When the news-readers announced on Wednesday morning that “the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth has died”, it reinforced the incompleteness that has hung in the cultural firmament for decades.
Even allowing for the Pulitzer’s high prestige, the announcers should — certainly by the time of Roth’s death — have been talking about “the Nobel Prize-winning author Philip Roth” but he was pointedly ignored while more than a few lesser writers were deemed by the Nobel committee’s judges of literature to have merited its supreme accolade.
As it is, we have now lost the last member of the pantheon of mid-20th-century American Jewish writers — Singer, Bellow, Malamud, Heller, Mailer — in which modern fiction was so vigorously reshaped.
Philip Roth was born 85 years ago in Newark, New Jersey, as any readers of his work will know only too well; it irresistibly pervades his writing. As does Jewishness, which, in his early work in the 1950s and ’60s— notably the novella, Goodbye Columbus, and the rollicking, onanistic Portnoy’s Complaint — attracted disgust and diatribe from some afflicted by that unfortunate malaise among our people that causes sufferers to approach Jewish fiction, non-fiction — and even journalism — with a near-pathological need to be scandalised. One symptom of this condition is the reliance upon such phrases as “washing dirty linen in public” and, of course, “self-hating Jew”.
On the evidence of his writing, Roth could be better described as a self-scrutinising Jew. He regularly employs alter-egos and thinly described versions of himself, not necessarily reflecting his public image. In Operation Shylock, there are two Philip Roths, I and II. Elsewhere, the Rothian Nathan Zuckerman appears in several novels wearing his creator’s clothes.
Aside from the Nobel, Roth did win a number of prizes, including the International Man Booker in 2011. This — and the Pulitzer — was for American Pastoral, a brilliant, colossal piece of work but one for which accusations of misogyny were levelled at him. And certainly, the female characters are not exactly bearers of sweetness and light.
The wife of the hero, Seymour “Swede” Levov, has an affair with a man she affects to despise, Swede’s own mistress is a woman of “nonsensical calm, ridiculous self-control”, another is a drunken hag.
Above all, there is Rita Cohen, a well-brought-up Jewish kid turned sneering, taunting revolutionary. In a key scene, Roth’s portrayal of her evokes, as some of the best, psychologically adept male writers have done throughout the centuries, the deep-seated masculine fear of female sexuality. Probably, its most powerful literary example is to be found — where else? — in Shakespeare. In King Lear, the aged, monarch, now mad, rages: “Down from the waist they are centaurs/ Though women all above:/ But to the girdle do the gods inherit/ Beneath is all the fiends’: there’s hell, there’s darkness,/ There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption…”
In American Pastoral, it is Rita herself, in a sudden, shocking gesture, who, pointing “beneath the girdle” says to Swede: “It’s a jungle down there… The swamp. It sucks you in. Smell it …”
In 2004, Roth wrote the counterfactual novel, The Plot Against America, in which he imagines the antisemitic, Hitler-admiring, aviator and proponent of an “America First” policy —whose name was sombrely cited by some commentators in their coverage of Donald Trump’s election campaign — being elected US president in 1940, and signing a pact with the Nazis. Roth posits the effect upon American Jews, including his own family.
Philip Roth’s output is large, 30 or more novels and several stories, varied in length and theme, and is generally genre-defying with a range of characters encompassing Mickey Sabbath, a one-time puppeteer, in Sabbath’s Theater, to the Nathan Zuckerman of My Life as a Man, in 1974, to that in Exit Ghost in 2007. But always at the heart of his work lay Roth the writer, too intelligent to be dismissed as a misogynist, and too Jewish to be defamed as self-hating. Mind you, that doesn’t mean he espoused a fellowship with all Jews, given his admission that he regarded religious people as “hideous” and religion as “a big lie”.
But he was a great writer, whose work fulfilled his belief in the high artistic and philosophical potential of the novel.
