But there’s a catch. Over the course of literary history some of the legitimately destructive reviews have been altogether too enjoyable for both writer and reader. Attacking bad books, they were useful acts in defence of civilization. They also left the authors of the books in the position of prisoners buried to the neck in a Roman arena as the champion charioteer, with swords mounted on his hubcaps, demonstrated his mastery of the giant slalom. How civilized is it to tee off on the exposed ineptitude of the helpless?
Back in the early nineteenth century, the great historian and mighty reviewer Lord Macaulay might have said that the ineptitude of the poet Robert Montgomery had not yet been exposed. And indeed the dim but industrious Montgomery had grown dangerously used to extravagant praise, until a new book of his poems was given for review to Macaulay. The results set all England laughing and Montgomery on the road to oblivion, where he still is, his fate at Macaulay’s hands being his only remaining claim to fame. Montgomery’s high style was asking to be brought low and Macaulay no doubt told himself that he was only doing his duty by putting in the boot. But Macaulay must also have given thanks that it asked quite so blatantly. Montgomery had a line about a river meandering level with its fount. Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount wouldn’t even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay made it funny, but from Montgomery’s viewpoint funny would surely have meant worse. He had been exposed for all to see as a writer who couldn’t see what was in front of him.
Across the pond, Mark Twain later did the same to James Fenimore Cooper. Making hilarious game of the improbabilities in Cooper’s tales of arcane woodcraft, Twain’s essays about Cooper have been American classics ever since. So have Cooper’s tales, but only in the category of enjoyable hokum. After Twain got through with him, Cooper’s literary prestige was gone. Reading the reviews that did him in, it is impossible to avoid the impression that Twain would have enjoyed himself less if Cooper had been less of a klutz. Like Macaulay, Twain used someone else’s mediocrity as an opportunity to be outstanding. This is getting pretty close to malice, for all its glittering disguise as selfless duty.
The same applied in the twentieth century to Dwight Macdonald’s attack on By Love Possessed, a novel by James Gould Cozzens that was not only a bestseller but had a huge critical success. Think of the reception for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, switch it back to 1957, and you get the scale. Cozzens had his face on the cover of Time. Macdonald thought the face needed a custard pie, and wrote a review that convincingly exposed Cozzens’s masterpiece as portentously arranged junk. Macdonald usefully did the same for the clumsy prose style of the New English Bible, but there he was attacking a committee. In the case of By Love Possessed he was attacking a man. When you say a man writes badly, you are trying to hurt him. When you say it in words better than his, you have hurt him. It would be better to admit this fact, and admit that all adverse reviews are snarks to some degree, than to indulge the sentimental wish that malice might be debarred from the literary world. The literary world is where it belongs. When Dr Johnson longed for his enemy to publish a book, it was because he wasn’t allowed to hit him with an axe. Civilization tames human passions, but it can’t eliminate them. Hunt the snark and you will find it everywhere.
New York Times, 10 September 2003
Postscript
Living in a brand-name economy, Americans like to see things clearly labelled even when it comes to matters of the mind. A literary CONTROVERSY has to be marked controversy so that the readers can prepare themselves for the unusual spectacle of people disagreeing with one another in print over a question that really has no simple answer. In America there must always be an answer or else there is something wrong with the question. Written at the kind invitation of the New York Times – whose cultural section has lately entered on a welcome new phase of encouraging the unclassifiable voice – the above piece will probably seem elementary to a British or Australian reader, but I reprint it here as an example of what can look like boldness in a context where consensus is held to be the norm, rather than the aberration. Had I been bolder still, I could have pointed out that the star critics of a dominant media outlet – the New York Times for example – have far too much power, because any common opinion on a given topic in the field of the arts is largely imposed by them. Snarky reviews in minor publications do little damage. They can easily be put down to personal ambition. But the ponderously delivered verdict of a tenured critic in one of the major publications can kill a play or a book overnight. The verdict doesn’t have to be hostile, merely ‘negative’, a word meaning anything less than ecstatic. How these concentrations of influence emerged in a democracy is no great mystery: Tocqueville foresaw just such an outcome. The mystery is why so many intelligent people should accept the resulting mediocrity of opinion as a fact of life. It was, however, an American financial mogul who told me that he thought that the literary culture of London left the New York equivalent looking comatose. He told me this at a book-launch held in his own apartment, where the crowd was dotted with extremely beautiful women. When I confessed to one of them that I had found Moby Dick a hard read, she reacted as if I had just revealed that I earned my living as a roach exterminator. Perhaps I had egg on my tie.
PHILIP ROTH’S ALTERNATIVE AMERICA
‘“Portnoy, yes, it’s an old French name, a corruption of porte noir, meaning back door or gate. Apparently in the Middle Ages in France the door to our family manor house . . .”’ Thus the young Alexander Portnoy dreams of convincing the pert shiksa ice-skater that he is not a Jew. But even in his dream she is not to be misled. ‘“You seem a very nice person, Mr Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of your face like that?”’ As the narrator goes on to explain, to us if not to her, it is because of his nose, which, unlike his penis, is now, with the onset of adolescence, so insistent on extending itself that it can’t be persuaded to retract even temporarily. ‘That ain’t a nose,’ shouts his interior voice, ‘it’s a hose! Screw off, Jewboy! Get off the ice and leave these girls alone!’
The Jewish notables who vilified Philip Roth after the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 were objecting to a lot more about its hero than his preoccupation with sex. They didn’t like his preoccupation with his nose, either. They didn’t like Roth’s apparent suggestion that there was no level ground for a young American male Jew between the twin peaks of tormented insecurity and priapic self-assertion. As a goy who was born and raised in Australia, where the book was banned, and who first read it in England, where it wasn’t, I couldn’t see their point at the time. I was too busy rolling around fighting for breath. It was the funniest book in the world. What was there not to like, except perhaps the hilarious sexual frankness that had caused the distinctly non-Jewish puritans of my benighted homeland to wig out? Why should his own people attack him?
With his latest book, The Plot Against America, the answer becomes clear. It was because the very idea of ‘his own people’ was bad news to people who wanted their ethnicity to be a minor issue, not a major one. A re-reading of Portnoy’s Complaint – and there could be no more delightful occupation – reveals that the rabbinical elders who convicted its author of Judische Selbsthass, Jewish self-hatred, had quite a lot to go on. Not without reason, they were even more shaken up by what was going on in Portnoy’s mind than by what was going on in his pants. Compared with his throbbing self-consciousness as a Jew, Portnoy’s throbbing crotch was a sideshow. But Roth’s judges convicted him without trying him first. He was proud of his background: savagely proud. Along with all the other themes he has explored since, his exultant celebration of Jewish-American social cohesion is there in his first book to become world famous. The earlier books – Goodbye Columbus, Letting Go and When She Was Good – had each stated some of his future subjects, but Portnoy’s Complaint stated the whole lot, packed together and painted like a circus act. Portnoy’s Complaint is a trick car out of which, instead of a family of dwarves, novels climb one after the other,
at an astonishing rate and seemingly without end. None of them is without its felicities, a round dozen of them are indispensable reading, a good handful of that dozen are among the best novels ever written in America, and all of them can be found tightly encoded into his original masterpiece. That lavish celebration of baseball in The Great American Novel, for example, is there in little, in the scenes where the grown men of Portnoy’s Arcadian neighbourhood play seven-inning softball on a Sunday spring morning while the youngsters long to be so masculine, funny and sure of their place. But this new novel was in there too: a novel wholly, instead of partly, concerned with being unsure – with insecurity.
Insecurity saturates The Plot Against America. Unfortunately the saturation goes right to the level of its telling. For a writer blessed with the eyes and ears to find real life fantastic in every detail, fantasy is the wrong form. As a narrative idea, Roth’s latest brainwave is down there with The Breast: perhaps even further down, because at least The Breast had Kafka’s cockroach for a predecessor. The predecessor of The Plot Against America is Robert Harris’s Fatherland: a considerable book in its own right, but one that exhausts the possibilities of its narrative trick, yielding Roth little room for manoeuvre. In Fatherland, America is unable to intervene decisively against Germany, leaving the Nazis a free hand in Europe. In The Plot Against America, America is unable to intervene decisively against Germany, leaving – what? Well, it leaves Roth a chance to speculate about what might have happened to America’s Jews.
*
But first of all, and you might well ask, what happened to America? Charles Lindbergh became President. To make this plausible, Roth has to re-jig the 1940 Republican convention. The re-jigging entails quite a lot of jiggery-pokery, but he just about makes it stick. There is a persuasive swing to the way Lindbergh captures the electorate’s imagination by flying from city to city. It would be more persuasive if he were doing it in Germany, where Hitler, in his first campaigns, actually did do that. He made a point of dropping from the clouds all over the place, and Leni Riefenstahl’s orgasmic scenes of the smitten populace searching the sky for the arrival of his aircraft are a fair registration of the enthusiasm he actually aroused. You can just about imagine Lindbergh having the same effect on the American backwoods, and there is no strain at all in imagining the appeal of his message: ‘Vote for Lindbergh or vote for War.’ Voting against war with Germany was what almost everybody was keen on until Japan attacked, and they might well have remained keen on it afterwards. If Hitler had been less crazy he would never have declared war on the United States, which the terms of his treaty with Japan did not oblige him to do. If he hadn’t, Roosevelt might still have had a hard job to get America into the war against him. That was the true fork in history, which Roth might have chosen to treat, but it would have meant leaving Lindbergh out. Roth, however, wanted Lindbergh in, because Lindbergh had anti-Semitic views.
Roth’s preparation of an alternative history is just a rearrangement of the furniture. If it had really concerned him he might have done it more adroitly. But what really concerns him is the retroactive prospect of an America with its traditional anti-Semitic prejudices given official endorsement. ‘Our homeland was America,’ says the Roth-like narrator. ‘Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.’ Roth’s challenge is to show how it changed. The challenge is not easily met, because America was never Germany. Certainly America was no stranger to official brutality: in America’s gaols and police stations between the wars, the third degree was common. There are plentiful records, some of them filmed, of Henry Ford’s armed goons violently repressing protests from laid-off workers, of Bonus marchers being put to flight by the troops of that barely controllable authoritarian General Douglas MacArthur, and, of course, of racist atrocities in the South. But there was no case of a minority’s being permanently threatened with violence backed by federal law. The Nazis did indeed come to power legally, after which they remade the laws in their favour, so that the hounding and eventual extermination of the Jews could be done on a legal basis. But none of that would have been possible if Hitler had not been granted dictatorial powers.
In the United States, where the separation of powers is a fundamental principle of the constitution, not even the most charismatic President – not even, say, Charles Lindbergh – could have instituted, in peace time, racially selective federal laws without the approval of Congress. Had Lindbergh set about gaining such approval, he would have had to sway the media, not to mention Hollywood. As every anti-Semite is eager to insist, the Jewish representation in those fields has always been large. Aware of these considerations, Roth knows that an American version of Nazi Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws framed against the Jews won’t do even as a fantasy. So he introduces the idea of the Office of American Absorption. He isn’t clear about how this apparently benign organization could have been set up without a debate in Washington about its possible malignancy, but he is disturbingly persuasive about how it might have operated had it come into existence. Bright young urban Jews of the Portnoy type are selected for temporary resettlement in the rural heartland, where they are encouraged to question the ethnic solidarity of their origins. The result is meant to be an erosion of their communal identity. This nightmare by Roth gains force from its closeness to the dream of every Jewish assimilationist. Not only calling themselves Americans first and foremost, but feeling it, the young Jews forget their heritage as a prelude to denying it.
Roth is dealing here with a continuing dilemma – individual acceptance is bound to be hindered by any cherishing of a collective uniqueness – and might have made more of it. He shows how the views of the Lindberghs, man and wife, might have made the anti-Semitism of the American upper orders even less shy about expressing itself. Jews not only can’t get into the country club, they can’t get into an ordinary hotel. He also shows that top-level anti-Semitism might have gained quite a lot of tacit support from top-level Jews. In Germany during the Weimar Republic, the influx of orthodox Jews from the East was frowned upon by assimilated Jews who were already there, on the grounds that it would inflame Nazi-style anti-Semitism further. (Actually the Nazis didn’t need any inflaming, but the full possibilities of that fact were not yet apparent, even to them.) Even in America, and especially in uptown New York, there was a sad but understandable tradition by which the settled and successful haute juiverie frowned on the raw immigrants whose habits might fan goyische prejudice. If Roth, as well as seizing on the real-life character of Lindbergh, had seized on the real-life character of, say, Walter Lippmann, he might really have been on to something. When Britain was battling alone against the Nazis, the destroyers-for-bases idea that saved Britain’s life was almost wholly Lippmann’s. But he had come too far in downplaying his own Jewish origins to take up the collective fate of the Jews as his chief concern. During the war he wrote nothing about the extermination of the European Jews, and after it he wrote little. Lippmann was the living definition of the Jew who considered himself an American first, and he might have provided Roth with the ideal demonstration of just how divisive that attitude could have been if there had been a subtle but comprehensive campaign to destroy Jewish solidarity. It could be said that by declining to adopt the role of representative Jew, he had already been conducting one.
And he could have said, and been right, that the very idea of a collective Jewish identity – the idea that all Jews were connected in a conspiracy of blood – was a fantasy made real only by Hitler. Even in Germany, and especially among the Jewish intelligentsia, it took time to grasp the reality that the Nazis would make no exceptions. It just seemed too insane. As Hannah Arendt once argued, you had to be a madman to guess what was coming. In Roth’s alternative America, the man who spots the implications of the insidious new official encouragement of anti-Semitism is a journalist unhindered by a sense of proportion. If Roth doesn’t seize on the real-life character of Walter Lippmann, he does seize on the real-life character of Walter Winchell. This is
the most daring stroke in the book, and leads to its most original single sentence, which Roth puts into the mouth of another force for good, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia: ‘Walter is too loud, Walter talks too fast, Walter says too much, and yet, by comparison, Walter’s vulgarity is something great, and Lindbergh’s decorum is hideous.’
Roth’s Winchell fights the good fight, and pays for it with his life. After President Lindbergh mysteriously disappears, there is an ultra-right coup d’état, Winchell’s own presidential candidacy is terminated by his assassination, and America temporarily goes openly pro-Nazi as a prelude to preparing war on Canada. Why did Lindbergh disappear? It would be spoiling the story to tell you. Roth does a pretty good job of spoiling the story himself, by dishing out the improbabilities with shameless haste: if it were not for the quality of the writing, you could be reading The Da Vinci Code. Luckily for the reader’s mental health, Roth is no more capable of an uninteresting sentence than Dan Brown is capable of an interesting one. But you would wonder why Roth bothered, if it were not so obvious that his chief concern is not with official repression, but with social prejudice, as it was then and still is today. Here, once again, and as always, he is in a cleft stick. He knows that he was brought up in an artist’s Arcadia, the ideal combination of domestic stability and psychic turmoil. (‘Doctor,’ Portnoy asks his analyst, ‘what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred . . . or the love?’) Lest we doubt that, he gives it to us again: the Weequahic neighbourhood of Newark, New Jersey, in all its emotional uproar, gnawing neurosis, flagrant embarrassments, and career-forming linguistic vitality. (With the proviso that literature should never be thought of as a branch of sociology, the novels of Richard Price can be said to give us the bitter contemporary reality of the boroughs that once inspired Roth’s sweetest memories.) But Roth also knows that another Arcadia patronizes the one he came from. To the blessed denizens of WASP Heaven, or Lindbergh Land, the noisy passions of his childhood will always look like a joke. The only possible defence mechanism of the Jewish comic writer is to get in with the joke first, and time it better: it was Woody Allen’s idea to stick himself with a rabbi’s beard in Annie Hall. But to the mind in which it is operating, the defence mechanism must inevitably seem a form of concession, and especially when the mind belongs to Roth – a man who has taken comic writing to the highest level of philosophy, politics and social analysis.