Philip Roth's The Human Stain
Gessen, Keith
THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, 2000 365 pp $26 WHAT PHILIP ROTH has always needed—and what, like Joseph K., he has been unfairly denied—is a proper trial. If not for the...
...KEITH GESSEN is a contributing editor at www.feedmag.com . DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 119...
...Roth's men are capable not only of courageous, society-defying acts, but also outrageous and irretrievable moral crimes...
...When he was still a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the late fifties, writing occasional movie reviews for the New Republic, the magazine printed a reader's letter mocking Roth for his naive moralism: "Didn't Mr...
...Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing...
...In another context, Howe once wrote about "the quest for moral style," and I believe this has been Roth's quest as a novelist...
...that, though the barbarians are here, we are they and so on, we ought to continue, for the moment, to wait...
...Near the beginning of The Human Stain, the final book in the trilogy, there is a scene in which a bereaved Coleman Silk, former dean of nearby Athena College, rushes to Nathan Zuckerman's secluded house and begins to pound upon the door...
...That is how all this began," Zuckerman says as he looks back on his quest for Silk's story: "by my standing alone in a darkening graveyard and entering into professional competition with death...
...ii8 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 "A vision of major possibilities"—it is a ringing, damning phrase, and in a certain sense Roth remains indefensible: the "reductive leveling" of what Howe would have considered our highest aspirations (justice, for one) proceeds apace...
...in American Pastoral, the blond-haired, all-state Swede Levov...
...It was hard to believe, given the ardor and the resolve, that out in California they were college science professors," he writes of Silk's sons in The Human Stain...
...Roth's father tell him the facts of life long ago...
...And the sentences, the endless outrageous sentences in which Roth delivers his frothing philippics repeatedly undermine whatever arguments he would like to argue...
...the reader chided...
...Meaning...
...Impeachment and political correctness and racism and deconstruction all derive, Roth argues, from the slavish suppression of our natural impulses...
...Grasped it intuitively and recoiled spontaneously...
...Fuck the laudable ideologies," Mickey Sabbath advised in Sabbath's Theater, and Roth does...
...I—whose house he had never before entered," Zuckerman recounts, "whose very voice he had barely heard before— had to put aside whatever else I might be doing and write about...
...Lurie, meanwhile, grows less skeptical of country life and ways...
...So there is a slightly put-upon quality to Roth's treatment of historical themes, as if, though acceding to the status of a Major Novelist, he will not observe the conventions, whatever those might be...
...to a radically reductive leveling or simplification...
...This is Roth at his absolute best: unstintingly clear, bordering close onto and crossing when necessary into cruelty...
...He deserves a trial, at long last, with lawyers and learned professors, like the ones James Joyce and even Allen Ginsberg got...
...Roth is one of the few writers now working who is not content merely to skip, camera-like, along surfaces, to erect a set of facing masks and call it a novel...
...Wrong again...
...As a novelist of sex, Roth is indefatigable...
...If not for the attacks on Jewish suburbia in Goodbye, Columbus or for what Irving Howe called the "rhetorical flourishes surrounding masturbation" in Portnoy's Complaint, then surely for the salacious, twentyonepage, phone-sex footnote in Sabbath's Theater...
...So if a trial for Philip Roth is out of the question, perhaps what he once called the "Yiddish theater" of literary criticism could provide some preliminary expiation...
...But it is Silk, with his decision to shed America's most imposing imaginable identifier, who is the largest Roth hero of them all—for the human need to break through the firewall of propriety has always been Roth's great subject, and deciding, just after the war, to pass as white is a transgression even more serious than marrying a shiksa...
...For Coetzee, language itself is suspect: it has become "tired...
...Disgraced, he moves to the country to live with his daughter, Lucy...
...More arthritis...
...This, surely, is the least prophetic letter of all time, for in the decades since then Roth has never ceased mounting the barricades of the DISSENT /Fall 2000 n 115 BOOKS sexual revolution, only shouting louder as the crowd began to thin...
...AND THAT'S just it...
...And a laughable hunger for more...
...More deceit...
...Then there's the old high school English teacher in I Married a Communist: "In Murray Ringold . . . human dissatisfaction has met its match...
...Roth has always written from within...
...I Married a Communist argues that postwar Party membership was a front for homicidal rage...
...It was the summer in America when the nausea returned," he writes, "when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop...
...A man learned in all the intricacies of the law, Howe was invoking an obscure but essential critical prerogative, the right to judge specific works according to the entirety of the author's "creative vision"— which in this case, he believed, was "deeply marred by vulgarity...
...As he is old, and everything has already happened, nearly all the action is contained in the play of Zuckerman's imaginative sympathy, filling in an entire canvas from some bare husks of detail, trying to discern an explanation for everything that went so horribly wrong...
...It is an old accusation, and one can almost feel Roth straining against it in his last three novels, which comprise together a loose trilogy about postwar American politics...
...The image of an incessantly typing Roth is apt, not so much because his books seem insufficiently "literary," but because they represent an idea of perpetual output...
...Roth's strips them away, tears from his characters' words their social obligations, from their backs their clothes, and then rips off their skin and tendons so that there is nothing left but the bone...
...in I Married a Communist, a 6-foot-6 Jewish communist...
...To read the novel in its entirety, in the voracious, two-day assault that it demands, is to have a hole blown into you so wide that most other books cannot help but seem small, they fall through you and come out the other side withBOOKS out touching a thing...
...I understood right off," a disappointed Zuckerman reports of his meeting with Swede Levov in American Pastoral, "that I wasn't going to get anywhere near the substratum...
...What this proves, Roth repeatedly informs us, is the unfathomability of actual things: "You can't know anything," he insists...
...YesRoth's objectivity has always been charged, as Lionel Trilling said of Flaubert, with irritability, but one would be hard pressed to find in the grim history of the American jeremiad a voice more brilliantly affirming of human possibility...
...The outraged, self-consuming Roth of The Human Stain is a writer of nearly overwhelming force...
...The book does not exactly propose a political program, but it suggests that we ought to make ourselves small and unobtrusive in the times to come...
...Just the size of the characters striding through Roth's last four books is astounding...
...In the past forty years, he has published nineteen novels...
...Even here, several years after prostate surgery has at last repressed the irrepressible Zuckerman, there appears to the aid of the aging Silk—pharmaceuticus ex machine—Viagra...
...He thought Coleman was going to stay here till the whole play could be performed, as though he and Coleman had been set down not in life but on the southern hillside of the Athenian acropolis, in an outdoor theater sacred to Dionysus...
...Disgrace is very skillfully done, better than this outline indicates, but in ambition and execution it is a small book...
...Yes, yes, yes," cries Sabbath, "he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life...
...But Roth's patent unconcern for politics is profoundly compensated for by his reconnaissance into the nether regions...
...Consequence...
...In Sabbath's Theater, the relentlessly perverted Mickey Sabbath...
...Intention...
...It is everything The Human Stain is not: tidy, smooth, pared down to its essentials, and politically, for lack of a better word, agreeable...
...for people of a certain generation, he has shaped their coming into consciousness...
...indeed, the digging is the essence of the Roth sentence, that barbed tangle ripping its way ever deeper toward meaning...
...And again, two pages later: "I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface...
...In this last novel as well, Roth peers out through a sexual prism: the title, after all, is a sort of private joke that includes among its many connotations not only the stain of human complexity and the stain of skin color, but also the conclusive presidential stain deposited one fateful evening onto Monica's navy-blue dress...
...Unlike Roth's Silk, Lurie is guilty and even vaguely ashamed of himself— the word "rape" flits across his mind...
...for if Roth's prose is hell-bent on anything it is knowing...
...Mark's Place apartment in the late fifties BOOKS and seeing the still unknown writer pounding at his typewriter at all hours of the day...
...Having had at sixties ultraradicalism and postwar communism in the previous two novels, Roth in The Human Stain reconstructs the story of seventy-one-year-old Coleman Silk, a light-skinned black man who decided, when young, to pass for white, and who is eventually hounded from his deanship for an allegedly racist comment...
...Instead of the complacency we would expect from a writer at ease with the limits of his knowledge, we have these rousing italics, as if even Roth's sentences cannot contain his meaning, as if by tipping his letters he wished to uproot them from the page and propel them whole into the wide, rough world...
...The rest of the book deals with the aftermath: Lucy has been impregnated by the rapists and decides to keep the baby as a form of symbolic expiation, it appears, for the sins of apartheid...
...that in response to the impending historical catastrophe, the writer, instead of booming forth, should shrink...
...He saw the fate awaiting him, and he wasn't having it," says Zuckerman...
...Even men of regular dimensions possess heroic significance...
...Though it arrives late, the encounter is a perfect symbolic introduction to these three novels: America, "the American berserk," is pounding on Roth's door, demanding that he do her justice on the printed page...
...For only such a spectacle, with its twenty-four-hour television coverage and solemn New York Times editorials, could clear his name at last of the accusation of unseriousness...
...THE CONTRAST with Roth's political outlook could not be clearer...
...It begins with a white literature professor in South Africa, David Lurie, losing his job for sleeping with a student...
...At the same time, it is a vision of life that is stunning above all in its generosity, for though Zuckerman has no patience for the son's self-dramatization, he recognizes immediately the impulse to read life as the enormous pitched battle that it is...
...Neither Napoleon on horseback nor Prince Andrei at Austerlitz, it is nonetheless life, in America, writ large...
...A LONG TIME ago, in a magazine that is now, politically, far, far away, Irving Howe pronounced a prosecutorial summation so devastating that all subsequent salvoes against Roth have been mere footnotes...
...Reading Roth's aggressive prose, one can't help wondering about all the nice books written each year that confirm the politics of all right-thinking people...
...Toward the end of The Human Stain, Zuckerman describes Coleman's wayward, obnoxious son Mark, bewailing his father at the funeral: Mark Silk apparently had imagined that he was going to have his father around to hate forever...
...Even now, secluded in the Connecticut woods the way his Zuckerman is secluded in the Berkshires, he knows that all pretense to standing outside the fierce partisanship of events is ultimately futile...
...seventeen years later, it was the "Age of Total Schlock") and the historical symptomhood of channeling, without commentary, the zeitgeist...
...Self-discovery— that was the punch to the labonz...
...Sex, which was once a nifty plot device in the form of Brenda Patimkin's diaphragm, has become an idea, an argument, and The Human Stain is the most tendentious novel Roth has ever written...
...The poet Robert Kelly has recalled walking by his St...
...He has outlived dissatisfaction...
...if Coetzee chooses a sort of negative, downsized liberalism, Roth explodes into a vengeful, bustling pessimism—"the decline of the West," rants the misanthropic Sabbath, "spread from the colleges to the police departments...
...If he can be said to have a consistent political idea it is that fanaticism, for all that it's very entertaining, is hugely destructive—whether in the West Bank or the antiwar movement or college campuses or Congress...
...He is instead a plunderer of depths, and his respect for the domestic drama is in inverse proportion to his disdain for the historical one...
...He traffics in hidden energies, and the unwavering assumption that runs through these political books is that politics exists only as an elaborate projection of baser desires...
...eaten from the inside as if by termites...
...All that we don't know is astonishing...
...More loneliness...
...For what Roth is offering, in place of politics, is a vision of the major moral possibilities of day-to-day life, a vision that his every sentence enumerates until it bursts, and that has no equals in contemporary fiction...
...You can't let the big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you...
...And he could use, as well, an urbane, sophisticated judge, like the one who included in his decision allowing Ulysses into the country a section almost wholly devoted to literary criticism: "Furthermore," it began, 'Ulysses' is an amazing tour de force...
...And from nothing else...
...Because if the history of politics and ideologies, for Roth, is merely an endless variation on the sexual theme, his characters' individual histories explode with the significant fireworks of errors, horrors, disasters...
...The book turns on the surprise, delivered quietly on page eighty-six, that Coleman Silk is black...
...The things you 116 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 know you don't know...
...But Roth himself is like a madman digging for China...
...Throughout that time he has always hung a precarious balance between historical commentary (it's the "Age of Utter Abandon," he declared in The Professor of Desire...
...DISSENT / Fall 2000.117 BOOKS To hate and hate and hate and hate, and then perhaps, in his own good time, after the scenes of accusation had reached their crescendo and he had flogged Coleman to within an inch of his life with his knot of filial grievance, to forgive...
...Howe had praised Roth highly, though not without reservations, upon the publication of Goodbye, Columbus...
...Roth is determined to know the unknown if he has to exhume it from the grave...
...And it is Zuckerman, finally, who is the most outsized character of all in these books...
...A trial for Philip Roth...
...Roth is hesitant, for he has some favorite subjects of his own to cover, but what sort of writer would he be—what sort of man, even—if he refused...
...He begins with a tirade against the "explosion of piety" surrounding the Clinton impeachment...
...A particularly elegant one, which often appeared in comparison to The Human Stain because it similarly placed academic political correctness in a broader social context, was J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace...
...You would have thought they ran Twentieth Century Fox...
...he was joined by Alfred Kazin, who began his own review with the sly phrase, "Several weeks ago, I was awakened, while reading the New Yorker, by Philip Roth's 'Defender of the Faith...
...The pressure of the battle with the university leads to his wife's death from a stroke and then to Silk's affair with a thirty-four-year-old janitor at the college, an affair so defiant it estranges him from his adult children as well as from the community at large...
...It's an incredibly, unyieldingly wrongheaded book...
...The Human Stain, on the other hand, burns with Zuckerman's due diligence, and toward the end of the book, aglow with the incredible hermeneutic task of the previous three hundred pages, his powers are so great, his understanding so well earned, that he sees, immediately, deep into the hearts of others, and we believe him: "I had the definite impression, in just our few moments together," he writes of Silk's daughter upon seeing her at the former dean's funeral, "that the link, now broken, between Lisa and her father would not be gone from her mind for a single day throughout the remainder of her life...
...I did no more than find a friend," Zuckerman remarks in The Human Stain, "and all the world's malice came rushing in...
...This is not the first time the author has been so importuned, and initially he declines, only to take the narrative reins after Silk has been murdered...
...Shortly after his arrival, the house is attacked by three black men who beat Lurie, steal his car, and rape Lucy...
...Not a moralistic style but a style that pays homage in all its visions and revisions—and, in its italics and contortions, to the inadequacy even of those to the awful consequences inherent in human action...
...More disappointment...
...Howe was now summarily withdrawing those endorsements: the "solemn ecstasies" with which the critics had met Portnoy's Complaint were comically misplaced, he concluded, because Roth was a writer who had "denied himself, programmatically, a vision of major possibilities...
...It is suffused, as if in deference to the rape at its center, with a sense of humility, with the conspicuous attempt, through a spare, chastened language, to wash itself clean...
...He demands that Zuckerman write the story of his downfall...
...The consequences of having loved him so fully as a beloved girl-child, and of having been estranged from him at the time of his death, would never let this woman be...
...Motive...
...The apparent comparison here to the McCarthy years, or to Watergate, seems a strange one, and the assignation of major historical significance to the Lewinsky affair even stranger, until one recalls that, for Roth, propriety itself is the great enemy...
...Didn't he ever hear of physical attraction (sex, I mean—shhh...
...But more important, to me, are their comparative visions of human possibility...
...his enemies...
...Questioning, like a concerned potential fatherinlaw, not so much Roth's talents as the seriousness of his intentions, Howe remarked in the novelist's work "an impulse to submit the rich substance of human experience, sentiment, value, and aspiration...
...If we can imagine a similarly circling writer like Saul Bellow as a sculptor, pacing about his mold of clay and gradually layering the details until a recognizable image suddenly congeals, then Roth is like a vandal in the studio, knocking off noses...
...Bellow's style accretes meanings...
...American Pastoral suggests that sixties radicalism stemmed from sexual perversion and inadequacy...
...Not knowing...
...So Zuckerman spends the rest of the book doing excavation work...
...I Married a Communist is the weakest of the three books because Murray Ringold relates what he already knows—there is no massive findingout mission for Zuckerman to execute, and therefore no action...
...Even the conclusions Roth draws from his own narrative are wrong...
...Fanaticism is bad— but Roth writes like a fanatic...
...More defeat...
Vol. 47 • September 2000 • No. 4
