← New Books Network
New Books Network
An Evening with Philip Roth: A Conversation with Bernard Avishai, Igor Webb, and Steven Zipperstein
01:07:03
Loading summary
Transcript32 lines
- [00:01]
Jonathan Brent
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:06]
Philip Roth
When I.
- [00:08]
Bernie Avishai
When I first met Philip Roth About 30 years ago, we were talking about something. All I remember is the last thing he said, which was something on the order of do the preparation, then just let it rip. And so we're going to just let it rip right now. I'm Jonathan Brent. I'm executive director of the EVO Institute, and I welcome everybody here this evening. I think it's going to be a truly exceptional evening, culminating in Philip Roth's reading a segment from Nemesis. I want to thank Philip for agreeing to participate in this panel. It's a great honor to Ivo that he does so, and it gives us a chance to talk publicly about some of the most important features of what I regard as one of his truly finest works that has not really been talked about, it seems to me, either with great depth or clarity, even in most of the press that this fine novel, novel Nemesis, has gotten. But I also want to congratulate Philip on the Booker Prize, which. Which, when. When I called this morning to congratulate him, he said, is it really important? I think it is. Without Suzanne Leon, assistant director of yivo, this evening simply would not have happened. And I don't need to say anything more. Alex Brandwein, Suzanne's terrific assistant, was responsible for designing and producing the programs, keeping track of reservations, helping in all details. And I wish also to thank Ella Levine, director of development, for her expertise in thinking through many of the details of tonight's program. By virtue of his range, his sheer prolific energy, the moral passion of his imagination, and his consummate artistic power, Philip Roth is, in my opinion, the master of American literature today. His endless inventions of the self in the modern world have connected and reconnected American and Jewish literature with their deepest and most fructifying sources in language, history, and the spirit of the Western imagination. In my view, he stands alone, not just here in America, but abroad, as the greatest literary mind and talent of our time. So it is indeed an honor for him to come to yivo. The YIVO Institute, which is the acronym for the Jewish Research Institute, was conceived over a long period of gestation in the intellectual ferment of east and Central European Jews at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, a ferment that brought to general awareness a startling fact. Although Jews had inhabited the land of Eastern Europe for some 1000 years, the civilization they had constructed, the language they had invented, the literature, art, music, folk tales, their legal and philosophical thinking, social customs and political ambitions had never been the object of serious study as something of value in in itself. Anywhere it wasn't studied, it wasn't known. It may seem paradoxical, but the YIVO Institute was one of the first significant monuments to the Jewish people's awareness of its complicated selfhood in the modern world. Obviously, Jewish religious continuity is one of the guiding threads of the Jewish religious tradition, from Abraham to the baal, Shem Tov and beyond. But the thought that the Jews of Eastern Europe had another kind of self, one that fully participates in modern secular society, and that this self had produced a distinct and uniquely vivid secular civilization was something little noted or reflected upon. The Yiddish language, for instance, was disparaged by Jews and Gentiles alike as a mere dialect, a bastard language. Today things are quite different to a great extent, owing to the efforts of the founders of the Evo Institute, which was conceived in Berlin in 1925, but given birth in Vilna, Poland later that same year. Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein were honorary board members. And over its 85 year history, YIVO has built one of the great libraries of the world and the largest archive of primary documents on any continent. Some 23 million objects devoted to East European Jewish civilization. All the languages of Europe and Russia, including Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino are represented. Max Weinreich, one of YIVO's founders and director of YIVO for many years, stated the aim of YIVO succinctly when he wrote that the purpose of YIVO is to study the position of the Jew in the modern world. Today, YIVO's mission remains essentially the same. By studying how Jews came to be, what they are as people as well as a people, perhaps it will be possible to understand what they are and what this extraordinary culture has created. A culture, I might add, whose visible manifestations were destroyed by the Nazis and their collaborators, but whose invisible influences continue to inform and shape the modern world. In Nemesis, Mr. Roth has written a deeply Proustian narrative of remembrance and loss in which the invisible power of the past takes its vengeance upon a 5 foot 4 inch, short sighted, earnest, physically powerful young man of limited imagination, but innocent and good intentions, thus proving that the work of Ivo is not yet over. And so with that, I want to introduce our panel who will come up on the stage and we will give 7 to 10, 11 minute talks. We will then talk among ourselves. We will take questions from the audience. Philip will then come up and read. And so please join me. Let's see, Steve, Igor, Bernie, myself. No, actually, yeah, you should be there. I'll be so the first is the biographies of everybody are in your program, so I don't need to go over them, I don't think. But Bernie Avishai, myself, Jonathan Brent, Igor Webb and Steve Zipperstein, and I hope you enjoy the discussion.
- [07:08]
Jonathan Brent
When Jonathan was talking about the Jewish people, I remember Philip once saying that Jews are members of the human race. Worse than that, I cannot say about them. It's a great pleasure to be here to celebrate Philip Roth. What is the right thing to do? What is the good? And does doing it, if indeed we can know it, bring happiness? These questions are not exactly new. They're also not exactly bad. Nemesis raises them rather more starkly and elegantly than other books Philip Roth has written. Nemesis also adds little twists. Aristotle never quite got to first. What if we know that the man striving for the good has a peculiar psychological tick, which is a strong, perhaps hubristic desire to prove himself dutiful, morally better than average, or at least, you know, never disgraced by moral cowardice. In short, to be thought good. How, if at all, would such a propensity impinge on our sense of a moral action? What would such a person sound like? Well, actually, we know what he might sound like. A little like Sophie Portnoy saying, I know it's a fault, Alex, I know it's a fault, but I'm too good. Second, what if the man in question can be known only indirectly, since everything we learn about him is from a story told by a now skeptical former acolyte? How can we judge him if we can't quite judge the facts? Or, as Roth might say, quote the facts? Many have understandably compared Nemesis to Camus the Plague. But the book that I think better anticipates Roth's Parable of a Novel is the little ignored Parable of a Novel by Arthur Kessler, published in 1943. He called it Arrival and Departure. The story features a young protagonist by the name of Slavic, a student leader from Eastern Europe, we assume Hungary, who escapes the local fascists after they had tortured him brutally. While the Nazis are rolling over Europe, he comes eventually to a country called Neutralia, we assume Portugal, the way station Kessler himself had escaped to. He falls in love with the fetching Odette, who gives him a bliss he had never known. Miraculously, the couple is offered safe passage to America. But Slavic is also given the opportunity to join the British Army. What to do? Slavic finds himself so torn between, on the one hand, assuming the share of his responsibility for fighting the Nazis and, on the other, escaping. Escaping into some private American contentment, that he suffers hysterical paralysis of the leg. You can almost hear, as time goes by between the lines. But then the novel turns on a Kesslerian hinge. Slavic presents himself to a psychoanalyst for treatment. He finds out on her couch that his outsized desire to fight injustice, which helped lead to his arrest back home, has been largely fueled by a neurotic impulse to self sacrifice, even to moral grandiosity. And this, so they find out, is derived from irrational guilt over the accidental death of his brother many years before. Of course, Slavic would want to fight the evil. That's his psychic disposition. What then, should he do now, in record time? The therapy is a contrivance of the plot, after all, Slavic is emancipated from the vice of this guilt. His leg recovers. But what emancipation is really possible from this terrible conundrum? Can knowing the tortured source of one's moralism, knowing one's compulsion to seem the champion, knowing that one has a messiah complex, as it were, help one decide what. What should Slavic do? Go to America or join the British army? Kessler, it turns out, is not all that ambivalent. Slavic chooses the army, the fight against the Nazis. Knowing what is understandable is not the same as knowing what is right and right. And here we see. Kessler's explicit admiration for Kant cannot be grounded in knowing only material facts, historical contingencies, universal pleasures, or psychoanalytic traumas. Some imperatives are, shall we say, categorical. The need to see others as ends in themselves, even when you are desp, even when you desperately want them to be your means. The need to do what you cannot, ask others to do if you will not. Indeed, or so Slavic concludes, it is purely materialist, including psychoanalytic explanations for human will, that are the real problem of our age. Well before Camus the rebel, Kessler attributes to Slavic what might be called an existentialist faith, the presumption that there is a mysterious dignity to being here that is proven, if by nothing else than by our recalcitrance, that matter matters, that moral perceptions may be relative. But this only makes the imperative of reciprocity absolute. Slavic, writes Odette, a farewell. I'll tell you my belief, Odette. I think a new God is about to be bor. For we are the descendants of Renaissance man of materialism's cult, the end and not the beginning. Slavic might well have paraphrased Ivan Karamazov. If God is dead, then all actions are understandable. Which brings me to nemesis. It is 1944 Newark, there is a polio epidemic. Bucky Cantor, 23, 4F, precocious, sees his buddies going off to do what Slavic had determined to do. At first, he stays on the job, devoted, coaching his febrile, vulnerable boys in the city. And here is the greatest parallel with camus the plague. Mr. Cantor is sticking to his post, just like Dr. Rieux. And also like Rieux, his wards start dying. Bucky's girlfriend, Marsha, is at a distant summer camp and urges him to join her. A prelude to engagement and the embrace of her loving family. He refuses. But something happens in what seems the spur of the moment decision. An effort to be happy as Americans are happy. A reluctant concession that all are victims of an epidemic no one controls or is responsible for. Bucky does join her. Dr. Rieux tells us that we don't need heroism to fight the plague, only common decency. Bucky's disappointed boss, by the way, seems to feel the same way. But the wrong thing in Rieu's case, actually and metaphorically, was pretty obvious. Fighting the plague or, you know, fighting a plague or Nazi occupation. It is not so clear what good Bucky does. And Ryu's notion of common decency takes for granted uncommon valor. Should this be expected of Bucky, anyway? Bucky and Marcia Reunet, reunited at the summer camp. Make love tenderly, as we wanted Warren Beatty to make love to Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass. Another departure for Philip Roth, perhaps. Yet Bucky soon regrets his decision to come up to the camp. It now seems to him a sign of weakness, surrender. He is racked with guilt for having left his post. He determines he will return, whatever the dangers. He doesn't know yet that the job actually had been terminated. Nor can we know if this determination is not just a kind of arrogance. For Roth has given us a convincing sketch of Bucky's psyche. And the picture is mixed. His childhood unhappiness, his physical insecurities, his family's chaos, his impulse to overcompensate for being at home while his buddies were overseas. His comparative sexual squareness. Could all of this not lead to an exaggerated sense of duty? And now comes the big blow of fate. Tragically, Bucky discovers a few days later that he is himself the silent carrier infecting his Newark boys, that he would soon succumb himself to the disease. Ironically, in abandoning his job and fleeing nemesis, he actually may have saved some boys, at least in Newark, though he wound up infecting various children at the camp. Now comes the real moral problem, too, because Bucky Recovers somewhat. Though his marvelous body is ravaged, he refuses even to see Marsha holding fast to his seclusion. Finally, reluctantly, Bucky allows a visit. She begs him to marry as planned. What should he do? She loves him, no doubt, or at least the man he was. Now it is she who's determined to do the right thing. Care for him, cherish him, presumably enjoy his company. Though we never get the idea Bucky was a spectacular conversationalist. Is Marcia too prone to an exaggerated sense of duty? Should Bucky marry her, knowing he could
- [16:40]
Steve Zipperstein
never give her what he will get from her?
- [16:43]
Jonathan Brent
Bucky, much like Slavic I'm not at all sure, like Dr. Rieux, chooses to break off the engagement. He concludes that it is right to do so. Roth adds another ball to this juggling. He gives us a not disinterested narrator to tell Bucky's story. The once admiring younger Arnie, who, having recovered from polio himself, cannot really forgive Bucky for not getting on with his life as he, Arnie, had done. In spite of polio, Arnie had become a husband and father and a nice touch, an architect making ramps and such for invalids. He thinks Bucky was more or less nuts not to marry. Marcia Rolf depicts most people around Bucky sharing this view. And is Arnie wrong? What to ask Kant's crucial question, if everybody did that well, would that really be so bad? Some, like JM Kutsia, in a wonderful review in the New York Review, suggest that Bucky is not simply punishing himself for leaving his job, but aiming for a kind of tragic distinction that Arnie, and by implication, I suppose, ordinary Americans, do not readily appreciate. The good man, the Homeric hero, rejects the very concept of chance. In accepting the punishment of the Furies, Bucky determines to see life as meaningful, serious. What Arnie is unwilling to see, or at least unwilling to respect, is first the force of Bucky's why and then the nature of Bucky's no we, which, pigheaded, self defeating and absurd though it may be, nevertheless keeps an ideal of human dignity alive in the face of fate. Nemesis, the gods God Coetzia is on to something. But Roth, I think, is implying a different and if possible, even more heroic conception of dignity and nemesis than what Coetzee suggests here. And here we see the parallel with Kessler. Bucky is not rejecting being a victim of chance, nor is he punishing himself in order to valorize some, quote, mysterious design. Rather, he rejects living as a victim, period. For this move, you cannot simply acknowledge fate, nemesis, the gods, God, all of which imply some kind of order behind events. You need Slavic's lonely faith in the meaningfulness of things in the absence of design, a dignity that is mysterious in its humility. Bucky, you see, is getting on with his life, for life to him means exercising his powers, or what is left of them, not surrendering to those of the gods. Perhaps he does condemn himself for leaving his post, but that was in the past. Now he could not stand the thought of living his life as a burden on Marsha or anybody. Yes, a man like Bucky would think like that, and such morally stubborn people as Katsia suggests actually can be dangerous. But so what? The residual problem is whether it is right to live as a burden on what should be a partnership. Look, bucky tells Arnie with a kind of magisterial poise, Marcia was a sweet, naive, well brought up girl with kindly, responsible parents who had taught her and her sisters to be polite and obliging. She was a young new first grade teacher, wet behind the ears, a slip of a thing, inches shorter even than me. It didn't help her being more intelligent than me. She still didn't have any idea how to get out of her mess. So I did it for her. I did what had to be done. Earlier, Bucky had told Arnie, whatever was done was done. Whatever I did, I did. What I don't have, I live without. The key, I think, is the weight of the word I. What I don't have, I live without. Nietzsche could not have pronounced the I more proudly or beautifully. And we all go the way of Bucky, do we not, contemplating the diminution of our powers, sickened by the prospect of becoming a burden, actually sickened by the prospect of no longer being ourselves. Roth has always spoken to that hyper precious moment when the child has gone into eclipse and the adult pleasure of autonomy. Bodies, risk, power and its surprising allies, aggression, pitilessness, moral courage, present themselves. We may have nothing but working fictions about one another, as Arnie has of Bucky, Marcia of Bucky, Bucky of himself, and wrath of us. But if happiness is possible, is it not in feeling the power of one's own judgments of feeling the power of action? In spite of serial misjudgments, happiness is not in accumulating means to future goods or becoming a sung hero. Happiness means struggling. Like Neil Klugman, Alex Portnoy, Peter Tarnopol, Nathan Zuckerman, and Mickey Sabbath, Bucky Cantor remains autonomous. He is perhaps the capstone of a life's work that demonstrated to Americans how little a work our lives are fated to be.
- [22:11]
Bernie Avishai
I'm delighted to see there's going to be disagreement on our panel. Not serious, but I want to pick up in my talk about Nemesis what I said earlier in quoting Max Weinreich concerning trying to understand the position of the Jew in the modern world, because I think there's an interesting aspect to this, not only in Nemesis, but in much of Roth's work, obviously, because although he treats Jews as if they weren't Jews most of the time, that is, as normal human beings, his novels are nevertheless about Jews. And so understanding the position of the Jew in the modern world, as Max Weinreich put it, requires more than consideration of Jews in their milieu as Jews, that is, as Jews faithfully following or angrily repudiating the prescriptions of their religious traditions. That is only half the story. And these traditions never occupy the narrative or moral center of a Roth novel. Instead, Roth treats Jews not as Jews, but as individuals, free or not, determined or not, be set or not, by particular circumstances and the general conditions of life in America. Let me quote from the first paragraph of Nemesis, the first case of polio. That summer came early in June, right after Memorial Day, in a poor Italian neighborhood, crosstown from where we lived over in the city, southwestern corner, in the Jewish Wikuic section.
- [23:43]
Philip Roth
We.
- [23:44]
Bernie Avishai
We heard nothing about it, nor did we hear anything about the next dozen cases scattered singly throughout Newark in nearly every neighborhood but ours. The Jewish Wyquaic section of Newark is one of many neighborhoods, and the Jewish destinies that will be enacted there will be, among many others, the Jewishness of Bucky Cantor, the novel's protagonist, is not merely incidental, nor is it at the center of awareness of the novel. It is the subject of a double focus and renders the novel's perspective very typical of the consciousness of much American Jewish life in general, an insularity with distinct boundaries that is nevertheless part of an eagerly embraced American collective. Most often it is an invisible factor in the lives of Roth's characters, and is so a nemesis, for the most part, until Bucky is confronted by the antisemitism of the Italian hooligans who spit on the sidewalk bordering the Chancellor playground, or by that of the Irishman who runs the playground and tells Bucky, all right, you got an answer for everything, you Jewish boys, You got answer. You got all the answers. The very invisibility of Bucky's Jewishness, however, makes it an essential part of the story. Many other things are invisible in this novel, though with visible Consequences. And it is not too much to say that the unseen menaces every aspect of Bucky Cantor's life, from the infection of the dreaded polio virus to the disappearance of his crooked father, extending to the fact that he does not bear a proper last name, as though someone had simply erased that essential component of his identity. Cantor is his mother's name, not his father's, and we never learn what his father's last name was. The unseen asserts itself in other ways as well. Dr. Steinberg, the kindly father of Bucky's bride to be, possesses a nose that was his most distinctive feature, a nose out of a folktale, a sort of sizable, convoluted, intricately turned nose that for many centuries confronted though they have been by every imaginable hardship, the Jews had never stopped making. Of course, what asserts its stubborn power in the shape of Dr. Steinberg's nose are his genes, those tiny, invisible determinants of our outward being. Bucky's given first name is in fact, Eugene, a sly Rothian joke played upon his unsuspecting character, in which the power of the invisible is embedded in his very name. But there is another unseen presence ruling the narrative, and that is the identity of Arnie Meznikoff, one of Bucky Cantor's boys on the Chancellor playground, a polio victim who, it turns out, has written the entire story, a fact not revealed until the very end. Bucky Cantor, we realize, is largely, if not entirely, the work of Arnie Mezdikoff's imagination, as was the entire polio epidemic of 1944, which, in an interview, Mr. Roth has said never happened. Meznikov calls him Mr. Cantor throughout the novel. It's a sign of respect, but it could mean something else as well. Who is Mr. Cantor? And who is Arnie Meznikov? Arnie tells us that after contracting polio, he was confined to a wheelchair for a year. Eventually, he could walk with a crutch and cane and his two legs braced. He served as an apprentice with an architectural firm in Newark, and then with another polio victim, starting a consulting and contracting firm specializing in architectural modification for wheelchair accessibility. We do our best to keep our estimates, to keep to our estimates, and to hold prices down. A contracting firm, indeed. The very pun begins to give his identity away, as all the boys have contracted polio. Slowly, he tells Mr. Cantor, polio ceased to be the only drama, and I got weaned away from railing at my fate. My wife's been a tender, laughing Companion for 18 years and having children to father. You begin to forget the hand you've been dealt with. Arnie is the one who forgets. Mr. Kantor, in his rejection of his beautiful and bounteous Marcia is the one who does not forget. Arnie is the one who wants but quote, the tiniest thing in the world to be like everyone else. Just as Marsha had desired nothing more than to be just an ordinary girl who wants to be happy, Mr. Cantor refuses this comfort. Just an ordinary girl, the tiniest thing in the world. Is it asking so much to be normal like everyone else? To be happy? Marsha even tells Mr. Cantor that he has the duty to be happy. But Mr. Cantor believes his duty lies elsewhere. It is to set her free from his crippled body. And so he hides. He hides his withered arm and leg from the world. He hides from Dr. Steinberg when he comes to find him at the gas station. He hides behind his new mustache. His face itself hides behind the layers of fat that have accumulated over the years. But what else does he hide? When Marsha first tells him to leave his job and come to Indian Hill camp to be with her, he objects that he can't leave his job. When she persists, he tells her that he can't leave his boys. To further protest, he says he can't leave his grandmother. And finally he declares, I can't leave Newark. Not at a time like this. A time like this, when the city is in the grip of a plague he didn't cause and cannot cure, when his boy's fates are demonstrably not in his hands, when in fact he has no role whatsoever in the unfolding of the events, once his playground is closed by the city government. What is Mr. Cantor hiding? Could it be the heroic self ideal infused in him, by which he was himself infected by his grandfather? The ideal of manhood that infected him through his grandfather who had immigrated from Polish Galicia, quote, whose fearlessness had been learned in the Newark streets. A grandfather who proved that though the world had tried, it could not crush him. What moral iron lung can keep you breathing after having assimilated the contagion of that ideal? When Mr. Cantor advances on the rat in his grandfather's grocery store and destroys it with his shovel, he is already bound in the braces and leans on the crutches of his grandfather's powerful example. Arnie invents Mr. Cantor as his anti self, his Mr. Hyde. To Arnie's Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Cantor is the hidden, though he is all Hyde, all body, a powerful, compact physical presence. He is the paradox of the invisible, the Rage. Arnie has forgotten the absolute force of the past that destroys tenderness, the uncompromising voice of centuries of suffering and truth seeking, that is not interested in forgetting the hand you've been dealt or keeping to our estimates and holding prices down. He is that within which passeth show and breaks the normal world to pieces. Arnie must invent him because he cannot be him. The moral choice in Nemesis is not between Arnie's compromising normality and happiness and Mr. Cantor's hidden rage and withered self. The novel does not present the reader with a choice at all. Rather, the novel is an awakening in the reader that the one reality is inextricably bound up with the other. As Ahab was with the white whale, as Dr. Jekyll was with Mr. Hyde, Melville wrote about the whale's whiteness. Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the white depths of the milky way? And Mr. Cantor leaves Arnie with the thought, let's hope their merciful God will have blessed them before he sticks his shiv in their back. There is no escape in Philip Roth's vision of nemesis from the stab from behind or the shiv in the back. Arnie knows this but cannot speak it.
- [32:07]
Philip Roth
Why?
- [32:09]
Bernie Avishai
Because of his wife's tenderness, his children's love, his desire to hold prices down, all the outward, normal, decent things one should want and have. Mr. Cantor himself knows this when he quiets the frustrated and panicked parents by telling them at the playground that, quote, the important thing is to keep everything in the boys lives as normal as possible and to stay reasonable and calm. Mr. Cantor is the unspeakable self. Arnie can only imagine. The terms of his moral struggle are not that his uncompromising conscience condemns him for doing something he shouldn't do despite ignorance or desire. Nor is he the Marquis de sade of the ID. Mr. Cantor believes in decency, in the moral life. He wants them above all things. Nor does Mr. Cantor resemble Oedipus, to whom he has been compared in some reviews. He does not in fact murder his father or sleep with his mother or bring the plague down on the city. He only imagines that he does. His conscience condemns him not for doing something he shouldn't do, but for doing something he should. Arnie says that Mr. Cantor no longer has a conscience he can live with, and this is true, but not because it is a bad conscience, but because it is an invented one, one with which he has been infected by time and circumstance, by history, and by the imagination of who he is. It is his imagination of himself that traps him and will never let him go. He cannot free himself from his own creation, his own self creation. The power of imagination is what gives his Nemesis its avenging cruelty. And this is why Mr. Cantor is and will always remain in the novel's last word, invincible.
- [34:03]
Igor Webb
Since noses have been introduced to the conversation, I hope you're enjoying our noses. I've organized my talk around four questions.
- [34:12]
Bernie Avishai
1.
- [34:13]
Igor Webb
How does nemesis fit into the body of Philip Roth's work? Roth has gone a long way towards answering this question. On the page preceding the title page of Nemesis, he lays out a neat Linnaean classification of his many novels. At the top are listed the Zuckerman books, beginning with his great novella the Ghost Rider and ending with a Human Stainless Steel and Exit Ghost. And towards the bottom is a new grouping now titled Nemeses in the Plural and including Everyman, the Humbling and of course Nemesis. There's a kind of reversal of thematic focus in Roth's classification system as you go from top to bottom. At the top are the books about the frequently extremely funny quarrel between the second and first generations, books about choice and radical autonomy, and in the Everything Goes US of A. But starting with American Pastoral, increasingly you come across books about living out what you don't and can't choose. The books visited by Nemesis. Roth emphasizes this shift by giving the Human Stain, for example, an epigraph from Oedipus the King, and now classifying his recent works under the name of the most vengeful Greek goddess, a merciless and implacable enemy of human choice. I should say a word more about Roth's generations. In one of those odd coincidences, it happens that a student in one of the first classes I ever taught freshman English at Stanford was Jonas Salk's youngest son. He was a good looking, serious and very able boy. His father, the famous scientist who also in 1970 married Picasso's ex mistress Francoise Gillot. His father was a poor boy from the Bronx and went to City College. Jonas father Daniel was an uneducated garment worker of Russian Jewish stock. The three Sauk generations nicely represent the world of Roth's fiction, albeit that Roth's people come from Newark and not the Bronx, and even more specifically seem all to have been bred on the Chancellor street playground. The older New York generation is a daunting model of upstanding responsibility, men and women without much education, but plenty of energy and perseverance and most of all, unreflective certainty about how to live. Roth's second generation is suckled equally on matzo ball soup and the acid free paper of the great books. And soon enough, these men find themselves in the world capital of hanky panky across the Hudson, where, reveling in a carnival of existential choice, they cast wistful glances back at the place of origin on Chancellor Street. The third generation is the generation of observers, sometimes taking the role of narrators like Arnie in Nemesis. Which brings me to question 2. How does nemesis reflect the plague narratives? Bernie Avishaw has already alluded to Camus novel, but for me the key book, a very Rothian book, is Boccaccio's Decameron. Here are a few quotations from Boccaccio's account of the plague in 14th century Florence. Some say that it descended upon the human race through the influence of the heavenly bodies. Others, that it was a punishment signifying God's righteous anger at our iniquitous way of life in the face of its onrush, all the wisdom and ingenuity of man were unavailing. Large numbers of men and women abandoned their city and headed for the countryside. It was as though they had imagined that the wrath of God would only be aroused against those who found themselves within the city walls. Of the people who held these various opinions on how to avoid the plague, not all of them died, nor did they all survive. Question 3 what should Bucky have done? Bucky is a shortish, extremely myopic, superbly athletic man of 23, as we know, earnest, reliable, diligent and effectively an orphan raised by his maternal grandfather. To understand that a man's every endeavor was imbued with responsibility, he tries, in an almost pedantic way to learn where, under the circumstances, his responsibility lies. What should guide him? Where is he to find answers to the questions asked of him by Mr. Michaels, the father of the first boy from the playground to die of polio? Where is the sense in life? Where are the scales of justice? Why does tragedy always strike down the people who least deserve it? To each of these questions, Bucky responds, I don't know the answer, but he must have an answer. He becomes obsessed with finding an answer. The trouble is that all the advice he receives for the example of his grandfather from his soon to be fiance's father, Dr. Steinberg, from his fiance Marsha, all the advice he receives somehow doesn't help. So when he makes his first fateful choice to leave New York for the mountains. He says yes to Marsha without having intended to, without having decided to. He startled himself by what he just agreed to. For us as readers, this choice is opaque, as though we were reading a parable. It's an act without adequate explanation, an act without sufficient interiority. How can we make sense of it? We can look, perhaps, at Bucky's love of diving. In a wonderful moment, shortly after he arrives in the Poconos, Bucky goes out alone to the camp's high board. He has to dive without his glasses, so he really cannot see. And when he dives, he can no longer feel the earth under his feet. He filled his lungs with the harmless, clean air of the Pocono Mountains, then bounded three steps forward, took off and in control of every inch of his body throughout the blind flight, did a simple swan dive into the water. This is the condition he loves best. Free of all external constraint, blind and suspended in the air, but in control of every inch of his body. The Bucky, whom we know as Mr. Cantor, the young man of the first third of the novel, seems admirably in control, already a full fledged adult, a self aware actor in life. But the man we come to know as Bucky is beleaguered by obligations he can't quite embrace as his own. Raised to fulfill every responsibility, he cannot distinguish among duties and be himself. When he chooses to quit the playground, therefore, it seems to him, he has not chosen. He speaks without intending to, as if someone or something other than himself uttered words for him. Which brings me to question number four. How much does it matter that Arnie Meznikov is the story's narrator? Well, the person who chooses Bucky's words for him is literally the chancellor, playground boy and polio victim, Arnie Mesnikoff. Arnie doesn't identify himself as the narrator until we're over 100 pages into the book. And for two thirds of the novel, we don't give him a lot of thought. He's nevertheless a fastidious raconteur with an affection for slightly archaic turns of phrase. One of the boys would rush up unbidden, he says, or he already knew many of us who habituated the playground or the driveway where they congregated. Arnie's diction and syntax seem completely appropriate to the 1940s America of which he is here. The bard. The narrative voice, the narrative and the narrative's protagonist all seem made of one lexicon. All seem to evoke a simpler and nobler America. Until, that is, Bucky himself is struck with polio. And Arnie, as the voice of a humane common sense, shows himself incapable of understanding either Bucky's dilemma or Bucky's choices. When Bucky tells Arnie that he was the poisoned arrow of a vindictive God, that he was polio, Arnie is horrified because despite the crippling results of his polio, Arnie has married and had children and lived something close to the life he might have lived had he never contracted polio. I'm sorry I used that word. He tries to persuade Bucky that even if he had been a carrier of polio, which is far from certain, he was an unsuspecting carrier and so could not bear any responsibility for the plague. But this is like telling Oedipus that, yes, he did kill his father and sleep with his mother. But since he didn't mean it, hey, what was the problem? Where in the first two sections of the novel, Arnie narrates without intruding, in the third and final section, he can't allow the story to speak for itself. Now he has to interpret and more argue. Like Marcia, he finds Arnie's trenchant judgment of God ridiculous. Bucky, he says, exhibits the hubris, a fantastical, childish religious interpretation. He's equally aghast at Bucky's inability to leave impossible theological questions alone. This maniac of why he calls him Marcia and Arnie are members of the Church of common sense. To them, Bucky's having contracted polio, or maybe even having passed it on to others, is a piece of bad luck without attribution or meaning. Yes, it's awful. Yes, it's hard to bear. But they believe love can counterbalance all of that. It's not something to pluck your eyes out over. But that's not at all how it looks to Bucky. Roth's epigraph from Oedipus the King is about how unspeakable acts can be purified. And in classical Greece there is a way. Even Oedipus attracts pity. And in the end, his ordeal, blind and in exile, magnifies human being. But how can Bucky cleanse himself? There is only one way. He must renounce Marcia, or, put differently, he must set Marcia free. Arnie misunderstands Bucky's act as the consequence of polio having irreparably damaged his assurance as a virile man. But the Bucky, it's the other way around. Had he not renounced Marcia, he would have lost his manhood. In the opening of Winesburg of Ohio, A book I know Roth admires, Sherwood Anderson says of the questing characters in that interconnected set of stories, that they are grotesques and that the collection is best understood as the book of the grotesque. You might say of Anderson's characters that they too are maniacs of why. And it's true that these kind of people, fixated on meaning relentlessly themselves gripped to mania by one truth, are grotesque. In the Greek tragedies, however, these grotesques, victims of horrible fates every bit as capricious as polio, achieve through their suffering a kind of glory. They do not reject God, and they do not slough off their admonishment as bad luck, but neither do they truckle under. Instead, by inhabiting, as it were, the caprice of fate, they realize their irreducible singularity, as does Bucky Arnie, who says Bucky has the aura of ineradicable failure. Nevertheless, thus catch faint glimpses of how Bucky might appear if appreciated from a different point of view. Which perhaps explains why he ends his narrative with a glorious, if ironic, portrait of Bucky engaged in that quintessentially Greek act of grace, the throwing of the javelin in Nemesis.
- [46:29]
Steve Zipperstein
Much like elsewhere in that astonishing canvas that is Philip Roth's work, community is something that no credible human being could live with, and whose absence tears, scars without end. It seems not insignificant that the greatest of all living novelists to explore the inescapability of aloneness is born of a people that has so resolutely defined itself for so long as the quintessence of togetherness. The interplay between the warmth, the nourishment of community and its suffocating. Still worse, its vengeful breath is a neighborhood known no less intimately by Roth than the intersections of Newark. Nemesis. Bucky Cantor, enveloped by the glow of community, is something of a human Phoenix. Quote. At 23, he was to all of us boys the most exemplary and revered authority we knew. A young man of convictions, easygoing, kind, fair minded, thoughtful, gentle, vigorous, muscular, running with the javelin aloft, stretching his throwing arm back behind his body, bringing the throwing arm through to release the javelin high over his shoulder and releasing it. Then, like an explosion, he seemed to us invincible. End quote. In the absence of people and their embrace, and having possibly infected those once close to him by his mere presence, he is literally nothing. All that vital purposefulness that would hit you in the face the moment you met him seemed itself to have been stripped away, lifted from him in shreds. Community's embrace stifles its absence, diminishes there's no closure here, nothing like the close of the Book of Job, the grimmest of all in the biblical canon. Whereas Philip Roth seems to feel God, Job and all else are left to exit far too gingerly, too gaily, there in the Bible, Job is permitted to die, quote, being old and full of days, end quote. His stock of sheep replenished, his brood of children and grandchildren within reach. In stark contrast, Roth's Bucky Cantor spends his Sundays alone in eating meals, in diners, taking in the occasional movie. No sheep for him, no sheep for the rest of us, either. Roth doesn't even allow Cantor a healthy dose of wisdom or repose or holiness or anything redemptive for all the unholy misery he has undergone. Instead, he's left a shell, someone you might cross the street to avoid. It's here, it seems to me, in Roth's musings time and again on community, the inability to live with it or without it. It's here that his Jewish preoccupations are most acute and fertile. Already, long ago, in Portnoy's Complaint, he offered that invaluable insight that nowhere, not even the bathroom permits privacy, if only because family can stand there, right outside it, just behind that one tenuous barrier separating oneself from its embraces and intrusions, offering a stream of advice on defecation, the wildliness of french fries and the like. I've long felt a link exists between this famous, brilliant scene and Isaac Bobble's in his childhood tale the Awakening. Bobble meditates, of course, on Bobble in the Ghostwriter With a child in Bobble's story, 2 escaping family to the only refuge of, albeit in perfect aloneness in his house, the toilet, and where his family, Odessa, gathers just outside to harangue, to insinuate itself into every pore of the boy's still unformed. And then, at the story's end, he is scooped up, guided through the city's nighttime streets by his aunt, who holds his hand tight. She does so, says the narrator, quote, so that I wouldn't run away. She was right. I was thinking of running away. He never does, of course, and it's just this moment, this impulse, its allure, more important, its inconceivability, to which Babel and Roth return time and again. Curiously, the debate with regard to the relevance of Jewishness for Roth remains robust. The very best single interpretive book on his work, Ross Poznach's Philip Roth's Rude the Art of Immaturity, published by Princeton in 2006, builds much of its argument around the contention that Roth's literary parentage is a cosmopolitan one, Poznak's term fathered by the likes of Henry James or Bruno Schultz, here a Polish, hence a world writer, not sired by those tribal boys, those provincials hailing from Chicago's Humboldt park or Brooklyn or for that matter, Odessa. There's no reference to Babel in the book's index. Somehow, in a study full of insight about Roth's most salient influences, the prospect that among them were ever pressing Jewish ones is viewed as reducing him in size and scope. When will Jewish influences cease to be seen as somehow intrinsically tribal? When will they be seen as no less confining, at least for those blessed with capacious imaginations, than, say, Chekhov's South Russian inflections? I have no doubt that Roth communes fruitfully, brilliantly with Henry James or Flaubert. But that doesn't scant the full array of influences of from which he draws that he uses so innovatively, and which include, in Sabbath's Theater and the Human Stain, two incessantly Jewish ones. Roth, in his Paris Review interview, quote, it isn't what it's talking about that makes a book Jewish, it's that the book won't shut up, the book won't leave you alone, won't let up, gets too close. End quote. Indeed, if one is to look for Roth's Jewish preoccupations, and one need not
- [52:49]
Jonathan Brent
look very far,
- [52:51]
Steve Zipperstein
there is nowhere better to see them than in his sense of jewelry's overheated embraces and exclusions, both born of much the same impulses, which have provided him a splendid prism through which to probe community, its warm bosom, its awful underbelly? Is there another people that praises its achievers, that polices its boundaries, that punishes its miscreants with the fervor, the torrent of righteous indignation meted out at one or another time to Philip Roth or Hannah Arendt or, for that matter, Richard Goldstone? Is it mere happenstance that jewelry's entry into modernity is punctuated by the afterglow of Spinoza's own excommunication from community, the appearance of that solitary person, shorn of obligatory fellowship, coolly isolated, and whose identity is so indelibly marked by his being, now and always communally adrift? Portnoy's complaint. They might as well have had plates in their lips and rings through their noses and painted themselves blue for all the human sense they made. The milchicks, the flacciks beside those meshuggena rules and regulations on top of their private craziness. It's a family joke that when I was a tiny child, I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm and hopefully asked, mama, Mama, do we believe in winter? Do do, do. Do you know what I'm saying? I was raised by Hottentots and Zulus. I couldn't even contemplating drinking a glass of milk with my salami sandwich without giving serious offense to God Almighty.
- [54:37]
Igor Webb
End quote.
- [54:38]
Steve Zipperstein
One escapes to the toilet or to the Brookshears, but I was. I was hoping you'd like that. One escapes to the toilet or the Berkshires. But. But the solitary pleasures they offer feel always like escape. There's a. A poignancy, an absence in them. And it's right there in that sense of having lost something that you'd never ever want to envelop you again. Where one finds at least one of the wounds that Roth's genius has wound itself around time and again for half a century now. Bismay un swansik until the age of Moses.
- [55:21]
Bernie Avishai
Well, we have some time, and if there are questions to ask of the panelists, we can do that. Or maybe if someone would like to raise a question for ourselves.
- [55:37]
Igor Webb
I think we should.
- [55:38]
Bernie Avishai
Yes. With the widow pushing for Raf Moris. And it seems to me that there's as much in the way of pity as a theme in Nemesis as there is of vengeance or fate.
- [55:56]
Steve Zipperstein
You know, it's always one of one's dear friends. That was the moral philosopher Berel Lang, I realized, anticipated this moment where we
- [56:05]
Jonathan Brent
would be parsing this book.
- [56:09]
Steve Zipperstein
Someone else do this? Or perhaps
- [56:15]
Jonathan Brent
I think the etymological question reminds me of that other Yiddish word, far fetched.
- [56:24]
Bernie Avishai
No, Nemesis is a good Greek word. Anyone else?
- [56:29]
Steve Zipperstein
If you don't ask us any questions,
- [56:32]
Bernie Avishai
then the sooner Philip will be doing his reading.
- [56:35]
Jonathan Brent
Right.
- [56:37]
Bernie Avishai
But this is obviously the reason we're all here and what we've been waiting for. And so, with great pleasure, Philip Raikier.
- [56:48]
Philip Roth
Well, that's a tough act to follow. Poor smart Jewish boys all cracking jokes. I'm going to read to you just a few pages. But coming where they do, they're the pages I like best in Nemesis. They constitute the last pages of the last work of fiction I published, the End of the line, after 31 books. The narrator of Nemesis is Arnie Meznikoff, a Newark architect, Formerly one of Mr. Cantor's playground boys, who in the epidemic summer of 1944, at the age of 12, contracted polio and was crippled by the disease for the rest of his life. So too was Bucky Cantor, the 23 year old playground director at Newark's Chancellor Avenue school. Badly crippled, even more badly crippled for the rest of his life. Arnie, after a time, recovers from the psychological, if not the physical effects of the disease, attends college and graduate school, opens an architecture office, marries, has children and counts his life a success. Embittered and guilt ridden Bucky Kanter, who long ago rejected the possibility of a wife and a family for a man and his fix, counts his life a humiliating failure. One summer day in 1971, 27 years after both were permanently crippled by polio, Arnie runs into his old playground director in downtown Newark. They begin to meet for lunch every week, and over time, Arnie hears from Bucky the story of all that happened to him during that epidemic summer and of the isolation and shame that Bucky has suffered since. This story, as Arnie recounts it, constitutes the novel. Nemesis ends with Arnie remembering the athlete Bucky had been before the cataclysm that destroyed his young body. From Nemesis. And yet, at 23, he was to all of us boys the most exemplary and revered authority we knew. A young man of convictions, easygoing, kind, fair minded, thoughtful, stable, gentle, vigorous, muscular, a comrade and leader both, and never a more glorious figure than on the afternoon near the end of June before the 44 epidemic seriously took hold in the city before for more than a few of us, our bodies and our lives would be drastically transformed when we all marched behind him to the big dirt field across the street and down a short slope from the playground. It was where the high school football team held its workouts and practices and where he was going to show us how to throw the javelin. He was dressed in his skimpy, satiny track shorts and his sleeveless top. He wore cleated shoes, and leading the pack, he carried the javelin loosely in his right hand. When we got down to the field it was empty, and Mr. Cantor had us gathered together on the sidelines at the Chancellor Avenue end, where he let us each examine the javelin and heft it in our hands. A slender metal pole weighing a little under two pounds and, and measuring about eight and a half feet long. He showed us the various holds you could use on the whipcord grip and then the one that he preferred. Then he explained to us something about the background of the javelin, which began in early societies, before the invention of the bow and arrow with the throwing of the spear for hunting, and continued in Greece at the first Olympics in the 8th century BC the first javelin thrower was said to be Hercules, the great warrior and slayer of monsters, who Mr. Cantor told us was the giant son of the supreme Greek God Zeus and the strongest man on Earth. The lecture over, he said he would now do his warmups, and we watched while he limbered up for about 20 minutes, some of the boys on the sidelines doing their best to mimic his movements. It was important, he said, at the same time as he was performing a side split with his pelvis to the ground, always to work beforehand at stretching the groin muscles, which were easily susceptible to strain. He used the javelin as a stretching stick for many of the exercises, twisting and turning with it balanced like a yoke across his shoulders while he kneeled and squatted and lunged. And then while he stood and flexed and rotated his torso, he did a handstand and began walking a wide circle on his hands, and some of the kids tried that with his mouth only inches from the ground. He informed us that he was doing the handstands in lieu of exercising on a bar to stretch his upper body. He finished off with forward body bends and trunk back bends, during which he kept his heels fixed to the ground while pushing upward with his hips and arching his back amazingly high. When he said he was going to sprint twice around the edge of the field, we followed, barely able to keep up with him, but pretending that it was we who were warming up for the throw. Then, for a few minutes, he practiced running along an imaginary Runway without throwing her javelin, just carrying it high, flat and straight. When he was ready to begin, he told us what to watch for, starting with his approach run and the bounding stride, and ending with the throw without the javelin in his hand. He walked through the entire delivery for us in slow motion, describing it as he did so. It's not magic, boys, but it's no picnic either. However, if you practice hard, he said, and you work hard and you exercise diligently, if you're regular with your balance drills one, your mobility drills two, and your flexibility drills three, if you're faithful to your weight training program, and if throwing the javelin really matters to you, I guarantee you something will come of that. Everything in sports requires determination. The three Ds, determination, dedication and discipline. And you're practically always there as usual, taking every precaution. He told us that for safety's sake, no one was to dart out onto the field at any time. We were to watch everything from where we were standing. He made this point twice. He couldn't have been more serious, the seriousness being the expression of his commitment to the task. And then he hurled the javelin. You could see each of his muscles bulging when he released it into the air. He let out a strangulated yowl of effort, one we all went around imitating for days afterward, a noise expressing the essence of him, the naked battle cry of striving excellence. The instant the javelin took flight from his hand, he began dancing about to recover his balance and not fall across the foul line he'd etched in the dirt with his cleats. And all the while, he watched the javelin as it made its trajectory in a high, sweeping arc over the field. None of us had ever before seen an athletic act so beautifully executed right in front of our eyes. The javelin carried, carried way beyond the 50 yard line down to the far side of the opponent's 30. And when it descended and landed, the shaft quivered and its pointed metal tip angled sharply into the ground. From the sailing force of the flight, we sent up a loud cheer and began leaping about. All of the javelin's trajectory had originated in Mr. Cantor's supple muscles. His was the body, the feet, the legs, the buttocks, the trunk, the arms, the shoulders, even the thick stump of the bull neck that, acting in unison, had powered the throw. It was as though our playground director had turned into a primordial man hunting for food on the plains where he foraged, taming the wilds by the might of his hand. Never were we more in awe of anyone. Through him, we boys had left the the little story of the neighborhood and entered the historical saga of our ancient gender. He threw the javelin repeatedly that afternoon, each throw smooth and powerful, each throw accompanied by that resounding mingling of a shout and a grunt, and each, to our delight, landing several yards farther down the field than the last, running with the javelin aloft, stretching his throwing arm back behind his body, bringing the throwing arm through to release the javelin high over his shoulder and releasing it. Then, like an explosion, he seemed to us invincible. Sam.