Dr. Metablog

Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

Philip Roth has written some wonderful books but this particular job isn't one of them. Portnoy's Complaint is nothing more than a comedian's shtick -- the undisciplined efforts of a borscht circuit comic "working blue." Poor Philip Roth. He set to be the heir of Lenny Bruce but accidentally fathered that unfortunate by-blow, the egregious Howard Stern, who is Portnoy raised to a power. 

Like many nightclub monologists, Roth doesn't bother to develop rounded characters but relies entirely on stereotypes. The women in Portnoy are types reduced to their crudest manifestations: the ignorant Appalachian, the upper-class twit-ess, the sabra soldier. The worst instance of stereotyping: the narrator himself, Alexander Portnoy, who embodies every single characteristic of the stage Jew except avarice and accent. Portnoy -- or parts of it -- would make a great Catskill routine. But a novel it's not. 

Is it possible that Philip Roth and Woody Allen are one and the same person? Or aspects of the same person. Both start out doing sex-obsessed comic monologues and both develop into great artists. They employ similar plots and characters (compare Portnoy's gentile girlfriend Mary Jane Reed of West Virginia, whom the monologist half-heartedly tries to educate, with Annie Hall of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, advised to attend adult education classes at NYU by Alvy Singer).

In the coming weeks, class, we will look at other Roth/Allen identities and parallels. They're both satirists and we'll explore the theory that Roth is an acerbic Juvenal while Allen is a genial Horace.   

No doubt that Philip Roth is envious of Woody Allen's more distinct features and more compact body, but has anyone actually seen the two together?  Or even a picture of them in the same undoctored frame?  Until they're sighted in the same room, I'll reserve judgment on whether Roth/Allen is one or two persons.

Foolish Prudery; Empson

It's easy to forget that our immediate forebears were absurdly prudish. Consider the case of William Empson, who ran afoul of the sex police in the late 1920s.

Empson may be the most influential literary critic of the previous century. All "close reading" was pioneered by him. Seven Types of Ambiguity, written when Empson was twenty-one years old and published in 1930, was the book with which my teachers were still wrestling well into the 1950s. Prompted by their puzzlement and by their enthusiasm, I dutifully read all about "ambiguity" and I also tried my best with the equally influential Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). In all frankness, both books were far too subtle for my blunt, unphilosophical brain. In 1961, when I was a graduate student, the pious and reactionary Douglas Bush, whose course in Milton was thrice-weekly transporting me to the caves of Morpheus, dismissed Empson's ground-breaking Milton's God (1961) as the work of the "village atheist."  (Empson thought that Christianity was a cruel and savage religion because it was grounded in scapegoating; he demonstrated that Paradise Lost became muddy and opaque when Milton struggled with the ethical basis of core Christian doctrines. In later years, the literary leviathanette Stanley Fish made his reputation by domesticating, diluting, and popularizing Empson's challenging ideas.)

Although I had lived with Empson's work since mid-century, I had absolutely no knowledge of the author's troubled private life until I read John Haffenden's William Empson, Among the Mandarins (Oxford, 2005) which at 695 pages is the first of a projected two-volume biography. (It's far too detailed; let me confess to skipping and skimming.) 

As a student at Magdalen College, Cambridge, Empson was mostly homosexual.  Haffenden says that he was interested in "male bliss and buggery." The upper-class students with whom Empson interacted were gay-tolerant and the authorities practiced a de facto "don't ask-don't tell" policy.  In 1929, Empson was elected to the prestigious Charles Kingsley Bye-Fellowship, which paid the then-splendid sum of 150 pounds annually. By that time, Empson had turned his attention to the other gender and was conducting an affair with a woman named Elizabeth Wiskemann who was seven years his senior. Somehow or other, a porter, an employee of the College, "found that Empson had some contraceptives in his possession." It was a scandal and Empson was arraigned by the college authorities for "sexual misconduct." He was stripped of his fellowship, expelled, his name expunged from the college records, and he was even banished from the city of Cambridge (by what authority Haffenden doesn't make clear).

For using contraceptives! For sexual relations with a woman! For preventing pregnancy! Clearly, Empson should have stuck to boys or kept clear of condoms.

Let us remember the situation of William Empson whenever conservative commentators trumpet "family values" and call for a return to the stricter sexual codes of previous generations. Or when we might be tempted to admire the wisdom of our ancestors.    

Words of Wisdom

"Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is," said the Great One, famously.  There you have it: perfect advice for hockey players.  It goes without saying that Gretsky's sentence applies equally well to entrepreneurs, intellectuals, artists, and in fact, to anyone who has to cope with a world in continual flux. Ah, but how can anyone know where the puck is going to be next second, or next week, or a decade hence?  Gretzky was one of those rare intuitive geniuses who did it all by instinct.  Ordinary mortals must wrack their tiny brains until their heads hurt to guess at the trajectory of their own particular puck.  Most of us, no matter how hard we try, are doomed to skate counter.  There are other people (alas, I'm one of them) who skate aimlessly, only dimly aware that somewhere out there on the field of play is a target puck.  Gretzky's wisdom deserves a prominent spot on the refrigerator of every moderately forward-looking, ambitious human being, where it can hang as both goad and frustration.

Here's another brilliant bit of Gretskyiana:  "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

Let us now turn to wisdom from Alan Sillitoe (young 'uns might not remember Sillitoe, but he was one of the important 'angry' English writers of the 1950s).  Sillitoe blessed us with the forceful and epigrammatic truth that "all writing is fiction, especially non-fiction."  I particularly savor that uncompromising, zingy "especially."  If I understand rightly, Sillitoe meant that a) no matter how faithful to experience a writer wishes to be, the act of writing inevitably emphasizes or omits or compresses or expands and therefore transforms experience into a story, a fiction.  And he also implied that b) no matter how factual the information, if it doesn't tell a story and act as a fiction it's not going to make its point.   Moreover, and more subtly, he meant that c) any story is ineluctably influenced and shaped by common modes of storytelling, and even against a writer's will assimilates itself to existing genres.  Bloggers, for example, are willy-nilly fictioneers who can't help writing bloglike posts.  But beware:  Alan Sillitoe most definitely did not mean to imply that because all narratives are culturally and artistically determined that they are therefore equivalent in value or truth;  he was a practiced, practical writer, not some post-modern theory-soaked obscurantist.   

Here's wisdom from the great Anatole Broyard.   Of his adolescence, he wrote, memorably, "if it hadn't been for books, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex."  "Mercy" is the well-chosen word that makes the sentence so piquant.  Books, says Broyard, have the power to civilize all of us, even pubescents.  Books can, and did, rescue him.  As for myself, if I remember accurately, adolescence was, in spite of extra-large doses of books, merciless. 

I don't know who first said that "you can't coach seven feet," but it's a common enough saying.  It doesn't mean that that you can't coach a seven-footer, but that no matter how much instruction you offer a guy who's five-ten, he's never going to be seven feet tall or fill the space on the floor that requires a seven-footer.  As I once heard a track coach remark, "I can teach them everything but speed."  A similar sentence, of baseball pitchers: "you have to be born with the whip."  For those of us who tried to teach less exotic subjects, I can offer some parallels from my own experience.  "You can't coach brains";  "you can't coach talent." 

But you can do something.  You can, in words of great uncommon wisdom, "play the hand you're dealt."

John Galt's Annals of the Parish (1821)

Annals of the Parish is another book that I've waited far too long to read.  Purporting to be the reminiscences of Mr Micah Balwhidder, minister of Dalmailing in Ayreshire, Scotland between the years 1760 and 1810, it's the most charming and friendly novel that I've encountered in many a day.  The industrial revolution, with all its good and evil, has found its way to rural Scotland. In Balwhidder's succinct retrospective summation:  "there was at home a great augmentation of prosperity and everything had thriven in a surprising manner;  somewhat, however, to the detriment of our country simplicity."   The "country simplicity" seems more than half medieval;  the "augmentation of prosperity" brings with it such benefits as literacy, London newspapers, commerce, regular transportation to Glasgow, a cotton mill (not a dark Satanic one, but a place where a decent livelihood may be earned) but also such debits as bankruptcies, American and continental wars, and social fissuring.  Annals of the Parish traces the end of world we have lost and the inception of the world in which we now dwell.  Galt is good solid Age of Reason optimist, but he knows enough to mourn the very changes that he appreciates.   

The novel is written in Scots;  it's not particularly difficult to understand, but sometimes Galt lays it on with a trowel.  Mr. Balwhidder tries to persuade the church elders to repair his "manse":  "I made a report of the infirmities both of doors and windows, as well as of the rotten state of the floors, which were constantly in want of cobbling.  Over and above all, I told them of the sarking of the roof, which was a frush as a puddock stool."  "Frush" means scratched or crushed;  a "puddock stool" is a toadstool or mushroom.  My unabridged dictionary does not have an entry for "sarking," but it's not difficult to guess that a sarking roof is not in perfect repair. The rich dialect, reported with affection and without condescension, intensifies the regional flavor. 

Galt's Dalmailing was in state of constant flux, while the various villages of Galt's great contemporary, Jane Austen, are, in social terms, static and immobile.  Who was more the observant novelist?      

Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907)

It sometimes happens that you meet a perfectly decent, intelligent person with whom you cannot conduct a satisfactory conversation.  He doesn't know when you're serious or when you're being ironic, doesn't get your jokes, misses your allusions and references, challenges your assumptions, and repeatedly asks, "What exactly do you mean?"  You and he are just not on the same wavelength.  There's no empathy, no meeting of minds.

Joseph Conrad and I have been locked into such an unprofitable relationship for these last fifty years (although, to be fair, the novelist himself is less engaged in the standoff than I).  In the 1960s, I embarked on a Conrad tour and, as is my custom, began at the beginning, reading the first six or so novels, from Almayer's Folly through Typhoon.  It was hard labor, not love.  The much-celebrated romantic ornamented prose style settled like thick mist over my hebetudinous faculties, so much so that I frequently lost track of the plot, failed to differentiate the characters, felt myself strangled by the metaphors and boggled by the syntax.  Befogged, miasmafied.  Even the stories that I dutifully re-read, such as Heart of Darkness, required effort and discipline.

Hungry for books, last summer, I was browsing the second-hand book shelves. There aren't many respectable options at the bodice-ripper-rich Bookshelf in Bradford, Vermont.  Conrad's The Secret Agent seemed like a good choice, especially since I could dimly recall that in the 1950s, the great mid-century Khan of English Literature, F. R. Leavis, had placed this particular novel way up high in the literary firmament.  For $3.50, I decided, what the heck, I'll try Conrad again. 

I felt my way through the Conradian fog for a few chapters, set the book aside for a couple of weeks, then started once again.  On the second or third try I finally succeeded and, for the first time in my life, connected to Conrad with ease and full comprehension.  Here's the key:  The Secret Agent is written in that familiar grave portentous style, but it's a funny, satirical leg-puller.  A bunch of incompetents, playing at being anarchists and communists, screw up their lives and the lives of everyone around them.  The Secret Agent is a spy novel, a police procedural, a political novel, and a comedy all rolled into one.  While was stuck thinking, late Dostoevsky, I made no progress, but when I came to the realization, not Dostoevsky but Coen brothers, the elements immediately fell into place.  Moreover, The Secret Agent is a novel not just for the pre-World War I moment, but for this present decade.  It's extraordinarily keen and insightful about the banality of terrorism.

Now I feel that I can tackle those other Conrad novels that have lain in wait for me all these years.  Stay tuned, fit audience but few, for further reports.  Joe C. and I may yet become great friends.