A Spooky Lonely Wooded Retreat
One of the best reasons to stay locked into Philip Roth’s world – his books, the complexities, the ups and downs of humanity -- is that you’ll always be just around the corner from a new feeling, an understanding.
That happened again this week reading Roth’s essay, “Juice or Gravy? How I Met my Fate in a Cafeteria,” for our next Philip Roth Book Club meeting with Professor James Duban on Saturday, Dec 2. We were caught on an early paragraph helping to set the scene for what we’ll see happening in the cafeteria. Roth wrote this essay which was used as an afterword to the 25th edition of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1994.
Roth is looking back to when he was 23 years old in 1956 and still “the aggressively independent son of energetic parents,” having obtained his Masters of Arts at the University of Chicago and next setting out to complete his service in the Army. An accidental injury would occur causing great pain that at different levels would be with Roth all of his life.
Here’s the paragraph:
The circumstances of my Army discharge should perhaps have alerted me to just how little one has to do with calling the shots that determine the ways in which a life develops. Though I'd gone into the Army, under the post-Korean War draft, assuming that I would be serving a two-year stint, I was released halfway through because of an injury incurred in basic training that had increasingly disabled me over the ensuing months. When I was in too much pain even to perform my Washington desk job, I was sent to the Army's gloomy rehabilitation center nearby, a spooky, lonely wooded retreat in Forest Glen, Md., where the other patients on my ward were mostly amputees and paraplegics. Their miseries drastically dwarfed my own, and many nights I would listen in the dark to someone my age or even younger crying aloud from his bed that this wasn't supposed to have happened to him. Eventually I was discharged for medical reasons, but still without having figured out, even after having lived and slept for over a month among the youthful victims of the most unlikely misfortunes, that orderly expectations and a rational outlook are as great a fantasy as anything cooked up in the roiling brain of a paranoid schizophrenic.
Roth conveys that feeling of solitary pain and immobility not just for himself but especially for others, his fellow patients in the woods that night. We feel it and want life to be different.
After his recovery and discharge, Roth returned to Chicago to begin teaching where he was rather quickly drawn to Margaret “Maggie” Martinson, who had so far led a tumultuous life, but claimed, he wrote, “to know everything there was about the unfairness of life.”
Please join us at the Philip Roth Book Club meeting on December 2, 2023. James Duban is a Professor of English at the University of North Texas.
-Nancy Shields
We’re Glad We Went!
We were off to New York last weekend to see Sabbath’s Theater, the off-Broadway production adapted from Philip Roth’s confounding controversial novel that Roth himself said was his personal favorite of 31 books.
It seemed probable that reading the award-winning novel, which was published in 1995, beforehand might help one to hold on to the feeling and profoundness of the production. But, if that was not the case, the acting of John Turturro, Elizabeth Marvel and Jason Kravits was so credible, so strong, one will be thinking about this man named Mickey Sabbath for some time to come.
Turturro’s Sabbath, a one-time puppeteer, is looking to close out unbearable grief from death and loss. His own life exudes depravity, lust and love, the degradation of women and certainly of himself. The setting is 1994, a half century after Sabbath’s older brother Morty died in the Second World War when Mickey was 12 or 13. His erotic mistress Drenka, is dead from cancer. His mother and father are dead. Mickey Sabbath is 64 years old and is looking for a way out.
Turturro and Ariel Levy adapted The New Group production which is playing at the Pershing Square Signature Center at 480 West 42nd Street. Due to popular demand, it has been extended through December 17. Jo Bonney directed.
In one of his teaching sessions after the novel was published, Philip Roth offered this wrap-up of Mickey Sabbath’s life during a Master Class at The Roth Explosion festival in Aix-en-Provence in 1999:
“…Sabbath doesn't move from being between a conventionally virtuous person and an outrageous person. He's an outrageous person from beginning to end. What he does reveal, I think in the book is his extreme polarity. And I think up until the second half, or in the first two thirds of the book, you see a much tougher, meaner, crueler, more bitter Sabbath than you see in the last third of the book. The closer he gets to the dead, the more the geyser of feeling is unleashed in him. And the closer he gets to the dead, the less guile he has. As a man in the presence of his dead, he has no guile. No, no whatsoever. He has virtually no strength.
And when he gets so close to his brother, as to wrap himself in that American flag, which was the flag that draped the coffin of his brother when he was buried as a soldier, there's no satire in him, and there's no satire in me. I'm not making fun of the American flag. It's easy to do that. And it's been done. I wanted to turn that on its head. And this is Sabbath…when he wraps himself in that flag and weeps for his brother. This is Sabbath at the other pole. He's reached the other pole. And that's part of the journey, too. It's a journey into feeling. It's a journey into his own raw wound. It's a journey into his own guts and his own blood and so on. And so the last third of the book has a very different feel to it. You don't have the brash high jinks, the wild performance. The wild performance has come to an end.”
Sabbath’s Theater was originally developed by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center for the Philip Roth Unbound Festival here in Newark this past March. The New York adaption includes a note cautioning ticket buyers that the performance includes haze and contains nudity, sexual situations, strong and graphic language, and discussion of suicide.
As we drew close to the theater that night with about 20 minutes to spare, we stopped in the Chez Josephine at 414 West 42nd for a quick bite at the zinc bar— a bowl of soup and we couldn’t resist trying a cocktail as we were serenaded by a singer. In those few minutes, write-ups of the 1986 Parisian bistro seemed absolutely true with live music and the warmest welcoming and attentive staff ever who understood and accommodated our time crunch. We want to thank Miriam Jaffe, program director at Philip Roth Society and her husband for giving us their Sabbath’s Theater tickets!
Back to the Beginning…
Philip Roth first became friends with the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in 1984. They met at different times in London, Israel and New York, and in 1988, set out to record their conversations as they walked about on city streets and sat in coffee shops in Jerusalem. Working together, the two novelists edited the recordings with the help of a translator (Appelfeld wrote in Hebrew) for an article that ran in 1988 in the New York Times Book Review. In 2001, Roth included their conversations in his book Shop Talk about his conversations with writers and colleagues about their work.
Appelfeld, born a year before Roth in 1932, grew up in a middle- class Jewish family in Romania. His mother spoke German. In 1941, the year he turned 9, the Romanian Army, fighting for the Nazis, took over his hometown, killed his mother and sent Aharon and his father to a forced labor camp in Transnistria. Aharon escaped from the camp and hid for three years in the forests of Ukraine, surviving as a shepherd for peasants, until he joined the Soviet Army as a cook. After the war, he was in a displaced persons camp for several months in Italy. In 1946, Aharon immigrated to Palestine where having no formal education, he began learning Hebrew which would become his language as a writer. It was not until 1960 in Israel, that Appelfeld and his father, both believing the other had died, learned they were both alive.
Appelfeld’s life as a writer centered on the Holocaust but as described in his New York Times obituary, his stories were told “from a seemingly naïve eye, a baffled child’s eye. The horrors, as critics pointed out, happened offstage; his novels rarely identified the threat explicitly as storm troopers with whips or concentration camps with poison-gas showers. Rather, people wrestled with the banalities of daily life as ominous events were apprehended like distant thunder, lending his narrative the absurdist quality of a Beckett play or the chill of a Kafka story.”
Roth described his friend as “a dislocated writer, a deported writer, a dispossessed and uprooted writer….His sensibility --marked almost at birth by the solitary wanderings of a little bourgeois boy through an ominous nowhere - appears to have spontaneously generated a style of sparing specificity, of out-of-time progression and thwarted narrative drives, that is an uncanny prose realization of the displaced mentality.”
“At first I tried to run away from myself and from my memories, to live a life that was not my own and to write about a life that was not my own,” Appelfeld told Roth in their conversations. “But a hidden feeling told me that I was not allowed to flee from myself and that if I denied the experience of my childhood in the Holocaust, I would be spiritually deformed. Only when I reached the age of thirty did I feel the freedom to deal as an artist with those experiences”
Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939, probably his most famous novel, tells the story of Jewish middle class vacationers at a fictional resort town outside Vienna enjoying their summer in a rather matter-of-factly way but slowly misconstruing what is happening, for example, as the town becomes overcrowded and the Sanitation Committee is requiring all Jews to register. They will be “invited” to go to German-occupied Poland and actually are trying to help in that relocation. The novel was first published in Hebrew in 1978 and translated into English in 1980, the first of Appelfeld’s novels to be translated.
“There’s no news from the public realm that might serve as a warning to an Appelfeld victim, nor is the victim’s impending doom presented as part of a European catastrophe,” Roth tells Appelfeld in their discussions. “The historical focus is supplied by the reader, who understands, as the victims cannot, the magnitude of the enveloping evil. Your reticence as a historian, when combined with the historical perspective of a knowing reader, accounts for the peculiar impact your work has, for the power that emanates from stories that are told through such modest means. Also, dehistoricizing the events and blurring the background, you probably approximate the disorientation felt by people who were unaware that they were on the brink of a cataclysm.”
Appelfeld agrees: “Historical explanations have been alien to me ever since I became aware of myself as an artist. And the Jewish experience in the Second World War was not ‘historical.’ We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day. This world appears to be rational (with trains, departure times, stations, and engineers), but in fact these were journeys of the imagination, lies and ruses, which only deep, irrational drives could have invented. I didn’t understand, nor do I yet understand, the motives of the murderers.”
Appelfeld died in January 2018, shortly before turning 86. Roth would die four months later in May, also 85.
How About It, Virginia Woolf?
In July of 2022, Joyce Carol Oates published in her A Writer’s Journal an interview she conducted in 1974 with Philip Roth who was 41 years old and an author of much international interest following the publication five years earlier of Portnoy’s Complaint.
That Roth gave her the interview in the first place was “remarkably generous,” Oates said because their conversation was going into the first issue of a magazine she and her husband Raymond Smith were starting called Ontario Review: a North American Journal of the Arts, a magazine with a base of no subscriptions.
At one point, Joyce asked Roth if he had experienced unfair critical treatment, and Roth made it clear that he had no patience for “marginal ‘literary’ journalists,” preferring instead to have working writers --young or established -- give him critical feedback on his novels.
“In fact, I don't think there's been a time since graduate school when genuine literary fellowship has been such a valuable and necessary part of my life,” Roth said. “Contact with writers I admire or towards whom I feel a kinship is precisely my way out of isolation and furnishes me with whatever sense of ‘community’ I have.”
Roth suggested writers pursue Virginia Woolf’s proposal in her essay, “Reviewing” to have journalism book reviews abolished and instead hire a serious critic for a fee to meet for an hour and speak honestly and openly about an author’s work. That private set up would prevent a review’s effect on book sales and allow the writer to discuss one’s own case while gaining invaluable feedback from a paid critic of one’s own choosing.
‘How sensible and human,” Oates quotes Roth saying. “It surely would have seemed to me worth a hundred dollars to sit for an hour with Edmund Wilson and hear everything he had to say about a book-of mine—nor would I have objected to paying to hear whatever Virginia Woolf might have had to say to me about Portnoy's Complaint, if she had been willing to accept less than all the tea in China to undertake that task. Nobody minds swallowing his medicine, if it is prescribed by a real doctor. One of the nicer side effects of this system is that since nobody wants to throw away his hard-earned money, most of the quacks and the incompetents would be driven out of business”
“Until this arrangement becomes the custom, I'll continue to look to a few writers whom I admire also as readers, to help mitigate my own feelings of isolation,” Roth says, quoting a letter from Melville to Hawthorne about Moby Dick that said “A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment, because of your having understood the book.”
“Just the sort of professional intimacy and trust that is signaled by this simple outpouring of gratitude from one isolated writer to another seems to me the best thing we have to give one another,” Roth added.
Reference:
Joyce Carol Oates, “A Conversation with Philip Roth,” A Writer’s Journal. July 27, 2022: https://joycecaroloates.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-philip-roth
Now Get This Straight!
In his 1991 memoir Patrimony, Roth tells of how a father and son kept a lifetime of love and support going despite different perspectives at times that really weren’t that different at all.
One of those stories came after Roth published a piece in an October 1987 New York Times Book Review – the first chapter in his upcoming autobiographical book The Facts—in which he wrote of the antisemitism in the 1930s and 40s that denied Herman Roth a pathway to become a top executive once he became a district manager in his Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
It did not take long after the book review article for Philip Roth to receive a letter from the Metropolitan Life president and chief executive officer saying a former company officer had contacted him about Roth’s assertion of antisemitism. The president wrote that he let that former colleague know, and now in turn, was informing Roth that some years earlier, he had invited Herman Roth to lunch where Herman made no mention of discrimination in describing his upward path to managing a large district office. The executive added that “if the views he’d once held about the Metropolitan’s religious bias were accurately reported in his son’s autobiography, they had clearly changed since.”
That did it for Philip Roth. “What rankled me and goaded me on,” he writes in Patrimony, “was that they were both determined to blame an unflattering perception of their company on my father, on unsubstantiated ‘attitudes’ and ‘views’ of his rather than on the company’s prior practices.”
Roth began to research with the help of the American Jewish Committee and New York Times articles and wrote the Met Life boss back that as late as the 1960s, the federal government was working to open up executive positions in insurance companies to Jews, Roman Catholics, Black people, and other racial minorities where top jobs could be “reserved for Anglo-Saxon Protestants.” A New York State investigation in 1960 when Herman Roth was still working for Met Life also documented discriminatory practices that still existed in major life insurance companies, Roth wrote in his letter.
What surprised Roth was that when he gave a copy of his letter to his father, Herman didn’t question that it was true, but spoke of his company being good to him giving him a good pension, and told his son not to write any more letters.
“Well, this was new – my father expressing chagrin over something I had written,” Roth writes. “In my Zuckerman novels, I had given Nathan Zuckerman a father who could not stand his writer son’s depiction of Jewish characters, whereas fate had given me a fiercely loyal and devoted father who had never found a thing in my books to criticize – what enraged him were the Jews who attacked my books as anti-Semitic and self-hating. No, what made my father nervous wasn’t what I wrote about Jews but, as it turned out, what I had now written about Gentiles –about Gentiles to Gentiles, and to Gentiles who had been his bosses.”
And yet, when Herman died two years later in October 1989, Roth says his cousin, Ann, told him she and her husband, Peter, had been visiting Herman and he had taken Philip’s letter to the insurance chief out of his files to show it “proudly” to her husband who was Herman’s lawyer.
“To me he never mentioned it again,” Roth writes, “nor did I receive a reply from anyone at the Metropolitan.”
The Question That Never Goes Away
An expected certainty during our Philip Roth Personal Library Book Club sessions is: “Why no Nobel Prize in Literature?” And on September 9, 2023, our presenter, the novelist and critic Steven Sampson, suggested possible reasons center on a certain anti-Americanism and a perception of Roth as a trashy, controversial writer.
“No male American writer born in America who doesn’t play the guitar (Bob Dylan won in 2016) has won the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1962,” Sampson said. It was John Steinbeck that year. Sampson made a note that Toni Morrison was a winner (1993).
Sampson cited anti-Americanism from remarks of a Nobel Prize committee chairman several years ago saying American writers were parochial and not open to other cultures and people in the world.
Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel in 1954 after publication two years earlier of The Old Man and the Sea. But that recognition did not come earlier after novels on love and sex, Sampson said, but about “one man pitted against nature, a fisherman, and a poor man at that.”
At the Philip Roth Society Conference which took place at the Newark Public Library in March of 2023, James Bloom, professor of English and American Studies at Muhlenberg College, offered a presentation on this very topic. U.S. citizens who received the Nobel include: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Brodsky, Toni Morrison, and Bob Dylan. Since 1901, a total of 110 prizes have been awarded and the recipients for 2023 will be announced in just a few days during the first week of October. The Nobel Prizes were established in Alfred Nobel’s will of 1895 and one portion was to be awarded to "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”
Roth was shortlisted a few times, but does it matter whether the prize eluded him? Roth received many other notable honors including the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, and the Man Booker International Prize.
I Might Give Them Some Books To Read
Following a reading from his memoir, Patrimony, at Trinity College in 1992, Philip Roth read aloud the questions, followed by his answers to the audience. Among the many topics was the following as recorded that evening:
With all the Neo-Nazis denying the existence of the Holocaust, what argument would you use to convince them otherwise? Well, I don't know that I would argue with the Neo-Nazis. I think I would be concerned. And I am concerned that young people who didn't live through the period 1939-45 and even though I was a child, I lived through it and it had a strong impact on my family and therefore on me. People who didn't live through that might be influenced by this vicious idiocy of the Neo-Nazis.
And so, I think I might give them books to read. And in fact, in the course I teach at Hunter College, I do indeed have my students read three books of Primo Levi's. A book called Survival at Auschwitz, a book called The Reawakening, and his brilliant, brilliant, grave masterpiece, The Drowned and the Saved…And I also have them read a book by Borowski, a Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. And I have them read a book by Gitta Sereny, a brilliant journalist, about Treblinka, called Into That Darkness. So that's my argument, my argument against them is not so much an argument against them, but an exposure of the material about the Holocaust to a new generation.
Twelve years after that evening, in 2004, Roth published The Plot Against America, the imagined story of real life aviator hero and isolationist Charles A Lindbergh winning the 1940 American presidential election, bringing the terror of fascism and antisemitism to Roth’s stand-in Newark childhood.
The books Roth cited that night are part of his personal library left to the Newark Public Library.
As of this past year, the majority of U.S. states did not yet require the teaching of the Holocaust in public school education, but 23 did. According to Wikipedia, those states are: California, Illinois, New Jersey, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Kentucky, Texas, Oregon, Colorado, Delaware, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Arizona, Maine, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Missouri.
For The Length of a Single Sentence
Philip Roth lays it out calmly, almost like building a case in court, but not letting up for a second, that he was neither a Jewish American nor American Jewish writer. Certainly, he was an American writer and a Newark Jew, he wrote in a Life and Letters column “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names” in The New Yorker (2017) less than a year before he died.
Roth’s insistence came to mind in recent days as the writer Stephen Sampson offered his own reasons on why he continues to refer to Roth as an American Jewish writer during an excellent discussion Sampson hosted on Portnoy’s Complaint at a September 9, 2023 session of the Philip Roth Personal Library Book Club.
The Paris-based literary critic and novelist, clear and forthright in his research and views, considers Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s 4th of 31 books, the author’s most important novel and most fun. You can watch the book club session here.
Sampson said it is Roth’s writing in a Jewish voice, including using Yiddish words that made the novel Sampson’s own favorite along with other novels in Roth’s first decades of writing. Sampson said he was not drawn in the same way to Roth’s later critically acclaimed novels absent that Jewish voice such as the American Trilogy: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000).
‘If you like the Roth from the late 1990s, 2000s, he’s an American writer,” Sampson suggested. “If you like the earlier Roth, then he’s an American Jewish writer.’
“A Newark Jew –why not? But an American Jew? A Jewish American?” Roth wrote in The New Yorker piece. “For my generation of native-born--whose omnipresent childhood spectacle was the U.S.A’s shifting fortunes in a prolonged global war against totalitarian evil and who came of age and matured, as high-school and college students, during the remarkable makeover of the postwar decade and the alarming onset of the Cold War--for us no such self-limiting label could ever seem commensurate with our experience of growing up altogether consciously as Americans, with all that that means, for good and for ill. After all, one is not always in raptures over this country and its prowess at nurturing, in its own distinctive manner, unsurpassable callousness, matchless greed, small-minded sectarianism, and a gruesome infatuation with firearms.”
“The list of the country at its most malign could go on, but my point is this: I have never conceived of myself for the length of a single sentence as an American Jewish, or Jewish American writer, any more than I imagine Dreiser and Hemingway and Cheever thought of themselves while at work as American Christian or Christian American or just plain Christian writers. As a novelist, I think of myself, and have from the beginning, as a free American and –though I am hardly unaware of the general prejudice that persisted here against my kind till not that long ago –as irrefutably American, fastened throughout my life to the American moment, under the spell of the country’s past, partaking of its drama and destiny, and writing in the rich native tongue by which I am possessed.” 1
References:
Philip Roth, “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names,” The New Yorker, May 29, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/i-have-fallen-in-love-with-american-names
(Adapted from an acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Nov. 20, 2002.)
An Evening Walk
Above: aerial photograph of the South Ward and both sides of Essex and Union County borders, 1980. Shows the path of Route 78 through the residential sections of Newark as well as all of Weequahic Park. Source: Charles F. Cummings NJ Information Center, The Newark Public Library.
One of Philip Roth’s powerful scenes in the The Human Stain (2000) captures the loss of historic homes and neighborhoods, businesses and community life, as construction of Interstate 280 cut a destructive swath through East Orange in the 1960s.
We’re reminded of Roth’s details as we look forward to the upcoming Newark Public Library 2023 Philip Roth Lecture on November 2 when Dr. John Wesley Johnson, Jr., assistant professor at St. Peter’s University, will speak on “History, Memory, and the Weequahic Section of Newark.”
I-280 also uprooted neighborhoods in the Central and North Wards of Newark. Professor Johnson’s research focuses on the impact of a second highway, Interstate 78, cutting through a section of Newark’s Weequahic in the 1960s. Johnson in July published his paper “In the Way of Progress: How a Federal Highway and Political Fragmentation Blighted Neighborhoods” in New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Roth’s story of what happened in East Orange comes as narrator Nathan Zuckerman meets for the first time and talks with Ernestine Silk following the funeral of her brother, Coleman Silk. Ernestine conveys with touching detail the loss of everyday life as they knew it in East Orange from I- 280 coming through after construction of the Garden State Parkway had eliminated Jones Street, the center of the Black community. Ernestine continues:
“Then 280. A devastating intrusion. What that did to that community! Because the highway had to come through, the nice houses along Oraton Parkway, Elmwood Avenue, Maple Avenue, the state just bought them up and they disappeared overnight. I used to be able to do all my Christmas shopping on Main St. Well, Main Street and Central Avenue. Central Avenue was called the Fifth Avenue of the Oranges then. You know what we’ve got today? We’ve got a ShopRite. And we’ve got a Dunkin’ Donuts. And there was a Domino’s Pizza, but they closed. Now they’ve got another food place. And there’s a cleaners.
But you can’t compare quality. It’s not the same. In all honesty, I drive up the hill to West Orange to shop. But I didn’t then. There was no reason to. Every night when we went out to walk the dog, I’d go with my husband, unless the weather was real bad –walk to Central Avenue, which is two blocks, then down Central Avenue for four blocks, cross over, then window-shop back, and home. There was a B Altman. A Russek’s. There was a Black, Starr, and Gorham. There was a Bachrach, the photographer. A very nice men’s store, Minks, that was Jewish, that was over on Main Street. Two theaters. There was the Hollywood Theater on Central Avenue. There was the Palace Theater on Main Street. All of life was there in little East Orange…’’
The 2023 Philip Roth Lecture: History, Memory, and the Weequahic Section of Newark by Dr. John Wesley Johnson, Jr. Register here.
Thursday, November 2nd, 2023 | 6:00-8:00 PM Newark Public Library
James Brown African American Room, 2nd Floor. Doors open: 5:00 PM
Banned Books
Above: Letter from Mrs. John Hughes to Philip Roth, circa 1970.
Staff at the Newark Public Library have been working on a project in preparation for Banned Books Week in October. Many of us volunteered to read passages from banned books and participated in recorded interviews about why they chose a particular book and passage.
It is a meaningful initiative which highlights the importance of the freedom to read. The Philip Roth Librarian chose a book from Roth’s own collection, The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin. After its publication, Kate Chopin would never write another novel ever again as a result of negative reactions to the book (some readers expressed they found it scandalous and controversial because the protagonist rebelled against the marital tradition and her responsibilities, chose not to follow established norms, and fell in love with another man).
We know that Philip Roth faced much criticism after Portnoy’s Complaint was published. The book was banned in Australia in 1970 because it was deemed obscene. Subsequently, copies were secretly printed and the ban was challenged in the courts and ultimately lifted in 1971. The book received negative reactions in the United States as well. Roth’s mother compiled scrapbooks of publicity related to seven of her son’s novels and the one for Portnoy’s Complaint is definitely the thickest volume.
Out of curiosity, we referred to the list of banned and challenged classics prepared by the American Library Association. Philip Roth owned many on the list:
The Great Gatsby; The Catcher in the Rye; The Grapes of Wrath; Ulysses; Beloved; The Lord of the Flies; 1984; Lolita; Catch-22; Brave New World; Animal Farm; The Sun Also Rises; As I Lay Dying; A Farewell to Arms; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Invisible Man; Native Son; Slaughterhouse Five; For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Call of the Wild; Go Tell It on the Mountain; All the King’s Men; Rabbit, Run; Tropic of Cancer; The Naked and the Dead; Women in Love; Brideshead Revisited; Naked Lunch; Sons and Lovers; Sophie’s Choice; The Awakening; In Cold Blood; A Clockwork Orange; Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The Best Applause
Just how much famed radio writer Norman Corwin meant to future novelist Philip Roth listening at home with his family in the 1940s comes alive in a delightful story Roth related after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his novel American Pastoral published the year before.
Asked by interviewer and author Bill Parkhurst about writing influences when he was young, Roth said the greatest influence in his teenage years was Corwin’s radio broadcasts. Roth added that the two writers had not yet met in real life but had become good friends talking on the telephone. Roth then told the following story:
“.…One of the most pleasant aspects of the Pulitzer Prize was that the day, whenever it was two or three weeks ago, when I got home, I found 40 messages on my answering machine. Four, zero, which I didn’t know the machine could do. And I didn’t know what had happened because I’d been out all day. So I thought one of two things had happened, I thought either I had died and these were condolence calls coming in or I’d won something. And it turned out that I’d won the Pulitzer Prize….
In among the messages, there was a message from Norman who was now 90 (actually 88 since born May 3, 1910). And I found the only emotional moment I had listening to all those tapes -- of course, I was pleased -- was when I heard this guy, this guy’s voice. And I called him the next day. And I said, you know, it’s no easy thing emotionally, to get a phone call from your boyhood hero who says, very good, you’ve done very well. So you know, when you’re a kid, you respond to, of course, different kinds of writing than you will as an adult. But there was something passionate in this radio writer, something deeply American in him. There was a tremendous amount of what I took to be political goodwill. And all these things were very, very provocative for a 14 or 15 -year -old.”
Norman Corwin’s radio programs in the 1930s and 40s covered many topics and were influential in part because they were dramatic and entertaining, often addressing serious issues by telling how they affected the lives of participants and listeners. His famous program “On a Note of Triumph,” celebrated the Allied victory in Europe, and was broadcasted on VE Day, May 8, 1945. He had a long career as a writer and journalist dying at the age of 101 in 2011. Roth owned three print copies of On a Note of Triumph, one of which included an inscription by Corwin (photo above).
Reference:
Philip Roth, I Married a Communist: Selection read by author and interview with Bill Parkhurst. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
Oh, Did You Ask, Can Philip Roth Write?
The 23-year-old narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is just starting to get published when he gets a chance to stay over at his idolized literary mentor E.I Lonoff’s farmhouse in the Berkshires. This scene in Philip Roth’s 1979 The Ghost Writer is a New England gem:
There was still more wind than snow, but in Lonoff’s orchard the light had all but seeped away, and the sound of what was on its way was menacing. Two dozen wild old apple trees stood as first barrier between the bleak unpaved road and the farmhouse. Next came a thick green growth of rhododendron, then a wide stone wall fallen in like a worn molar at the center, then some fifty feet of snow-crusted lawn, and finally, drawn up close to the house and protectively overhanging the shingles, three maples that looked from their size to be as old as New England.
In back, the house gave way to unprotected fields, drifted over since the first December blizzards. From there the wooded hills began their impressive rise, undulating forest swells that just kept climbing into the next state. My guess was that it would take even the fiercest Hun the better part of a winter to cross the glacial waterfalls and wind-blasted woods of those mountain wilds before he was able to reach the open edge of Lonoff’s hayfields, rush the rear storm door of the house, crash through into the study, and, with spied bludgeon wheeling high in the air above the little Olivetti, cry out in a roaring voice to the writer tapping out his twenty-seventh draft, “You must change your life!” And even he might lose heart and turn back to the bosom of his barbarian family should he approach those black Massachusetts hills on a night like this, with the cocktail hour at hand and yet another snowstorm arriving from Ultima Thule. No, for the moment, at least, Lonoff seemed really to have nothing to worry about from the outside world.
Oh, To Be A Center Fielder
Philip Roth kept this framed photo of the Brooklyn Dodgers in a guest bedroom at his CT residence.
Philip Roth’s lifelong devotion to baseball can be so insightful, so welcomed in his novels, and that’s certainly the case during Alexander Portnoy’s brilliant, funny, forever controversial monologue with his psychoanalyst in Portnoy’s Complaint.
Alex wants the doctor to know what it was like being a center fielder on his softball team, the Seabees A.C., a team that meant everything to Alex. He was too anxious a hitter to make his high school team, he says. The tryout coach inquired if he didn’t need glasses “and then sent me on my way.”
“Thank God for the Seabees A.C.! Thank God for center field! Doctor, you can’t imagine how truly glorious it is out there, so alone in all that space…Do you know baseball at all? Because center field is like some observation post, a kind of control tower, where you are able to see everything and everyone, to understand what’s happening the instant it happens, not only the sound of the struck bat, but by the spark of movement that goes through the infielders in the first second that the ball comes flying at them; and once it gets beyond them, ‘It’s mine,’ you call, ‘it’s mine’ and then after it you go. For in center field, if you can get to it, it is yours.”
Alex’s scenario takes on the vibe of a pro game, what it’s like “standing nice and calm—nothing trembling, everything serene—standing there in the sunshine,” loose like his hero Dodger Duke Snider, waiting under a high fly ball.
Alex makes the catch, the third out, and heads in, shooting the ball to the opposing team’s shortstop coming out onto the field, and without breaking stride, goes “loping in all the way, shoulders shifting, head hanging, a touch pigeon-toed, my knees coming slowly up and down in an altogether brilliant imitation of The Duke. Oh, the unruffled nonchalance of that game!”
When his time comes to bat, Alex knows how to raise the bat above his shoulders, flex and loosen his shoulders, step in to the batter’s box, take a called strike “which I have a tendency to do, it balances off nicely swinging at bad pitches…”
The point is, he says is that he has mastered every detail so “that it is simply beyond the realm of possibility for any situation to arise in which I do not know how to move, or where to move, or what to say or leave unsaid…And it’s true, is it not? – incredible, but apparently true – there are people who feel in life the ease, the self-assurance, the simple and essential affiliation with what is going on, that I used to feel as the center fielder for the Seabees? Because it wasn’t, you see, that one was the best center fielder imaginable, only that one knew exactly, and down to the smallest particular, how a center fielder should conduct himself. And there are people like that walking the streets of the U.S. of A? I ask you, why can’t I be one! Why can’t I exist now as I existed for the Seabees out there in center field! Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder – and nothing more!”
Please join our Philip Roth Book Club dialogue on Portnoy’s Complaint with literary critic and author Steven Sampson, Sep 9, 1 p.m. EST. The Zoom link will get posted as we get closer to the date.
Summertime in Connecticut
When Philip Roth’s novel Zuckerman Unbound came out in 1981, a June Saturday Review featured the 48-year-old novelist on the magazine cover with the headline: “Philip Roth Still Waiting for His Masterpiece.”
By most accounts, that “masterpiece” would come to readers 16 years later with the publication of American Pastoral in 1997. Of interest to us looking back is that along with Henry Weil’s Saturday Review cover story was a short article by Roth’s close friend Richard Stern sharing his impression of a stay at Roth’s home in Connecticut where writing and companionship thrived the summer before in 1980.
Stern, who became Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at University of Chicago, began his friendship with Roth when they met at the university in 1956. Roth was 23, and Stern, 28. It became a “57-year-long literary conversation and friendship,” Roth wrote in a remembrance after Stern died in 2013.
Of those summer days in 1980, Stern wrote that he was one of Roth’s regulars at summer retreats, and upon getting to his assigned room on the second floor, Stern saw a view out his window of lawns, apple trees, a hay field, and Roth’s partner Claire Bloom (they would marry in 1990) hanging out clothes to dry before driving to get the night’s vegetables and swimming 40 laps in the pool upon her return.
“This is no vacation retreat,” Stern wrote. “It’s a house in which vocation and vacation fuse. The whole point is there’s no vacation. Not that the atmosphere doesn’t alter when a book’s being started instead of finished or a play’s getting prepared rather than recovered from.”
“…This is a house of fiction-makers. Human beings in and out of the house, in and out of books, are analyzed, magnified, felt with and against so that more interesting ones can get invented. During the day, everyone’s at a different typewriter; groans over misplaced commas are bouncing off every wall. We assemble at meals, breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table, Roth and Bloom squeezing oranges, cutting bread, pouring coffee. In late afternoon, it’s the pool under birch trees…”
Stern added that there could be a wrap-up seminar and a candle-lit dinner at the table in the barn and someone back at a typewriter at night.
Through the years, Roth credited Stern, whose own best- known novel would be Other Men’s Daughters as the key motivator to Roth getting his first book published. During their lunches in Chicago, Roth would tell stories about growing up in New Jersey and after recounting one summer romance, Stern told him to “write it down.” Roth did and his novella Goodbye, Columbus came out in May 1959.
Of Stern, Roth wrote:
“Frequently, while listening to Dick speak of a new colleague, project, sorrow, hardship, idea, improbability, of another blast of news from the great fallen world—while listening to his vivid, focused, unfailingly unhackneyed responses—the same three words would be catalyzed in me: ‘You’re so human.’”
References:
Richard Stern, “Roth Unbound,” Saturday Review, June 1981, pp. 28-29.
Philip Roth, “A Formidable Writer, An Exceptional Man: Philip Roth on Richard Stern,” Literary Hub, Sept. 1, 2017. https://lithub.com/a-formidable-writer-an-exceptional-man-philip-roth-on-richard-stern/
“Stairwell by Stairwell”
Photo: Herman Roth in the 1970s
A year after Philip Roth published his 1991 memoir Patrimony: A True Story about the last years of his father’s life, the New Jersey Historical Society --for the first time --gave its annual award for “significant contributions to New Jersey history” to a novelist.
Roth, who was 59 that year, gave all credit to his father, Herman Roth, born in Newark’s Central Ward in 1901, the son of Sender and Bertha Roth who were part of the immigration movement between 1879 and 1910 that drew a quarter of a million foreign immigrants to Newark’s 100,000 primarily English-speaking population.
Herman Roth was able to go to school through the eighth grade before starting his life of work, and it is that career as a life insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life in North and South Jersey, that saw him “talking for nearly forty years to thousands of families here about life-and-death matters in the toughest human terms ,” Philip Roth said in his speech, adding: “They can’t win,” my father told me, “unless they die.”
“It’s the insurance man and not the novelist,” Roth says, “who came to know, from a vast personal experience, with his own brand of awareness and practical intelligence, the social history of Newark, New Jersey’s largest and, during the decades my father was employed there, its liveliest and most productive city, to know it not just neighborhood by neighborhood, not even just block by block and house by house and flat by flat but door by door, hallway by hallway, stairwell by stairwell, furnace room by furnace room, kitchen by kitchen.”
“…It was he and not I, who, by virtue of an occupation that took him daily among the people and into their homes however lowly, became something of an amateur urbanologist in the city of Newark, an anthropologist-without-portfolio from one end of the state to the other, and it is for the prodigious substantiality of this achievement, his far-from-ordinary entanglement with the breadth and depth of the everyday existence of a hard-bitten city’s seemingly insignificant lives, that I’d like to accept this award in his name.”
Roth included his acceptance speech in his Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013.
What The Kids Say
We’ve just received a copy of a terrific anthology highlighting 21 of the stories and artwork Newark students aged 8 to 18 created in a Covid 19 Stories and Artistic Expressions project. Published by our Newark Public Library with funding from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the students capture how deeply Covid 19 affected their lives and show the individual and collective spirits that helped Newark’s young people get through their days of pandemic.
Our Philip Roth Personal Library wants to celebrate these student writers and artists, remembering similar admiration and gratitude for the more than 200 high school- aged youth who submitted stories about living in Newark for our writing contest this past winter.
In the new anthology, students tell of sudden separation from school and friendships. They learn to cook, hold their family members close, put up a Christmas tree. Their sleep patterns suffer. They play board games and eat ice cream, become bored with social media, become depressed. Students struggle to keep learning, find a way to be with their teachers online. They feel hopeful seeing hungry people get help, no longer take things for granted. They learn of George Floyd’s murder. A grandfather dies; a brother and sister survive.
“Their voices are important and needed to be heard and shared,’’ says Sharon Owens, who oversaw the project and is manager of Newark Public Library’s Springfield Branch. “This project is important to me because our youth are our future, they need our love, understanding and support. Our Newark students shared poignant stories and poems. Their artistic expressions are realistic and meaningful. I am so appreciative, proud and humbled by the work they shared.”
What Did He Want? To Possess His Readers, Just For A Time
Philip Roth had just turned 50 that year in 1983 when he was asked how his novels might affect the ordinary reader. The question came near the end of a summer interview with literary biographer Hermione Lee, then a lecturer in English at the University of York. Their discussions over a day and a half in England would become “Philip Roth, The Art of Fiction No 84” in The Paris Review, Fall 1984.
“Novels provide readers with something to read,” Roth answered. “At their best writers change the way readers read. That seems to me the only realistic expectation. It also seems to me quite enough.”
Lee, who would go on to be president of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, pressed Roth further on his literary power. He was in the final stages of writing The Anatomy Lesson:
“You asked me if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure there’s been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it’s a way of life for them. It doesn’t mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book—if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don’t. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that’s otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn’t fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it’s not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading.” -Philip Roth
References:
Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (New York, Vintage, 1985)
A Good Story
So many of Philip Roth’s colleagues and friends have shared stories and remembrances with our Philip Roth Personal Library, and continue to do so. What a wonderful gift!
As in the novelist’s own storytelling– and there’s really not a simpler way to convey this -- these remembrances and reflections by those up close to Roth are just so full of life. He was so much about living.
Roslyn Schloss, the book editor who was both a friend and longtime copy editor to Roth through the second half of his 31 books, gives us great detail on how the two went back and forth on getting fiction scenes factually right and believable and the prose to the point where Roth would eventually sign off on it. Her essay, That Unrelenting Need to Unveil Meaning appears in the Philip Roth Personal Library catalogue that came out last year.
In her story, Schloss quotes a message from Roth so that we can feel a little of what she called “the twenty-four-hour-a-day diligence:”
“Six pages follow. I can’t see straight. You know what to do. We’ll speak tomorrow….Twenty pages follow. Any questions, I’m at home tonight. I may go out for an hour around eight to get something to eat....Been futzing with it, what with the Yankees being rained out. This is it, I swear.”
“It was not,” Schloss says. “That diligence, that doggedness, that unrelenting need to unveil meaning was there, of course, to the very end. There were drafts upon drafts; there was never really a final draft because the refining went on until the thing was between hard covers.”
Thank you, Roslyn Schloss, and all of you wrote in the catalogue and so many of you contributing to the Roth library. Keep the stories coming.
Pajamas and Nightdresses
If we keep coming back to how much Philip Roth loved his family and his Weequahic community growing up, it’s because of scenes like the following in which the seven-year old narrator Philip Roth tells of the anger his neighbors experienced when the fictionalized anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh wins the Republican nomination for President on a summer night in 1940. The scene in The Plot Against America begins with the family inside the Roth home listening to Lindbergh in Philadelphia accepting both the party nomination and a mandate to stay out of the war in Europe. Lindbergh didn’t include earlier vilifications of the Jews in his speech, the narrator says, but nonetheless a piercing group anger “carried every last family on the block out into the street at nearly five in the morning.”
So there Roth has us and holds us--on the street.
“Entire families known to me previously only fully in daytime clothing were wearing pajamas and nightdresses under their bathrobes and milling around in their slippers at dawn as if driven from their homes by an earthquake. But what shocked a child most was the anger, the anger of men whom I knew as lighthearted kibbitzers or silent, dutiful breadwinners who all day long unclogged drainpipes or serviced furnaces or sold apples by the pound and then in the evening looked at the paper and listened to the radio and fell asleep in the living room chair, plain people who happened to be Jews now storming about the street and cursing with no concern for propriety, abruptly thrust back into the miserable struggle from which they had believed their families extricated by the providential migration of the generation before.”
The scene’s not quite finished. Roth brings us back inside:
“After their having gone without sleep all night long, there was nothing that these bewildered elders of ours didn’t think and nothing that they didn’t say aloud, within our hearing, before they started to drift back to their houses (where all the radios still blared away), the men to shave and dress, and grab a cup of coffee before heading for work and the women to get their children clothed and fed and ready for the day.”
“Verbal catnip to an eager adolescent’s reading hunger”
How does a love of reading blossom and thrive? For Philip Roth, it was a visit to the Weequahic Branch of the Newark Public Library where he discovered his euphoria.
“You know, I wasn't raised in a literary environment. I wasn't raised in a literary household. And I think part of the excitement was just that, that this was all new to me. And it was a whole new way of looking at the world and looking at life and thinking that was utterly foreign to me and it worked right for my brain. So it was a lifelong passion.”-Philip Roth, 1999 [1]. Philip Roth revealed this statement during Norman Manea’s master class at Bard, during which time I Married a Communist was being discussed.
“I had some books that were favorites. I read the sports books of John Tunis, if any of you knew those. Then I had baseball fantasies. He wrote baseball fantasies in my head and these didn't hurt. I think they were very good books. Did you read them? Was it John Tunis? And then I read books by someone, what was his name, Pease, P-E-A-S-E? They're kind of adventure stories. I suspect that it must have been the era, it was very good. Then I read Howard Fast. When I was 11, 12, 13 years old, because I was developing very liberally left political positions. I was 13 in 1946. And would have voted in 1948 for Henry Wallace if they let 15 year olds vote. And so I read Howard Fast, a book about the Revolutionary War called Conceived in Liberty and then it was a book about the Haymarket Riots, I forget what that's called, Freedom Road? But he meant a great deal to me. Then, at about 17, 16, I guess, I discovered reading and literature in a big way, when I began to read Thomas Wolfe, who probably no longer serves that function in people's lives. But he did for my whole generation. He was a powerhouse to me. Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River, The Web and the Rock, You Can't Go Home Again, I read them all. They are massive books, 800-900 pages long. A little book called Only the Dead Know Brooklyn, and I love the title, I still like the title. And then from there, I went on to college, and then I really began to read a lot. But as a child, no more than the ordinary child used to read back then, now back then, ordinary children read quite a bit. And the public branch of the public library in our neighborhood in Newark was busy. This is not a nostalgic recollection. It was busy. You'd see kids going in and out with five, and six, and 10 books, and taking them out and putting them in the bicycle basket and bicycling home and coming back. And so as a group, I think we read quite a bit. Because, of course, needless to say, there was no television. But I don't think I was an exceptional reader for a child.” [2]
References:
Philip Roth, remarks made while visiting Norman Manea’s master class at Bard College, 1999.
Philip Roth, remarks made when visiting Trinity University after a reading from Patrimony, 1992.