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78 Books and arts
The Economist
May 26th 2018
I
F THERE is one detail of Philip Roth’s bio-
graphy that is worth knowing, it is not
that he was Jewish or that he had no chil-
dren or that he was born in New Jersey—it
is that he preferred towrite standing up at a
lectern. There are pages of his workwhere
the irrepressible vitality of his writing
seems to glow on the page as if charged
with some kind of existential incandes-
cence—the great and persistent question of
his novels being no less and no more than:
what the hell do human beings think they
are doing here on Earth?
Mr Roth died on May 22nd. His work
will forever be synonymous with verve,
energy, wit, ontological wrath and—above
all—a total commitment to both subject
and style. His career began in1959when he
was accused of being anti-Semitic follow-
ing the publication ofone ofhis early short
stories, “Defender of the Faith”, in the
New
Yorker
. The rownearly overwhelmed him.
“What is being done to silence this man?”
wrote a prominent rabbi. But real fame—
and literary and commercial success—
came with “Portnoy’s Complaint”, pub-
lished in the revolutionary year of1969.
Written in the form of a “confession” to
a psychoanalyst, this was the book that
brought him to the attention of America
and the world. Even now, it is fiercely
alive—a one man serio-comic farrago of
sexual transgression, psychic pain, meta-
physical horror and cultural lament. It con-
tains all the seeds thatwere to germinate in
the two dozen novels that followed, not
least Mr Roth’s predilection for provoca-
tion and a kind of burnished, resplendent
blasphemy. “Do me a favour, my people,”
Mr Roth wrote in “Portnoy”, “and stick
your suffering heritage up your suffering
ass—I happen also to be a human being!”
That last phrase is the key to the man
and to his work. Forget the Jewishness or
anti-Jewishness. Certainly, like all great art-
ists, Mr Roth mined his immediate milieu,
but only as a way of directly unearthing
the deeper questions of family, society, be-
lief, culture and relationships; of getting at
the underlying nature of humanity. Juda-
ism is only his way in, a mighty metaphor
for all religions and all peoples. (He used
his religion in the manner of, say, Bob Dy-
lanor LeonardCohen.) But, profoundly,Mr
Roth eschewed the literature of victim-
hood. He refused to be relegated. Instead—
like all great artists—his subject was every-
thing he could possibly imagine, summon
or otherwise lay his hands on. His subject
was the human condition.
And, like all great artists, he inhabited
and embodied contradictions. You cannot
disagree with himmore than he disagreed
with himself. He wrote about patriotism
and he hated patriots. He wrote about ide-
alism and he despised idealists. He wrote
about the familywith great love, andyet he
railed against the asphyxiation of family.
He was a moralist who loathed moralists.
He was an atheist locked in lifelong battle
with a God who neither cared nor existed.
His subject was often no more than ten
square miles of New Jersey and therefore
thewholeworld.
Hewas fearlessly engagedwith the pro-
fane and the repellent; and yet his work is
apt on any page to break out into such pas-
sages of compassion and sorrow that the
reader is ambushed all over again—this
time by emotion. He wrote again and
again about sex as a rebuke to death and
death as the great reprimand to sex, as if by
smashing the two great subjects against
one another he might find at last the true
particles of existence.
Of “Sabbath’s Theatre” (published in
1995), Mr Roth laterwrote:
Such depths as Sabbath evinces lie in his po-
larities. What’s clinically denoted by the
word ‘bi-polarity’ is something puny com-
pared to what’s brandished by Sabbath.
Imagine, rather, a multitudinous intensity of
polarities, polarities piled shamelessly upon
polarities to comprise not a company of
players, but this single existence, this theatre
ofone.
For some critics, this was his best book. Mr
Roth himself chose it, along with “Ameri-
can Pastoral” (1997), an intergenerational
story of an immigrant family, as one of his
favourites. “Operation Shylock” (1993) also
belongs on that list.
There is bad Roth as well as good Roth,
of course. But, even at his worst, readers
know they are in the hands of a resound-
ingly intelligent writer. That is part of the
pleasure of reading him: the feeling of be-
ing in the company of a mind that will not
let you down in terms of the reach and
grasp of what you are about to encounter.
A shaping dramatist for whom the human
drama is at once sexual, spiritual and intel-
lectual. A novelist who credits his readers
with the same understanding and intellec-
tual resources as himself.
Look
, he seems to
say,
I saw this and I found that. I know you
live and feel as deeply as I do—so I know
you’ll recognise the comedy, the horror, the
tragedy and the farce.
Then there is the actual writing. Sen-
tence by sentence, he attended closely to
words. The hyper-illuminated minds of
his protagonists and thewars they fight, of-
ten with themselves, disguise the inge-
nious artistry of his work. He was a formi-
dably precise writer; as a pilot of the
English language, he was as exacting as
Austen and as careful as Nabokov. He was
richly alive to cadence and euphony. His
paragraphs are written to careful rhythms,
from incantatory to fulminatory with ev-
ery stop on theway in between.
Nobody is dying
Something to dowith the marriage of high
seriousness and low comedy is at the core
ofhiswork; something to dowith thewars
against false piety, against the fantasy of
purity and other forms of sanctimony;
something to do with how the novel is
playful and capacious enough to contain
the life of the mind and the body and the
spirit; something to do with human indig-
nation and with human dignity; some-
thing to do with an epic disregard for the
rigid tedium of conventions and the dis-
honesties of human life, relationships and
consciousness.
Writing of the pianist Yefim Bronfman
in “The Human Stain” (2000), a novel of
campus and racial angst, Mr Roth said:
He doesn’t let that piano conceal a thing.
Whatever’s in there is going to come out, and
come outwith its hands in the air. Andwhen
it does, everything there out in the open, the
last of the last pulsation, he himself gets up
and goes, leaving behind him our redemp-
tion. With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly
gone, and though he takes all his fire offwith
him like no less a force than Prometheus, our
own lives now seem inextinguishable. No-
body is dying, nobody—not if Bronfman has
anything to say about it.
Not if Philip Roth had anything to say
about it.
7
Philip Roth
Theatre of one
Atribute to one of the greatest Americannovelists of the post-war era