The Human Stain

Dear Brent,

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I fold: You win. After reading your entry I went back to the passages in question and found that the Silks are better--realer, deeper, more palpable--characters than I thought. Walt, Coleman's brother, is as rigid and explosive as their father is wise; and their mother's bitterness, in her great soliloquy upon hearing Coleman's horrible declaration of independence, is truly gut-wrenching. If these characters are also rooted in actual American black experience, then Roth deserves more credit for empathy and awareness than I gave him--than he's generally given, in fact. Your explanation of Silk's father and his race consciousness--his feeling that Coleman "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"--also goes a long way toward escalating the novel's dramatic tension, its rich and unresolved ambivalences: Why did this man do this to his family, to his people, to their centuries of unspeakable suffering? What depths of self-loathing drove him? Do you really have to go to these lengths to be an "I"? Is a self that turns its back on everything that made its existence possible a self worth having?

I still think Roth is using Coleman for his own ends, though--call it using the black collective experience to talk about Roth's encounter with the Jewish one. I thought maybe we could take our last day of this "Book Club" to talk a little more about literary ethics, about what it means to make use of people and characters for your own, personal and maybe even invidious reasons, whether or not you create art in the process. This is an acute question for Roth--less in The Human Stain, actually, where you've convinced me that he's pulled it off, than in his last novel, I Married a Communist, which was pretty clearly a payback for his ex-wife Claire Bloom's unpleasant little memoir, Leaving a Doll's House. (I say unpleasant because I read it last week and it was really hard to take--Bloom seems not to realize how self-absorbed, ignorant, and passive she makes herself sound.) Bloom accuses Roth of all sorts of awful things: cold-heartedly kicking Bloom's daughter out of their house; sexually harassing a friend of said daughter; and most tellingly for our purposes, of stealing the stories of Bloom and her family for his book Deception. Bloom tells us that the wife who is cheated on in that book was called Claire until she threw a fit and made Roth change it. So, for revenge, in I Married a Communist Roth creates a character who's an actress and a secret Jew and an anti-Semitic phony, and to add insult to injury gives her a horrid daughter who's a musician, just as Bloom's daughter is, whose sole ambition appears to be to make her mother's and her mother's husband's lives miserable.

But it's not just that book. Roth seems to write everything out of pique, or rage, or rancor. He's American literature's No. 1 score-settler. There's Milton Appel, of course, and then there's that first ex-wife, the Midwestern girl who gave him the trope of the monstrous shiksa in the first place, alternately called Lucy (When She Was Good), Maureen (Letting Go, My Life as a Man), and Josie (The Facts). In each case, his infuriated rants are (to me) a pure delight to read. If bitterness fuels brilliant satire, who cares if it's warranted? My colleague Michael Brus just e-mailed us this quote from The Professor of Desire (which I've never read), in which a poetry professor declares, in another apparent swipe at Appel, and also in defense of Roth's sometimes disturbing autobiographical method: "For me the books count--my own included--where the writer incriminates himself. Otherwise, why bother? To incriminate the other guy? Best leave that to our betters, don't you think, and that cunning Yiddish theater they've evolved, called Literary Criticism."

On the other hand, I have friends whose literary judgment I respect who simply can't stand being flooded by Roth's gargantuan waves of self-pity and invariably put his novels down halfway through. And then there are the living people who are his targets. I wouldn't want to be them when Roth gets up on his high horse and tries to run them down.

And yet, on the other hand! (This is getting Talmudic. I'm sorry.) Is Roth really the worst of all score-settlers? What about your nemesis Bellow? (Or are you his nemesis? I can't keep it straight. For those of you who don't know what we're talking about, read Brent's amazing memoir Parallel Time for the famous scene in which he stalks Bellow.) Just last Saturday you wrote an editorial for the New York Times in which you pointed out that Allan Bloom isn't the only University of Chicago professor whose life is appropriated for Ravelstein. There's also Edward Shils, a former mentor of Bellow's whom he now seems moved to trash. I quote you: "Bellow insinuates that the Shils character, Rakhmiel Kogon, is a closeted homosexual, and describes him as having 'tyranny backed into his face.' " I'm reading Ravelstein now, which, by the way, contra Jonathan Rosen and Chris Caldwell in their Bellow "Book Club," I absolutely loathe--it's so doddering and fawning and self-congratulatory and, I suspect, damns Bloom too, albeit with faint praise. The Bellovian snideness, his urge to slander the living and the dead, is worse in this novel than others, but it's always been there to some degree. As you said about Bellow in Parallel Time, "He moved through the crowd looking downward, hungrily scanning hips, crotches and legs. This was how he did it. The rest of us were a junkyard where he foraged for parts."

So I guess where I come down on this is: If vindictiveness is what gets you to your desk in the morning, I guess I'd choose Roth's open rage over Bellow's controlled nastiness. Though I suppose that isn't much comfort to Claire Bloom or her daughter or the poor real-life French professor who must have inadvertently crossed Roth and given him the idea for the hilarious theory-babbling post-feminist deconstructionst Delphine Roux in The Human Stain.

Best,

Judith

P.S.: You talked about Jews and the University of Chicago--but what about blacks? I know Robert Hutchins was responsible for clearing the blacks out of the surrounding neighborhood, for which the black community in Chicago will never forgive him. But what about blacks at the school itself? Is the record as stellar as it is for Jews?

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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).

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