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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.

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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. English language as anything other think of themselves as Jewish- It was one of those incendiary peri- than a tool of survival. Yet a mass of American rather than simply as Jewish. ods in social history—the late Thirties writing in English—mainly melodrama The tricky thing for the Jews of that and early Forties—when, out of the and didacticism—poured out of a vi- generation was how to talk and write break-up of class stability, there arises

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a complicated promise of change that Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement (the blacks—how long and hard is the road is experienced by some as salutary, by protest novel of popular fiction) to that must be walked in order to leave others as threatening. The Great De- Miller’s Focus (the paranoid realism behind both testament and stereotype, pression had brought about an extra- of the incensed middlebrow) to Saul and arrive at the place where one is ordinary leveling of social hierarchies— Bellow’s The Victim (the brooding able to render the full, free taste of suddenly, all kinds of people did not modernism of the future major novel- one’s actual experience. The Jews, said know who they were or where they ist), we have, in whatever class of lit- Fiedler with some bitterness, would be- stood—and this circumstance had re- erature these books occupy, work that come jurists, professors, theater greats, leased emotional extremity of every could have been written by any one of and corporate heads long before they kind. Thousands of people remembered a significant number of imaginatively would occupy the world of serious lit- the Depression as a time of indiscrim- sympathetic gentile writers. The bold- erature and produce a Dos Passos, a inate kindness, and thousands remem- ness of these books lay in writing about Hemingway, a Faulkner, or even a bered it as a time of shocking murder- Jews; it did not lie in sounding like Steinbeck, a Farrell, a Penn Warren. ousness. Out of this agitation came an Jews. That, in itself, would prove the Interestingly enough, there were energetic pathology. most vital, if not telling, works of gut-level imagination being Thus, in the Thirties and Forties, complication of all. written by American Jews in the Thir- there were more Jews breaking into ties and Forties that were neither white-collar jobs, the arts, and the pro- Let’s stop to appreciate the mo- generic social realism nor highbrow fessions—right alongside a virulent ment. It is the late Forties. The Sec- modernism; but, aimed at the mass- Jew-hatred that made itself felt at every ond World War has ended, the reali- market reader, they failed to gain se- level of society, from the most sophis- ty of the Holocaust has not yet been rious consideration. It is astonishing ticated to the most primitive, and absorbed, the United States is at the today to read some of them and find nowhere more than in New York City. height of its glamour and power, and embedded in their pages the origins Arthur Miller’s 1945 novel, Focus, was the future seems to belong to any of the antisocial wildness that only a frightening but plausible fable of the who might claim it. Devotion to the twenty years later would deliver Jewish- polite anti-Semitism of corporate Man- claustrophobic atmosphere of one’s American writing as we know it into hattan meeting the Christian Front own hyphenated experience is at an Fiedler’s Promised Land. variant in lower-middle-class Brooklyn. all-time low. The enthusiasts out- In 1937 a novel by Jerome Weid- The novel tells the story of an ami- number the skeptics. They have de- man called I Can Get It for You Whole- ably conservative WASP working in a cided to love America: surely Ameri- sale became a runaway bestseller. big Midtown firm who, in his adult ca will love them back. Wholesale traces the period during life, suddenly finds it necessary to wear But it was not—and now they be- which a big-city garment-district hus- spectacles. As soon as he puts the glass- gan to see that it never had been—a tler named Harry Bogen completes his es on, a startling change occurs in his simple matter of American culture ex- swindler’s apprenticeship and turns appearance: he looks Jewish. From tending a warmhearted welcome. Such pro—cheating, framing, embezzling— there the novel takes off. The protag- long adversarial relationships as that of all the while gloating about how smart onist loses his job, is ostracized in his the Jews and WASP America have a he is, and how deeply stupid everyone neighborhood, and at last is not only startling yet predictable consequence: by else is. threatened but attacked. The book is the time the door opens, those knock- Harry Bogen was a kind of gutter- one long, anxiety-provoking read. ing at it are infected with the poison of snipe not seen before in Jewish- Yet agitation was better than stasis. self-doubt, a substance more toxic than American writing. There is not a page For intellectually ambitious Jews, this all the historical humiliations com- in the book on which Harry is not period was the equivalent of the Sixties bined. As W.E.B. Du Bois and James scheming. Scheming is his life’s blood. and Seventies for African-American Baldwin knew, for blacks the danger When he gets what he wants he no intellectuals: the door of assimilation began with whites hating them, and longer wants it—it’s the next thing on had been opened wide enough that ended with them hating themselves. his ever growing list that he must have, some of them (if turned sideways) could In the late 1950s, Leslie Fiedler wrote and that next thing inevitably involves walk through, even while just across two essays on Jewish-American writers. gobbling someone up. A psychic tape- the threshold stood the gatekeepers One of his most penetrating points was worm is at work in Harry. He must eat gazing quizzically, with either thinly his observation that the Jewish- others because he himself is being eat- disguised distaste or open hostility. American novelist had internalized the en from the inside out. But as few can There was only one way for intel- stereotype of the Jew in American lit- sustain thinking of themselves as can- lectual Jews of these decades to be tak- erature. When he sat down to write, he nibals, it becomes necessary to dehu- en seriously, and that was through the had trouble shaking off the hostile or manize those whom one is about to replication in their work of high cul- sentimental images that appeared reg- consume. Thus, Harry speaks of every- ture. No intellectual Jew walking ularly in the work of gentile writers. one—and I mean everyone—he en- through the door of American liter- It’s impossible to overestimate the val- counters in vivid, degrading epithets: ary life in the Forties would have ue of such an insight. In our own time, Jews are “kikes” and “mockies”; blacks dreamed of drawing attention to him- we see—through the efforts of would- are “niggers”; women, “pots,” “pussies,” self by writing otherwise. From Laura be artists among women, gays, and and “bitches”; and gentiles get the

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simple, perpetual sneer “goyim.” In a third book in line with the modernist told in school that “George Washing- 1941, four years after the publication minimalism that had ensured the crit- ton and Abraham Lincoln were your of Wholesale, Budd Schulberg pub- ical success of the first two, and soon Presidents”—he could take a deep lished What Makes Sammy Run? and it realized that he was harnessed to a nov- breath and exhale the poetic, ragged, was “Sammy Glick” rather than “Har- el for which he had no heart: the writ- semicriminal world full of hungry ex- ry Bogen” that entered the American ing felt cramped, the vision received, pectation from which he had emerged. language as a euphemism for ruthless the connection between himself and This language that came out of him self-advancement, New York Jewish his material severely strained. The sit- now was not, strictly speaking, Eng- style. But for my money, it was the uation made his face ache. Every morn- lish; it was American—his American— wrong choice; as raw as Sammy Glick ing he went off to work at his rented a language, he said, laughing, that “was is, Harry has him beat by a mile. studio as though he were going to the mine to do with as I wished.” Wholesale isn’t about a primitive on dentist. But one day, the sight of an The Adventures of Augie March in- the make; it is the primitivism itself unremarkable image changed every- jected a sense of live movement into an flung down on the page, talking fast thing. The Paris streets were flushed atmosphere pervaded by the stagnan- and hard in your ear and in your face. daily by open hydrants that allowed cy of spirit—“To write poetry after It’s an extraordinary act of mimicry, water to run along the curb, and on Auschwitz is barbaric”—that had al- prefiguring the work of Bellow and this particular morning Bellow noticed lowed Western literature to now live Roth in that not only is it voice, all a dazzle of sunlight on the water that ac- with itself. Alienation of the self was all voice, nothing but voice; it’s a voice centuated its flow. His spirits lifted, well and good, Bellow’s intensely new working its way into the reader’s ear and he was made restless rather than American voice called out, but the fact like a plumber’s snake, moving direct- depressed. Suddenly there opened up remained that we were alive—alive and ly and relentlessly, carefully avoiding vi- before him the memory of a kid from still yearning. If anyone could make tal organs like the heart, straight down his boyhood who used to yell out, “I got clear the bottomlessness of human to the gut. a scheme!” when they were playing yearning, it was Augie March. Here he Harry Bogen is the deracinated De- checkers; then he recalled this kid’s was, a first-class hunger artist, pushing pression itself: survival in a world where vividly abnormal family; and then the his way out of a garishly populated dis- all bets are off. For readers of the psy- Chicago streets from which they had all enfranchisement that was, in its own chologically (as well as physically) sprung up like weeds pushing through way, a war zone, to claim his right to starved Thirties, Harry was an anodyne. concrete. An urge to describe that long- “not lead a disappointed life.” In 1953 No matter that he was a predator: read- ago life overcame him. that thought was received, both in Eu- ers loved that he was eating so well. Instantly, the gloom disappeared, rope and in the States, as a welcome ag- Wholesale is a literary equivalent of the the unwanted novel got put aside, and gression against the veneration of spir- blaxploitation movies that forty years Bellow began to write “in a spirit of re- itual exhaustion that characterized later had African-Americans cheering union with the kid who had shouted, serious literature of the moment. The on the bloodthirsty protagonist: it, too, ‘I got a scheme!’” Soon enough that aggression lay in the daring of the wanted blood—someone’s, anyone’s. kid got named Augie March, and prose—the unexpected vocabulary, the Wholesale is at once of its moment around him an astonishing sentence liberty-taking sentences, the mongrel and a harbinger of the writing that, structure began to form, one that in- nature of its highbrow-lowbrow narra- less than a generation later, would stead of shaping the character seemed tion—in service, ultimately, to what mine similar material with a skill to release the character; and not just re- felt like a piece of rescued wisdom about and a worldliness Weidman could lease him, but determine the course the meaning (that is, the origins) of a not possibly have had at his disposal. his adventures would take. Language disappointed life. Rightly perceived as a piece of popu- and subject couldn’t chase each other From the get-go, Augie tells us that lar fiction powered by vicious daring, fast enough. Bellow marveled at what he’s never seen himself as anything oth- Wholesale nonetheless revealed a lev- was happening. It was as though these er than a blank slate upon which “life” el of Jewish-American angst more stories, these people, this word order would write a story. “All the influences murderously unforgiving than had had been locked up inside him for a were lined up waiting for me,” he says. previously been imagined. Ultimate- lifetime. As he said years later of a char- “I was born, and there they were to ly, that angst would define the work acter in Augie, “You might put it that form me, which is why I tell you more of writers who learned to hammer he had been in hock for years; for of them than of myself.” It hasn’t oc- their molten fury into the tempered decades. He and I together had been curred to him until now that his head- steel of a weapon. The question, waiting for an appropriate language. long plunge toward raw experience then as now: To be used By that language and only that lan- might prove paradoxically fateful, in against whom? guage could he be redeemed.” that he was not only being made by the For the first time in his working life, world but was himself doing quite a bit In 1949, Saul Bellow, thirty-three Bellow felt he owned his writing. With of the making. In calculating the cost of years old, with two books under his those remembered rhythms in his ear, what has been lost, injured, or cast aside belt (Dangling Man and The Victim), that syntax and vocabulary on his as he has moved frantically through his was living in Paris on a Guggenheim tongue—an amalgam of immigrant on-the-run life, Augie at last takes into fellowship, feeling pressured to produce speech, tabloid reporting, and being account his own emotional unsteadi-

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ness. He has not, after all, fled the ghet- promise and don’t deliver, the home- ness that is Herzog’s book-length mono- to in one piece; there’s a leak in his ap- grown fast-talkers with pity for none. logue, not to be taken any more seri- petite-filled heart. An inability to love Everywhere this narrator turns, they’re ously than anything else being specu- reliably has made him culpable in the at him, pulling the rug out from under lated on, because the real guilt—the accumulation of sorrow laced in- him, while he (year by year, title by ti- undeniable, unforgivable, criminal escapably through not only his destiny tle) becomes ever more spellbound by guilt—lies with them. The wife and the but, we come to feel along with him, the tumult. Increasingly, all he can do friend who have committed moral that of all humanity. Never again would is stand there and be inundated. homicide on his watch. And actually, a character like Augie March hold the It was the inundation—in book af- we can more or less forget the friend. It’s page in a Bellow novel, speculating with ter book after book—that came as a the wife who now becomes the object more gravity than irony, more tender- literary astonishment, the vividness of some of the most talented misan- ness than grievance, on the terrible dy- and the gorgeousness of it, glowing thropy in American literature. namic in human affairs that implicates with the force of dazzling, inventive Gradually, Herzog’s wife, Made- us all. complaint pouring from the mouth of leine, is presented to the reader as an For Bellow, the writing of Augie this lunatic Jew who had swallowed a embodiment of the kind of evil self- March was pure joy. It was the joy that library, this betrayed lover of art, his- interest that represents a threat to made his protagonist entranced by the tory, and women, pining for the return the entire human race. A “plotting surge of life within and around him; of a civilization whose loss he cannot bitch” with cold, cold eyes, she had one proposition in the book never in stop documenting. Early Bellow read- been born to do him in. In time, as question is that to live in pursuit of ers encountered the sheer raciness of Herzog goes on obsessing, he realizes experience, whatever the consequence, the performance—migod, can he re- that the problem isn’t just his wife; it’s is of irreducible value. Yet, almost im- ally be doing this?—with women. All women. The women who mediately after Augie was written, this shivery delight. exercise with cunning and calcula- naked exultation in life for life’s sake tion the powers that have been put in- began to complicate itself in Bellow’s Herzog was the pivotal novel. to them, and them alone, for the spe- prose and soon gave way to a tone of This is the book that delivers in full cific purpose of bringing him to his voice and a vision that grew steadily the sound of the Jewish-American knees. Standing on a train platform in more manic than eager, more ironic narrator (the one no gentile could New York’s Grand Central station, than candid, more brilliant than lyric. possibly imitate) in a frenzy of spiri- He saw twenty paces away . . . a woman With the increase in writing glitter, tual homelessness, putting in place in a shining black straw hat [and eyes there grew apace a self-pitying dis- for all time the way that the world, that] reached him with a force she could connect emanating in ever greater de- instead of fortifying him, just keeps never be aware of. Those eyes might be gree from an unchanged (and un- coming at him. The novel tells of blue, perhaps green, even gray—he changing) first-person narrator who how Moses Herzog, a failed academic would never know. But they were bitch would dominate the books to come. whose wife has just left him for his eyes, that was certain. They expressed a It was as though that early joy had best friend, goes mad with disbelief sort of female arrogance which had an stemmed from the appeasement of a that this humiliation has been visited immediate sexual power over him; he prolonged hunger that, once achieved, on him—him!—and rushes about, experienced it again that very mo- made joy unnecessary to a writer not obsessing like the Ancient Mariner, ment—a round face, the clear gaze of pale bitch eyes, a pair of proud legs. equipped for it by nature. From here writing unsent letters to the living on, his pleasure would consist in at- and the dead, going endlessly over In despair over ever being able to fath- tention paid to the humiliation of hav- the whole sorry story of the betrayal om the nature of his natural enemy, ing had to be hungry for so long: a ten- with anyone who comes his way. Herzog cries out in his journal, “What dency that proved consequential as This fever of Herzog’s is the book. He do they want? They eat green salad Bellow’s writing took a view of life wants to understand—Oh, God, yes, and drink human blood.” that repeatedly opened itself to the to understand!—what has happened, Thirty years after the Depression— charge of solipsism. not only superficially to him alone in the aftermath of the Second World Over the next thirty years, Augie but to humanity at large: locally, na- War, and under the shadow of nuclear would transmute into Henderson, Her- tionally, globally; historically, cultur- threat, gray-flannel anxiety, imminent zog, Charlie Citrine: ever more fabled ally, politically. cultural breakout—it is women who and feverish narrators who come to ex- In the course of this monumental ef- are the arch evil in the life of the perience the world as a place of anxi- fort to grasp his situation, Herzog, in Jewish-American protagonist. It is they ety rather than promise, and them- an offhand way, tells the reader that he who poison the spring of life at which selves as men of trusting spirit under has been a bad husband and father, a our talented, high-minded narrator perpetual siege, pitched relentlessly for- cold, ego-serving lover (“It was his pride would otherwise be drinking happily; ward into a universe of monumental that must be satisfied. His flesh got what they who determine that he will stag- angst where all bets are really off and was left over”), a self-involved friend, a ger and drop in his prime, these agents every kind of social threat keeps com- painfully inconsiderate son. These of mortal threat, incomprehensible ing at them: the corporate gangsters recognitions, however, appear only as punishment, deliberate degradation. who “do” the world, the women who part of the great mix of subverting mad- How can he defend himself against

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such unearned malevolence except by tween the sexes became the nourish- fundamental humanity is not in ques- writing this book? ment of choice. It went tion. When, near the end of the novel, What is the contemporary reader down like ice cream. Neil asks himself, Who is she? What do to make of such writing? Today, Moses I really know of her? it is not to demo- Herzog sounds more like Harry Bogen With the sensational publication nize Brenda but to underscore the mys- than Everyman, with his equally mad in 1969 of Portnoy’s Complaint, it be- tery of sexual love. At the very end, take on the world as a place where one came evident that Philip Roth, eigh- when each is accusing the other of fa- either eats or is eaten. We more or less teen years younger than Bellow, was tal misinterpretation, Neil mourns, “I understand Harry B.’s paranoia, but the son arrived to work the father’s loved you, Brenda, so I cared.” Brenda what exactly is it with Moses Herzog ground with an even more alarming in turn pleads, “I loved you.” They stare and all the Herzogs to come? sense of outrage. The love-hate at- at each other. “Then we heard the tense It is painful to realize that only as tachment to one’s own outsiderness in which we’d spoken. . . . I think Bren- Bellow’s place in the world took on that had been linked to the war be- da was crying too when I went out the greater definition did this live sense tween the sexes would now be chained door. . . . And I knew it would be a long of grievance against women flare, ris- to it for all time. If in Bellow misogy- while before I made love to anyone the ing up from a coldness lodged deep in ny was like seeping bile, in Roth it was way I had made love to her.” the psyche that no amount of success lava pouring forth from a volcano. A long while? How about never? could make warm to the prospect of fel- Yet in the son as in the father, ani- A decade later, in the novel that lowship. Painful, because the griev- mosity toward women-as-women was could be called Roth’s Herzog, Alexan- ance, as such, was conspicuously absent something that took time to come into der Portnoy lies on the analyst’s couch from the earlier work. its own. Goodbye, Columbus, for ex- and, as though declaring himself an Writing Augie March produced in ample, is remarkably gentle toward both opium eater, describes what has grad- Bellow a benevolence of mood so great its protagonists, a young man and ually developed into the clarified na- that the book extends a striking ten- woman equally drawn by the sexual ture of his creator’s relation to women- derness toward women and men alike. pleasure they take in each other. Here, as-women rather than women-as- Here, they are fellow creatures trapped it is class difference (he’s working-class fellow-creatures. Speaking of himself in in an existential misery of which they from Newark; she’s middle-class from the agitated third person, Roth’s Port- themselves are the originators, equal- Short Hills) that provides both the ex- noy confides: ly endowed with emotional frailty, and citement and the denouement, and al- While everybody else has been marrying equally responsible for the moral ig- though there is not a moment when nice Jewish girls, and having children norance with which they, as lovers, the narrator is not undercutting his own . . . what he has been doing is—chasing destroy each other. In Augie March it sentimental feeling (Philip Roth de- cunt. And shikse cunt, to boot! Chasing is, if anything, the woman’s greater ef- void of irony is unimaginable), the de- it, sniffing it, lapping it, shtupping it, but fort at self-understanding that makes gree of mockery and self-mockery is so above all, thinking about it. . . . It seems to the situation large. mild as to seem almost affectionate. make no difference how much the poor Augie’s love for Thea Fenchel is glo- On their first date (at a tennis court) bastard actually gets, for he is dreaming rious in its extremity. She made his Brenda tells Neil about her nose job. about tomorrow’s pussy even while “soul topple over,” he tells us. Never He says, “Let me see if you got your pumping away at today’s! before has he been “so taken up with a money’s worth.” She says, “If I let you single human being.” In time, howev- kiss me would you stop being nasty?” And then Alex gets down to it: er, the heat between them cools, and They kiss, and Neil reports: What I’m saying, Doctor, is that I don’t Augie, himself in perpetual need of ado- I felt the wet spots on her shoulder blades, seem to stick my dick up these girls, as ration, strays. He is surprised when Thea and beneath them, I’m sure of it, a faint much as I stick it up their back- is devastated. Their parting scene elic- fluttering, as though something stirred grounds—as though through fucking I its a feeling a reader almost never ex- so deep in her breasts, so far back it could will discover America. Conquer Amer- periences in Bellow’s work: heartbreak. make itself felt through her shirt. It was ica—maybe that’s more like it. . . . I want In this novel, Bellow knows what like the fluttering of wings, tiny wings what’s coming to me. My G.I. bill—real every great writer knows: that no bigger than her breasts. The small- American ass! The cunt in country-’tis- melancholy makes cowards of us all; ness of the wings did not bother me—it of-thee! I pledge allegiance to the twat that among men and women limita- would not take an eagle to carry me up of the United States of America—and tions of the spirit are shared and those lousy hundred and eighty feet that to the republic for which it stands: Dav- enport, Iowa! Dayton, Ohio! Schenec- emotional incapacity evenly make summer nights so much cooler in Short Hills than they are in Newark. tady, New York, and neighboring Troy! parceled out. After Augie, though, when the joy of discovering his own What is present here—and will even- Portnoy’s Complaint, even more than voice was spent, he forgot what he tually disappear entirely from Roth’s Augie March, was a book for its time. knew. The writing itself grew richer work—is tenderness for women and The novel was experienced, at the end and wilder, even as that old, cold, men together. With tenderness comes of the outlaw Sixties, like a dam burst- grievous sense of deprivation ate at comradeship: Brenda is not necessarily ing, letting loose a flood of madman him, like a parasite demanding to be more sympathetic a creature than any hungers and grudges wrapped in a de- fed. In no time at all antagonism be- other woman in Roth’s oeuvre, but her ranging hilarity. It was not only the

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force of the prose but the shock of Port- The more fully realized the Roth nar- phenated existence. Thereafter, the noy’s deracinated explicitness—its ado- rator became—the more celebrated and parents of most American Jews were ration of the unbridled, the antisocial, lionized, loved and rewarded—the more also American. The claim on existen- the passionately infantile at the heart gripped was his creator by primeval tial outsiderness that, from its incep- of things—that fed exuberantly into angers and grievances. His impassioned tion, had acted as a foundation for the spirit of the times. The applica- association of woman-hating with be- Jewish-American writing became, al- tion of all that excess to the proud, ing Jewish-in-America soon outstripped most overnight, a thing of the past. swaggering anxiety of (still!) being that of his talented elder by a cynical No longer would the useful neurosis Jewish-in-gentile-America—as good mile and revealed an even more ex- that marked those who’d grown up a representation as any of all that the treme temperament. The misogyny in half in, half out of the culture be liberationist culture hoped to bring to Roth’s work seemed less and less a func- grounded in firsthand experience. Af- its knees—ensured Portnoy’s success tion of character, and more and more an ter that, if an American Jew felt him as a landmark work whose literary qual- indication of the author’s own swamped or herself a born outsider, it was a per- ities would forever be confused with being. In Portnoy the reader could be- sonal problem, not a metaphor. the history of its moment. Which, as lieve that the women are monstrous During this time when immigrant it happened, included Jewish assimi- because Portnoy experiences them as parents were disappearing from the lation as (very nearly) a fait accompli. monstrous. In all the books that fol- lives of American Jews—the 1960s That, perhaps, was the real rub. lowed over the next thirty years, the and ’70s—relations between women Ironically, with each advance in a women are monstrous because for Philip and men were undergoing the his- successful movement for social inte- Roth women are monstrous. toric sea change that was largely re- gration, it is anger—not hope, much The pity of it all is the loneliness sponsible for the erosion of complici- less elation—that deepens in the pe- trapped inside Roth’s radiant poison. ty between Bellow and Roth and titioners at the gate. Ironic but not Portnoy cries out, “How have I come to their readers. It was the women’s surprising: to petition repeatedly is to be such an enemy and flayer of myself? movement, even more than the suc- be reminded repeatedly that one is not And so alone! Oh, so alone! Nothing cess of assimilation, that revealed the wanted, never has been, never will be. but self! Locked up in me!” Years later, displacement behind all that trade- Which is why an oppressed people Nathan Zuckerman sees life, from be- mark misogyny. As the social reality greets the promise of liberation more ginning to end, as the same howling of Jewish outsiderness waned, the often as a snarling antagonist than as wilderness. He is alone on the planet: rage at the heart of Jewish-American a gratified suppliant. And the snarling alive but in solitary. All he has to keep writing began to lose its natural itself, after generations of passivity, him company is the sexual force of his source of energy. This turn of events begins to feel good, and soon more own rhetoric. Unchanged and un- delivered an unexpected piece of in- than good: necessary; a thing in and of changing, Roth’s male protagonist formation about the entire enter- itself that is hard to give up. struggles on, book after book, decade af- prise. The work was inextricably In Portnoy’s Complaint, probably for ter decade, doomed to repeat in lan- bound up not so much with being the first time in Jewish-American lit- guage that glows in the dark the in- kept out as with the sickness of feeling erature, woman-hating is openly asso- creasingly tired narrative of the illness kept out. Woman-hating had been ciated with a consuming anger at what from which he can neither recover nor the synthetic fuel needed to keep the it has meant to be pushed to the mar- expire: his solipsism. He has succumbed sense of illness alive. Without that, gin, generation after generation; hu- to the danger inherent in closing the the work had nowhere to go and miliated time and again into second- space between author and narrator; he nothing much to say. class lives; deprived, in egalitarian has fallen in love with the inability to In the nineteenth century, Jewish America, of a place at the table in mat- see himself in anyone other than him- mockery was described by a critic of ters of social importance. For men like self, a development that leads inex- Yiddish literature as “the sick despair Bellow and Roth, the sense of pent-up orably to stasis. By the late Eighties the of [those for whom life is] a perma- outrage was so intense that it was in- very devotion to omnivorous self- nent witticism.” It could never get evitable not only that it vent itself on presentation that for so long electri- beyond the limited force of its own those closest to hand but that it con- fied his readers had become wearisome. excoriating humor. That force held fuse them with the powers that be. Ten years ago, Philip Roth, realiz- everyone and everything up to supe- Thus, humiliation goes kinky. Begin- ing that this material in its unrecon- rior ridicule, but it could not pene- ning with Herzog and Portnoy, theirs structed form had been sucked dry, sud- trate its own self-deceptions; hence, was a literature that screamed, “Don’t denly and without warning, with the it could not deepen psychologically. tell me I don’t run things around publication of American Pastoral, aban- If you accept this observation as a here!”—only it was screaming it at the doned it, thereby bringing Jewish- given—and I do—you cannot help women its authors slept with. American fiction at what had been its wondering how much of Ur-Bellow Portnoy was a watershed book; after richest and most significant and Roth will prove to have tran- it, the distance between narrator and au- to an unceremonious close. scended its moment of cultural glory. thor closed with remarkable speed, and Somehow it’s hard to imagine yester- the resemblance between Roth and Bel- Roth’s was the last generation of day’s savaging brilliance transforming low began to take on historic meaning. American Jews to be born into the hy- into tomorrow’s wisdom. ■

76 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2008