11 MAY 1991, Page 39

Father, son and family ghosts

Frederic Raphael

PATRIMONY by Philip Roth Cape, £13.99, pp.238 Jews also have fathers. Sometimes they survive the women who, according to the mythology, both sustain and exhaust them. Philip Roth's father, Herman, was a second-generation immigrant, who grew up and lived all his 80-plus years in Newark, N.J. His life story might have been entitled `Hullo, Columbus'. Jews of his style were fiercely patriotic and belligerently Democrat in politics. F.D.R., whatever his dubious attitude to the Holocaust, cast a long shadow. Herman Roth called Reagan `Mr Ray-Gun'; his son's attack on Nixon, Our Gang, was an act of piety as well as of indignation.

Philip's notorious ambivalence (to put it mildly) with regard to Jewish allegiance, above all his shameless tendency to shout the unspeakable, whether in sexual or social matters, has made it appear that he was the next best thing to a renegade. (Success is never all bad.) Here, he comes to terms with his dad, in a moment-by- painful-moment account of a terminal brain tumour. The reconciliation is touch- ing, as the prodigal comes to realise how close he is to the man whom he rejected, in the howling rages of an adolescence which, like that of many writers, lasted longer than his hair. The bad apple also does not fall far from the tree.

Roth fiLs is not in the habit of sparing what he celebrates. His widowed father becomes an object of concern, but only at the very end is he pitied. He retains a cer- tain intimidating hold on his celebrity son, who is amazed to hear himself say, at one point, 'Do as I say', and even more amazed to be obeyed. Herman Roth, who never got beyond the eighth grade, whose spelling was uncertain, who called his wife `Mommy' (and apostrophised her thus, in tears, long after her death), was also a men- sch. His penis retains its enviable size, in his son's can't-help-looking eyes, as he squats, in senile awkwardness, in the tub. At the height of his career, the Metropolitan Life Assurance, he was in charge of a big department in Newark which was, in those days, a place he knew (and loved) as well as his Friday prayers. The decline and death of a man for whom being a Jew was the heart of the matter are made particularly poignant by the kind of detail which his son, unerringly, fastens upon. Herman's abandoning of his tefillin — the boxed epitomes of sacred text which the Orthodox bind literally to them in prayer — in the men's locker room at the 'Y' (the Jews' social centre) is bewildering to the son, who only then begins to under- stand why his father always parcels up and gets rid of things (Philip's prized stamp col- lection was among them) which belong to a phase of life that has, however sadly, ended. This book is in the same tradition.

Patrimony is furiously respectful of a self- willed man who, even as a cartilaginous tumour was in the process of splitting him open from within, maintained a stumbling dignity and a sceptical attitude to the medi- cal profession which, more or less blithely, proposed to cut his head open and extract the 'benign', lethal lump. He rightly resist- ed a process which would, as his carefully prepared questions elicited, at the very best leave him having to learn to walk (and talk) all over again. He limited himself to getting rid of the cataracts which made him more miserable than the disfiguring symptoms he learned to live with.

Roth's book is as shdrt as it is candid. Its memorial brevity does not prevent its author's shadow from falling quite heavily across the pages. Internal evidence is plen- tiful that Roth fils is a best-selling novelist, a college professor, the friend of famous people (Primo Levi walks on) and someone who doesn't usually take shit from anyone. Yet, shit is, literally, all that his father has to offer him. After a painful biopsy — a needle thrust through the roof of the mouth — the old man was constipated and finally, explosively, 'beshat' himself (the quasi-biblical term was his repeated, morti- fied choice). Philip promised him not to tell anyone and set about to clear up. He actually scrubbed the floorboards with a toothbrush. This act of filial humility was, perhaps, enough to exempt him from his vow of silence (on the whole, if you want something to be kept secret, don't say or do it in front of scribblers). For Philip, memory is an obligation; not forgetting anything is a matter of honour, not of tact- lessness.

Roth's ear for dialogue is of an alarming accuracy (only the unsuspecting will want to bend it). Sentiment could scarcely be more unsentimentally conveyed. Even in tragic circumstances, comedy keeps break- ing in: when Philip himself, under stress from a million pressures, has to have emer- gency heart by-pass surgery, there is riotous irony in his efforts to keep his dying father from suspecting that the son is in mortal peril. If there are any ungainly notes here, they derive from the moments which The Famous Author feels obliged to do his mature prosaic stuff:

People don't always realise what good girls we grew up as, too, the little sons suckled and gurgled by mothers adroit as my own in the

skills of nurturing domesticity.

Mrs Roth, however ill-used in life, seems to bring out the worst in her son, even posthumously. Her lamps were 'a little glitzily ornate and surprisingly uncharacter- istic of [her] prim, everything-in-its-place aesthetic'. This undescriptive verbosity indicates, perhaps, where Roth still has unfinished business with one of his family ghosts. For the rest, memory has aptly served both comic and tragic purposes: the unforgotten becomes unforgettable.