Dear Judith,
It is interesting–and significant–that it took you two readings to register the depth and seriousness of the Silk family hurt–and the hurricane that swept through the family’s emotional life when cute little Coleman took off for Whitesville. The delay in your comprehension is all the more interesting because you are a close reader–dare I say a “Talmudic” reader?–of this novelist. But you missed this stuff initially because you were reading through your Roth filter. Put another way, you are unaccustomed to his reporting things of this nature in a non-cynical way. What this means is that Brother Roth needs to write a while from a different vantage point and with a different set of tools.
Speaking of Coleman Silk, you ask: “Is a self that turns its back on everything that made its existence possible a self worth having?” Well, in the Christian tradition, one is required to love the sinner while despising the sin. That’s how I handle this one. Also, bear in mind that Coleman Silk is part of a long, long literary tradition, though Roth makes the error of ignoring that tradition in building this character. Try, for example, Charles W. Chesnutt’s novel The House Behind the Cedars (written in 1900–and still in print from Penguin), a psychological look at a fair-skinned black man and his sister who make their way into South Carolina plantation society by putting their visibly black mother behind them and passing as white. John and Rena Warwick do not change races merely because they want to be “white.” They do it because they want opportunities that are unavailable to persons who are visibly identifiable as black. When John Warwick tries to become a lawyer (an occupation forbidden to black people in the South at the time), a white judge tells him: “You want to be a lawyer. … You are aware, of course, that you are Negro.” The character replies that looking white is all that matters (which was pretty much true in 19th-century South Carolina), saying, “A Negro is black; I am white, and not black.” This, as I said earlier, is the fatal flaw in how The Human Stain characterizes Coleman. Roth cuts him off from this explosive and heartbreaking history.
Which brings us to your question about literary ethics. As you suggest, many writers are animated by revenge. But remember, revenge begins its life as simple, elemental hurt and evolves into revenge after a time. Someone once said of Saul Bellow, for example, that he entered into terrible experiences in real life (even into disastrous marriages) so that he would have something to write about. Writers often need some jarring, nasty experience to jolt them into action. A failed romance is often just the ticket; it taps into primal impulses that are buried somewhere down there most of the time.
As for literary ethics, look at it this way: Claire Bloom should have known better than to marry a turned-in guy who was going to do her in when the relationship collapsed. For heaven’s sakes; could Claire Bloom read? Did she see that stack of novels out there in the world? Didn’t she have at least an inkling of how the adventure would turn out? I tell you straight off, Judith, if Philip Roth proposes to me, Brent Staples, I will say, “Thank you, Philip, but no thanks. I don’t want you writing about the way I snore or drop my boxer shorts short of the hamper or the hair I leave in the sink after I shave.” I say categorically right now: I will not under any circumstances marry Philip Roth. And to the next Claire Bloom, I say, buyer beware.
Many novelists appropriate real life for their books. Some feel that they can move forward only by expunging or mutilating what has gone before. Others have decided that their loves and friendships are too important to cannibalize for literary salami. Is Roth the worst at cannibalizing his life? Mmmmmm … I don’t know. Saul Bellow is pretty good at it, too. I agree with you that Bellow’s new novel Ravelstein is more slanderous than usual, more bitter and cutting. As a former colleague of his said to me the other day, “The swipes in this book are difficult to understand.” This former colleague then asked not to be quoted, fearing that he would end up beheaded in the next book. How the two people who discussed Ravelstein for Slate missed all this is beyond me, especially since issues of morality figured so heavily in the discussion.
That said, I must come clean about Bellow. I learned to write by copying Saul Bellow, I yield to no one in my admiration for his art. He has the hatchet out for me now, but maybe we can bury it sometime. Line for line, I dig him the most. Put another way, I can love the sinner (and the prose style) while hating the sin.
Now. You asked about black people at the University of Chicago. In my entire time there, I never took a course from even one black professor. I was the only black person in the room in most every class. Similarly lonely were: the socioliogist E. Franklin Frazier, who took his Ph.D. 1931; the famous historian Carter Woodson, who took a master’s in history in 1908; and the dancer Katherine Dunham, who took an undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1936; and General Benjamin O. Davis, who received a B.A. in 1932.
The education was just grand–well beyond what was available to friends of mine who went to school in the overrated Ivy League. But my most pronounced memories of Hyde Park and the university have to do with being mistaken for a criminal on the street when I was in fact a Ph.D. student, working on my literary chops. Part of that work, as you now know, was in shadowing Himself, Mr. Bellow, whose style has suited me well.
