Me and My Alter Ego

...Now its impact extends to The Facts, part autobiography, part fiction...

...Zuckerman thinks Roth is wrong about Josie's role in his life, particularly where Portnoy's Complaint is concerned...

...Highly sophisticated in literary theory, Roth has played these tricks before in ways associated with Jorge Luis Borges or the French "anti-novel...

...And though they may well have occurred that way—in his autobiography Roth does not say—the explicit sex acts that in their variety, promiscuity and frequency so obsessively fill his pages seem like pornographic fantasies, too...

...He thinks that out of respect for May, who is alive and whose relationship to Roth is widely known, the writer is being too gentlemanly...

...Zuckerman contends rather, that the anger and excess of Portnoy come from Josie, who drove Roth into analysis and showed him he could not be " the dominating consciousness in every situation...

...But he was not prepared for the ton of bricks that fell on his head when he was invited in 1962 to take part in a panel at Yeshiva University with the title "The Crisis of Conscience in Minority Writers of Fiction...

...Does this hold even if their fictions touch on sensitive moral and social issues, with very little fresh invention...

...Remembering Roth's own invocation of myth, we can be sure that freedom would come only after a long night's struggle with a much more mysterious and frightening counterself than a ventriloquist's dummy named Zuckerman...

...But for depth analysis they have no interest...

...Ergo mythology and dream life, ergo Greek drama and modern fiction...

...It became a major topic of his clearly autobiographical fiction, and was responsible for the strange pattern two years ago of his novel TheCounterlife...

...Prometheus was a Titan who stole fire from the gods for the good of man, and was punished by being chained to a mountain and tortured by an eagle feeding nightly on his immortal liver...

...A has-been TV quiz show star threatens to kidnap Zuckerman's mother...

...The question, he says is not whether Roth in his autobiography has resisted the dramatizing, exaggerating and inventing taken for granted in fiction, but whether he has had the courage or self-understanding to include straightforwardly in his account of himself the "inadmissible," the "truly shaming facts that can never be fully borne, let alone perceived, without the panacea of imagination...

...If you want to learn about an author, consult his characters...

...Such talk between two men about a woman is distasteful—and a gleeful hypocrisy when the two men are really one, and it all goes into the book anyway...

...Are Zuckerman and Tarnopol to Roth what Lear and Richard III were to Shakespeare or Oedipus and Antigone to Sophocles...

...Where are thedepth symbols, thecounterselves, the displacements that would make these novels equally the story of someone not brought up a Jew in Newark and not a writer of novels...

...What does it tell us about the relation of fiction to truth that now, in The Facts, nearly 20 years after Portnoy's Complaint, Roth brings out a brief autobiography dedicated to his father, still alive...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University Are writers of fiction justified in demanding that they be judged by quite different standards from everyone else...

...At Yeshiva he quickly discovered...

...As late as the trilogy Zuckerman Bound (1979-85) Roth seemed perversely to grant his critics' case by creating an alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, whose career parallels Roth's almost exactly...

...Does fiction, as its defenders argue, convey a "deeper" truth...

...Such grand questions are not unfair, since Roth with grand irony called his trilogy Zuckerman Bound, after the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, and one volume of it Zuckerman Unbound, after the Prometheus Unbound of Shelley...

...Nathan flies to Israel to "rescue" Henry and fails, but not without being subjected to much Israeli discussion of the harm his fiction may be doing to the Jews...

...Zuckerman criticizes Roth for the way he treats May...

...From the resulting trauma Roth never recovered...

...When he wrote his early stories, "Goodbye Columbus" and "Defender of the Faith, " he had no idea how repugnant to those same ordinary Jews such "hyperbolic comedy" was when it seemed to mock them before an audience of Gentiles...

...The ungentlemanly Zuckerman cruelly describes May's limitations, some sexual, and gives the real reasons Roth needed her for a time and then no longer...

...and that his brother was not a dentist but an art student who helped direct Philip toward the arts...

...Zuckerman even asks whether Roth's inserting him in this purported autobiography is not "a self-defensive trick at having it both ways...

...With that book...

...I don't mean the way you treat her in life...

...He describes them in a bare, humorless style intended to emphasize—quite unfairly —the difference between the constraints of fact and the exuberance of fiction...

...I do not care about that...

...After his funeral the married Englishwoman whom he had longed to marry steals into his apartment to discover from the manuscript of Nathan's autobiographical novel what their life in England would have been if Nathan had survived...

...Not only did he worry for the next 25 years about what had happened, but his characters worried with him and for him...

...Everyone, including Robert F. Kennedy, assumed they would eventually marry...

...In Roth there are no gods, no transcendence, no Jacob wrestling with an angel...

...His wife wants it shaved off, but fears that Roth will make Nathan wear it as a provocation to her family and their friends...

...He had not felt any crisis...

...Obviously by Zuckerman's definition the inadmissible, the shameful could not be included because they can only be borne, indeed only perceived, in fiction and myth...

...Ralph Ellison, one of the other panelists, tried to divert the attacks but failed...

...Roth has no need in these novels to symbolize sex...

...I refuse to allow him to make that into a major problem again.' Feeling himself trapped by Roth's own "obsessive biography," Nathan envies characters " whose authors naively maintain that at a certain point the characters 'take over' and do the story telling themselves on their own initiative...

...Henry has the operation first and dies, and Nathan goes to his funeral...

...Living in England, happily married to an upper-class Englishwoman, Zuckerman has grown a beard that makes him look foreign and rabbinical...

...Zuckerman's addition even includes its own fictional incident, the case of the beard...

...Roth is in many respects the funniest, most intelligent and most observant of our novelists, yet he is still apparently trapped in the self-preoccupation that has made him repeat the same themes and incidents in novel after novel without evident progress...

...What crisis...

...But you killed him, Nathan...

...In The Facts we learn from Nathan himself that they are actually experiencing that life, but only as Philip Roth, himself living in England, determines it...

...After the funeral Nathan's brother Henry, the model son, the dentist, bursts out angrily, "You killed him, Nathan...

...He went so far in a newspaper interview as to compare Zuckerman to Edgar Bergen's Charlie McCarthy...

...The real action in Roth's novels, as in those most recently of John Updike, is with women, and here there is almost no fantasy, as the autobiography shows...

...Can he ever be freed of his obsession if this has not happened after so much psychoanalysis and several brushes with death...

...One of the episodes is the experience at Yeshiva...

...that in it he remembers a secure, happy Jewish childhood in Newark, with supportive parents who made sacrifices to send him to Bucknell University...

...The nearest to gods in Roth's stories are Jewish writers of immense fame who are fantasized as still alive but in diminished roles, invariably in relation to Roth or his surrogates—Kafka as Roth's Hebrew teacher in Newark, Anne Frank as a former student at Bennington having an affair with her teacher, whom Zuckerman is visiting...

...Roth's account, he says, tells us nothing of importance about the fiction because the real emotions that produced it are left out...

...After the introductory talks the moderator ignored the other panelists and treated Roth like the accused on the witness stand...

...He realized that he "was not just opposed, buthated...

...Roth here picks out five episodes of his life that relate to his stories...

...Inexplicably, in the following section of the book Henry is alive and has uncharacteristically joined a heavily armed settlement in Israel headed by someone like Rabbi Meir Kahane...

...It is always there being practiced...

...He should have been warned, Roth says, by the "flat assertiveness" of the phrase "The Crisis of Conscience...

...It is the Yeshiva panel all over again...

...Roth is saying that only fiction tells the truth, but that he totally controls the fiction...

...Even formerly supportive critics like Irving Howe had to reconsider Roth's case...

...Heprided himself on "being something of an authority on ordinary Jewish life, with its penchant for self-satire and hyperbolic comedy...

...A trick it certainly is...

...Portnoy exclaims to his analyst...

...A seatmate on an Israeli plane gets Zuckerman returned to Israel as a hijacker...

...The comedy consists of making the ventriloquist's impudent dummy seem sharper-witted than his master...

...Zuckerman's irrelevant and implausible brushes with melodrama, occurring usually when kinky characters attach themselves to him because of his literary fame, seem similarly fantasized...

...As a former student and teacher in graduate departments of literature, as an admirer of Kafka, Henry James, Flaubert and Joyce, Philip Roth thought himself entirely at home with such questions...

...Years earlier in My Life as a Man, another Roth alter ego, Peter Tarnopol, professes to tell the nonfictional truth about his life, and prefaces it with two short stories about his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman...

...They think you're too famous to criticize—that you're beyond the reach now of ordinary human beings...

...For Roth the book originated at dinner parties given by Robert Brustein of the American Repertory Theatre, where successful Jews confident of their American status and "with a taste for farcical invention" could delight in memories of their upbringing...

...In his previous work, TheCounterlife, both Henry Zuckerman, the dentist, and Nathan, the novelist, decide independently to have a risky heart operation instead of being made impotent by the medicine they are taking...

...Beforewecan answer, NathanZuckerman, to whom this very partial autobiography is addressed, answers for us...

...But do they actually occur in Roth's narcissistic fiction, where the principal characters are so like himself and his history is so largely theirs...

...they are writers like himself sitting before typewriters inventing stories...

...Despite the shock of this encounter, Roth committed a far worse offense in 1969 by publishing Portnoy's Complaint...

...But when Roth took May to London, he decided that now that Josie was dead he wanted to be free of May too, and casually picked up a Hong Kong prostitute for sex in the Hilton...

...How much longer," she exclaims, "are we to be bedeviled by his Jewish fixation...

...Nothing Roth said satisfied them...

...The women described we already know from the novels, and particularly the woman called "Josie" who deceived Roth into marriage, ingeniously bedeviled him for years and nearly destroyed him before she literally destroyed herself in a fatal accident...

...Its wild obscenities and grotesque burlesques intensified the anger of those who saw Roth as a self-hating Jew happy to betray his family, his upbringing, the whole Jewish past, to win profitable laughs by reviving anti-Semitic stereotypes long banned from the media...

...Then Nathan in his turn has the operation and dies...

...Roth had trouble leaving the hall because of the angry auditors who surrounded him...

...Zuckerman has written a novel just like Portnoy which, by its gross intimacies, humiliates his parents before their friends and literally causes his father's death...

...that at Bucknell he was a great success, exploiting his Jewishness, not concealing it...

...When Roth was told this he could not believe that his worst enemy was gone...

...It was Johnson who provoked "the fantastical style of obscene satire that began to challenge virtually every hallowed rule of social propriety in the middle and late '60s.' Portnoy was published the year after the violent student anti-war protests of '68...

...Nobody will tell you—they're too frightened of you to say it...

...His major characters are not makers and shakers of the real world...

...It is to this dialectic between fact and fiction that Zuckerman returns at the end of The Facts...

...If so, what is it...

...Then the audience took over...

...Zuckerman contrasts her with a loving, well-bred Cleveland heiress—here called May Aldridge—who had for five years loyally seen Roth through his troubles with Josie...

...Then with the war in Vietnam came Lyndon B. Johnson, whose "outsized personality" made him "the inspirational impresario" for the "ugly extremes of theatrical combat dividing the society...

...I mean the way she is treated as asubject here...

...I felt absolutely nothing about her dying at 39 other than immeasurable relief...

...Wouldhe," hewas asked, "have written such stories in Nazi Germany...

...Who needs dreams...