Radiant Poison

(69-76)Gornick Final2 7/24/08 9:29 AM Page 69 CRITICISM RAD IANT P OI S ON Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and the end of the Jew as metaphor By Vivian Gornick For some twenty-five or An angry fever inhab- thirty years—between the ited these writers of the mid-1950s and the early Fifties and Sixties, one 1980s—a single explosive that burned with a development in our liter- strength that routinely ature made the experi- threatened either to purge ence of being Jewish-in- or to consume the body America a metaphor that upon which it fed. Con- attracted major talents, ventional English could changed the language, not address the condition. and galvanized imagina- It required a syntax and a tive writing throughout a sentence structure that Western world badly in could fan the fever, spread need of a charge. Its two the infection, stimulate a pathbreaking stars—one nervous system clearly in at the start, the other at distress. The American the end—were Saul Bel- language was ready to low and Philip Roth, a accommodate. Virginia pair of writers who strong- Woolf had once com- armed the culture into plained that she couldn’t accommodating the ex- find the words to make an perience. Not another English sentence that writer after Roth could would describe what ill- lay claim to the metaphor ness felt like to her, be- with the demanding cause as an Englishwoman savvy that he and Bellow she was constrained from had brought to the enterprise. to them (very much like the shift that taking liberties with the language. This In its glory days, Jewish-American has occurred over the past few decades is exactly what outsider literature does writing was an indicator of a cultural for blacks, women, and gays). This shift in this country: fashions the language shift that a couple of million Ameri- was welcomed half a century ago with anew, precisely so that it can express cans had thought they’d never live to a violent rush of words that announced what it feels like to be ill. That, essen- see: a shift that ushered in a final phase the arrival of a narrating voice whose tially, is what Jewish-American writ- of assimilation for Jews at levels of signature traits were a compulsive bril- ing at its best has done. In my view, it American life previously unavailable liance, an exuberant nastiness, and a would never be about anything else. In take-no-prisoners humor edged in self- the hands of a Saul Bellow or a Philip Vivian Gornick is the author of The Men in My Life (Boston Review Books), a col- laceration. These traits never deserted Roth, such expressiveness could— lection of criticism, due out this month, the work of those years; rather, they and did—set off a literary charge of from which this essay is adapted. were integral to the entire undertaking. epic power. Illustration by André Carrilho CRITICISM 69 (70,72)Gornick Final2 rev2 7/29/08 9:15 AM Page 70 They were thoroughly at one with brant subculture. Mixed in amid the American without sounding like one their “illness”—that is, their newfound dross were a small number of novels newly arrived to the culture. brashness over having been marginal- and stories written with a kind of des- In this context, Delmore Schwartz ized—these Jewish-American writers of perate inventiveness by women and is the Richard Wright of Jewish- the Fifties and Sixties, closing the gap men of sensibility. One of the strongest American writing. He is the writer between author and narrator to a de- of these is Anzia Yezierska’s 1920 sto- without whom—the one whose work gree not before seen in American lit- ry collection, Hungry Hearts. Set on formed the bridge between immigrant erature. At the heart of the enterprise New York’s Lower East Side, immersed writing and the writing that was to be- lay a self-regard that made the writ- in the life of the streets, the work is yet come more authentically Jewish- ing rise to unmatched levels of verbal precocious, concerned as it is not with American than his own. Born in glitter and daring, even as its danger- documenting social misery but with Brooklyn in 1913 into a household ously narrowed scope ruled out sym- the idea of an inner life thwarted by self where more Yiddish than English was pathy, much less compassion, for any as well as world. Today, these stories spoken, he was a paragon of the arriv- character on the page other than the can be read as artifacts. iste generation of Jewish-American in- narrator himself. Most especially was In Yezierska’s work, whether the nar- telligentsia. His personality was marked sympathy denied those closest to the rator speaks in the first person or in the by a tidal wave of brilliant speech that narrator, the people he purportedly third, the story is inevitably divided be- blended his immigrant experience with knew best: friends, family, lovers; par- tween the moment when she announces the sound of the street, and came out ticularly lovers—these, counterintu- her “wild, blind hunger” for her own life of the mouth of a man who read Eliot itively, acted only as a foil for the nar- and the moment when she realizes that and Pound each morning before break- rator’s biting sense of insult and injury. she is trapped by a repression from which fast. He saw himself as an alienated Saul Bellow once said to his biogra- any hope of release is dim. The bakery Jew who was yet convinced that to pher, “I had no idea that our moment window against which Yezierska presses serve a literary culture imprinted by would be so short.” The wonder is not her nose is not America; it is self-pos- European modernism was a holy mis- that the moment was short but that it session. At the end of her autobiography sion. In his writing, Schwartz would lasted as long as it did, and that it cre- she writes, “I realized that the battle I always be both precocious and rever- ated so much influential prose out of so thought I was waging against the world ential, at one and the same time an limited a sense of empathy. had been against myself, against the original and a keeper of the culture. Theirs was a magnificent instance of Jew in me”—that is, the self she has All his life he would remember how writers and a time well met. Postwar experienced as shamed and fearful. much he had suffered being a Jew at American literature—from the Beats There is no subject, really, in Yezier- Harvard when he went to teach there to Norman Mailer to the Man in the ska’s writing. The work is all language, at the end of the Depression. Cam- Gray Flannel Suit—was ripe for dec- language by the rushing mile, language bridge in the Forties was death for Del- larations of outrage. What, after all, that the writer stops up, cuts off at one more. Even as he despised the patri- had it meant to have won the war only length or another, calls a story or a cians in the English Department, he to be living inside the straitjacket of novel but which, in fact, is only the found himself yearning for their recog- Cold War anxiety? Jewish-American ongoing sound of that unleashed voice nition and acceptance, and for this he writing, with its own scores to settle, announcing its overwhelming neces- hated himself. Feeling compromised, was happy to join in the indictment— sity. Occasionally, there comes a page he was driven to put on a frantic dis- but what an irony its huge success radiant with clarity and detachment, play of urban Jewish smarts, an outra- was. Behind that singular forward and the reader takes hope—now the geous behavior that, of course, alien- thrust—beginning with the publica- story will go forward!—but turn that ated the Harvard grandees all the more. tion of The Adventures of Augie March page and we are heading once more It was only standing at a bar in Green- in 1953—lay a history of social inte- into the hurricane. The performance is wich Village, surrounded by friends gration that took so long to complete astonishing. And all the more so when and intellectual well-wishers, that he itself that by the time it did, the bad one realizes that forty years on it will be found the responsive presence he re- taste in the mouths of these writers repeated with infinitely greater so- quired to feed the writing self he now had become toxic. It was this very phistication and impact, but not much identified with saving literature from toxicity that earned them emblemat- more detachment or control. the philistines. This was a crusade of ic status in a culture characterized by College-educated Jews born of im- immense chutzpah, one that reflected moral exhaustion and lib- migrant parents in the United States the speed and urgency with which the erationist breakout. in the first decades of the twentieth Jews of his generation responded to century wanted badly to leave that tes- the invitation, however grudging or At the turn of the twentieth cen- tifying voice behind. Coming of age partial, to imagine themselves not only tury, if you were a Jewish immigrant, it in the 1930s, many of this generation partaking of American culture but in- was unlikely that you thought of the felt liberated enough in imagination to fluencing it as well.

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