificed,” she notes, and “the question of how to go on binding” (74) seems to continue to animate the Jewish community; Nicole’s story is that of a writer attempting to wrestle free of being bound too tightly. Epstein, a successful New York businessman, is also at a crossroads. Like Nicole, he embarks on an ambiguous mission of self-discovery to Israel, after his marriage has fallen apart. His quest leads him to

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Safed, home of Jewish mysticism, and to the Kabbalist concept of Tsimtzum—the idea that God “withdrew Himself, and in the void that was left, He created the world” (106). This concept works in counterpoint to Nicole’s interest in the “multiverse—the possibility that the universe actually contains many universes, perhaps even an infinite set of them” (45). These twinned ideas of absence and multiplicity become leitmotifs throughout the novel. Dan O’Brien (2021) suggests that Krauss “consciously reworks” (33) Operation Shylock in Forest Dark, and there are certainly parallels to Roth’s novel, and to The Counterlife. Thematically, all three books portray how a Jewish American writer’s experience in Israel leads them to question their Jewish identity and interrogate the extent to which the country is or should be, in Naomi Sokoloff’s (2016) phrase, “a Jewish center of gravity” (369), even for Jews living in the diaspora. Stylistically, Krauss’s use of parallel narratives recalls the form of The Counterlife, and Nicole’s narrative owes much to Operation Shylock’s fauxautobiographical narrator, “Philip Roth.” The theme of celebrity, meanwhile, is one that Roth explores in Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and which pervades both The Counterlife and Operation Shylock. But Krauss’s conscious reworking of Roth extends beyond this intertextual dialogue with his Israel books and can be traced through a shared creative engagement with the work of one of Roth’s own influences, Franz Kafka. Kafka became for Roth “something of an obsession in the 1970s” (Brauner 2007: 23). Roth visited Prague in 1972 expressly to see where Kafka had lived and to locate “the sites that are mentioned in his letters and diaries” (Roth 1976). His “pilgrimage” ended with a visit to Kafka’s grave, a scene fictionalized in The Professor of Desire (1977), where protagonist David Kepesh, following Jewish custom, places a pebble at Kafka’s gravesite, before noticing “the plaques [on] the cemetery wall, inscribed to the memory of Jewish citizens of Prague exterminated in Terezin, Auschwitz, Belsen, and Dachau. There are not pebbles enough to go around” (PD 176). As this scene suggests, Kafka offered Roth a way to approach the Holocaust in his work and to trace a link between his life in America and European Jewish history. But 1970s Prague faced a different totalitarian threat. In subsequent visits to the region, Roth became acquainted with dissident authors, and the contrast between life for a writer in the Soviet Union and in America made a lasting impression, leading Roth to establish the “Writers from the Other Europe” series, which brought to an English-language audience the work of a host of Middle and Eastern European novelists; Krauss would credit the series with introducing her to the work of Schulz (Nadel 2021: 281). Kafka became “synonymous” for Roth “with intellectual life behind the Iron Curtain, with Kafka’s forever-stymied protagonists the precursors to modern day K.s, faced with the … absurdities imposed by the Soviets” (Gooblar 2011: 72). At the same time, Roth appears to have felt a strong personal affinity with the Czech writer. This complex identification becomes the starting point for Roth’s “quietly radical work” (Pierpont 2013: 89), “Looking at Kafka” (1973). Opening with Roth contemplating a photograph of Kafka taken “at the age of forty (my age)” (RMO 281), the piece begins with an overview of Kafka’s biography. Roth notes that Kafka “died too soon for the holocaust” (282), “introducing,” Claudia Roth Pierpont (2013) observes, “the no longer new if not yet capitalized historical term into his prose” for the first time (89). Had he not died from tuberculosis in 1924, Roth wonders, would Kafka have been spared the fate of his three sisters, who all perished in the camps? Would he perhaps have emigrated to Palestine, as his friend and literary executor Max Brod did, and as Kafka had said he wished to do in a letter to his lover, Felice Bauer? Or to America, to Princeton, where by the late 1930s he was celebrated by the likes of Thomas Mann? But “had Kafka lived,” Roth speculates, “it is not at all certain” that his books would

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have been published; he would not have been “Mann’s ‘religious humorist’” (RMO 282), “just a Jew lucky enough to have escaped” (283). In the second section, essay gives way to fiction: Kafka has escaped to America after all—not to Princeton, but to Newark, where he becomes a Hebrew teacher; in his class, a nine-year-old Philip Roth. Roth’s parents play matchmaker, setting up the lonely refugee with Philip’s Aunt Rhoda. Thus, there is briefly (before the courtship and the counterfactual collapse) the prospect of Roth becoming Kafka’s nephew; a similar fantasy of affiliation propels The Ghost Writer, where Zuckerman imagines marrying Anne Frank. In both texts, Roth binds himself to Jewish history while also straining against it, finding in this daring blend of fact and fiction a way to “wrestle” in his writing with the legacies of the Holocaust and their bearing on American Jewish identity. Kafka is a similarly ambivalent figure of identification in Krauss’s novel. Nicole is approached by Friedman, an emeritus Literature professor, with some information regarding the location of a stash of Kafka’s manuscripts, in the possession of “the now elderly daughter of Brod’s lover, Esther Hoffe” (Krauss 2017: 88). Nicole becomes intrigued by the manuscripts, at which point Friedman “reveals” that Kafka didn’t die in 1924 but lived under a false name in Israel until his death in 1956. Relaying what Friedman tells her, Nicole describes how Kafka found quiet satisfaction working as a gardener on a kibbutz while Brod promoted his work and perpetuated the myth of his death. But Kafka did not ultimately find peace in the Holy Land; after learning of his sisters’ fate in Europe, he became “hounded by the idea that he would be found out,” Friedman tells Nicole, leaving the kibbutz to spend his final years roaming Tel Aviv, “restlessly moving around the city” (201). A year away from her fortieth birthday, Nicole contemplates the same photograph Roth uses to open “Looking at Kafka,” a photo “taken during the last year of his life” (115). Like Roth’s hybrid text, Krauss’s counterlife of Kafka blends fact and fiction, interweaving detail from the real-life legal wrangle over a cache of Kafka’s manuscripts that remain in the possession of Hoffe’s descendants. In the long-running trial, the National Library of Israel asserted ownership of the manuscripts based on the claim that Kafka is a Jewish writer, and that his work therefore belongs to the Jewish people and so to the Jewish State. As Nicole notes, this invokes “the tireless argument about just how Jewish Kafka really was” (125) and raises the question of whether Israel can and should make such claims on behalf of “the Jewish people.” In an essay on the trial, Judith Butler (2011) observes that the position of the National Library “relies on a conception of the nation of Israel that casts the Jewish population outside its territory as living in … a state of exile and despondency that should be reversed, and can be reversed only through a return to Israel.” This discourse of sovereignty and the Right of Return is particularly ill-fitting in Kafka’s case, Butler suggests, not only because of his well-known ambivalence about both his Jewishness and Zionism, but also because his work manifests a “poetic of non-arrival.” In his letter to Felice, Kafka declared his dream of escaping to Palestine; yet in his diaries and parables, Butler writes, we find “meditations on the question of going somewhere, of going over, of the impossibility of arrival,” which “seem to allegorize a way of checking the desire to emigrate to Palestine.” Butler argues that Kafka elaborates a diasporic aesthetics, his work charting “the departure from a common notion of place for a notion of perpetual non-arrival.” Nicole is similarly troubled by Israel’s claim to be “the representative and culmination of Jewish culture,” a claim that “depends on an overcoming of the Diaspora” and on the “notion that only in Israel can a Jew be authentically a Jew” (Krauss 2017: 270). Kafka was not a writer of nationhood, Nicole argues, but of “the threshold,” his fiction full of characters on “the threshold of happiness … of escape, of transformation”

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(135–6). The threshold names a form of dwelling between departure and arrival, a mode of being beyond the claims of ethnicity or the nation state, an interstitial existence that seems to match Nicole’s own precarious situation and dislocated frame of mind. As he had for Roth, Kafka thus becomes a complex and generative figure of identification and fantasy in Krauss’s novel, mediating her preoccupation with Jewish identity and belonging. As they had for Roth, Kafka’s fiction and the facts of his biography open up a space for Krauss to explore the aesthetic possibilities of mixing fact and fiction. Anticipating his engagement with the figure of Anne Frank in The Ghost Writer, Roth explores the affinities he sees between his own work and life and Kafka’s by imagining the Czech writer in America, domesticating him for comic effect, and letting the ironic disparity between his own comfortable childhood in Newark and Kafka’s lonely existence in Prague—a Prague at once of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation—play out, even as he ultimately dismisses the fantasy of Kafka escaping. By contrast, Krauss imagines Kafka in Israel, and so posits a more complicated homecoming, refracted through the real-life trial over where and to whom Kafka’s manuscripts belong, and reflecting her own ambivalence about the claims of the Jewish state on Jewish identity and culture—including on her own work. Krauss, too, will dismiss this fantasy of Kafka escaping; instead, she will portray Kafka as a writer of “nonarrival” and of “thresholds,” a writer who cultivated an exilic, diasporic authorial identity that Krauss—in this experimental novel of parallel narratives and multiple universes, of counterlives and psychic fragmentation—also seeks to claim.

CONSTELLATIONS Like Forest Dark, Asymmetry is a parallel narrative, though in Halliday’s novel the story of the seemingly autobiographical female character—Alice, an editorial assistant at a New York publishing house—is in third person, while the accompanying narrative, focusing on Iraqi American economist Amar Jaafari, is in first person. In an essay on parallel narratives, Halliday (2018b) explains that she became intrigued by how the form “simultaneously resists and pursues” conventional notions of “continuity and completion” by “juxtaposing narratives whose plots have no apparent … intersecting point.” Through such parallels, she writes, “a novelist might achieve a more realistic impression of the world’s multiplicity.” Halliday cites The Counterlife as an “astonishing” novel that “not only contains parallel narratives; its plot lines also brake, reverse and occasionally sideswipe one another,” exemplifying a central message of Roth’s work: “life’s a mess.” In Asymmetry, Ezra Blazer, an esteemed older novel writer who resembles Roth, reaches a similar conclusion. “[L]ife is all accident” (Halliday 2018a: 263), he says in a radio interview, the transcript of which forms the novel’s final section. His early work suffered because it didn’t acknowledge this fundamental fact. “Sometimes you just have to let your characters get on with it,” he reflects. “If their paths cross and they can teach each other something, fine. But if they don’t, well, that’s interesting too” (256). The novel’s reception was taken up with the question of to what extent Ezra is an accurate fictionalization of Roth and how much of the novel’s portrayal of the romance between Ezra and Alice is grounded in reality. Halliday and Roth did have a “larky affair” (Bailey 2021: 684), beginning in Spring 2002 and petering out three years later, when Halliday began seeing her future husband, to whom Asymmetry is dedicated. The pair remained friendly; along with Krauss, Halliday was among the small group who attended a party for Roth’s penultimate

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birthday in 2017, and he apparently “loved” Asymmetry (Bailey 2021: 795). Halliday both encouraged and played down the comparison between Ezra and Roth in a New York Times profile coinciding with the novel’s publication—“a very Roth-like two-step” (N. Smith 2018), as one reviewer archly noted. “Of course there are details of Alice’s life that overlap with my own, but so much is invented for the sake of the narrative,” Halliday told the Times. “Philip, more than anyone, knows that’s what writing is like” (Alter 2018). Mostly conducted in the famous writer’s Manhattan apartment, Ezra and Alice’s relationship revolves around a shared enjoyment of sex, baseball, and zany role play; we sample some of their back-and-forth in transcripts of telephone conversations, recalling the dialogic structure of Roth’s 1990 novel, Deception. It also mostly plays out on Ezra’s terms, though the two fall into a pattern of mutual dependency: Ezra offers Alice financial help, while Alice runs errands and cares for Ezra, who is in and out of hospital. Ezra introduces Alice to the work of his favorite writers, writers also important to Roth. On the Holocaust, Ezra recommends works by Primo Levi—whom Roth interviewed and greatly admired—and Hannah Arendt, who was, as Corey Robin (2021) notes in a recent essay, a “real presence” for Roth, though one that has tended to be overlooked by critics. “Arendt and Roth distinguished themselves” by “refusing the political pull and moral exaction of an embattled minority,” Robin writes, and thereby often found themselves at odds with the American Jewish establishment—Arendt especially so with Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), the work Ezra recommends to Alice. The Alice section of the novel—“Folly”—is interspersed with italicized block quotations from Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (1947) and Arendt’s work, and passages from Camus and Genet, among others. Thus, Ezra plays Pygmalion to Alice, offering her a literary education and introduction to his favorite music: she listens repeatedly to a work by Czech composer Leoš Janáček but “with each playing’” feels herself “less, rather than more, capable of comprehending its complexity” (Halliday 2018a: 109). The relationship is also an education for Alice in the discipline necessary to be a writer, in “being alone for as long as it took” (75). This is significant because Alice harbors her own literary ambitions, a topic on which Ezra has some typically strident advice. “Forget about world affairs … Don’t worry about importance” (Halliday 2018a: 70–1), he says, when Alice suggests that she wants her work to speak to the contemporary political moment because “writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough” (70) (the novel is set in the early 2000s, during the Iraq war). He advises her instead to draw on her own experience and family history, including her difficult relationship with her father, a conspiracy theorist who calls “to inform her … that not a single Jew had reported to work in the towers on the day they came down” (12). Ezra’s advice chimes with Alice’s own nagging doubts about her ability to imagine other people’s lives, as she is trying to do with her fledgling book idea: she grows uncertain “whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man” (71). Alice is torn between wanting to engage with the world and wanting to shelter from it, as Ezra in his old age has taken to do, whether in the bubble of his apartment or on his isolated island (a version of Roth’s Connecticut retreat). But the outside world sometimes penetrates these sanctuaries. As Alice and Ezra watch baseball, the voice of the TV commentator announces that “due to a technical error tonight’s game is being brought to you by AFN: the American Forces Network,” which delivers coverage to “our men and women in uniform” (89–90). The second section of the novel is narrated by Amar, who has been detained by immigration officials at Heathrow as he attempts to travel from the United States, where he received his doctorate in economics, to Iraqi Kurdistan, where his brother still lives. His

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narrative—“Madness”—is split into two alternating sections: the first, an account of his detention and interrogation at Heathrow, relayed mostly in dialogue, ironically recalling Alice and Ezra’s telephone conversations; the second, a longer, more descriptive account of his family’s experience in Iraq before and during the war, and his time spent in the United Kingdom and United States. We suspect that Amar’s narrative belongs to the book that Alice had been planning to write. If so, it would appear at first glance to be a clear refutation of Ezra’s advice: a narrative told from the perceptive of a Muslim man, dealing with “important” world events far removed from Alice’s immediate experience. On closer inspection, however, Amar’s narrative constitutes not a rejection but a subtle revision of Ezra’s guidance, much as Asymmetry can be read as both homage and rejoinder by Halliday to Roth’s influence. Amar’s story is a “funhouse version” (N. Smith 2018) of Alice’s narrative. His powerlessness during his encounters with immigration officials casts in a different light the imbalances—or asymmetries—structuring Ezra and Alice’s relationship, while his formal, detached narration recalls Alice’s “old-fashioned way of speaking” (N. Smith 2018). Amar also seems to have made his way through Ezra’s reading list and listening recommendations. His section includes references to Janáček (Halliday 2018a: 142), Levi (229), Arendt (221), and to Stephen Crane’s definition of an artist (“an artist is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways” [226]), the same quote that hangs above Ezra’s desk (10). So perhaps Alice is following Ezra’s advice and writing about herself after all, whilst ventriloquizing—à la Ezra and à la Roth—the voice of an imagined other. Or perhaps we might think of “Madness” as a transposition of—or variation on—“Folly,” to invoke two compositional terms suggested by the repeated allusions to music in both sections. The novel’s bifurcating parallel narratives also recall Roth’s structural experiment in The Counterlife, and, in Amar’s section, we more clearly see that Asymmetry is also preoccupied with some of the central themes of Roth’s novel, namely identity and belonging and their relation to ethnicity and nationhood. In both books, two brothers have divergent conceptions of the foundations of their identity. In Asymmetry, Amar’s brother Sami has rejected a comfortable life as a doctor in the States to return to Iraq to work at a hospital for corrective surgery, spending the war “staunching rocket wounds … and swaddling burns” (208). “Certainly, no one could accuse him of doing a job that did not matter” (208), Amar reflects—not true, perhaps, of an economist or a writer. In The Counterlife, Nathan Zuckerman’s brother Henry closes his dental practice and goes in search of a more authentic Jewish identity in a West Bank settlement, wishing, like Sami, to be closer to the epicenter of world events and to what he understands to be his ancestry. By contrast, Amar realizes that, willingly or not, he is a product of the Iraqi diaspora, more familiar with life in the United States than his socalled homeland, much as Nathan is in The Counterlife. “My landscape wasn’t the Negev wilderness,” Nathan writes, but “industrial, immigrant America” (C 53). Amar’s sense of place is more up in the air. Conceived in Baghdad to Iraqi parents but born on a plane in American airspace, he can claim dual nationality; but this ambiguation of roots results not so much in a multiplicity of attachments as an absence of them, a precarious form of statelessness worsened by the war and made vivid at border control. Surveying the ruins of Iraq’s capital, the phrase that comes to Amar’s mind is Primo Levi’s to describe the Bruna at Auschwitz: “Baghdad, to borrow four words from If This Is a Man, was the negation of beauty” (Halliday 2018a: 229). In such moments, Halliday’s novel considers the possibility of thinking comparatively about Iraqi and Jewish diasporic identities, and perhaps about the horrors of Iraq and the Holocaust. In doing so, Asymmetry might be

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said to take its lead from Arendt. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt pursues the “paradoxical task” of grappling with the “unprecedented nature” of the Holocaust “while simultaneously seeking the antecedent elements that help explain its possibility and marking the parallel phenomena that share its genus” (Rothberg 2009: 41). Instead of searching for origins, then, Arendt outlines a “disjunctive constellation linking anti-Semites, imperialism, and totalitarianism” (41). Her comparative approach reveals “the minority as a permanent institution” of the national imaginary and dispossession and the infringement of civil liberties as “inherent in the structure of the nation-state” (Arendt 1986: 275). In her postwar moment, Arendt writes that “an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons” comprises “the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics” (277). It’s a description that might also apply to the post-Iraq political context delineated in Asymmetry, a novel that, in its fragmented yet recursive narrative structure, attempts a kind of Arendtian “history by constellation” (Menand 2021: 109) of our own contemporary moment. In the case of both Krauss and Halliday, then, their reading of Roth leads them to explore forms of identity and historical imagination beyond ethnicity and the nation-state, and to examine the possibilities and costs of diaspora and exile. Krauss’s revisionary reading of Roth’s “Looking at Kafka” in Forest Dark celebrates Kafka as an artist at the “threshold,” slipping free from (though never ultimately escaping) the binds of Jewish literature, history, and nationalism. In Asymmetry, Halliday moves beyond simply fictionalizing Roth to engage with both the formal experimentation of his work and his thinking on the Holocaust, identity, and, as Ezra puts it near the end of the novel, “the extent to which we’re able to penetrate the looking-glass and imagine a life, indeed a consciousness, that goes some way to reduce the blind spots in our own” (Halliday 2018a: 261). Like Forest Dark, it is also a novel of thresholds, not least in the story of Amar’s Kafkaesque suspension between Arrivals and Departures at Heathrow. Much of Roth’s posthumous reputation has come to rest on the series of novels belonging to the so-called “national turn” (Cheyette 2013: 161) in his later work, and especially on the “American Trilogy.” But Krauss and Halliday suggest that one of the more generative ways for ambitious “Counter-Roths” to engage with his legacy might be to consider Roth’s long examination of border regions, diasporas, and the transnational—as a writer who is most at home on the threshold.

REFERENCES Alter, Alexandra (2018), “Lisa Halliday’s Debut Novel Is Drawing Comparisons to Philip Roth,” New York Times, February 2. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/books/in-lisahallidays-debut-novel-philip-roth.html (accessed July 25, 2022). Arendt, Hannah (1986), The Origins of Totalitarianism, London: André Deutsch. Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, London: Jonathan Cape. Berger, Alan L. and Asher Z. Milbauer (2013), “The Burden of Inheritance,” Shofar, 31 (3): 64–85. Brauner, David (2007), Philip Roth, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brauner, David (2017), “The Sons of Phil: Rothian Self-Satire and Self-Incrimination in Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament and Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure,” Open Library of Humanities, 3 (2). Available online: https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4456/ (accessed July 25, 2022). Butler, Judith (2011), “Who Owns Kafka?” London Review of Books, 33 (5): March 3, 2011. Available online: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-kafka (accessed June 20, 2022). Cheyette, Bryan (2013), Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History, New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Cohen, Joshua (2018), “The Cult of Philip Roth,” The New Republic, May 24. Available online: https://newrepublic.com/article/148509/cult-philip-roth (accessed June 20, 2022). Franzen, Jonathan (2013), The Kraus Project, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gooblar, David (2011), The Major Phases of Philip Roth, London: Continuum. Halliday, Lisa (2018a), Asymmetry, London: Granta. Halliday, Lisa (2018b), “Top 10 Parallel Narratives,” The Guardian, March 7. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/07/top-10-parallel-narratives (accessed June 20, 2022). Hoberek, Andrew (2007), “Introduction: After Postmodernism,” Twentieth-Century Literature, 53 (3): 233–47. Kalisch, Michael (2017), “Correcting Philip: Reading Franzen Reading Roth,” Philip Roth Studies, 13 (2): 21–38. Krauss, Nicole (2005), The History of Love, New York: Norton. Krauss, Nicole (2010), Great House, London: Penguin. Krauss, Nicole (2017), Forest Dark, London: Bloomsbury. Krauss, Nicole (2018), “The Presence of Philip Roth,” New Yorker, May 24. Available online: https:// www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-presence-of-philip-roth (accessed June 20, 2022). Krauss, Nicole (2020), “To Be a Man: Nicole Krauss with Judith Thurman,” Live From NYPL, YouTube, December 10. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdv1xkzIk2A&ab_ channel=TheNewYorkPublicLibrary (accessed July 25, 2022). Krauss, Nicole (2021), “Nicole Krauss: On Stealing from Life as a Livelihood,” Financial Times, February 26. Available online: https://www.ft.com/content/dddb39a5-ae51-47c6-8fb3e93ac7693887 (accessed June 20, 2022). Lethem, Jonathan (2011), “The Rumpus Long Interview with Jonathan Lethem,” in Jaime Clarke (ed.), Conversation with Jonathan Lethem, 165–74, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lethem, Jonathan (2017), “The Counter-Roth,” in Christopher Boucher (ed.), More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers, 41–8, New York: Melville House. Margalit, Ruth (2017), “The Voice of Authority,” New York Review of Books, December 21. Available online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/21/nicole-krauss-voice-authority/ (accessed June 20, 2022). McGurl, Mark (2009), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Menand, Louis (2021), The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Miller Budick, Emily (2007), “Roth and Israel,” in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 68–81, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller Budick, Emily (2016), “The Ghost of the Holocaust in the Construction of Jewish American Literature,” in Hana Wirth-Nesher (ed.), The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, 343–61, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Laura (2005), “Under the Influence,” New York Times, May 1. Available online: https://www. nytimes.com/2005/05/01/books/review/the-history-of-love-under-the-influence.html (accessed June 20, 2022). Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Brien, Dan (2021), “Literary Conversations,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 27–36, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierpont, Claudia Roth (2013), Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Robin, Corey (2021), “Arendt and Roth: An Uncanny Convergence,” New York Review of Books, May 12. Available online: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/05/12/arendt-roth-and-the-imperativeof-dissent/ (accessed June 20, 2022). Roth, Philip (1976), “In Search of Kafka and Other Answers,” New York Times, February 15. Available online: nytimes.com/1976/02/15/archives/in-search-of-kafka-and-other-answers.html (accessed June 20, 2022). Roth, Philip (1979), The Ghost Writer, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1981), Zuckerman Unbound, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Roth, Philip (1990), Deception, London: Jonathan Cape. Roth, Philip (1993), Operation Shylock, New York: Simon & Schuster. Roth, Philip (1996), The Counterlife, New York: Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2000), The Professor of Desire, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2007), Reading Myself and Others, London: Vintage. Rothberg, Michael (2009), Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sansom, Ian (2017), “Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen Review,” The Guardian, September 9. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/09/moving-kings-joshua-cohen-review (accessed June 20, 2022). Sax, David (2009), “The Rise of the New Yiddishists,” Vanity Fair, April 8. Available online: http:// www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/04/yiddishists200904 (accessed June 20, 2022). Smith, Namara (2018), “It’s Mister Softee,” London Review of Books, 40 (14): July 19. Available online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n14/namara-smith/it-s-mister-softee (accessed June 20, 2022). Smith, Zadie (2018), “The I Who Is Not Me,” in Feel Free, 333–48, London: Hamish Hamilton. Sokoloff, Naomi (2016), “Israel in the Jewish American Imagination,” in Hana Wirth-Nesher (ed.), The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, 362–78, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, James (2005), “Tides of Treacle,” London Review of Books, 27 (12): June 23. Available online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n12/james-wood/tides-of-treacle (accessed June 20, 2022).



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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Roth Abroad BRETT ASHLEY KAPLAN

INTRODUCTION Thanksgiving, 2014: I’m in Budapest, presenting at a Holocaust conference, and in between papers, wandering the beautiful, uneven streets constructed of cobblestones that feel as old and worn as time. I find some of the old synagogues, but they’re closed. I find the memorial on the banks of the Danube: metallic shoes perched on the edge of the incandescent water, as if their wearers just stepped out. And I can’t stop crying. One of the other conferees takes me to a hidden Holocaust memorial, names of victims engraved on a ribbon stretching around and embedded within the concrete cracks of brick walls. You would miss it if you didn’t know it was there. But once you find it, and you read the names, their specificity offers a moving contrast to the shoes. Budapest had been a vibrant scene of Jewish life before the war (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum n.d.). The only other time I’d been in Budapest, sometime in the early 1990s, it felt frozen in the gritty Soviet past, the train full of hulky guards with cracked leather straps, the air foul with pungent smoke. In the city, huge photographs of Jewish life before the war plastered the walls of a construction zone, a palimpsest of the lost past. On the 2014 trip, as I wander, I come across, in the window of a bookshop, a pink and yellow book featuring a silhouette of a crawling naked woman in stilettos. It’s (naturally) Hungarian Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), discounted. Forgetting for a moment Roth’s important work advocating for Central European writers in his “Writers from the Other Europe” series, forgetting for a moment that Roth had been to Budapest and had spent time in Prague, I wonder what on earth a Hungarian reader would make of Portnoy’s Complaint. Roth’s Prague and my experience of Budapest were shadowed by the Holocaust, and by one of Roth’s persistent questions: he (and his characters) often wonder, what if I’d been in Europe during the war? What if my grandparents had not emigrated to the United States? What if? And, in one of his “abroad” books, The Professor of Desire (1977), a Holocaust survivor arrives in the idyll of the Catskills and tells his story to Kepesh and the perfect Claire Ovington, the girlfriend Kepesh knows he will grow not to love. As was the case with The Ghost Writer (1979), in which Nathan Zuckerman imagines that a beautiful young woman with the evocative name of Amy Bellette was Anne Frank, survived, hiding purloined-Poe style in plain sight, in The Professor of Desire, strange juxtapositions between traumatic and sexual histories inhabit the texts. Roth always seemed so quintessentially American, so incredibly Jewish-American. Confronted in the middle of my melancholy flânerie with a garish cover of Hungarian Portnoy, I was having trouble grasping what a Hungarian reader might find in Roth—in

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FIGURE 27.1 Shoes on the Danube Promenade, Budapest, Can Togay and Gyula Pauer. Photo by author.

FIGURE 27.2  Holocaust Memorial, Budapest. Photo by author.

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FIGURE 27.3  Hungarian translation of Portnoy’s Complaint. Photo by author.

Portnoy’s Complaint, no less. How on earth could a book like Portnoy, so reliant for its humor on the exact cadences of East Coast Jewish-American comedic speech be translated? It’s been reported multiple times that Roth was a bit stuck before he realized that he could render the sorts of casual stand-up comedy that he delivered to friends in literary form. Before Portnoy, his writing was stuffier, more inflected with scrabbly bits of Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and other influencers. After Portnoy, his writing flowed in his own voice. And that very Jewish-American voice found an enormous international readership. His work has been translated into many languages (I haven’t been able to find an accurate count, but certainly: Chinese, Japanese, Russian, French, Italian, German, Hungarian, Finnish, Dutch, Hebrew, Polish, Spanish, and many others) and appreciated all over the world.1 So, there is something—dare I say it?—universal in his work that, nuances and specificities of neurotic Newark Jewish manhood aside, appeals across the globe. Like many American Jews, Roth’s characters are shadowed by the Holocaust and all of its what ifs and all of its inherent melancholias. This is one of the reasons Roth’s work appeals globally: he’s looking at the emotionalities of this European genocide through the lens of the American experience. But Roth’s global appeal also stems from other ways in which his exposures of anxieties and other human emotions transgress national borders.

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Multiple conferences on Roth have taken place all over the world, and I’ve met Roth scholars from Japan, India, France, Italy, Switzerland, among other countries. I was honored to be part of an excellent conference on Roth in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 2014, and, as Ira Nadel (2021) reports, there was a week-long conference entitled “The Roth Explosion” in the beautiful French city Aix-en-Provence (5), and doubtless many other Roth conferences in other places on our planet. My student Nobuto Sato, who works on Jewish-American, Japanese, and Yiddish literature, told me that Philip Roth is definitely one of the best-known American writers in Japan. Since Goodbye, Columbus was translated in 1969, most of his books were translated within 3-5 years after their original publication, which reflects the Japanese readership’s long-standing commitment to Roth. He was often seen as one of the trio of Jewish American writers with Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, but now, I think, he is read more in a broader context of postmodern literature.2 Another Comparative Literature student, Ragini Chakraborty, noted of Roth’s wide appeal in India: The popularity of Philip Roth was something that I became aware of during my undergraduate years in 2011/12. His The Plot against America had come out in 2004 and created quite a buzz in the following years. However, I feel Roth’s political writing resonates a lot with the current socio-political scenario in India and he is becoming a much talked about name both within the academia and outside.3 Indeed, the rise of populist fascism in India, Hungary, and other places around the world would make The Plot against America (2004), in particular, an especially resonant text. And I wonder how much of what Roth saw in Europe behind the Iron Curtain found its way into his very widely read counterfactual history. The question of “Roth Abroad,” then, can be tackled from a series of perspectives: biographically, what was Roth’s time spent abroad like? Fictionally, how do spaces beyond the United States, in the world outside of Weequahic, NJ, figure in Roth novels? And, finally, how was Roth received abroad? In what follows, I will first briefly turn to the three extant biographies (Nadel, Bailey, Pierpont) to recall how and when Roth traveled abroad. Then, I’ll zero in for a quick read of one of the “abroad” novels, The Professor of Desire. Why that one? Because this Kepesh book does something interesting with the layering of traumatic memory onto Kepesh’s memories of sexual development and unease.4 To answer the last question (how was Roth received abroad?), I reached out to scholars from France and Italy—to see anecdotally how Roth is received in these places that I focus on in the conclusion.

ROTH’S TIME ABROAD AND “WRITERS FROM THE OTHER EUROPE” To look at the biographical time Roth spent abroad I’m relying on the three biographies. But, before citing Blake Bailey’s tome, a caveat: I’m electing to use it because Roth allowed him, as his official biographer, significant access to details about his time in Europe. Roth wrote

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about three hundred pages of notes to Bailey.5 But it’s painfully evident within the book that Bailey chooses not to comment on and even seems to be silently smirking along with, some of the deeply unfortunate gender politics at play in Roth’s books and life. For example: unsurprisingly, perhaps, Bailey focuses his discussion of Roth’s time in Prague around young women. Jirí Mucha, Roth’s guide to the ancient city, promised him “anyone you want to fuck” (Bailey 2021: 383) and then “Mucha assured Roth that fifteen-year-old girls from all over the country flocked to his palazzo on Saturday nights for his famous parties” (383). Bailey doesn’t recoil here, as he might have, against Mucha’s promise of children for illegal and unethical acts. I find this disturbing and symptomatic. And this forces me to ask: Where does Roth’s time abroad and focus on Eastern and/ or Central European writers intersect with the problematic gender representations in his work? His one novel with a foreign capital in the title, after all, is The Prague Orgy (1985). Bailey reports that, when Roth saw Mucha for the last time in London, some years after the latter promised him these underage girls, Mucha told Roth that he had a fifteen-year-old girlfriend: “When Roth looked unimpressed, Mucha added, ‘But I’ve known her since she was twelve’” (383). This jibing and joking about deeply troubling behavior smacks of boy’s club-in-joke acceptance of troubling, unethical treatment of kids. It’s not surprising, given Bailey’s grooming of young girls, but disturbing to find traces of his own behavior manifest in his writing about Roth. Bailey’s biography is a complicated text to cite, but I’m hoping to use its information to inform this look at Roth’s intersections with the world abroad while telling you straight up that Bailey seems to me like the worst (Peyton 2021). Caveat over, we can now turn to Roth’s time spent abroad. Roth’s second wife, the British actress Claire Bloom, lived in London and preferred it there; Roth preferred his life in NYC/ Connecticut. They both felt displaced during the decade or so that they each spent about six months of the year on one, and the other six months on the other side of the Atlantic (Bailey 2021: 492). In London, as Roth details in The Counterlife (1986), through his characters’ experiences, he often felt out of sync and, worse, he felt a certain cold, coded antisemitism that made him long for New York. While Roth spent most of his time writing and working in Warren, CT, for many years he also worked abroad to help bring Eastern Bloc writers to the West through his “Writers from the Other Europe” series. These two times abroad (London and Prague) plus his many trips to Israel form the bulk of his biographical time outside the United States. But it remains true that Roth’s global appeal far outstrips his time abroad. Roth’s first trip to Europe happened in 1958, when he was an aspiring writer of twenty-five who enjoyed hanging out with the Paris Review crew and worked on a novel in Rome (Nadel 2021: 94–8). In 1959 on a Guggenheim, Roth spent six months writing in Rome (Nadel 2021: 124–7), but during this time he seems to have mostly socialized with American ex patriates and did not necessarily become enmeshed with Italian culture. Nevertheless, not only did Roth venture to Italy frequently, he also turned to Italy often in his fiction, and often as a site of debauchery, as it appears in Portnoy’s Complaint and other novels. While in Rome, Roth’s first wife, Maggie, had an abortion. He later told Bailey of driving “past the steps of the Santa Maria Maggiore”: “I wanted to crawl all the way up straight into the arms of Jesus” certain that we were going to be busted and in Catholic Italia I would wind up in chains and serving on a road gang under the Sicilian sun for the rest of my life” (qtd. in Bailey 2021: 184). Echoing the threads tying fantasy to trauma, the most important Italian connection for Roth was his interview with Primo Levi in Turin in 1986 during which time he formed a “remarkably deep” (Pierpont 2013: 163) friendship with the survivor.

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FIGURE 27.4  Philip Roth visiting Primo Levi in September 1986 at his home in Turin, Italy. Courtesy of La Stampa and the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi, Turin, Italy.

In his interview with Levi, Roth reflects on Levi’s family’s long roots in Italy, dating back to 1500. But Levi, not missing a beat, tosses the question back to Roth, as an American Jew with necessarily shallow roots. Levi asks him: “don’t you feel yourself, you, Philip Roth, ‘rooted’ in your country and at the same time ‘a mustard grain.’ In your books I perceive a sharp mustard flavor” (WW 196). By which Levi means that he finds a sense of distinction, as a Jew, within the American matrix in Roth’s fiction. Roth would always push to be understood as an American writer first, rather than a Jewish-American writer, and would express, and have his characters express, ambivalence about Israel. It never figures in his work as an uncomplicated endpoint or homeland. In 1963, on a trip sponsored by the American Jewish Congress, Roth embarked on his first voyage to Israel (Nadel 2021: 159; Bailey 2021: 242–4). Israel figures in Roth’s fiction most fully, of course, in Operation Shylock (1993), where the novel is largely set, featuring no less than two characters named Philip Roth. But an important scene near the end of Portnoy’s Complaint takes place there (see Kaplan 2019), and several scenes in The Counterlife as well.6 But for Roth, the national connection with America overshadows all other spaces. This sense of patriotism is manifest in many of his works, most forcefully in The Plot against America, which depicts a fascist America that takes over even the patriotic Roth family who make pilgrimages to Washington, D.C., to show the kids the greatness of the American dream. When Roth first started traveling to Prague, it was not with the intention of creating the “Writers from the Other Europe” series. Roth went there, so his three extant biographers

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report, to chase Kafka, to walk in his footsteps, as Roth so often felt the presence of Kafka in his work and referred to him both implicitly and explicitly in multiple texts. An early short story, “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting or, Looking at Kafka,” (1973, reprinted in Why Write?) even imagined that Kafka was still alive and teaching in New Jersey. But once in Central Europe, behind the Iron Curtain, Roth began to see the need for these writers to be read in the West—except that, by the end, he may also have endangered the very writers he was trying to broadcast. Ultimately, there is no doubt that the “Writers from the Other Europe” series had a big impact—perhaps most importantly in bringing a wide readership to Bruno Schulz whose The Street of Crocodiles (1977) and Sanitorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (1979) were published in the series (see Bailey 2021: 386). Because Isaac Bashevis Singer had praised the initial translation into English of The Street of Crocodiles, Roth arranged to interview him, and their conversation was published on February 13, 1977, in The New York Times. Roth asks Singer, toward the end, about his experience of moving to America: “You,” Roth says, left Poland in the middle 30s, some years before the Nazi invasion. Schulz remained in Drogobych and was killed there by the Nazis in 1942. Coming over here to talk to you, I was thinking about how you, the Jewish writer from Eastern Europe most nourished by the Jewish world and most bound by it, left that world to come to America, while the other major Jewish writers of your generation—far more assimilated, far more drawn toward the contemporary currents in the larger culture, writers like Schulz in Russia, and in Czechoslovakia, Jim Weil, who wrote some of the most harrowing stories I’ve ever read about the Holocaust—were destroyed in one ghastly way or another, either by Nazism or Stalinism. May I ask you who or what encouraged you to leave before the horrors began? After all, to be exiled from one’s native country and language is something that the majority of writers would dread and probably be most reluctant to accomplish voluntarily. (Roth 1977b: 20) Like his conversation with Levi, we can see in Roth’s questions the betrayal of his own sense of rootedness to America, and his sensitivity to writers who must live in exile. In at least three places abroad, Roth himself felt a sense of menace or crafted his characters experiencing discomfort, dislocation, or antisemitism. Prague figured, as Claudia Franziska Brühwiler (2014) argues, as a space of intense connection where Roth felt the presence of both Kafka and the length of Jewish history most keenly and thus he helped writers behind the iron curtain. But it also figured as a space of menace, as Roth discussed. While in Prague, Roth was followed and then eventually detained and questioned. Almost immediately after this arrest, justifiably rattled, he returned swiftly to New York. But while Roth was safely away, his friend Ivan Klíma was questioned at length by the police—about Roth. Klíma then told Roth (2017a), in a letter, that he (Klíma) asked his rough questioners, “‘Don’t you read his books?’ … As might be expected, they were stymied by the question, but Ivan quickly enlightened them. ‘He comes for the girls,’ Ivan said.” Roth introduced one of the editions of the series, Milan Kundera’s Laughable Loves (1974) (Roth was general editor but did not pen most of the introductions) and notes that the narratives therein connect with “those humorous stories one hears by the hundreds in Prague these days, stories such as a powerless or oppressed people are often adept at telling about themselves, and in which they seem to take an aesthetic pleasure—what pleasure is

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there, otherwise?—from the very absurdities and paradoxes that characterize their hardship and cause them pain” (xvi). Roth evinces here a deep familiarity with the hundreds of stories one hears in Prague, and it was crucial that he understand these tales of woe to begin the important work of introducing these writers to the United States and other readers of English. The overlaps, then, between Roth’s search for Kafka, his time in Prague becoming imbued with these lusty quests, and his feeling of being overshadowed by the traces of the Holocaust and threatened by the then present-day secret police all come together. It’s no understatement to say that Roth’s series of writers from the other Europe changed the landscape of several key authors’ circulation and appreciation within the United States and abroad. Writers including Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz, and Tadeuz Borowski, among others, might not have garnered the recognition they did were it not for Roth. So, biographically, Roth spent most of his time abroad in London, with his second wife, Claire Bloom, but he also traveled to Rome, Paris, Venice, London, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Flaubert’s birthplace in Rouen, Kafka’s grave in Prague, Israel, and many other places in the world. These voyages left their mark on the settings of his novels.

INTERNATIONAL SETTINGS IN ROTH’S FICTION While many characters throughout Roth’s novels travel abroad, the major settings outside the United States appear in The Counterlife (London and Israel), Operation Shylock (Israel), The Prague Orgy (obviously), and The Professor of Desire (also Prague and a sprinkling of other European locales including London and Venice). A crucial, brief, scene in Portnoy’s Complaint takes place in Israel and a few scenes are set in Italy.7 But The Professor of Desire offers an especially interesting take on its main character David Kepesh’s time abroad. In The Professor of Desire, Kepesh feels immediately that he should not have crossed the Atlantic: “I look at the iron bedstead on which I am to spend the next three hundred nights or so, and in an instant am bereft of the high spirits with which I had crossed the Atlantic, the pure joy with which I had fled from all the constraining rituals of undergraduate life” (27). By the very next page, however, Kepesh has turned around: “I begin to understand that for an unknown lad to have traveled to an unknown land may not have been a mistake after all. Terrified I am of course of dying like Maupassant; nonetheless, only minutes after peering timidly into the notorious alleyway, I have had a prostitute—the first whore of my life,” and he goes on to realize that his partners “have been born outside the continental United States” (28). The Europe in The Professor of Desire is ripe with women waiting for him for all sorts of sexual adventures. Claudia Roth Pierpont (2013) aptly notes that Birgitta, one of the threesome including another Swedish girl, Elisabeth, “is hardly more than a stick figure, with no existence beyond the sexual, and can be seen as both a failure of the book and part of its point” (105). Thinking back to the intersections between Roth’s time in Prague as (jokingly and not jokingly) “for the girls,” The Professor of Desire also casts Europe as the scene of seductions more pliable than in the United States, the home of the uptight American girls Roth’s main characters often meet. Portnoy’s Monkey is of course an exception, but Drenka, from Sabbath’s Theater (1995), who matches or exceeds her in lustiness, is described in terms of her foreignness as “a dark, Italian-looking Croat from the Dalmatian coast” (375). In addition to all this good hunting for Kepesh, Europe becomes the scene of Claire’s pregnancy, which she aborts when they return home (221), unbeknownst to him. After Kepesh divorces Helen, he tells his analyst that he’s “bereft of my potency, even for an entertainment

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as unambitious as self-love. ‘I should never have come home from Europe’” (101). Claire and Kepesh travel to Prague in search of traces of Kafka and, “Near the wall of the castle, on cobbled Alchemist Street—and looking like the dwelling out of a child’s bedtime story, the fit habitation for a gnome or elf” is one of the places Kafka lived and wrote (168). Chasing Kafka, then, becomes one aspect of Kepesh’s time abroad while another becomes chasing tail. An interesting cohabitation between the melancholic and the sexual emerges here, as in The Ghost Writer with Zuckerman’s dreams of Anne Frank, or in Italy, which is crucial given its association with fictional debauchery and Roth’s deep attachment to Levi whom Roth regarded as an exemplary Italian. In The Professor of Desire, then, Europe begins as a scene of isolation, blossoms (or devolves, depending on how you want to look at it), into a sexual adventure zone, and then morphs into a search for Kafka and a somber recognition of the what-if-ness of the Holocaust, there, not here. But the traumatic stories of loss and survival follow Kepesh and Claire even into the idyll in the Catskills, a short drive from the hotel the elder Mr. Kepesh used to run. David’s father visits them, bringing with him a dear, new-ish friend, a Mr. Barbatnik, a survivor, who tells them his tale. He survived by making up stories day by day to enable him to just get through “till that night.” He arrives to tell of survival just as Kepesh is trying to figure out whether he can stay with Claire. Her problem seems to be that she’s too apple-pie innocent, not enough Birgitta-daring; Kepesh knows he will be “without desire” (261) and wonders how “much longer before I’ve had a bellyful of wholesome innocence” (251). And he’d already seen “how very easily I could have no use for her” (162). Kepesh realizes this when, ten years after he’d been hunting for girls in London and found a pair of conveniently available Swedish women, he’s in Italy with Claire and Birgitta keeps haunting him with his memories of her unfettered, salty, slutty, adventures. I’m not sure what to make of these overlaps and cohabitations other than to mark that spaces abroad in Roth’s fiction seem to bring both melancholic reflections on genocide—and really, how could they not?—alongside adventures that nice American boys can’t have at home. Perhaps, then, it’s not so surprising to encounter a lewd cover of Portnoy’s Complaint translated into Hungarian in a bookshop not so far from moving Holocaust memorials.

REFLECTIONS ON ROTH’S RECEPTION ABROAD: SAMPLES FROM FRANCE AND ITALY Roth announced his retirement through a French magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, but, by his own account, somewhat accidentally. And then in an interview in Le Monde with Josyane Savigneau he explained how the accident occurred: A young woman was here to interview me for a French magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, and near the end of the interview she asked, “What are you working on?” And I answered, “I’m not working on anything.” And she said, “Why not?” and I said “I think it’s over. I think I’m finished.” That was it. I didn’t intend to be making an announcement designed to produce a frenzy. I was just candidly answering a straight question put to me by a good reporter. Many months later, some eager journalist in America must have idly picked up an old copy of Les Inrockuptibles while waiting for a haircut in a barber shop and rushed it into print, the French translated by Google into comically inaccurate English. (Savigneau 2013)

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Accidental or not, the announcement first happened in a French journal, where Roth enjoyed huge popularity. Bailey (2021) notes that “Roth’s impressive New York Times obituary was above the fold on the front page, and he got even bigger star treatment in France: ‘Philip Roth: Mort d’un géant’ read the headline in Le Monde” (799). While the phrase “mort d’un géant de la littérature américaine” circulated widely and appeared in L’express, France Info, France 24, and other outlets (L’Express 2018; Franceinfo 2018), the Le Monde headline actually read “L’écrivain américain Philip Roth est mort à l’âge de 85 ans” (Savigneau 2018a). In 2013, Le Monde devoted an entire special issue to Roth. It’s a beautifully produced collection of articles, photographs, extracts from Roth’s work, interviews, and homages that marked his appeal in France. At the same time, the special issue does not shy away from the controversies Roth always encountered and notes that his critical reception (including in France) was not always glowing. But why is Roth so popular in France? “The love affair,” Pricscille Lafitte (2018) notes, “between Roth and France made little sense to James McAuley, Paris correspondent for The Washington Post, as he tried to decipher the reasons for Roth’s popularity in France.” “Philip Roth has never lived in France,” McAuley (2017), author of The House of Fragile Things (2021), notes, and continues that Roth “reads French literature only in translation and has never set a novel in Paris, the clichéd province of the lonely urban saunterer and existential ennui.” In order to try to get a handle on why Roth is so very popular in France, I asked one of my French graduate students, Nicolas Portugal, and he speculated via email that Roth’s literature evokes societal issues such as racism (The Human Stain) and was translated and published in France at a time where reflections on race(s) within the French Republic started to develop in public discourse. Since the 1980s, a continuous debate agitates France between the partisans of Universalism, and, on the other hand, supporters of Multiculturalism (sometimes described as communautarisme by its detractors), I believe that Roth’s novels—independently of the social, geographical, historical and cultural contexts of his texts—find a resonance in French society because the social issues he addresses as a writer are at the core of American and French identities.8 Nico’s response is really interesting because he’s making a case for something that has been fairly marginal to Philip Roth scholarship as central to the French appreciation. I also asked my colleague, Jean-Philippe Mathy, an emeritus professor of French who works on French/American cultural relations and is the author of Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mourning, and Memory in Late Modern France (2011): France has always been known for the large amount of international literature in translation published in the country … The postwar generation of French writers had a great interest in and appreciation for interwar American authors (Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Steinbeck). Sartre, for example, praised the innovative style, technique and content of American literature in an article published in 1946 in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “American Novelists in French Eyes” … so this widespread interest in American literature in the forties and fifties might have prepared the ground for the reception of Roth two decades later.9 Mathy, a different generation, of course, from Nico, sees the long arc of American literature’s impact in France, and Roth, then, becomes just another version, not a special case.

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Steven Sampson, an American who has been living in Paris for years and has written both academic work on Roth and a novel inspired by Roth, responded that French intellectuals have a love/hate relationship with America: they’re nuts about it, but deal with uncomfortable feelings of subservience by criticizing their love object. Minority figures, amongst which Jews—for whom, for separate reasons, the French have an obsession—provide a convenient way of doing that; hence, the fascination for “New York” Jewish writers: Paul Auster when I arrived here in the 1990’s, replaced by Roth after American Pastoral. The French read literature from a socio-economic viewpoint; their take on the Newark trilogy allowed them to view Roth as politically committed and subversive. On the other side of the Atlantic, American Jews tend to adore France (Bellow, Woody Allen, Roth, etc.); Roth’s inner circle had a large percentage of French Jews or Francophone European exiles. As for Les Inrocks, I’m not sure he considered that interview as THE retirement announcement, but at any event, he may have wished to make a gift to the journalist, the young and beautiful Nelly Kaprièlian (who now dates Will Self).10 It’s clear that Roth enjoys very broad popularity in France—the special issue of Le Monde, a long piece by his friend Savigneau (2018b) (who introduced the Le Monde special issue) in French Vanity Fair, numerous articles and television shows, the august Pléiade edition of Roth’s work, the fact that none other than Léa Seydoux stars in a filmic adaptation of “Tromperie” (Deception 2021), the fact that Roth (accidentally) announced his retirement in a French journal, not to mention Roth having been granted a Legion of Honor, all offer ample evidence of the French appreciation for his work. Roth is only one of two living writers who are not French to be canonized with a Pléiade edition. The three reasons from interviews cited here, again, anecdotally, point to a shared concern with race, a long-standing interest in American literature, and an obsession with Jewishness that Roth (despite his protestations) typifies. Outside of France, Italy would probably be the second most appreciative audience of Roth’s. Pia Masiero, author of Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books (2011), and a professor at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, was kind enough to put me in touch with Norman Gobetti, one of Roth’s Italian translators. When I asked Norman about Roth’s popularity in Italy, he replied (and I’ve redacted): Roth’s literary reputation in Italy skyrocketed with the publication of American Pastoral. Almost all of his previous books were translated in Italy in good time (one exception was The Great American Novel), and Portnoy’s Complaint was a big hit in Italy, too, but for a long time Philip Roth was considered a comical, lewd author, not a literary master, and his books were definitely not bestsellers. Everything changed with American Pastoral. This momentous novel was immediately received as a masterpiece, and it became not only a bestseller, but a long seller. …. These are some facts I know, but I still haven’t really answered to your question: why did it happen? Here I can only suppose … Italian people are a people of writers and (mostly) would-be writers (I could say we have maybe more writers than readers …), and, after American Pastoral, Roth began to be perceived as the writer par excellence, a paragon of literary virtues. Free from ideological restraints, almost ascetic in his devotion to writing, engaged in complicated mirror plays between facts and fiction, defiant, alone, towering, he was The Writer (all the more so

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because of Stockholm’s snubbing). So, I think Roth was (and maybe still is) viewed as an ideal, high-minded model by many readers who are also writers or would-be writers. But, obviously, Roth had also a Dark Side. He was high-minded, sure, but also mischievous, outrageous, possibly misogynist, surely sex-obsessed … Also this ambivalence, I think, is deeply fascinating for Italian readers (especially for women, in my experience). Here in Italy, we are used to equivocalness, uncertainty, duplicity, and complicated nuances.11 Roth’s reception abroad indicates that, as unlikely as it may at first blush seem, his work has universal appeal, touching as it does on themes that many people can relate to: anxiety, guilt, unhappiness, bitterness, anger, sexual play, solitude, the ravages of age, declining health, love and its ephemerality, death, mourning, struggles with overbearing parents, not being understood, narcissism, impotence, consent, and many other human, all too human, phenomena. But the answer to why Roth is popular all over the world may be quite simple: he could write.

NOTES 1. For more on Roth in translation see Ivanova. 2. Email to me, July 9, 2021. 3. Email to me, December 2, 2021. See also Kumar (2018). 4. The other abroad novels received treatments from me in Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth. 5. See my review of Ira Nadel’s biography for more on this: Kaplan (2022). 6. Indeed, there’s been a recent turn in contemporary Jewish-American literature toward Israel as setting: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am (2016), Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark (2017), Nathan Englander’s Dinner at the Center of the Earth (2017), and parts of What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank (2012), Joshua Cohen’s Moving Kings (2017), David Bezmozgis’s The Betrayers (2014), and no doubt others besides. It’s safe to say, then, that Israel as setting and theme provides, unsurprisingly, a strong current in Jewish-American writing, including the works of Philip Roth. 7. See Bohlen’s (2011) discussion of Roth’s interview with Italian journalist Livia Manera. 8. Email to me, November 30, 2021. 9. Email to me, July 13, 2021. 10. Email to me, December 28, 2021. 11. Email to me, January 30, 2022.

REFERENCES Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, New York: Norton. Bohlen, Celestine (2011), “Rare Unfurling of the Reluctant Philip Roth,” The New York Times, September 15. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/arts/16iht-Roth16.html (accessed December 28, 2022). Brühwiler, Claudia Franziska (2014), “A Reluctant Public Intellectual: Philip Roth in the GermanSpeaking Media,” Philip Roth Studies, 10 (1): 77–90. Franceinfo (2018), “Philip Roth, la mort d’un géant de la littérature américaine,” Franceinfo Culture, May 23. Available online: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/culture/livres/roman/philip-roth-la-mort-dun-geant-de-la-litterature-americaine_3333885.html (accessed April 21, 2022).

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Ivanova, Velichka (2021), “Roth in Translation,” Philip Roth in Context, in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 360–71, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaplan, Brett Ashley (2019), “How Many Feminists Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?” Philip Roth Studies, 15 (1): 68–78. Kaplan, Brett Ashley (2022), “Fiction as Revenge,” Cercles: Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone. Available online: http://www.cercles.com/review/r91/Nadel.html (accessed April 20, 2022). Kumar, Amitava (2018), “What If Philip Roth, the Sharp Satirist, Had Been an Indian Writer?” The Wire, May 25. Available online: https://thewire.in/books/what-if-philip-roth-the-sharp-satirist-hadbeen-an-indian-writer (accessed April 20, 2022). Kundera, Milan (1974), Laughable Loves, trans. Suzanne Rappaport, introduction by Philip Roth, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Lafitte, Priscille (2018), “A Special Relation: France’s Love for Philip Roth,” France 24, May 23. Available online: https://www.france24.com/en/20180523-philip-roth-france-special-relation-loveliterature (accessed April 21, 2022). Le Monde Hors-Série: Philip Roth, Un Américain pas si tranquille. February 2013. L’Express (2018), “Roth: mort d’un géant littéraire,” L’Express, May 23. Available online: https:// www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/philip-roth-mort-d-un-geant-de-la-litterature-a-85-ans-aux-etatsunis_2010698.html (accessed April 21, 2022). McAuley, James (2017), “Philip Roth Is France’s Newest Literary Superstar: Why?” The Washington Post, October 27. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/philip-roth-is-francesnewest-literary-superstar-why/2017/10/27/5df0e0e6-b848-11e7-9b93-b97043e57a22_story. html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.764f652bef8b (accessed April 20, 2022). Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peyton, Eve Crawford (2021), “I Was 12 When We Met,” Slate, April 29. Available online: https:// slate.com/human-interest/2021/04/blake-bailey-former-student-sexual-assault-essay.html (accessed April 20, 2022). Pierpont, Claudia Roth (2013), Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1977), “Roth and Singer on Bruno Schulz,” New York Times, February 13: 5, 14, 20. Available online: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1977/02/13/issue.html (accessed December 21, 2022). Roth, Philip (1994), The Professor of Desire, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2010), Novels 1993–1995, New York: Library of America. Roth, Philip (2017a), “‘He Comes for the Girls’: Philip Roth on Getting Kicked Out of Prague,” Literary Hub, September 8. Available online: https://lithub.com/he-comes-for-the-girls-philip-rothon-getting-kicked-out-of-prague/ (accessed April 25, 2022). Roth, Philip (2017b), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013, New York: The Library of America. Savigneau, Josyane (2013), “Philip Roth: ‘I Don’t Wish to Be a Slave Any Longer to the Stringent Exigencies of Literature,” Le Monde, February 14. Available online: https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/ article/2013/02/14/philip-roth-i-don-t-wish-to-be-a-slave-any-longer-to-the-stringent-exigencies-ofliterature_1831662_3260.html (accessed April 20, 2022). Savigneau, Josyane (2018a), “L’écrivain américain Philip Roth est mort à l’âge de 85 ans,” Le Monde, May 23. Available online: https://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2018/05/23/l-ecrivainamericain-philip-roth-est-mort-a-l-age-de-85-ans_5302998_3382.html (accessed April 21, 2022). Savigneau, Josyane (2018b), “Philip Roth et Josyane Savigneau, une amitié particulière,” Vanity Fair, May 23. Available online: https://www.vanityfair.fr/culture/voir-lire/articles/article-mag-philiproth-et-josyane-savigneau-une-amitie-particuliere/58191 (accessed April 21, 2022). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (n.d.), “Budapest,” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/budapest (accessed April 20, 2022).

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Roth and Adaptation DEBRA SHOSTAK

In over a dozen film and televisual adaptations of Philip Roth’s fiction released across more than sixty years, filmmakers have ranged widely in approaching the challenge of bringing Roth to the screen. In keeping with the principle common among theorists of filmic adaptation, this chapter considers these adaptations not by judging their fidelity to an original text, as an aesthetic standard or interpretive tool, but rather according to the tropes of reading, translation, and transformation (Stam 2005; Hutcheon 2006). The chapter explores how filmmakers translate the distinctive features of Roth’s writing into conventions and codes specific to the filmic medium and considers the interpretive consequences of their translations. The adaptations under consideration, in order of their release, include The Contest for Aaron Gold (1955), Goodbye, Columbus (1969), Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), The Ghost Writer (1983), The Human Stain (2003), Elegy (2008, adapting The Dying Animal), The Humbling (2014), Listen Up, Philip (2014), American Pastoral (2016), Indignation (2016), The Prague Orgy (2019), and The Plot against America (2020).1 Roth’s readers more often than not have been disappointed by the adaptations of his fiction, however. As Linda Hutcheon (2006) notes, “we experience adaptations … as palimpsests through our memory” of works we have read (8). Because the most memorable features of Roth’s writing are its music, verve, ear for the vernacular, uncompromising intelligence, ruthless probing of character, and acerbic comedy, his tone shadows our perceptions of the shift from the verbal to the audiovisual medium. Resoundingly a written and heard writer, Roth devotes comparatively little of his narrative energies to the visual. Certainly, he offers countless brilliantly painted, hauntingly seeable scenes—consider, for example, Mickey Sabbath wrapped in the American flag in Sabbath’s Theater (1995) or Bucky Cantor throwing the javelin in Nemesis (2010). Nevertheless, Roth’s work often challenges adaptation to the cinema, which relies fundamentally on mise-enscène—that is, all the visual cues that viewers perceive within the frame of the screen that convey exposition, feeling, and ideas, including settings, props, the position and movement of actors, costumes, lighting, camera distance and focus, and so forth. In Roth’s fiction, natural or built spaces and places, weather, colors, even gestures and facial expressions may be less indelible features for readers than characters’ perceptions, choices, and, especially, voices, arguing, complaining, recounting, and explaining. Therefore, the corollary to film’s miseen-scène is often not image but a verbal expression of interiority, a moment revealing an interpretive consciousness or internal discourse, deploying modernist preoccupations within a demotic realism. Since the cinema privileges the visual over sound and has limited resources with which to record characters’ thoughts directly, screenwriters and directors struggle to put Roth onscreen because they require a cinematic vocabulary within which to render the insistently verbal and subjective (Doane 1999).

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Lacking space for thorough readings of each adaptation, this chapter addresses them not chronologically but by comparing representative details from a few films each within rough, overlapping categories that shape the translation of Roth’s meanings. Since the categories distinguish emphases but are not exclusive, readings within each draw on features from the others, and a given adaptation may be illuminated within multiple categories. The three analytical categories include, first, films that strategically deploy uniquely cinematic devices, such as camerawork, editing, soundtrack, and mise-en-scène; second, films that alter the texts’ narrative form in event, sequence, closure, or historical context; and third, films that translate the perspectival thrust—the voice—of the source material into cinematic language.2 The most cinematically innovative adaptations, especially those finding means to represent internal states, include Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip, which is not truly an adaptation at all. Constructed around an encounter between a Dedalian novice writer, Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman), and a surrogate father, the aging, reclusive novelist Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), it owes much to The Ghost Writer (1979). Perry, however, turns the novel upside down. Eliminating Roth’s metafictional Anne Frank fantasy, the film shifts the ironies of the Nathan Zuckerman/E.I. Lonoff relationship into a realistic, pathetic interdependency of solipsistic men, exaggerating Roth’s portrait of the artist as a self-pitying, emotionally abusive masculinist. Sean Price Williams’s restless handheld camerawork, edited jarringly, captures the “insatiable ego” of Philip and Zimmerman, in the voiceover narrator’s words, in jittery, off-center traveling shots, brutal close-ups, and claustrophobic framing. The film’s autumnal palette and dim lighting, like the soundtrack’s haunting jazz trumpet solos, satirize rather than sympathize with the “solitude and self-imposed exile” of both writers from human warmth. A similarly satiric tone, scarcely evident in Roth’s novel The Humbling (2009), derives from the filmic techniques presenting the likewise narcissistic actor Simon Axler (Al Pacino). Director Barry Levinson transforms the austerity and numb defeat of Roth’s Axler into a dark, often farcical comedy of aging male impotence by magnifying the Rothian motif of antic confusion between art and life. Levinson repeatedly films an unstable and epistemologically uncertain Axler, using mirroring, refracted, reflexive shots, unsteady handheld camerawork, off-center framing, jarring editing, and Pacino’s intentionally hammy acting. Levinson’s interpretation appears immediately in the opening sequence, which translates Roth’s first line, “He’d lost his magic” (H 1). Preparing for his stage entrance, Axler applies make-up in a mirror as he rehearses Jacques’s lines “All the world’s a stage” (II.vii.139) from As You Like It (ca. 1599), before descending into a paranoid fantasy. As in a classic anxiety dream, he imagines himself locked out of the theater, unrecognized; the scene crescendos into a comically exaggerated, Kafkaesque panic in which he turns about frantically while a multitrack soundtrack in his head desperately asserts his name. Where Perry and Levinson’s close-ups convey scorching distance on their central figures, Isabel Coixet’s lengthy, intimate close-ups in Elegy (2008) anchor her startling translation of The Dying Animal (2001) into a tender, un-Rothian tale of aging, loss, and recovery, signaled by its retitling. Elegy destabilizes the cool dismissiveness, self-protective ironies, and objectifying tendencies of Roth’s David Kepesh, breathtakingly dramatized in the scene when Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz) asks Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) to photograph her breasts before she undergoes surgery for cancer. Coixet recasts the scene’s reflexive reference to cinema’s visual pleasure.3 Although the viewer sees from Kepesh’s objectifying position behind the camera, his discomfiture and grief—displacing the novel’s matter-of-fact voice— coupled with Coixet’s uncomfortably long shot while Consuela slowly uncovers her body

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and looks directly into the camera, install her as a subject, deflecting the voyeurism implicit in the action. The soundtrack’s minor-key Bach and Satie piano compositions and the somber palette and shadowed lighting of Coixet’s mise-en-scène expose the solitude of Kepesh’s self-defined “freedom” as monochromatic and emotionally barren. A dark, chilly, shadowed mise-en-scène—a conventional cinematic trope for melancholy—similarly telegraphs the interpretations conditioning the adaptations of both American Pastoral and The Human Stain. In both, an elegiac tone, marking Swede Levov’s loss of wife, daughter, and pastoral dream to the realities of American history, and Coleman Silk’s loss of place, identity, lover, and life in a racialized culture, shifts into stately nostalgia the fury, sarcasm, irony, indignation, and even humor in Roth’s novels. Indeed, in multiple adaptations, the softening and flattening of Roth’s tone characterize their narrative adjustments, the second category of analysis. For example, the only trace of Roth’s Holocaust allusions left in The Contest for Aaron Gold—such as the Jewish protagonist’s implied refugee past—is Alfred Hitchcock’s macabre introduction and wrap-up insinuating that he has incinerated a ceramics instructor in a kiln. The narrative revisions of the American Trilogy are even starker. American Pastoral retains little of the “indigenous American berserk” that constitutes the “fury, … violence, and … desperation of the counterpastoral” (AP 86) essential for Roth to shatter the Swede’s pastoral delusion. Instead, the film transforms the novel’s scrutiny of heedless innocence swept up into American history into a circumscribed, sentimental family melodrama in which Swede Levov (Ewan McGregor) appears as an unambiguously heroic father and Jewishness plays little part. The tonal shift is conspicuous in the film’s closure. Roth concludes with a bitterly ironic family gathering, in which Lou Levov nearly loses an eye to the fork of an alcoholic WASP, causing the stricken narrator to end with an unanswered cry—“what on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” (AP 423). McGregor and screenwriter John Romano instead close with a mawkish scene Roth could never have written, in which Merry Levov (Dakota Fanning) reappears to pay her respects at her father’s funeral. Similarly overly cautious and narrowed in scope is The Human Stain. Director Robert Benton and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer (who also adapted The Dying Animal into Elegy) quiet the noise and conflict of the novel into an elegant tale. Touching during the flashbacks to Coleman Silk’s (Wentworth Miller) young adulthood, filmed in warm tones, the film becomes wintry in shooting Coleman’s (Anthony Hopkins) present-day, doomed relationship with Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman), filmed in moodily cool, gray tones. The film’s narrative framing, in fact, immediately forecasts its interpretation. By presenting in the opening sequence Coleman and Faunia’s fatal car accident, delayed by Roth until late in the novel, the event becomes fatalistic rather than contingent. The story of Coleman’s struggle to construct an identity within racialized American culture—to “forge a distinct historical identity, … to spring the historical lock” (HS 335)—reduces to a deterministic, admonitory tale. Most literary adaptations make numerous changes, large and small, in excising, adding to, or reordering scenes, generally to focus a film’s themes and streamline the narrative into a filmable form and length. But the most telling alterations of Roth often appear, as in The Human Stain, in their narrative framing, especially in the films’ closure. Elegy, for example, upends Roth’s conclusion. The Dying Animal closes with the shocking, unanswered advice from Kepesh’s anonymous interlocutor not to visit Consuela in the hospital—“if you go, you’re finished” (DA 156)—in words that echo Kepesh’s cynical self-involvement. In Elegy, however, Kepesh appears at Consuela’s postoperative bedside; he climbs into the bed to embrace and comfort her, and the film’s last line, as the camera tactfully draws back from

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them, is his assertion, “I’m here.” Elegy’s final image, running under the credits, repeats an earlier extreme long shot of Kepesh and Consuela in a joyful moment on a wintry beach, the camera now following them offscreen as if into a new, united, perhaps warmer life. Less sentimental but equally affirming is the conclusion to The Humbling, which rewrites Roth’s final deadpan account of Axler’s suicide in his attic, his “heyday” (H 140) in the theater irredeemably over, persuading himself to pull the trigger by playing that he is acting in Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896). Levinson and screenwriters Buck Henry and Michal Zebede reimagine the scene by dramatizing Axler’s suicide as an artistic triumph, effectively reversing his persistent humiliations. Axler has returned to the stage as King Lear. In Lear’s final scene of grief over Cordelia’s body, the film again conflates art and life as Axler thrusts a real rather than a stage dagger into his chest; the gullible audience, thrilled by the illusion, greets him with thunderous applause as Axler, a secret smile on his face, dies while the screen fades to black. Levinson’s daring playfulness with the text transforms it into his own irrepressible satire, arguably improving a lesser Roth effort. An antithetical approach appears in James Schamus’s reverential adaptation of Indignation, whose caution, solemnity, and sensitivity strip the narrative of much of its titular emotion, however affecting and beautifully acted the film, like Elegy, is on its own terms. Marcus Messner’s fear and rage, both political and oedipal, appear in the novel’s frequent references to blood, butchery, and the Chinese revolutionary anthem whose lines sing in his mind and give the novel its title. With a few exceptions, as during the stunning set-piece in which Marcus (Logan Lerman) confronts the Winesburg College Dean (Tracy Letts), Schamus dilutes Roth’s indignation. Instead, he elevates Marcus’s romantic interest, Olivia (Sarah Gadon), to the center of the film’s narrative, diminishing the novel’s historical critique of 1950s American repressiveness to foreground a tale of star-crossed lovers. As in The Human Stain, the film’s narrative framing expresses its interpretation. The opening and closing sequences interpolate images into the novel, of Olivia in a nursing home, aged, silent, and apparently remembering the story that occupies the diegesis, making Indignation appear as much Olivia’s story as Marcus’s. Roth, of course, had no hand in reinterpreting his fiction as it appears in these adaptations. Interestingly, however, in the two screenplays he developed, adapting The Ghost Writer and The Prague Orgy, he revamped his own novels, including their narrative framing. Together with director Tristram Powell, credited along with Roth for the screenplay, Roth immediately reduces The Ghost Writer’s indeterminacy and suspense in the production’s precredit sequence, telegraphing Amy Bellette’s “factual” identity as Anne Frank—no longer clearly Zuckerman’s fantasy about her—when Amy (Paulette Smit) quotes in voiceover from Anne Frank’s diary. The novel’s reflexiveness remains, however, in two ways. First, under the opening credits, a dissolve initiates a montage presenting the famous photograph of Anne Frank’s face, followed by close-ups on barely legible handwritten words, suggesting her manuscript diary as the narrative’s interpretive frame. Second, subtle shifts in the mise-en-scène represent the interpenetration of past and present, fact and fantasy—black and white filming for Anne/ Amy’s memories; bleached-out color cinematography for Lonoff’s austere, tense household; and dark but warmer colors when Nathan Zuckerman is filmed writing—and inevitably reinventing—the story of his visit to Lonoff. The adaptation of The Prague Orgy likewise maintains Roth’s original reflexiveness in its frequent references to storytelling and surveillance. But, as in Roth’s (2007) unproduced screenplay for a television adaptation, written in 1985–6,4 the Czech film begins in medias res, with Zuckerman’s (Jonas Chernick) arrival in Prague, shifting the novella’s first scene in New

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York, when Sisovsky (Jirí Havelka) begs him to travel to Prague, to subsequent expository flashbacks. Director Irina Pavlásková immediately capitalizes on the camera’s reflexive embodiment of surveillance to put the viewer on edge regarding the surveillance state, as we see Zuckerman entering customs in Prague. When Bolotka (Pavel Kríz) transports him, his car is clearly followed, but the tone in which the filmmakers present Communist surveillance as the narrative unfolds mixes fear with the world-weary irony and absurdist dark comedy in Roth’s novella. Pavlásková’s film, however, eliminates Roth’s sly connections between the manuscripts Zuckerman seeks and the story of the writer Bruno Schulz, emphasizing instead the cynical despair and resignation of the female leads, Olga (Kseniya Rappoport) and Eva Kalinová (Klára Issová). The filmmakers enhance Roth’s late scene representing his Kafkaesque vision of Eastern Europe. Strong-armed into a car, Zuckerman is treated to Novak’s (Miroslav Táborský) diatribe condemning the deviancy of Czech artists, conjured earlier in the opulent orgy scene. In the film, Zuckerman is then seemingly abandoned on a bridge, his isolation exaggerated by a high crane shot. But almost immediately another car arrives to take him to the airport to fly home—the capitalist American almost deflatingly immune from Sovietera oppression. The film’s closure reinforces Zuckerman’s displacement from meaningful political action, as Eva, now a salesclerk in New York, blithely dismisses him, assuring him with stinging irony that he has gained something better than the lost manuscripts: his own Prague story, which will surely be a bestseller. While the films discussed thus far maintain Roth’s temporal settings and, often, his allied critique of their historical context—the sexually repressive 1950s in Indignation, for example, or the antipastoral 1960s America in American Pastoral—two adaptations recontextualize the historicity of their respective source texts. Both Goodbye, Columbus and HBO’s sixepisode production of The Plot against America recast Roth’s fiction into a “history of the present,” where the “present” is the time of release.5 Goodbye, Columbus, the first featurelength adaptation of Roth’s work, appeared ten years after the novella’s 1959 publication date. Consequently, the 1969 context of American culture and cinematic style shapes the interpretation of the source, though without leaving Roth behind. The film’s historicity is especially visible in its rendering of sexuality—explicitly, as in Neil Klugman’s (Richard Benjamin) refusal to pursue Brenda Patimkin (Ali McGraw) when she leaves his car, while he mugs that he has an erection, and implicitly in director Larry Peerce’s frequent use of sexualized or romantic montage, a staple of 1960s film, where the soundtrack comprises nondiegetic music without dialogue. A case in point is the opening sequence, set at the swimming pool where, as in the novella’s first scene, Neil meets Brenda. The sequence sets the film’s exaggeratedly satiric tone with its first shot, a close-up on a dewy female navel, followed by numerous objectifying shots of women of various ages or their truncated body parts; the camera catches jiggling female buttocks, loose aging skin, and straps slipping off shoulders, intercut with images of Neil beaming at the women. There is little critical distance on the camera’s voyeuristic position or on the jaunty soundtrack, sung by the 1960s group The Association. Such lyrics as “it’s a lucky day … taking the world by surprise” serve as a bridge to the first shot of Brenda, sleekly swimming in slow motion, lit by a dazzling summer sun. Any irony serves the objectification of women rather than its critique, as later, in the wedding scene, it serves a broad satire of greedy Jewish American consumption. Shifting Roth’s representation of 1950s repressed sexuality toward the sexual freedom of the late 1960s enables the film to embellish Roth’s historical analysis, emphasizing what had become, by 1969—and in part because of Roth’s ­work— stereotypical images of sexual appetites and Jewish American culture.

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HBO’s Plot against America miniseries, while also released well after the novel’s 2004 publication, rather differently alters its historical resonances from Peerce’s approach in Goodbye, Columbus. Roth writes Plot as a historical palimpsest: the retrospective adult narrator “Philip Roth” already knows, and toward the novel’s closing recounts, the resolution of the terrifying events he narrates from the perspective of the child Philip living them in the present. Such double vision is naturally the premise of any retrospective, past-tense narration, but because Roth takes the workings of history—specifically mid-century American history—as his subject, the overlay of retrospection on a present with unpredictable futurity enhances the novel’s suspense, exploiting the tension between the two temporal schemes. Series creators David Simon and Ed Burns add a politically astute alternative layer to the Plot’s (and the plot’s) historicity. The adaptation hints, with a frisson of fear for viewers, at the coincidence of its production during the Trump years and its release during the run-up to the 2020 election, when many Americans grew anxious about the rise of white nationalism, fascist violence, isolationism, and demagoguery, an anxiety that extended even toward the fate of democracy itself in the United States. The adaptation signifies itself as a document of the present, for example—where Roth’s speculative 1942 predicts 2020—in the breathtaking final episode, resonant in ways the filmmakers could not have foreseen. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s (Caroline Kaplan) speech, calling on the citizenry to reject violence and the government’s indefensible actions—“Those who have violated the Constitution should be held to account in strict adherence to the law of the land”—chillingly forecasts the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. Perhaps more disquieting is the series’s final, open-ended montage. On election day in 1942, when, in the novel, Roosevelt retakes the Presidency, the nondiegetic soundtrack offers Frank Sinatra’s (1944) joyful rendition of “The House I Live In”—“What is America to me? … A certain word, ‘democracy,’ … the air of feeling free/And the right to speak my mind.” Although the mise-en-scène shows numerous citizens gladly voting, the filmmakers use the eerie montage to conclude with a dreadful prognostication. While Herman and Bess Levin (Morgan Spector and Zoe Kazan) listen avidly to election returns on the radio, the viewer watches voter suppression enacted: official ballot boxes are stolen from polling places and unceremoniously fed into a bonfire. What is America, indeed. The Plot against America series underscores its urgent question about America through an additional reworking of the storytelling. The filmmakers’ choices bring into focus the final category under consideration: the representation of perspective—voice and its translation— within the forms of fiction and cinema. In Roth’s Plot, the adult Philip’s commitment to remembering his childish perceptions causes the child’s anxiety to prevail over the narrative. The series, however, erases the narrow, exclusive viewpoint, spreading the interest beyond Philip’s perspective toward his immediate family members, thus resembling Indignation’s balance of Marcus’s story with Olivia’s. Such equalizing is partly an artifact of cinema, whose camera naturally sees from the outside, providing an illusion of comprehensive objectivity. Acting certainly can convey subjectivity and interiority, as do the camera, especially in closeups, and other filmic technologies such as editing, lighting, and mise-en-scène. But cinematic discourse often takes in a wider field than a singular point of view. However enriching to the story Roth tells in Plot, the adaptation’s translation into multiple perspectives has a two-fold result: the novel’s retrospection disappears, leaving its plot strictly in the present; and the equalizing focus on multiple characters affects the economy of the narrative, guiding the adaptation’s elimination of Roth’s scenes and requiring additional scenes Roth did not write. This interpretive alteration appears boldly in the story of Philip’s cousin Alvin. In the novel, readers witness Alvin almost exclusively as he affects young Philip;

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in the film, Alvin (Anthony Boyle) gets his own story, turning Roth’s account of Alvin’s brief, humiliating service in the Canadian army into both heroic action and preparation for an equally heroic counterplot against President Lindbergh. Alvin emerges, with Bess and Herman, as the central consciousnesses and consciences of the series, demoting Philip (Azhy Robertson) to an ancillary position, however poignantly displaying his innocence. Simon and Burns further demonstrate how the violence of history spreads beyond the Levin family to the American citizenry through mulitperspectival montage sequences, unlike the winking or sentimental gimmicks of Goodbye, Columbus. Plot’s montages establish the simultaneity of events and meaningful resonances between them. Sequences are cut into segments, edited in a back-and-forth rhythm of juxtaposition to create a thematic rhyming between events, a form that works visually but could seem jumpy or contrived in written discourse. In episode 3, for example, Alvin’s mission during the war is intercut with the Levin family’s harrowing visit to Washington, DC, where American antisemitism reveals itself; Alvin and the family are accordingly “wounded,” literally and figuratively, because of their faith in their freedom to act. Likewise, in episode 5, Evelyn’s (Winona Ryder) wedding to Rabbi Bengelsdorf (John Turturro), marking the height of their deluded complacency and collaboration with Lindbergh’s government, is intercut in ironic contrast with Herman’s participation in a rally for Walter Winchell that turns into a violent, antisemitic riot when Bund members arrive. The skillful manipulation of the image through editing conveys the filmmakers’ ideological and ethical critique graphically and viscerally, without didactic commentary, thus finding a cinematic vocabulary to refigure the perspectival power of Roth’s narration from Philip’s bewildered and fearful point of view. With some exceptions, other adaptations are less adept at translating Roth’s distinctive, dominating voice into cinematic discourse. Voiceover might seem an obvious choice for screenwriters adapting novels, especially those written in the first person, because it can present verbatim a narrator’s quasi-internal, confiding speech and relevant exposition. In practice, however, filmmakers use voiceover sparingly, since its juxtaposition to the illusion of natural dialogue within the filmic diegesis tends to create a stilted, unnatural effect that removes the viewer from immersion within the frame. Still, the adaptation of The Ghost Writer, for example, deploys Zuckerman’s selective voiceover effectively to distinguish the cinematic representation of the ongoing drama at Lonoff’s retreat from Nathan’s meditations while he writes his account of the events seemingly from the next room. More intrusive if inevitable are Marcus’s occasional voiceovers in Indignation, where Schamus desires to include Roth’s uncanny presentation of Marcus’s voice from beyond the grave, reflecting on his violent death in Korea to underscore the novel’s central insight about “the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result” (I 231). Perhaps most convincing is Perry’s intentionally reflexive exploitation of the device in Listen Up Philip, where the anonymous, acidly skeptical, writerly voiceover (Eric Bogosian) repeatedly intrudes on the action to intensify the narrative’s critical distance on Philip’s and Zimmerman’s inhumanity and egotism. Far less compelling is the awkwardly superfluous voiceover in the two American Trilogy adaptations. Roth’s strategic use of Nathan Zuckerman as narrator illuminates his central project: the epistemological and ethical impossibility of knowing other people or telling their stories, crystallized both in the oft-quoted passage from American Pastoral that “getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. … It’s getting them wrong that is living” (AP 35), resulting in Zuckerman’s openly acknowledged invention of his protagonists’

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lives and thoughts, and in the biting threat of the opening chapter of Human Stain, titled “Everyone Knows” (HS 1). Both films insert Zuckerman (respectively, David Strathairn and Gary Sinise) deferentially but clumsily as an observer to the action but not, as in the novels, its mastermind, reconstructor, creator—its author—who provides narrative drive, uncertainty, tone, plausibility, and interiority to the central figures. Without the frame of Zuckerman’s energetically speculative, discursive imagination—albeit that his reflexive voice seems to fade from American Pastoral—much of the effect of the characters’ interiority disappears from both adaptations. Swede Levov flattens onscreen into the unreadable niceness that Roth’s Zuckerman struggles with as false. Although the young Coleman expresses internal conflict over how his racial position circumscribes his subjectivity, the ambiguities, ambivalences, and pointed humor of the adult Coleman and Faunia smooth out predictably into melodrama. The Human Stain effectively realizes the novel’s problem of knowing mostly in its final uncanny sequence, when Zuckerman encounters Faunia’s ex-husband, the violent, post-traumatic Vietnam veteran Les Farley (Ed Harris), ice-fishing. The snowbound scene is figuratively chilling, as Les may—or may not—be menacing Zuckerman. Yet the filmmakers undercut their nuanced filming of the encounter by making Les’s responsibility for the accident that kills Coleman and Faunia a narrative fact, rather than, as in the novel, Zuckerman’s imaginative extrapolation. Indeed, the matter of “narrative fact” in part explains the glaring missteps in Ernest Lehman’s adaptation of Portnoy’s Complaint. Since of all Roth’s novels, Portnoy is the most singularly voiced, it illustrates the perspectival problem blatantly. The clamorous frenzy of Portnoy’s fantasies, complaints, self-recriminations, and self-excuses constituting the novel works on the page. Not only does Roth frame the novel with Portnoy’s conflict between being a “Jewboy” and a “nice Jewish boy” (RMO 35), but also Portnoy’s relentless voice encourages comic distance as Roth turns Alex’s interiority inside out. Portnoy’s hysteria— all those exclamation points!—unwittingly descends into hilarity; his verbal excess prompts ironic readings of the uncensored irruptions from his id and neurotic ego. But the film, dutifully reproducing verbatim chunks of Roth’s discourse, concretized visually within the frame, traps the viewer within Portnoy’s (Richard Benjamin) injured selfhood and assaults us with his unflagging howl of anguish and accusations. As a supremely sensory experience, film cannot readily sustain such a single note—especially when it is nonstop shouting. With a few exceptions (as in the slapstick fantasy, shot with a distorting lens, when Portnoy confesses to his parents that syphilis has caused his penis to fall off), the film’s presentation of Portnoy’s complaints concretely, as facts within the cinematic frame—what Gerard O’Donoghue (2021) calls the film’s “unfortunate literalism” (350)—reduces Portnoy, and those he rages against, to purposeless, vulgar stereotype. Curiously, among the adaptations, Portnoy’s Complaint is the only film to exaggerate— to a fault—the tone and transgressiveness of Roth’s text, if perhaps unsurprisingly, given its source and release in 1972, at the height of the sexual revolution and psychoanalysis’s sway over American culture. More striking, perhaps, is that roughly half of the adaptations discussed here rub off many of Roth’s edges, blunting the novels’ thematic resonances and taming their tone: the indignation and comic self-flagellation that so often drive Roth’s narratives and conception of character. As with many successful literary adaptations, the films that, ironically, seem best to honor Roth are those, like Elegy, The Humbling, Listen Up Philip, and The Plot against America, that are willing to stray the farthest from overly conscientious replication of the novels, making Roth their own.

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NOTES 1. The 2021 French adaptation of Deception, directed by Arnaud Desplechin, starring Léa Seydoux and Denis Polydalès, and filmed during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, was not readily available to screen at the time of writing. 2. For the most insightful and comprehensive chronological survey of the adaptations, see O’Donoghue (2021). For a fuller bibliography of film reviews and scholarly essays, see Appendix (Three, 391–96) A guide to film and television adaptations of Roth’s fiction. 3. Laura Mulvey (1975) famously theorized the objectifying gaze of both male viewer and male character at onscreen females. 4. Editor Ross Miller’s note 507.2 explains the history of the adaptation (Roth 2007: 645). 5. Michel Foucault (1977: 30) coined the phrase “history of the present.”

REFERENCES American Pastoral (2016), [Film] Dir. Ewan McGregor, USA: Lionsgate. The Contest for Aaron Gold (1955), [Film] Dir. Norman Lloyd, USA: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 6, Episode 4. Doane, Mary Ann (1999), “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th ed., 363–75, New York: Oxford University Press. Elegy (2008), [Film] Dir. Isabel Coixet, USA: Lakeshore. Foucault, Michel (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Pantheon. The Ghost Writer (1983), [Film] Dir. Tristram Powell, USA: American Playhouse Season 3, Episode 1, January 17. Goodbye, Columbus (1969), [Film] Dir. Larry Peerce, USA: Paramount, 1969. The Human Stain (2003), [Film] Dir. Robert Benton, USA: Miramax. The Humbling (2014), [Film] Dir. Barry Levinson, USA: Millennium. Hutcheon, Linda (2006), A Theory of Adaptation, New York: Routledge. Indignation (2016), [Film] Dir. James Schamus, USA: Summit. Listen Up, Philip (2014), [Film] Dir. Alex Ross Perry, USA: Tribeca and Faliro, 2014. Mulvey, Laura (1975), “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16 (3): 6–18. O’Donoghue, Gerard (2021), “Roth in Adaptation,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 347–59, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. The Plot against America (2020), [Television Series] Creat. Ed Burns and David Simon, USA: HBO, 2020. Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), [Film] Dir. Ernest Lehman, USA: Warner Brothers. The Prague Orgy [Prazské orgie] (2019), [Film] Dir. Irena Pavlásková, Czech Republic: Prague Movie Company. Roth, Philip (1975), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1997), American Pastoral, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2000), The Human Stain, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2001), The Dying Animal, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2007), “The Prague Orgy (A Television Adaptation),” in Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979–1985, 507–93, New York: The Library of America. Roth, Philip (2008), Indignation, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2009), The Humbling, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt. Shakespeare, William (1969), The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage, Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Sinatra, Frank (1944), “The House I Live In (That’s America to Me),” [Song] music by Earl Robinson, lyrics by Lewis Allan. Stam, Robert (2005), “Introduction: The Theory of Adaptation,” in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds.), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, 1–52, Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Roth Exhibited: An Interview with Bryan Zanisnik BRYAN ZANISNIK, AIMEE POZORSKI, AND MAREN SCHEURER

Bryan Zanisnik is an NYC-based artist working in performance, video, photography, and sculpture. In 2012, Zanisnik caught the attention of Philip Roth when he staged a performance sitting in a large glass container wearing swimming trunks and silently reading Roth’s 1973 The Great American Novel. Roth’s lawyers served Zanisnik a cease-and-desist letter within the first half hour of the opening of Every Inch a Man. As part of a response to Roth’s ultimately unsuccessful intervention, Zanisnik later created the Philip Roth Presidential Library, a site-specific installation that was first erected in Miami in 2016 and then taken up again for the Queens Museum in 2017. Both installations feature drywall and wood sculptures: walls and pillars with cracked openings that showcase hundreds of Roth novels from different editions and translations. The following conversation took place over email in December of 2022 when Zanisnik was digging his way out of a major snowfall in the Catskills. The moment had a Lonoffian quality—with two admirers, Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer, seeking insight into the life of an artist they have studied for years from afar. Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer (The Editors): Philip Roth’s thematic commitment to challenging such institutions as family, government, religion, culture, and education seem to appeal to you. Can you say more about that—or describe any other thematic concerns of Roth that appeal to you as a visual artist? Bryan Zanisnik (BZ): As early as I can remember, I have always had a contrarian approach to life. This potentially developed out of my teenage interest in the anti-war movement, punk rock, and the arts in general. This approach to life may explain why I studied art as an undergraduate student and eventually became a professional artist. Likewise, “contrarian” is the perfect word to describe Roth’s characters, and to a degree, Roth himself. Challenging social, religious, and institutional norms runs through almost every book of his, and I admire the courage of these outsider, iconoclast protagonists. Of course, with a contrarian outlook, there is another, more dubious side to the rejection of society. In transgressing societal norms, there is always the risk that one is violating or exploiting the rights of another person or group. In recent times, critics have brought into question the ethics of Roth’s characters and their transgressions. Is this due to his attempt to destroy all societal boundaries, yet failing to take into account the people he is transgressing? I can only speak for myself here, that in holding a contrarian outlook today, I try to also

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FIGURE 29.1 Philip Roth Presidential Library, site-specific installation, 2016, Locust Projects, Miami, FL.

view the world from my opposing perspective. Are any of my transgressions hurtful to underrepresented groups? If so, then I am failing myself, and a contrarian view is no better than the oppressive status quo. The Editors: In what ways do you think your mutual beginnings in New Jersey have contributed to your approaches to art and life? BZ: New Jersey is a very interesting place geographically, as it can be seen as both the center and the margin. New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are often lumped together, and even referred to as the “tri-state area.” I grew up a mere twenty miles from New York City, and abstractly speaking, this sounds like the center of the metropolitan universe—forty minutes from the tallest buildings in the world, the largest financial institutions in the world, and the biggest art world. Yet, to people living in the small, New Jersey suburb I grew up in, it felt anything but center. I remember as a teenager I would tell people I am going to New York City, and neighbors would ask, have you booked a hotel? Will you stay all weekend? I always thought, such odd questions to ask when I am driving a mere forty minutes. Yet if I were to travel to Europe or Asia, and explain I am less than an hour from midtown, I would be seen as living in the “center.” This duality and tension between center and margin, inside and outside, is something that permeates my work and can directly be tied back to the geography of my youth. The Editors: Beyond the issues and themes that Philip Roth takes up in his fiction, is there anything about Roth’s distinctive style that has attracted or even influenced you?

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BZ: I have always been drawn to Roth’s distinctive sense of humor. I find his humor part absurd and part abject and transgressive. The point of Roth’s humor has never been in search of a cheap laugh or thrill, but rather there is a pointedly societal critique in every snarky line of prose he writes. He brings attention to the absurdity of life, death, love, and human will. In tackling these major themes through the absurd, there is a kinship between Roth’s writings and those of the twentieth-century existential writers such as Camus, Sartre, and Kafka. The Editors: What inspired your take on Roth’s The Great American Novel as the impetus for a performance piece in 2012 Was there something about the cultural moment at the time that made Roth’s 1973 work especially resonant? BZ: To be quite frank, I chose Roth’s The Great American Novel because it was one of his worst received works. I was creating this very grandiose performance where I stood high up in the gallery on a platform, holding a Roth novel while a fan circulated baseball cards and out-of-print US currency around me. I wanted a counterpoint to this grandiosity, and it made sense to choose a “failed” work, so to speak. Not that I necessarily believe The Great American Novel is a failure, but it was received poorly upon release and to this day is one of his least celebrated works. Another reason I chose The Great American Novel is that it was Roth’s attempt to create a modern opus, an almost Joycean-like work. I am incredibly influenced by the writing of James Joyce, and I loved the idea of framing my psychologically driven performance and installation around a failed, somewhat incomprehensible American opus.

FIGURE 29.2  Every Inch a Man, site-specific installation and performance, 2012, Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY.

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The Editors: How did the legal battle with Roth influence your creative process? BZ: My legal battle with Roth did not so much influence my creative process but rather was an extension of it. I am drawn to an artistic practice that is organic, in flux, and responds to the realities and contexts that surround it. When the first cease-and-desist letter from Roth arrived, I was shocked. When this shock passed, I began to ask myself: How can this legal battle influence my work, both conceptually and in a tactile way? Physically speaking, I began photocopying the letters from lawyers as they arrived. These letters were then scattered throughout the gallery, building upon the thousands of objects already installed in the installation. Conceptually speaking, the legal battle transformed the work from possessing a passing mention of Roth to becoming entirely about him. Initially I saw the holding of the Roth novel as a small gesture in a much larger work. I thought of the installation and performance as a sentence, and the novel as the punctuation that appeared at the end of this sentence. When the legal battle began, that is all viewers spoke about, and to a degree, all I thought about. The small punctuation swallowed up the sentence and became the entire subject matter. The Editors: You have stated previously that you avoid referencing other visual artists and turn to literature instead. What is it about literature that inspires you? And what are the challenges of “translating” literary references into visual art? BZ: My interest in literature develops from my deep connection to narrative. Working with objects and imagery can be a very abstract process, but I have always been interested in the context around which objects exist, and more specifically, the stories these objects tell. I am particularly drawn to taking two or more objects and putting them together in order to create a third object and narrative. This linear assembling of objects—and the narrative that develops—can be corollary to the construction of a literary sentence. The challenge here is to create a new narrative without completely erasing the visual or the aesthetic. If the work becomes too literary, too language-based, then the work becomes too distant from a visual arts context, and this is problematic. The Editors: How does literature (and literature that is self-reflexive like Roth’s) help you shape your own self-reflexive practice as an artist? BZ: I am influenced by Roth’s semi-autobiographical writing because my own practice is autobiographical in nature. A similarity between Roth and myself is that when we draw from biography there is an inherent vulnerability there. More specifically, there is a desire to unearth the subconscious and all the transgressive, embarrassing, and abject desires that reside there. One major challenge as a visual artist is: How do we visually represent the subconscious when it is, essentially, the realm of the unseen and the unknown? That is why I often turn to literature. In psychoanalysis, therapists often say to speak the first association that comes to mind. There is an immediacy to language that seems to tap into the unknown. The relationship between the visual arts and the unconscious is a bit more complicated, as the unconsciousness must traverse form, composition, and aesthetics before it is visually born. Literature, language, and narrative has always been a shortcut for me to more immediately access this unknown.

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The Editors: As primarily a temporal rather than a spatial art, literature is notoriously difficult to “exhibit” in a museum, and yet, you draw inspiration from literature as an art and as a material practice. How does your work relate to museal practices of presenting literature to the public? What are your thoughts on books as artistic objects, particularly in works like the Philip Roth Presidential Library and Every Inch a Man? What about Roth’s works in book form makes them special as artistic objects? BZ: All time-based works are difficult to exhibit in a gallery context. A recent study determined that the average visitor at a museum spends twenty-seven seconds looking at a work of art. This is especially challenging for time-based works such as film and video, but it applies to literature as well. Over the years, a number of institutions and artists have held public, durational readings as visual artworks. While initially intriguing, they have fallen victim to the limits of a time-based work in a museum setting. With these challenges in mind, I have always been drawn to the physical book itself as a way to make concrete the time-based narrative held within. This is most obviously the case with the Philip Roth Presidential Library, but can also apply to my performance, Every Inch a Man. I held a Roth novel, and it appeared that I was reading it, but there were no spoken words. On the one hand, it’s a temporal work, but on the other, I am simply holding a physical object and the silence emphasizes the physical book over the narrative content within. One thing that particularly drew me to Roth’s novels as physical artworks is the endless amount of editions and translations that exist in the world. When I sourced his books for the Philip Roth Presidential Library, I sought out first editions, current editions, hardcover, soft cover, and prints in nearly every language imaginable. The endless iterations of each novel made them feel like artist multiples. The same way an artist like Warhol would make a series of silk screens addressing commodity culture, I thought Roth—specifically his publishers— would print numerous editions of his novels, each with a slight variation, from the cover image to the language. The Editors: You have often used the performances of family members in your work and so, one might argue, has Roth. In Patrimony (1991), Roth writes “relational autobiography,” i.e., he writes the self through a relational other. How does your approach relate to or contrast with Roth, aesthetically and ethically? BZ: I have often thought of the family members who I have collaborated with as filters for my ideas. A performance or installation begins as an idea, and then this idea travels through the bodies of my collaborators—often my mother and father—and what comes out the other end is the content of my work. I think there is an analogy between this process and a water filter. Water goes through a purification filter and what comes out the other end is still water, but it is more pure and precise. Working with collaborators, especially family members, seems to have had a purifying influence on my work, allowing the content to become more precise, raw, and direct. Of course, there are some real ethical issues that need to be addressed in this process. I cannot speak for Roth and the ethics of his relational autobiography, but for me I was deeply aware of the implications. While a body is a physical form and raw material, I couldn’t work with another’s body—or my own for that matter—without a sense of responsibility towards the other. That is why I have always approached collaboration with an openness and directness, being in clear and honest communication with my collaborators, and have treated the collaboration as an equal partnership, not a hierarchy.

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The Editors: The biographies that appeared in 2021 have once again highlighted Roth’s emphasis on tight authorial control—through his “co-writing” of Bailey’s biography and his legal intervention against Nadel’s. How do you see your own relationship to Roth’s “authority,” and how does your work intervene in questions of authorship and (auto)biography? Does this observation shed light on your earlier experiences with Roth, directly or indirectly? BZ: Immediately following my opening reception for Every Inch a Man, a gallery employee approached me and told me that I received a cease-and-desist order from Philip Roth’s attorneys. I thought he was joking. Then he went on to explain that Roth’s attorneys served the legal papers at my opening. They wanted to serve me personally but could not, as I was standing six feet above the ground inside a glass container while holding a Roth novel. At first, I was entirely shocked that Roth would threaten legal action for merely holding his novel, but the more I read about him, the more it made sense. Around the same time as my performance in 2012, Roth was battling with Wikipedia as he wanted to edit his own entry. This all seems in line with later legal and authorship battles of Roth, like with Bailey and Nadel. As far as my own relationship to Roth’s “authority,” I like to see my Roth-based works as an unauthorized collaboration. While I am producing the work, the content is heavily based upon Roth’s own work, and what results is a collaboration that he is not only indirectly involved in, but is also adverse to it. I think this adds to the psychological charge of the works, making them about authorship but also about issues of control, dominance, and submission. The Editors: Your work Philip Roth Presidential Library seems to be a wonderful counterpoint to the Philip Roth Personal Library that Roth bequeathed to the Newark Public Library upon his

FIGURE 29.3 Philip Roth Presidential Library, site-specific installation, 2017, Queens Museum, Queens, NY.

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death. Philip Roth’s Personal Library is an authorized project—in all senses of the word— capturing how Roth hoped to be remembered through the collection of his own, personally annotated library. How do you see your work, Philip Roth Presidential Library, speaking to this quite different project connected with questions of legacy? BZ: I think there’s a big difference between authorized memorials and more unofficial ones. As important as the Roth Library at the Newark Public Library is, it only tells one part of the story. Namely, the story that Roth wanted told and the legacy he imagined. While my work tells a more “unauthorized” story of Roth—one dealing with legal entanglements, authorship, and even obsession, there’s also parts of my work that celebrate Roth. I could not make a work that criticizes an artist and his ego and not also, in some perverse way, celebrate that ego by bringing it to the forefront of museum and art contexts. Ultimately, I think a fuller portrait of Roth can only be seen when we look at both libraries side by side. The Editors: What do you think is Roth’s legacy for you and other artists? BZ: There’s a long history of artist and writer collaborations, Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein or Marcel Duchamp and André Breton are two iconic collaborations that come to mind. I like to think of my Roth projects in conversation with this long history of artist-writer collaborations. As far as Roth’s particular legacy, I hope my project presents a fuller portrait of Roth, with all his successes and failures in mind. It is no small secret that Roth can be a problematic author in regard to his representations of women. I am no literary critic or historian, but I would hope that my work presents Roth at his most exposed, and that allows the viewer to judge his legacy, and for that matter, my own legacy.

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PART SIX

Shop Talk



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CHAPTER THIRTY

Philip Roth and a Pedagogy of Compassion MAGGIE MCKINLEY

In an interview with David Remnick for The New Yorker, Philip Roth (2000) offered some relatively dire meditations on the future and fate of literature, which he felt was becoming increasingly devalued in a culture consumed by screens. “Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared,” he said. “It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.” Roth’s claim that such a habit of mind has vanished is debatable, but it is difficult to deny a waning interest in literary fiction within our culture at large, with fewer readers willing or able to devote time to what Roth called the “mature, intelligent adult novel.” Some of this, no doubt, has to do with the pace of our increasingly technological world and related diminishing attention spans, combined with the deeply flawed notion in certain sectors of society that literary study is not “productive” in the ways that our consumerist culture has come to value. This presents an array of evolving challenges in academia, particularly regarding curriculum design and student engagement in the undergraduate literature classroom. As a professor of English at a community college in the Chicago suburbs, I begin every course with a discussion that aims to establish the benefits of literary study—a preemptive move of sorts—and I continue to address this with my students over the duration of the semester. The problem I have located in my students’ responses to literary fiction, however, has less to do with a skepticism about its value than a general lack of familiarity with the genre. Of course, many of my students excel at close reading and have a ready list of favorite novels—but many more of them struggle with figurative language, metaphor, and subtext. Teaching the work of Philip Roth presents its own set of unique challenges, as the density, length, point of view, tone, sense of humor, and at times essential historical context present a variety of obstacles to student understanding and appreciation. For example, The Ghost Writer, Roth’s 1979 novel about Nathan Zuckerman’s visit with his literary idol E.I. Lonoff, which is ultimately also a novel about authorship, literary influence, and the weight of history, proved to be a demanding text for more than one of my classes. Even high-achieving students who elected to enroll in my Honors English course found it to be dull and confusing and described Zuckerman as unlikeable and unrelatable; additionally, without cultural context, it was difficult for them to understand the significance of Roth/Zuckerman’s imagined “resurrection” of Anne Frank. This is anecdotal evidence, of course, but I am certainly not the only instructor who has observed challenges that stem less from resistance to Roth than from what we might

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call distance—a feeling of separation from the culture that produced the text and from the characters that populate it. In his own reflection about the challenges of teaching Roth, Benjamin Schreier (2013) argues that a fundamental barrier to effectively teaching Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) to undergraduates is that “the book is for us so completely inscribed by its literary historical ‘significance,’ so completely overdetermined, as to be inaccessible in any other way” and “interest in Portnoy’s can only be formulated in the context of an academic interest in Roth’s career—as an appendage to a kind of reception history from which close reading of the text can never really be extricated” (207). While Julie Husband (2007) documents a positive experience teaching Roth’s work alongside that of Toni Morrison in a graduate seminar, she also admits that “even with a considerable amount of frontloading, many undergraduates do not have the feel for American history that makes Roth fans respond so viscerally to his writing” (4). Beyond the problem of history, there are challenges pertaining more specifically to the identities and behaviors of Roth’s male protagonists. In addition to representing a lived experience that often sharply diverges from that of our students, these characters exhibit behaviors that could easily be categorized as examples of toxic masculinity. While this does not make them unworthy of study, as I and others have argued elsewhere,1 it does add another layer to the already complicated endeavor of weaving Roth into college curricula. “Philip Roth has been a tough sell here in Iowa,” Husband (2007) writes. “Colleagues asked, ‘Will college students be interested in novels featuring middle-aged men?’ ‘Isn’t Roth, well, unP.C.?’” (4). More recently, Jacques Berlinerblau (2021) cited comparable obstacles in similar language, noting that “among younger readers—readers attuned to our age’s sensitivities about gender, race, and class—this author is a really, really hard sell” (1). Berlinerblau’s slightly intensified resounding of Husband’s phrasing is a good indication of how the shifts in our cultural conversations, particularly in the wake of #MeToo, have made it even more difficult to help students locate the value of seriously engaging with Roth’s work—especially when we as Roth scholars find ourselves simultaneously reckoning with his legacy in essential but sometimes painful ways. I do not claim to have definitive answers to these thorny pedagogical problems. There is no magical method that will suddenly make Roth’s work immediately appealing and readily accessible for every student or instructor, and certainly, some texts are more teachable than others, or make more practical sense given time, topic, and course goals. What I would like to do here, however, is emphasize how and why the particular challenges of teaching Roth are meaningful in themselves—that in fact, they may be the very point of teaching Roth in the first place. We illuminate what is valuable about studying Roth specifically, and literary fiction more generally, when we struggle to help our students understand difficult characters, encourage them to consider contexts and circumstances of a novel’s construction and publication, and listen with open minds to their considerations of morally or ethically challenging moments. Doing this work in the classroom helps to develop not only critical thinking skills, but emotional intelligence as well, since when we engage in the process of closely reading Roth’s work with our students, navigating its provocations with patience, we are practicing both empathy and compassion—habits of mind and behavior that are as essential now as ever. Such efforts are enveloped by what is generally defined today as a pedagogy of compassion, an evidence-based approach to teaching that crosses multiple disciplines. In some ways, it can be seen as an extension of Paulo Freire’s (1998) theory of progressive teaching, which emphasizes the importance of humility, courage, tolerance, and the ability to accept

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unresolved tensions. In Freire’s model, “the teacher and learner are in a partnership” and work collaboratively to create meaning and knowledge (Vandeyar and Swart 2016: 145). As with Freire’s approach, current conversations about compassionate pedagogy, described in more detail below, are often centered on modes of interaction and engagement with students. However, compassionate pedagogy is also closely tied to course content, particularly in literature classes, where novels and short stories provide “exemplars” of complex human behavior that underscore the value of the qualities Freire mentions, as well as the feelings of connection and solidarity that form the foundation of compassion (Bracher et al. 2019: 120). This is especially true, I would argue, of Philip Roth’s work. His fiction features compassion as a salient theme, a compassion that exists not despite the objectionable characters or difficult subject matter, but as inextricably linked to them. From his examination of a small town’s reaction to an outsider in “Eli, the Fanatic” (1959) to his acknowledgment of the generational trauma experienced by Alexander Portnoy to his evocation of the grief and loss felt by Mickey Sabbath, Roth repeatedly invites his readers to explore the nature and importance of compassion—especially in those cases where it seems almost impossible to cultivate. His work highlights that our attempts to form compassionate responses and human connections across difference and in ethically troubled moments are part of the universal human struggle. In this vein, the complex and contradictory characters in Philip Roth’s work, combined with the changes in culture, audience, and reception over the years, require an approach that is humble and dialogic in the way that Freire posits. We practice a pedagogy of compassion when we engage in respectful conversations with students who might naturally receive a work like Portnoy’s Complaint much differently in 2022 than readers did in 1969—and in a way that might prompt us to rethink and expand on our own existing ideas about Roth’s literature. In other words, at its core, Roth’s fiction invites a study of the subject of compassion, which is best facilitated through the active and conscious praxis of compassionate teaching. To better understand a pedagogy of compassion, it is helpful to first differentiate compassion from empathy and sympathy, concepts which are sometimes used interchangeably, though each bears its own distinct etymology. The oldest of these terms, sympathy, derives from the ancient Greek sympatheia, which translates generally as “fellow feeling” (Gerdes 2011: 232). While the word still maintains this core tenet, its connotation has shifted over time, becoming increasingly connected to the notion of pity. In passively feeling sorry for someone’s suffering, as opposed to feeling or suffering with them, sympathy has thus become more associated with condescension. As Susan Lanzoni (2018) and Ana Soto-Rubio and Shane Sinclair (2018) observe, this changing understanding of sympathy coincided with the rising interest in empathy during the twentieth century. Derived from the Greek term empatheia, often translated as “in feeling,” empathy has accrued an array of definitions in its relatively short life in modern linguistics. As Lanzoni explains, the term’s early iterations refer to a “self artfully expanded or projected … to make the world in its own image” (279) while later “empathy shrank the self so as to better appreciate another’s experience” (280). Today it is largely understood as a “means to step inside another’s experience to grasp it more fully” (277). In recent decades, due in part to its foundations in art and aesthetics, empathy has been at the center of research focused on the benefits of reading literary fiction. And indeed, many such studies have turned up encouraging results, concluding that reading literary fiction has the potential to increase empathy, as it helps us to better understand experiences that are not our own.2 While empathy remains a central part of conversations about literature, academic studies have lately prioritized compassion over empathy as essential to pedagogy across

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disciplines. Some of this shift is related to concerns about empathy’s potential drawbacks; for example, critics have “suggested that there is a potential ‘dark side’ to empathy involving attuning to the feelings of another person to take advantage of their vulnerability, to manipulate them, or even to exacerbate their suffering” (Soto-Rubio and Sinclair 2018: 1430). A recent study of compassion conducted at Kent State University notes such concerns as well, highlighting the ways in which narrative empathy has the potential to reify existing biases (Bracher et al. 2019: 112) and noting that “the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy” (107). What differentiates compassion from emotions like sympathy and empathy is its “actionoriented” dimension (Rashedi, Plante, and Callister 2015: 132; Zembylas 2013: 509). Like sympathy and empathy, compassion is an “affective state” (Rashedi, Plante, and Callister 2015: 132). It is rooted in the Latin term “compati,” meaning “to suffer with,” an etymological foundation similar to that of sympathy and empathy in its emphasis on shared feeling. However, compassion in its modern usage is defined more particularly as “the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help” (Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas 2010: 351) and “actively alleviate another person’s suffering” (SotoRubio and Sinclair 2018: 1430). In these terms, we might think of empathy as a precedent to compassion: first we must seek to understand, and then we can be moved to facilitate change— in our thinking, in ourselves, and in the world around us. It might be challenging, at first, to imagine how to transition from the study of Roth’s fiction to this kind of action. How can one alleviate the suffering of a fictional character who does not exist? How can one move from the necessarily limited world of the novel to broader implications of “real-world” suffering? In many respects, these questions get to the heart of anxieties about the modern relevance of not just literary fiction, but the Humanities in general. Some potential answers lie within the exercise of close reading itself and the widely applicable cognitive skills it develops, which are the foundations of a pedagogy of compassion.3 Bracher et al. (2019) provide a detailed model for a practice of literary study centered on developing this mindset, which they term Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP). Their research suggests CCP can help students develop two capabilities that can in turn enhance compassion. These cognitive skills include 1) “recognition of self-other overlap” and 2) “cognizance of the situational, uncontrollable causes of bad character, bad behavior, and bad life-outcomes” (107). These habits of thinking help produce the “impartial, universal compassion” that in turn fosters a propensity for social justice (112).4 This is not, of course, something that can be achieved by studying a single text or enrolling in a single course. But research suggests that compassion can be taught,5 and that a pedagogy of compassion provides students with a set of critical thinking tools essential to this development. For students new to literary study, or to Philip Roth, Roth’s early short stories might best lend themselves to an application of compassionate pedagogy. For example, “Eli, the Fanatic” offers a self-contained introduction to Roth, in that it does not require an awareness of Roth’s recurring characters or his wry doubling, it does not demand extensive prior knowledge of literary history, and its length makes it far more accessible to students in survey courses. More importantly, the theme of compassion lies at the very center of the text. After all, Eli’s personal journey is ultimately compassion-seeking. Despite sharing a Jewish history and faith, he (and by approximation, his assimilated suburban Jewish community) initially finds little in common with the Jewish community at a nearby Yeshiva. Eli must reach across the cultural differences between himself and his mirrored other, whom he deems “the greenie,”

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to truly understand their shared history and establish solidarity. His journey includes a move toward empathy—he literally walks in the greenie’s shoes, an unsubtle symbol of this increased understanding—but Eli is moved to do something more to help assuage the greenie’s pain. “Tell me, what can I do for you, I’ll do it,” he insists desperately (GC 291). When he dons the greenie’s suit, he “felt those black clothes as if they were the skin of his skin” (293), and at the end of the narrative, Eli not only comes to understand his pain but is also irrevocably changed by finding solidarity with this previously othered individual; the sedative Eli is given for his seemingly unhinged (but actually empathetic and compassionate) behavior “calmed his soul, but did not touch it down where the blackness had reached” (298). In addition to offering Eli’s personal journey as an example of empathy motivating actual change, the story also provides opportunities to employ a compassion-directed line of questioning, as we can ask about the behavior of other characters around Eli who perceive his newfound compassion to be a nervous breakdown. What are they missing by not viewing the situation with the kind of compassion they might have employed themselves? How might we see their behavior as shaped by the cultural forces acting upon them? In asking these questions in the classroom, we not only locate where Roth explores compassion as a theme and character trait, but we also practice the habits of inquiry about “the situational, uncontrollable causes” of behavior, which can illuminate unseen struggles and challenges and help develop a more compassionate way of considering those around us in the “real world.” Not all of Roth’s work offers such compact, effectual teaching opportunities. As Roth continued to develop his literary voice in the 1960s and 1970s, his characters became more exaggerated, more difficult, more controversial. Portnoy’s Complaint, My Life as a Man (1974), and the early Kepesh novels, as well as later novels like Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and American Pastoral (1997), among others, feature male protagonists whose actions might quickly alienate college students today, given the characters’ masculinist striving and aggression. An honest and frank discussion of gender in Roth’s work is an essential part of an open dialogue with students, but such discussions are unlikely to eliminate skepticism or aversion. Indeed, it is important to emphasize in these conversations that the value of a text does not rest on a character’s likeability, that studying a character’s bad behavior does not necessitate condoning it, and that negative reactions to a text can actually be integral to productive analyses. In the process of acknowledging character faults and Roth’s fraught representations of gender, we can work with our students to identify the guises and deflections adopted by these protagonists, to articulate the reasons they err, self-deceive, and seethe, and to interrogate the forces within the text that contribute to the protagonists’ masculine crises as well as the cultural forces that might have influenced Roth’s own construction of them. Such an approach validates students’ feelings of discomfort while actively demonstrating the cultural, historical, and literary knowledge that can arise from using those initial reactions as critical, analytical tools. Exploring the roots of characters’ behavior can also help transition to relevant discussions of blame and responsibility, central points in studies of compassion development. As some scholars have noted, compassion is often tied to ideas of “deservingness,” or “the degree to which an individual is responsible for his own suffering,” a concept grounded in Aristotle’s argument that “deserved suffering should lead to blame and reproach, whereas undeserved suffering should elicit compassion” (Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas 2010: 357). However, Bracher et al. (2019) weave the concept of blamelessness into their theory of CCP, drawing from the Tibetan Buddhist belief in “moral luck, the fact that no one deserves to suffer

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because no one is ultimately to blame for anything they have done or failed to do, since no one got to choose their genes or formative environment” (115).6 This might sound at first like a dubious argument, particularly to skeptics of Roth’s work, whose objection to or discomfort with his subject matter often lies in the flaws of his protagonists, who can be easily read (and in some cases, perhaps, should be read) as agents of their own demise. I would argue we can use compassionate pedagogy to discuss Roth’s fiction not with the goal of avoiding criticism of his characters’ faults, but rather to better understand the complex system of causes and contexts contributing to their behavior. The barometer for success does not necessarily need to be a feeling of empathy or compassion toward every character in Roth’s work. Instead, the aim is to develop a more compassionate process of evaluation—a frame of mind and a mode of inquiry that can extend beyond the literary world—by identifying the external factors and emotional struggles that shape a character. This might be applied to some of the difficult protagonists in Roth’s denser novels, perhaps most suitable for upper-level literature courses. Sabbath’s Theater, for instance, directly challenges many readers’ moral sensibilities, as Mickey Sabbath’s behavior is intentionally discomfiting and inappropriate. This is a novel, after all, about a performer who gradually alienates his entire audience. He dubs himself “a teacher of estrangement from the ordinary,” and aims to scandalize, seeking out notoriety. But as Roth also tells us, “Something horrible is happening to Sabbath” (78). Even as he thrills at the prospect of transgression, Sabbath is in mourning: for his long-lost wife Nikki, for his lover Drenka, for his advocate Linc, for his brother, for his mother. Sabbath’s perversities combine with moving portrayals of his grief; indeed, their inseparability helps to explain some of his actions. He terrifies a young woman in the subway as he performs monologues from King Lear (1606) because he is unraveling as he fixates on his lost loved ones; he urinates on Drenka’s grave because he sees it as a way of honoring their shared love of the perverse even after she is gone. The perfect storm of Mickey Sabbath’s controversial, exasperating, pitiable, hilarious, moving, tragic life invites us to unearth the roots of his actions, to understand how he is driven by suffering and vulnerability. A close analysis of Sabbath’s varied and contradictory character traits, and the relationship between his culpability and the external forces at work upon him, helps to illuminate that even as (and often because) he stumbles, he also suffers—and is perhaps therefore deserving of both blame and compassion. Compassion itself, after all, “begins with recognizing suffering” and “invites us to step out of our usual frame of reference” to consider the emotional predicament of another, which increases our desire to alleviate their pain (Rashedi, Plante, and Callister 2015: 132). Roth’s work, which immerses us in the various ways people react to emotional and physical pain, provides some of the most intimate and complex examinations of suffering in modern American Literature, Sabbath’s Theater being only one example. For instance, Nathan Zuckerman’s narration in American Pastoral is, in some ways, a primer in how to conduct a compassionate analysis in these terms. Describing Seymour “the Swede” Levov, Zuckerman reflects on the act of witnessing and empathizing with the suffering of another: To embrace your hero in his destruction … to let your hero’s life occur within you when everything is trying to diminish him, to imagine yourself into his bad luck, to implicate yourself not in his mindless ascendancy, when he is the fixed point of your adulation, but in the bewilderment of his tragic fall—well, that’s worth thinking about. (AP 88)

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Zuckerman’s point—that we can only really begin to know and understand someone through their pain and suffering, as opposed to their glory—foregrounds the intersection of empathy and compassion. It reflects an attempt not only to imagine oneself in the shoes of another, but to see how as members of a society, we are inevitably implicated in the lives of others, bearing some connection to one another. The Swede himself turns out not to be “god or demigod” but only “another assailable man” (89). Our efforts to comprehend Roth’s characters in the classroom, much like Zuckerman seeks to find the vulnerability in his subjects, can be a way to understand “self-other overlap,” a first step in being moved to change our understanding of our relationship to others, first on the page, then in the world. Roth also situates suffering as central to the human experience in his exploration of the indignities and anxieties surrounding illness, aging, and mortality, evident in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), the novels that comprise the American Trilogy, The Dying Animal (2001), Exit Ghost (2007), and the tetralogy of novellas he published at the end of his career. Indeed, Roth is most often lauded for his works that examine the reality and inevitability of sorrow and distress. But even Portnoy’s Complaint is a novel about suffering, and framing it as such in class discussions can help to shift the emphasis toward shared humanity at the heart of a book that, as Schreier aptly noted, is understandably puzzling to twenty-first-century students. The confessional construct of the novel immediately reveals Portnoy’s attempt to confront the circumstances of his suffering, and the narrative gradually reveals that he is coping with problems that remain central to the human experience: generational trauma, dysfunctional family, identity crises, and discrimination. In this vein, through Portnoy’s monologue, the novel also introduces the experience of ethnic and religious marginalization, as well as a search for belonging in America that remains incredibly relevant today.7 “Don’t tell me we’re Americans just like they are,” Portnoy tells Dr. Spielvogel. “No, no, these blond-haired Christians are the legitimate residents and owners of this place, and they can pump any song they want into the streets and no one is going to stop them either” (PC 145–6). Despite Portnoy’s famous rejection of “the saga of the suffering Jews,” his tale recounts how the inescapability of history continues to shape him (PC 76). These struggles are not excuses for the “bad character, bad behavior, and bad life-outcomes” that Portnoy exhibits elsewhere, but they illuminate the necessity of considering context and circumstance and serve as a basis for discussing the moral luck that influences his life. To arrive at a point where we can do this interpretive work, we must inevitably first help students move through what they might experience as a kind of literary opacity. Yet the work that we do to pierce the veil of cultural distance and unfamiliarity is precisely what Bracher et al. (2019) identify as central to a compassion-cultivating pedagogy, as spending time analyzing the inner lives of fictional characters can potentially “train readers to recognize their solidarity with others, by revealing aspects of characters that are shared by readers but that are largely obscured by superficial differences and ego-defensiveness in real-life encounters” (116). The value is in the steps we take to find our way through the ethical gray areas introduced by Roth’s plots and protagonists, to arrive at a reading of characters that moves us to see the humanity in their struggle. As Miriam Jaffe (2021) observes, “Roth teaches readers … how to closely read, not just texts, but people” (194). Consider Roth’s resonant assertion in American Pastoral that “getting people right is not what living is all about anyway,” but that it’s “getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again” (35). This is the very kind of humility that lies at the heart of Freirean

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and compassionate pedagogy. When we consciously attempt to foster compassion for an individual’s suffering—even by simply rehearsing this in the fictional realm of literary study—we productively engage in what Zuckerman calls “this terribly significant business of other people” (35). Most instructors of literature likely already implement something akin to compassionate pedagogy, even if they do not define it as such. For example, though Ezra Cappell (2013) does not directly reference this term in his reflection about teaching Roth’s work on the United States–Mexico border, he articulates how reading Roth can help students develop the cognitive skills and affective tendencies essential to compassion, namely the ability to find self-other overlap and solidarity with others who at first seem very different. “Roth helps my students, and me, contemplate the difficult labor of cultural transmission,” he writes, “which is gained through the lifelong labor of figuring things out—in making disparate connections” (Cappell 2013: 200). Emily Gould (2018), too, implicitly illuminates the benefits of a compassionate pedagogy in her essay on teaching Goodbye, Columbus (1959) to students at Columbia University, most of whom had not heard of Roth, but whose own interpretations of the novella were instructive to her in surprising ways. As she reflects, The class-based gulf between Neil and Brenda—its historical sources, the way such rifts rippled out into American culture for several generations—was totally boring to my students. … Instead, what they took away from this book was a sense of permission. After they read it, their reading responses and creative assignments became markedly less stilted and academic. They not only became more comfortable saying how they felt, they also became more agile at describing their feelings, and even at tracking down some of their feelings’ sources. In this instance, Roth’s text becomes the vehicle for a pedagogical partnership, wherein the instructor learns from the students’ perspectives, and students apply what they draw from the text to their own daily lives to the extent that they exhibit a positive change in behavior. As teachers and scholars of Philip Roth, we might see the impact of this literature in ways that Roth himself could not—or would not—see throughout his career. Ever the contrarian, Roth disavowed many assessments of his work during his lifetime, including its potential impact. “You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no,” he said in an interview with Hermione Lee (WW 167). In a later discussion with Martin Krasnik, Roth (2005) also framed reading literature as a purely solitary act, rather than as a collaborative exercise, and called for the abolishment of literature departments in general.8 Despite Roth’s assertions, his fiction, when approached via compassionate critical reading, may well have the ability to change something in a culture, by helping to shift the way we think about people and how we treat them. Moreover, the benefits of dialogue in the classroom suggest this does not have to be done in solitude—and that it might in fact be most effective when done together. As Roth also said to Hermione Lee, “The best readers come to fiction … to have set loose in them the consciousness that’s otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn’t fiction” (WW 167). An open-minded and collaborative discussion interrogating the assumptions we bring to a text is nothing if not an act of deconditioning. In this way, a pedagogy of compassion, a practice that can open new ways of seeing the world and the people in it, has liberating implications beyond the act of reading itself.

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NOTES 1. See Berlinerblau (2021), McKinley (2021), and Shostak (2007), for example. 2. Bracher et al. (2019) cite several studies that have further supported “the notion that reading fiction exercises and strengthens people’s real world empathetic ability” often through what is referred to as “perspective taking.” As results indicated, “readers who simulated the experience of (and thus presumably experienced affective empathy for) a character who was a member of a stigmatized group exhibited less stereotyping and more positive attitudes toward the group as a whole” (109). 3. In this way, a pedagogy of compassion applied to literary study shares characteristics with narrative medicine and its goal of enhancing radical empathy. For an excellent overview of this concept and how it applies to Philip Roth in particular, see Jaffe (2021). 4. The results of their study found that “CCP enhances recognition of moral luck and universal human solidarity, increases sympathy for stigmatized and marginalized groups, and advances social justice by producing preferences for less harsh social policies for such groups” (Bracher et al. 2019: 149). 5. See Vandeyar and Swart (2016) and Jazaieri et al. (2013). 6. In their study of the complex legal implications of blame, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen (2004) reflect on the social intuition to punish people who seem to “truly deserve it” but observe that “whenever the causes of someone’s bad behaviour are made sufficiently vivid, we no longer see that person as truly deserving of punishment” (1783). 7. This is not unique to Portnoy, of course; Lisa Kirby (2006) has noted that “[r]eading Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) together offers a discourse on passing that presents an important teachable moment about issues of selfhood and marginalized identities in the United States” (151). 8. However, Roth (2010) also later remarked on how much he himself enjoyed teaching literature.

REFERENCES Bracher, Mark, Deborah Barnbaum, Michael Byron, Tammy Clewell, Nancy Docherty, Francoise Massardier-Kenney, David Pereplyotchik, Susan Roxburgh, and Elizabeth Smith-Pryor (2019), “Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy: Advancing Social Justice by Improving Social Cognition Through Literary Study,” Scientific Study of Literature, 9 (2): 107–62. Berlinerblau, Jacques (2021), The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Cappell, Ezra (2013), “From Mount Meru to Newark: Teaching Philip Roth on the U.S. Mexico Border,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 32 (2): 197–201. Freire, Paulo (1998), Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, trans. Donaldo Macedo, Dale Koike, and Alexandra Oliveira, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gerdes, Karen E. (2011), “Empathy, Sympathy, and Pity: 21st-Century Definitions and Implications for Practice and Research,” Journal of Social Service Research, 37 (3): 230–41. Goetz, Jennifer L., Dacher Keltner, and Emiliana Simon-Thomas (2010), “Compassion: An Evolutionary Analysis and Empirical Review,” Psychological Bulletin, 136 (3): 351–74. Gould, Emily (2018), “The Shocking Thing about Teaching Roth to College Kids,” The Cut, May 24. Available online: https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/teaching-goodbye-columbus-by-philip-roth-tocollege-kids.html (accessed June 30, 2022). Greene, Joshua and Jonathan Cohen (2004), “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 359 (1451): 1775–85.

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Husband, Julie (2007), “Teaching Philip Roth and Toni Morrison,” Philip Roth Society Newsletter, 5 (2): 4–5. Jaffe, Miriam (2021), “Narrative Medicine,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 194–202, New York: Cambridge University Press. Jazaieri, Hooria, Geshe Thupten Jinpa, Kelly McGonigal, Erika L. Rosenberg, Joel Finkelstein, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Margaret Cullen, James R. Dorty, James J. Gross, and Philippe R. Goldin (2013), “Enhancing Compassion: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Compassion Cultivation Training Program,” Journal of Happiness Studies, 14 (4): 1113–26. Kirby, Lisa (2006), “Shades of Passing: Teaching and Interrogating Identity in Roth’s The Human Stain and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,” Philip Roth Studies, 2 (2): 151–60. Lanzoni, Susan (2018), Empathy: A History, New Haven: Yale University Press. McKinley, Maggie (2021), “Masculinity,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 275–86, New York: Cambridge University Press. Rashedi, Roxanne, Thomas G. Plante, and Erin S. Callister (2015), “Compassion Development in Higher Education,” Journal of Psychology and Theology, 43 (2): 131–9. Roth, Philip (1993), Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, New York: Random House Vintage International Edition. Roth, Philip (1994), Portnoy’s Complaint, New York: Random House Vintage International. Roth, Philip (1996), Sabbath’s Theater, New York: Random House Vintage International. Roth, Philip, (1998), American Pastoral, New York: Random House Vintage International. Roth, Philip (2000), “Into the Clear,” Interview with David Remnick for The New Yorker, May 8. Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/05/08/into-the-clear (accessed June 30, 2022). Roth, Philip (2005), “Philip Roth: ‘It No Longer Feels Like a Great Injustice That I Have to Die,’” Interview with Martin Krasnik for The Guardian, December 14. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/14/fiction.philiproth (accessed June 30, 2022). Roth, Philip (2010), “Philip Roth Goes Home Again,” Interview with Scott Raab for Esquire, October 1. Available online: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a8604/philip-rothinterview-1010/ (accessed June 30, 2022). Roth, Philip (2017), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013, New York: Library of America. Schreier, Benjamin (2013), “Why It’s Impossible to Teach Portnoy’s Complaint,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 32 (2): 205–7. Shostak, Debra (2007), “Roth and Gender,” in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 111–26, New York: Cambridge University Press. Soto-Rubio, Ana and Shane Sinclair (2018), “In Defense of Sympathy, in Consideration of Empathy, and in Praise of Compassion: A History of the Present,” Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 55 (5): 1428–34. Vandeyar, Saloshna and Ronel Swart (2016), “Educational Change: A Case for a ‘Pedagogy of Compassion,’” Education as Change, 20 (3): 141–59. Zembylas, Michalinos (2013), “The ‘Crisis of Pity’ and the Radicalization of Solidarity: Toward Critical Pedagogies of Compassion,” Educational Studies, 49 (1): 504–21.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Nemeses: Roth and His Biographers JESSE TISCH

In September 1814, Lord Byron received a visit from Johann Spurzheim, a leading practitioner of the voguish field of phrenology. Upon inspecting the great man’s skull, Spurzheim declared his surprise. Lord Byron was “a little astonished” himself: his every quality “has its opposite in great force,” implying that “my good & evil are at perpetual war.” “Pray heaven,” he added, “the last don’t come off victorious” (Byron 2009: 137). The story suggests something of the problem of being Philip Roth’s biographer. Wielding modern tools, the biographer paints a clear, coherent portrait. But how coherent? The writer is “too many people if he’s any good,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said (Hook 2002: xiv). Roth would surely have agreed, adding an additional problem. As he famously wrote, “getting people right is not what living is all about.” Rather, it’s getting them wrong—and wrong, and wrong again. “That’s how we know we’re alive,” he wrote in American Pastoral (1997): “we’re wrong” (35). Where to begin, then, in pondering “Roth and biography”? With Roth’s own opinions? As usual, he was of several minds. Or perhaps with the myriad attempts by friends and journalists to chronicle Roth’s life? Surely, the subject is broad enough to encompass Roth’s zealous efforts to select a biographer and protect his legacy. “You’re gonna have to defend me when I’m dead,” he told Mary Karr, a personal friend. “Philip,” she replied warmly, “you’re indefensible” (TheNewChannel 2021). To some scholars, Roth seems like a biographobe, which would put him in excellent company. James Joyce attacked “biografiends” (Banville 1999). Gore Vidal mocked “scholarsquirrels” (Vidal 1988). Henry James wrote The Aspern Papers (1888) to belittle biographers. In a sense, they were amateurs. Lord Tennyson, fearing biographers’ encroach, enlisted his son, Hallam, to write one. Thomas Hardy outsourced the job to his wife—or so he claimed. In fact, he wrote it himself. Attempts to control biographers are as old as biography itself. Since the Enlightenment, authors have been happy to destroy their papers, lest shameful secrets emerge. This might be seen as a perverse form of respect, granting the power of biography to shape legacies. At his request, Philip Larkin’s girlfriend shredded incriminating diaries. Henry James preferred arson, staging a backyard auto-da-fé. Samuel Johnson destroyed papers, hampering James Boswell. And Boswell? He chose three literary executors, all of whom gave up. Together, they handed the job to Boswell’s favorite son, James.

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DEATH AND BIOGRAPHY Roth was no Boswell. For one thing, he left no direct heirs, so the bonds of blood couldn’t protect him. No wonder he was anxious. “Two things await me,” he once said, naming death and biographers as his greatest worries (Taylor 2020: 51). Presumably he meant in that order. But who knows? In some sense, Roth seemed to fear he wouldn’t survive death, at least the death of his reputation. Concerns over privacy—over exposure and humiliation—haunted Roth and his characters. David Kepesh fears his secrets splashed on page 1: “It’s nobody’s business!” (B 36). Portnoy, always in overdrive, imagines headlines “revealing my filthy secrets to a shocked and disapproving world” (PC 175). The nightmare is realized in The Human Stain (2000): “Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age” (38–9). In fact, everyone doesn’t know—but they could! Hence the hero’s anxiety. So it goes, again and again and again. What mortifying secrets was Roth concealing? The answer emerges in Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth (2020), by Benjamin Taylor. When Roth met Taylor, around 1994, he was riding high, having overcome serious depression to finish Sabbath’s Theater (1995). In time, Taylor, a writer and scholar, became Roth’s confidante, his caretaker, even his health care proxy. “You are the best of friends and kindest of men,” Roth told Taylor in 2013. “You must know how much I treasure our friendship” (Taylor n.d.). Taylor recalls Roth “aglow and triumphant” (Taylor 2020: 28), but also beset by shames. They were surprisingly common: physical infirmity, mental illness. In so many ways, Roth overcame society’s rules and expectations. Yet he couldn’t transcend its stigmas, nor achieve the sublime indifference of old age. Fear of judgment “plagued him as acutely as any itch in the loins,” writes Taylor, expressing some bemusement. That Roth “should be so primly worried about what people were saying struck me as funny” (Taylor 2020: 49). In many ways, Taylor describes an ordinary person, with ordinary defenses and selfevasions. Can we ever tell the truth about our childhoods? We misremember; we dramatize events; we settle on happy stories; or we exaggerate the awfulness in order to justify our adult mistakes. Nostalgia, forgetfulness, self-delusion: these distortion fields, which affected Roth as much as anyone, make our stories completely untrustworthy. Taylor cheerfully repeats Roth’s cheerful childhood stories. “Happy at home and happy at school,” Taylor (2020) writes. “The Roths were a sparking example of what family life could be” (68–9). Well, not exactly. The Roths had their troubles, like all families, if occasionally darker. “I knew I had to get away. I didn’t care where it was,” Roth once recalled. “I felt that if I stayed at home any longer I would kill him” (Miller 2003). “Him,” of course, is Herman Roth, his gruff, controlling father. Herman had his virtues (see Roth’s 1991 memoir, Patrimony), but patience and gentleness weren’t among them. Meanwhile, Roth’s mother, Bess, was more opaque, a tender yet threatening parent with a mania for cleanliness. Her war against schmutz was unending, whereas Philip would insist that “error, excrement, semen” are what defines us (HS 242). Bess insisted on proper behavior. Philip waged a sixty-year crusade against propriety and good taste, vowing to “let in the repellent” (EG 272). To be sure, their relationship was complex. “Writers and their mothers—the uncharted deep,” Edna O’Brien (1999: 21) once wrote. One illuminating portrait is “The Angry Act,” a case study from 1967. (The author is Hans Kleinschmidt, better known as Roth’s therapist, though his patients included Truman Capote, Harold Brodkey, Leonard

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Bernstein, and Richard Avedon.) With its strong Freudian overtones, the document goes where biographers fear to tread: the subject’s unconscious. It also recalls specific humiliations, evoking the castrating mother of Freudian cliche. In one instance, young Philip is mocked for wanting a jock strap: “You have such a little one that it makes no difference” (Kleinschmidt 1967: 124). In another, Bess punishes her son by locking him out of the family home until, sobbing, he pounds the door, pleading for reentry. “The Angry Act”—surely one of the stranger entries in the biographical canon—evokes the overbearing Sophie Portnoy. To the ghastly story of Philip being locked out, Kleinschmidt adds a startling detail: before banishing her son, Bess would pack him a little backpack so he could flourish in his new life outside the home. “Submission seemed to be the price for love,” Kleinschmidt (1967) writes, noting Roth’s inability to accept dependence on his mother (124–5). Roth rejected Kleinschmidt, too, mocking his Freudianism. But the therapist was on to something: Roth would assert his superiority his entire life, rejecting authority, craving freedom and control in nearly all his relationships, personal and professional.

FAREWELLS, MOSTLY FRIENDLY With all this family tsuris, it’s well to remember that no childhood is exclusively anything— pleasant or Dickensian. The fears, confusions, and anxieties of childhood are balanced by its pleasures, wonders, and excitements. And, anyway, it’s only temporary. By adulthood, Roth no longer needed to perform goodness for his demanding parents—or anyone else. His mere presence commanded respect, even reverence. In Remembering Roth (2019), the writer James Atlas recalls admiring Roth from afar. Then he received—surreally—a fan letter from Roth. As he held it, he couldn’t believe “the greatest writer in the English language” was addressing him. “The letter was typed on plain paper,” he says, as if wood or parchment would have been more appropriate (Atlas 2019). Roth had enjoyed Atlas’s biography of the poet Delmore Schwartz and was simply saying so. If Atlas was startled (“The signature was plain but thunderous in its import”), so were other writers Roth anointed. In Atlas’s case, a friendship ensued, though never of equals. Atlas assumed his role: “a mere acolyte, a servant to his literary and sometimes personal needs.” How could it be otherwise? “He was the most charismatic person I’ve ever known—the largest presence, the funniest, the most brilliant, the most profound” (Atlas 2019). Indeed, many writers saw Roth as a deity, a symbol, seldom a real person. One effect of Atlas’s memoir is to show how much space Roth took up in people’s lives, even as they took up little space in his. “Our friendship mattered more to me than to Roth,” he says. “How could it not?” (Atlas 2019). Atlas’s memoir might have been titled Asymmetry were the title not already taken. When Lisa Halliday, a young Harvard grad, met Roth, she was twentythree, a literary assistant. The ensuing romance became grist for fiction, though this time, it’s Roth pinned down on the page. In Halliday’s roman à clef, “Ezra Blazer” suffers back pain, the Mets’ ineptness, and Nobel Prize neglect. (“Blazer! You were robbed!” a stranger shouts at him [Halliday 2018: 83].) Meanwhile, “Alice” is treated to a flash of Blazer’s paranoia when he insists on searching her purse. (“For security reasons,” he explains, fishing around for recording devices [Halliday 2018: 7].) As a character, Alice is quiet, almost a cipher, suggesting how young and unformed Halliday was when Roth, then almost seventy, began courting her. Roth made a wonderful subject; as we can see, Roth’s friends were almost helpless before the urge to write about him. Another intriguing example is Alan Lelchuk’s 2003 Ziff: A Life?

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The book is a genre unto itself: the possibly true, possibly false memoir. When Lelchuk met Roth, in 1969, they engaged in the type of crude sexual banter that Roth seemed to love. “Nothing was off-limits,” says the narrator—“talking about capacity and desire, morning versus night fucking and erotic positions, dynamo women and perverse habits” (Lelchuk 2003: 13). Ziff is a clever performance; its power derives, in part, from the appearance of factuality. Just like a Roth novel. Another “fictional” portrayal—perhaps the most revealing—is Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies (1992), which recounts a brief romantic affair with Roth. (Roth conceded its accuracy and even blurbed the novel.) Hobhouse depicts a man whose silences are as alluring as his banter. She admires his “monkish habits,” his stubborn aloofness, but also his intensity: “he always listened like someone decoding, sensing, processing vulnerability, a place to enter, overpower” (Hobhouse 1992: 197). This playful aggression, or aggressive playfulness, was a Roth hallmark, noted by both Hermione Lee (1984) (“no vagueness is tolerated, differences of opinion are pounced on greedily”) and David Remnick, who recalled Roth’s almost terrifying powers of perception as being “scary in the beginning, because you knew that there was not one goddamn thing lost on him” (Leon Levy Center 2019). Scary indeed—but also bracing. Roth’s scrutiny, the nowhere-to-hide quality, was strangely alluring. How flattering, how enlivening, to be paid such close attention by the famous, formidable Roth. Roth’s company was like a drug to some people, while others simply loved to escape everyday boredom into a state of heightened alertness.

ROTH VS. THE JOURNALISTS Clearly, Roth was more comfortable as inquisitor than subject, as many journalists discovered. “This guy has only two speeds: urbane/engaging and prickly/upset,” one reporter noted (Streitfeld 1993). That may recall Zuckerman—“He has two dominant modes: his mode of self-abnegation, and his fuck-’em mode” (RMO 123). In the second mode, prickly, belligerent Roth could drive reporters crazy. “If I described the nightmare of interviewing Philip Roth—from start to finish, and all the way in between—it was really a low point,” the literary journalist Robert McCrum recalled. “It was absolutely ghastly” (McCrum 2021). Not every reporter got brusque, defensive Roth. Some lucky admirers were granted friendly access. David Remnick’s profile of his “favorite living writer” (qtd. in Berlinerblau 2021: 14) was a landmark, written with characteristic ease and assurance. If biography is longitudinal, capturing changes over time, then reporting offers snapshots, quick and vivid. Indeed, Remnick captures a moment, from 1999 to 2000, when Roth, disgusted by the Clinton/ Lewinsky scandal, wrote The Human Stain, a novel that deplores society’s puritanism. Roth takes his revenge on that harsh, judgmental society, judging it back, lobbing missiles at early Millennials (“Yap yap yap”) and anti-Clinton conservatives (HS 147). Remnick captures Roth’s early-late stage, after his American Trilogy and before his late, death-haunted phase. “Roth is no longer the wunderkind,” Remnick (2000) wrote; “he is sixty-seven, and the books reflect it.” A much earlier profile—Albert Goldman’s over-the-top Life magazine piece—is a kind of bookend. Written in the brash, no-boundaries style of 1960s magazine journalism, it saluted “a slender, psychotic novel by Philip Roth” and captured Portnoy-mania: copies passing “hand to hand at sophisticated dinner parties so that all may

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have the opportunity to read aloud” (Goldman 1969). It also captured the younger, prefamous Roth, a zany tummler whose outrageously irreverent impressions had friends almost asphyxiating from laughter.

BIOGRAPHY IN REVERSE We’ve strayed far from “biography.” Then again, the concept is somewhat elastic. What does it mean to write a life? “Life writing”—Virginia Woolf’s lovely phrase—is a broad category that might include diaries, letters, and biography. It might also include “reverse biography,” Jacques Berlinerblau’s term for The Philip Roth We Don’t Know (2021), which urges us to assume Roth’s fiction is autobiographical. Most scholars discourage this. Berlinerblau says, Go ahead. We know Roth plundered “real life” for material, so why pretend otherwise? As Zuckerman says, “Calling it fiction was the biggest fiction of all!” (C 227). But encouraging the biographical fallacy isn’t Berlinerblau’s main purpose. He’s fascinated by Roth’s racial and gender politics. He comes neither to praise nor bury Roth, but, instead, to evaluate his fiction coolly, almost empirically. Nonetheless, a quiet current of emotion runs throughout. Parsing Roth’s interviews, he sees fibbing, dissembling, and gaslighting, and notes Roth’s “skilled stonewalling” of biographers (Berlinerblau 2021: 14). As a reader, Berlinerblau seems to have traveled an interesting road, from early, uncritical fandom to a more qualified admiration. Is his disenchantment common? Can others sympathize? Great fiction adds to the fullness of our lives—it enlightens, challenges, consoles, and awakens us. But biography is another matter. The writer’s life is often messier, uglier, and duller than his art, which may account for the peculiar disappointment of many literary biographies. We expect a glimpse of genius, a portrait of mastery. Instead we get a bumbling, ordinary human with normal flaws and neuroses. We see this over and over: the art soars, but the artist is decidedly earthbound. Why did we lionize them? How were we fooled? The simple, timeless lesson of most biographies is to be careful whom you worship.

IRA NADEL’S COUNTERLIFE Is it true, as Berlinerblau suggests, that Roth’s readership is shrinking? The #MeToo movement hasn’t helped. (“This author is a really, really hard sell,” says Berlinerblau (2021), a college professor [9].) If students aren’t reading Roth, then who is? Scholars; long-time Roth fans, for whom Roth is like Dylan or Springsteen; and, of course, biographers. Which brings us to Ira Nadel’s smart and judicious Philip Roth: A Counterlife (2021). Nadel, a seasoned biographer and Roth scholar, strikes a careful balance between theme and chronology—the tension at the heart of every biography. Nadel is a shrewd interpreter: he finds patterns, connects dots, solves puzzles. He leaves little doubt as to who Roth really was. Nadel’s Roth is frequently agitated. Nadel probes Roth’s anger, while letting the reader make certain inferences. Here, Roth comes off as someone oddly comfortable with rage, a pleasurable, even soothing emotion. It was certainly a familiar emotion; a useful emotion; a hard emotion that grounded his diffuse personality. To Nadel, anger and discontent are Roth’s key qualities and reliable muses. “People are unjust to anger—it can be enlivening and

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a lot of fun,” Roth wrote, giving Nadel his epigraph (C 150). In grim moments, Roth saw life as a series of assaults, like his mother’s jock strap remark. “Anger became a natural reaction to such humiliation,” Nadel (2021: 2) writes. Which raises a question, perhaps the question, for Roth’s biographers: How much of Roth’s discontent can be attributed to his conflicted personality? Conversely, how much explanatory weight do we give to childhood, where the die is supposedly cast? Nadel grapples smartly with those questions, emphasizing inner conflict. Roth suffers “a deepseated ambivalence” about marriage: “half the time he sought stability and love, but that played against his innate determination to be free.” So it goes, over and over. “Independence battled domesticity. These irreconcilable elements brought havoc” (Nadel 2021: 368). Nadel gives us twelve rounds of Roth vs. Roth. He also pays acute attention to Roth’s fiction, tracing Roth’s development as an artist through the classic stages—apprenticeship, emulation, maturation, reinvention, and late style. There’s even a period of self-imitation, the early 1970s, where Roth attempted to out-do Portnoy’s Complaint with several forgettable provocations: Our Gang (1971), The Breast (1972), and The Great American Novel (1973).

PHILIP ROTH, BIOGRAPHILE? Would Roth have admired Nadel’s critical biography? Highly doubtful. As it happens, Roth was so incensed over Nadel’s Critical Companion to Philip Roth (2011) that he considered legal action—over a single passage! Ultimately, Roth wound up paying $61,022 to his attorneys to have the offending passage rewritten. Later, through his agent, Roth sought to hamper if not sabotage Nadel’s biography. What was Roth’s general attitude toward biography? On one hand, his bookshelves sagged with lives of Whitman and Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Rilke. Was Roth a biographile? “When you admire a writer you become curious,” he wrote in The Ghost Writer (50). Roth’s curiosity, judging by his library, was considerable. Furthermore, he could admire “the biographer’s attribute of imaginative sympathy”—a lovely and apt phrase from Roth’s correspondence (Taylor n.d.). In generous moments, he admired biographers’ skill and diligence, just as he admired glove-makers, coffin-diggers, and other professional craftsmen. On the other hand, there’s his 2007 novel Exit Ghost, which gives biography a black eye. Here we meet Kliman, a young, ambitious biographer with a scandalous scoop. Kliman is a villain—the biographer as amoral careerist. His project inflames Zuckerman, who rails against “the dirt-seeking snooping calling itself research” (EG 102). Flush with moral certainty, he scolds Kliman, vowing to retaliate: “I’m going to do everything I can to sabotage you” (EG 103). Kliman’s chutzpah meets Zuckerman’s wrath. Somehow, both sides will lose. Is Kliman meant to represent all biographers? At times, it seems so, though he hardly resembles Leon Edel, Richard Ellmann, or other eminences. Still, Zuckerman hurls some solid jabs at “the lowest of literary rackets.” Might that be Roth speaking? “Once I was dead, who could protect the story of my life?” Zuckerman wonders (EG 275). That’s almost certainly Roth speaking. His ire is personal, as was Roth’s. And the pathos of the situation was almost certainly Roth’s.

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BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS Kliman, though a caricature, is still a biographer, a familiar type, and real biographers may wince in recognition. There’s no such thing as a guileless biographer. The biographer needs to be many people, all somewhat cunning. He is akin to “the professional burglar, breaking into a house,” writes Janet Malcolm (1994: 9). This may seem overstated—or not. Even Benjamin Taylor possessed the jot of ice that biographers need: after conversing with Roth, he secretly took notes, squirreling them away for his memoir. Roth was a friend, but also a subject—great material. Perhaps there’s something fundamentally undignified about biography. The biographer is a needy creature, hungry for secrets. Fans of biography are “greedy readers, with an insatiable appetite for details and story,” writes Hermione Lee (2005: 2). Everyone is implicated in this unseemly frenzy. Biography serves a primal need—to learn another person’s secrets. The inherently voyeuristic nature of biography is difficult to deny, even as more high-minded justifications are routinely given. No wonder biography has its discontents. “My book is not a biography,” Bernard Avishai states in Promiscuous, his 2012 meditation on Portnoy’s Complaint (18). Indeed, Avishai turns us (forcefully) back to Roth’s novels. That may be wise, since writers work from their unconscious—the deepest part of themselves. Avishai’s message is clear: If you want to know Roth on a deep, synaptic level, read his books. They’re the best guide to his obsessions, confusions, and torments, his desires and defenses. In short, they show Roth’s inner life—“the biographer’s holy grail,” as Stacy Schiff puts it (Williams College 2013). But Avishai—another loyal Roth friend—isn’t finished. He aims to reveal how useless biography is—“to leave readers doubting that there could ever be a problem for which biography is the solution” (Avishai 2012: 18). And yet, he can’t resist the biographical urge. What was Roth like in person? How was Portnoy’s Complaint written? These are a biographer’s questions—and Avishai’s. To show us, he shares personal memories, private conversations, and vivid snapshots of the many Roths he knew: earnest Roth, playful Roth, prickly, hyper-sensitive Roth, still smarting over Jacqueline Susann’s Tonight Show crack. As for Portnoy’s Complaint, we get a lively account of false starts, revisions, and its origin as “dinner-table shtick” in the 1960s. Here again is Roth-the-ventriloquist, a one-man repertory who mastered American idioms. Even Marie Syrkin (no Roth lover, she) had to admire his profusion of voices: “Roth is a gifted mimic with superb ear for the intonations of dialogue” (Avishai 2012: 112).

ROTH VS. THE BIOGRAPHERS Roth’s adventures with biographers comprise a long, strange, sometimes depressing chapter of Roth’s biography. Before 1996, Roth was relatively unworried about biography. He had always insisted—loudly—on being understood and admired, but it was journalists, those professional busybodies and misreaders, whom he worried about, not those determined shadows, biographers. Then came Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), Claire Bloom’s vengeful memoir of her life with Roth, which proved the axiom that those who know us best can hurt us worst. Being portrayed as selfish, unstable, and manipulative was surely Roth’s worst nightmare. In response, Roth

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began plotting revenge: He composed a lengthy, point-by-point refutation, Notes to My Biographer; he asked his lawyers to prepare a libel suit; and he appointed a biographer, Ross Miller, a longtime friend, whom he counted on to write sympathetically and show Roth’s essential decency. Almost immediately Roth was unhappy. The man he saw as his “helpful sidekick” was a feckless biographer. He barely interviewed anyone. He seemed fixated on Roth’s sex life. For around five years, the project was shelved, then reluctantly restarted. “I was over 70 and thought I had to decide on a biographer before I died rather than leaving my story to the luck of the draw” (Taylor n.d.). By 2007, however, the arrangement had quietly but spectacularly collapsed. Miller felt exploited (“he wanted me to settle a score for him!”), while Roth felt misled (“what are you lying for … Why, why why?”), sensing that his biographer had come to dislike him—something of a vocational hazard for biographers, but not something Roth could tolerate parens (Taylor n.d.). After scouting new biographers (Hermione Lee, the esteemed British biographer; Steven J. Zipperstein, the renowned Jewish historian), Roth settled on Blake Bailey, a decision that seemed—at the time—like a fortuitous match. Biographers reveal other people’s secrets, but in doing so, they can’t help but reveal a few of their own. From the start, Bailey was powerfully drawn to a certain type of writer. His subjects were disturbing men; self-destructive men; men with sexual secrets, who lived in terror of being exposed. Until that happens, they seesaw between success and its opposite: failure, abjection, disgrace. That was true of Richard Yates, John Cheever, and Charles Jackson, the alcoholic triad of Bailey’s earlier biographies. They were, to a man, secret keepers. Frightened men. When Bailey began his research—long before his own private behavior was scandalously exposed—he seemed primed for a different assignment. What was it like being Roth’s biographer? Pretty much what you would expect: enlivening, frustrating. “Will you not concede to a single shortcoming or wrongdoing?” Bailey asked in one exasperated moment. “And you categorically exculpate yourself from even the vaguest hint of blame” (Taylor n.d.). Roth’s predictable response was to wonder “why it should arouse in you such prosecutorial suspicion.” After all, he had supplied “piles of documentation” (Taylor n.d.). What more did his biographer want? Roth, having lost control of one biographer, feared a repeat disaster. Bailey had suggested that Claire Bloom was merely “feckless.” Roth: “What you call feckless in Claire Bloom I would describe as a sense of reality so deficient that it endangers others” (Taylor n.d.). As for Maggie Martinson, hadn’t there been happier times? “What you described as Maggie’s love—love cannot be something that does not make a scrap of difference of the conduct of the purported loving one.” At times, Roth seemed ready to lump Bailey together with his other betrayers: Maggie, Claire Bloom, and Ross Miller, whose “limitless malice” still enraged him (Taylor n.d.). In the end, Bailey fell more or less into line. By my count, more than eighty passages in Philip Roth: The Biography (2021) repeat Roth’s accounts, sometimes nearly verbatim. In one private memo to Bailey, Roth recalled an argument with first wife: “Shut up! Maggie snapped,” writes Bailey, echoing Roth (“Shut up! she snapped”) (Bailey 2021: 179). In both versions, Roth “jumped” up and scolded his crazy wife. Roth: “she relented, and retreated to our bedroom.” Bailey: “abashed, she retreated to their bedroom.” More mischievously, the words “Roth [commented] to a friend” appear several times in Bailey. That friend? Bailey, of course (Bailey 2021: 770).

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And yet Bailey, an occasional stenographer, also exhibits a stubborn independence, resisting Roth’s directives. The great irony is that this “authorized” book, intended to shield Roth’s legacy, has instead tarnished it. Here we see Roth cheating, gaslighting, and saying things like, “What’s the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don’t fuck her?” (Bailey 2021: 502). We get Roth as a Byronesque roué. “You know that all my loves go crazy, and make scenes,” Byron (2009: 225) wrote (225). Roth was full of Byronian complaints, blaming “hysterical” ex-wives and pining for “a woman I can trust and love, and who is sweet and passionate” (Bailey 2021: 344). In these pages, many good, loving women offer themselves, only to be brushed aside. Roth is “lost,” says a friend, living amid “an emptiness he has cultivated very carefully” (Bailey 2021: 653). At times, Bailey gives us a tragic Roth, lonely and bereft. Good biographers follow their subjects’ desires for love, support, and understanding. From Bailey’s biography, it’s clear Roth’s life was filled with meaningful work but often devoid of love and human connection. “I’m huddled in my studio, where I really wish I lived,” Roth once told Updike; “it’s all I ever wanted, more or less” (Roth 1996).

ATTN: FUTURE BIOGRAPHERS To read Bailey’s biography is to marvel at Roth’s charisma, his vitality, his intense allure. What was the elixir? For Roth’s friends, it was his remarkable liveliness, heimishness, humor, generosity, and lack of judgment and criticism. For many women, his odd mixture of presence and aloofness; tenderness and aggression. “While Roth, with his undeniable drawing power, may have captured me in a certain way, I was also aware from the start that this kind of swashbuckling, supremely manipulative man could only break my heart,” wrote Daphne Merkin (2021). To get close, but not too close—that was the prudent strategy, some decided. After Bailey’s sudden downfall, the air around Roth seemed poisoned, the level of toxicity only gradually decreasing to safe, breathable levels. What might the future of Roth biography hold? Right now, it’s hard to say, thanks partly to the litigious Roth estate, which has threatened to destroy Roth’s private documents. What can seem, at first glance, like a matter of right and wrong, is, in fact, a matter of competing interests. Scholars want access. Their subjects want privacy and control. Normally, there’s a compromise, in keeping with the transactional nature of biography. History suggests that more research is coming. Biographies, even “definitive” ones, are ephemeral, subject to “the relentless process of being superseded, outmoded, and eventually forgotten,” as Richard Holmes (2002: 15) puts it. The grim statement is also promising: pity the past biographers; salute the future ones. It is they, after all, who offer fresh portraits, keeping the public’s attention on a writer. “Biography, in the end, is a stay against death,” James Atlas (2017) notes. “Most of us don’t get one” (347). In the end, to ponder “Roth and biography” is to ponder everything that prevents us from seeing Roth clearly. Not just fame, charm, and handsomeness, but that seductive, compelling voice, always insisting, insisting that we believe him. To resist Roth’s narrative requires stubborn, skeptical inquiry—the approach best exemplified by Nadel and Berlinerblau. It also requires a tricky set of balancing acts. Can one be sympathetic yet detached; skeptical yet fair-minded; morally grounded but not sententious? The usual challenges of biography—to get someone right; to honor their complexity—are particularly acute when it comes to the bundle of contradictions that went by the name Philip Roth.

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REFERENCES Atlas, James (2017), The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale, New York: Pantheon. Atlas, James (2019), Remembering Roth, Newark: Audible. Avishai, Bernard (2012), Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness, New Haven: Yale University Press. Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Banville, John (1999), “The Motherless Child,” The New York Review of Books, December 16. Available online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/12/16/the-motherless-child/ (accessed December 8, 2022). Berlinerblau, Jacques (2021), The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bloom, Claire (1996), Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir, Boston: Little, Brown. Byron, George Gordon (2009), The Complete Works: Letters and Journals, Vol. 5, ed. Peter Cochran, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Goldman, Albert (1969), “Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth Looms as a Wild Blue Shocker and the American Novel of the Sixties,” The Stacks Reader, February 7. Available online: http://www. thestacksreader.com/portnoys-complaint-philip-roth-albert-goldman-life-magazine-2/ (accessed February 16, 2023). Halliday, Lisa (2018), Asymmetry, New York: Simon & Schuster. Hobhouse, Janet (1992), The Furies, New York: Doubleday. Holmes, Richard (2002), “The Proper Study?” in Peter France (ed.), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, 7–18, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hook, Andrew (2002), F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kleinschmidt, Hans (1967), “The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity,” Imago, 24 (1): 98–128. Lee, Hermione (1984), “Philip Roth: The Art of Fiction No. 84,” The Paris Review, 93. Available online: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2957/the-art-of-fiction-no-84-philip-roth (accessed December 8, 2022). Lee, Hermione (2005), Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lelchuk, Alan (2003), Ziff: A Life?, New York: Carroll & Graf. Leon Levy Center for Biography (2019), “James Atlas, Claudia Roth Pierpont, David Remnick, Judith Thurman on Remembering Roth,” YouTube, April 3. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6Ke-wOLc8wo&t=1282s (accessed March 3, 2023). Malcolm, Janet (1994), The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. McCrum, Robert (2021), Interview with Gil Roth, Virtual Memories Show #450, September 7, 2021. Available online: http://chimeraobscura.com/vm/episode-450-robert-mccrum (accessed February 17, 2023). Merkin, Daphne (2021), “The Afterlife: Revisiting Roth’s Promise,” n+1 Magazine, June 26. Available online: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-afterlife/ (accessed December 8, 2022). Miller, Ross (2003), “A Practical Lover of Freedom,” interview with Philip Roth, in Nathan Beyrak (prod.), Words & Images, Jerusalem Literary Project in conjunction with Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, New York: Oxford University Press. O’Brien, Edna (1999), James Joyce, New York: Viking. Pierpoint, Claudia Roth (2013), Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Remnick, David (2000), “Into the Clear: Philip Roth Puts Turbulence in Its Place,” New Yorker, May 8. Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/05/08/into-the-clear (accessed January 2, 2023). Roth, Philip (1969), Portnoy’s Complaint, New York: Random House. Roth, Philip (1972), The Breast, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Roth, Philip (1979), The Ghost Writer, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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Roth, Philip (1986), The Counterlife, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Roth, Philip (1996), Letter to John Updike, May 23, Updike Papers, box 269, Houghton Library, Harvard. Roth, Philip (1997), American Pastoral, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2000), The Human Stain, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2001), Reading Myself and Others, New York: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2007), Exit Ghost, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Streitfeld, David (1993), “What Hath Roth Wrought? Oh, the Usual Controversy. But This Time, Readers Aren’t Buying It,” Washington Post, May 10. Available online: https://www. washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/05/10/what-hath-roth-wrought-oh-the-usualcontroversy-but-this-time-readers-arent-buying-it/5fe46d32-8389-4935-ad4a-1bb1c93e7bd0/ (accessed December 8, 2022). Taylor, Benjamin (2020), Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, New York: Penguin Books. Taylor, Benjamin (n.d.), Correspondence. Box b-001210, Folder 12. Benjamin Taylor Collection of Philip Roth Materials, C1609, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. TheNewChannel (2021), “Blake Bailey and Philip Roth,” YouTube, April 26. Available online: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBtsh7asABo (accessed March 11, 2023). Vidal, Gore (1988), “Gore Vidal’s ‘Lincoln’? An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books, April 28. Available online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/04/28/gore-vidals-lincoln-an-exchange/ (accessed December 8, 2022). Williams College (2013), “Stacy Schiff ’82, Baccalaureate 2013,” YouTube, June 5. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kvzZVu8rnI (accessed December 8, 2022).

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Censorship and Translation in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, The Breast, and The Professor of Desire GUSTAVO SÁNCHEZ CANALES

INTRODUCTION In an interview Milan Kundera granted to Philip Roth in 1980, the Czech writer talks about the influence that totalitarian policies had exerted over literature in his country for decades: This is what is currently happening in Bohemia. Contemporary Czech literature, insofar as it has any value at all, has not been printed for 12 years; 200 Czech writers have been proscribed, including the dead Franz Kafka; 145 Czech historians have been dismissed from their posts, history has been rewritten, monuments demolished. A nation which loses awareness of its past gradually loses its self. (ShT 97–8) There is no doubt that dictatorship was one of Roth’s major concerns, especially throughout the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, in his interviews with Ivan Klíma (ShT 40–77) and Milan Kundera (ShT 90–100) he explored, among other issues, the pernicious effects of censorship on Czech society under Communist rule. We should also bear in mind that The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Prague Orgy (1985) refer repeatedly to the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s and 1970s. This climate of censorship in culture also pervaded Spanish society around those times. Although translations of Roth’s works have received considerable attention from scholars,1 they have rarely been linked to the problem of censorship, which highlights important questions for a translation’s adequacy and helps illuminate the difficulties of translating Roth’s provocative prose. For this reason, I believe that it is timely to look at how three Roth novels—Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), The Breast (1972), and The Professor of Desire— suffered the effects of censorship on their translations when they were first published in Spanish in the late 1960s and the early 1970s—in the case of Portnoy’s Complaint and The

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Breast—and the late 1970s in the case of The Professor of Desire. Despite the fact that Spain seemed prepared in the late 1960s and early 1970s to leave behind Francoism—General Francisco Franco’s military dictatorship (1939–75) known for authoritarianism, nationalism, and conservative Catholicism—a certain degree of censorship was still applied in the country until the mid-1980s. It is commonly known that any dictatorship’s first objective is to eliminate the opposition parties. Once this has been accomplished, the aim is to criminalize those who disagree with the new regime’s ideology—that is, “the truth.” In the case of Francoism, “the truth” basically boiled down to the tenets of National Catholicism, popularly known as “The Movement.” The censorship applied throughout Franco’s regime was mainly of a religious nature. Consequently, the Movement aimed to spread national and international culture through the dissemination of “good customs,” which involved eliminating anything that could go against the Movement’s morals and ethics. One of the most important Spanish critics who has addressed the theme of censorship in literature is Manuel L. Abellán. According to him (1980: 87–96), Francoist censors applied four criteria to the books they revised: sexual morality, linguistic decorum, politics, and respect for religion as an institution. Drawing on Abellán’s classification, I compare in this chapter passages from Portnoy’s Complaint, The Breast, and The Professor of Desire as they were written in English with how they were rendered into Spanish. In the case of the three Roth works analyzed here, it is very clear that censorship—or “innovación atemperada” (“tamed innovation”) as it was euphemistically known for years—was used when something went against Spain’s Catholic morals of the time.2

TRANSLATION AND CENSORSHIP UNDER FRANCO’S SPAIN The Spanish scholar Camino Gutiérrez Lanza (2002), who has devoted the bulk of her research to censorship and translation, explains that Francoism is “[o]ne of the most significant periods for the study of sociopolitical manipulation of discourse in the recent history of Spain” (141).3 As typically happens in any dictatorship, the official values—mainly of a religious nature in Francoism’s case—had to be preserved in order to spread the so-called “Movimiento Nacional” (“National Movement”). The “Movimiento Nacional”—usually known simply as the “Movimiento”—consisted of the only legal party in those times, “Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista” (popularly known by its acronym “FET y de las JONS”), and the “Sindicato Vertical” (“Vertical Syndicate”). This syndicate was the Spanish trade union that opposed Marxism’s class struggle. If we take the Party’s conservative leaning into account, it will not be very difficult to see that the censorship exerted primarily sought the preservation of the Spanish morality of that time known as “Nacionalcatolicismo” (“NationalCatholicism”) (Abellán 1980: 15–22). A key figure in the defense of the so-called “doctrina general del Movimiento”—“The Movement’s general doctrine”—was Gabriel Arias Salgado (1904–62), whose work as Vice Secretary of Popular Education (1941–5) and as Minister of Information and Tourism (1951–62) was crucial in the implementation and consolidation of censorship in Spain. Among other duties he was responsible for the Regime’s press and propaganda.4 Unlike in

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other countries under a totalitarian rule at the time, in the Spain of the 1940s onward censorship was of an ecclesiastical nature aimed to keep the Catholic faith intact. Therefore, censorship in that four-decade-plus period was originally intended to prohibit the publication of books that mostly went against the morality of the epoch. There were numerous books, though, that were also prohibited because they were written by leftist poets and playwrights. That was the case of members of the so-called “Generation of the 27” such as Federico García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, and Rafael Alberti. It is no wonder then that in order to try to escape censorship and publish with more freedom, many Spanish publishing houses moved to South America between 1939 and 1970: mainly Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay. Editorial Losada, which was founded—and based— in Buenos Aires in 1928, was one of the publishing houses that played a key role in the publication and dissemination of forbidden works in Spain. Editorial Losada specialized in the publication of the works of the Spanish Republican writers of the Generation of the 27 banned in Spain after the end of the Civil War (1936–9).5 During Francoism, censors who were responsible for selecting what was worth publishing and, in the case of foreign works, what was worth importing and translating, guaranteed that the released product complied with the morality standards of the time. A paradigmatic example of how censorship served the Regime’s interests is found in John Ford’s Mogambo (1953), where parts of the dialogue were changed and a couple of scenes were omitted: since there could be no allusions to an adulterous affair, Linda Nordley (Grace Kelley) and Donald Nordley (Donald Sinden), married in the original version, are siblings in the dubbed version.6 In what has been termed as “late Francoism” (1969–75), rather than banning the publication of specific authors and books, censorship consisted in the alteration of many passages—ranging from changes in the use of certain words, phrases, and sentences to their omission—that line up with what Abellán explains in his book-length study. It is obvious then that the censored parts were regarded as a threat for the Regime’s ideology. (The “Ley 14/1966, de 18 de marzo, de Prensa e Imprenta”—“The Press Act of 1966”—that granted a little more freedom was received favorably [BOE 1966].) After Franco’s death on November 20, 1975, the situation began to change in the mid- and late 1970s: eroticism became a central feature of novels, plays, and movies. In the case of TV films, it was imperative to include the so-called “Código de regulación de contenidos por rombos” (1963–84). The reason is that diamonds were used to rate films according to their content: one diamond appeared on the right-hand side corner at the beginning of the film for those films rated for teenagers between fourteen and seventeen; two diamonds were used for those films rated for eighteen-year-olds and above. With regard to books, a seal that read “Lectura para personas de amplio criterio. Prohibida su venta a menores de edad” (“Reading for broad-minded people: sale forbidden to minors” [under twenty-one in those years]) was stamped on covers of works that, according to the censors, could hurt “decent” people’s feelings. Although censorship began to wane in the late 1970s as explained above, it continued to be applied until the mid-1980s.7 It goes without saying that the 1977 translation of Portnoy’s Complaint and the 1978 Spanish version of The Professor of Desire could not escape the ignominy of the seal; conversely, the 1973 translation of The Breast does not have the stamp on its cover because it was published in Uruguay.

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CENSORSHIP IN THE TRANSLATION OF THREE ROTH NOVELS Luckily, the vast majority of Philip Roth’s novels translated into Spanish have been faithfully rendered. However, it is enlightening to examine how many words, phrases, and sentences were censored—that is, changed, or even eliminated—in the first translations of three of his novels as the “best” way to make them fit into the morals of the time. This chapter attempts to demonstrate that these novels were subjected to the very act of censorship itself or, as was expressed for years, to an “innovación atemperada” (“tamed innovation”). A paradigmatic example of a censored work through the use of “tamed innovation” can be found in Amor sin escribe sin hache (1931) by the Spanish dramatist Enrique Jardiel Poncela (1901–52). This play, a parody of romantic novels, was forbidden in the 1930s (Abellán 1980: 20) because, according to the censor of the time, it showed “una inmoralidad continua” (“continuing immorality”) and, taking the censor’s report as his main source, Abellán adds that Jardiel Poncela’s play could be published “en el momento actual, si el autor, con su inteligencia ya probada la adaptara al ambiente y vida española del momento presente” (“nowadays if the author, who has displayed his intelligence adapted it [the play] to the Spanish context and life of the present moment”) (20). In Table 32.1, I offer a selection of examples provided by Abellán (1980: 21), where we can see how Jardiel Poncela’s play was censored. I hope this table will help the reader better understand the kind of censorship applied to Roth’s novels. Below, I will try to show how 1970s censors applied three of Abellán’s four criteria (1980: 87–96)—sexual morality, linguistic decorum, and respect for religion as an institution—to Portnoy’s Complaint, The Breast, and The Professor of Desire. The first criterion is sexual morality. I explained above that the dominant ideology during Francoism was “National-Catholicism.” As Abellán (1980: 88) suggests, sexual morality, a priority in those decades, was something to be preserved. This included the prohibition of freedom of speech that went against good manners, especially those connected with the sixth commandment—“thou shalt not commit adultery.” (The change of the word “lover” for “husband” and “girlfriend” in the table above is a case in point.) Related to the issue of sexual morality was the need to refrain from making any reference to abortion, homosexuality, or divorce. (Although the first Spanish divorce act had been passed during the Second Republic in 1932, it was repealed in 1939, and it was not passed again until the summer of 1981, that is, almost six years after Franco’s death [BOE 1932; BOE 1981].) The first example of an infringement of “sexual morality” can be seen in Portnoy’s Complaint. Chapter II, entitled “Whacking Off” (PC 17–37)—a part which deals with the Table 32.1  Examples of how a faithful translation (left) could be censored (right). Original text

Modified text

intimidades del sexo (intimacies of sex)

intimidades del amor (intimacies of love)

mi primer amante (my first lover)

mi primer marido (my first husband)

excitarte (to excite you)

deleitarte (to please you)

porque la mentira es la única verdad del mundo (because lying is the only truth in the world)

porque mentir es de sinvergüenzas (because lying is typical of scoundrels)

tenía una amante (he had a lover)

tenía una novia (he had a girlfriend)

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protagonist’s sexual awakening—is accurately translated in the 2007 translation as “Pajas” (Roth 2007a: 25–46). However, the 1977 Spanish version refers to it as “Sacudiendo” (Roth 1977a: 27–47)—literally “beating” or “shaking.” My impression is that when 1970s readers saw that word for the first time, they were not clear about whether Roth’s section dealt with how to beat (e.g., an egg) or whether it was about an earthquake that had shaken the ground somewhere. In “Cunt Crazy” (PC 78–184), a section about Alex’s initiation into adult sex, the 2007 translation gives the perfect translation—“Loco por el coño” (Roth 2007a: 87–201). However, as expected, the 1977 version was toned down and the euphemistic title “Ansia de sexo” (Roth 1977a: 89–186)—“Craving for Sex”—was used instead. Interestingly, Portnoy’s Complaint is a much less censored book than a reader familiar with the novel would have expected, as the use of the word “sexo” in the toned-down version of the late 1970s indicates. Reading this word a few years before—let alone in the 1940s, 1950s, or even 1960s—would have been unthinkable. This example proves that, although we would have to wait a little longer to leave censorship behind, times had fortunately begun to change. (It should not be ignored that in the 1930s censored version of Jardiel Poncela’s play the phrase “intimidades del sexo” appeared as “intimidades del amor” in the modified text.) As an example of an affront to “sexual morality” in The Breast, Roth’s next censored novel, I have chosen a passage in which Claire Ovington sees her boyfriend David Kepesh in the hospital. Before she adapts to seeing him transformed into a huge breast, Claire visits Kepesh every day and, “for the first half of each hour, uncomplainingly and without repugnance attends to my pleasure. Converts a disgusting perversion into a kindly, thoughtful act of love” (B 77; emphasis added). The italics, which will show hereafter the object of the present analysis, is well rendered in the 2006 edition: “durante la primera media hora, sin quejarse y sin repugnancia, se ocupa de proporcionarme placer. Convierte una perversión asquerosa en un amable acto de amor” (Roth 2006: 81; emphasis added). However, there is no trace of the reference to the “disgusting perversion [turned into] … an act of love” in the 1973 translation. What the Spanish reader of the 1970s discovers is that David and Claire, far from devoting part of their time together to transforming moments of perversion into love, focus, instead, on conversation: “La mitad de cada hora que Clara comparte conmigo la dedicamos al placer sexual, el resto del tiempo a la conversación” (Roth 1973: 91; emphasis added). (It should not be disregarded that the title of the 2006 edition El pecho has more sexual connotations than El seno, the more insipid title used in the 1973 translation.) A similar kind of censorship is found in another hospital scene in which David describes the routine of his encounters with Claire. He specifically says that his girlfriend “came every evening to suck my nipple and talk” (B 54; emphasis added). As can be expected, the 2006 translation is impeccable: “Claire venía todas las tardes para chuparme el pezón y hablar” (Roth 2006: 58; emphasis added). Claire’s action must have been perceived by the censor of the time scandalous enough to have it removed. The reader of this edition was simply informed that she had come to the hospital to see him: “Claire vino a verme” (Roth 1973: 64). Before moving onto the second criterion—“linguistic decorum”—there is a particularly interesting example of morality-based censorship in The Professor of Desire, which has to do with abortion. This was a taboo topic during Francoism. Almost at the end of the novel, Helen Baird, who is two months pregnant, visits her former boyfriend David. At one point of their conversation the issue of abortion is brought up: “But you did want to have it.” “The abortion?”

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“No, the child.” “I want to have a child, of course.” (PD 222; emphasis added) In the 2007 translation—“‘Pero tú querías.’ ‘¿Abortar?’ ‘No, tener el niño’” (Roth 2007b: 215)—what is a noun in English (“abortion”) becomes a verb (“abortar”) in Spanish. If Helen’s answer had been that she wanted the abortion—that is, that she did not want the child to be born—aborting in the Spanish version (“abortar”) would have been something intentional. However, in the 1978 censored text the reference to abortion is more ambiguous: “‘Pero tú querías tenerlo.’ ‘¿El aborto?’ ‘No, el niño’” (Roth 1978: 244; emphasis added). The reason is that in Spanish the very same word “aborto” translates into “abortion” and “miscarriage.” I still remember that in those times when someone used the word “aborto,” practically everybody interpreted it as something unplanned or spontaneous. This was understandable because abortion was illegal until 1985, the year when it was decriminalized (BOE 1985). The second criterion analyzed here is “linguistic decorum” (Abellán 1980: 89). Closely connected with the idea of “sexual morality” was the use of polite language because using rude and offensive words was not expected from “decent” people. By far this is the most applied criterion in the three novels. In Portnoy’s Complaint, there are several cases of censored rude expressions. For instance, half-way through the narrative Alex begins to explain how he began to lead an ambivalent life. This is what David Kepesh will later describe as “studious by day, dissolute by night” (PD 17). In Portnoy’s case, he begins to know that “dissolute” world during his teenage years, a world to which he refers as the “world of pussy” (PC 125), rightly rendered into Spanish as “mundo del chocho” (Roth 2007a: 138). Conversely, in the 1977 version the translator uses instead the euphemistic phrase “mundo de las mujeres complacientes” (Roth 1977a: 133)—“world of accommodating women.” There is a prudish example of censorship in the Czech translation of Portnoy’s Complaint in line with this last phrase. According to Blake Bailey (2021), this is what Eva Kondrysova, a Czech editor, explained to Roth in one of his visits to Prague: “an act of cunnilingus … had been roughly translated as ‘he licked her pan’ (‘you know, lick the pan of the roast?’)” (360). In that same scene, Alex, bothered by the presence of Sheldon, blurts out to him: “Oh, fuck you, Shelly, they’re your friends, you make the garlic bread” (PC 125). This is faithfully expressed in its 2007 counterpart version: “Mira, que te den por el culo, Shelly, son tus amigos, o sea que tú haces el pan de ajo” (Roth 2007a: 138; emphasis added). In the 1977 translation the whole sentence is left out (Roth 1977a: 133). This substitution—or even elimination—of curse words is also applied in the 1970s translation of The Breast. There is one particularly interesting scene. Having described his inexplicable transformation into a huge mammary gland, David begins to explain what his hospital life is like. One of his routines—Claire’s suckling of his nipple is by far the most pleasurable one—was pointed out above. From the beginning David wants to spare the reader any misunderstandings about Claire’s behavior. That is why he hastens to say, “before going further, that Claire is no vixen” (B 33; emphasis added). Merriam-Webster gives three definitions for the word “vixen”: “a female fox,” “a shrewish, ill-tempered woman,” and “informal: a sexually attractive woman.” If we look up the Spanish equivalent— “zorra”—in the Diccionario de la lengua española, we see that ten entries are offered. The first definition corresponds to the description of the female fox; the second definition alludes

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to shrewdness—“m. y f. coloq. Persona muy taimada, astuta y solapada”—and the seventh definition is self-explanatory: “f. despect. malson. [derog. rude] prostituta.” The expected translation is made in the 2006 version: “Antes de seguir adelante, debo aclarar que Claire no es precisamente una zorra” (Roth 2006: 38; emphasis added). The rendered text of the 1970s is particularly revealing: “Debo aclararles antes de seguir más adelante que Clara no es ni una loba ni una virgen en espíritu” (Roth 1973: 36–7; emphasis added). With respect to the 2007 translation the term “vixen” was toned down in two ways: in first place, the noun was replaced by “loba”—literally “a female wolf”—which, according to the second definition of the Diccionario de la lengua española, is a “[p]ersona sensualmente atractiva.” “Loba” in this context is usually employed in Uruguay, the country where that edition was published. In Spain, however, it sounds less strong. Secondly, Claire is also defined as “[ni] una virgen en espíritu”—“[nor] a virgin in spirit”—a typical sanctimonious euphemism to soften the noun in the original version. The last criterion addressed here is respect for religion as an institution. As Abellán (1980: 89) explains, during Franco’s dictatorship religion was the recipient of all the values that should rule any “decent” person’s life. That is why censors could not tolerate any references or comments that questioned anything about the Catholic faith. In Portnoy’s Complaint there is a scene where Alex has a row with his father about religion. At one point of that conversation, Alex blurts out something that to the censors’ ears must have sounded particularly offensive and as such unacceptable in the form of an allusion to Christ’s divinity in such a derogative way: “Their whole big-deal religion is based on worshiping someone who was an established Jew at that time. … Jesus Christ, who they go around telling everybody was God, was actually a Jew!” (PC 40; emphasis added). The 2007 translation is perfectly rendered into Spanish: “La religión de los cristianos, toda ella, está basada en adorar a alguien que en su tiempo era judío declarado. … Van por ahí pregonando la divinidad de Jesucristo, ¡y resulta que Jesucristo era judío!” (Roth 2007a: 48–9; emphasis added). Something like “[v]an por ahí pregonando la divinidad de Jesucristo” could not have escaped the censors’ attention. Furthermore, the way Alex verbalizes it must have been perceived by the 1970s censors as an attack against a basic tenet of the Christian faith as clearly stated in several books of the New Testament (Rom. 1:3–4, Gal. 4:4–7, Eph. 4:7, and Col. 1:12–3; 2:9). Therefore, in the 1970s translation the reference to Jesus Christ’s divinity disappears. In this version, the only allusion is to Jesus Christ’s Jewishness: “Toda su religión se basa en la adoración a alguien que era un judío declarado en aquel tiempo. … ¡Jesucristo, que van diciendo por ahí a todo el mundo que era en realidad un judío!” (Roth 1977a: 52–3; emphasis added). It is no wonder that if the reference to Christ’s divinity is suppressed in the 1970s version, an allusion to atheism in The Professor of Desire must have been much more than those censors could have taken. A paradigmatic example of this is found toward the end of the novel when David is telling Claire about the difficult relationship he had with his father as far as their opposing approach to religion is concerned. David’s atheism is something that Mr. Kepesh finds unacceptable: “‘My father could have killed me, but I absolutely did not want to be a fanatic. To believe in what doesn’t exist, no, that wasn’t for me. These are just the people who hate the Jews, the fanatics. And there are Jews who are fanatics too,’ he tells Claire, ‘and also walk around in a dream’” (PD 257; emphasis added). As expected, the text of the 2007 translation is faithfully rendered: “Mi padre podría haberme matado, pero yo no quería ser un fanático, de ninguna de las maneras. Creer en lo que no existe, no, no era lo mío.

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Fanática es la gente que odia a los judíos. Y también hay judíos fanáticos—le dice a Claire—, que andan por ahí paseándose en un sueño” (Roth 2007b: 248; emphasis added). In the 1978 translation the two italicized sentences are omitted. The passage appears like this: “Mi padre hubiera deseado matarme, pero yo no quería ser en absoluto un fanático. [passage omitted]. Y hay judíos que también son fanáticos—le dice a Claire—y andan por ahí como soñando” (Roth 1978: 282). I believe that it is clear by now that complying with the Christian morality was repeatedly propagated by the regime’s mass media—radio, newspapers, and the cinema. Television did not appear in Spain until late 1956. (There were just two TV stations until 1990, the year when private TV stations began to broadcast.) For decades anything that was considered by the censors as an attack against the official religion was inevitably silenced.

IF ONLY ROTH HAD KNOWN … To my knowledge Philip Roth was unaware of how the three novels examined in this chapter had been censored. Consequently, we have no first-hand evidence of what he would have said about this issue. However, we do know his repulsion toward dictatorship and the inevitable totalitarian control it exerted on citizens. In a visit to Prague in the early 1970s, Roth explored the possibility of having translated his recently published books Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Gang (1971). Eva Kondrysova told him then that “[t]he ‘authorities’ had deemed the books unsuitable for translation” (Bailey 2021: 360). The key to turning down his suggestion is found in her explanation: “all the decent people at the firm had been sacked after the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Soviet” (Bailey 2021: 360). Not collaborating with a totalitarian regime entails being fired, at best, and other less pleasurable consequences such as imprisonment or even death at worst. I would like to finish by referring to a letter written by Roth that can help us reconstruct what he could have said if he had known that some of his books had been subjected to censorship in Spain. It is a letter dated April 30, 1959, that he sent to Rabbi Rachman, who had felt outraged at “Defender of the Faith” (1959), a story published one and a half months before. Roth, irate at the rabbi’s attempt to censor him and his works, writes that “[h]e who criticizes must be silenced—that is a terrible tenet to have to live by” (Bailey 2021: 169). What else can be said?

NOTES 1. See, for instance, Ivanova (2021), Nemes (2017), and a special section in Partial Answers, with studies by Sánchez Canales, Ivanova, Masiero, and Jarniewicz (2013). 2. For this reason, I have not found any politics-related censorship in Portnoy’s Complaint, The Breast, and The Professor of Desire. 3. For the reader interested in this issue, please consult her webpage: Gutiérrez Lanza (n.d.). 4. For a more extended study of the role played by Gabriel Arias Salgado during Francoism, see Abellán (1984: 153–72). 5. For a brief account of this period, consult Sánchez Canales (2013: 279–83).

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6. For a general overview of censorship in films, see for instance Abellán (1980: 23–9) and Gutiérrez Lanza (2012: 223–5). 7. For an in-depth analysis of this period, see Payne (1987).

REFERENCES Abellán, Manuel L. (1980), Censura y creación literaria en España (1939–1976), Barcelona: Ediciones Península. Abellán, Manuel L. (1984), “Censura y moral en el primer franquismo,” “Papers”: Revista de Sociología, 21: 153–72. Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, New York: W.W. Norton and Company. BOE (1932), “Ley de divorcio,” Gaceta de Madrid, 72: 1794–9. Available online: https://www.boe.es/ datos/pdfs/BOE/1932/072/A01794-01799.pdf (accessed April 22, 2022). BOE (1966), “Ley 14/1966, de 18 de marzo, de Prensa e Imprenta,” Boletín Oficial del Estado, 67: 3310–5. Available online: https://www.boe.es/buscar/pdf/1966/BOE-A-1966-3501-consolidado.pdf (accessed April 22, 2022). BOE (1981), “Ley 30/1981, de 7 de julio, por la que se modifica la regulación del matrimonio en el Código Civil y se determina el procedimiento a seguir en las causas de nulidad, separación y divorcio,” Boletín Oficial del Estado, 172: 16457–62. Available online: https://www.boe.es/boe/ dias/1981/07/20/pdfs/A16457-16462.pdf (accessed April 22, 2022). BOE (1985), “Ley Orgánica 9/1985, de 5 de julio, de reforma del Código Penal,” Boletín Oficial del Estado, 166: 22041. Available online: https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/1985/07/12/pdfs/A2204122041.pdf (accessed April 22, 2022). Gutiérrez Lanza, Camino (2002), “Spanish Film Translation and Cultural Patronage: The Filtering and Manipulation of Imported Material during Franco’s Dictatorship,” in Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (eds.), Translation and Power, 141–59, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Gutiérrez Lanza, Camino (2012), “Censorship and TV Dubbing in Spain: From Movie of the Week to Estrenos TV,” in Rosa Rabadán, Trinidad Guzmán, and Marisa Fernández (eds.), Lengua, traducción, recepción: en honor de Julio César Santoyo = Language, translation, reception: to honor Julio César Santoyo, 223–5, León: Universidad de León. Gutiérrez Lanza, Camino (n.d.), “¿Quiénes somos?” TRACE: traducción y censura. Available online: https://trace.unileon.es/es/presentacion/quienes-somos/ (accessed April 22, 2022). The Holy Bible: Authorised King James Version. (n.d.), Glasgow: Collins. Ivanova, Velichka D. (2013), “Philip Roth’s Professor of Desire in Light of Its French Translation,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 11 (2): 293–304. Ivanova, Velichka D. (2021), “Roth in Translation,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 360–71, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jarniewicz, Jerry (2013), “Ventriloquism in Philip Roth’s Deception and Its Polish Translation,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 11 (2): 321–31. “loba” (2021), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed. Available online: https://dle.rae.es/ lobo#NXSPngL (accessed July 21, 2022). Masiero, Pia (2013), “The Difference in One Word: The Italian Translation of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 11 (2): 305–19. Nemes, Ana (2017), “Translating Philip Roth into Hungarian,” Philip Roth Studies, 13 (2): 71–85. Payne, Stanley G. (1987), The Franco Regime 1936–1975, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Roth, Philip (1969), Portnoy’s Complaint, New York: Random House. Roth, Philip (1972), The Breast, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Roth, Philip (1973), El seno, trans. Juan Roux, Montevideo: Bantam Ediciones. Roth, Philip (1977a), El lamento de Portnoy, trans. Adolfo Martín, Barcelona: Grijalbo. Roth, Philip (1977b), The Professor of Desire, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1978), El profesor del deseo, trans. Antonia Menini, Barcelona: Grijalbo. Roth, Philip (2001), Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Roth, Philip (2006), El pecho, trans. Jordi Fibla, Barcelona: Grijalbo Mondadori. Roth, Philip (2007a), El mal de Portnoy, trans. Ramón Buenaventura, Barcelona: Seix Barral. Roth, Philip (2007b), El profesor del deseo, trans. Ramón Buenaventura, Barcelona: Random House. Sánchez Canales, Gustavo (2013), “‘Lectura para Personas de Amplio Criterio’: Censorship in the Translations of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and The Professor of Desire,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 11 (2): 279–91. “vixen” (2020), Merriam-Webster, 5th ed. Available online: https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/vixen (accessed July 21, 2022). “zorra” (2021), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed. Available online: https://dle.rae.es/ zorro#cVU9wGT (accessed July 21, 2022).

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The Philip Roth Personal Library in Newark: Genesis, Purpose, and Contents TIMOTHY J. CRIST, NADINE GIRON, AND ROSEMARY STEINBAUM

Toward the end of his life, Philip Roth approached us with the extraordinary proposal of bequeathing his large personal collection of books, many filled with his marginalia and notes, to the Newark Public Library. Through subsequent discussions with Roth and visits to see his books, Library officials developed plans that met with his full approval for creating the Philip Roth Personal Library (PRPL) within our stately Main branch. Under the terms of his Revocable Trust, Roth confirmed the planned gift of his personal library, including the books from both his Connecticut and New York City homes and objects, documents, photographs, and furniture considered “useful to lend personal authenticity to the environs of the Philip Roth Personal Library.” The Philip Roth Personal Library opened in June 2021 with two spaces: a working research library and an exhibit space whose inaugural display showcases the collection and guides Roth readers and newcomers through the writer’s life and work. Architects Ann Beha and Thomas Hotaling of Ann Beha Architects in Boston reclaimed a grand space adjacent to the Main Library’s original Reading Room and fitted it for contemporary systems and uses. Jonathan Alger and Daniel Fouad of C&G Partners in New York conceived the design and realized the look of the space. The architecture and design of the PRPL aim to capture the Rothian mood in several ways. The color palette is taken from Roth’s book covers. Quotations in enlarged letters on the walls and in the bookshelves recollect Roth’s worldview. The lighter shade and contemporary cut of the bookshelves suggests the simplicity of Roth’s personal surroundings, in contrast to the grand, late-nineteenth-century Library structure. And, as Roth hoped, the tall writing desk, Eames reading chair, and other items from his Connecticut writing studio lend personal authenticity to the space. Visitors enter the PRPL through the exhibition space, with the reading room at the far end. The inaugural exhibit consists of eleven vitrines, each dedicated to a different Roth theme such as baseball, family, and Newark, and showcasing books, letters, notes, photographs, objects, and passages from Roth’s writing. The reading room is lined floor to ceiling with Roth’s books, organized as they were in his homes, along with noteworthy documents and objects. In order to detail the phases of the project, this chapter has three parts: first, the story of Roth’s lifelong association with the Newark Public Library, by Timothy J. Crist, Library

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trustee; second, an account of the genesis and development of the PRPL itself, by Rosemary Steinbaum, Library trustee and adviser to the Roth Library; and third, a description of the collection, how it was cataloged, and some early discoveries, by Nadine Giron, supervising librarian of the Philip Roth Personal Library.

PHILIP ROTH AND THE NEWARK PUBLIC LIBRARY Philip Roth’s lifelong association with the Newark Public Library began as a child at his neighborhood branch library and then matured during his teenage years at the Main Library. Later, while writing his Newark novels, Roth frequently drew on the local knowledge and research skills of Newark librarian Charles Cummings. In deciding to bequeath his personal library to the Newark Public Library and establish two endowments to support its operations, Roth called the library “my other home, my first other home” (Roth 2014). Roth’s family home at 81 Summit Avenue in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark is just a mile walk from the branch library on Osborne Terrace. The upper floor of the two-story branch library, reached in those days by a separate entrance, housed the children’s room. He borrowed books such as John Tunis’s The Kid from Tomkinsville (1940) and Howard Fast’s Citizen Tom Paine (1943). As he got older, Roth migrated to the adult room on the first floor where he found the four autobiographical novels of Thomas Wolfe (Shane and Dana 1930: 43–8; NPL 2013: 4; Roth 2013). During his senior year at Weequahic High School and his first year of college at RutgersNewark, Roth turned to the much larger collection at the Main Library on Washington Street in downtown Newark, “its open stacks Mecca itself.” He later recalled falling into the snare of “the strongest American voices of that era,” including Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos, “their books plucked indiscriminately one at a time from the shelves.” He added, “It was at one of the library tables that, alone, I first looked into the fourteen stories of Hemingway’s In Our Time. ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/when a new planet swims into his ken’” (Roth 2013). A decade later, the Main Library figured prominently in his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1960. In a letter to the New York Times in 1969, protesting a proposal by members of the Newark City Council to shut the library, Roth recalled the impact of the Newark Public Library on him in his youth: When I was growing up in Newark in the forties we were taught, or perhaps just assumed, that the books in the public library belonged to the public. Since my family did not own many books, or have very much money for a child to buy them, it was good to know that solely by virtue of my citizenship, I had the use of any books I wanted from that grandly austere building downtown on Washington Street, or the branch library I could walk to in my neighborhood. But even more compelling was this 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 my property alone, they were everybody’s. That idea had as much to do with civilizing me as any idea I was ever to come upon in the books themselves. (Roth 1969: 30)

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After decades away, Roth reconnected with the Newark Public Library in 1991, when John T. Cunningham, historian of New Jersey and first president of the Friends of the Newark Public Library, asked him to give a talk at the library. When Cunningham asked what honorarium would be appropriate, Roth responded: “Fee? How about renewing my Newark Public Library lending card? That’ll do” (John T. Cunningham Collection). He later mounted the library card on a small piece of marble and used it as a paperweight on the standing desk in his writing studio in Connecticut. Cunningham also offered to give him a day-long tour of Newark, which eventually took place in October 1992. Roth brought his friend Blair Clark, whose family owned the Clark Thread Company that had thrived in Newark earlier in the century, and the Romanian writer Norman Manea on the tour; Cunningham brought Charles F. Cummings, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of Newark developed over thirty years in the Newark Public Library’s New Jersey room and who had been named Newark’s first official City Historian three years earlier (John T. Cunningham Collection).1 After the tour, Roth wrote to Cunningham to thank him for “re-introducing me to the place I once loved best on this earth,” adding that he liked Cummings “enormously.”2 That tour was the beginning of Roth’s relationship with Cummings, which ripened into close friendship as Cummings served as his local researcher. When Roth needed a building to stand in for the Levov glove factory in American Pastoral (1997), he and Cummings walked up Central Avenue together, past the old car dealerships, until he finally found the place he could describe in his novel; in relating the story later, Roth commented, “tangibility is exactly what you want on the surface of a book.”3 In December 1999, six weeks after Cummings accompanied Roth to “The Roth Explosion,” a four-day international book festival in Aixen-Provence, Roth wrote to him, “the Newark Public Library has been invaluable to me as a writer. … I simply could not have written [American Pastoral] without the material I found at the library and could have found nowhere else.”4 Roth made a similar comment to Georg Brunold, deputy editor of the Swedish Du magazine, following an interview and tour of Newark, telling Brunold that his career would not have been the same without Cummings, adding “and this is true.”5 Cummings also helped Roth while he was researching and writing The Plot against America (2004) in the early 2000s, providing information about prominent Newark Jews during the five-year period from 1937 to 1942, and about St. Peter’s Church, orphanage, and parochial school. As the September 2004 publication date approached, Roth suggested to Cummings that he come to the Newark Public Library on the day the book was released, or the following day, for a “little talk” about the city and a meet and greet—but “definitely not” to autograph any books.6 A year later, Cummings helped orchestrate “Philip Roth Day” in Newark, when Roth was given a key to the city and a historical plaque was placed on his childhood home. After Cummings died in December 2005, Roth published a warm tribute to “a great Newark hero” in the Newark Star-Ledger, calling him the most generous of men, a “librarian, archivist, historian, recording journalist, teacher, lecturer, and impassioned tour guide par excellence. He was my devoted friend” (Roth 2005: 1). Given Roth’s long association with the Newark Public Library, it was natural that the Library would join in celebrating his eightieth birthday with an exhibit, Philip Roth: Photos from a Lifetime, which ran from March to August 2013. As Rosemary Steinbaum explained in the accompanying exhibition catalog, “Roth opened his boxes of personal photographs for consideration to be included in the exhibit. He wrote, edited and rewrote the captions accompanying each photograph. He remained available to the library at every step along the

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process of preparing the exhibit.” Roth loved the exhibit, which “unimaginably, incomparably, … unsettlingly exceeded” his expectations. He returned several times to view it, often unannounced, and requested additional copies of the exhibition catalog (Steinbaum 2013: 5; Roth 2013).

THE GENESIS OF THE PHILIP ROTH PERSONAL LIBRARY In September 2013, Philip Roth approached Library Director Wilma J. Grey, through his lawyer Perley Grimes, to ask if the Newark Public Library would accept the donation of his personal library (Grimes 2013). Director Grey and all who were involved knew immediately that accepting the donation would be a tremendous responsibility, financially and otherwise. Philip Roth’s personal library, properly cataloged and displayed, would bring readers, scholars, and fans to Newark. The Newark Public Library was to create a literary destination. Via correspondence between Mr. Grimes and Ms. Grey in December 2013, Roth was given a choice between two spaces in the Main Library to house his collection (Grey 2013). After reviewing the dimensions and locations of the two spaces, Roth selected the room that is now the Philip Roth Personal Library, a nine by sixteen meter space with a high ceiling, large windows, and handsome paneling. The room was part of Reference, housing—fittingly, given the young Black boy’s fascination with Gauguin in Goodbye, Columbus—the art book collection. The room is on the second floor, adjacent and perpendicular to Centennial Hall, the Library’s original reading room, now serving as a grand gathering space. The doors of the Philip Roth Personal Library open onto the Library’s central atrium. Once the decision had been made to accept his personal library, and once Roth had selected the space in the Main Library for it, the next matter was to develop concept designs to test the feasibility of housing Roth’s books in the space. The room would need extensive renovations and redesign. In February 2014, the Library’s team met with Roth in the office of the firm that provided early architectural consultation. In the meeting, Roth described the importance of reading, the tangibility of books, and hope that the imagined Personal Library would become a living place and inspire both readers and writers. In March 2014, a delegation from the Newark Public Library visited Roth at his home in Warren, Connecticut. Roth was expecting us. The purpose of the visit was to survey the scope and layout of his library. Throughout the house, books were grouped by genre and arranged alphabetically by author. The living room and parlor of the house were lined with books. Most of Roth’s personal library was shelved in a room at the back of the house, a room filled with double-sided metal library shelves, floor to ceiling. Roth allowed the library team to absorb its treasures, finding interesting inscriptions—one, for instance, from William Styron, others from Roth himself to his parents, because he had brought home and shelved their books after their deaths. Tunis’s baseball novels were grouped together with other books about baseball. The second floor of the house contained books of drama and poetry; behind the front rooms and up the attic stairs were memorabilia—Roth’s Weequahic High School diploma, honorary degrees, baseball memorabilia, and Roth’s foreign editions. After we spent some time among the books in the main house, Roth led us to his writing studio, across the yard from the main house. There we saw the familiar standing writing desk, a trestle table with chair, desk lamp, and computer, an Eames chair, and more shelves of books. There was a back room as well, for resting. Some of the bookshelves here were organized by

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novel, the material that informed The Plot against America shelved together—stamp collecting, tobacco farming, Nazis in Newark (2003) by Warren Grover—while another shelving group held the material for Nemesis (2010): summer camping in America and polio. We spent time examining interlineations in the books and chatting with Roth. We inquired about a segment of a schoolroom alphabet in script propped on a music stand beside the trestle desk. That, explained Roth, signified the difficulty of writing, not just word-by-word, but letter-by-letter. When we returned to the main house and gathered in Roth’s living room, Roth had a gift to offer each of us. We were each to choose a book from among a stack of his novels, and he would personally inscribe it. There was one more visit with Roth on the subject of his Personal Library, held in the office of the architectural consultant in April 2014. There we discussed concept designs for the project as well as its scope. Roth commented on the preliminary designs. It was a convivial meeting, with Roth seemingly feeling positive about the project. This impression was confirmed when, months after Roth’s death in May 2018, on a visit to his New York City apartment to survey the books and associated artifacts, we found an early, printed, architect’s rendering of the Personal Library open on his bed. In 2016, working closely with Roth, the Newark Public Library inaugurated an annual Philip Roth Lecture, with the goal of launching Roth programming in advance of there being a Philip Roth Personal Library. Roth suggested “Literature and History of America” as the theme for the series, and he was instrumental in selecting the first three speakers, including the inaugural lecturer, Zadie Smith, whose talk about using first-person narration in writing is anthologized in Feel Free (2018) as “The I Who Is Not Me.” It was after Roth’s death that we learned that the Newark Public Library had a deadline for constructing the Philip Roth Personal Library: three years from the date of death. Fundraising began in earnest, as did the matter of hiring the final architecture and design team. The Library’s director selected Ann Beha Architects of Boston as architect in partnership with C&G Partners of New York as designers. They became the team to design the Philip Roth Personal Library. Soon, a group from the Newark Public Library made another trip to Roth’s Connecticut house to measure and assess the collection in detail and to select the related furniture and personal items for the Roth Library. Thereon followed design meetings, which took place both at the Library and at C&G’s office. Broad design questions included: how many and which books to display? The decision, in the end, was to shelve 3,700 books in the room, those with markings, inscriptions, notes. The rest of the collection—including duplicates, Roth’s collection of his own books, Encyclopedia Britannica, and The Internet for Dummies—is housed in reference stacks, accessible from the Roth Library. Other design decisions were where, structurally, to divide the reading room from exhibition space, and what materials to use designing the shelving, with the ultimate goals of complementing the nineteenth-century monumental aesthetic of the Library building and accommodating Roth’s own propensity for simplicity. Construction began in the spring of 2020. That the Library was closed to the public because of the Covid-19 pandemic aided early remediation and construction. By the fall of 2020, the construction team from Shawmut Design and Construction was on-site, reinforcing the floor to bear the weight of the freestanding, double-sided glass bookcase that divides the spaces, tracing and upgrading the ductwork, bringing the HVAC systems up to date, and reclaiming and refinishing historic woodwork. While Shawmut’s team was constructing the Roth Library, the authors of this chapter were curating the inaugural exhibition. We researched and selected the Roth quotations to

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embellish the walls and shelves; chose objects for display; arranged the objects from the collection for display; wrote descriptors and captions for the exhibition in tandem with C&G; and attended to all the details a visitor sees when visiting the Philip Roth Personal Library. C&G selected design elements—typeface, color palette, wall presentation, banners— and guided the final design process in every detail. Installation took place in April and May 2021, and, by the end of May, in accordance with Roth’s three-year requirement, the Philip Roth Personal Library was ready to open. Official ribbon cutting, with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, took place on June 7, 2021.

THE COLLECTION The Philip Roth Personal Library includes more than 7,000 books, furniture, artifacts, and ephemera found tucked inside the books. Shelved in the order Roth himself used, nonfiction in one large space, research material in the writing studio, and the remainder shelved alphabetically by author’s last name throughout the rest of the rooms, the collection is fully cataloged and available to readers and researchers by appointment. An accompanying exhibition space is open to the public during the same hours as the Newark Public Library. It proved to be a major task to meet the three-year deadline to open the Personal Library, since much time passed before we acquired the bequest. We visited Roth’s residences in both Warren, CT, and New York City on several occasions to assess Roth’s collection and begin an inventory. During these visits, we photographed every shelf in every bookcase in every room, along with other objects destined for the Newark Public Library. In the fall of 2019, just eighteen months before our deadline, we received permission to retrieve the books from Roth’s apartment in New York City. We packed approximately 900 books, shelf by shelf, retaining their order. Subsequently, in July 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we arranged a three-day move of the items from Roth’s home in Connecticut (6,000+ books, furniture, LP collection; awards and diplomas; posters, a sculpture, academic robes, radios, and a well-recognized tweed jacket). In his house, drama and poetry were accumulated in the bedroom; fiction was spread between the living room and parlor, arranged by author; and approximately 2,500 nonfiction books were housed in the “library room,” arranged alphabetically either by author or by personal subject name, except for some subjectspecific clusters such as baseball, Jewish Studies, periodicals, and art. When the boxes of books arrived from Connecticut, the Library was still closed to the public due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and most staff were working remotely. Less than a year remained to process and catalog the collection. While processing the books, we found many items inserted between pages or adhered to them (sticky notes, letters, notes, photographs, receipts, travel itineraries, clippings, and items used as placeholders—paper towels, toothpicks, and even a straw). One field guide also preserved many dried flower specimens between its pages. We removed these items from the books, placed them into corresponding folders, and added detailed information in each catalog record about inscriptions, marginalia, and loose items found inside the book. We amassed fourteen document boxes of ephemera and created a corresponding finding aid for The Philip Roth Collection.7 Once the bookcases in the Philip Roth Personal Library were installed in mid-May 2021, we shelved books in Roth’s order, beginning with the items from his apartment in New York, followed by his writing studio in Connecticut, and then other rooms in the home. The process was complex since we needed to add the resulting shelf location to each catalog record.

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Each catalog record indicates where the book was shelved in Roth’s home and where it is now shelved, whether the book contained any loose items, and whether marginalia, marking, underlining, or an inscription is present. Nearly 3,700 books are on display in the Philip Roth Personal Library. Artifacts and panels of quotes have been arranged and placed throughout the shelves, including one of Roth’s Olivetti typewriters, presentation copies given to Roth by other authors, examples of marginalia, and Saul Bellow’s top hat. The remaining books, either those lacking any markings, duplicates, or volumes of encyclopedias and periodicals, are kept in a storage room adjoining the Philip Roth Personal Library. Roth actively purchased second-hand books and withdrawn library books to supplement his reading and research. For example, Roth acquired numerous books about polio and summer camps while writing Nemesis and reference materials about stamps, Walter Winchell, Charles Lindbergh, and political history for The Plot against America. He consulted these research materials carefully, referencing historical events to convey sentiment and experience. Roth had strong personal recollections of many of the subjects in his books, such as the Second World War and the Vietnam War. Roth acknowledged the Vietnam War as one of the most dramatic periods in his life and touched on it often during interviews. He acquired many books on the topic, which he incorporated into American Pastoral and The Human Stain (2000). One of the first books Roth purchased was the script of Norman Corwin’s On a Note of Triumph (1945). A portion of this work was aired on VE Day, but the book contained the script in its entirety. Roth cherished the book (there are three copies in the collection).8 Roth often noted his appreciation of authors such as John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, and Don DeLillo, whose work was rooted in American settings. They are well represented in the collection. In the years after he gave up writing novels, Roth read American history almost exclusively; many of these books were in his NYC apartment. Roth used his personal library heavily. Several of the books are in poor condition, such as one of his copies of Crime and Punishment ([1866] 1950), a paperback, which has split along the spine. It is not unusual to find several copies of the same title, particularly the ones he specified were significant to him during his younger years, each underlined and annotated in a unique way.9 Roth also signed and dated many of the copies, so it is possible to run a search to determine what novels he read during a certain year or time period. For example, we know Roth was required to read Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) in college as part of his rigorous literary education. When browsing the shelves, visitors can distinguish older books from newer ones, and which received more use than others. In the 1960s, when Roth was teaching literature at the University of Pennsylvania, he continued to educate himself through reading. He introduced his students to French, Japanese, and Eastern European writers, all of which are contained in the collection (Céline, Colette, Kōbō Abe, Yukio Mishima, Bruno Schulz, Milan Kundera, and others). Roth later also taught his own novels. The teaching notes found inside some of those books are particularly interesting since they offer discussion topics (for American Pastoral: place, time, subject, cause, characters, and goal) and questions (for Goodbye, Columbus: how much is it an attack on a way of life? Is Neil a sufficient hero? How important to the stories is the Jewish background?). Roth’s library also contains many newer novels sent to him by publishers or authors for review. While his collection represents nearly every subject, literature, history, the arts, and philosophy prevail. For example, Roth owned many titles by Kafka, Camus, Colette, Tolstoy,

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Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky. He also collected books on his favorite sport—baseball. We can determine which female authors Roth read, which young authors Roth supported (Jonathan Ames, Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Maslow, Denis Johnson, Frederica Wagman, and others), which African American authors are represented in the collection (including Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin), and his reading on such key topics as Existentialism (particularly Kafka and Camus), history, politics, Eastern European and Russian literature (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov), and psychology. Other subject areas include Newark, military history, short stories, poetry, and drama as well as ones of personal interest, such as botany, cooking, art, and nature walks. Roth’s library fed his curiosity. His annotations, whether in the margins, on a page from a notepad, or on a sticky note, reveal an individual who analyzed his reading and posed questions as he went along. It is not surprising to find “Why?” scrawled repeatedly in the margins. Roth also developed the habit of underlining and marking pages of certain books and then creating a list (or index) of those pages, with additional notes, on the first two pages. His marginalia are expressive, at times questioning the author, acknowledging a definition (i.e., “what eccentricity is”) or offering exclamations (“Education!”). Themes are often noted and starred, such as “Self-censorship,” and “intensität [sic] der Juden,” on a piece of paper inserted in S.S. Prawer’s Heine’s Jewish Comedy (1983). Roth annotated the reverse sides of book jackets, including in The Nightmare Decade: The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy (1971) by Fred J. Cook and History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (1996) edited by Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt. In the former, Roth scribbled early character notes in a red felt pen for I Married a Communist (1998) below the word “treason:” the Fromberg family (perhaps the initial surname before Roth changed it to Fromkin), Eve Frame (written as Eve Fromm), who was the sister of history teacher Paul Fromberg (later renamed Iron Rinn), and an explanation that Eve was married three times before “she took up with Ringold.” In the latter, one finds more jottings in red felt pen relating to American Pastoral: “deterioration & craziness,” “we don’t know anything about Rita,” and “Jessy not shy at all.” Even Roth’s own works contain marginalia and sticky notes. He heavily revised his works after they were published, admitting, “When you’re done, finally, you’re not certain you’re done” (Roth 2011). One copy of The Ghost Writer (1979), on display, contains much underlining and many sticky notes. And in Goodbye, Columbus, one story, “The Conversion of the Jews,” includes many legible annotations. During the cataloging process we also found books that belonged to Roth’s wives, Margaret Martinson and Claire Bloom. For example, in January 1959, the year Roth and Martinson wed, she signed and made markings in a copy of The Waves (1931) by Virginia Woolf. The same is true for a copy of Henry Miller’s Nights of Love and Laughter (1955). And we know Roth and Martinson shared books—she tended to use a blue pen while making notes, while Roth exclusively used a pencil or a black or red felt pen. Claire Bloom’s books include a copy of Padraic Colum’s The Road Round Ireland (1926): “To Claire, [inscription in Gaelic], Pauline,” most likely the Irish actress Pauline Flanagan who performed with Bloom. As we analyze the books, watch interviews, and consult articles, we are able to make connections but are stumped by unanswered questions. Roth’s notes contain abbreviations and initials; sometimes they are illegible. We also wonder about the used books in the collection. Are most from Roth’s favorite vendor later in life, AbeBooks? How many belonged to his friends? For example, we know at least one book in the library, Stanley M. Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional & Intellectual Life ([1959] 1963) was William Styron’s

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since it contains his bookplate. Some of the second-hand books also contain markings, many that are not Roth’s, but others are questionable. We are interested to learn more about Roth’s associations. How was he connected to some of the individuals who presented him with copies of books? The Newark Public Library also acquired Roth’s foreign language collection, including translations of many of his works that he kept in a closet—in Armenian, Catalan, Croatian, Swedish, Japanese, German, Hungarian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Norwegian, Italian, Turkish, Hebrew, and several others. The astonishing range of these editions demonstrates Roth’s popularity beyond the United States. We found another unexpected treasure inside of a printer box: a collection of seven scrapbooks assembled by Roth’s mother, with reviews, advertisements, letters, and any information she could find in print about how the media was receiving her son’s works, both the positive and negative. The Philip Roth Personal Library collection has already grown through donations. Roth’s friend Joel Conarroe presented photocopies of draft typescripts that Roth asked him to read and comment on in advance of publication. We were grateful when he offered additional materials a few weeks after the Philip Roth Personal Library opened, including books Roth inscribed to him and a unique poster that contains the text of Everyman (2006). Micki Ruttenberg Auerbach, who met Roth when they were both camp counselors in 1952, donated her collection of Roth’s letters to her following their summer romance; these materials provide an understanding of what Roth was reading in the early 1950s, as documented on the list he created for her, “How to Make Micky [sic] an Intellectual!”10 Other significant gifts have been promised. Roth’s love of reading and lifelong association with the Newark Public Library are memorialized in the Philip Roth Personal Library. Visitors experience the moment when reading and writing combust to fuel Roth’s fiction. Going forward, the collection will serve as a repository for Roth-related books, manuscripts, and artifacts, a resource for scholars, and a literary destination for the public.

NOTES 1. John T. Cunningham, letters to Philip Roth, June 27, 1991, and August 26, 1991; Philip Roth, letter to John T. Cunningham, August 31, 1991 (John T. Cunningham Collection). Roth’s John Cotton Dana lecture at the Newark Public Library took place on November 10, 1991. Cunningham later helped to negotiate permission to use the photo of the general store in Mendham, NJ, on the cover of American Pastoral; conversation with Philip Roth, February 21, 2014. 2. Philip Roth, letter to John T. Cunningham, November 6, 1992 (John T. Cunningham Collection). 3. Conversation with Philip Roth, February 21, 2014. 4. Philip Roth, letter to Charles F. Cummings, December 9, 1999 (John T. Cunningham Collection). “The Roth Explosion” took place on October 21 to October 24, 1999. 5. Georg Brunold, email to Charles F. Cummings, July 2, 2003, pasted by Cummings in his desk diary under July 7, 2003 (Charles F. Cummings Papers). 6. Entries by Charles F. Cummings in his desk diary for January 26, 2000, January 15, 2002, July 8, 2002, and September 14, 2004 (Charles F. Cummings Papers). 7. A finding aid, a shelf list, and a link to the catalog can be found on the webpages of the Philip Roth Collection and the Philip Roth Personal Library.

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8. Roth even noted Corwin as his “hero” in his Chancellor Avenue Elementary School autograph book, as a thirteen-year-old. 9. Examples: four copies of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), five copies of Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964), five copies of Céline’s Journey to the End of the World (1932), five copies of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), six copies of Marcel Proust’s A Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), six copies of his friend’s Richard Stern’s Other Men’s Daughters (1973; including three copies of an edition that included an introduction by Roth), and five copies of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). 10. Auerbach’s donations are listed in Donated Materials Related to Philip Roth.

REFERENCES Charles F. Cummings Papers. NPL. Available online: https://newarkpubliclibrary.libraryhost.com/ repositories/3/archival_objects/77911 (accessed March 15, 2022). Donated Materials Related to Philip Roth. NPL. Available online: https://newarkpubliclibrary. libraryhost.com/repositories/5/resources/426 (accessed March 15, 2022). John T. Cunningham Collection. NPL. Available online: https://newarkpubliclibrary.libraryhost.com/ repositories/3/resources/72 (accessed March 15, 2022). Grey, Wilma J. (2013), Email to Perley Grimes, December 10, PRPL. Grimes, Perley (2013), Email to Wilma J. Grey, September 19, PRPL. The Joel Conarroe Collection of Philip Roth Material. NPL. Available online: https:// newarkpubliclibrary.libraryhost.com/repositories/5/resources/421 (accessed March 15, 2022). Newark Public LIbrary (NPL) (2013), Philip Roth: Photos from a Lifetime, Exhibition Catalogue, Newark: Newark Public Library. Philip Roth Collection. NPL. Available online: https://newarkpubliclibrary.libraryhost.com/ repositories/5/resources/420 (accessed March 15, 2022). Philip Roth Personal Library. NPL. Available online: https://prpl.npl.org/research (accessed March 15, 2022). Roth, Philip (1969), “Reflections on the Death of Library,” New York Times, March 1: 30. Roth, Philip (2005), “A Great Newark Hero,” Newark Star-Ledger, December 25: 1. Roth, Philip (2011), “Writing and Re-writing a Novel,” Web of Stories. Available online: https://www. webofstories.com/play/philip.roth/100 (accessed October 7, 2021). Roth, Philip (2013), Letter to Wilma J. Grey, April 9, PRPL. Roth, Philip (2014), “Why the Newark Public Library,” PRPL. Shane, Eleanor and John Cotton Dana (1930), The Nine Branch Libraries of the Public Library of Newark, N.J., Newark: Newark Public Library. Smith, Zadie (2018), Feel Free: Essays, New York: Penguin. Steinbaum, Rosemary (2013), “Dedication,” Photos from a Lifetime, 5, Newark: Newark Public Library.

APPENDIX ONE

Annotated Bibliography CONNOR E. DOMBAL

This annotated bibliography features a selection of monographs, edited collections, and biographical works about Philip Roth.

Monographs Basu, Ann (2015), States of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Basu focuses on five of Roth’s late novels with a particular interest in how he represents the relationship between what she calls “manhood” and American identity. Basu centers her argument on Roth’s interest in postwar America and analyzes American mythologies using explication to highlight Roth’s techniques and their impacts. Basu considers the changeable physical and mythical terrain of the United States and how that can affect self-making. Overall, Basu’s analysis of Roth’s postwar America in conversation with American identity and culture is expertly handled and insightful. Baumgarten, Murray, and Barbara Gottfried (1990), Understanding Philip Roth, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. This 1990 coauthored work serves as a companion to reading Roth and is particularly useful for nonacademic readers and students looking for introductory examinations of Roth’s novels and nonfiction. The book begins with an overview of the life of Roth before moving on to discuss his novels published between 1959 and his 1986 work, The Counterlife. Berlinerblau, Jacques (2021), The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Berlinerblau analyzes Roth’s novels in the wake of the 2017 #MeToo movement. He considers Roth’s relation to such topics as misogyny, gender, sexuality, and racism with a particular interest in the claimed fictionalized autobiographical nature of some of Roth’s characters. Berlinerblau examines Roth’s place in an awakened society that is much less accepting of rampant, extreme patriarchy. Roth’s troubled men and their actions are limited to the literary realm, but what Berlinerblau focuses on is the place of the artist and what his work means in accordance with defenders and critics of Roth. Bloom, James D. (2022), Roth’s Wars: A Career in Conflict, Lanham: Lexington Books. Bloom’s book considers how Roth’s characters navigate the causes and consequences of war. Bloom’s methodology seems best described as a hybrid historicist approach, as he juxtaposes close reading of Roth’s representations of war with historical documents, religious sources, and personal experiences. The work serves as a good base for historical connections, as well as understanding Roth’s narrators and their comments on war.

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Brauner, David (2007), Philip Roth, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Brauner presents an overview of Roth’s works with specific attention paid to Roth’s later works before more fully considering Roth’s influence on contemporary American fiction overall. Brauner examines Roth’s unique and powerful fictional voice in conversation with Roth’s takes on such contemporary subject matter as masculinity, trauma, morality, historical influence, and Judaism. Connolly, Andy (2017), Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition, Lanham and London: Lexington Books. Connolly links Roth’s fiction to political and historical contexts by examining Roth’s skillful narrative experimentation informed by literary formalism. Connolly analyzes the underlying connection to political elements by rejecting assumptions that reading for aesthetics and historicism in Roth’s novels must be mutually exclusive. As such, Connolly takes a split approach using the theories of literary formalism and new historicism to introduce and examine Roth in new or expanded ways. Cooper, Alan (1996), Philip Roth and the Jews, Albany: State University of New York Press. Cooper’s book analyzes Roth’s works with a particular focus on interaction with Jewish American identity and the issues of late-twentieth-century Jews. Cooper only takes up Roth’s work through 1970, explicitly stating that the book pays no attention to Roth’s developments afterwards. Scholars interested in early Roth will find Cooper’s work insightful, but his paradoxical acknowledgment of, and disinterest in, later Roth can lead to confusion. Gooblar, David (2011), The Major Phases of Philip Roth, London and New York: Continuum. Gooblar’s deep analysis of Roth in the context of his changing styles throughout the decades helps establish Roth’s works as distinctly his. Gooblar “balances readings of Roth’s” inward creation of subjectivity with his outward appropriation of literary models and discourses. Thus, he positions himself between contemporaries like Debra Shostak, who focuses on the “inward” looking Roth, and Ross Posnock, who focuses on the “outward.” Gooblar separates Roth’s expansive career into different clusters based upon shifts in Roth’s interests or pursuits, leading to a well-organized review of Roth’s novels. Hayes, Patrick (2014), Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayes examines Roth and Roth’s work with a focus on responses to the literary nature of the writing itself. Hayes argues that the relationship between power or emotions and literature is important to the budding relationship of ethics and literature. Hayes delves into Roth’s emergence, Roth’s feelings on literature, contemporaries’ views of literature, and how Roth’s literature reflects modern American literature more generally. Kaplan, Brett Ashley (2015), Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Kaplan examines Roth’s novels alongside the concept of “Jewish Anxiety,” arguing that Roth highlights a particular form of anxiety that stems not just from fear of victimization but also from fear of perpetration. Kaplan’s readings focus on the minority characters in Roth’s novels to explore their problematic underdevelopment, and she emphasizes what Roth achieves with these characters. The insecurity surrounding Roth’s main characters and various masculinities is set against the different issues of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, raising questions about Roth’s complex personal politics. Kaplan specifically focuses on the novels’ messages in relation to Jewish anxiety in the context of the Rothian literary realm. Overall, Kaplan’s work provides examples of excellent close reading and analysis, while also highlighting modern contemporary discussions. Kimmage, Michael (2012), In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kimmage examines Roth’s three works American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—generally known as Roth’s American Trilogy, but here understood as

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the “Newark” Trilogy—and analyzes their historical grounding and possible inspiration. Kimmage claims the more accurate title of these works is the “Newark Trilogy” because Newark plays an important role for each novel’s protagonist. Kimmage juxtaposes the city’s own histories and issues with his characters’ development to determine what he calls “history’s reach” and illustrates how history can influence the individual. Kimmage provides the historical context of Newark and highlights how such an unassuming city affected Roth and his works. Masiero, Pia (2011), Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld, Amherst: Cambria Press. Masiero argues for the pivotal role of Nathan Zuckerman as a narrator and his character’s intertwinement with Roth himself. Masiero focuses on the development and growth of the fictional Zuckerman and his echoes to the real Roth, Roth’s own growth, and the narrative weaving of a tumultuous writer with Jewish roots. A deep dive into the relationship between Roth as an author and Zuckerman as a narrator, this book closely reads the delicate narrative techniques and world building exemplified by Roth. Posnock, Ross (2006), Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Posnock examines Roth’s use of rudeness, crassness, or immaturity as a literary device, Roth’s wielding of the technique, and the writers and theorists Roth’s “Rude Truth” is grounded in. Posnock provides close readings and analysis of Roth’s many novels and characters via the lens of immaturity to dissect the technique that encapsulates Roth’s unique style. Additionally, Posnock contextualizes Roth’s “rude truths” within a discussion of Roth’s style to establish Roth’s rudeness as a meaningful practice and a method of literary criticism. Pozorski, Aimee (2011), Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010), London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Pozorski argues that Roth represents the traumatic founding of the United States as fundamental to American subjectivity. Pozorski’s perspective grounded in Trauma Studies, balanced with deep critical readings of Roth’s works akin to poetry analysis, establishes the ways Roth explores the connection between trauma and American identity. Due to Pozorski’s relaxed, informal language, the work is more accessible to non-literary scholars and holds interest for a larger audience with interests in history, democracy, and literary tradition. Safer, Elaine B. (2006), Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth, Albany: State University of New York Press. Safer analyzes Roth’s later novels to examine how Roth portrays and addresses real-world issues or concepts through Roth’s narrative techniques. Safer emphasizes how Roth’s novels draw on Roth’s own experiences as a Jewish writer and member of a social minority group to capture widespread societal topics. Safer utilizes in-depth close readings with the support of contemporaries and other critiques to highlight the breadth of Roth’s narratives. Shechner, Mark (2003), Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth, Madison and London: The University of Wisconsin Press. Shechner’s 2003 monograph attempts a deep dive into Roth’s novels, seeking not to understand the motivation behind Roth’s writings but instead to analyze the language in his novels. Shechner takes a very personal approach to Roth and details his interactions with Roth’s works in relations to ongoing Roth criticism. Shechner provides excellent historical context, making this book a useful resource for scholars examining Roth via the dual lenses of close reading and historicism. Shipe, Matthew A. (2022), Understanding Philip Roth, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Shipe’s work provides a comprehensive overview of the life and work of Roth. Shipe’s work combines biographical elements with introductory close readings of Roth that help readers new to Roth navigate his themes, ideas, and literary techniques. Additionally, the recent publication of Shipe’s

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work in 2022 can be especially helpful in providing one of the most contemporary resources in locating current scholarship on Roth and his times. Shostak, Debra (2004), Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Shostak examines Roth’s oeuvre by highlighting such underlying concepts as the constructs of selfhood, changes in Roth’s mentalities, and, by contrast, consistencies present throughout Roth’s novels. Shostak analyzes Roth’s works in a retrospective manner rather than the traditional method of reading them in the order in which they were published. Shostak’s “cross-sectional” approach uniquely helps capture a more complete sense of the concepts consistent throughout his career. Shostak highlights Roth’s interest in such topics as masculinity, Jewish American identity, narrative storytelling, and the American subject.

Edited Collections Brühwiler, Claudia Franziska and Lee Trepanier, eds. (2017), A Political Companion to Philip Roth, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. This collection reflects on the place of political thought in Roth’s oeuvre. Such themes as American Jewish Identity, Zionism, freedom, equality, tolerance, race, class, and gender, according to this collection, all exemplify Roth’s political engagement as a novelist. The collection targets a diverse audience and includes new work by established and rising Roth scholars. Gooblar, David and Aimee Pozorski, eds. (2016), Roth after Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination, Lanham and London: Lexington Books. This edited collection serves multiple functions in Roth Literary Studies. First the collection presents eleven original essays by prominent Roth scholars on a range of topics, highlighting the importance and breadth of Roth’s work. The collection is a direct response to Roth’s announcement of his retirement from writing, speculating on the enduring legacy of Roth’s novels. Halio, Jay L. and Ben Siegel, eds. (2010), Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth’s Later Novels, Newark: University of Delaware Press. This collection of essays is devoted to analyzing Roth’s later works, especially as they push boundaries and present new experimental challenges compared to the earlier works. The collection maintains its focus on the latter half of Roth’s career by acknowledging and connecting Roth’s early works, showing the development, the contrast, and the similarities of Roth’s fictional elements. A variety of topics are covered ranging from the autobiographical nature of Roth’s novels to with such issues as identity, race, and sex. Ivanova, Velichka D., ed. (2011), Reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Ivanova’s collection examines Roth’s method in light of his interest in capturing post-Second World War American reality and seeks to counter the critics who disparage Roth’s repetition of themes, materials, and characters. Ideas like assimilation, ethical identity, the traumatic history of the American people, and others are explored in the collection. McKinley, Maggie, ed. (2021), Philip Roth in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This enormous collection of essays highlights the multitude of possible approaches to, and contexts concerned with, Roth’s novels. In an overall sense, McKinley’s collection focuses on Roth’s range as a writer while simultaneously exploring important discussions that arise from Roth’s works. Topics include American national identity, history, the individual, politics, gender, sexuality, geographical significance, and theoretical methods possible for exploring Roth’s novels. McKinley’s collection serves as an excellent starting point for new researchers as it highlights different areas of interest, gives insight into numerous arguments made by leading scholars, and provides a biographical introduction and examination of Roth’s life.

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Milbauer, Asher Z., and Donald G. Watson, eds. (1988), Reading Philip Roth, London: Macmillan Press. This collection of essays seeks not only to expand the critical conversation surrounding Roth’s novels but also to clarify erroneous understandings of Roth’s works. The essays collected here consider how Roth’s characters such as Nathan Zuckerman interact with and interpret the novels’ events. This collection appeared just as Roth entered the later stage of his career and shines light on previous discussions surrounding Roth. While the work is dated and lacks a complete catalog of Roth’s works, it is a useful resource in understanding early debates concerning Roth. Parrish, Timothy, ed. (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Parrish, this comprehensive overview of Roth and his works begins with a biography of Roth, and then opens to the varying topics and discussions that Roth addresses in his novels. Parrish’s collection provides a good overview of the entire arc of Roth’s career up to the year 2007 as well as an excellent starting point for scholars interested in Roth, or the matters related to Roth. Pinsker, Sanford, ed. (1982), Critical Essays on Philip Roth, Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. Pinsker’s 1982 collection focuses on Roth’s early career. While Pinsker’s collection only covers Roth’s career through The Ghost Writer (1979), it provides an early sense of Roth’s development and growth as a writer. Pinsker’s collection includes theoretical examinations as well as general reviews of Roth’s novels and motifs. It is especially helpful to scholars interested in exploring Roth’s concepts of AmericanJewish identity and Jewish humor. Pozorski, Aimee, ed. (2012), Roth and Celebrity, Lanham and London: Lexington Books. This collection centers on the question of how the complications and implications of “celebrity” shaped Roth’s work and career. Pozorski’s collection examines Roth’s work and contemporary Roth scholarship via the lens of Celebrity Studies. Building on earlier works, this collection recasts readings of Roth’s life and work in the context of celebrity culture to explore the complex relationships among Roth, his work, and his own celebrity. Grounded in the connection between American ideals and its cultural obsession with celebrity, Pozorski’s collection raises new questions about celebrity status using Roth’s life and work as an exemplary case. Pozorski, Aimee, ed. (2013), Critical Insights: Philip Roth, Amenia: Grey House Publishing. This edited collection begins with a biography of Roth that situates readings of his work along the trajectory of his life and then immediately opens into two main sections of essays. The first section concerns the critical contexts of Roth’s novels, exploring concepts like narratology or culture in Roth’s writing. The second section concerns critical readings that offer a wide range of topics and perspectives that range from feminism to historicism to interpret the works themselves. The collection contains essays written by leading Roth scholars and serves as a starting point for prospective scholars to begin their exploration of Roth, while also being accessible to established scholars as a reminder that there is more work on Roth to be done. Royal, Derek Parker, ed. (2005), Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, Westport and London: Praeger Publishers. Royal’s collection analyzes Roth’s individual works or issues from a variety of different viewpoints and provides a reading of key themes present throughout Roth’s works. The collection also includes brief summaries of Roth’s works, analyzes Roth’s literary elements, and considers Roth’s works in relation to each other. By providing viewpoints of multiple critics, the collection serves as an entrance into Roth’s most significant themes. Siegel, Ben and Jay L. Halio, eds. (2010), Playful and Serious: Philip Roth as a Comic Writer, Newark: University of Delaware Press. This edited collection featuring top Roth scholars of the time analyzes and codifies Roth’s comic aesthetic and reflects on how Roth’s comic mastery interacts with the serious topics he engages. In their introduction, the pair of co-editors define Roth as a “comic” writer in terms of his humor, irony,

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satire, comedy, and wit. Scholars interested in Roth’s method and growth as a writer will find this collection useful. Shostak, Debra, ed. (2011), Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot against America, London and New York: Continuum. Shostak’s collection centers around three of Roth’s major works. The collection is intended for literary scholars at both post- and undergraduate levels and provides close analysis of such themes as race, American individualism, American culture, and American history. The collection of essays provides high-level arguments by skilled Roth contemporaries.

Biographical Works Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, New York: W.W. Norton Company. As Roth’s authorized biographer, Blake Bailey worked directly with Roth for numerous years, had access to Roth’s personal archives, and interviewed countless contacts of Roth in order to complete a definitive picture of his life, upbringing, and subsequent literary success. Bailey examines Roth’s personal and sexual relationships, while also tracking his literary journeys and experimentations. While the book is no longer in print with Norton, it is now available via Skyhorse Publishing in the wake of Bailey’s own sex scandals. Lethem, Jonathan, Hermione Lee, Alain Finkielkraut, Claudia Roth Pierpont, Edna O’Brien, and Philip Roth (2014), Philip Roth at 80, New York: The Library of America. Philip Roth at 80 is a unique collection of remarks delivered in 2013 at the eightieth birthday celebration of Roth co-organized by members of the Philip Roth Society and the Newark Preservation and Landmarks Committee. The collection includes a diverse array of autobiographical reflections, personal dealings with Roth, and praise of Roth’s works, culminating in Roth’s own reading of how memory functions in Sabbath’s Theater (1995), generally considered one of his most difficult texts. The collection provides unique insight into Roth’s life as well as insight into the wealth of respect Roth earned among his friends and colleagues during his lifetime. Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, New York: Oxford University Press. Nadel’s unauthorized biography uses archives, interviews, and Roth’s own novels to try to uncover the “real” Philip Roth. Nadel juxtaposes accounts of Roth’s life sourced in archives and interviews with texts written by the author himself, calling into question tensions between Roth’s persona versus the Roth hidden behind the page, kept from the public eye. Nadel also explores Roth’s literature for figments of his “counterlife” in his works and leans into the supposed autobiographical nature of Roth’s writing. Nadel’s valuable study serves well in conjunction with other biographies or literary-focused pieces connecting Roth’s works with his life story. Pierpont, Claudia Roth (2013), Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Pierpont positions her book as part memoir and part exploration of Roth’s works, with biographical elements woven through each chapter. Despite Pierpont’s claim the book is not a biography, her work is heavily influenced by Roth himself. A major portion of the book’s quotations and excerpts exist because of conversations she had with Roth and memories of time she spent with him. However, Pierpont claims to have kept Roth’s influence from swaying her task of creating a major critical work on Roth. Pierpont’s book serves as a useful tool when looking for examples of excellent close reading that offer further insight into Roth’s fiction and is offset nicely with the semi-biographic nature of the book that only aids in Pierpont’s analysis. Searles, George J., ed. (1992), Conversations with Philip Roth, Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi. This collection of interviews spans most of Roth’s career through 1992 and provides excellent, difficult-to-find interviews with the members of the media who tended, at the time, to be averse to

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Roth. The collection is wide-ranging and provides snapshots into what concerned readers throughout Roth’s early career. The collection is extremely useful for historical support and an excellent resource for examining what inspired or prompted Roth to write his novels. Taylor, Benjamin (2020), Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, New York: Penguin Books. Taylor’s hybrid biography/memoir deals with his friendship with Philip Roth. Taylor’s work gives true insight into the man, Roth, behind the pen and allows a glimpse into Roth’s inner workings through their conversations as friends, giving scholars and readers alike the opportunity to see Roth as a person, rather than Roth as an author.

APPENDIX TWO

Uncollected Published Stories: An Annotated Inventory JAMES D. BLOOM

“The Day It Snowed” (1954), Chicago Review, 8: 34–45. This story recounts the experience of Sydney, a fatherless schoolboy, as he faces the disappearances of grownup family members in what seems like rapid succession. Roth’s omniscient narrator describes Sydney’s feelings about these elders and tracks his steps to learning that his aunt, father, and stepfather will never return. The plot turns on Sydney’s defiance of his mother’s orders to stay home alone during his stepfather’s funeral and instead search the streets alone for his missing stepfather. The title refers to the winter weather and the threatening storm that thwarts Sydney’s search. Sydney’s perspective anticipates Ozzie Freedman’s in “The Conversion of the Jews” (who like Sydney was subjected to corporal punishment at the hands of his elders) and the narrator in The Plot against America, who also has to grapple with inexplicable disruptions in his seemingly comfortable surroundings. “Why does everybody have to disappear on me?” Sydney asks a sympathetic stranger who agrees to help him find his stepfather (42). According to Ira Nadel (2021: 406), the “unadulterated prose style” (406) in “The Day It Snowed” reverberates in the last Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost (2007) while Blake Bailey (2021) ascribes the style of “The Day It Snowed” to the influence of Truman Capote (97). “The Contest for Aaron Gold” (1955), Epoch, 5–6: 37–50. Following its initial publication in the short-lived journal Epoch, “The Contest for Aaron Gold” appeared later the same year in the annual Best American Short Stories collection. This third-person narration recounts the struggle of an art teacher at a summer camp to rescue an artistically inspired camper from the head counselor who controls the activities. This plot reverberated four years later in Roth’s breakout novella, “Goodbye, Columbus,” in which Neil Klugman, the first of Roth’s memorable author-surrogate first-person narrators, mounts a similarly quixotic campaign to rescue an art-besotted boy from the petty tyranny of the public library bureaucracy that employed Klugman. In “The Contest for Aaron Gold,” Roth pits Werner Samuelson, a war-refugee potter, against the sports ethos of a summer camp that employs him as its ceramics teacher. Lefty Shulberg, a retired pro-basketball player and the camp’s highest-pad counselor who controls the camp schedule from his diving-tower perch with a whistle and megaphone, enforces a traditional “manly” or “jock” ethos throughout the story. Roth pointedly confirms Shulberg’s athletic bona fides and alpha status by assigning him the familiar sports nickname Lefty. The nickname Lefty also calls to mind the era in which Roth composed “The Contest for Aaron Gold” (an era Roth would depict thoroughly in I Married a Communist [1998] some forty years later). In 1955 during the McCarthy era, Lefty’s surname Shulberg would have reminded readers of the “naming names” treachery of ex-lefties like the similarly named Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg whose 1954 betrayal of his friends before the House Un-American Activities Committee all too often passed for true “Americanism” in the 1950s. In assembling Roth’s debut Goodbye, Columbus (1959) collection four years after this story’s initial publication, George Starbuck, Roth’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, excluded “Contest” because

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he found its focus insufficiently “Jewish” (Bailey 2021: 154). In 1960, an adaptation of “The Contest for Aaron Gold” was aired on NBC’s weekly series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Lambert). “Heard Melodies Are Sweeter” (1958), Esquire, August: 58. This single-page three-character dialogue takes place in a TV writers’ room. The writers appear to work at NBC since the narrator identifies the setting as an office “somewhere in Rockefeller Center”—site of the network’s storied Radio City headquarters—as they brainstorm inconclusively to find an “angle” for the premier of a new variety show starring singer Tommy Thrush, whom the writers compare to Perry Como and Frank Sinatra: the stars the writers hope will appear on the show, along with singers Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore and iconic newscaster Edward R. Murrow. The title alludes to John Keats’s 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and its speaker’s insistence that “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” Roth’s attachment to Keats’s poetry would continue to resonate throughout his novels. In Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), the eponymous narrator reflects on a romantic weekend getaway in Vermont by quoting Keats’s ode “To Autumn” (1820), wondering whether it was “tenderness for one another that we experienced, or just the fall doing its work, swelling the gourd (John Keats) and lathering the tourist trade into ecstasies of nostalgia for the good and simple life?” (186). In American Pastoral (1997), Nathan Zuckerman leavens his memories of a dancing partner’s and long-ago hayride date’s breasts with lines from Keats’s 1819 poem, “Ode on Melancholy” (77). In Everyman (2006), Roth opened what would become the Nemesis Tetralogy with an epigraph quoting Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), which Roth also quoted in his only Cosmopolitan story, “The Good Girl,” in 1960. “Expect the Vandals” (1958), Esquire, December: 208–28. Set at the end of the Second World War, this third-person adaptation of Robinson Crusoe examines the relationship between two GIs stranded on a Japanese-occupied atoll as the result of a botched amphibious assault and recounts their rescue by a naval task force overseeing an A-bomb test on the island. The plot turns on the relationship between the two survivors and the viewpoint character’s care for his wounded, paralyzed fellow survivor. The viewpoint character, a Jewish accountant and wouldbe philosopher from New Jersey, comes to regard his charge, a major-league baseball prospect raised in rural Pennsylvania, as the embodiment of the alien Norman Rockwell America he knew only from reading The Saturday Evening Post. Even though “Expect the Vandals” was omitted from Goodbye, Columbus as being insufficiently “Jewish” (Bailey 2021: 154), “Expect the Vandals” became, thanks to the wounded soldier’s description of his caretaker as a pagan, Roth’s first sustained depiction of a fraught Jewish-gentile encounter like those he would subsequently stage in American Pastoral, The Counterlife (1986), The Great American Novel (1973), Indignation (2008), Nemesis (2010), and “On the Air” (1970). The Battle of Blood Island, a screen adaptation of “Expect the Vandals,” premiered in 1960 (Nadel 2021: 166; Royal 2006) “The Love Vessel” (1959), The Dial, 1: 41–68. This third-person narration takes as its point of departure the failure of New Yorker Sam Shachat to begin a new life “under the purple Palestinian sky” on a kibbutz along the Gaza border (51). The plot focuses on the aftermath of Shachat’s failure and his efforts to keep a promise he made to a fellow kibbutznik by delivering a jar of Holy Land soil to his mother in New York. With its Israeli setting, its attention to Zionism, its repeated references to warfare between Arabs and Jews, the story looks ahead to The Counterlife and Operation Shylock (1993) as well as to Alexander Portnoy’s humiliating Tel Aviv visit in Portnoy’s Complaint and to the imagined obituary in Sabbath’s Theater (1995), which reports that “Mr. Sabbath did nothing for Israel” (195). “The Good Girl” (1960), Cosmopolitan, May: 98–103 In “The Good Girl,” Roth’s arch omniscient narrator recounts the return home of Laurie Bowen, a New Jersey Cornell student and Elizabeth Taylor lookalike (with “the eyes of a Modigliani nude”), from a nightclub date at a “crowded belly-dancing place on the West Side” (101). The story contains three discrete acts. The first act consists of a detailed report on Laurie’s reactions to the “desperate advances” of Brown junior Richard Renner, whose “despised sexual plotting” strikes Laurie as a “long and dangerous … safari

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through Somaliland”—an “almost military invasion of “her undefended skin.” Richard assails Laurie with a “Gargantuan tug” and by hurling insults like “Philistine” (99–100). The story’s second act focuses on Laurie’s interactions in the Bowens’ apartment with Laurie’s father and a guest at the college reunion party in progress as Richard escorts Laurie home. In this act, Laurie’s father introduces the title phrase in praising his daughter: Her father puckered his lips at her and said, “A good girl?” Oh, she felt marvelously free! His saying that—parodying all the terribly concerned fathers—always confirmed her belief in the specialness of her family. Other girls wound up in the back seats of cars—heaters and radios going full blast—because they hated their fathers, detested their mothers, and were dreadfully unhappy. She was happy. (100) In the third act Laurie contemplates her father’s compliment while analyzing her beauty in front of the bathroom mirror until she’s interrupted by a drunken guest who comments on Laurie’s appearance, quizzes Laurie about her date, and complains about her own marriage. In the final act, amidst the “unfestive, and sordid-looking” dregs of the party, Laurie bickers with her mother about this bathroom intrusion and answers her father’s question, “were you a good … ?” with a mutinous “No!” (102). In a backstory Laurie regales Richard, Scheherazade-like, with memories of her teenage theatrical aspirations and of her starring role as Juliet in a high school production. Laurie’s dreams of stardom look forward to depictions of Eve Frame’s stage career in I Married a Communist, while her “witty and epigrammatic” disparagement of fellow cast members’ New Jersey diphthongs also calls attention to Roth’s preoccupation with New Jersey and his broader attachment to the sounds of American English (C 54; WW 331–5). “The Mistaken” (1960), American Judaism, 10: 10–12. Most of this story takes the form of an unnamed son’s unsent letter to his widowed mother. Reacting to a TV news report on the gangland execution of his boyhood “best friend” Murray Miller (10), who became a notorious gangster, the narrator “explains” the significance for his own life of his relationship to the deceased (11). This explanation rests on a memory of how deranged he had felt on “that awful day” when the neighborhood grocer died and how, feeling “angrier than I had ever felt in my life,” he almost “drowned” Murray by shoving his face in the snow (11). Roth ends the story with an omniscient narrator counterpointing the thirty-year-old distress described in the letter with a scene depicting the domestic tranquility the letter-writer has committed himself to securing and protecting. “Novotny’s Pain” (1962), New Yorker, October 27: 46–56. Set in 1950, “Novotny’s Pain” recounts the brief military career of a put-upon Korean War-era conscript who suffers a diagnostically challenging back injury on KP during basic training. The plot alternates between hospital episodes, which result in Novotny being accused of malingering and being diagnosed as unfit for service, like other “crackpots …, bed-wetters, homos, petty thieves” (55), and his civilian life in Chicago as the dutiful, studious son of a widowed mother both before and after his service; as a devoted fiancé; and as a patriot who “believed in fighting for freedom” (46). In referring to Novotny’s family’s “foreign extraction” (46) and to their economic circumstances—and in effect to the plight of all Americans who “had not as yet grown fat off the fat of the land”—Roth raises questions about Novotny’s patriotic “belief” and about how “indebted” families like the Novotnys should feel to their homeland, especially when facing the prospect of leaving “some part of his body on the battlefield, or coming home … in a box” (48). Though set in the early 1950s, this story appeared in the New Yorker during the year following President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural exhortation to his “fellow Americans,” to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Though Roth enlisted in the Army too late for combat in Korea, “Novotny’s Pain” draws on Roth’s similar ordeal in basic training and at Walter Reed Army Hospital (Bailey 2021: 105, 110; Nadel 2021: 81–2). “Novotny’s Pain” was the first of several works by Roth featuring men who served in the Korean War era US Army, including My Life as Man (1974), The Ghost Writer (1979), and most notably Indignation. The diagnostic plotting in “Novotny’s Pain” also anticipates Roth’s midcareer turn to the medically inflected plots in such novels as The Anatomy

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Lesson (1983), The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, The Dying Animal (2001), Everyman, Exit Ghost, The Humbling (2009), and Nemesis (Jaffe 2021). “The Psychoanalytic Special” (1963), Esquire, November: 106–9, 172–6. This omniscient narration recounts the psychoanalysis and (mis)adventures of Ella Wittig. A thricemarried polyamorous suburban mother “who believed in marriage” (174), Ella routinely takes the train to Manhattan for her therapy and also “in search of deep pleasure and lasting passion” (106)—new “lovers” and briefer liaisons, “sleeping with nobodies” (175). Fed up with her treatment by a local “woman analyst” who presses “her to defend herself against the charge of promiscuity” (106), Ella begins therapy with a therapist whom, after three months of treatment, she can trust. Over the course of this promising new therapeutic relationship, Ella also conducts an affair, a relationship she expects to last, with “a redheaded Englishman,” “the most beautiful man, the most beautiful lover” (108). After he abandons her, Ella inconclusively continues her therapy and resumes her quest for pleasure and passion. This story’s therapeutic template builds on Libby Herz’s psychoanalytic storyline in Roth’s first novel, Letting Go (1962; Scheurer 2017), and anticipates the therapeutic episodes in My Life as a Man (1974) and the psychoanalytic framing of Portnoy’s Complaint as well as introducing to Roth’s readers Dr. Spielvogel, the therapist who treats both Ella and Alexander Portnoy, and later Peter Tarnopol. “An Actor’s Life for Me” (1964), Playboy, January: 84–6, 228–35. This omniscient narrative examines the troubled marriage and the thwarted artistic ambitions of two childless twenty-something New Yorkers whom Roth introduces as “not a perfectly happy couple” (86): failed playwright Walter Appel, who becomes a producer’s assistant, and his wife Juliet, an aspiring actress and Katherine Hepburn lookalike who leaves the theater to become a “girl Friday” at a nonprofit theater company (228). The plot of “An Actor’s Life for Me” turns on Walter’s adulteries, one with a secretary picked up in “a broken-down ski lodge” (228) bar during an agreed-upon break from his marriage and the other during a play-scouting trip to London, with a British actress Roth describes as the kind of woman Walter “had only fantasied behind locked doors in the delirium of puberty” (230) and whom the London press (as quoted in the story) referred to as a “tigress” (231). In anticipation of Marcus Messner’s hospitalization in Indignation, this affair abruptly ends with Walter being rushed to the hospital for an appendectomy. In a recurring scene that frames the story, Roth shows Walter upon his return to Manhattan, standing at the window of the study in his Upper West Side apartment and troubling himself about a naked man in the apartment across the street whom Walter suspects of exposing himself to Juliet. As Ira Nadel (2021) observes, Roth would go on to amplify this focus on a theatrical couple some forty years later in I Married a Communist (167). He would also reprise the surname Appel in The Anatomy Lesson by naming Nathan Zuckerman’s Irving Howe-like nemesis Milton Appel. The title phrase “an actor’s life for me” comes from a song in Walt Disney’s 1940 animated adaptation of Pinocchio. Also titled “Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee,” the song promised the newly humanized Pinocchio a life of ease, glamor, and fame as an actor and was sung by a con man, an anthropomorphized fox, intent on leading Pinocchio astray on his way to school. “On the Air” (1970), New American Review, 10: 7–49. In this story Roth combines omniscient narration with a manic monologue, often an obscenity-laden and slur-ridden rant, in recounting the feckless “talent scout” and ex-shoe salesman Milton Lippman’s campaign to sign Albert Einstein, “THE GENIUS OF ALL TIME” and “A JEW,” to host a radio quiz show and to join Lippman’s quixotic battle against “goyische crap” (9). Roth interspersed Lippman’s monologue with his fawning letters to “The Great Einstein” and with descriptions of Lippman’s work as an agent, representing “mostly … colored” performers (10). An omniscient narrator complements Lippman’s voice with an inventory of the great acts Lippman aspires to emulate, including Atlantic City’s famed Diving Horse, Adolph Hitler, Mussolini, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Roth threads this inventory and the “daring” and grandiose philosophical reflections that Lippman prided himself on (20) with an account (interrupted by a news flash about Hitler’s mustache and a quiz contest on funniness addressed to readers) of Lippman’s misadventures, at Howard Johnson’s and at Duffy’s Tavern, as he traverses New Jersey’s “real dumb” goyische hinterlands accompanied by his family en route to Einstein’s Princeton home (22). The focus on radio broadcasting in “On the Air”

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anticipates the central role of radio voices in Roth’s late novels The Plot against America and I Married a Communist. Though Roth “could never bring himself to reread, much less reprint” “On the Air” (Bailey 2021: 335), the story’s murdered police chief—Lippman’s tormenter—voices a fervent defense of fiction reminiscent of Roth’s often exasperated apologias for his own aesthetic. Lamenting his spectators’ inability to respond to a “genuine work of art” and explaining such concepts as ambiguity, impersonation, and irony, the Chief asks whether he “should be punished” for the “narrow literalism” of his audience (41). “His Mistress’s Voice” (1986), Partisan Review, 53: 155–76. In this sentence-fragment suffused monologue, published during the same year in which Nathan Zuckerman, in The Counterlife, extolled the “jumpy beat of American English” (54), the mistress of a ruthless, relentless, charismatic, “insidious and craven” district attorney (163), shifts mercurially between pleas for consideration and affirmations of her own will (as a hedonist, as an intellectual, as an omnivorous reader of telegrams, letters, “prefaces,” the novels of Thomas Hardy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Harper’s and Vogue) (169–75) and between reminiscences about her “upbringing” (161) and reflections on race and the criminal justice system. After spending twenty-two pages contemplating how she might change her life, this unnamed narrator bids her D.A. lover adieu. Promising to “disappear like a submarine,” she gratefully acknowledges that “the discomfort” he inflicted “has been fruitful” (175–6). Anticipating epiphanies and tirades during the next decade, by Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath’s Theater, by Nathan Zuckerman in American Pastoral and The Human Stain (2000), and by Murray Ringold in I Married a Communist, Roth’s narrator denounces “purists who put things on a higher plane” as “the great inhibitors” (174).

References Bailey, Blake (2021), Philip Roth: The Biography, New York: Norton. Jaffe, Miriam (2021), “Narrative Medicine,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 194–202, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambert, Josh (2008), “Hack Job,” Tablet, September 12. Available online: https://www.tabletmag. com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hack-job (accessed June 22, 2022). Nadel, Ira (2021), Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roth, Philip (1986), The Counterlife, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1994), Portnoy’s Complaint, New York: Random House/Vintage. Roth, Philip (1996), Sabbath’s Theater, New York: Random House/Vintage. Roth, Philip (1998), American Pastoral, New York: Random House/Vintage. Roth, Philip (2017), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction, 1960–2013, New York: Library of America. Royal, Derek Parker (2006), “The Blood before the Stain: An Interview with Joel Rapp,” Philip Roth Studies, 2 (1): 3–11. Scheurer, Maren (2017), “A Psychopathology of Everyday Women: Psychoanalytic Aesthetics and Gender Politics in Letting Go and ‘The Psychoanalytic Special,’” Philip Roth Studies, 13 (1): 13–28.

APPENDIX THREE

A Guide to Film and Television Adaptations of Roth’s Fiction DEBRA SHOSTAK

The guide includes selected critical and journalistic pieces offering comparative overviews of the adaptations of Roth’s fiction; basic information about each filmic or televisual adaptation to date; a brief synopsis of each adaptation; and a selected list of criticism and/or reviews for each, where available.

A. Roth in Adaptation: Selected Comparative Criticism and Reviews Bloom, James D. (2012), “Philip Roth’s Lover’s Quarrel,” in Aimee Pozorski (ed.), Roth and Celebrity, 29–45, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Chandler, Adam (2014), “Stop Making Film Adaptations of Philip Roth Novels,” The Atlantic, June 18. Available online: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2014/06/stop-making-filmadaptations-of-philip-roth-novels/373032/ (accessed June 14, 2022). Nadel, Ira (2012), “Philip Roth and Film,” in Aimee Pozorski (ed.), Roth and Celebrity, 47–65, Lanham, MD: Lexington. O’Donoghue, Gerard (2021), “Roth in Adaptation,” in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context, 347–59, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Robson, Leo (2016), “Philip Roth versus the Movies,” The New Yorker, August 1. Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/philip-roth-versus-the-movies (accessed June 14, 2022). Rowin, Michael Joshua (2016), “The Triumphs and Follies of Adapting Philip Roth (A History),” Brooklyn Magazine, October 25. Available online: https://www.bkmag.com/2016/10/25/adaptingphilip-roth/ (accessed June 15, 2022).

B. List of Adaptations with Selected Criticism and Reviews Film and television adaptations are listed in chronological order of their release date. 1. Film adaptation: The Battle of Blood Island (The Filmgroup, 1960), 71 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (1958), “Expect the Vandals,” Esquire, December 1: 208–28. Director: Joel M. Rapp Screenplay: Joel M. Rapp Performers: Richard Devon, Ron Kennedy, Roger Corman (uncredited) The Battle of Blood Island turns into an action film Roth’s early short story focused on the tensions that exist for two soldiers who, having survived an American landing on an island held by the Japanese during the Second World War, await rescue. Selected criticism: Royal, Derek Parker (2006), “The Blood Before the Stain: An Interview with Joel Rapp,” Philip Roth Studies, 2 (1): 3–11.

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2. Television adaptation: The Contest for Aaron Gold (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 6, Episode 4, 1955), 25 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (1955), “The Contest for Aaron Gold,” Epoch, 5–6: 37–51. Director: Normal Lloyd Teleplay: William Fay Performers: Barry Gordon, Frank Maxwell, Sydney Pollack Hitchcock’s production follows the outlines of Roth’s short story about a ceramics instructor at a summer camp but erases the story’s Holocaust allusions and thematic focus on artistic courage and sincerity. Roth’s protagonist, an Austrian Jewish refugee, is transformed into an American, and the central student character’s crucial aesthetic decision hinges on psychological determinism and not, as in Roth’s story, artistic integrity. Selected criticism: Lambert, Josh (2008), “Hack Job: The Surgical Steps Alfred Hitchcock Presents Took to Adapt Philip Roth for Television,” Tablet Magazine, September 12. Available online: https://www.tabletmag. com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hack-job (accessed June 14, 2022). 3. Film adaptation: Goodbye, Columbus (Paramount, 1969), 101 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (1959), “Goodbye, Columbus,” in Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, 3–136, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Director: Larry Peerce Screenplay: Arnold Schulman Performers: Richard Benjamin, Ali McGraw, Jack Klugman Peerce’s Goodbye, Columbus is a relatively straightforward adaptation, including many of the novella’s scenes and dialogue. Deploying 1970s Hollywood filmmaking conventions, the adaptation’s visual realization of the young couple’s sexual desires as well as mid-twentieth-century suburban Jewish American striving and consumption exaggerates Roth’s satire. Selected criticism and reviews: Fishman, Sylvia Barack (1998), “Contemporary Jewish Feminists as Image Makers: Our Mothers and Our Sisters and Our Cousins and Our Aunts,” in Joyce Antler (ed.), Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture, 151–70, Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. Levinson, Julian (2020), “Using Film to Teach ‘Goodbye, Columbus,’” in Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubenstein (ed.), Teaching Jewish American Literature, 324–7, New York: Modern Language Association of America. Lewis, Cherie S. (1989), “Philip Roth on the Screen,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 8 (2): 205–11. Zollman, Joellyn Wallen (2011), “Of Lox and Columbus: Jewish and American Themes in Goodbye, Columbus,” in Lawrence Baron (ed.), The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema, 288–94, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. 4. Film adaptation: Portnoy’s Complaint (Warner Brothers, 1972), 101 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (1969), Portnoy’s Complaint, New York: Random House. Director: Ernest Lehman Screenplay: Ernest Lehman Performers: Richard Benjamin, Karen Black, Lee Grant, Jill Clayburgh Lehman’s literalization of Alex Portnoy’s verbal excesses, hyperbolic imagination, and high-pitched outcries of self-pity and recrimination, enacted within both the film’s dialogue and mise-en-scène, assault the viewer with unnuanced stereotype. The film turns the novel’s transgressive comedy into distasteful shtick that deprives the viewer of any sympathy for the protagonist that Roth’s writing may elicit. Selected criticism and reviews: Lewis, Cherie S. (1989), “Philip Roth on the Screen,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 8 (2): 205–11.

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Rabin, Nathan (2012), “Portnoy’s Complaint,” AV Club, September 5. Available online: https://www. avclub.com/portnoy-s-complaint-1798174069 (accessed June 15, 2022). Ziewacz, Lawrence (2011), “Holden Caulfield, Alex Portnoy, and Good Will Hunting: Coming of Age in American Films and Novels,” Journal of Popular Culture, 35 (1): 211–18. 5. Television adaptation: The Ghost Writer (American Playhouse, Season 3, Episode 1, January 17, 1983), 78 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (1979), The Ghost Writer, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Director: Tristram Powell Screenplay: Philip Roth and Tristram Powell Performers: Mark Linn Baker, Sam Wanamaker, Claire Bloom, Paulette Smit Aided by Roth’s contributions to the teleplay, The Ghost Writer aptly translates the novel to reproduce its triangle of tensions between Lonoff and his wife Hope, Lonoff and the young Amy Bellette, and Zuckerman and his twin desires for both Lonoff’s approval and Amy. It does, however, also turn Zuckerman’s fantasy of Amy as Anne Frank into a fact, diminishing the novel’s reflexivity and uncertainties. Selected criticism and reviews: N/A 6. Film adaptation: The Human Stain (Miramax, 2003), 106 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (2000), The Human Stain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Director: Robert Benton Screenplay: Nicholas Meyer Performers: Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris Benton’s Human Stain, while filmed with visual sensitivity, has been criticized as miscast in presenting Hopkins as Coleman Silk and Kidman as Faunia Farley. The adaptation dilutes the mystery and the combined tragedy and cynical comedy of Coleman’s racial passing into a melodrama focusing more on his midlife love affair with Faunia than on the novel’s urgent questions about the relationship between the American promise of free self-invention and the traps of history and ideology. Selected criticism and reviews: Castle, Robert (2006), “Unadaptable: A Fatal Problem with The Human Stain,” Bright Lights Film Journal, February 1. Available online: https://brightlightsfilm.com/unadaptable-fatal-problemhuman-stain/#.YqjQkJDMJDc (accessed June 14, 2022). Lane, Anthony (2003), “Deceived,” The New Yorker, November 3. Available online: https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2003/11/03/deceived (accessed June 14, 2022). Kauffman, Stanley (2003), “The Same, Only Different,” The New Republic, November 24: 24–5. Kermode, Mark (2004), “An Honourable Failure,” New Statesman, January 26: 46. Scott, A. O. (2003), “Secrets of the Skin, and of the Heart,” New York Times, October 31: E1, 13. 7. Film adaptation: Elegy (Lakeshore, 2008), 112 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (2001), The Dying Animal, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Director: Isabel Coixet Screenplay: Nicholas Meyer Performers: Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Dennis Hopper As the revised title suggests, Coixet and Meyer rework Roth’s meditation in The Dying Animal on aging, needy male sexual desire, marked by the calculated emotional detachment and self-protection David Kepesh summons as an arrogant public intellectual. Elegy is instead a beautifully filmed, bittersweet, melancholic, deeply felt tale of an alienated man’s reconciliation to love, sympathy, and mortality. Selected criticism and reviews: Boozer, Jack (2017), “The Intratextuality of Film Adaptation: From The Dying Animal to Elegy,” in Thomas Leitch (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, 197–213, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Frediani, Federica (2017), “Unsound Elegy: Breast Cancer in The Dying Animal by Philip Roth and Elegy by Isabel Coixet,” in Stephanie M. Hilger (ed.), New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies, 253–65, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Garcia, Maria (2008), “Requiem for a Professor … of Desire: Isabel Coixet Adapts Philip Roth’s Dying Animal,” Film Journal International, 111 (8): 18–19. Gordon, Andrew M. (2017), “Philip Roth’s Novel The Dying Animal and Isabel Coixet’s Film Adaptation Elegy,” Philip Roth Studies, 13 (2): 63–9. Rowin, Michael Joshua (2008), “The Dying Art,” Reverse Shot, August 8. Available online: http:// reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/583/elegy (accessed June 14, 2022). Shostak, Debra (2014), “Lateness, Timeliness, and Elegy: Philip Roth’s Dying Animal on Film,” Genre, 47 (1): 79–102. 8. Film adaptation: The Humbling (Millennium, 2014), 107 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (2009), The Humbling, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Director: Barry Levinson Screenplay: Buck Henry and Michal Zebede Performers: Al Pacino, Greta Gerwig The Humbling rewrites Roth’s austere short novel from the Nemeses Tetralogy in tone and adds several distinctive episodes to Roth’s narrative. The filmmakers transform the tale of aging, artistic failure, and male sexual humiliation into a dark, reflexive, farcical take on male narcissism and the interpenetration of art and life. Selected criticism and reviews: Holden, Stephen (2015), “Raging against the Dying of the Stage Lights,” New York Times, January 22. Available online: http://nyti.ms/1Ey9ZzG (accessed June 14, 2022). Horowitz, Simi (2015), “The Humbling,” Film Journal International, January 22. Available online: http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/reviews/specialty-releases/ e3i7c11e3d6f7fa41171fdc8d978e0b7f81 (accessed June 14, 2022). Lane, Anthony (2015), “Adventures in Rothland,” The New Yorker, February 2. Available online: https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/adventures-rothland (accessed June 14, 2022). Shostak, Debra (2021), “Representing ‘Roth,’” Revue Française d’Études Américaines, 16: 75–91. 9. Film adaptation: Listen Up, Philip (Tribeca and Faliro, 2014), 109 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (1979), The Ghost Writer, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Director: Alex Ross Perry Screenplay: Alex Ross Perry Performers: Jason Schwartzman, Elizabeth Moss, Jonathan Pryce, Krysten Ritter Using The Ghost Writer as an ur-text, but not beholden to the source novel’s plotting, Perry transforms the surrogate-father relationship between Roth’s Zuckerman and Lonoff into an acerbic satire of narcissistic, emotionally self-destructive male novelists who, deluded that they are free and selfsufficient, sacrifice human connection to ambition. Selected criticism and reviews: Bérenger, Tanguy (2017), “‘A Woman’s Point of View’: Dialogue and Perspective in Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip,” Philip Roth Studies, 13 (2): 39–50. Brody, Richard (2014), “The Rothiest Movie at Sundance,” The New Yorker, January 27. Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-rothiest-movie-at-sundance (accessed June 14, 2022). Shostak, Debra (2021), “Representing ‘Roth,’” Revue Française d’Études Américaines, 16: 75–91. 10. Film adaptation: American Pastoral (Lionsgate, 2016), 108 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (1997), American Pastoral, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Director: Ewan McGregor Screenplay: John Romano Performers: Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, David Strathairn

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American Pastoral effectively renders the look of the 1960s in Swede Levov’s Newark and rural worlds. The adaptation, however, erases Roth’s central inquiry into the Swede’s unfathomable motivations and fiercely guarded innocence, turning an epistemological and historically grounded ethical quest into a sentimental melodrama about a heroic but thwarted family man. Selected criticism and reviews: Barker, Andrew (2016), “‘Pastoral’ Proves a Tough Mix for Rookie Director,” Variety, September 11: 1, 14. Horwitz, Simi (2016), “American Pastoral,” Film Journal International, 119 (11): 132–3. 11. Film adaptation: Indignation (Summit, 2016), 111 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (2008), Indignation, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Director: James Schamus Screenplay: James Schamus Performers: Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, Tracy Letts, Linda Emond, Danny Burstein Schamus’s sensitively filmed, poignantly acted, respectful adaptation mutes the indignation about error, contingency, and the oppressiveness of social convention suffusing Roth’s Indignation. The film shifts attention from the uncanny narration that puts Marcus Messner solely in the novel’s center toward a narrower, sentimental, but more evenly balanced representation of Marcus and Olivia Hutton’s romantic and sexual liaison. Selected criticism and reviews: Brody, Richard (2016), “A Sterilized Philip Roth Adaptation,” The New Yorker, August 2. Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/a-sterilized-philip-roth-adaptation (accessed June 14, 2022). Feeney, F. X. (2016), “College Kid: James Schamus Is Still Learning after All These Years as a Class Act,” Written By, 20 (5): 35–41. Gooblar, David (2017), “‘There Is Some Shit I Will Not Eat’: Indignation in Indignation and Its Film Adaptation,” Philip Roth Studies, 13 (2): 51–62. Molesworth, Charles (2016), “Philip Roth’s Indignation Lost in Adaptation,” The Smart Set, September 14. Available online: http://thesmartset.com/philip-roths-indignation/ (accessed June 14, 2022). West, Dennis and Joan M. West (2016), “Portraying 1950s America on Film: An Interview with James Schamus,” Cineaste, 41 (4): 14–19. 12. Film adaptation: The Prague Orgy [Pražské orgie] (Prague Movie Company, Czech Republic, 2019), 102 minutes, in Czech and English Source text: Philip Roth (1985), The Prague Orgy, in Philip Roth, Zuckerman Bound, 699–784, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Director: Irena Pavlásková Screenplay: Pavla Subartova Performers: Jonas Chernick, Jirí Havelka, Pavel Kríz, Kseniya Rappoport, Klára Issová The Prague Orgy effectively uses the cinematic camera’s intrinsic capacity for surveillance and voyeurism to convey Roth’s vision of Nathan Zuckerman’s threatening stay within Prague’s surveillance state under Communism and his disorienting encounter with the culture of artists grown cynical about political change. Selected criticism and reviews: N/A 13. Television adaptation: The Plot against America (HBO 6-part series, 2020), 366 minutes Source text: Philip Roth (2004), The Plot against America, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Directors: Thomas Schlamme, Minkie Spire Creators: Ed Burns and David Simon Performers: Zoe Kazan, Morgan Spector, Anthony Boyle, Winona Ryder, John Turturro, Azhy Robertson, Caleb Malis

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The six-hour running time of the series allows Burns and Simon to render an emotionally and ideologically nuanced, vibrantly cinematic adaptation of The Plot against America that immerses the viewer in the period and conveys Roth’s dire warnings about nationalism, demagoguery, violence, and antisemitism threatening modern America. The well-acted series shifts the story’s perspective from Roth’s singular focus on young Philip to share the narrative interest and viewpoint equally among the members of his family. Selected reviews: D’Addario, Daniel (2020), “The Plot against America,” Variety, March 5, 71–2. Dessem, Matthew (2020), “The Plot against America’s Showrunners on Why They Changed the Ending,” Slate, April 20. Available online: https://slate.com/culture/2020/04/the-plot-againstamerica-finale-david-simon-ed-burns-interview.html (accessed June 14, 2022). James, Nick (2020), “The Plot against America,” Sight & Sound, 30 (8): 79. 14. Film adaptation: Deception [Tromperie] (Why Not Productions, France, 2021), 105 minutes, in French Source text: Philip Roth (1990), Deception, New York: Simon and Schuster. Director: Arnaud Desplechin Screenplay: Arnaud Desplechin, Julie Peyr Performers: Denis Podalydès, Léa Seydoux, Emmanuelle Devos, Anouk Grinberg The film was not available for screening in the United States at this writing, nor were criticism or substantive reviews.

Index

Abe, Kōbō 375 Aging 7, 81, 83–4, 88, 106, 117, 121, 123, 154, 160, 241, 249, 269–72, 318, 321, 343, 393, 394 Alberti, Rafael 361 Ames, Jonathan 376 Anderson, Sherwood 370 Antisemitism 28–9, 33, 37, 40, 58, 102, 107, 158–9, 173–4, 185, 204–5, 207, 209–11, 234, 282, 307, 309, 323, 396 Appelfeld, Aharon 62, 206–8 Arendt, Hannah 159, 165, 167, 192, 297–9 Atlas, James 349, 355 Auslander, Shalom 255, 291 Auster, Paul 313 Avedon, Richard 349 Avishai, Bernard 353 Bailey, Blake 8, 37, 62, 101, 142, 153, 282–4, 287, 296, 306–9, 312, 332, 354–5, 364, 366, 384, 386, 387, 388, 390 Baldwin, James 187, 376 Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) 119, 123 Beethoven, Ludwig van 82, 88 Bellow, Saul 12, 29, 60–4, 143, 261, 291, 306, 313 Bennett, Brit 182, 184, 224 Benton, Robert 319, 393 Bernstein, Leonard 83, 349 Bezmozgis, David 314 Biography 2, 8, 9, 20, 36–7, 63–4, 68–9, 75, 86, 88, 101, 113, 142, 153–4, 162, 208, 282–4, 287–8, 294, 296, 307, 330, 332, 347–55, 383, 384, 385 Bloom, Claire 2, 38, 63, 242, 307, 310, 354, 376, 393 Borges, Luis 73 Borowski, Tadeusz 68, 310 Brâncuși, Constantin 119, 123 Breton, André 333 Brodkey, Harold 348 Broyard, Anatole 184, 243–6 Buell, Laurence 216, 218, 220 Burns, Ed 273, 322–3, 395 Bush, George W. 44, 147 Butler, Judith 42, 44, 295

Caldwell, Erskine 370 Camus, Albert 73, 297, 329, 375–6 Capote, Truman 348, 386 Carter, Angela 73 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 375, 378 Chabon, Michael 291 Chekhov, Anton 7, 48, 376 Coetzee, J.M. 246 Cohen, Joshua 291–2 Coixet, Isabel 318, 393 Cold War 72–4, 208 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle 375 Conrad, Joseph 73, 267 Crane, Stephen 130 Death 2, 3, 7, 8, 37, 50, 58, 63, 65, 87, 89, 93, 94, 98, 102, 105, 113–14, 120–1, 122, 132, 162, 175, 188–9, 197, 208, 219, 221–3, 239–42, 244, 245, 254, 260, 262, 265, 269–70, 273, 282, 286–8, 293, 295, 314, 323, 329, 333, 348, 350, 355, 366, 373 DeLillo, Don 292, 375 Democracy 5, 6, 157–61, 163–4, 166, 167, 281, 322, 381 Diaspora 5–6, 105, 201, 205–8, 210, 292, 294–5, 298–9 Disability 2, 7, 269–77 Dos Passos, John 73, 312, 370, 375 Dreiser, Theodore 370 Du Bois, W.E.B. 251 Duchamp, Marcel 333 Dylan, Bob 132, 351 Ellison, Ralph Waldo 166, 189, 282, 376 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 130, 216, 283, 287–8 Empson, William 216 Erdrich, Louise 376 Faulkner, William 11, 312, 352 Flaubert, Gustave 82, 246, 305, 310, 378 Foucault, Michel 250, 325 Francoism 360–3, 366 Frank, Anne 122, 128, 159, 192–3, 203–4, 209, 246, 295–6, 303, 311, 314, 318, 320, 337

398 INDEX

Freud, Sigmund 120, 165, 252, 255, 349 Fuentes, Carlos 73 Gauguin, Paul 114–17, 119, 164, 172, 372 Gender 6, 7, 9, 50, 105, 150, 230, 249, 252–3, 266, 270, 274–5, 307, 338, 341, 351, 379, 380, 382 Genet, Jean 297 Gogol, Nikolai 138 Gombrowicz, Witold 76, 310 Grant, Linda 255 Guston, Philip 62–3, 113, 122 Halliday, Lisa 8, 240, 291–2, 296–9, 349 Hardy, Thomas 347, 390 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 62, 154, 281–2, 285, 288 Heine, Heinrich 246 Hemingway, Ernest 106, 243, 312, 352, 370, 375 Hernández, Miguel 361 Hesse, Hermann 87 Hitchcock, Alfred 319, 387, 392 Hobhouse, Janet 246, 350 Holocaust (see also, Shoah) 5, 6, 28–9, 40, 125–6, 127, 131–3, 189, 191–8, 202–7, 251, 255, 291–2, 294–9, 303–5, 309–11, 319, 392 Israel 15, 18, 39, 62, 105, 126, 149, 172, 201, 205–6, 230, 232–3, 237, 293–6, 307–8, 310, 314 Jacobson, Howard 255 James, Henry 7, 82, 129, 135, 283, 305, 347 Janáček, Leoš 297–8 Jewishness (see also, Judaism) 4, 6–7, 15, 26–7, 29, 31–3, 61, 93, 102, 122, 161, 169, 171, 175, 203, 205, 207, 231, 234–5, 237, 247, 249, 251–3, 255, 256, 295, 313, 319, 365 Johnson, Denis 376 Johnson, James Weldon 188 Joyce, James 126, 329, 347, 392 Judaism (see also, Jewishness) 5, 125–33, 161, 207, 252–3, 380, 388 Kafka, Franz 58, 60, 63–4, 73, 122, 139, 245, 247, 294–6, 299, 309–11, 329, 359, 375–6 Kauffman, Charlie 255 Keats, John 387 Kierkegaard, Søren 5, 73, 92, 265 Kitaj, R.B. 113, 122, 201, 206, 210 Klíma, Ivan 62, 71, 76, 309, 359 Klímová, Rita 71 Kominsky-Crumb, Aline 255 Korean War 148, 202, 208, 287, 388 Kott, Jan 73 Krauss, Nicole 8, 291–6, 299, 314

Kristeva, Julia 141, 254 Kundera, Milan 62, 68, 73–4, 76, 91, 99, 310, 359, 375 Lachaise, Gaston 119, 123 Lardner, Ring 370 Larsen, Nella 182, 189 Lee, Hermione 15, 30, 36, 43, 59, 71, 109, 249, 344, 350, 353–4, 384 Lehman, Ernest 324, 392 Lelchuk, Alan 59, 61–2, 349–50 Lethem, Jonathan 291–2, 384 Levi, Primo viii, 62, 64, 297–8, 307–9, 311 Levinson, Barry 318, 320, 392, 394 Lewis, Sinclair 370 Lloyd, Norman 325, 392 London 2, 5, 11, 15, 62–3, 205, 207, 210, 233–4, 307, 310–11, 389 Lorca, Federico Garcia 361 Maillol, Aristide 119, 123 Malamud, Bernard 60–3, 291, 293, 306 Malcolm, Janet 353 Mann, Thomas 60, 241, 294–5 Mantegna, Andrea 119 Marriage 30, 37, 75, 93, 121, 123, 130, 154, 162, 167, 189, 242, 259, 264, 275, 293, 352, 388–9 Martinson, Maggie 2, 307, 354, 376 Maslow, Jonathan 376 McCarthyism 47, 148, 153, 174, 202, 208, 386 McCarthy, Mary 62–3 McGregor, Ewan 319, 394 Melville, Herman 246, 283 Miller, Arthur 76 Miller, Henry 376 Miller, Ross 75, 240, 242, 325, 348, 354 Mishima, Yukio 375 Misogyny 8, 64, 108, 282–4, 379 Modigliani, Amedeo 119–22, 387 Montaigne, Michel de 94 Morrison, Toni 338, 376 Morton, Timothy 220 Nadel, Ira 7, 37, 69, 76, 81, 82, 89, 101, 241–2, 247, 288, 293–4, 306–8, 332, 351–2, 355, 384, 386, 387, 388, 388, 391 Narrative 5–7, 16–23, 41–2, 74–5, 81–5, 106–8, 117–20, 163–6, 182–4, 253–4, 270–7, 282–3, 296–9, 317–22, 330–1, 340–1, 380, 381, 382, 389, 394, 396 Newark 1–3, 8, 11, 15, 25, 27, 31, 33, 49, 65, 82, 85–6, 101, 106–7, 116, 127–9, 131, 136, 143, 150, 170–1, 173–5, 178, 187, 196–7, 202–3, 210, 217, 219, 231, 233–5, 267, 295–6, 305, 313, 369–78, 381, 384, 395

INDEX 399

Newark Public Library 3, 9, 61, 103, 114, 170–1, 281, 288, 332–3, 369–78 Nixon, Richard 107, 147–9 O’Brien, Edna 62, 348, 384 Orwell, George 74, 246 Ozick, Cynthia 292 Paris Review, The 15, 59, 76, 92, 307 Pavlásková, Irina 321, 395 Peerce, Larry 321–2, 392 Perry, Alex Ross 318, 323, 394 Philip Roth Personal Library xv, 3, 8–9, 288, 332–3, 369–78 Picasso, Pablo 117–19, 333 Pierpont, Claudia Roth 32, 74, 76, 113, 122, 294, 306–7, 310, 384 Plato 5, 92, 158, 166 Poncela, Enrique Jardiel 362–3 Powell, Tristram 320, 393 Prague 2, 11, 15, 62–3, 71–6, 148, 204, 211, 247, 294, 296, 303, 307–11, 320–1, 364, 366, 395 Preece, Patricia 121, 123 Proust, Marcel 73, 244, 378 Pynchon, Thomas 292 Race 2, 6, 7, 114, 116, 139, 148, 150, 151, 164, 166, 170, 182–5, 187, 189, 192, 227–34, 236, 237, 249, 251, 282, 288, 312–13, 338, 379, 380, 382, 384, 390 Remnick, David 138, 246, 335, 350 Rich, Adrienne 265 Rilke, Rainer Maria 352 Rome 266, 307, 310 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 40, 150, 177, 230, 322, 389 Rorty, Richard 160 Roth, Philip (Works) American Pastoral xvii–viii, 7, 18, 21, 22, 23, 47, 53, 54, 75, 76, 81, 82, 84, 85–6, 88, 96, 98, 103, 104, 107, 123, 148, 150, 151, 159, 160, 161, 165, 167, 173, 177, 178, 208–9, 216, 219, 240, 244, 246, 260, 313, 317, 319, 321, 323–4, 341, 342, 343, 347, 371, 375, 376, 377, 380, 382, 384, 387, 390, 394–5 The Anatomy Lesson xvii–viii, 11, 18, 21–2, 96, 203–4, 239–46, 269, 343, 388–9 The Breast xvii–viii, 9, 11, 19–21, 23, 59, 62, 81–3, 107, 113, 117–18, 122, 138–9, 240, 244, 249, 264, 348, 352, 359–66 The Counterlife xvii–xviii, 11, 18, 22, 25, 62, 70–1, 75–6, 85, 94, 97, 126, 132, 159–60, 163, 170, 192–5, 201–2, 205–8, 210, 227–8, 231–5, 239–40, 292–4, 296, 298, 307–8, 310, 351–2, 379, 387–9, 390

Deception xvii–xviii, 11, 15, 17, 36, 38–9, 41, 44, 88, 108, 210, 240, 244, 297, 313, 325, 396 The Dying Animal xvii–xviii, 5, 8, 11, 20, 23, 81, 82, 83, 94, 113, 117–18, 121, 141, 142, 143, 209, 239, 240, 244, 264, 269, 282, 285, 286, 317, 318, 319, 343, 389, 393–4 Everyman xvii–xviii, 11, 93–5, 239–42, 245, 247, 269–72, 277, 286, 377, 387, 389 Exit Ghost xvii–xviii, 11, 68, 81–2, 85, 87–9, 147, 151, 209, 239, 244, 246, 269–70, 272, 277, 282, 286–8, 343, 348, 352, 386, 389 The Facts xvii–xviii, 11, 35–44, 57–8, 68, 102, 104, 126, 169, 177–8, 202, 207, 210, 239, 282 The Ghost Writer xvii–xviii, 3, 11, 20, 6, 70–1, 122, 128, 158–9, 162–3, 192–3, 201–4, 208–9, 211, 291, 295–6, 303, 311, 317–18, 320, 323, 337, 352, 376, 383, 388, 393–4 Goodbye, Columbus xvii–xviii, 3, 4, 5, 11, 15, 25–33, 37, 68, 70, 71, 76, 125–6, 135, 136, 161, 192, 193, 194, 306, 317, 321, 322, 323, 344, 370, 372, 375, 376, 386, 387, 392 The Great American Novel xvii–xviii, 5, 8, 11, 59, 61, 106–9, 313, 327, 329, 352, 387 The Human Stain xvii–xviii, 6, 8, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 48, 54, 57, 71, 81, 82, 84–5, 88, 93, 95, 103, 104, 113, 140, 148, 151, 153, 157, 159, 160, 165, 167, 173, 175–7, 181–9, 208, 209–10, 243, 244, 262, 281, 282, 283, 312, 317, 319, 320, 324, 345, 348, 350, 375, 380, 384, 390, 393 The Humbling xvii–xviii, 12, 48, 82, 242, 244, 266–8, 269, 286, 317–18, 320, 324, 389, 394 I Married a Communist xvii–xviii, 11, 16, 48, 83–4, 103–4, 107, 148–9, 151, 154, 170–1, 173–5, 208–9, 244, 376, 380, 386, 388–90 Letting Go xvii–xviii, 11, 18, 69, 81, 89, 130, 136–8, 260, 389 My Life as a Man xvii–xviii, 11, 19, 58–9, 68, 82, 108, 201, 282, 292, 341, 388–9 Nemesis xvii–xviii, 3, 5, 12, 15, 27–8, 33, 104–5, 125–33, 147, 191–3, 196–7, 209–10, 240, 244, 249, 270, 272, 274–7, 286, 317, 373, 375, 387, 389 Operation Shylock xvii–xviii, 3, 11, 18, 36–7, 39–41, 43, 70, 85, 94, 113, 126, 149, 159, 163, 192–3, 201–2, 206–8, 210, 242, 244, 251, 268, 270, 293–4, 308, 310, 387, 389 Our Gang xvii–xviii, 11, 23, 59, 107–9, 147–9, 352, 366 Patrimony xvii–xviii, 11, 36, 38–9, 57–8, 102, 128, 169, 241, 244, 269, 331, 348

400 INDEX

The Plot Against America xvii–xviii, 3, 11, 36, 40, 44, 64, 74, 113, 128, 147–8, 150, 158, 160–1, 187, 191–3, 195–6, 210, 230–1, 244, 246, 270, 272–7, 286, 306, 308, 317, 321–4, 371, 373, 375, 386, 390, 395–6 Portnoy’s Complaint vii, xv–xvi, xvii–xviii, 3, 7, 9, 11, 19, 37, 43, 48, 53, 59, 61, 81–2, 84, 104–5, 107–8, 117, 127, 140, 149, 158–9, 170, 172–3, 202, 249, 252–6, 266, 282, 303, 305, 307–8, 310–11, 313, 317, 324, 338–9, 341, 343, 348, 352–3, 360–6, 387, 389, 392–3 The Prague Orgy xvii–xviii, 11, 48, 72, 74, 148, 154, 192, 204–5, 307, 310, 317, 320, 359, 395 The Professor of Desire xvii–xviii, 9, 11, 23, 72, 82–3, 102–3, 105, 117, 137–9, 259, 265, 294, 303, 306, 310–11, 359–66 Reading Myself and Others xvii–xviii, 4, 11, 27–30, 32, 48, 57–64, 66, 92, 102, 107, 125–27, 136, 138–40, 149, 152, 166, 170, 203, 208, 260–1, 294–5, 324, 350 Sabbath’s Theater xviii, 3, 5, 7, 11, 18–19, 21–2, 48, 57, 65, 74, 95–8, 113, 128–9, 142–3, 152, 216, 220–4, 244, 260, 266–8, 269, 282, 310, 317, 341–2, 348, 384, 387, 390 Shop Talk xviii, 4, 8, 11, 57–8, 62–4, 113, 122, 159, 167, 359 When She Was Good xviii, 11, 82, 130, 260 Why Write? Collected Nonfiction xviii, 4, 15–21, 28, 57–8, 63–5, 67, 70, 72, 128, 203, 207, 211, 240, 308–9, 344 Zuckerman Unbound xviii, 11, 18, 294 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 246 Safran Foer, Jonathan 255, 291, 314 Said, Edward 87–9 Sartre, Jean-Paul 202, 207, 312, 329 Schamus, James 320, 323, 395 Schiele, Egon 119 Schulz, Bruno 62, 68, 73–4, 204, 293–4, 309–10, 321, 375 Second World War 2–3, 26, 47, 84–5, 105–6, 129, 208, 229, 231, 235, 251, 375, 382, 387, 391 Shakespeare, William 7, 223, 244, 375 Shoah (see also, Holocaust) 62, 64, 128–9, 131, 133, 193, 291

Shteyngart, Gary 255, 291 Silverman, Burton 122 Simon, David 273, 322–3, 395–6 Sinatra, Frank 81, 84, 322, 387 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 62, 291, 293, 309 Smith, Zadie 291–2, 373 Socrates 91–2, 95 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 74 Spencer, Stanley 120–3 Spinoza, Baruch 203 Springsteen, Bruce 82, 351 Stein, Gertrude 333 Steinbeck, John 312, 370 Strauss, Richard 81, 85, 87–9 Styron, William 76, 372, 376 Taylor, Benjamin 150, 152, 154, 242–7, 348, 352–4, 385 Tolstoy, Leo 85, 240, 375–6 Trauma 3, 6, 127, 131, 141, 181, 184, 189, 198, 201, 203–4, 206–11, 216, 275, 282, 292, 303, 306–7, 311, 324, 339, 343, 380–2 Twain, Mark 128, 135, 352 Updike, John 73, 76, 355 Vaculik, Ludvik 71–3 Velázquez, Diego 119 Vietnam War 148, 161, 173, 176, 202, 208, 210, 324, 375 Wagman, Frederica 61, 376 Wallace, David Foster 11, 291, 292 Watergate 202 Weequahic 2, 81, 101–5, 127, 129, 131–2, 191, 196, 209, 274, 306, 370, 372 Wharton, Edith 246 Whitman, Walt 135, 166, 252, 253, 352 Wiesel, Elie 131, 197 Williams, William Carlos 375 Woolf, Virginia 35–6, 43, 351, 376 Writers From the Other Europe Series 2, 4, 11, 63, 68, 71–5, 76, 294, 303, 306–9 Yeats, William Butler 122, 123, 267 Zipperstein, Steven 288, 354

401

402

403

404

405

406