Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity

Philip Roth’s Rude Truth

Philip

Roth’s

Rude

Truth

The Art of Immaturity

Ross Posnock

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press

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Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2008

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows Posnock, Ross.

Philip Roth’s rude truth : the art of immaturity / Ross Posnock.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-1-40082-734-3

1. Roth, Philip—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PS3568.O855Z845 2006

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3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For

Sophia Rose Posnock

and her

bravery

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

—Emerson

If you are repelled by immaturity, it is because you are immature.

—Witold Gombrowicz

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

1 Introduction: Roth Antagonistes

2 Immaturity: A Genealogy

3 Ancestors and Relatives: The Game of Appropriation and the Sacrifice of Assimilation

4 A very slippery subject: The Counterlife as Pivot

5 Letting Go, or How to Lead a Stupid Life:Sabbath’s Nakedness

6 Being Game in The Human Stain

7 The Two Philips

Coda: The stars are indispensable

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Preface

What wisteria and alcohol are to Faulkner, and fishing and bullfights to Hemingway, rudeness is to Roth. It seems to be everywhere in his books—a sport and a pastime, often delivered as a rant. Rudeness in Roth is a source of stylistic energy, but also a principled (even moral) position, the antidote to the condition of anti-humanity that calls itself nice. Nice. Nathan Zuckerman repeats the word, letting its horror emerge, then declares: I don’t care if "my kid grows up wearing pantyhose as long as he doesn’t turn out nice . . . another frightened soul, tamed by inhibition" (AL 600–601). Implied here is that the anti-nice, the rude, is synonymous with a vitality won from socializing forces bent on exacting obedience, restraint, repression—basic constituents of mature adulthood. For Roth, rudeness is precious lifeblood, not simply boys being boys, and an earlier exponent of rudeness, Emerson, would concur. But Emerson hedges slightly: "I . . . ought to speak the rude truth, he vows, but finds that every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right" (Essays 273, 262). Roth too is not as truculent as he advertises (the quote above from Zuckerman occurs as he is having fun masquerading as a pornographer). Always within is the devoted son and good boy, a figure who explicitly emerges, relatively irony free, in his two family memoirs.

Of course, Emerson is no Whitman, Roth is no Céline or even Hubert Selby or Kathy Acker. But these limits are precisely what make immaturity possible: it is a mode of being that emerges not from the obliteration of bourgeois restraint, but from pushing or defying its limits, and by being judged against a presiding norm. Immaturity is diacritical, implicitly asking—immature compared to what?

The immaturity I am concerned with is of literary rather than personal interest, and on the few occasions I touch directly on Roth’s biography it is to make a literary point. The art of immaturity names not only a subject but also a literary practice or strategy as old as the novel itself: recall the childish Don Quixote’s quarrel with reality. His wariness of its demands to adapt demonstrates for the first time, says one philosopher, the paradox that art’s contribution to society is in fact resistance to society (Adorno, Aesthetic 321). More recently, Milan Kundera has located Quixote’s resistance in the havoc Cervantes wreaks on certitude, replacing the apodictic and dogmatic discourse of his younger contemporary Descartes with "the wisdom of uncertainty " unique to the genre, and licensing a freedom for later novelists to play games with reality rather than to obey canons of realism, plausibility, and chronological order (Art 7, 15).Without using the word, Kundera adumbrates a number of the elements that immaturity will summon in this book.¹ Without mentioning his friend Philip Roth, Kundera returns us to the origins of the modern novel in Europe as one useful, if unfamiliar, literary context to discuss a writer usually regarded as a wholly known quantity, confined to a particular region (New Jersey), particular aesthetic tradition (American literary realism and natural-ism), and, above all, a particular ethnicity (third-generation American Jew). I hope readers expecting (yet one more) discussion about Roth and being Jewish in America will come to be persuaded that this topic has for too long been isolated from a more capacious inquiry into larger dimensions of his art and broader questions of what it means to be human. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted long ago, failure to recognize the Universal in the Particular breeds the menace of all group exclusiveness and segregation (Writings 1194)

In a writing career that has flourished for nearly half a century, Philip Roth long ago slipped the bonds of particularism not least by exemplifying that the local cannot be thought apart from the worldly, that the devoted chronicler of Chancellor Avenue in Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood has fashioned his themes and innovative forms of representation in lifelong conversation with canonical predecessors and contemporaries from Europe and the United States. Of course there have been other American regionalists, Faulkner preeminently, who have rendered the local within larger patterns furnished by venerable literary models, a modernist strategy pioneered by Joyce. But Roth makes his literary engagements and allusions the subject of his fiction, integrates them directly into his characterizations, a method made plausible by the fact that nearly all his protagonists and narrators are writers or figures of highly developed sensibility for whom literature is the stuff of life.²

In short, as if behind the backs of the pigeonholing critics who would anchor him to his historical coordinates, Roth resides in a world literary space . . . an actual—albeit unseen—world without frontiers, be they national, regional, or aesthetic (Casanova 3).³ Neither is it stratified by class entitlement. This republic of culture is found on no map save the one drawn by literature. How it shapes a number of Roth’s major novels is the main subject of this book. I attend especially to his practice of appropriation—by which he claims his literary forebears wherever he finds them—as one mode of transport to this kingdom of world culture. Like the rude play of immaturity, appropriation insists on democratic access and resists preordained authority (including the authority of historical context). This skepticism encourages the letting go of culturally enforced restraint and the experience of aesthetic bliss, the last phrase associated with that meticulous student of Cervantes, Nabokov.

Roth and Nabokov share with Kundera a less than reverential attitude to the nineteenth-century elevation of realism into the prime responsibility of the serious novelist. Yet Nabokov and Roth also exhibit a genius for realist verisimilitude founded on a nearly tactile responsiveness to the sensory fullness . . . the superabundant detail of life that Roth calls the rhapsody (HS 52). Roth’s notion of rhapsody is entwined with the grossly corporeal and visceral, thus true to the root meaning of aesthetic. While Roth’s version may not be as elegant as Nabokov’s, both novelists immerse themselves in the blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography (HS 22).And what places a Humbert Humbert or a Mickey Sabbath in the midst of the blizzard is their seamless joining of desire, flesh, and art. When Roth writes of the contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are, he is bringing together the crude force of desire and an aesthetic imperative to be mindful—to render in language our fleshly matter (HS 37).

In sum, Roth—resistant realist, worldly regionalist—is different things at once. If one were forced to name the sharp point upon which those things converge, it would be provocation; Roth conceives it as inseparable from art but also makes provocation a subject in itself, a force that disrupts assurance and control. By midcareer he began calling this force counterlife or counterliving, as a way of understanding the capacity—indeed propensity—of individuals and history for defying the plausible and predictable. (As early as 1960, he famously commented that American reality was so outrageous it was even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meager imagination) (RMO 167). One literary manifestation of Roth’s acute feel for the unsettled has been what Saul Bellow once called the sliding focus of his irony: You don’t know when he means you to take him seriously. When you think you’ve got him connected to a position, you find he’s gotten away from you (qtd. Shostak, Philip Roth 269). Bellow was speaking (on a television documentary) of Roth’s most vertiginous novel—Operation Shylock—but his remark applies more broadly—to the provocations of counterlife that Roth imprints on his late work starting on the level of the sentence. Bellow’s remarks bring to mind his own very different understanding of art. As he stated in his Paris Review interview: I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too (Art 67). Stillness is neither the slippery Roth’s strong suit nor interest; and Bellow’s well-known statement about his art helps clarify a difference between two writers and friends who have so often been linked, usually for superficial reasons. Chapters 1 and 5 take up in passing some of their intersections, but I will spend some of the following pages elaborating the instructive differences in how their careers have played out in American culture since the early 1970s.

This era was the pivotal moment when the youth or counterculture, having instigated political tumult, helped radicalize literary taste. It moved, broadly speaking, from realism to an antirealist experimentalism that, unlike earlier high modernism, fed on the energy released by Beat writing of the late fifties and continued blurring boundaries between high and low, art and life, the psychotic and sane.⁴ By 1965 Leslie Fiedler was speaking of the youth culture as testament to the obsolescence of everything our society understands by maturity, including language itself: in their fondness for porno-esthetics and obscenity (in this era Ed Sanders launched Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts) they seek an antilanguage of protest as inevitably as they seek antipoems and antinovels (195, 197). The importing of French literary theory and practice, beginning with Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet in the midsixties, was an additional source of iconoclasm. This ventilation of high culture was felt far and wide and indirectly helped prepare the way for both postmodernism and multiculturalism in the eighties. The event that crystallizes this transitional moment, it now seems clear, was the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. Pynchon’s novel was the Moby-Dick for those of the hip new sensibility coming of age by the middle to late 1960s, and it crowned an already remarkable amount of advanced fiction—by John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Burroughs, William Gaddis,William Gass, John Hawkes, Ishmael Reed, Susan Sontag, among others—that was required reading for the intellectually and politically adventurous. (It is worth noting that by the eighties political correctness and its suspicion of difficult art as ideological heresy drove a wedge between avant-garde literature and the commitment to social justice.)

In a recent essay on this period and the pivotal place of Gravity’s Rainbow, Gerald Howard, a self-described connoisseur of the era’s experimental fiction, makes vivid this realignment of the canon in the early 1970s: "We had, of course, little use for the standard issue Big Names. Bellow had put himself beyond the pale with his churlish Mr. Sammler’s Planet; Cheever and Updike were too suburban; Vidal wrote historical novels with plots , for God’s sake (great essays though). . . .Only two Big Names escaped our scorn—Philip Roth, as a result of all the excellent trouble he had caused with Portnoy, and Mailer, for his omni-directional rage against the machine" (30).⁵

Howard’s sketch sounds right to me and not simply because it tallies with my own period taste. With Mr. Sammler’s contempt for the sixties (a sexual madness was overwhelming the Western world, says the title character, an erudite, melancholy, Holocaust survivor in New York), Bellow did indeed lose credibility with the new sensibility, a rift he welcomed and sought to widen in coming years. With the Nobel Prize in 1976, Bellow’s attainment of high mandarin status was certified. And in the 90s, his biting irreverence about multiculturalism, reflected in his notorious jibe, Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him sealed his reputation for grouchy disengagement (qtd. Atlas 573).

But what of the status of Bellow’s colleague Roth, eighteen years his junior? Portnoy had turned him into a culture hero to the young, but his novels of the seventies, The Breast, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire, made him increasingly unpopular with other branches of that audience—feminists and antirealists.⁶ They came to have as little use for him as the Jewish moralists he had offended as far back as 1959. Roth’s sense of his own status might be glimpsed in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), refracted through Nathan Zuckerman. In the midst of a nervous breakdown in Chicago, he receives a letter from the University of Chicago student paper: The editors wanted to interview him about the future of his kind of fiction in the post-modernist era of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon and attached ten questions. Among them: why do you continue to write? . . . Do you consider yourself part of a rearguard action, in the service of a declining tradition? (686–87).

One answer was The Counterlife, published three years later. It was hailed as a triumph by William H. Gass, a premier theorist and practitioner of experimental fiction. Although the novel upended realist conventions, Roth insisted that the antirealism of The Counterlife was not in the service of a contemporary theory—postmodernism—but of life’s inherent antirealism. In its crafty fabrications, his novel was miming the caprice of reality.⁷ And Roth’s gamesmanship was as old as the genre of the novel itself. Recall again Don Quixote: its second half includes characters who have read the first half and regard the Don as both real and fictive. Having once flaunted a raw immaturity (in Portnoy), now Roth became famous for depicting the interpenetration of the actual and artifice; with the help of his alter ego Zuckerman, he flaunted insouciance about the sanctity of the real. The book after The Counterlife was his memoir The Facts. Starting with the pseudotransparent title, Roth mocks the genre’s special relation to truth by addressing the book to Zuckerman, who replies with an extended critique. So, to stay with the terms from The Anatomy Lesson, Roth was not engaged in a rearguard action, in the service of a declining tradition. He was proving over and over how much power to unsettle, how much audacity, remained both in the genre dedicated to the new—the novel—and in the modernist (Poundian) dictum to make it new. In a display of stunning imaginative vitality he published five ambitious novels in seven years (1993–2000).

The culmination, chronologically and artistically, is The Human Stain; almost at once it was recognized as a major achievement, is widely taught and written about, and, arguably, is as close to a canonical work as Roth had written since Portnoy. Although The Human Stain risks potentially incendiary topics such as racial passing, academic feminism, and sexual relations between a man and woman far apart in age and class, the novel’s politics are in fact not simple or easy to discern: it attacks the "tyranny of propriety and virtue-mongering" on the right and left. This rampant moral didacticism incites resistance—the rudeness and rage that drive The Human Stain (and Sabbath’s Theater , 1995). But Roth’s characters, rather than being left at the mercy of these passions, work through them, turning them, implausibly but persuasively, into the very condition of intimacy and empathy.

The stature of The Human Stain also makes clear that Roth’s career trajectory and his presence in the culture would not follow Bellow’s—the literary titan turned embattled curmudgeon.⁸ Rather than this familiar script, Roth’s would be a career busy inventing new ones. For here is a certified Big Name (to recall Gerald Howard’s term), deep in his fourth decade of work, still capturing and challenging the imagination of the educated reading public—even outraging it. On the way to the National Book Award, Sabbath’s Theater repulsed, among many others, the New York Times daily reviewer. And in 2004 The Plot Against America was a national best-seller. Many read its fantasy of demagoguery triumphant in the land of democracy as an ominous reflection of post-9/11 political malfeasance

Another of his late nineties novels—American Pastoral—explicitly took up the sixties, and some regarded its portrayal of antiwar violence tearing up a family as a turn to the cultural right (a turn that was greeted with dismay or delight according to one’s political beliefs). But, as Louis Menand wrote in a review: if being on the cultural right means having an old-fashioned modernist commitment to high art, Roth has always been on the cultural right (94). I concur, but with these caveats: from our present vantage, Roth’s lasting power tells us something new—that the postmodernist commitment, at least in its more programmatic versions, has proved old-fashioned, while the modernist continually renews itself, responding to the zeitgeist while also excavating the space of world literature.⁹ Roth’s career is sustained by its irreverent attitude toward realism and above all by its capacity to evoke and be carried away by the rhapsody of sensory fullness—art’s primal rhythm and matter.¹⁰

Attuned to the rude and elemental, Roth has kept faith with modernism for most of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond without becoming rearguard or embattled. In truth, such terms as cultural right or left are empty in regard to a writer whose aim—to affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times—is more inclusive than bound to particular contexts and local incitations (Emerson, Essays 267). The pledge to speak rude truth and to make an art of immaturity acquires cutting force from literary and philosophical practices that predate modernism and afford a perennially vital set of aesthetic motives and imperatives. The times are always ripe for tonic rudeness since smugness (often in the guise of religious or rationalist certitude) seems virtually a transhistorical given. Montaigne rose to the occasion, as did William James, Dostoyevsky’s underground man, and Roth’s friend the painter Philip Guston. They, along with a number of others, will appear in chapters 2 and 7.

To affront and affront and affront till there was no one on earth unaffronted: Mickey Sabbath’s sublime ambition and impossible project may be as close to an artistic credo as his creator would care to disclose (ST 198).

Acknowledgments

Roth provokes strong opinions and lively conversations, and I have enjoyed hearing and engaging in a number of both. It has been fun as well seeing him win over some previously suspicious readers. Nancy Ruttenburg, with the zeal of a new convert, was a great interlocutor. Joan Richardson too had a conversion experience and offered excellent suggestions. Rochelle Gurstein, a potential convert, was characteristically gracious, as was Jack Barth, in discussing Philip Guston. Sharon Cameron was in no way a convert but trained her exacting eye on sections of early drafts and much improved them. From longer distances, David Shields, Sara Blair, Susan Glenn,Mary Esteve, and Jessica Burstein all offered useful advice. Stephen Cox, Gregg Crane, George Kateb, Richard Poirier, and Eric Sundquist helped me rethink things with their incisive critiques of various chapters. Emily McKeage carefully read the whole manuscript and made a wealth of subtle comments that invariably improved matters large and small. Richard Isomaki has been a scrupulous copyeditor. Judd Tully introduced me to Philip Guston’s dealer David McKee. I am grateful to all of the above. Also due thanks are Lawrence Buell, Michael T. Gilmore, and Gregg Crane for inviting me to talk about Roth at Harvard, Brandeis, and Michigan respectively. On each occasion I profited from the range and richness of audience responses. Mary Murrell acquired this book for Princeton University Press, and her staunch interest and support made everything easier. Hanne Winarsky has been a worthy successor, and I have much appreciated her commitment and enthusiasm. Earlier versions of some material in chapters 2, 3, and 6 appeared, in different form, in Raritan .Its editor, Jackson Lears, is always a source of sage counsel.

This book, as promised, is for my daughter. As a teenager, she has shared her expertise about a couple of the subjects mentioned in my title and subtitle. But she has also taught me something more. Those who know her will understand my dedication.

Philip Roth’s Rude Truth

1

Introduction: Roth Antagonistes

Decrying the sanitized eulogy he has just heard delivered over the coffin of his friend the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who has suddenly died during heart surgery, an unidentified mourner, bearded and middle-aged, gives an impromptu countereulogy on the sidewalk:

He made it easy for them. Just went in there and died. This is a death we can all feel good about. Not like cancer. . . . The cancer deaths are horrifying. That’s what I would have figured him for. Wouldn’t you? Where was the rawness and the mess? Where was the embarrassment and the shame? Shame in this guy operated always. Here is a writer who broke taboos, fucked around, indiscreet, stepped outside that stuff deliberately, and they bury him like Neil Simon—Simonize our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck! Hegel’s unhappy consciousness out under the guise of sentiment and love! This unsatisfiable, suspect, quarrelsome novelist, this ego driven to its furthest extremes, ups and presents them with a palatable death—and the feeling police, the grammar police, they give him a palatable funeral with all the horseshit and the mythmaking! . . . I can’t get over it. He’s not even going to rot in the ground, this guy who was made for it. This insidious, unregenerate defiler, this irritant in the Jewish bloodstream, making people uncomfortable and angry by looking with a mirror up his own asshole, really despised by a lot of smart people, offensive to every possible lobby, and they put him away, decontaminated, deloused—suddenly he’s Abe Lincoln and Chaim Weizmann in one! Could this be what he wanted, this kosherization, this stenchlessness? I really had him down for cancer, the works. (C 217–19)

Reading this, we know where we are: the outrage, wit, excess, cadence, and above all the voice—the careening, over-the-top verbal intoxication that takes on a lyric life of its own, one of near giddy pleasure in its enraged vulgar onslaught; we are in a Philip Roth novel, in this case The Counterlife . Verbal energy overturns boundaries as Neil Simon consorts with Hegel, Zuckerman invades the collective body—an irritant in the Jewish bloodstream—while turning his own inside out—looking with a mirror up his own asshole—and words are set in motion: the bland laugh machine Neil Simon morphs into a verb—Simonize— that has the impossible task to polish and domesticate our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck,Nathan’s last name now a pungent monosyllable.

If the voice can be torrential and perfervid, it can also, even in its excess, be spare. Here is a vintage moment of the latter mode, a small aria to a man whom Roth calls my kind of Jew: Worldly negativity. Seductive verbosity. Intellectual venery. The hatred. The lying. The distrust. The this-worldliness. The truthfulness. The intelligence. The malice. The comedy. The endurance. The acting. The injury. The impairment (OS 394). The voice is by now unmistakable, as indelible as Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s.

I have quoted the countereulogy for the pleasure of hearing Roth, but also because it can serve as his miniature self-portrait—albeit an inflamed and burlesqued one—which makes immediately vivid his investment in provoking genteel sensibilities, in embodying the unpalatable. Roth’s infamous mocking of bourgeois pieties is crucial to our sense of his literary identity and presence in contemporary culture. In fact, this is to say hardly more than that he is a modern writer; épater le bourgeois is modernism’s reflex. Yet who has made it so fertile a subject, a source of literary history, of comedy and pathos, who has made it more his own than American literature’s bad boy? Portnoy’s Complaint was the first novel to show a Jew going wild in public—the last thing in the world a Jew is supposed to do—and the sheer gusto of Roth’s portrait of a ‘cunt crazy’ masturbator of the respectable classes caused a publishing sensation in 1969, and helped define the era’s raucous impiety (RMO 258, 256). Thanks to its assault on adulthood and restraint, the novel made the words Roth and immaturity seem a natural pairing. But the immaturity of Portnoy’s Complaint—exorbitant, raw, regressive—is only one mode of immaturity, whose subtler incarnations have engaged not only Philip Roth but any number of writers, thinkers, and painters as they all explore less defended ways of being in the world.

As my preface suggests, Milan Kundera is one of Roth’s chief interlocutors in this book, one of the figures whom I set in conversation with a novelist whose cosmopolitanism has for too long been hidden under the familiar rubric of Jewish American. Early on, conventional wisdom cast Roth in the role of the rebellious Jewish son and junior partner, born in Newark in 1933, of the firm Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, and Malamud (Wisse 317). While this grouping is more than the journalistic cliché almost wholly devoid of content Roth dismissed in 1981 (RMO 104), it has by now outlived its initial usefulness. For one thing, Roth’s near half-century career of remarkable, indeed relentless, productivity—since 1959 twenty-two works of fiction and five of nonfiction—has left such early and parochial rubrics in the dustbin of literary history. And he has gone far from home (if only to return in The Plot Against America , which seven-year-old Philip Roth narrates). For thirteen years Roth lived in London half the year; for five years in the seventies he was a regular visitor to Prague, where he took a little crash course in political repression, became close with several writers, including Kundera, and was pivotal in publishing the English translations of some of the leading works of postwar Eastern European literature (RMO 140). Roth’s own books have a large international audience (they have been translated into over thirty languages, and in fall 2004 two were best sellers in France). All of these experiences, including his permanent return to the United States in 1989, which renewed his sense of the country and became a catalyst for his American trilogy (1997–2000), have significantly enlarged and deepened his art.

Roth’s cosmopolitanism has created a body of work that is best understood in an international context—American, European, and Eastern European. The main effort of this book is to construct these overlapping frames of reference, using them as a resource for literary criticism of the fiction, and making vivid Roth’s creative engagement with a rich lineage of intellectual history. Threading together my multiple contexts is the subject of immaturity. As a fertile homegrown resistance to the renunciations required by adulthood, immaturity began to appear as such in the American renaissance of the mid–nineteenth century as part of romanticism’s celebration of the child and of spontaneity.¹ This open, unguarded sensibility, earlier discounted by Enlightenment scientism and rationalism but in touch with Renaissance humanism, would come to inspire one current of international modernism, including the work of a number of European and Eastern European novelists and thinkers. While the separate branches of this romantic and modernist lineage are well known, their convergence upon the subject of immaturity and in the work of a single capacious novelist remains to be explored.

By redescribing this distinct current in modern thought, I hope to enlarge and clarify our understanding of a writer confined for too long to rather befuddled received opinion that sees him (and his narrators) as uneasily poised between the bourgeois Jewish family that hemmed him in and the Christian cold shoulder that nudged him out . . . it was never clear where he thought he belonged or to what he owed allegiance (Wisse 318). This response, with its trace of exasperation at Roth’s elusiveness, is a perennial one to the cosmopolitan evasion of fixed identity.²

Roth is actively defying the trajectory of most major twentieth-century American novelists, whether earlier figures such as Faulkner and Hemingway or his original cohort of Bellow, Mailer, Malamud. Critics generally agree that the later work of all these writers marks a falling off from their prime. But the preponderance of major novels in Roth’s career, by my estimate, leans toward the later decades: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), The Counterlife (1986), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and The Human Stain (2000) comprise the first rank, closely followed by The Ghost Writer (1979), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), Operation Shylock (1993), American Pastoral (1997), and The Dying Animal (2001). In Roth’s surge in the nineties and into the next century, with The Plot Against America (2004) and Everyman (2006), he has published eleven books, nine of which were novels, and five of which were distinguished works. This is unprecedented in American letters of the twentieth century. Late Roth is now beginning to deserve comparison with what is usually regarded as the summit of late turns of novelistic genius—Henry James’s major phase at the start of the century.

It is tempting to see the sketch above as charting a triumphal march from Jewish Newark to the WASP throne of literary greatness—a hymn to cultural assimilation by a gradual sacrifice or bleaching out of ethnicity. Indeed, Roth has said of his Jewish cohort, each of us found his own means of transcending the immediate parochialism of his Jewish background (RMO 108). In fact, Roth’s own means of transcendence was not the familiar route of assimilation hinted at above but rather something closer to its opposite—what I will be calling appropriation, a word borrowed from Emerson, who borrowed it from Goethe, and a word also crucial to Ralph Ellison, who understood all of culture as an appropriation game (Collected 511). A writer Roth much admires, Ellison, in using the term, builds upon the thinking of a mentor, the philosopher Alain Locke, and upon W.E.B. DuBois. Henry James, another Roth favorite, also figures here, for without using the word appropriation he makes vivid the spirit of its practice when he says to be an American is a great preparation for culture . . . we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own, can pick and choose and . . .claim our property wherever we find it (Letters 1:77). To rewrite assimilation as appropriation banishes the whole melodrama of assimilation whereby the outsider is required to cast off old (ethnic) ways for new and submit to a culture assumed to possess a stable, homogenous identity; this sacrificial process affirms a hierarchy of insider/outsider, native/ alien grounded in blood and origin.³

By contrast, all that appropriation requires is a good library. It houses what DuBois famously called the kingdom of culture where the color line of Jim Crow America does not obtain. I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not, as DuBois memorably noted in 1903 (365). Aesthetic bliss escapes, however temporarily, the long arm of history. The formulation tentatively floated above—Roth’s career as the triumphal march to WASP literary greatness—is deflated when we recall the importance of the Newark Public Library for the young Philip Roth. Raised in a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood, in a house that contained few books, Roth treasured the library as the arena for claiming his public property. He begins his career in effect by honoring this kingdom and its importance as a haven for ethnic and racial outsiders. Goodbye, Columbus is partly about a lower-middle-class Jewish librarian in Newark’s grand public library and a poor black boy who haunts the place and is in love with Gauguin’s paintings. The librarian briefly befriends the boy, helps him gain access to the art books, and urges him to get a library card. The story ends with the librarian, after a bitter breakup with a girl from a wealthy Jewish family, staring into another library, observing a wall of books needing to be shelved. The kingdom of culture, free of racial and class barriers, beckons him back to a life among books.

One of the objects in the public domain Roth appropriated was Henry James. Roth tell us in his memoir The Facts that The Portrait of a Lady "had been a virtual handbook during the early drafts of Letting Go," his first novel (157). Far from concealing this inspiration, Roth builds it into the plot: his Jewish graduate student protagonist is writing a dissertation on James. So perhaps I was too hasty in having discarded my prior formulation; let me amend it: one of the reasons Philip Roth acquires James’s mantle is not because of an act of cultural passing in which Roth appears in WASP-face, but rather because Roth’s literary sensibility is distinctly cosmopolitan in James’s appropriative sense.

Greek for world citizen, cosmopolitan is rarely a neutral term and often pejorative because it usually involves a refusal to revere local or national authority and a desire to uphold multiple affiliations. In an academic culture obsessed by identity, the cosmopolitan has the distinction of being grounded instead in the practice of appropriation: insouciance regarding claims of ownership and the drawing of boundaries becomes the basis of a cosmopolitan relation to culture. To achieve it liberates culture from the proprietary grip of a single group; possessiveness—of the dismal and familiar jazz is a black thing, Shakespeare a white sort—is set aside for sampling, fixity for mobility. Cosmopolites refuse to know their place. And cosmopolitanism, which challenges the sense of entitlement to cultural riches assumed to repose in privileged birth or inheritance, is, in theory at least, what democratic America embodies.⁴ Recall that James said to be an American is a great preparation for culture. Here is Ellison’s version, from his famous evocation at the start of Shadow and Act of his freewheeling Oklahoma youth in the 1920s. The state’s blacks were often charged by exasperated white Texans with ‘not knowing their place,’ and Ellison and his friends proved them right (Collected 50). As self-styled renaissance men, he and his friends sampled literature, art, and music high and low; we were ‘boys,’ members of a wild, free, outlaw tribe which transcended the category of race. Rather we were Americans (52). Here is Roth’s version: I would think that much of the exuberance with which I and others of my generation of Jewish children seized our opportunities after the war—that wonderful feeling that one was entitled to no less than anyone else, that one could do anything and could be excluded from nothing—came from our belief in the boundlessness of the democracy in which we lived and to which we belonged (F 123).

Belonging, then, does not conflict with this sense of cosmopolitanism as appropriation; indeed Roth is a great regionalist, the laureate of New Jersey who has made his old Newark neighborhoods a living presence in many of his books. He has said that the great American writers are regionalists. It’s in the American grain (qtd. Alvarez