* * *
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Pierpont will be most controversial in her take on the deeply gentle, much-loved, and still-living Eudora Welty, whose profile she titles, with some irony, “A Perfect Lady,” and whom she correctly notes has entered the national pantheon as a kind of favorite literary aunt, “the Pallas Athena of Jackson.” One has to applaud Pierpont’s sense of justice here, with regard to the little things—“It is appalling that just about everyone willing to speak about Welty in her youth refers to her physical unattractiveness”—as well as to the harder, larger ones.
In Pierpont’s view it is Welty’s interrupted, and eventually unlocatable, moral and social discernment that is most disturbing to a reader of her oeuvre. Despite a brilliant interlude as a photographer in the 1930s, when her subject was Mississippi blacks, Welty seems to have kept from the center of her work the racial story everywhere around her. In Pierpont’s mind Welty has been polite, perhaps blinkered, rarely writing anything that would inconvenience or offend her Jackson, Mississippi, neighbors and her residence among them. (Welty, now ninety, still lives in the house of her childhood.) “The uncertainly educated denizens of Welty’s ingrown, post-historic, Coca-Cola-sodden South” are to Pierpont “truly akin to monsters—albeit, at Welty’s dismaying best, entirely guileless and extremely funny ones.”
The “dismaying best” says it all. That Welty’s work doesn’t just record but too often imitates the social refusal and denial all about it, Pierpont believes, should not to be overlooked because of Welty’s literary gifts. Pierpont does not address aesthetic ideas of naturalism or that more antique word, regionalism; it does not matter to her that the glancing way in which race is mentioned by Welty might be accurate to the segregated, white world she portrays. Pierpont sees Welty as having struck an unholy bargain with the charming South: she would keep its hatred and ugliness out of her work, in exchange for acceptance.
Such a flat-footed assertion is of course both thrilling and naïve: it is impossible that a writer of Welty’s stature would be capable, even unconsciously, of such a coarse and poisoned contract. One wonders here whether Pierpont has perhaps encountered a generosity of spirit and called it ingratiation. She is also likely flunking Welty in political homework unassigned to Welty’s northern peers; one detects in Pierpont’s account a geographical bias. Pierpont also declines to emphasize the complicated ironies and portraits of internal exile that abound in Welty’s work.
But, Pierpont writes well—and so not unpersuasively. Since she is interested less in literary criticism than in the wrong turns of a writer’s life, she claims that Welty’s alleged spiritual failing and artistic turnaround are attributable to two people Welty loved and desired to please: John Robinson, the attentive, handsome, and homosexual stepgrandson of a racist Mississippi governor; and Welty’s own overbearing mother. If, upon her father’s death, Welty had not had to return from New York, where she was then living, and taken up residence with her mother, her work, Pierpont suggests, might have continued on a very different path. (In one of Pierpont’s searing parentheticals, she notes that Katherine Anne Porter in 1952 visited Jackson and was incensed when Welty, then forty-two, had to ask her mother if Porter might come for dinner. To make matters worse, Welty’s mother said no.) The jazz improvisations and grim social complexities that were included early on in Welty’s stories gave way, Pierpont insists, to “something akin to the folksy humbug of Will Rogers.”
Of course, all writers are vulnerable to accusations of having left things out—wittingly or unwittingly—of having avoided or transformed certain things because of the difficulty of addressing them head-on. Often it is a kind of modesty, a writer’s underestimation of his or her abilities, that keeps the work—and perhaps the life—so constricted. Welty, by virtue of birthplace and temperament, may be particularly vulnerable to such complaints. When she was growing up, “the only black people she appears to have seen were contented servants. According to her own report, quite unremarkably she questioned nothing.” Works such as Delta Wedding appear to Pierpont—and others—to traffic in the flattering, local white myths. Quite tellingly, in her twenties, Welty apologized publicly, if a bit sarcastically, for not having been in jail or trodden grapes like other young people. But then Welty was always famously “nice.” When her Collected Stories appeared in 1980, her publisher removed the word nigger from a significant portion: Welty gave her consent.
* * *
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Passionate Minds, with its unintimidated questions and explorations, is provocative and bracing, a wizard’s mix of innocence and fire. One can only guess how that playwright-actress Lillian Hellman might have fared within its pages.
(2000)
Philip Roth’s The Human Stain
For admirers of the shrieking, lyrical work of Philip Roth, the 1990s were a feast. First came Patrimony (1991), Roth’s magnificent memoir of his father, one of his few books to stir tears not simply of laughter. Then came the intellectually exquisite Operation Shylock (1993), followed by Sabbath’s Theater (1995), Roth’s masterpiece of erotic and tragicomic mourning. Three stunning books in quick succession: it seemed an outpouring of unstoppable, idiosyncratic genius.
In terms of sheer productivity, brilliance, distinctly American diction, philosophical rage, comic irritability, dramatic representations of solitude, uniqueness of voice, and unwavering repugnance toward heterosexual convention, it is difficult to think of a contemporary artist with whom Roth might even be compared. If one strains and reaches into another medium entirely, Stephen Sondheim comes to mind. Both have committed their lives to a single (if commercially ailing) art form, provocatively pushing at its margins with piercing wit and multitonal notes, for the avid consumption of the more literate members of an essentially middlebrow audience—their loyal fans.
The condition of the fan over time, however, is a complicated one. The fan’s admiration may grow proprietary, neurotic, and fussy—conducted no longer in the language of love but in the unattractive tones of disappointed connoisseurship. Such a condition, with time, resembles something vaguely if unilaterally marital, replete with dashed hopes, eccentric pronouncements, insincere forgiveness, nagging, muttering, and some occasional really extremely minor drinking.
So….Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?
Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral (1997), despite its many lively and sharply observed passages, was, to this reader, a falling-off from the three books before it. The novel’s disdainful depiction of sixties radicals (who are given little of intelligence to do or say) and the portrait of its sweet, hollow hero appeared fatally underimagined. American Pastoral was followed by I Married a Communist (1998), which sometimes seemed cripplingly awash in unwarranted—and therefore sentimental—emotion.
Rage is often Roth’s highly effective muse, but it may have failed I Married a Communist because it was made too talky, rendered tonal before it was rendered dramatic. The leading male characters all join forces to heap their disgust upon the female characters just a tad too soon. The novel’s events are insufficient up front to subject the narration so quickly to such bile. Of course, T. S. Eliot once made something of the same criticism of Hamlet.
Roth’s new novel, The Human Stain, loosely belongs to a trio that includes these last two novels. They have many things in common: a nostalgia for old Newark; a handsome hero-fool; the handsome hero-fool’s tell-it-like-it-is brother; and the presence of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s literary doppelgänger, who is observer, bit player, and imaginary channeler of all three novels. Moreover, although none of these novels is a political one per se, each is set in a politicized landscape, positioning a messy family drama within the politically charged setting of the presidential years of Nixon, Eisenhower, and Clinton, respectively. Of the three, The Human Stain is, to this reader, the most interesting book; its particular hero-fool is arguably the most socially intriguing character to whom
Roth has ever devoted himself.
Jewish identity crises are, of course, Roth’s signature subject: his fictional portraits tend to be of Jewish men fashioning for themselves independent ways of being Jewish; authenticity and existential freedom are his themes, and his narratives generally proceed by argument, often in the form of dialogue. In The Human Stain, Roth gives us Coleman Silk, classics professor at fictional Athena College in western Massachusetts. Silk is a neighbor of Nathan Zuckerman, as Gatsby was of Nick Carraway, and “was also the first and only Jew ever to serve at Athena as dean of faculty.” But Silk’s Jewishness contains a secret. As it turns out, he is not actually Jewish at all. Roth has given us a man struggling with a truly independent way of being Jewish: pretending to be Jewish. Being Jewish, for Coleman Silk, means being white. Silk is actually a light-skinned black man, the son of a New Jersey optician, who, in his early twenties, seeing he could pass for white, decided to go ahead, disown his family, and pass. “To become a new being,” thinks Zuckerman. “To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America’s story, the high drama that is upping and leaving—and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands.”
When Silk tells his mother his decision, her stoicism is heartbreaking. To see her future grandchildren, she says, she’ll just sit quietly on a park bench if Coleman will walk them by. “You tell me the only way I can ever touch my grandchildren is for you to hire me to come over as Mrs. Brown to babysit and put them to bed, I’ll do it. Tell me to come over as Mrs. Brown to clean your house, I’ll do that.” It is a valedictory between mother and son on a par with Hector and his weeping mother (just before Hector is slaughtered by Athena). Not for nothing is Coleman Silk a classics scholar. His favorite book, in fact, is the Iliad.
The cost and purposefulness of Silk’s reinvention is extraordinary, even within the fictional world of an author who has written valentine after valentine to the idea of trespass.
Did he get, from his decision, the adventure he was after, or was the decision in itself the adventure?... Was it the social obstruction that he wished to sidestep? Was he merely being another American and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness? Or was it more than that? Or was it less?
It is a decision that Silk’s fate comes to mock profoundly. Roth gives Silk a Jew’s life but also a Jew’s death—that is, he is singled out as a Jew by an anti-Semite and marked for death. The message of the kaddish, Zuckerman notes, is “a Jew is dead. Another Jew is dead. As though death were not a consequence of life but a consequence of having been a Jew.”
In a novel abounding with harsh ironies, one of the most peculiar is the one the novel begins with, the one that has Silk summoning Zuckerman before him. Professor Silk, we come to learn, has been forced into retirement. Two years before, he used the word spooks in class, meaning ghosts or phantoms, but it was mistaken for a racial slur and a complaint was brought against him. When he refused to apologize in any way whatsoever, and instead grew more and more furious, his resignation became inevitable. This incident, he feels, is his tragedy (slaughtered by Athena!), for he devoted his life’s work to the college, as both teacher and esteemed dean. He blames the scandal for the death of his wife, Iris (in the midst of the controversy she died of a stroke), and in his sorrow and fury continues to alienate not just his colleagues but his children and friends. He begins writing a book called “Spooks” and asks Zuckerman to help him with it.
Although Zuckerman does not directly help Silk, he begins tentative investigations on behalf of his own book, The Human Stain, a title that clearly refers not just to the taint left upon this earth by our species but also to the pigmentation that so arbitrarily colors human skin. Zuckerman’s imagining of Silk’s story leads him to other ones, especially that of Silk’s new girlfriend, Faunia Farley, who is a janitor at Athena College and is a woman so unformed by societal expectations, so unimaginably assaulted by life, that she is accepting of everything Silk could possibly reveal about himself. “It was the closest Coleman ever felt to anyone! He loved her. Because that is when you love somebody—when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.”
The novel’s weakest parts involve hatefully rendered interior monologues of two characters, the first being Lester Farley, Faunia’s psychotic ex-husband and Vietnam veteran, whom Roth seems to construct from every available cliché of the Vietnam vet. The second is Delphine Roux, a lonely young classics professor who dresses like a schoolgirl and becomes the target of Roth’s fierce but unconvincing satirical commentary. (In what can only be described as a kind of pedophobia, the villains of Roth’s last two novels were schoolgirls—spoiled and oddly dangerous to middle-aged men.) The book indulges in the sort of tirade against political correctness that is far drearier and more intellectually constricted than political correctness itself. Roth, usually fond of both sides of an argument, fails to extend understanding toward—and only makes fun of—the possible discomfort of minorities or women in settings like Athena, where prejudice may be trickily institutional and atmospheric, causing events like the spooks utterance to be seized hold of and overinterpreted. Such seizing is like nabbing Al Capone for tax evasion—neither accurate nor wrong. And despite the protests against Black History Month, brazenly placed in the mouth of Silk’s African-American sister, the novel shows that Zuckerman’s education would indeed have benefited from such a month.
The novel is strongest and is even magical when Zuckerman is actually present on the page—and, in this case, in the room with Coleman Silk, observing him with articulate infatuation. Silk is quick, lithe, charismatic, in ways indomitable, “an outgoing, sharp-witted, forcefully smooth big-city charmer, something of a warrior, something of an operator, hardly the prototypical pedantic professor of Latin and Greek.” At one point they fox-trot together on Silk’s porch. “Come, let’s dance,” says Silk, bare-chested and in shorts, hearing a Sinatra song on the radio.
“But you mustn’t sing into my ear,” says Zuckerman, who, once he is dancing, adds, “I hope nobody from the volunteer fire department drives by.” The homoerotic moments in The Human Stain are not “overtly carnal” but playful and warmhearted. At one point the book even contemplates the sexual allure of Milan Kundera—from the point of view of Delphine Roux, but still: as a writer, Roth knows how to have fun.
In addition to the hypnotic creation of Coleman Silk—whom many readers will feel, correctly or not, to be partly inspired by the late Anatole Broyard—Roth has brought Nathan Zuckerman into old age, continuing what he began in American Pastoral. Alone, prostateless, now outside the sexual fray, Zuckerman has become a melancholic poet of twilight and chagrin; the combination of perspicacity and weary tranquillity becomes him as a narrator. He is like that beloved American character, the retired private eye, brought back in for one more case. When he accidentally befriends an African-American, the national story of race opens up for him in all its particularities—or, rather, one fascinating set of them. He says of Silk:
The dance that sealed our friendship was also what made his disaster my subject. And made his disguise my subject. And made the proper presentation of his secret my problem to solve. That was how I ceased being able to live apart from the turbulence and intensity that I had fled. I did no more than find a friend, and all the world’s malice came rushing in.
The Human Stain is an astonishing, uneven, and often very beautiful book.
(2000)
Matthew Klam’s Sam the Cat
Before Robert Gottlieb became editor of The New Yorker for a brief five-year term (from 1987 to 1992), the fiction printed in the magazine was famous (among those associated with smaller literary magazines) for its squeamish gentility. No body fluids, sounds, or smells were permitted in its pages. Other banished and corrupting vulgarities included the word wig (instead of hairpiece) as
well as the barbarism “yellow light” (one was required to say “amber light” when writing of a traffic signal).
Of the several young fiction writers who came speeding headlong through the amber light of Gottlieb’s interregnum, no one seemed more provocatively expressive of current American vernacular (in its white male form) than the then twenty-seven-year-old Matthew Klam. The narrative voice of “Sam the Cat,” his first of seven stories to be published in The New Yorker, was so alarmingly, vitally full of forbidden utterance that it seemed to set the pages of the magazine on fire. “The downstairs smelled like cat piss,” that first story read, worrying the line between candor and scatology. “Skippy’s litter box was like an overflowing minefield.” If its youthful antiheroics and attention to style and myth made it seem quite a legitimate descendant of John Updike’s renowned “A&P,” the helpless prurience and bumbling belligerence of its voice owed something to the theatrical monologues of Lenny Bruce and Spalding Gray. “You walk into a supermarket or a restaurant, your girlfriend goes in first and you’re looking at her ass. And you say to yourself, ‘Isn’t that the most beautiful ass? That’s mine. It’s beautiful.’ Like it’s going to save you. An ass isn’t going to save you. What’s it going to do? Hide you from the police?” The story was greeted at the time with dismay, shock, and delight—sometimes simultaneously in a single reader.