Sex and life and literature
Caroline Moorehead
A Philip Roth Reader (Cape pp. 484, £8.95) In interviews Philip Roth has complained that the vast success of Portnoy's Complaint branded him as a writer of sexual extravaganzas, and condemned him to having to sit through meals being bored to death by dirty stories. CI wouldn't mind meeting Roth' Jacqueline Suzanne was famous for saying, 'but I wouldn't want to shake his hand.') A Philip Roth Reader is a strong reminder that Roth, often underrated in this country, is a rich and varied writer of many themes. Portnoy appeared in 1968, midway through his writing career. before it came stories of the hell of middle class, middle American domesticity; after, a period of satire; now a steady output around an emerging Roth hero of a writer as reader as man.
Collections of episodicfragments can make the least satisfactory of books. They irritate by stimulating a taste for more; bore by perfunctoriness. It is a tribute to Roth and to the extracts he has chosen — no book is left out — that these leave such a sensation of completeness, such a feeling of pleasure.
Roth is a reader; his books are literary books, his heroes men of words. The erotic obsessions associated with him are often merely the framework for a wry appraisal of matters of the mind. Sex and life and literature are complicated affairs but the Roth mind, formed on the lessons of literary stars, is the guiding force. 'Teachers', Roth has one -hero say, 'and books are still the best things that ever happened to me, and probably had I not been so grandiose about my honor, my integrity, and my manly duty, about "morality itself", I would never have been so susceptible to a literary education and its attendant pleasures . . . Literature got me into this and literature is gonna have to get me out'.
Nowhere is the sex/literature/manhood theme more powerfully developed than in My Life as a Man in which one of the most likeable of Roth's heroes (they are all likeable), Peter Tarnopol, struggles out of the clutches of a set of classic Roth parents to an easy and early literary success. But Roth men do not get away with much. Publicly Tarnopol is esteemed; privately his life is a catastrophe.
Choked first by the lying Maureen, twice divorced sculptress, waitress and actress who precipitates their doomed marriage by claiming that she is pregnant (she buys a sample of urine for two dollars and twenty five cents from a pregnant black woman in a tenement building), he divorces her only to settle for and thee reject Susan, a 'tender, appreciative and devoted mistress' whose 'rather dead than unwed' strictures he cannot stand. 'in Maureen and Susan' Tarnopol concludes elsewhere, 'I came in contact with two of the more virulent strains of a virus to which only a few women among us are immune,' Women do not fare well at Roth's hands, something he is at pains to disprove by including in the last section of the book 'You must change your life', women characters who do at least escape their usual role of definers of men's uncertainties. But they do not rise far. Martha Reganhart (Letting Go) is rarely more than a worldly and harrassed raiser of children; and When she was good, Roth's third novel, was built around the attitudes of Lucy towards men and their authority — legal, sexual and paternal. It is not so much that his women are minor characters, simply that their problems are minor when seen alongside the guilts and torments that destroy men.
To be Jewish is Roth's world. But to be Jewish, for Roth, is to be a good family man, a hard worker, usually of some accomplishment, middle-class and erudite. It is to yearn, frequently, for the octopus arms of the Jewish family, But it is also to be a rebel, either through insistence on reality over taboos (Nathan Dedalu.s's struggle with his distraught father over a short story in which he seems to have betrayed Jews), or through pornographic fantasy and erotic encounter. Roth heroes measure themselves in terms of manliness.
'Bless me with manhood', begs Alexander Portnoy, hero of a book as richly comic in extract as on publication — when it was hailed a masterpiece in America, ruled obscene in Australia and made the subject of a libel suit by a French garage worker who bore the same name.
After Portnoy came a period of satire and burlesque, pushing the comic exaggerations of Portnoy as far as they would go in Our Gang, The Great American Novel, and The Breast. In patches, these bear witness to Roth's easy brilliance with words and occasions, but in their entirety they are, like his non-fiction, the least exciting of his work.
The Reader uses them with economy, proving Roth's superb ear for the euphemisms and clich6s of modern political double talk, and his obvious affection for the great sporting traditions of American life.
Roth has selected his two passages from The Great American Novel with care — both are taken from what is best in the book, the spoofing biographies of the players of his once great, now diminished baseball league — and neither, happily, embark on his parable of ailing America, seen through the eyes of a crochety inmate of the Valhalla's Old Folk's Home, or labour the humour, much of it easily lost on an English reader.
The Breast is burlesque gone mad. In The Professor of Desire, published later, David Kepesh, Professor of Literature at New York State University, thinks a great deal about Kafka; in The Breast, he is the victim of a horrific metamorphosis (the concern• was contagious?) not into an insect but into a 155-pound, six foot, fatty, spongey, sight less, pink nippled breast, strung up in a hospital hammock. Beyond the initial shock, the analogy with Kafka ceases, for Roth's breast is another Roth character, and not a very successful one at that, with neither the anarchy nor the disorientation of Kafka's rootless and chilly world.
To publish a Reader prompts the search for a stock character, a binding theme; as with an autobiography, it is hard not to end up reviewing the man rather than the work. The character is there: clever, erotic, Jewish American, undergoing analysis, an only son moving from knowing infancy to anxious middle age. Roth has covered much ground in the 20 years of his published span. The niche that he has made his own, that of parody and verbal dexterity, self mockery and insight, he has worked with brilliance. But a Reader also leads to comparison, particularly with so literary a writer, and these extracts, shrewd, funny, always enjoyable, do not carry the pain of Catch 22, the stringency of Humbolt's Gift, or the unerring tones of Updike's unhappy cou ples. But that, perhaps, is what is wrong with a Reader: that it invites needlessly diminishing comparisons at all.
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