May 30, 2018
It was difficult to escape the glowing obituaries of Philip Roth who died this month at age 84. They were ubiquitous, one more fawning than the next. I started seeing red – pun of course intended, since Roth is a name derived from rot the German word for red. The name was often connected to places with smelters, feuerroth or fiery red.
Fiery he was, in his search of identity issues, his willingness to defy the Jewish Orthodoxy around loshon hora, the evil tongue, which prohibits not just spreading lies but telling truths about fellow Jews that might be harmful to them. As he himself put it:
“I had informed on the Jews. I had told the Gentiles what apparently it would otherwise have been possible to keep secret from them: that the perils of human nature afflict the members of our minority.” And indeed, in his novels he offered a psychogram of Jewish-American males in conflict with the WASP majority, with other minorities, particularly African Americans, and within the Jewish communities themselves, the struggle between generation.
Never was he more fiery though, than in the preoccupation with sexuality and the disrespect towards women whether they be mothers or wives or daughters or lovers. Being called on that by serious writers, feminists, intellectuals or plain old readers seemed to fall on deaf ears and was met, if at all, with condescension and a buckling down to write the next ever more objectifying piece. The review below captures it well.
A panelist left the deliberations in protest when Roth was awarded the Man Booker prize in 2011, for brilliance across a lifetime work. For balance, here is a positive evaluation of his approach:
Roth was successful in bringing out the struggle for Jewish identity and ethics, and brilliant in describing a slice of history of second and third generation, secular East coast Jews being at once drawn to and repelled by assimilation. He sharply delineated the conflicted relationship between Jewish and Black communities, and the idea of having a man try to escape his racial fate as a Black person by assuming a Jewish identity, assuming that would free him of restrictions (and failing disastrously), was among his more interesting. But those accomplishments are undermined by that strain of narcissistic misogyny that weaves through every single novel, until the end.
Some say that we should beyond that because of his brilliance. Others say he just described the way the world is and thus holds a mirror to our eyes to stimulate improvement. I go with my gut: when I first read Portnoy’s complaints it was in translation.The German word is Beschwerden, a term that has double meaning. It means complaints but also ailments. After finishing the book all I could think was he has an ailment, indeed. A chip on the shoulder the size of New Jersey.
The gut feeling was borne out. His real life was a mirror of his protagonists’, in ways that make my skin crawl. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5764731/TOM-LEONARD-tempestuous-marriage-Philip-Roth-British-wife.html
It will be interesting to see if his body of work survives and continues to get the acclaim visible in all the obituaries with the advent of younger, less sexist generations.
Martha Ullman West
Brava, brava, brava, brava for photographs as usual but also, oh yeah, tell it, Friderike, the text of this blog. I have been equally disturbed by the unqualified tributes. He was an important writer, he was indeed at times (but not always) a brilliant writer who broke barriers against writing about sexuality but Fear of Flying by Erica Jong came not too long after Portnoy’s Complaint and while it created a lot of talk for the use of the f-word, there was little discussion of its brilliance and humor. So here’s some irony: Roth and Ursula Le Guin are the among few, if not the only, authors to be collected and published by the American Library while still alive. I thank you for this blog from the heart!
Sara Lee
“Some say that we should [look] beyond that because of his brilliance. Others say he just described the way the world is and thus holds a mirror to our eyes to stimulate improvement. I go with my gut.”
I am strongly among the “some” who “say” and the “Others.” I taught AMERICAN PASTORAL several times in seminars on the 1960s, and I think that novel captures aspects of those years better than any monograph on the subject. Next week I am taking a one-week course (five three-hour meetings) on Roth at Brandeis that will focus on GOODBYE COLUMBUS and THE HUMAN STAIN. Re-reading the latter, I was blown away again. I found it so disturbing (also so insightful and provocative) that I could read it only in small chunks at a time! Curious to hear what the professor and my classmates have to say. Also to talk to you further about this when we next get a chance….
Susan Wladaver Morgan
Thank you saying this. Despite his originality and brilliance in certain areas, he was utterly blind to his own misogyny and its damage to living women. And he never learned.