Reading Myself and Others Read online

  The second abandoned project was a play entitled The Nice Jewish Boy. Still more about a Jewish family, their son, and his shiksa—in its way a less comforting, more aggressive Abie’s Irish Rose. A draft of the play was eventually read as a workshop exercise at the American Place Theatre in 1964, with Dustin Hoffman, then an off-Broadway actor, in the title role. The trouble with it was that the realistic dramatic conventions I had adopted rather unthinkingly (and strictly) didn’t provide me with the room I needed to get to the character’s secret life. My unfamiliarity and timidity with the form, and the collaborative effort itself, inhibited and conventionalized my own sense of things, and so rather than proceeding to a production, I decided after the reading to cut my losses. Again somewhat sadly. The comic surface of the play (what father said to mother, what mother said to son, what son said to shiksa) seemed to me accurate and funny; yet the whole enterprise lacked the inventive flair and emotional exuberance that had given The Jewboy whatever quality it had.

  So: the struggle that was to be at the source of Alexander Portnoy’s difficulties, and motivate his complaint, was in those early years of work still so out of focus that all I could do was recapitulate his problem technically, telling first the dreamy and fantastic side of the story, then the story in more conventional terms and by relatively measured means. Not until I found, in the person of a troubled analysand, the voice that could speak in behalf of both the “Jewboy” (with all that word signifies to Jew and Gentile alike about aggression, appetite, and marginality) and the “nice Jewish boy” (and what that epithet implies about repression, respectability, and social acceptance) was I able to complete a fiction that was expressive, instead of symptomatic, of the character’s dilemma.

  While making abortive forays into what was going to emerge years later as Portnoy’s Complaint, I was intermittently writing equally shadowy drafts of a novel that was variously titled—as theme and emphasis shifted—Time Away, In the Middle of America, and Saint Lucy, and that was published in 1967 as When She Was Good. This continuous movement back and forth from one partially realized project to another is fairly typical of how my work evolves and the way I deal with literary frustration and uncertainty, and serves me as a means of both checking and indulging “inspiration.” The idea, in part, is to keep alive fictions that draw their energy from different sources, so that when circumstances combine to rouse one or another of the sleeping beasts, there is a carcass around for it to feed on.

  After the manuscript of When She Was Good was completed midway through 1966, I almost immediately began to write a longish monologue, beside which the fetid indiscretions of Portnoy’s Complaint would appear to be the work of Louisa May Alcott. I did not have any idea where I was going, and playing (in the mud, if you like) more accurately describes my activity than does writing, or “experimenting,” that much-used catchall with its flattering implications of courageous pioneering and disinterested self-abandonment.

  This monologue was delivered by one of those lecturers who used to go around to schools, churches, and social groups showing slides of natural wonders. My slide show, delivered in the dark and with a pointer, and accompanied by running commentary (including humorous and illustrative anecdotes), consisted of full-color enlargements of the private parts, fore and aft, of the famous. Actors and actresses, of course, but primarily—since the purpose was educational—distinguished authors, statesmen, scientists, etc. It was blasphemous, mean, bizarre, scatological, tasteless, spirited, and, largely out of timidity, I think, remained unfinished … except that buried somewhere in the sixty or seventy pages were several thousand words on the subject of adolescent masturbation, a personal interlude by the lecturer, that seemed to me on rereading to be funny and true, and worth saving, if only because it was the only sustained piece of writing on the subject that I could remember reading in a work of fiction.

  Not that at the time I could have deliberately set out to write about masturbating and come up with anything so pointedly intimate. Rather, it would seem to have required all that wildness and roughhousing—the merriment, which is how I experienced it—for me just to get to the subject. Knowing that what I was writing about President Johnson’s testicles, Jean Genet’s anus, Mickey Mantle’s penis, Margaret Mead’s breasts, and Elizabeth Taylor’s pubic bush was simply unpublishable—a writer’s hijinks that might just as well not see the light of day—was precisely what allowed me to relax my guard and go on at some length about the solitary activity that is so difficult to talk about and yet so near at hand. For me writing about the act had, at the outset at least, to be as secret as the act itself.

  More or less in tandem with this untitled exercise in voyeurism—which purported to enlarge and examine upon an illuminated screen the sexual parts of others—I began to write a strongly autobiographical piece of fiction based upon my own upbringing in New Jersey. For lack of anything more inspired, simply as a kind of genre title, it was called in its first rough draft of several hundred pages Portrait of the Artist. By sticking closely to the facts, and narrowing the gap between the actual and the invented, I thought I could somehow come up with a story that would go to the heart of the particular Jewish ethos I’d come out of. But the more I stuck to the actual and the strictly autobiographical, the less resonant and revealing the narrative became. Once again (as I now see it) I was oscillating between the extremes of unmanageable fable or fantasy and familiar surface realism or documentation, and thereby holding at bay what was still trying to become my subject, if only I would let it. I had already described it, unknowingly, in the antipodal titles of the two projects previously abandoned: the argument between the Abel and Cain of my own respectable middle-class background, the Jewboy and the nice Jewish boy.

  Somewhere along the way in Portrait of the Artist, in order to broaden the scope and relieve the monotony, I invented some relatives to live upstairs from the family, loosely modeled upon my own, who were to have been at the center of the book. These upstairs relatives of “ours” I called the Portnoys. In the beginning the Portnoys were modeled, about as loosely, upon two or three families in whose apartments I used to play and snack and sometimes sleep overnight when I was a boy. In fact, an old boyhood friend of mine, who was interviewed by his local newspaper at the time of my book’s publication, was quoted as saying that my family certainly did not seem to him to resemble the Portnoys; “but,” he added, “I suppose Phil didn’t see it that way.” That there was a family which in certain aspects Phil did see that way, and, I suspect, which this old boyhood friend of mine sometimes saw that way as well, he did not, for reasons of filial discretion and personal modesty, let on to the reporter.

  Though actually the family the Portnoys looked most like to me, as I became increasingly taken by them and began to allow them to take hold in the novel, was a family I had described in passing in an essay published in American Judaism some five years earlier.* The essay had grown out of a talk I had given at a B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League symposium in Chicago in 1961, in which I had attacked what I took to be the unreality and silliness of Jews who were being popularized around that time in books by Harry Golden and Leon Uris. The family was not called the Portnoys then, nor were they as yet the product of my own imagination. Rather, I had come upon them, in various disguises and incarnations, in my reading. Here (abridged somewhat) is what I said at the A.D.L. symposium in 1961:

  … There are several Jewish graduate students in a class I teach at the Writing Workshop of the State University of Iowa, and during this last semester three of them wrote stories about a Jewish childhood … Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, in each story the hero is a Jewish boy, somewhere between ten and fifteen, who gets excellent grades in school and is always combed and courteous … [This] Jewish boy … is watched—he is watched at bedtime, at study time, and especially at mealtime. Who he is watched by is his mother. The father we rarely see, and between him and the boy there seems to be little more than a nodding acquaintance. The old man is eith
er working or sleeping or across the table, silently stowing it away. Still there is a great deal of warmth in these families—especially when compared to the Gentile … family [in the story]—and almost all of it is generated by the mother … [But] the fire that warms can also burn and asphyxiate: what the hero envies the Gentile boy is his parents’ indifference, and largely, it would seem, because of the opportunities it affords him for sexual adventure … I hasten to point out that in these short stories the girls to whom the Gentile friend leads the young narrator are never Jewish. The Jewish women are mothers and sisters. The sexual yearning is for the Other …

  Here then was the folktale—transmitted to me by my students as an authentic bit of American-Jewish mythology—that began to enlarge my sense of who these Portnoys might be … or become. Now it even made a nice kind of sense that in that first slapdash draft of Portrait of the Artist I had imagined them to be “relatives” living “upstairs”: here were the fallible, oversized, anthropomorphic gods who had reigned over the households of my neighborhood; here was that legendary Jewish family dwelling on high, whose squabbles over French-fried potatoes, synagogue attendance, and shiksas were, admittedly, of an Olympian magnitude and splendor, but by whose terrifying kitchen lightning storms were illuminated the values, dreams, fears, and aspirations by which we mortal Jews lived somewhat less vividly down below.

  This time, rather than choosing as I had in The Jewboy to treat this folklore as folklore—emphasizing the fantastic, the charming, the quaint, the magical, the poetic—I determinedly took off in the opposite direction. Under the sway of the autobiographical impulse that had launched Portrait of the Artist, I began to ground the mythological in the recognizable, the verifiable, the historical. Though they might derive from Mt. Olympus (by way of Mt. Sinai), these Portnoys were going to live in a Newark and at a time and in a way I could vouch for by observation and experience.

  (With this sleight-of-hand, if I have to say so myself, I seemed to have succeeded all too well. Among the several hundred letters I received after the book’s publication, there was one from a woman in East Orange, New Jersey, who claimed to have known my sister when she and my correspondent’s daughter were classmates together at Weequahic High in Newark, where the Portnoy children went to school. She remembered what a sweet, lovely, polite girl my sister was, and was shocked that I should be so thoughtless as to write as I had about her intimate life, especially to make jokes about her unfortunate tendency to gain weight. Since, unlike Alexander Portnoy, I happen never to have had a sister, I assumed it was some other Jewish Athena with a tendency to gain weight to whom my correspondent was alluding.)

  However, it was to be a while yet before I began to feel so constrained by the conventions I had imposed upon myself in Portrait of the Artist that I abandoned that manuscript in its turn—and thus released the Portnoys from their role as supporting actors in another family’s drama. They would not get star billing until sometime later, when out of the odds and ends of Portrait of the Artist I liked best, I began to write something I called “A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis.” This turned out to be a brief story narrated by the Portnoys’ son, Alexander, purportedly his introductory remarks to his psychoanalyst. And who was this Alexander? None other than that Jewish boy who used to turn up time after time in the stories written by those Jewish graduate students back in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: the “watched-over” Jewish son with his sexual dream of The Other. Strictly speaking, the writing of Portnoy’s Complaint began with discovering Portnoy’s voice—more accurately, his mouth—and discovering, along with it, the listening ear: the silent Dr. Spielvogel. The psychoanalytic monologue—a narrative technique whose rhetorical possibilities I’d been availing myself of for years, only not on paper—was to furnish the means by which I thought I might convincingly draw together the fantastic element of The Jewboy and the realistic documentation of Portrait of the Artist and The Nice Jewish Boy. And a means, too, of legitimizing the obscene preoccupations of the untitled slide show on the subject of sexual parts. Instead of the projection screen (and the gaping), the couch (and the unveiling); instead of gleeful, sadistic voyeurism—brash, shameful, masochistic, euphoric, vengeful, conscience-ridden exhibitionism. Now I could perhaps to begin.

  On Our Gang*

  First, is there a tradition of political satire in America to which Our Gang belongs?

  Yes, though it probably isn’t known even to most educated Americans. Political satire isn’t writing that lasts. Though satire, by and large, deals with enduring social and political problems, its comic appeal lies in the use made of the situation of the moment. It’s unlikely that reading even the best satiric work of another era we feel anything like the glee or the outrage experienced by a contemporary audience. Subtleties of wit and malice are wholly lost over the years, and we’re left to enjoy the broadest, least time-bound aspects of the work, and to hunt through footnotes in order to make connections and draw inferences that are the teeth and claws of this sort of writing. Except for a few students of American literature and history, no one today is going to be interested in reading James Russell Lowell’s satires in doggerel verse, The Biglow Papers, written in the middle of the nineteenth century from an abolitionist point of view, or the dialect letters of “Petroleum V. Nasby,” the work of another antislavery Northerner, David Ross Locke. Yet both are wonderful comic inventions, as virulent and funny as the political satire of Defoe and maybe even some of Swift. Lincoln admired the Nasby letters so much that he is supposed to have said he would have given up the Presidency to have been able to write them.

  Another reason Americans might not realize satirical writing once flourished here is that there’s hardly any around today. People would be surprised, not only by the imaginative richness, but by the ferocity of the political satire that appeared in ordinary daily newspapers throughout the country in the nineteenth century, especially during the decades leading up to and following the Civil War. I don’t believe there’s a daily newspaper in America today that would print the kind of sustained attack that Lowell made upon General Taylor during the campaign of 1847, or Locke made upon the Northern Democrats during Lincoln’s Administration. If you look at how American Presidents were ridiculed in the daily papers in the nineteenth century, you have to conclude that editors and readers were a heartier bunch a hundred years ago, far less intimidated than they appear to be today by Emily Postish notions of respectability.

  Are there any other American writers you admire who have worked along these lines?

  Well, Mencken. Specifically, his attack on Harding’s puerile prose style, which he called “Gamalielese.” Mencken said that Harding’s style was so bad that a sort of grandeur crept into it. And there is a poem by E. E. Cummings, a sort of mock eulogy occasioned by Harding’s death, which describes President Harding as “the only man woman or child who wrote/a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical/errors…”

  Are you suggesting a connection between Mencken’s attitude toward Harding and your own toward President Nixon in Our Gang?

  Yes and no. I don’t feel much kinship with Mencken’s ideas—particularly his notions as to what constitutes an aristocracy rub me the wrong way. But as a critic of American public rhetoric, he was very funny. I think, yes, there is in my book a concern similar to his in the essay “Gamalielese.” But we approach the problem of debased political language in different ways. Where he analyzes and evaluates Harding’s prose in a journalistic essay, Our Gang is an exaggerated impersonation, a parody, of Nixon’s style of discourse and thought. I go about my work in the manner of a fantasist and farceur; Mencken uses the weapons of a literary critic.

  I believe he was also more amused by Mr. Harding than I am by Mr. Nixon. The reason may be that there’s been a lot of terror packed into the short space of time that separates Mencken’s “Gamalielese” from George Orwell’s “Newspeak”—related kinds of double-talk at which President Nixon is equally adept. Mencken might never have drawn th
e same conclusions from rotten political prose that Orwell did twenty-eight years later in the novel 1984. Mencken thought it was inevitable that American democracy would produce as leaders clowns and charlatans who, along with their other disabilities, couldn’t speak English. He considered what they said and the way they said it entertainment, rivaled only by Barnum and Bailey. It took an Orwell—and a second world war, and savage totalitarian dictatorships in Germany and Russia—to make us realize that this seemingly comical rhetoric could be turned into an instrument of political tyranny.

  You’ve mentioned specifically two nineteenth-century satirical works, The Biglow Papers and the Nasby letters, both growing out of the Civil War period, and now Mencken’s essays. Any other literary works of a satiric nature that seem to you relevant to our discussion of Our Gang?

  It might be as much to the point to mention satiric works of a non-literary, or popular, nature. “Satiric” probably isn’t the right word here—I mean broadly comic in the style of Olsen and Johnson, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and the like. Recently I saw Abbott and Costello in a segment from an old movie of theirs, doing that famous baseball dialogue “Who’s on First?” It’s a marvel of punning and verbal confusion, characterized by the sort of buffoonery that I was trying for in the longest section of Our Gang, “Tricky Has Another Crisis.” Obviously, Tricky—in contrast to either the colorless straight man Abbott or the benign fool Costello—is an old-fashioned villain in the Tartuffian mold. Still, the style of some of Abbott and Costello’s slapstick comedy seems to me suited to the monkey business that Tricky and his friends engage in in that “crisis” section.