Philip Roth Article

Two recent biographies of Philip Roth have revealed some disgraceful things about him. Of course, by the standards of the most disgraceful twentieth-century artists (Pound, Dali), or of some other modern celebrities, his sins are relatively forgivable. Roth appears to have been a rapacious adulterer, including during his fifties with his female students, and in his relationships with women he was apparently controlling and manipulative. He also wrote characters into some of his novels who are similarly afflicted by a deep misogyny. But in a climate where the sexual entitlement of powerful men is only beginning to be examined, Roth’s behaviour and how it connects to his work has been led into the dock. Rather than horse-whipping Roth or resorting to the clichéd defence that he was ‘of his time’, it is more interesting to ask why his behaviour and the perspectives of his characters came about. Roth emerged as a writer in the 1960s, a decade when the most significant social development was the loosening of legal and moral restraint in discussing sex. Free (almost) from the threat of litigation or embargo, all of Roth’s contemporaries tried their hand at writing about sexual impulses – as Martin Amis once said John Updike follows his characters ‘not only into the bedroom but into the bathroom. Indeed, he sends a little Japanese camera crew in there after them.’ This is in itself was a rebellious act, but with no previous literature to draw upon these writers fell back on themselves and their prejudices. Arguably Roth authored the best of the novels from this sociologically experimental time, Portnoy’s Complaint, a petulant and priapic monologue about a young man’s sexual obsessions – and his misogyny. I would maintain that there is both political and aesthetic value to this. Roth’s unreconstructed character offers an examination of primeval masculine impulses towards women while producing satirical comedy through exaggeration and distortion. Indeed, a peremptory memo Roth wrote to himself shows it was his active intention to draw literary testimony from his own id: ‘DO NOT JUDGE IT. DO NOT TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT. DO NOT CENSOR IT.’ But the urges that he thought it appropriate to satirise were not to everyone’s tastes then, and it is only more recently that they were packaged as canonical literature. The critics who have taken issue with Roth’s life and the misogyny his characters exhibit are older than me, and grew up at a time when Philip Roth, John Updike and comparable writers like Saul Bellow were both literary celebrities and literary gods. Their works competed for the position of ‘great American novel’ and to not read them was considered a breach of intellectual etiquette. The implication was that these writers were striving for the universal. And in fairness, Roth’s later works like American Pastoral do adopt a Victorian narrative scope that gestures in that direction. But still, in works like Portnoy’s Complaint and subsequently Sabbath’s Theater, he was ultimately drawing from the grubby urges which lie at the bottom of the masculine brain. To write from the first-person or localised third-person perspective of a character who dehumanises women is to result in dehumanised female characters. The novelist-critic Dara Horn has complained in the New York Times that this represented a ‘lack of not only empathy, but curiosity’ about women, with Roth’s work and private life in alignment in her view. This was a limitation in his work, and in his life too. But the answer to this is more books, and more perspectives, not lambasting Roth for the particular and in many ways insular cultural and temporal space he occupied. Novels which assert the grubby interiority that Roth pioneered are now being written about women – most successfully perhaps in the work of Otessa Mosfegh. No-one would seek to claim her work as humanistic, universal literature, and it was a mistake to do so with Roth. If he must descend from the lofty position of American chronicler because of his toxically masculine subjectivity, then so be it, but that is not itself an artistic sin. The capacity to write about nasty, condescending, vulgar people should remain, but we should be able to enjoy it while knowing that is exactly what it is. .

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