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Promiscuous
Portnoy's Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness
By Bernard Avishai
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Bernard Avishai
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-17811-1
Chapter One
A Novel in the Form of a Confession The Enigma of Portnoy, Who Is Not Roth
By the beginning of 1969, much of Portnoy's Complaint had already appeared in print. Excerpts had been published in Partisan Review (whose 5,000 bookish copies were passed from hand to hand), Esquire, and New American Review, the now defunct magazine edited by Roth's friend and early promoter Ted Solotaroff. Rumors about publication rights began to circulate, creating the feeling of an impending literary squall. Random House, which paid Roth a $250,000 advance (about $2.5 million in today's money), published the hardback in February; Bantam paid $350,000 for the paperback rights. ("I wondered," Roth told a friend at the time, "what did you tip the courier who just handed you a check for a quarter of a million dollars?") Portnoy's Complaint sold 420,000 copies during the first ten weeks of its going on sale. Over 275,000 sold within two days of the publication date.
At launch, George Plimpton—another early supporter of Roth's work at the Paris Review, who was then at the height of his own fame—interviewed Roth for the New York Times Book Review. "But surely you don't intend us to believe," Plimpton pressed him, "that this volatile novel of sexual confession, among other things, had its conception in purely literary motives?" Roth answered, not without that tincture of defensiveness that would seep into a hundred future interviews: "[Portnoy] is obscene because he wants to be saved.... [His] pains arise out of his refusal to be bound any longer by taboos which, rightly or wrongly, he experiences as diminishing and unmanning. The joke on Portnoy is that for him breaking the taboo turns out to be as unmanning in the end as honoring it. Some joke."
The joke on Portnoy? Come on, the jokes were by Portnoy. Was the thirty-six-year-old Roth, who had never had a novel sell more than 25,000 copies in hardcover, ducking the blowback from his wicked, perfect aim? Nor did it take more than a few months for Portnoy's Complaint to slip into America's cultural currents like a little anchor. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, Josh Greenfeld proclaimed that "Portnoy's past comes off as a kind of universal pop boyhood of the forties," albeit "with a Jewish accent and comic twist." We—and again, I don't just mean American Jews—began to refer to its characters, or should I say its targets, as if using a kind of shorthand: Sophie (especially Sophie), The Monkey, "my father," Rabbi Warshaw, Cousin Heshie, Dr. Spielvogel. The main characters became instant archetypes, which younger readers particularly gained a feel for, or had an opinion about, or thought they should have; characters personifying new (or newly admitted) emotions, standards, disturbances—characters on the way to becoming Jeopardy! questions. Patches of Portnoy's Jewish-mother-admonitions even entered into our household squabbles. "I know it's a fault, Alex, but I'm too good!" my son, then a teenager, once threw back at me.
Nelson Aldrich, another erstwhile Paris Review acquaintance, still thinks of Portnoy's Complaint as one of those books "around which you pivoted," and he never thought to ask—so he told me—"What am I doing reading a book from this quarter?" Not long ago, Time critic Richard Lacayo, rating his all-time favorite novels, recalled the book as "a literary instance of shock and awe." President Obama, greeting the winners of the National Humanities Medal in 2010, Roth among them, asked his audience, "How many young people have learned to think by reading the exploits of Portnoy and his complaints?" (Roth told me that as Obama actually presented the medal, he whispered, "You're not slowing down, are you?" Roth had to disappoint him by admitting that he was.) So the reaction to the novel was immediate, and the legend of Portnoy's strikes kept building. The novel was cited in journals and academic literature even more often in the 1990s than in the 1970s.
You have to start with the sex, or what passed for sex when you were young in midcentury. At least since Augustine's Confessions, there have been readers drawn to coming-of-age stories with sexual hunger driving the plot and moral torment prompting Help. You have to wonder, as I have reason to suspect its author does, if Portnoy's Complaint didn't endure all these years simply for salacious reasons: the memorable, and now fading, generational scandal of his having depicted masturbation so graphically and with such confessional energy:
So galvanic [explains Portnoy] is the effect of cotton panties against my mouth—so galvanic is the word "panties"—that the trajectory of my ejaculation reaches startling new heights: leaving my joint like a rocket it makes right for the light bulb overhead, where to my wonderment and horror, it hits and it hangs. Wildly in the first moment I cover my head, expecting an explosion of glass, a burst of flames—disaster, you see, is never far from my mind. Then quietly as I can I climb the radiator and remove the sizzling gob with a wad of toilet paper. I begin a scrupulous search of the shower curtain, the tub, the tile floor, the four toothbrushes—God forbid!—and just as I am about to unlock the door, imagining I have covered my tracks, my heart lurches at the sight of what is hanging like snot to the toe of my shoe. I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off ...
We ate this stuff up, for reasons we could hardly explain and didn't much want to. We were grateful to the author of Portnoy's Complaint for what we took to be his candor. But—though this may not have been obvious to us at the time—we did not read such passages the way we read the folded-over pages of Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers. For Portnoy is not only a more sophisticated raconteur than Robbins, he is never quite in league with our fantasies, or his own, for that matter. In almost every case, Eros always flies away and he is left with panic, then cover-up, then ironic distance from crime and punishment, then despair over his sense of alienation ("in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil"; "I once cored an apple ... and ran off into the woods to fall upon the orifice of the fruit, pretending that the cool and mealy hole was actually between the legs of that mythical being who always called me Big Boy when she pleaded for what no girl in all recorded history had ever had"). The voice is self-consciously ironic, learned, avid.
"The book, clearly, was transgressive and utterly in its moment," the critic Igor Webb told me. "Who thought that you could write about masturbating in the bathroom while your mother was on the other side of the door—who thought you could write about this, and do so with that timbre, with its layers: the humor, the psychoanalytic frame, the elation. That was liberating but also curious. It was a thrill: humanizing of the taboo." Lacayo writes that for the masturbation alone Portnoy's Complaint "will endure forever," though he added, hinting at something, that this was because the scenes transcended their own calculated vulgarity to raise other, more permanent questions—say, painful tensions between children and parents ("Doctor, what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred ... or the love?"). Portnoy, a literary agent friend wrote me, paved the way for the smartened-up, masturbation-rich film comedies by visible, young, almost always Jewish tricksters like Judd Apatow: "Those reluctant, barely grown-up guys would have nothing without Portnoy's now distant permission. And this is just one major commercial, cultural, long-distance service provided by the book. Convention-bound, expensive, big-ticket romantic comedies were allowed to be about the fussy, demented, frightened partings from the reassuring cleanliness of childhood."
Alfred Kazin had tried to summarize things early on when he reviewed Portnoy's Complaint in the New York Review of Books in the spring of 1969: "No matter where he goes and how many girls he can have at one time in his bed, [Portnoy] is still a masturbator at heart, still rebelling against the undefeatable."
Masturbation as a form of rebellion, lewdness as a cultural opportunity, repression as a psychic fact. The complaint, in this surface sense, was hardly Portnoy's alone. The novel did not kick off the sixties, we thought, so much as provide a comic culmination for them. "There is no firm language for the adult male embarked on a career of voluptuous enjoyment," Kazin writes in his diaries, reading the galleys of Portnoy's Complaint. "He lies to no woman more than he lies to himself—lies in the sense that he improvises positions and postures (morally speaking) for him to live by in this hand-to-mouth existence." Elia Kazan's film Splendor in the Grass, from 1961, had given us the tragic prelude, what was then the matter with Kansas: Bud and Deanie—Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood—hot for each other, gritting their teeth, going insane. By 1969, their shame was just on the verge of becoming quaint. Woodstock Nation had not yet sacked out, but Hef had had his Bunnies, Mrs. Robinson, her Ben, Jacqueline Susann's valley, its dolls. The literary scholar Robert Alter told me he recalls how by the early 1960s three novels—the reissue of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita, and Tropic of Cancer—had pretty much broken "the last taboos against dealing with the erotic." Our carnality had been ratified in the many art-house cinemas where Blow-up and Barbarella had played. As for the B movies, the curve of Angie Dickinson's breasts was becoming as agreeably unavoidable as the Coca-Cola trademark.
Nor, after reading Saul Bellow's Herzog, could we, or at least the more studious among us, doubt Jewish complaining as an art form or an author's vehicle for condescending to the world. Many of us found ourselves rooting instinctively for Portnoy's impudence, for his comically Jewish version of Bud, for "letting it all hang out"—for expressing the dirt of desire after the hygiene of childhood—because we assumed nothing in the private sphere could be more shocking than what had been going on in the public. Portnoy's Complaint was polished up during the spring of 1968. This was the time of the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite's doubts, John and Yoko's liturgy, the gunning down of Dr. King, the tugs at RFK's cuffs, Soviet tanks in Prague, PLO hijackings, Cohn-Bendit, HAL, Chicago "police riots." The book was published during the months of numbness we felt when we realized how all of the above had yielded (I still wince to say it) President Richard M. Nixon. For educated Americans, not even particularly hip ones, there was suddenly internal exile to contemplate.
Todd Gitlin wrote in his great chronicle, The Sixties, that people who had been veterans of anti-war protest and political experiment "gravitated toward the milieu which in the late Sixties had begun to call itself the 'human potential movement.'"
This melange of encounter groups, therapies, and mystical disciplines promised to uncover authentic selves, to help people "live in the present," "go with the flow," "give themselves permission," "free themselves of shoulds," "get in touch with their feelings," "get in touch with their bodies"—promises of relief for besieged individuals burdened by obligations; promises of intimate personal relations for those who had lost the hope of God or full community; promises of self-expression for the inhibited and cramped, the bored and spoiled.
Turning inward, to a kind of sexual defiance, seemed political all by itself, maybe the only politics left to us. America had been softened up by Mike Nichols, by Mort Sahl—also by the wackiness that had trickled into America from England's Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python. Our gang. In this atmosphere, what could be more welcome than an author doing to prudery what Sinclair Lewis had done to "modern merchandizing." Roth, so he told Esquire's Scott Raab, had "let it rip."
I had written three books prior that were all careful in a way. Each was different from the other, but they didn't let it rip, and now was my chance. [Portnoy's Complaint] was written at the tail end of the sixties, so all that was happening around one, and I was living in New York at the time, so the theatrics around me gave me confidence.... I had a friend who had a strong influence on me, not as a writer, just as a friend. I was very fond of him; he was a terrific live wire—Al Goldman. He taught at Columbia. He wrote a classical-music column. He was very much a serious literature professor.... The sixties transformed him. I don't know anyone more transformed—and many people were transformed. Al became a rock-music critic for Life, and he was my rock instructor. He used to take me to Madison Square Garden when he was covering various people.... B. B. King came to the Garden, and Al took me backstage to meet him just after Portnoy's Complaint came out. The girls were lined up around the block for B. B. King's dressing room, and in back with him he had a half a dozen or so acolytes in powder-blue suits, and we sat around and talked for a while. Then I went to get the seat while Al interviewed him further—and when I left, B. B. King looked at his boys in their powder-blue suits, rubbed my seat, and said, "This guy just made a million dollars from writin' a book." ... I went to a Janis Joplin concert with him, I went to a Doors concert with him—it was wonderful ...
So it seemed natural to think Portnoy's peculiar abandon was a turn of the screw from the author of Goodbye, Columbus, his inhibitions removed by the vehemence of anti-war radicalism. And, indeed, no stand-up comic before Portnoy's Complaint had got in there and talked this way about that special discontent that unravels the civilized: the fuse of pussy, the eruptions, the madness. We couldn't let go of this Roth, our Prince of Pussy, whose ability to endure freedom seemed a kind of standard, no matter the toll it allegedly took on his sanity. We wanted him, like Portnoy, to be in one affair after another, even if this meant one shrink after another. We ignored Roth's caution that he was inventing a character whose self-pity and obscenity were also revealing.
The caution—that Portnoy was not Roth—was ignored even by more seasoned critics who read novels for a living. "I want the novelist," wrote New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, heaping praise on Roth for finding a way to say everything he really feels through his apparent alter ego, "to bare his soul, to stop playing games, to cease sublimating." And this being America, the book's lines, especially about masturbation, were probably most scandalous for people who never actually bothered to read them. Jacqueline Susann, who appeared on Johnny Carson in 1969, was asked if she had ever met Roth; after replying that she had not, she added that she would like to meet him but would "not want to shake his hand." (Years later, Roth was still consoling himself: "After all, it wasn't as if André Malraux said it to François Mauriac.")
It did not easily occur to us, in short, that a book that was in its moment was not just of its moment; that one didn't really need the sixties to have the shame, or the family, or the confession, or the dangers of erotic insurgency; that unlike Sergeant Pepper, say, the book was not valorizing the sixties, but seemed preoccupied with resisting the misapplied moral lessons of the forties, or the pipe-and-elbow-patches intellectual styles of the fifties—resistance that launched the sixties. We found it hard to see that the book's themes were latent in any bourgeois decade, a point I'll return to in the next chapter. We also found it hard to see that, to have Portnoy, you needed Roth to be not just unbuttoned but inventive.
Roth would soon bore of being famous for "baring his soul." In New York, people threw him knowing looks as he passed them on the street. Jewish leaders were inflamed. Strangers at the swimming pool assumed that he, like Portnoy, was on the verge of seducing a lover or breaking up with one, offering him advice; diners at a restaurant would pass his table and ask if he was having liver. It was not like being famous for the Salk vaccine. "It was a story about a boy and his conscience," Herman Roth, Roth's (by then) widowed father, put the matter with a lovely simplicity to People magazine in 1983. "They blew it all out of proportion."
Between 1971 and 1976, Roth often traveled to Prague, funneling money and book contracts to Czech writers, eventually founding a series for Penguin Books called "Writers from the Other Europe," which helped to get novels by Milan Kundera, Bruno Schultz, Tadeusz Borowski, and others into print. In Prague, the prestige of having written an international best-seller could be put to use; the further he got from New York, and the closer to ground zero of Jewish tragedy, the easier it was to escape being honored as America's preeminent Jewish sex-clown. Eventually, however, Roth felt he had to weigh in as a critic, raising questions about the perils of writing fiction, and especially this fiction. In the fall of 1974, he published a lengthy, earnest essay, "Imagining Jews," in the New York Review of Books. It focused largely on how contemporary Jewish writers had overcautiously rendered the impacted aggressions of sexuality, another subject worth returning to. But it began with Roth's confession of frustration with critics underestimating Portnoy as an invention.
Roth noted that critics praised the author of Portnoy's Complaint for sheer spontaneity one year, and, a year or two later (when "the pendulum of received opinion swung the other way"), praised "disguise, artifice, fantasy, montage, and complicated irony"—all the things Portnoy's Complaint was presumably lacking. He was adamant: fiction is never just one thing or another; the line between a confession and fiction is not easily drawn under any circumstance. ("When there is a writer in a family," Czeslaw Milosz says, "that family is finished.") Yet craft matters, intention matters—whatever the difficulties in divining it. Was it not time to think about what the character revealed and therefore what the author—not his character—was up to?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Promiscuous by Bernard Avishai Copyright © 2012 by Bernard Avishai. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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