The Impacted Aggressions of Sexuality

Philip Roth has died, which has gotten me started on a post I've been dithering over for a couple of years now.

It all started when I stumbled on Promiscuous: "Portnoy's Complaint" and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness (Yale, 2012), by Bernard Avishai.  Avishai was born in Canada and is now a professor of business at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  He was a personal friend of Roth's, and had access to some of the latter's view of his work, including Portnoy's Complaint (Random House, 1969), which is probably Roth's most famous, and certainly his most notorious work.

Avishai's eulogy for Roth can be read here.  It's a lovely personal bit of writing, and I found myself identifying with Roth to a degree.  He wasn't good at romantic relationships and had no children, but he had many friends and enjoyed being a mentor.  His failures as a husband might be different from mine; Claire Bloom's 1996 memoir of her marriage to him indicates that he was even harder to live with than I am, which is always a relief to know.  (I could have been worse!)

But it's Roth's work, not his life, that I'm interested in here, though the work is also problematic to put it mildly.  Avishai is very defensive about it, and indulges in some typical straight-male-supremacist mansplaining in response to feminist accusations of misogyny in Roth's writing.  It's reminiscent of Tina Fey's recent confrontation with David Letterman about sexism in TV comedy.  I've written about this before, wondering if at least some women recognized themselves in Portnoy's wild sexual frustration; of course some did.  Talia Lavin has an essay in the current Village Voice in which she describes how reassuring, if not liberating, her adolescent identification with Alexander Portnoy was.

Nonetheless his prose echoed something I had already begun to feel: the subaltern griminess of my desires, the urgency of my flesh, made me dirty; I was a dirty Jew, in direct contrast to the holy Jews that surrounded me, let alone the unimaginable goyim I saw primarily on TV. I was (I am) small, plump, simian-faced, pursued by a halo of ungovernable frizz; I felt I took up too much space. I looked into the faces of those I desired and imagined what I saw in them to be disgust. Portnoy’s Complaint was disgusting: Alexander Portnoy fucked raw liver. Alexander Portnoy masturbated on a bus. Alexander Portnoy was perpetually at the point of ejaculation. Alexander Portnoy was a dirty Jew. Like me. Portnoy’s Complaint with its beat-up yellow cover was soon added to the small pile of books that felt incontrovertibly mine. “Doctor, doctor,” I recited to myself, in Portnoy’s voice, as I slipped my hand under the waistband of my modest long black skirt and dreamed of familiar figures transmogrified by my lust, “it’s time to put the id back in yid.”

But she recognizes that the identification wouldn't have gone both ways:

In allowing myself to be seduced by the author, to inhabit his viewpoint, I adopted this myopia; to be thrilled by great art, I had to abnegate my own gender. This is, of course, a laughably common experience: to be anyone but a white man and consume the canon, one must thrust one’s own experience willfully back, to see a man in the full and indulgent complexity with which he would never, ever see you. He would not deign to; he did not need to; now, he never will.

That some women identified with Portnoy, or any of Roth's other male characters, is not proof that his work isn't sexist or even misogynist, any more than the fact that some of Roth's best friends were women proves the same about the man.  That Avishai falls into that cliche doesn't speak well for him.

As a gay goy boy I also recognized myself, or thought I did, in young Alexander Portnoy, though his predictable use of mom-obsessed gay men on Fire Island as bogeymen was not helpful.  On the other hand, it inspired me to write a short play during my senior year of high school, which had a gay character.  (A hairdresser, duh.)  The play was also influenced by Albee's The American Dream, dosed with Theater of the Absurd.  This must have been in 1969, so what I'd read of Portnoy at the time would have been the excerpts published in New American Review before the book was published.  I'd also read The Essential Lenny Bruce and Bruce's autobiography, which had a voice very similar to Portnoy's.  I'm amazed that I composed such a thing at that age, and I wish I could read it now, but I lent the only copy to my high school drama teacher (what was I thinking? well, I could hardly have shown it to my mom), who never returned it.

Avishai does a pretty good job in Promiscuous of distinguishing between Portnoy and Roth.  (As Gore Vidal once remarked, even though people fantasize about sex far more than they engage with its reality, they tend to believe that no writer about sex ever makes anything up, but regurgitates straight autobiography onto the page.)  But one thing struck me very forcefully as I read and reread Promiscuous (it's very readable, and not very long) that has less to do with Portnoy or Roth himself than with certain stresses and faults in the culture that produced him.

In teaching notes he prepared for a college class he was going to address on his work, Roth wrote: "Masturbation, which seems to have made the book famous, was the least of it.  It was the aggressive rage, the ingratitude, the hatred that was the most shameful secret" (page 8 of the Kindle edition).  Exactly, and on some level I recognized that as a teenager on my first reading.  But for me as for so many readers (including, as you can see, Talia Levin), Portnoy made an impression as adolescent rebellion against repression, especially sexual/erotic repression.  Another motif, intimately intertwined with the erotic, was rebellion against the pressure to be a Good Little Boy or Girl, which was a common theme in mid-century American literature.  The villain, of course, especially in those days, was Mom, always trying to mold you into a submissive good citizen.

Though I didn't see it that way at the time, as a young homosexual I was at least as repressed.  I couldn't have challenged adults about it then, because almost no one thought that gay kids (or adults) had a right to sexual expression or love.  Which didn't keep me from daydreaming about it, but I couldn't really imagine it either.

Then it suddenly occurred to me to quote again the remarks of another Jewish writer, Joanna Russ, about the scapegoating of mothers:

Every women’s studies teacher, for example, knows the female student who comes into her office and announces defiantly that she’s going to get married – the world is still full of girls who think that heterosexual alliances with men represent a form of rebellion against sexless Mommy. How do these young women imagine their mothers ended up where they were? Yet the hope persists that heterosexual activity (a little wilder than stuffy Mom’s) will provide access to the men’s freer, wider world. Mother’s function as the forewoman who polices Daughter’s sexuality, in many American families, gives some color to this notion – that an alliance with men is an alliance against Mother – and yet these girls must have at least the suspicion that Mom made the same bargain. And surely they know that heterosexual alliance can’t confer membership in the men’s world but only a place (Mother’s place, in fact) on the sidelines. But they don’t. And so they end up married, leading the same life as Mother, or – if unlucky – a worse one with less bargaining power. And their daughters repeat the process.*

But what, I began to ask myself as I read Promiscuous, would be better for kids?  Alexander Portnoy's daydreams of sexual expression are as stunted as mine were, maybe more so: he can only imagine a fantasy girl he calls Thereal McCoy, an insatiable minx who begs him, "Give it to me, Big Boy! Give it all you've got!" as he pulls his pud.  If mom's repression was magically removed and Alex were free to do what he wanted sexually, what would have satisfied him?  The trouble wasn't that masturbation is unsatisfying; so is copulation with a partner -- you have to, or get to, do it over and over again.  He was a teenager right after World War II, though we know that people, including adolescents, were sexually active in those days far more than they were supposed to be.  Their activity led often enough to unwanted pregnancies and shame.  Imagine an erotic utopia; I've been trying to do so, and it's not as easy as I thought.  Nowadays, when kids can get access to accurate sexual information and often to contraception, it's still difficult for many of them, because they don't necessarily know what they want, or they want what (or whom) they can't have.  Eroticism, like other human emotions, isn't rational.  It's messy.  A lot of what people say about it is mistaken, confused, self-defeating.

A start can be made, I think, with accurate sexual information.  Because I learned how bodies worked erotically long before I got any experience with them beyond the self-inflicted, I had little anxiety about how sex was done.  It took me a long time to realize that not only did many adults not want kids to know about sex, many kids didn't want to know either.  Many clung to shame, mainly so they could try to inflict it on others.  Maybe this is a more or less inevitable consequence of puberty, where what seems gross to pre-adolescents (kissing, my lips touched boy lips -- eeuuuw) abruptly becomes desirable -- while still, often, remaining gross.  No wonder many people are comfortable doing it, but resist talking about it. It might have been easier for young Alex Portnoy if he could have talked honestly about his desires with someone who wouldn't have been freaked out by them, but maybe not.  After all, even as an adult, free (he thought) of religion, free of his parents' strictures, in a comparatively open time and place, he still didn't know what he wanted.  That's the point of the book.

To borrow another metaphor, there can't be a Grand Unified Theory of love and sex that works for everybody, because everybody doesn't want the same thing.  What one person wants is the opposite of what the next person wants, but the same person will harbor contradictory wishes and fears.  Edmund White has said that when he was having sex with hundreds of men a year, he still felt that other guys were getting more than he was, and he wasn't getting enough.  I never had as many partners as that, but I still have had more than any decent person is supposed to have; sometimes I felt frustration, because you can never have everybody you want, and of course some people you don't want will want you.  Nevertheless, as I got older, I found that I was amazed at how lucky I've been sexually speaking, how much good experience I've had with people I really wanted.  How many partners is a decent person, or even an indecent one, supposed to have?  What is the proper place of sex in a person's life?  There's no agreement about that at all.  (There is, however, a widespread and tenacious conviction that a person should have at most one partner, and ideally not even one.)  It was a common belief among the scientifically minded in the early twentieth century that once religion and its associated ignorance and hangups were removed, sex would become unproblematic and rational.  But human beings aren't rational.  Not everybody welcomes openness and honesty; even if you get rid of existing misconceptions and superstitions, people will just invent new ones.  That's how we got them in the first place. 

------------------------
* From Russ's review of Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976), reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen (University of Liverpool Press, 2007), page 162

The Rejection of Shame

I'm still reading Claudia Roth Pierpont's Roth Unbound, advancing chronologically through Philip Roth's career.  For some reason she skipped the long story "On the Air," which appeared in issue 10 of the paperback-magazine New American Review, back in 1970; I know I still have that issue around here somewhere.  It has almost never been reprinted, apparently because Roth himself hates it.  But it fits so neatly into that period, which includes several intentionally provocative works, from Portnoy to the Nixon satire Our Gang. And incidentally, one of the more amazing bits in Roth Unbound is a page-and-a-half excerpt from Nixon's White House Tapes, most of which I read before I realized that it was not a quotation from Our Gang but the real thing:

NIXON: Roth is of course a Jew
HALDEMAN: Oh yes ... He's brilliant in a sick way [73].

Anyway, I'm now reading Pierpont's discussion of Roth's middle period, initiated by The Ghost Writer in 1979.  This is the novel where the protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, meets a young woman who might or might not be Anne Frank, if Frank had survived Bergen-Belsen and immigrated to the US.  Roth was interested in her status as a sort of Jewish saint, had been wondering for years about her appeal.  As Pierpont explains it:

For all the tears that have been shed for Anne Frank, has her book really taught anybody anything?

The question may seem naive.  But Nathan, in the voice of his imaginary Anne, comes to an answer about the lessons of the book that accords, perhaps unsurprisingly, with Roth's defense of his stories years earlier.  The Diary has touched so many people -- and here Roth says "aloud" the most hazardous thing he felt he had to say -- because there was nothing notably Jewish about this mostly secular, Dickens-reading, European family who just happened to be Jews.  "A harmless Chankukah song" once a year, a few Hebrew words, a few candles, a few presents; there was hardly more to it than that.  They were in no way foreign, strange, or embarrassing -- and look what happened to them.  They were entirely charming, in fact, especially, of course, Anne.  And look what happened to her.  What did it take to provoke what happened?  "It took nothing -- that was the horror.  And that was the truth.  And that was the power of her book."  As Roth had once replied to the rabbis, it is impossible to control anti-Semitism through exemplary behavior, accomplishments, or charm.  Because anti-Semitism originates not in the Jew but in the anti-Semites.  Repression, pretension, "putting on a good face": all useless.  Anne's diary offered a double lesson, really.  For Gentiles, a lesson in common humanity, the nightmare made real because of how familiar Anne and her family seemed.  And for Jews, the fact that this familiarity had not done a thing to save them [118].

The stories Roth had to defend years earlier were in his first book, Goodbye Columbus, which had outraged many Jewish readers and spokesmen for (as they thought) airing Jewish dirty laundry where the Gentiles could see it.  At least once he was asked, "Mr. Roth, would you write the same stories you've written if you were living in Nazi Germany?" (14).  Roth was not living in Nazi Germany, of course.  His take on Anne Frank was in part an answer to that very stupid question.  For one thing, German Jews were among the most assimilated in Europe; all their efforts to minimize their differences made them no less vulnerable.  Hasidim who stood out were demonized in ways that often sound familiar from antigay propaganda now, but assimilated Jews were demonized as a Fifth Column, a secret menace pretending to be normal while burrowing away at the foundations of Western Civilization.  As Pierpont puts it, anti-Semitism (or any kind of bigotry, really) originates not in the Jew but in the anti-Semite.  I've argued before that trying to appease bigots by conforming to predominant gender norms is just as futile, for the same reason: flamboyant "stereotypical" queers will outrage many people, but others will be just as outraged by non-stereotypical queers who pretend to be normal.  This doesn't mean that all gay people or Jews should strive to be visible, only that it's useless to rationalize conformity as a remedy for bigotry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a fine piece yesterday that (among other things) addressed the same point for African-Americans.

When W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1897, claimed that the "first and greatest" step toward addressing "the Negro Problem," lay in correcting the "immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves" he was wrong. No amount of morality could have prevented the overthrow of Wilmington by white supremacists—the only coup in American history—a year later. When Booker T. Washington urged blacks to use "every iota of influence that we possess" to "get rid of the criminal and loafing element of our people," he was wrong. When Marcus Garvey claimed that "the greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself," he was dead wrong. When Malcolm X claimed that "the white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” and asserted that black people "will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community," he was wrong. He knew the game was rigged. He did not know how much.

In his book The Condemnation of Blackness, the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad notes that a few years after Du Bois made his proclamations he was shocked to find himself cited by unreformed white supremacists.

Besides, many of the black people who were lynched in Du Bois' day were in fact responsible, disciplined, and successful: that was why the mobs targeted them.  (Again, like Jews -- stereotyped as rich -- and gay men -- ditto.)

That isn't to deny, of course, that many black people are irresponsible -- Coates addresses that elsewhere in the piece -- or that many gay people are.  But so are many white people, and many straights.  Whites may complain about low-class white trash, but they don't see the misconduct of other whites as invalidating their own privilege, and they certainly don't expect to be judged by it.  The same goes for straights versus gays, or Gentiles versus Jews, or Christians versus Muslims, or men versus women ... any such division, really.

In another book I read recently, What Is English and Why Should We Care? (Oxford, 2013), Tim Machan says that colonialists preferred that "natives" speak broken English, which could be despised as a symptom of laziness and/or inferior intellect, rather than fluent standard English, which caused the rulers anxiety on numerous levels.  This double bind persists, I think, in whites' contempt for poor blacks (or other Others -- it also applied to European immigrants a hundred years ago) combined with hatred of those who succeed in whites' domains.  This accounts for the racist hatred of Barack Obama, as can be seen in the memes which depict him as an African witch doctor or other "primitive" caricature.  But it can also be seen in white liberal middle-class caricatures of inbred rednecks and ignorant fundamentalists.  The Other is a mirror in which we try very hard not to see ourselves.

True Universality

I'm reading Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2013), by Claudia Roth Pierpont (who, despite her maiden name, is no relation to Philip Roth), and I came on a revealing bit.  I'm not a big fan of Roth, though I have read at least a dozen of his books.  He's one of those writers I respect more than I enjoy; I feel the same way about Toni Morrison.  I feel I ought to read his later work, but haven't gotten around to it and don't know when I will.  But Portnoy's Complaint, Roth's 1969 bestseller, made a big impression on me when it was first published.  I was eighteen then and impressionable.  I'd practically memorized The Essential Lenny Bruce, a transcription of that satirical comic's work, a few years before, and Portnoy seemed like more of the same.  Roth and Bruce had the same slightly deleterious effect on my adolescent prose that J. D. Salinger had had a few years before.

Anyway, Pierpont writes:

In 2009, on its fortieth anniversary, Portnoy was awarded an unofficial, retrospective Booker Prize, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, for the best novel of 1969.  A dissenting judge on the jury, the English classicist Mary Beard, complained about the choice in a Times Literary Supplement blog, deriding the book as "literary torture" and a "repetitive, blokeish sexual fantasy."  She was met with a hail of reactions, pro and con, ranging from a heated defense of "the can't-put-it-down vigour of Roth's writing" to derisory comments about his "ethnic stereotypes" and the calmly universalizing assertion that "any man who's grown up in an ethnic-immigrant household in America has his entire life story etched out in the pages of that book" [65].

I think the quotation I've put into boldface is highly revealing.  Beard said, after all, that Portnoy is a blokeish sexual fantasy.  ("Bloke" being Brit for "guy.")

Even I, a queer American male who didn't grow up in an ethnic-immigrant household -- both my parents were several generations off the boat, and neither was Jewish -- found it easy to identify with Portnoy.  But would a woman, most women, any woman feel the same way?  Maybe; women grow up feeling constrained and limited by their upbringing too.  But women are the problem in Roth's book: the mother, the dull sister, the crazy hillbilly girlfriend, the numerous WASP girlfriends, the tough Israeli woman before whom Portnoy is impotent.  It's possible, and desirable, to identify with characters of the other sex: women have been doing it for millennia, and more men do it than is usually recognized.  But it gets old after a while, and the most determined, sympathetic female reader might be disturbed at last by the role women characters play in Portnoy's Complaint.  Considering that women are just over half the population, their reactions to art and entertainment ought to count for something.  Any woman who's grown up in a male-supremacist society -- meaning all of them -- might begin to wonder why her life story isn't etched out in more pages, and get tired of seeing women treated as the adversary Others all the time.