His real subject was not Jewishness, or New Jersey, but the human condition
IF THERE is one detail of Philip Roth’s biography that is worth knowing, it is not that he was Jewish or that he had no children or that he was born in New Jersey—it is that he preferred to write standing up at a lectern. There are pages of his work where the irrepressible vitality of his writing seems to glow on the page as if charged with some kind of existential incandescence—the great and persistent question of his novels being no less and no more than: what the hell do human beings think they are doing here on Earth?
Mr Roth died on May 22nd. His work will forever be synonymous with verve, energy, wit, ontological wrath and—above all—a total commitment to both subject and style. His career began in 1959 when he was accused of being anti-Semitic following the publication of one of his early short stories, “Defender of the Faith”, in the New Yorker. The row nearly overwhelmed him. “What is being done to silence this man?” wrote a prominent rabbi. But real fame—and literary and commercial success—came with “Portnoy’s Complaint”, published in the revolutionary year of 1969.
Written in the form of a “confession” to a psychoanalyst, this was the book that brought him to the attention of America and the world. Even now, it is fiercely alive—a one man serio-comic farrago of sexual transgression, psychic pain, metaphysical horror and cultural lament. It contains all the seeds that were to germinate in the two dozen novels that followed, not least Mr Roth’s predilection for provocation and a kind of burnished, resplendent blasphemy. “Do me a favour, my people,” Mr Roth wrote in “Portnoy”, “and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass—I happen also to be a human being!”
That last phrase is the key to the man and to his work. Forget the Jewishness or anti-Jewishness. Certainly, like all great artists, Mr Roth mined his immediate milieu, but only as a way of directly unearthing the deeper questions of family, society, belief, culture and relationships; of getting at the underlying nature of humanity. Judaism is only his way in, a mighty metaphor for all religions and all peoples. (He used his religion in the manner of, say, Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen.) But, profoundly, Mr Roth eschewed the literature of victimhood. He refused to be relegated. Instead—like all great artists—his subject was everything he could possibly imagine, summon or otherwise lay his hands on. His subject was the human condition.
And, like all great artists, he inhabited and embodied contradictions. You cannot disagree with him more than he disagreed with himself. He wrote about patriotism and he hated patriots. He wrote about idealism and he despised idealists. He wrote about the family with great love, and yet he railed against the asphyxiation of family. He was a moralist who loathed moralists. He was an atheist locked in lifelong battle with a God who neither cared nor existed. His subject was often no more than ten square miles of New Jersey and therefore the whole world.
He was fearlessly engaged with the profane and the repellent; and yet his work is apt on any page to break out into such passages of compassion and sorrow that the reader is ambushed all over again—this time by emotion. He wrote again and again about sex as a rebuke to death and death as the great reprimand to sex, as if by smashing the two great subjects against one another he might find at last the true particles of existence.
Of “Sabbath’s Theatre” (published in 1995), Mr Roth later wrote:
Such depths as Sabbath evinces lie in his polarities. What’s clinically denoted by the word ‘bi-polarity’ is something puny compared to what’s brandished by Sabbath. Imagine, rather, a multitudinous intensity of polarities, polarities piled shamelessly upon polarities to comprise not a company of players, but this single existence, this theatre of one.
For some critics, this was his best book. Mr Roth himself chose it, along with “American Pastoral” (1997), an intergenerational story of an immigrant family, as one of his favourites. “Operation Shylock” (1993) also belongs on that list.
There is bad Roth as well as good Roth, of course. But, even at his worst, readers know they are in the hands of a resoundingly intelligent writer. That is part of the pleasure of reading him: the feeling of being in the company of a mind that will not let you down in terms of the reach and grasp of what you are about to encounter. A shaping dramatist for whom the human drama is at once sexual, spiritual and intellectual. A novelist who credits his readers with the same understanding and intellectual resources as himself. Look, he seems to say, I saw this and I found that. I know you live and feel as deeply as I do—so I know you’ll recognise the comedy, the horror, the tragedy and the farce.
Then there is the actual writing. Sentence by sentence, he attended closely to words. The hyper-illuminated minds of his protagonists and the wars they fight, often with themselves, disguise the ingenious artistry of his work. He was a formidably precise writer; as a pilot of the English language, he was as exacting as Austen and as careful as Nabokov. He was richly alive to cadence and euphony. His paragraphs are written to careful rhythms, from incantatory to fulminatory with every stop on the way in between.
Nobody is dying
Something to do with the marriage of high seriousness and low comedy is at the core of his work; something to do with the wars against false piety, against the fantasy of purity and other forms of sanctimony; something to do with how the novel is playful and capacious enough to contain the life of the mind and the body and the spirit; something to do with human indignation and with human dignity; something to do with an epic disregard for the rigid tedium of conventions and the dishonesties of human life, relationships and consciousness.
Writing of the pianist Yefim Bronfman in “The Human Stain” (2000), a novel of campus and racial angst, Mr Roth said:
He doesn’t let that piano conceal a thing. Whatever’s in there is going to come out, and come out with its hands in the air. And when it does, everything there out in the open, the last of the last pulsation, he himself gets up and goes, leaving behind him our redemption. With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly gone, and though he takes all his fire off with him like no less a force than Prometheus, our own lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is dying, nobody—not if Bronfman has anything to say about it.
Not if Philip Roth had anything to say about it.