My Generation (57 page)

O
ne of the most beautiful tributes ever made by one writer to another was the one that Jim Dickey wrote upon the death of Truman Capote.
¹
It could only have been written by a man who, like Jim, knew firsthand of the hard work, the anguish, but also of the final exaltation of the artist's calling. I wish I had the time, and also the gift, to be able to pay such homage to my friend Jim, but I hope these few hasty words will in some way express my admiration for the poet who was the laureate of his generation. I come from the same generation—the generation of World War II—and Jim and I were both born in the South; our Southern upbringing in the years of the Great Depression and our experience in uniform during the war helped weld our companionship.

Jim was Southern to his fingertips but he was of that category, richly endowed with humanity and learning, that always confounds Northerners. Willie Morris is fond of telling the story of a taxi ride he made, with Jim and another Southerner, from LaGuardia Airport into Manhattan. The taxi was driven by a beetlebrowed type who thought the Dixie accents from the backseat gave him the license to erupt in a tirade against black people. For a long while the three riders listened to this racist diatribe, until at last Jim, exasperated beyond endurance, leaned forward and said: “Shut up! We don't need advice from an amateur bigot.”

What Jim had seen and suffered during the war was, like his Southernness,
a determining element in much of what he wrote, and I began to understand this part of him back in the early 1970s, when he lived near me for part of a summer on Martha's Vineyard. It was the summer just before the release of that very fine movie
Deliverance
, and Jim was on a perpetual high, quite aware that he was on the verge of a rare happening, that of an author of an exceptional novel seeing an exceptional movie made of it. As everyone in the world knows, Jim loved the bottle—and so did I in those days—and we would hit the tennis court at ten in the morning, falsely emboldened by (I shudder at the recollection) a pitcher of dry martinis. After these disastrous games we'd sit on my front porch, and it was there that he told me something about his life in the Air Force. He spoke of fear, and of the exquisite fragility and vulnerability of the men who flew those planes, and as he told me of those things I began to see how
Deliverance
, which I had so admired as a novel, was in a sense an allegory of fear and survival: of innocent and well-meaning men, set upon by forces of inexplicable evil, who nonetheless come through by the skin of their teeth. An awareness of life's sweetness, which we cling to despite preposterous hazards, is at the heart of Jim's writing.

Jim was rambunctiously and vigorously alive to a degree I've rarely known in anyone. His energy carried over into his prose and, perhaps most significantly, into the best of his poetry, which will surely live as long as that of any poet of his time. His personal excesses and abuses upon himself were the result of journeying to dark places that others have shunned, and having the need to find the solace of oblivion. What one must remember about James Dickey are his words, words that will forever sing:

My green, graceful bones fill the air

With sleeping birds. Alone, alone

And with them I move gently.

I move at the heart of the world.

[Tribute read at a memorial service for Dickey at the University of South Carolina, February 14, 1997. Previously unpublished.]

I
n the interest of full disclosure I want to say that I have long been a friend of Philip Roth's. Therefore it may seem odd to you that I accepted being not only today's speaker but also the chairmanship of the selection committee, and that I did not recuse myself (I think that's the term) from a situation in which there was an obvious conflict of interest. But I figured, what the hell, if the Supreme Court, from which we are supposed to draw many of our moral examples, could so flagrantly and so often demonstrate partiality to the point of actually electing a president, why shouldn't I merely indulge myself in some high-powered literary logrolling and get my old pal a nice medal? So I had no hesitation in agreeing to the chairmanship, determined to muscle my way into a position of force that would brook no opposition to the choice of Philip Roth. Fortunately, my task became sublimely simple. While the committee members did put forth other names—and there were some immensely worthy names, I might add—the presence of Philip Roth so truly dominated our gathering that he became a shoo-in. Thus, whatever guilt I anticipated over being a shameless, even ruthless, partisan was mercifully allayed.

I've been closely connected with the present recipient of the MacDowell Medal since a year far back in the 1950s when my wife, Rose, served as midwife to one of Philip Roth's firstborn literary offspring.
The Paris Review
, which I had helped found, had been in existence for only four or five
years, and Rose had signed on as an editorial assistant, which meant that she worked pro bono as manuscript reader. This was an especially thankless job since the magazine had yet to achieve the lofty reputation it now has and the submissions, mainly short stories, were accordingly of fairly humble quality. Rose and I were living then in a cottage in Connecticut. While she felt that she was laboring in a noble cause, her exposure to so many works of feeble inspiration and haphazard syntax left her pretty enervated. Few literary agents had learned of the
Review
's existence, so most of the entries arrived “over the transom,” as they said in those days, unsolicited. I can still remember the sighs of delight, modulating almost into wonder, that came from Rose as she finished an entry from a writer named Philip Roth. Here finally was the genuine article, a story with bite and originality, zestfully written, obviously from someone young, but marked by the confident authority of a guy who knew exactly what he wanted to say and how to say it.

In his autobiographical writings, Philip has said of his undergraduate stories that he had “managed to extract from Salinger a very cloying come-on and from the young Capote his gossamer vulnerability, and to imitate badly my titan, Thomas Wolfe, at the extremes of self-pitying self-importance.” What was evident from this story, called “Epstein,” written a scant few years after his days at Bucknell University, was that its author had immediately rid himself of all vestiges of self-pity or self-importance and composed a first-rate narrative marked with the poise of early maturity. The story was eagerly accepted by the
Paris Review'
s editor, George Plimpton; he soon published other Roth stories which were included in the collection
Goodbye, Columbus
, an exciting volume that appeared when the author was only twenty-six and made him, like Byron, famous overnight. I first met Philip in 1960, in Rome, just as his fame was cresting. We had only known each other for a short time when he got word that
Goodbye, Columbus
had won the National Book Award. He was obviously pleased, though a little flabbergasted, and flew back to New York to receive the prize. Later on, when he returned, and we sat up late in trattorias, talking about books and American politics (it was the last gasp of the Eisenhower days) and other matters, I could sense through what he said that his pleasure over the success of
Goodbye, Columbus
was not unalloyed; there were responses to the work that bothered him, though I couldn't tell at the time how truly bothered he was.

But I'll come back to this. The young fellow I knew in Rome was marvelous
company. The Jewish comic strain that imbued the tales in
Goodbye, Columbus
with their essential flavor was part of Philip's appeal. We had rollicking Roman dinners and other mildly manic get-togethers. On the spur of the moment we flew off to the British Isles, Rose and me, Philip and his then wife Maggie, in an escapade which might have ended in disaster—so soggy was the weather in London and Dublin and so dismal, after Italy, was the food in both places—had we not been buoyed by a kind of insouciant determination to enjoy ourselves and by Philip's running commentary on the prevailing horrors, a take that was hilariously scathing and cathartic. During our travels together we inevitably exchanged details about our respective and profoundly disparate upbringings—mine in Tidewater Virginia, his in New Jersey—and I began to see how the all-Jewish world of Philip's Newark neighborhood and Weequahic High School so decisively formed the spirit and marrow of the creatures inhabiting
Goodbye, Columbus
. Ina later memoir touching on this period he wrote: “Discussions about Jewishness and being Jewish, which I was to hear so often among intellectual Jews once I was an adult in Chicago and New York, were altogether unknown; we talked about being misunderstood by our families, about movies and radio programs and sex and sports….About being Jewish there was nothing more to say than there was about having two arms and two legs. It would have seemed to us strange
not
to be Jewish—stranger still, to hear someone announce that he wished he weren't a Jew or that he intended not to be in the future.”

Everyone by now knows of the hazards of being a writer of fiction in a multicultural society. As I found out years ago, to attempt to interpret the experience of an ethnic group other than one's own, grounded in the notion that a common humanity gives out the license to do so, is like walking into a minefield. But Philip's ugly awakening came from a crueler irony: even writing about one's own group can elicit rage, if the truths one tells cut too close to the bone. During a symposium at Yeshiva University not too long after the appearance of
Goodbye, Columbus
, Philip was asked: “Mr. Roth, would you write the same stories you've written if you were living in Nazi Germany?” Philip goes on to say: “Thirty minutes later, I was still being grilled. No response I gave was satisfactory and, when the audience was allowed to take up the challenge, I realized that I was not just opposed but hated. I've never forgotten my addled reaction: an undertow of bodily fatigue took hold and began sweeping me away from that auditorium even as I tried to reply
coherently to one denunciation after another….I had actually to suppress a desire to close my eyes and, in my chair at the panelists' table…drift into unconsciousness.” Later at a restaurant, still infuriated, he says to his companions, over a pastrami sandwich no less: “I'll never write about Jews again.” Well, fat chance.

Over the years Philip and I have been drawn together by various mutual concerns but never have I felt so sympathetic, never did my heart beat with such a sense of brotherly accord, as during those times in the past when he was warding off assaults from crazed and vindictive rabbis. Or from Hadassah matrons bent on redeeming places like Asbury Park from Philip's brand of moral pollution. By the late 1960s there had appeared—or I should say, exploded—
Portnoy's Complaint
, which was all about Jews, and not just Jews but mainly one young Jew, the Assistant Human Opportunity Commissioner of New York City and, more specifically, his lascivious juxtaposition with any number of randy girlfriends, particularly a West Virginia shiksa, known as The Monkey. All in all a breakthrough novel, feverish, a sensation, a wildly scabrous book which once and for all established a norm of sexual candor from which there could be no turning back. If nothing else,
Portnoy
made life forever safe for masturbation.
Portnoy
did not, however, escape the pursuit of self-appointed watchdogs and pecksniffs, a large portion of them Jewish, who were bent upon inflicting vengeance for its author's inexcusable slander. Philip and I had become rural Connecticut neighbors by then. I had been through my own crucible, having published a novel dealing with American slavery which was quite successful in many ways but which incurred the wrath of numerous black intellectuals who pounced upon me with the same
ad hominem
fury that Philip had experienced with rabbis.

Like Philip, who should have stayed away, I foolishly allowed myself to be grilled in public: in my case the foe were seething black inquisitors who caused me to realize, like Philip, that I was not just opposed but hated. I too had felt the need to close my eyes and drift into unconsciousness. The experience we both shared had helped anneal our already strong friendship. And in Philip's case I have the feeling that such brainless enmity may have had the salubrious effect of making him increasingly alert to some of the more insidious threats looming on the national horizon. We had little inkling, during the anarchic, freedom-loving last years of the 1960s, when a book like
Portnoy's Complaint
happily flourished, of a not-so-far-off time when the equality and dignity so justly sought by disenfranchised groups would be
provisionally achieved, or at least enormously ameliorated, only to be confounded by dogma and fanaticism. This poisonous new conformism would be most immediately apparent on college campuses, but in government too, and in subtle ways it would permeate society. It would also become one of Philip's preoccupations, in his later work, as he both soberly and gleefully exposed the raw face of Jewish bigotry, black bigotry, Arab bigotry, feminist bigotry, left-wing bigotry, right-wing bigotry, and all the other large and small tyrannies that bedevil us and lessen us as a people.

In one of his memoirs Philip has his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, speak to him, Philip, as follows: “If there's one thing that can put the kibosh on a literary career, it's the loving forgiveness of one's natural enemies.” He then goes on to say: “The whole point about your fiction (and in America, not only yours) is that the imagination is always in transit between the good boy
and
the bad boy—that's the tension that leads to revelation” (
The Facts
, p. 167). Here in brief, Zuckerman gets to the core of much of the magnetic appeal of Philip's books, reminding us that the cute high school lad portrayed in his 1950 yearbook (described as “a boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense”) has come a long way on that journey in which, seeking to find his Americanness, seeking it with an urgency only possible in the grandson of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, he found it, and with it found both a lot of good and a great deal of wickedness. Because he couldn't take his Americanness for granted—as say, a Virginia-born WASP might do—there has been a hard-won quality in Philip's work, which has added depth to his achievement. Like that of nearly all good authors one should care about, Philip's writing has powerful elements of the transgressive, the shocking, the contumacious; he wants to root out evil wherever he can find it, but since the good boy and the bad boy are in perpetual conflict, and there is a constant quarrel going on, and mistrust and doubt, the result—as in such superb recent novels as
American Pastoral
and
The Human Stain
—is a kind of majestic equipoise. Here the wreckage of the American dream, its sad miscalculations and fatal errors—sometimes viciously initiated but as often the product of decent people smothered by circumstance—is fully glimpsed by an artist of rare tragic vision.

Throughout his career Philip has worked with the focused energy of the committed writer, turning out a shimmering body of work. It's been an often exhilarating experience to have come to know him as well as I do, to be a good friend and neighbor, and to be able to enjoy as frequently as I have the
company of one so mercurially alive, whether in a somber mood or explosively, peerlessly funny. Like his alternate persona, the descriptively named writer E. I. Lonoff, Philip has labored away without stint in the Connecticut woods, isolated, converting the vicissitudes of a seemingly uneventful existence into imaginative edifices rich with fully limned characters acting out their compelling dramas, written in what can only be called the Rothian style, exclusively his own, and resolutely, though unaffectedly, non-postmodern.

There has of course been some domestic turbulence, caustically described. It has also been a life not unhaunted by the darkest of shadows, and these too have been transformed into powerful elements of this fiction. Occasionally, a life-threatening event has paralleled my own and further drawn us together. In the early 1990s Philip was besieged by a monstrous black cloud bank of clinical depression, one which, though fueled by some vile medication, was doubtless chiefly the result of that mysterious constellation of causes that even now, universally, makes the treatment and understanding of this terrifying illness so problematical. Anxiety-ridden, racked by dreams of self-destruction, and in excruciating pain, Philip finally put himself behind institutional walls where he eventually recovered as, thankfully, most people do. His ultimate triumph, however (or perhaps revenge), was that of the resourceful artist. This was an exquisitely detailed and harrowing account of his own ordeal that takes place at the beginning of
Operation Shylock;
it is one of the clearest portraits of clinical depression to be found in fiction.

That we are near the end of an era, that the novel is moribund or irrelevant, that writing itself is in peril, that the creation of fiction is a marginal occupation, that literature is due to be vaporized in a cosmic swarm of delights—these reports keep up their tedious buzz. Not too long ago I heard Philip himself utter a chillingly bleak pronouncement about the future of the Word, and I thought: well, maybe he's got a point. Later, though, I had second thoughts, and backtracked in the realization that I may be far more of an optimist than I care to admit. My provisional cheer is based largely on a subjective view of imaginative writing but I think it might be shared by some of you today who truly value reading and the immeasurable rewards of great fiction. Of course we prize the novel for many good reasons: for the special authority of the writer's voice; for its style, whether low-keyed or rambunctious or seductively lyrical; for its philosophical challenge or subtlety;
for its uncanny rendition of a sense of place; for the authenticity of its dialogue—the list goes on; usually our pleasure comes from an amalgam of all these things. But one feature of great fiction seems to me so central, so essential that it reduces all the others to secondary roles. I'm thinking of the astounding invention of human beings. That a mob of vital creatures could spring from the synapses of the brain of a sleepless, overcaffeinated Balzac strikes me as one of the great and beautiful mysteries. Ever since the beginning of the novel we have embraced with passion these flesh-and-blood offspring of their creators' fantasies, reacting to the most memorable among them with the same relish and admiration, disappointment and suspicion, perplexity and chagrin—and ultimate awe—that we feel for grand historical figures. These people (“characters” if you will) have also been essential in establishing our own identity as members of the human race. Whether commonplace or noble, shady or godly, princes or putzes, whether they are named Emma Bovary or Raskolnikov, Huck Finn or Jay Gatsby, Molly Bloom or Rabbit Angstrom, they have made claims on our allegiance, and even our capacity for love, which we would honor only a touch less readily than those of cherished family members. Why great fiction will never die, I feel certain, is because the inhabitants of fiction's pages—and often sublime figments we've come to know as Dilsey and Ahab and Sancho Panza—are profoundly mortal even in their immortality; they are perishable just as we are perishable. We shall ever refuse even to think of consigning these creatures, and the books in which they dwell, to oblivion. To do so would be to signal our own deaths.