American Pastoral Read online

  American Pastoral

  Philip Roth

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

  Vintage Books

  A Division of Random House, Inc. New York

  To J. G.

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 1998 Copyright © 1997 by Philip

  Roth

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Vintage

  Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and

  simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,

  Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by

  Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, in 1997.

  “Dream” by Johnny Mercer. Copyright 1944 (renewed),

  WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc.,

  Miami, Florida, 33014.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roth, Philip. American pastoral / Philip Roth.—1st Vintage International ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-375-70142-7

  1. United States—History—1961-1969—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.0855A77 1998 97-35623

  813’.54—dc21 CIP

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  Printed in the United States of America 3579B864

  Dream when the day is thru, Dream and they might come true, Things never are as

  bad as they seem, So dream, dream, dream.

  — Johnny Mercer,

  from “Dream” popular song of the 1940$

  the rare occurrence of the expected …

  — William Carlos Williams, from “At Kenneth Burke’s Place,” 1946

  I

  Paradise Remembered

  The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a

  magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation

  removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly

  Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The

  name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish

  students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed

  anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed

  blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov.

  * * *

  The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in

  baseball. Only the basketball team was ever any good—twice winning the city

  championship while he was its leading scorer—but as long as the Swede excelled,

  the fate of our sports teams didn’t matter much to a student body whose elders,

  largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all

  else. Physical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official

  rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of

  pleasure in our community— advanced degrees were. Nonetheless, through the

  Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world,

  the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they

  AMERICAN PASTORAL

  imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and

  make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes. Primarily, they

  could forget the war.

  The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can

  best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and

  the fears that it fostered. With the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the

  meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance,

  the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of

  never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again.

  And how did this affect him—the glorification, the sanctifica-tion, of every

  hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he

  rifled for a double down the left-field line? Is this what made him that staid

  and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward

  manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that

  an entire community was ladling with love? The high school cheerleaders had a

  cheer for the Swede. Unlike the other cheers, meant to inspire the whole team or

  to galvanize the spectators, this was a rhythmic, foot-stomping tribute to the

  Swede alone, enthusiasm for his perfection undiluted and unabashed. The cheer

  rocked the gym at basketball games every time he took a rebound or scored a

  point, swept through our side of City Stadium at football games any time he

  gained a yard or intercepted a pass. Even at the sparsely attended home baseball

  games up at Irvington Park, where there was no cheerleading squad eagerly

  kneeling at the sidelines, you could hear it thinly chanted by the handful of

  Weequahic stalwarts in the wooden stands not only when the Swede came up to bat

  but when he made no more than a routine putout at first base. It was a cheer

  that consisted of eight syllables, three of them his name, and it went, Bah bah-

  bah! Bah bah bah … bah-fraW and the tempo, at football games particularly,

  accelerated with each repetition until, at the peak of frenzied adoration, an

  explosion of skirt-billowing cartwheels was ecstatically discharged and the

  orange gym bloom-

  ers of ten sturdy little cheerleaders flickered like fireworks before our

  marveling eyes … and not for love of you or me but of the wonderful Swede.

  “Swede Levov! It rhymes with … ‘The Love’!… Swede Levov! It rhymes with . .

  . ‘The Love’! … Swede Levov! It rhymes with … ‘The Love’!”

  Yes, everywhere he looked, people were in love with him. The candy store owners

  we boys pestered called the rest of us “Hey-you-no!” or “Kid-cut-it-out!”; him

  they called, respectfully, “Swede.” Parents smiled and benignly addressed him as

  “Seymour.” The chattering girls he passed on the street would ostentatiously

  swoon, and the bravest would holler after him, “Come back, come back, Levov of

  my life!” And he let it happen, walked about the neighborhood in possession of

  all that love, looking as though he didn’t feel a thing. Contrary to whatever

  daydreams the rest of us may have had about the enhancing effect on ourselves of

  total, uncritical, idolatrous adulation, the love thrust upon the Swede seemed

  actually to deprive him of feeling. In this boy embraced as a symbol of hope by

  * * *

  so many—as the embodiment of the strength, the resolve, the emboldened valor

  that would prevail to return our high school’s servicemen home unscathed from

  Midway, Salerno, Cherbourg, the Solomons, the Aleutians, Tarawa—there appeared

  to be not a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden gift for

  responsibility.

  But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony

  being a human consolation and beside the point if you’re getting your way as a

  god. Either there was a whole si
de to his personality that he was suppressing or

  that was as yet asleep or, more likely, there wasn’t. His aloofness, his seeming

  passivity as the desired object of all this asexual lovemaking, made him appear,

  if not divine, a distinguished cut above the more primordial humanity of just

  about everybody else at the school. He was fettered to history, an instrument of

  history, esteemed with a passion that might never have been if he’d broken the

  Weequahic basketball record—by scoring twenty-seven points against Barringer—on

  a day other than the sad, sad day in 1943 when fifty-eight Flying

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  Fortresses were shot down by Luftwaffe fighter planes, two fell victim to flak,

  and five more crashed after crossing the English coast on their way back from

  bombing Germany.

  The Swede’s younger brother was my classmate, Jerry Levov, a scrawny, small-

  headed, oddly overflexible boy built along the lines of a licorice stick,

  something of a mathematical wizard, and the January 1950 valedictorian. Though

  Jerry never really had a friendship with anyone, in his imperious, irascible

  way, he took an interest in me over the years, and that was how I wound up, from

  the age of ten, regularly getting beaten by him at Ping-Pong in the finished

  basement of the Levovs’ one-family house, on the corner of Wynd-moor and Keer—

  the word “finished” indicating that it was paneled in knotty pine, domesticated,

  and not, as Jerry seemed to think, that the basement was the perfect place for

  finishing off another kid.

  The explosiveness of Jerry’s aggression at a Ping-Pong table exceeded his

  brother’s in any sport. A Ping-Pong ball is, brilliantly, sized and shaped so

  that it cannot take out your eye. I would not otherwise have played in Jerry

  Levov’s basement. If it weren’t for the opportunity to tell people that I knew

  my way around Swede Levov’s house, nobody could have got me down into that

  basement, defenseless but for a small wooden paddle. Nothing that weighs as

  little as a Ping-Pong ball can be lethal, yet when Jerry whacked that thing

  murder couldn’t have been far from his mind. It never occurred to me that this

  violent display might have something to do with what it was like for him to be

  the kid brother of Swede Levov. Since I couldn’t imagine anything better than

  being the Swede’s brother—short of being the Swede himself—I failed to

  understand that for Jerry it might be difficult to imagine anything worse.

  The Swede’s bedroom—which I never dared enter but would pause to gaze into when

  I used the toilet outside Jerry’s room—was tucked under the eaves at the back of

  the house. With its slanted ceiling and dormer windows and Weequahic pennants on

  the walls, it looked like what I thought of as a real boy’s room. From the two

  windows that opened out over the back lawn you could see the roof

  of the Levovs’ garage, where the Swede as a grade school kid practiced hitting

  in the wintertime by swinging at a baseball taped to a cord hung from a rafter—

  an idea he might have got from a baseball novel by John R. Tunis called The Kid

  from Tomkinsville. I came to that book and to other of Tunis’s baseball books—

  Iron Duke, The Duke Decides, Champion’s Choice, Keystone Kids, Rookie of the

  Year—by spotting them on the built-in shelf beside the Swede’s bed, all lined up

  alphabetically between two solid bronze bookends that had been a bar mitzvah

  gift, miniaturized replicas of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” Immediately I went to the

  * * *

  library to borrow all the Tunis books I could find and started with The Kid from

  Tomkinsville, a grim, gripping book to a boy, simply written, stiff in places

  but direct and dignified, about the Kid, Roy Tucker, a clean-cut young pitcher

  from the rural Connecticut hills whose father dies when he is four and whose

  mother dies when he is sixteen and who helps his grandmother make ends meet by

  working the family farm during the day and working at night in town at

  “MacKenzie’s drugstore on the corner of South Main.”

  The book, published in 1940, had black-and-white drawings that, with just a

  little expressionistic distortion and just enough anatomical skill, cannily

  pictorialize the hardness of the Kid’s life, back before the game of baseball

  was illuminated with a million statistics, back when it was about the mysteries

  of earthly fate, when major leaguers looked less like big healthy kids and more

  like lean and hungry workingmen. The drawings seemed conceived out of the dark

  austerities of Depression America. Every ten pages or so, to succinctly depict a

  dramatic physical moment in the story—”He was able to put a little steam in it,”

  “It was over the fence,” “Razzle limped to the dugout”—there is a blackish, ink-

  heavy rendering of a scrawny, shadow-faced ballplayer starkly silhouetted on a

  blank page, isolated, like the world’s most lonesome soul, from both nature and

  man, or set in a stippled simulation of ballpark grass, dragging beneath him the

  skinny statuette of a wormlike shadow. He is unglamorous even in a baseball

  uniform; if he is the pitcher, his gloved hand looks like a paw; and what image

  after image

  AMERICAN PASTORAL

  makes graphically clear is that playing up in the majors, heroic though it may

  seem, is yet another form of backbreaking, unremu-nerative labor.

  The Kid from Tomkinsville could as well have been called The Lamb from

  Tomkinsville, even The Lamb from Tomkinsville Led to the Slaughter. In the Kid’s

  career as the spark-plug newcomer to a last-place Brooklyn Dodger club, each

  triumph is rewarded with a punishing disappointment or a crushing accident. The

  staunch attachment that develops between the lonely, homesick Kid and the

  Dodgers’ veteran catcher, Dave Leonard, who successfully teaches him the ways of

  the big leagues and who, “with his steady brown eyes behind the plate,”

  shepherds him through a no-hitter, comes brutally undone six weeks into the

  season, when the old-timer is dropped overnight from the club’s roster. “Here

  was a speed they didn’t often mention in baseball: the speed with which a player

  rises—and goes down.” Then, after the Kid wins his fifteenth consecutive game—a

  rookie record that no pitcher in either league has ever exceeded—he’s

  accidentally knocked off his feet in the shower by boisterous teammates who are

  horsing around after the great victory, and the elbow injury sustained in the

  fall leaves him unable ever to pitch again. He rides the bench for the rest of

  the year, pinch-hitting because of his strength at the plate, and then, over the

  snowy winter—back home in Connecticut spending days on the farm and evenings at

  the drugstore, well known now but really Grandma’s boy all over again—he works

  diligently by himself on Dave Leonard’s directive to keep his swing level (“A

  tendency to keep his right shoulder down, to swing up, was his worst fault”),

  suspending a ball from a string out in the barn and whacking at it on cold

  winter mornings with “his beloved bat” until he has worked himself into a sweat.

  “‘Crack…’ The clean sweet sound of a bat squarely meeting a ball.” By the next


  season he is ready to return to the Dodgers as a speedy right fielder, bats .325

  in the second spot, and leads his team down to the wire as a contender. On the

  last day of the season, in a game against the Giants, who are in first place by

  only half a game, the Kid kindles the Dodgers’

  hitting attack, and in the bottom of the fourteenth—with two down, two men on,

  and the Dodgers ahead on a run scored by the Kid with his audacious,

  characteristically muscular baserunning— he makes the final game-saving play, a

  running catch smack up against the right center-field wall. That tremendous

  * * *

  daredevil feat sends the Dodgers into the World Series and leaves him “writhing

  in agony on the green turf of deep right center.” Tunis concludes like this:

  “Dusk descended upon a mass of players, on a huge crowd pouring onto the field,

  on a couple of men carrying an inert form through the mob on a stretcher… .

  There was a clap of thunder. Rain descended upon the Polo Grounds.” Descended,

  descended, a clap of thunder, and thus ends the boys’ Book of Job.

  I was ten and I had never read anything like it. The cruelty of life. The

  injustice of it. I could not believe it. The reprehensible member of the Dodgers

  is Razzle Nugent, a great pitcher but a drunk and a hothead, a violent bully

  fiercely jealous of the Kid. And yet it is not Razzle carried off “inert” on a

  stretcher but the best of them all, the farm orphan called the Kid, modest,

  serious, chaste, loyal, naive, undiscourageable, hard-working, soft-spoken,

  courageous, a brilliant athlete, a beautiful, austere boy. Needless to say, I

  thought of the Swede and the Kid as one and wondered how the Swede could bear to

  read this book that had left me near tears and unable to sleep. Had I had the