Love, Guilt and Memory
Bayer, Linda
BOOKS Love, Guilt and Memory Patrimony: A True Story Philip Roth Simon & Schuster, 1991.238 pp., S19.95 Reviewed by Linda Bayer Within the last decade, letters by Freud were discovered...
...Is this efficiency, pathology, insensitivity...
...With grace and humor this book proclaims, in effect, you don't have to lie to love...
...Not in distortion...
...In memory we preserve and hallow the dead...
...In memory is the seed of salvation, in forgetting the root of exile...
...May 25, 1984: 94...
...With unflinching honesty, Roth chronicles the admiration he bears for his 86-year-old father dying of a brain tumor...
...The memory of good in loved ones can nourish continuity and integrity for the future...
...The book ends with Philip Roth's nightmare that his father returns to reproach him that the deceased should have been buried in a suit, not a shroud...
...Honest detail need not imply disrespect...
...younger and angrier age, is now succeeded by the prospect of the loss of not "just any father but the father with everything there is to love in a father and more"—this notwithstanding Philip's boyhood grief that he did not have the judicious, intellectual, sensitive father he would have preferred...
...The gap between "sighted," educated sons and their immigrant or lower-class fathers, which Roth wrote about in other books at a * In Freud's personal and professional correspondence with Wilhelm Fleiss written^between 1887 and 1902: letters revealed by5ean-Paul Sartre, "Freud par Sartre," Inedit, Paris...
...The diatribe goes on for two more pages...
...Philip is hurt and horrified...
...As always, Roth is obsessed by truth...
...This insight softens Freud's earlier insistence that the Oedipus complex—the emotional conflict originating at age three to five when the child competes with the parent of the opposite sex to take the spouse away from the parent—insures paternal hostility...
...How much of Philip's misogyny, for which he has been much maligned, sprung from his father's deprecating behavior toward women (despite Herman's deeper, benevolent intentions...
...Nonetheless, the son is in agony...
...Do me a favor, Herm, get off the woman's ass, because it isn't just Lil's weakness buying a shitty cantaloupe: it's a human weakness...
...I will become dead to my loved ones too," as it were...
...Herman was acting out the loss he had just felt at the funeral, mitigating the pain by symbolically burying the rest of his treasured wife's remains...
...in honest recollection we honor our ancestors and collect our past forever united with theirs...
...Taken figuratively, though, Roth has displayed his father properly, down to the old man's underwear—as have many artists (like Ferdinand Hodler, who documented in paint the excruciating death of his beloved wife...
...Herman constantly upbraids Lil—the devoted companion he sometimes thinks was sent to him by his beloved dead wife...
...She can't even buy a cantaloupe," Herman tells his son in disgust...
...Even with only one good eye, Herman's perception of Lil's faults is microscopic...
...Psychological ambiguity is the essence of life and needn't prevent devotion...
...BOOKS Love, Guilt and Memory Patrimony: A True Story Philip Roth Simon & Schuster, 1991.238 pp., S19.95 Reviewed by Linda Bayer Within the last decade, letters by Freud were discovered indicating that paternal death is paramount for a man: "Whether he is detested or loved, the event that counts most in the life of a man is the death of his father...
...I'd rather buy a car than a cantaloupe—I'd rather buy a house than a cantaloupe...
...Otto Rank observed these anti-Oedipal tendencies...
...My father is dead to me...
...See "Why Oedipus Really Loved His Father," E. James Lieberman in "A New Look at an Old Myth," Family Therapy News, February 1991: 5. Rank was one of Freud's closest proteges...
...Philip responds to his father: "Look, a cantaloupe is a hard thing to buy—maybe the hardest....A cantaloupe isn't an apple, you know, where you can tell from the outside what's going on inside...
...The author notes his own acrimonious marital separation and his failure to be with the woman he loved during his father's death...
...May his memory be a blessing,"Jews say when someone dies...
...We must conduct our lives so that the recollected past can hallow both today and tomorrow...
...Roth's father's injunction is ours: "Do not forget"—be it Jerusalem, one's father, or the love of one's youth...
...The son has obeyed: "In keeping with my unseemly profession, I had been writing all the while he was ill and dying...
...Herman seems similarly callous after his wife Bessie's death when he immediately starts going through her drawers and giving away her belongings...
...It also explains children's desires to prevent parental divorce.** Philip Roth's magnificent book, Patrimony, about his father's death, is subtitled A True Story—and it is...
...Herman discards his dear wife's possessions to purge himself and express his loss...
...She is being persecuted by you for something that maybe one percent of the human population is able to do right— and even with half of them it's probably guesswork...
...Herman criticizes Lil for everything from the way she opens a can of soup to eating too much food...
...He never sweetens the father's glaring faults while cherishing an inextricable bond...
...Patrimony is a wise exploration of the price and reward children reap in forgiveness and reconciliation...
...Patrimony is about the legacy of love, guilt, and memory that must be negotiated in all its ambiguity if families— particularly the Jewish family—are to survive as an institution...
...Herman's "persecuring" Bessie is a well-chosen word for a Jewish man whose entire people labor beneath a patrimony of religious scapegoating and martyrdom at the hands of others...
...I'll tell you about making a mistake with a cantaloupe: We all do it We weren't made to buy cantaloupe...
...But Roth the writer is able to create humor under the most tragic circumstances, an old and effective Jewish trick...
...Philip Roth illustrates, without examining, how his father and his heritage scripted the next generation's difficulties with women...
...Philip's father Herman was stubborn, accidently inconsiderate and carelessly cruel to the women he loved...
...Linda Bayer, author of the novel The Blessing and the Curse UPS, 1988), is a professor of literature with graduate degrees in clinical psychology...
...It's the same reason Jewish mourners themselves put dirt on the casket and participate in the actual burial...
...The son begs his father to wait: "Stop throwing things out...
...In the last words of the book, the elder Roth admonishes his son: "You must not forget anything...
...How many men, perhaps Philip among them, react to the death of their fathers by defensively discarding or withdrawing from loved ones—wives and lovers—to prevent (or reenact) further loss or even to assert identification...
...Philip recounts his father's gradual loss of vision...
...The son is overwhelmed by guilt: "I had dressed him for eternity in the wrong clothes...
...The brain is an abyss between fathers and sons experiencing this type of generational and cultural estrangement...
...But Roth soon recognizes his father's primitiveness...
Vol. 16 • December 1991 • No. 6
