The Human Stain

Dear Judith.

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

First off, let me place some distance between Irving Howe and me. I agree, I agree: His generation preferred socialist realism as a way of seeing working class people--and particularly black working class people--in literature. This fetish was especially costly to black writers, who were accused of selling out if they depicted black characters as full, rounded human beings instead of as scarred individuals for whom racism was the only, palpable fact. Yes, Brother Howe attacked Philip Roth in the '70s for not providing the desired portrait of Jews. But he mounted a similar attack on Roth's favorite American novelist, Ralph Ellison, in the 1960s. Howe faulted Invisible Man for not being a novel about the "ideological and emotional penalties suffered by Negroes in this country." Isn't that wild, just as wild as all hell? But like many of his fellow critics, Howe preferred the limited version of black identity in Richard Wright's Native Son, which starred a monstrous black man who was said to have been made monstrous by his experiences with racism.

Now. You reject my argument that Roth turns Coleman "Silky'' Silk into a tchotchke. As you assert: "It is not that Roth ignores what it means to be black in America in the 1940s and '50s; it's that he's come up with a way to relegate it to the background, and to turn passing, a perfectly comprehensible response to an insane situation--Coleman's father calls it 'Negrophobia'--into a vile bit of personal treachery." But then you accuse Roth of showing "condescending kindness'' and of being "so damn pious'' when Coleman's father breaks out the race-loyalty rap. You would be happier, I take it, if Roth attacked what you see as sanctimony in the Silk crew.

I agree that Roth approaches these people differently, with a minimum of the usual mockery. But I doubt that Roth is doing so out of a patronizing impulse--or fear of a boycott from the NAACP. He treads more carefully here because he is out of his depth. Simply put, he does not know what to make of the collectivist impulse and the collectivist rhetoric that the Silks display. You see the Silk dad as sanctimonious. But I must tell you, the tone and style of his speech rang true to me. I hope that does not surprise you. But try to grasp what it was like for a black family clinging to the edges of middle-class existence during the '40s and '50s and '60s--at a time when the black middle class was virtually nonexistent. Silk's father embodies perfectly the impulses that allowed black people to survive both white racism and the disrupting influences of the very, very poor--who were no mere empty abstraction but who lived right next door. When Silk's father comes down on Coleman for boxing at the gym with all that riffraff, he is talking about class loyalty and uplifting the race. By wasting his talents with riffraff, the father is saying, Coleman is blowing off more than himself. He is blowing off people going back a hundred years who picked cotton and cleaned toilets so that pretty little Coleman could play the genius at NYU. By the way, as the great-grandson of a black man born in the waning days of slavery, I am very much conscious of this connection and of what my ancestors endured to propel me to a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago--and a job as an essayist for the most powerful newspaper in the world. I feel that connection strongly. I work to honor it--and I write directly out of it. Yet I remain a cosmopolitan, abroad in the secular world. Yes? A strong, in-group identity need not be stultifying. In many cases, it provides a cache of muscle that the person would otherwise lack.

The rhetoric of in-group loyalty is closer to the surface--and certainly far more public--among black people than among Jews. The difference stems in part from the fact that Jews have "Overcome," in the words of the civil-rights song. But differences in visibility are also crucial. The average Jewish person reads as "white" in public and can do pretty much as he or she wishes, without incurring either in-group wrath or damaging the public persona of the group. The average black person reads as, well, "black," in public and is therefore subject to certain generalizations, not to mention routine stop-and-frisks from the New York City and Los Angeles police departments.

I agree, I agree; Coleman's mother is too self-sacrificing. But the rhetoric of self-discipline and racial uplift that Coleman's father lays on is altogether authentic. In his era (the era of W.E.B. DuBois), to be a black intellectual and professional person meant that you were a "race man'' by default, carrying both the burdens and the responsibilities thereof. To waste your talent was both a personal crime and a crime against the race. It seems to you that Roth lacks the courage to make fun of this stance. It seems to me that Roth is nonplused here: He feels the power of this rhetoric and is unable to summon his standard series of objections to what he sees as groupthink. Interesting. Don't you think?

Now. You ask about "Jewish heavy-hitters'' at the University of Chicago, which gave us both Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Why so many heavy-hitters? Well, my dear, you don't know the half of it. Irving Kristol. Gertrude Himmelfarb. Hannah Arendt. Leo Strauss. Milton Friedman. The list goes on an on. The University of Chicago never had anti-Jewish quotas, not even from the start in the 1890s. A founding member of that faculty, I am told by those who know, was the Rabbi Emil Hirsch--the grandfather of Edward Levi, who later became a U.S. attorney general and president of the university as well. Back when most other universities had anti-Jewish quotas, it was said by some that the University of Chicago "used Baptist money to pay atheist professors to teach Catholic philosophy to Jewish students." The money being from Rockefeller, who founded what he hoped would be a Baptist university. In addition to not having quotas, the university tended to accept more students from working-class backgrounds than the Ivies did. Unlike many other universities, where the elite thinkers don't teach at all, the University of Chicago allowed students to have close and sometimes even seminar-level contact with name-brand thinkers in every area. The brightness of these people, experienced at such close range, leaves an impression that is often beneficial. Bellow and Roth were certainly heavy-hitters, as you say, drawn to a place where Jews were welcome from the beginning. But don't put Bloom in that class. As his colleague Edward Shils said, the weak and muddled book that was The Closing of the American Mind would better have been called The Closing of an American Mind. Bloom was a poseur in a place that was jammed with the real thing.

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

This week, a discussion of Philip Roth's new novel, The Human Stain (click here to buy it, and here to read an excerpt). Judith Shulevitz writes Slate's "Culturebox" column. Brent Staples writes editorials on politics and culture for the New York Times and is the author of Parallel Time (click here to buy it).

SPONSORED CONTENT