The Humbling Read online

  The Humbling

  B O O K S B Y P H I L I P R O T H

  Z U C K E R M A N B O O K S

  The Ghost Writer

  Zuckerman Unbound

  The Anatomy Lesson

  The Prague Orgy

  The Counterlife

  American Pastoral

  I Married a Communist

  The Human Stain

  Exit Ghost

  R O T H B O O K S

  The Facts • Deception

  Patrimony • Operation

  Shylock The Plot Against America

  K E P E S H B O O K S

  The Breast

  The Professor of Desire

  The Dying Animal

  M I S C E L L A N Y

  Reading Myself and Others

  Shop Talk

  O T H E R B O O K S

  Goodbye, Columbus • Letting Go

  When She Was Good • Portnoy’s Complaint • Our Gang

  The Great American Novel • My Life as a Man

  Sabbath’s Theater • Everyman • Indignation

  The Humbling

  The

  Humbling

  Philip Roth

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  BOSTON • NEW YORK

  2009

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and

  incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.

  Copyright © 2009 by Philip Roth

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections

  from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin

  Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roth, Philip.

  The humbling / Philip Roth.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-23969-9

  I. Title.

  PS3568.0855H85 2009

  813’.54 —dc22 2009013742

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design by Robert Overholtzer

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The teaching technique credited to Vincent Daniels

  on page 34 is borrowed from How to Stop Acting

  by Harold Guskin (Faber and Faber, 2003).

  For J. T.

  The Humbling

  1

  Into Thin Air

  HE’D LOST HIS MAGIC. The impulse was spent. He’d never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing happened: he couldn’t act. Going on-stage became agony. Instead of the certainty that he was going to be wonderful, he knew he was going to fail. It happened three times in a row, and by the last time nobody was interested, nobody came. He couldn’t get over to the audience. His talent was dead.

  Of course, if you’ve had it, you always have something unlike anyone else’s. I’ll always be unlike anyone else, Axler told himself, because I am who I am. I carry that with me—that people will always remember. But the aura he’d had, all his mannerisms and eccentricities and personal peculiarities, what had worked for Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya—what had gained Simon Axler his reputation as the last of the best of the classical American stage actors—none of it worked for any role now. All that had worked to make him himself now worked to make him look like a lunatic. He was conscious of every moment he was on the stage in the worst possible way. In the past when he was acting he wasn’t thinking about anything. What he did well he did out of instinct. Now he was thinking about everything, and everything spontaneous and vital was killed—he tried to control it with thinking and instead he destroyed it. All right, Axler told himself, he had hit a bad period. Though he was already in his sixties, maybe it would pass while he was still recognizably himself. He wouldn’t be the first experienced actor to go through it. A lot of people did. I’ve done this before, he thought, so I’ll find some way. I don’t know how I’m going to get it this time, but I’ll find it—this will pass.

  It didn’t pass. He couldn’t act. The ways he could once rivet attention on the stage! And now he dreaded every performance, and dreaded it all day long. He spent the entire day thinking thoughts he’d never thought before a performance in his life: I won’t make it, I won’t be able to do it, I’m playing the wrong roles, I’m overreaching, I’m faking, I have no idea even of how to do the first line. And meanwhile he tried to occupy the hours doing a hundred seemingly necessary things to prepare: I have to look at this speech again, I have to rest, I have to exercise, I have to look at that speech again, and by the time he got to the theater he was exhausted. And dreading going out there. He would hear the cue coming closer and closer and know that he couldn’t do it. He waited for the freedom to begin and the moment to become real, he waited to forget who he was and to become the person doing it, but instead he was standing there, completely empty, doing the kind of acting you do when you don’t know what you are doing. He could not give and he could not withhold; he had no fluidity and he had no reserve. Acting became a night-afternight exercise in trying to get away with something.

  It had started with people speaking to him. He couldn’t have been more than three or four when he was already mesmerized by speaking and being spoken to. He had felt he was in a play from the outset. He could use intensity of listening, concentration, as lesser actors used fireworks. He had that power offstage, too, particularly, when younger, with women who did not realize that they had a story until he revealed to them that they had a story, a voice, and a style belonging to no other. They became actresses with Axler, they became the heroines of their own lives. Few stage actors could speak and be spoken to the way he could, yet he could do neither anymore. The sound that used to go into his ear felt as though it were going out, and every word he uttered seemed acted instead of spoken. The initial source in his acting was in what he heard, his response to what he heard was at the core of it, and if he couldn’t listen, couldn’t hear, he had nothing to go on.

  He was asked to play Prospero and Macbeth at the Kennedy Center—it was hard to think of a more ambitious double bill—and he failed appallingly in both, but especially as Macbeth. He couldn’t do low-intensity Shakespeare and he couldn’t do high-intensity Shakespeare—and he’d been doing Shakespeare all his life. His Macbeth was ludicrous and everyone who saw it said as much, and so did many who hadn’t seen it. “No, they don’t even have to have been there,” he said, “to insult you.” A lot of actors would have turned to drink to help them-selves out; an old joke had it that there was an actor who would always drink before he went onstage, and when he was warned “You mustn’t drink,” he replied, “What, and go out there alone?” But Axler didn’t drink, and so he collapsed instead. His breakdown was colossal.

  The worst of it was that he saw through his breakdown the same way he could see through his acting. The suffering was excruciating and yet he doubted that it was genuine, which made it even worse. He did not know how he was going to get from one minute to the next, his mind felt as though it were melting, he was terrified to be alone, he could not sleep more than two or three hours a night, he scarcely ate, he thought every day of killing himself with the gun in the attic—a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun that he kept in the isolated farmhouse for self-defense—and still the whole thing seemed to be an act, a bad act. When you’re playing the role of somebody coming apart, it has organization and order; when you’re observing yourself coming apart, playing the role of your own demise, that’s something else, something awash with terror and fear.

  He could not convince himself he was mad any more than he’d been able to convince himself or anyone else he was Prospero or Macbeth. He was an artificial madma
n too. The only role available to him was the role of someone playing a role. A sane man playing an insane man. A stable man playing a broken man. A self-controlled man playing a man out of control. A man of solid achievement, of theatrical renown—a large, burly actor standing six feet four inches tall, with a big bald head and the strong, hairy body of a brawler, with a face that could convey so much, a decisive jaw and stern dark eyes and a sizable mouth he could twist every which way, and a low commanding voice emanating from deep down that always had a little growl in it, a man conscientiously on the grand scale who looked as if he could stand up to anything and easily fulfill all of a man’s roles, the embodiment of invulnerable resistance who looked to have absorbed into his being the egoism of a dependable giant—playing an insignificant mite. He screamed aloud when he awakened in the night and found himself still locked inside the role of the man deprived of himself, his talent, and his place in the world, a loathsome man who was nothing more than the inventory of his defects. In the mornings he hid in bed for hours, but instead of hiding from the role he was merely playing the role. And when finally he got up, all he could think about was suicide, and not its simulation either. A man who wanted to live playing a man who wanted to die.

  Meanwhile, Prospero’s most famous words wouldn’t let him be, perhaps because he’d so recently mangled them. They repeated themselves so regularly in his head that they soon became a hubbub of sounds tortuously empty of meaning and pointing at no reality yet carrying the force of a spell full of personal significance. “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air.” He could do nothing to blot out “thin air,” the two syllables that were chaotically repeated while he lay powerless in his bed in the morning and that had the aura of an obscure indictment even as they came to make less and less sense. His whole intricate personality was entirely at the mercy of “thin air.”

  VICTORIA, Axler’s wife, could no longer care for him and by now needed tending herself. She would cry whenever she saw him at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, unable to eat the meal she had prepared. “Try something,” she begged, but he ate nothing, said nothing, and soon Victoria began to panic. She had never seen him give way like this before, not even eight years earlier when his elderly parents had died in an automobile crash with his father at the wheel. He wept then and he went on. He always went on. He took the losses hard but the performance never faltered. And when Victoria was in turmoil, it was he who kept her tough and got her through. There was always a drug drama with her errant son. There was the permanent hardship of aging and the end of her career. So much disappointment, but he was there and so she could bear it. If only he were here now that the man on whom she had depended was gone!

  In the 1950s, Victoria Powers had been Balanchine’s youngest favorite. Then she hurt her knee, had an operation, danced again, hurt it again, had another operation, and by the time she was rehabilitated the second time round, someone else was Balanchine’s youngest favorite. She never recovered her place. There was a marriage, the son, a divorce, a second marriage, a second divorce, and then she met and fell in love with Simon Axler, who, when he’d first come from college two decades earlier to make a career on the New York stage, used to go to the City Center to see her dance, not because he loved ballet but because of his youthful susceptibility to the capacity she had to stir him to lust through the pathway of the tenderest emotions: she remained in his memory for years afterward as the very incarnation of erotic pathos. When they met as forty-year-olds in the late seventies, it was a long time since anyone had asked her to perform, though pluckily she went off every day to her workout at a local dance studio. She had done all she could to keep herself fit and looking youthful, but by then her pathos exceeded any ability she’d ever had to master it artistically.

  After the Kennedy Center debacle and his unexpected collapse, Victoria fell apart and fled to California to be close to her son.

  ALL AT ONCE Axler was alone in the house in the country and terrified of killing himself. Now there was nothing stopping him. Now he could go ahead and do what he’d found himself unable to do while she was still there: walk up the stairs to the attic, load the gun, put the barrel in his mouth, and reach down with his long arms to pull the trigger. The gun as the sequel to the wife. But once she’d left, he didn’t make it through the first hour alone—didn’t even go up the first flight of stairs toward the attic —before he had phoned his doctor and asked him to arrange for his admission to a psychiatric hospital that very day. Within only minutes the doctor had found him a place at Hammerton, a small hospital with a good reputation a few hours to the north.

  He was there for twenty-six days. Once interviewed, unpacked, relieved of his “sharps” by a nurse, and his valuables taken to the business office for safekeeping, once alone and in the room assigned him, he sat down on the bed and remembered role after role that he had played with absolute assurance since he’d become a professional in his early twenties—what had destroyed his confidence now? What was he doing in this hospital room? A self-travesty had come into being who did not exist before, a self-travesty grounded in nothing, and he was that self-travesty, and how had it happened? Was it purely the passage of time bringing on decay and collapse? Was it a manifestation of aging? His appearance was still impressive. His aims as an actor had not changed nor had his painstaking manner of preparation for a role. There was no one more thorough and studious and serious, no one who took better care of his talent or who better accommodated himself to the changing conditions of a career in the theater over so many decades. To cease so precipitously being the actor he was—it was inexplicable, as though he’d been disarmed of the weight and substance of his professional existence one night while he slept. The ability to speak and be spoken to on a stage—that’s what it came down to, and that’s what was gone.

  The psychiatrist he saw, Dr. Farr, questioned whether what had befallen him could truly be causeless, and in their twice-weekly sessions asked him to examine the circumstances of his life preceding the sudden onset of what the doctor described as “a universal nightmare.” By this he meant that the actor’s misfortune in the theater—going out on the stage and finding himself unable to perform, the shock of that loss—was the content of troubling dreams any number of people had about themselves, people who, unlike Simon Axler, were not professional actors. Going out on the stage and being unable to perform was among the stock set of dreams that most every patient reported at one time or another. That and walking naked down a busy city street or being unprepared for a crucial exam or falling off a cliff or finding on the highway that your brakes don’t work. Dr. Farr asked Axler to talk about his marriage, about his parents’ death, about his relations with his drug-addicted stepson, his boyhood, his adolescence, his beginnings as an actor, an older sister who had died of lupus when he was twenty. The doctor wanted to hear in particular detail about the weeks and months leading up to his appearance at the Kennedy Center and to know if he remembered anything out of the ordinary, large or small, occurring during that period. Axler worked hard to be truthful and thereby to reveal the origins of his condition—and with that to recover his powers—but as far as he could tell, no cause for the “universal nightmare” presented itself in anything he said sitting across from the sympathetic and attentive psychiatrist. And that made it all the more a nightmare. Yet he talked to the doctor anyway, each time he showed up. Why not? At a certain stage of misery, you’ll try anything to explain what’s going on with you, even if you know it doesn’t explain a thing and it’s one failed explanation after another.

  Some twenty days into his stay at the hospital a night came when, instead of waking at two or three and lying sleepless in the midst of his terror till dawn, he slept right through until eight in the morning, so late by hospital standards that a nurse had to come to his room to awaken him so that he could join the other patients for 7:45 breakfast in the dining hall and then begin the day, whi
ch included group therapy, art therapy, a consultation with Dr. Farr, and a session with the physical therapist, who was doing her best to treat his perennial spinal pain. Every waking hour was filled with activities and appointments to prevent the patients from retiring to their rooms to lie depressed and miserable on their beds or to sit around with one another, as a number of them did in the evenings anyway, discussing the ways they had tried to kill themselves.

  Several times he sat in the corner of the rec room with the small gang of suicidal patients and listened to them recalling the ardor with which they had planned to die and bemoaning how they had failed. Each of them remained immersed in the magnitude of his or her suicide attempt and the ignominy of having survived it. That people could really do it, that they could control their own death, was a source of fascination to them all—it was their natural subject, like boys talking about sports. Several described feeling something akin to the rush that a psychopath must get when he kills someone else sweeping over them when they attempted to kill themselves. A young woman said, “You seem to yourself and to everyone around you paralyzed and wholly ineffectual and yet you can decide to commit the most difficult act there is. It’s exhilarating. It’s invigorating. It’s euphoric.” “Yes,” said someone else, “there’s a grim euphoria to it. Your life is falling apart, it has no center, and suicide is the one thing you can control.” One elderly man, a retired schoolteacher who had tried to hang himself in his garage, gave them a lecture on the ways “outsiders” think about suicide. “The one thing that everyone wants to do with suicide is explain it. Explain it and judge it. It’s so appalling for the people that are left behind that there has to be a way of thinking about it. Some people think of it as an act of cowardice. Some people think of it as criminal, as a crime against the survivors. Another school of thought finds it heroic and an act of courage. Then there are the purists. The question for them is: was it justified, was there sufficient cause? The more clinical point of view, which is neither punitive nor idealizing, is the psychologist’s, which attempts to describe the state of mind of the suicide, what state of mind he was in when he did it.” He went tediously on in this vein more or less every night, as though he were not an anguished patient like the rest of them but a guest lecturer who’d been brought in to elucidate the subject that obsessed them night and day. One evening Axler spoke up—to perform, he realized, before his largest audience since he’d given up acting. “Suicide is the role you write for yourself,” he told them. “You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged—where they will find you and how they will find you.” Then he added, “But one performance only.”