Dying in Character: Memoirs on the End of Life

3. “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext”: Philip Roth and Patrimony

= 75 < chapter 3 “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” Philip Roth and Patrimony = A “father’s death,” Freud contends in the preface to the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, is the “most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life” (xxvi). Although most psychoanalysts now believe that a mother’s death has a greater impact on a son’s or daughter’s life, Philip Roth would agree with Freud. Roth’s memoir Patrimony is a deeply moving account of his relationship with Herman Roth, who died in 1989 at the age of eighty-eight. Roth cared for his father in the final months of his life, when he struggled with a massive brain tumor. The memoir explores not only the father-son relationship and the problems arising from end-of-life care but also the ethics of disclosing painful and shameful experiences that the dying want to remain private. Patrimony also calls into question Roth’s memory, including what he reveals and conceals about the biographical subject. Patrimony has the ring of authenticity about it, largely because Roth insists that everything in it is true. Indeed, the subtitle emphasizes this: A True Story. On the cover of the paperback edition is the critical imprimatur from the San Francisco Chronicle: “A tough-minded, beautifully written memoir. . . . It smacks of honesty and truthfulness on every page.” Patrimony, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, affirms the importance of remembrance and truth-telling. 76 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < Roth ends the story with the words, “You must not forget anything”— an injunction that becomes for the secular Roth a sacred if problematic commandment. The Facts: Roth’s Autobiography? Given the many statements he has made throughout his long, prolific career that he is not an autobiographical writer, Roth’s willingness to write openly and candidly about himself and his family, without disguises or evasiveness, is startlingly out of character. One of Roth’s central paradoxes is that the more autobiographically transparent his fiction is, the more he denies he is writing about himself. Another paradox is that the more elusive he is in his nonfiction, the more he insists he is writing about himself. This is strikingly evident in his other memoir The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, in which he refers to the death of his mother and the fragile health of his father. Roth’s discussion of his parents and childhood in The Facts prepares us for the more elegiac Patrimony. The two books complement and complicate each other. Published in 1988, three years before the appearance of Patrimony, The Facts opens with Roth’s letter to Nathan Zuckerman, his fictional alter ego who appears in several novels (including The Counterlife), to whom the novelist-turned-autobiographer offers his justification for writing about his real life. “If while writing I couldn’t see exactly what I was up to, I do now: this manuscript embodies my counterlife, the antidote and answer to all those fictions that culminated in the fiction of you. If in one way The Counterlife can be read as fiction about structure, then this is the bare bones, the structure of a life without the fiction” (6). Roth implies that he wrote The Facts partly because of his “exhaustion with masks, disguises, distortions, and lies” (6), and partly because he “needed clarification, as much of it as I could get—demythologizing to induce depathologizing” (7). The need to depathologize was particularly important to him because of a breakdown he suffered in 1987, “at the height of a ten-year period of creativity.” What should have been minor surgery turned into a “prolonged physical ordeal that led to an extreme depression that carried me right to the edge of emotional and mental dissolution ” (5). Another reason he wrote The Facts was “as a palliative for the loss of a mother who still, in my mind, seems to have died inextricably—at = Roth and Patrimony < 77 seventy-seven in 1981—as well as to hearten me as I come closer and closer and closer to an eighty-six-year-old father viewing the end of his life as a thing as near to his face as the mirror he shaves in” (8–9). Roth’s father was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1988, and though it was not malignant, its size made surgery risky. The brain tumor may not have been evident when Roth was completing The Facts, but he nevertheless anticipated his father’s impending death. “After nearly forty years of living far from home, I’m equipped at last to be the most loving of sons— just, however, when he has another agenda. He is trying to die” (The Facts 17). The last sentence is ambiguous, and Roth is anxious to avoid being misunderstood. “Trying to die isn’t like trying to commit suicide—it may actually be harder, because what you are trying to do is what you least want to have happen; you dread it but there it is and it must be done, and by no one but you.” Ironically, Roth, who was fifty-five when he published The Facts, seems more obsessed with dying and death than his father. This obsession is no less apparent in Patrimony, where his father seldom refers to his approaching death. Throughout The Facts and Patrimony Roth depicts his father as a largerthan -life hero of mythological proportions. Noting that his father had only an eighth grade education, Roth tells us in The Facts that he achieved in the insurance business a “remarkable success for a man with his social and educational handicaps” (18). What made this success even more unusual, Roth adds, is that the family shoe store his father opened shortly after getting married went bankrupt, forcing him to take several low-paying jobs without a future. Nor was this Herman Roth’s only business failure. In the middle 1940s, he invested all of his money in a frozen-food distribution company that also failed. He lost not only his own money but also the eight thousand dollars he had borrowed from his relatives. And so just as Roth and his older brother, Sandy, were entering college, their father was still trying to pay off debts incurred from his two bankruptcies. Significantly , there is not a word of reproach from Roth for these business failures. He admires his father’s persistence, indomitable spirit, heroic work ethic, and familial loyalty. Herman Roth’s entrepreneurial failures did not prevent him from working dutifully for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, where he rose through the ranks until he became a district manager. Roth’s pride in his father also appears in Reading Myself and Others, where he elaborates upon his halcyon childhood. “‘The weight of paternal 78 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < power,’ in its traditional oppressive or restraining guises, was something I had hardly to contend with in adolescence. My father had little aside from peccadilloes to quarrel with me about, and if anything weighed upon me, it was not dogmatism, unswervingness, or the like, but his limitless pride in me” (5). Herman Roth’s “stubborn determination and reserves of strength” following his grave financial setbacks transformed him into a “figure of considerable pathos and heroism, [a] cross of a kind between Captain Ahab and Willy Loman” (5). There are hints throughout The Facts of a conflicted father-son relationship , but we are given few specific details—certainly nothing that would suggest a stormy relationship. One of Roth’s few “terrible” fights with his father occurred when he came home during his first midyear vacation from Bucknell. Refusing to explain to his father his “weekend whereabouts after midnight,” Roth spent two days of “histrionic shouting and bitter silence.” He negotiated a “fragile truce” with his father and then returned to college, “freshly evacuated from the Oedipal battlefield” (47)—a psychoanalytic interpretation upon which he refuses to elaborate. The chapter in The Facts called “Now Vee May Perhaps to Begin” alludes to the last sentence in Roth’s most famous novel, when Alex Portnoy ’s hitherto silent psychoanalyst, Dr. Otto Spielvogel, signals the real beginning of his analysand’s therapy. Roth implies in The Facts that Alex’s “comical counteranalysis” (156) in Portnoy’s Complaint bears little relationship to his own psychoanalysis from 1962 to 1969. He has curiously little to say about psychoanalysis or the novel that brought him so much notoriety. Roth’s family drops out of the second half of The Facts, which is devoted to his explosive relationship with a woman who tricks him into marriage by pretending that she is pregnant and then refuses to divorce him. He refers to her as Josephine Jensen, “Josie,” a pseudonym he uses, he admits in the prologue, to avoid exposing the identities of those characters who might not appreciate the violation of their privacy. But there was no need to disguise the name of his wife, Margaret Martinson Williams, whom he married in 1959, when he was twenty-six years old, and who died in 1968 in an automobile accident in Manhattan’s Central Park during a time when Roth’s marital woes were making national headlines. The marriage was a disaster from the beginning. Roth found himself so confused and shaken by this relationship, so demoralized and devastated, so unnerved and unmanned by Josie’s duplicity, histrionics, and “botched” suicide attempts, = Roth and Patrimony < 79 that he began to fall victim to self-hatred, a phenomenon that he says he had never before experienced. Roth entered psychoanalysis to understand the meaning of this self-hatred. He could not fathom how his history as the “gorged beneficiary of overdevotion, overprotection, and oversurveillance within an irreproachably respectable Jewish household” (93) led him to become involved with a woman like Josie. He writes about this experience in his novel My Life as a Man, the most autobiographical of his fiction. Roth has only praise for his parents during this dark period in his early and midtwenties. They sensed, far before their son did, that the marriage was doomed to fail. Roth is particularly grateful to his father, who acted toward Josie with “extreme diplomacy, with a display of gentlemanly finesse that revealed to me, maybe for the first time in my life, the managerial skills for which he was paid by the Metropolitan Life” (The Facts 106). Roth insists that his near-perfect childhood had nothing to do with his attraction to Josie, and that there was, therefore, no connection between his past and present. He thus rejects one of the central tenets of psychoanalysis , that the past shapes our present and future. He mentions only fleetingly his intense psychoanalysis, which was undertaken “to stitch back together the confidence shredded to bits in my marriage” (137). “Where’s the Anger?” Roth’s discussion of autobiographical facts is fascinating but not entirely convincing, as Nathan Zuckerman points out in the final thirty-five pages of the book. In a taunting, adversarial voice, Zuckerman challenges Roth on every major issue in The Facts, including the relationship with his parents. “Don’t publish—you are far better off writing about me than ‘accurately’ reporting your own life,” Zuckerman exclaims (161). He accuses Roth of being “kind, discreet, careful” (162), a criticism few of Roth’s detractors have expressed. Zuckerman accuses Roth of selective memory, of excluding painful truths about his parents, of idealizing the past—in short, of writing out of character. “There’s an awful lot of loving gentleness in those opening chapters of yours, a tone of reconciliation that strikes me as suspiciously unsubstantiated and so unlike what you usually do” (165). Zuckerman cannot believe that the author of the wildly satirical novel Portnoy’s Complaint, filled with the hero’s endless accusations, rage, resentment , shame, and hostility, could have come from a nurturing home. 80 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < Zuckerman’s prosecutorial voice seems far more authorial than Roth’s, particularly when he sarcastically compliments his creator on being such a dutiful son—the opposite of Alex Portnoy. “Where’s the anger?” Zuckerman impatiently demands—and never receives an answer. Pointing out that “Roth” is the least developed character in The Facts, Zuckerman declares, “You are not an autobiographer, you’re a personificator” (162). He raises other questions about the self-disclosures in The Facts. “Your psychoanalysis you present in barely more than a sentence. I wonder why. Don’t you remember, or are the themes too embarrassing? I’m not saying you are Portnoy any more than I’m saying you are me or I am Carnovsky; but come on, what did you and the doctor talk about for seven years?” (169). In what is perhaps his most stinging accusation, Zuckerman maintains that even if 99 percent of The Facts is true, the missing 1 percent changes the meaning of the story. “With autobiography there’s always another text, a countertext , if you will, to the one presented. It’s probably the most manipulative of all literary forms” (172). Zuckerman is a formidable fictional countervoice in The Facts. Through him, Roth expresses many of his driving obsessions without worrying excessively about disclosing autobiographical truth. He is the central character in the “Zuckerman” novels, including those Roth wrote before and after Patrimony. Tellingly, the embattled father-son relationship is a central theme in these stories. Seeking to be the spiritual—or artistic—son of the celebrated novelist E. I. Lonoff, Zuckerman admits in the beginning of The Ghost Writer that “I had a loving father of my own, whom I could ask the world of any day of the week, but my father was a foot doctor and not an artist, and lately we had been having serious trouble in the family because of a new story of mine” (9–10). The trouble began when Zuckerman gave his father the manuscript of a story based on a family feud in which the latter tried unsuccessfully to play the role of peacemaker. “I was naive enough to expect nothing more than the usual encouragement for a story that borrowed from our family history instances of what my exemplary father took to be the most shameful and disreputable transgressions of family decency and trust” (81). In Zuckerman Unbound, Roth’s alter ego has written a Portnoyesque novel, Carnovsky, which is the object of frenzied media attention and ridicule . One Sunday morning Zuckerman “watched three therapists sitting in lounge chairs on Channel 5 analyzing his castration complex with the = Roth and Patrimony < 81 program host. They all agreed that Zuckerman had a lulu” (128). Zuckerman insists vainly that he is a novelist, not an autobiographer, but his father is so upset with his son’s autobiographically transparent stories that he has a stroke and dies. Nathan fears that his father’s last word, “Bastard,” “barely audible, but painstakingly pronounced” (193), refers to himself. Nathan’s older brother accuses him of patricide, the result of his failure to believe that writing about people has real consequences. In the next Zuckerman novel, The Counterlife, Nathan’s brother repeats the accusation, one from which Zuckerman can never entirely free himself , notwithstanding his protests to the contrary. And protest he does repeatedly throughout the story, arguing insistently, “I can only exhibit myself in disguise. All my audacity derives from masks” (275). Zuckerman continues to brood over his father in I Married a Communist, fearing that he fatally wounded him with the publication of the novel and, in the process, gravely wounded himself. Nor is it only in the Zuckerman novels that Roth reflects on a father similar to his own. The fear of a father’s death appears in the 1977 novel The Professor of Desire, where David Kepesh often finds himself lost in reverie about his father. Twice in the story Kepesh imagines his father dead. In Deception, Roth’s next novel after The Facts, an American novelist living in England named “Philip” writes about his elderly father, “Herm,” in a way that seems autobiographical . “My old father still lives at the boil. He’s got an opinion about everything and often it’s not mine. I sometimes have to suppress being a fourteen-year-old with my father. Rather than waiting to die, sitting with my father I sometimes feel as though I’m waiting for life to begin” (81). The father-son relationship lies at the heart of many of Roth’s novels. He spends far more time analyzing this relationship than others equally complex, be they father-daughter, mother-son, or mother-daughter. In The Anatomy Lesson, a character asks Zuckerman why he spends so much time reading psychoanalytic studies about the father: “I look through these books on your shelves, your Freud, your Erikson, your Bettelheim, your Reich, and every single line about a father is underlined” (104–5). One suspects that the reason Zuckerman underlines every sentence about the father is to understand the relationship with his own father, a relationship that is endlessly complicated and problematic. Roth characteristically has it both ways when he ends The Facts with Zuckerman’s skepticism over the author’s truth claims. It is not only 82 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < Zuckerman’s voice that seems more authentic than his creator’s but also his shrewd literary criticism. Zuckerman offers some of the most perceptive observations found anywhere about the nature of Roth’s creativity. “The things that wear you down are also the things that nurture your talent. Yes, there is mystery upon mystery to be uncovered once you abandon the disguises of autobiography and hand The Facts over for imagination to work on. And no, the distortion called fidelity is not your métier—you are simply too real to outface full disclosure. It’s through dissimulation that you find your freedom from the falsifying requisites of ‘candor’” (184). Zuckerman ’s statements faithfully echo Roth’s pronouncements in many of his books, including the interviews appearing in Conversations with Philip Roth. “To label books like mine ‘autobiographical’ or ‘confessional’ is not only to falsify their suppositional nature but, if I may say so, to slight whatever artfulness leads some readers to think that they must be autobiographical ” (122). The novelist compares himself to a ventriloquist who “speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself.” The writer’s art, Roth adds, “consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he ‘is’ once the curtain is down” (167). How factual, then, is The Facts? Do we believe Roth—or his interrogator , Zuckerman? Significantly, Zuckerman does not identify any specific countertexts to The Facts. His accusations remain, finally, unsubstantiated and theoretical, thus allowing Roth the opportunity to maintain a dignified silence. Nevertheless, these accusations linger long after we have finished reading The Facts. Is Roth idealizing his parents? Is he falsifying his childhood and adolescence? Is he omitting shameful incidents of the past? What is the 1 percent of the truth that does not appear in The Facts? Where are the nonfiction countertexts? Roth addresses none of these questions in Patrimony, where his voice is similar to that of the autobiographer in The Facts. There is no “Zuckerman” voice in the memoir about his father, no countervoices or countertexts, no effort to undercut or qualify the truthfulness of the story. “An Enfeebled Old Man” Dedicated to “our family, the living and the dead,” Patrimony opens with an elegantly crafted sentence that highlights Herman Roth’s rapidly = Roth and Patrimony < 83 failing health: “My father had lost much of the sight in his right eye by the time he reached eighty-six, but otherwise he seemed in phenomenal health for a man his age when he came down with what the Florida doctor diagnosed, incorrectly, as Bell’s palsy, a viral infection that causes paralysis, usually temporary, to one side of the face” (9). Roth has always been adept in diagnosing his fictional characters’ physical and psychological disorders, and he writes here with characteristic clinical precision about his father’s deteriorating health. The next sentence is also noteworthy : Roth tells us that his father had become “romantically involved” with a seventy-year-old retired bookkeeper, Lillian Beloff, a year after the novelist’s mother died in 1981. Many people in Roth’s situation would have felt ambivalent about an elderly parent beginning a relationship so quickly after the other parent’s death, but Roth never intimates this. Within two pages Roth returns to present tense—1987—and describes how his father has turned into an “enfeebled old man” (12). His speech begins to slur, his vision fails, his appetite disappears. An MRI indicates the grim news: his father has a “massive tumor.” Roth is understandably horrified because the disease strikes at the center of his father’s identity. Viewing the MRI images, Roth begins to cry—“not because I could readily identify the tumor invading the brain but simply because it was his brain, my father’s brain, which prompted him to think the blunt way he thought, speak the emphatic way he spoke, reason the emotional way he reasoned, decide the impulsive way he decided. This was the tissue that had manufactured his set of endless worries and sustained for more than eight decades his stubborn self-discipline, the source of everything that had so frustrated me as his adolescent son, the thing that had ruled our fate back when he was all-powerful” (16). In an eerie example of life imitating art, Alex Portnoy often worries about his father’s persistent headaches, fearing they are symptomatic of brain cancer. “My father has been ‘going’ for this tumor test for nearly as long as I can remember” (25), Alex confides to his silent psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel, and he imagines his father’s skull “splitting open from a malignancy” (26). No less than David Kepesh in The Professor of Desire or Nathan Zuckerman in several novels, Alex is preoccupied with his father’s death. “I never get a telegram, never get a phone call after midnight , that I do not feel my own stomach empty out like a washbasin, and say aloud—aloud!—‘He’s dead.’ Because apparently I believe it too, 84 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < believe that I can somehow save him from annihilation—can, and must!” (118). In The Anatomy Lesson Zuckerman’s mother dies of brain cancer, though Roth gives us no concrete details of her dying or death. Most sons in Roth’s fictional world suffer from “anticipatory grief.” The term was coined by Erich Lindemann in his classic 1944 article “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief” and later developed by Therese A. Rando in several books. According to Rando, ambivalence is one of the key features of this phenomenon. “Ambivalence is viewed as having a special impact on anticipatory grief because the target of ambivalent feelings, that is, the dying patient, is not only still alive but is potentially vulnerable, balanced between life and death. This vulnerability makes any hostility or death wish appear particularly potent and dangerous and may contribute to the clinical impression that anticipatory grief appears to be more readily denied than conventional grief” (9). Robert Fulton has called into question the validity of this clinical concept, suggesting that “there is no certainty as to whether ‘anticipatory grief’ is functional or dysfunctional for the individual or the family . There is also uncertainty as to its implications for caregivers” (349). Nevertheless, it is striking to see how Roth’s fictional sons are filled with anticipatory grief over the thought of the death of their aging fathers. Roth’s fictional sons, regardless of whether they are adolescent or middle -aged, brood endlessly over their fathers’ health and approval. Nor is this a generalized fear of all parental loss: it is only Roth’s fictional sons, not his fictional daughters, who worry about their fathers’—not their mothers’—deaths and approval. The more the sons are estranged from their fathers, the more they worry over their fathers’ deaths. Alex cannot prevent himself from analyzing the meaning of his endless fear over his father’s health, and he is honest enough to admit the darker implications of his worry. As he leaves for Europe with his girlfriend, the “Monkey,” for an orgiastic vacation, he hears his father ask where he can be reached for the next month, and when Alex refuses to give him the address, the father exclaims, “What if I die?” Alex finds these words so unsettling that he later wonders aloud to his analyst whether he has only imagined them. With each new story, Roth has become more preoccupied with death. While driving to see his father at the beginning of Patrimony, he makes an “accidental” turn on the New Jersey Turnpike and finds himself at the cemetery where his mother is buried, a place he has visited only twice. = Roth and Patrimony < 85 He decides to leave his car and visit her grave. Significantly, he doesn’t feel closer to her, as many people do when they visit their deceased loved ones. Nor does he find much value in meditating on the dead. Later he observes that the inadvertent visit to the cemetery had not brought him comfort or consolation. Nevertheless, the visit was “narratively right: paradoxically, it had the feel of an event not entirely random and unpredictable and, in that way at least, offered a strange relief from the impact of all that was frighteningly unseen” (74). Roth’s rejection of religion has remained one of the constants throughout his life, and nothing that happens in Patrimony causes him to waver from this disbelief. There are moments in Patrimony when Roth refers to God, but these moments are always ironic, as when he tells us, while he is looking at the pictures of his father’s brain, that the mystery of human creation emanates from a tiny organ. “God’s will erupted out of a burning bush and, no less miraculously, Herman Roth’s had issued forth all these years from this bulbous organ. I had seen my father’s brain, and everything and nothing was revealed” (17). Roth is always aware of what Kübler-Ross calls “life’s big questions,” but unlike her, he believes they will always remain unfathomable. Presumably, Herman Roth shares his son’s religious disbelief, though at one point he wryly observes to his doctor, “I’ve got a lot of people waiting for me on the other side” (Patrimony 164). Roth is surprised when his father agrees without hesitation to sign a living will, but they never engage in religious, spiritual, or existential discussions of dying or death. Nor do we see Herman Roth’s actual dying or death. Roth succeeds in encouraging his father to reminisce over the highlights of his life, but Herman Roth never offers any final statements about life or expresses farewell to his children or grandchildren. Why these omissions in Patrimony? Roth may not have felt it was necessary to talk about religion, given his unyielding views on the subject. Because he never informs his father that he is dying, the writer may have felt that a discussion of death would be too painful, both for him and his father. Nor do we learn whether anyone else in the family, such as Roth’s brother, Sandy, or Lillian Beloff, discussed these issues with Herman Roth. If none of these discussions took place, one can infer that it was partly because of the fierce cultural taboo surrounding dying and death, a taboo that can be seen, paradoxically, in a memoir devoted precisely to 86 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < dying and death. Few novelists and memoirists have written more about death than Roth, but there is surprisingly little discussion in his stories between the living and the dying. The cultural taboo over death may also explain Herman Roth’s decision to dispose of his wife’s possessions immediately following her death. Even Roth is shocked when he discovers that his father has thrown out some of his son’s college possessions, including the Phi Beta Kappa key that the writer had given to his mother years earlier. He interprets his father’s behavior as “simply doing what he had done all his life: the next difficult job” (Patrimony 31). Herman Roth’s “primitivism” stuns his son. “Standing all alone emptying her drawers and her closets, he seemed driven by some instinct that might be natural to a wild beast or an aboriginal tribesman but ran counter to just about every mourning rite that had evolved in civilized societies to mitigate the sense of loss among those who survive the death of a loved one” (32). And yet Roth adds that there was “something almost admirable in this pitilessly realistic determination to acknowledge, instantaneously, that he was now an old man living alone” (32–33). Roth offers a loving and memorable portrait of his father while at the same time revealing that he was a difficult, at times impossible person. The comparison in Reading Myself and Others of Herman Roth with Ahab and Willy Loman is puzzling: unlike Melville’s Ahab, Roth’s father is never monomaniacal, and unlike Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, he is never broken-spirited or suicidal. And yet Herman Roth is an overworked insurance salesman whose entire life has been spent pursuing the American dream for his family. Linda Loman’s statement about her husband also applies to Roth’s father: “He’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person” (A. Miller 56). Roth pays attention to the many formidable aspects of his father’s personality, including his “reigning biases” that have grown worse in old age. Roth implies that because his father had little to do in retirement, he found himself dependent on his wife: “‘You know what I am now?’ he told me sadly on his sixty-fifth birthday. ‘I’m Bessie’s husband’” (Patrimony 37). Uninterested in developing new hobbies or doing volunteer work, Herman Roth “settled down to become Bessie’s boss—only my mother happened not to need a boss, having been her own since her = Roth and Patrimony < 87 single-handed establishment of a first-class domestic-management and mothering company back in 1927, when my brother was born” (37). Bess Roth’s determination to divorce her husband shocks her son. A year later she died of a massive coronary while at a restaurant with her husband. Roth later learns that on the evening of her death, his father “had fled from her corpse” at the hospital, where she was declared dead (33). Roth speculates that his father may have felt guilty over her death because he had pushed her to walk beyond her endurance on the day she died. Herman Roth appears dazed and depressed after the death of his wife, and his son describes his effort to encourage his father to take care of himself and remain connected to the world. Alone in his apartment, the father is bereft and helpless; outside, he resumes his former talkative, gregarious self. Roth appears tender and solicitous both as a son and as a caregiver. Always masterful in his use of dialogue, he captures his father’s mannerisms and characteristic perceptions of the world. Roth’s questions , especially during the middle sections of Patrimony, encourage his father to speak joyfully about the past; both father and son are engaging storytellers. Roth’s affection for his father is one of the most affecting aspects of Patrimony. Gazing upon his father’s aged body, Roth concedes that only his eyes remained “beautiful.” That Herman Roth’s eyes could remain beautiful throughout the obstacle course of life is no less noteworthy than the memoirist’s awareness of the crushing nature of life, which takes its relentless toll on everyone. “Will I be a zombie?” Herman Roth asks his son about the result of brain surgery (68). Roth responds evasively to this daunting question, assuring his father that the tumor is not likely to be cancer while at the same time withholding information about its massive size. Roth speaks to several physicians about his father’s illness, and he tries to reassure his father that the situation is not hopeless. He takes his father from physician to physician, checks on the credentials of the surgeons, explains to his father the nature of the surgery, and helps to manage his father’s fears—and his own. Indeed, his own fears are overwhelming, and he finds himself often weeping, depressed, and unable to write. Throughout Patrimony Roth comes across as deferential to his father without endorsing the latter’s harsh judgments of other people. Herman Roth is relentlessly hypercritical of his female companion, who, along 88 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < with one of her stepsons, moved into his apartment a year after Bess Roth’s death. He attacks Lil’s docility and excessive weight, a criticism that Roth attempts to soften by observing that “eating was her only revenge, and like the tumor, it was something he could not stop no matter how he railed against it” (79). Roth succeeds in remaining sympathetic here to both his father and his companion. “He could never understand ,” Roth writes empathically, “that a capacity for renunciation and iron self-discipline like his own was extraordinary and not an endowment shared by all” (79). The capacity for renunciation and iron self-discipline characterizes the son as well. So, too, does Roth share his father’s penchant for “hocking,” a Yiddishism that he defines colorfully as “to badger, to bludgeon, to hammer with warnings and edicts and pleas—in short, to drill a hole in somebody’s head with words” (80). It is the same quality that one sees in Alex’s unceasing torrent of accusations against his parents in Portnoy’s Complaint. “All Sons Leave Their Fathers” Why did Roth write a memoir about his father’s death but not his mother ’s? The obvious answer is that Roth was a caregiver for his father, who died slowly, unlike his mother, who died suddenly, when Roth was living in England. Apart from this, the father-son relationship has always been more fraught than the mother-son relationship in Roth’s fictional world. Sons separate themselves from their fathers at an early age in Roth’s stories and cannot imagine returning home. In Roth’s first novel, Letting Go, Gabe Wallach’s dentist father watches helplessly as his wife dies from leukemia, and he then reflects sadly and angrily on his son’s failure to console or care for him. “What kind of son was it, anyway, who left his aging father!”—a statement that is exclamatory rather than interrogatory. Dr. Wallach then follows it up with a statement that is a universal truth in Roth’s world: “All sons. All sons leave their fathers. Of course. He considered himself a student of psychology and he was not naive about certain facts of life.” Dr. Wallach knows what Philip Roth knows: “he had known in his heart that a boy does not become a man living in his father’s house.” In Roth’s stories, “children grow up and go away. This was one of life’s laws to which he and his son could not expect to be made exceptions” (487). It is also one of life’s laws in Patrimony. Roth left his parents’ home at = Roth and Patrimony < 89 an early age, never to return, and they inhabit different worlds—different culturally, intellectually, and artistically. Throughout the story Roth appears as a loving son and a responsible caregiver, but it is evident that he feels out of place when he visits his father in a South Florida retirement community immediately following his mother’s death. Roth devotes several pages to a musical program he attends with his father at the “Galahad Hall Social Club” (53). Following the chairwoman’s announcements of the “Matzoh Fund Drive,” Roth describes sympathetically what he would have satirized mercilessly in Goodbye, Columbus. A stranger to this culture , Roth inserts himself easily and amiably into his father’s world, one that is so different from his own. It is surely remarkable that Roth can be nonjudgmental about his father’s friends and acquaintances. He acts with exemplary caution and solicitude when he asks his father whether he has had another fight with Lil, and when his father recites a litany of complaints , Roth says, tactfully, “It’s not my business to butt in . . . but is this really a good time to start an argument?” (Patrimony 82). His words help to defuse his father’s anger, and a few moments later he describes how the three of them walk, arm-in-arm, to the drugstore, the crisis resolved. The image of the father, his new romantic relationship, and the son walking together hints at an Oedipal situation, with Lil replacing the son’s deceased mother. Roth heightens the significance of this event by telling us that “it was the same walk on which my mother had overextended herself on the day she died” (83), but he never expresses any reservations about his father’s new companion. Later in the story, an old friend named Joanna Clark remarks on Roth’s changed relationship with his father: “You’ve forgiven him. You’ve forgiven him that relentlessness and that tactfulness, that wanting to make everybody over in the same mold. All children pay a price, and the forgiveness entails forgiveness also for the price you paid. You talk about him in a very reconciled way” (Patrimony 127). Roth immediately agrees and then makes a revealing comment: “Since my mother died, I’ve got awfully close to him. It would have been easier the other way” (127). Did Roth become closer to his father, more forgiving, because of his father’s increased vulnerability without his wife of fifty-five years? Or did Roth’s relationship with his mother somehow prevent him from becoming closer to his father while she was still alive. And yet if the latter possibility is true, how do we explain the fact that 90 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < all of Roth’s comments about his mother in Patrimony are uniformly positive ? For years Herman Roth had believed he was “married to perfection, and for years he wasn’t far wrong—my mother was one of those devoted daughters of Jewish immigrants who raised housekeeping in America to a great art” (36–37). Adroit in the “skills of nurturing domesticity,” Bess Roth was a wife and mother of “wizardly proficiency” (38). The more Herman Roth devalues Lil (“she can’t even buy a cantaloupe”), the more he idealizes his deceased wife: “Mother did everything right” (193). Why would he idealize his deceased wife if she wanted to divorce him shortly before her death? No hint of a dark or difficult side to Bess Roth appears in Patrimony, where she embodies the virtues of “modesty, humility, loyalty , bravery, efficiency, dependability” (63). Janice Winchester Nadeau calls this form of idealization “sanctification of the deceased,” which occurs “when the person who has died is described by the bereaved as saintlike or other-worldly” (145). Bess Roth’s saintly virtues must have been tested throughout her long marriage to a man who seemed so overbearing . Why, then, would Roth remain distant from his father while his mother was still alive, unless his idealization of her betokens unconscious ambivalence? Totem and Taboo Patrimony suggests that Roth had an easy, unconflicted relationship with his mother, one that could not be more different from Alex Portnoy’s tempestuous relationship with his mother. The theme of Oedipal desire, so striking in Portnoy’s Complaint, hardly appears in Patrimony. And yet there is a moment when Roth raises the specter of incestuous love. In one of the most curious scenes in Patrimony, Roth hails a cab in Manhattan to take him to the hospital where his father is having a biopsy of the tumor. Roth is speaking to the wife of an old friend as the cab approaches, and a few minutes later the cabdriver asks him whether he has “fucked” her. Looking into the rearview mirror, Roth sees a pair of eyes “whose truculent glare was even more startling than the question.” “As a matter of fact, no,” the anxious passenger replies. “One of my friends does. She’s his wife.” When the cabdriver responds cynically, “What difference does that make? He’d fuck your wife,” Roth rejoins, “No, this particular friend wouldn’t, though I understand it happens.” Roth then confides to the = Roth and Patrimony < 91 reader, “I understood because I’d done it myself on a few occasions, but, unlike the driver, I wasn’t putting all my cards on the table right off” (154). The cabdriver’s menacing aura is matched by his menacing actions; he confesses proudly that he had knocked his father’s four front teeth out: “My old man’s in his grave now without his four front teeth. I knocked ’em out of his fucking mouth for him” (156). As the conversation continues , Roth studies this man with a “professional interest,” fascinated by his transparent misogyny, paranoia, and patricidal fury, and when the driver asks him whether he’s a “doctor,” Roth pretends he’s a psychiatrist in order to defuse the cabdriver’s homicidal rage. Noting wryly the “positive transference” in their relationship, Roth offers an interpretation of the cabdriver that combines classic psychoanalytic theory and his own version of cultural studies: He is of the primal horde of sons who, as Freud liked to surmise, have it in them to nullify the father by force—who hate and fear him and, after overcoming him, honor him by devouring him. And I’m from the horde that can’t throw a punch. We aren’t like that and we can’t do it, to our fathers or to anyone else. We’re the sons appalled by violence, with no capacity for inflicting physical pain, useless at beating and clubbing, unfit to pulverize even the most deserving enemy, though not necessarily without turbulence, temper, even ferocity. We have teeth as the cannibals do, but they are there, imbedded in our jaws, the better to help us articulate. When we lay waste, when we efface, it isn’t with raging fists or ruthless schemes or insane sprawling violence but with our words, our brains, with mentality, with all the stuff that produced the poignant abyss between our fathers and us and that they themselves broke their backs to give us. (Patrimony 159) In this extraordinary passage Roth invokes Totem and Taboo, Freud’s farranging contribution to social anthropology in which he analyzes the “horror of incest” and speculates that civilization arises from the suppression of aggressive and sexual instinct. Subtitled Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, Totem and Taboo offers Freud’s most compelling definition of ambivalence, a word he borrowed from the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. “It appears wherever, in addition to a predominant feeling of affection, there is also a contrary, but 92 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < unconscious, current of hostility—a state of affairs which represents a typical instance of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The hostility is then shouted down, as it were, by an excessive intensification of the affection, which is expressed as solicitude and becomes compulsive, because it might otherwise be inadequate to perform its task of keeping the unconscious contrary current of feeling under repression” (49). Freud then suggests that this “solicitous over-affection” is found in the “most unlikely circumstances ,” especially in “attachments between a mother and a child or between a devoted married couple” (49). Many of the ideas in Totem and Taboo resonate in Roth’s world, beginning with Freud’s 1934 preface to the Hebrew edition, with which Roth would surely identify: “No reader of this book will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers—as well as from every other religion—and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature” (xv). No contemporary writer is more alert to the nuances of ambivalence than Roth or more attuned to the ways in which fear and desire, hate and love are locked into irresolvable conflict in relationships , be they familial, marital, or extramarital. And no writer is more inclined to agree with the following passage from Totem and Taboo than Roth, a passage that reflects the age-old battles between fathers and sons: “Psycho-analysis has revealed that the totem animal is in reality a substitute for the father; and this tallies with the contradictory fact that, though the killing of the animal is as a rule forbidden, yet its killing is a festive occasion—with the fact that it is killed and yet mourned. The ambivalent emotional attitude, which to this day characterizes the fathercomplex in our children and which often persists into adult life, seems to extend to the totem animal in its capacity as substitute for the father” (141). Why does Roth include the scene with the “parricidal driver” in Patrimony (161)? Why the allusion to Totem and Taboo? Several explanations come to mind, beginning with Roth’s efforts both to confirm and disconfirm Freud’s theory of the primal father. Herman Roth may not seem, on the surface, emblematic of the violent and jealous father who awakens so much ambivalence in his sons, the primal horde, and who = Roth and Patrimony < 93 must, therefore, be slain for the sons to incorporate his totemic power. Nevertheless, Roth describes his father as “all-powerful” (Patrimony 16), a man “on whom the claims of family were so emotionally tyrannical” (91), who was “obdurate, resolute” (104), and whose strength continues to “amaze” his son (123), Herman Roth embodies for his son the qualities of “survivorship, survivorhood, survivalism” (125), and while Roth uses “totemic” (108) to describe his father’s friends, clearly the word describes his own father as well. “He wasn’t just any father,” Roth writes, “he was the father, with everything there is to hate in a father and everything there is to love” (180). Throughout Patrimony we see Roth’s abiding love for his father, along with devotion and admiration. Metropolitan Life should have “beatified Herman Roth, as the Church beatifies martyrs who suffer for its causes” (180). Roth recognizes that his love for his father borders on idealization , and he anticipates his readers’ skepticism here. “You can say that it doesn’t mean much for a son to be tenderly protective of a father once the father is powerless and nearly destroyed” (180). He concedes that when he was growing up, he was in conflict with his father—conflict that caused the son to smack his forehead and howl in despair. Repudiating his father’s authority became an “oppressive conflict, as laden with grief as it was with scorn” (180). We can see the son’s love for his father in Patrimony and, at worst, normal ambivalence, but we do not see hatred—except in the portrait of the patricidal cabdriver, who represents murderous Oedipal rage. This helps to explain Roth’s inclusion of this scene in the memoir. The psychological defense mechanism of “splitting” comes into play here. The cabdriver is the bad son, part of the murderous horde who annihilates the father, while Roth is the good son, one of those who, appalled by insane violence, settles scores through his words and brain. In Freud’s vision of the primal horde, the sons castrate the father and steal his magical potency; in Roth’s vision in Patrimony, the good son looks at his father’s penis without any feeling of ambivalence or Oedipal rivalry. “‘Good for him,’ I thought. ‘If it gave some pleasure to him and my mother, all the better’” (177). Roth never minimizes the “poignant abyss” that separates him from his father, an abyss created, in large part, by language. Nowhere is the abyss more striking than in a letter Herman Roth wrote to his older son. 94 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < Roth contextualizes the letter by telling us that his brother had cautioned their father, “for the sake of domestic peace,” to be less critical of Lil and of Sandy’s son Jonathan, who was just beginning his career. The letter is filled with misspellings of simple words—“liveing room,” “smokeing,” “safed” (instead of “saved”), and “diceplin” (which he also spells “disaplin ”). The misspellings demonstrate, perhaps too starkly, the father’s eighth grade education. The letter also reveals Herman Roth’s tendency to see the world in terms of black and white, as can be seen in the first paragraph: “I think there are two type’s of (among people) Philosophies. People who care, and those that don’t, People who do and people who Procrastinate and never do or help” (Patrimony 80). The father views himself as a person who both cares and does, and who went out of his way to pay for the surgeries of his wife and his younger son. He knows he is hocking—indeed, he signs the letter “The Hocker”—but he can’t help himself, especially when he gives unsolicited advice to his grandson to save money: “A Penny saved is a penny earned.” Apologizing for sounding overbearing, he admits that he has “many battles with my concience, but I fight my wronge thoughts. I care, for people in my way” (81). There’s nothing particularly shocking about Herman Roth’s spoken words in Patrimony, but it is shocking to see how primitive his written language is. It’s also startling to see how he can be so domineering in the name of “caring.” The letter enables us to understand how difficult it must have been for everyone in the Roth family to live with him. From this point of view, Roth’s decision to include the letter in Patrimony is narratively right—the father’s words reveal a great deal about his personality . Roth could have told us what his father was like, but instead he shows us. He could have summarized his father’s letter, but instead he quotes it word for word. As narratively right as the letter is, however, it raises a privacy issue: almost certainly the father never authorized the appearance of this letter in a story about his dying and death. This is the first but not the last problematic privacy issue raised in Patrimony. A Broken Promise The far more troubling privacy issue occurs later in Patrimony when Herman Roth, constipated for four days as a result of his worsening health, explosively evacuates his bowels when stepping out of a shower = Roth and Patrimony < 95 in his son’s Connecticut house. Roth foreshadows this scene by telling us that a day before the incident, while passing the bathroom, he could see his father was “sitting on the toilet holding his head in his hands” (167)—one of the most poignant moments in the story. The accident occurs the next day. Almost bursting into tears, the father confesses, in a “voice as forlorn as any I had ever heard, from him or anyone, . . . I beshat myself” (172). Roth immediately cleans up his father and then the bathroom. Repeating that he “beshat” himself—an archaic word for anyone to use, especially someone with a limited vocabulary—the father, filled with shame, then makes the following request: “Don’t tell the children,” he said, looking up at me from the bed with his one sighted eye. “I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “I’ll say you’re taking a rest.” “Don’t tell Claire.” “Nobody,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. It could have happened to anyone. Just forget about it and get a good rest.” (173) This remains the single most powerful and disturbing scene in Patrimony, one that raises many troubling questions. Roth not only breaks this promise but also refuses to explain or defend his actions. Nor does he express guilt, remorse, or regret over the broken promise. Surely he knows that many readers will be angered, perhaps appalled, by the decision to violate his father’s privacy. Roth is honest enough to include this dialogue in the story—no one would have known about the broken promise had he not called attention to it—and yet he refuses to defend himself. How do we interpret his silence here? As an admission of guilt? As an expression of defiance of conventional morality? As an acknowledgment that this is what writers do—betray the people to whom they have promised confidentiality ? In an interview published in Conversations with Philip Roth, the writer responded evasively to the question of how his father would have reacted to the broken promise. “‘I think about [that question] too,’ he says. ‘One doesn’t want to be sentimental answering it. Well, I don’t know what things he might not have liked so much. I don’t know, he might not have liked some things. Who could?’ he asks. ‘Who could? But he’s dead. So we needn’t speculate’” (272). Writing about a parent’s or spouse’s incontinence must be one of the most wrenching decisions for a memoirist, and it is instructive to contrast 96 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < Roth with other writers. John Bayley penned three memoirs about his wife, Iris Murdoch, who developed Alzheimer’s disease. In the middle volume, Iris and Her Friends, Bayley writes lovingly—and comically—about his wife’s increasingly unpredictable toilet habits. “Sometimes she will go to the right place, even though she makes a mess of it. More often, she will do it on the carpet outside, or in another room. Then she lays the results, as if with care, on a neighbouring chair or bookshelf. I don’t mind a bit cleaning up, an operation which seems mildly to amuse her. I can make a joke of it, too, and we can laugh about it together. A small domestic challenge I can easily meet, and Iris seems to enjoy seeing me do it” (185–86). Bayley’s comic vision of death and dying, his cheerful acceptance of being his wife’s caregiver, is world’s apart from Roth’s tragic vision. For Bayley, there is no shame about being in his wife’s situation, and, therefore, no guilt in writing about it. In the ironically entitled A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir writes about her shock when her mother, dying of cancer, decides not to “bother about” a bedpan. “And Maman, who had lived a life bristling with proud sensitivities, felt no shame. In this prim and spiritualistic woman it was also a form of courage to take on our animality with so much decision” (64). All three memoirists write about a loved one’s incontinence, but only Roth has broken a promise to remain silent. After commenting on the soiled bathroom, Roth compares the daunting task of cleaning the bathroom to the process of writing a book: “I have no idea where to begin” (Patrimony 173). It’s an odd simile, since unlike writing a novel or memoir, cleaning a bathroom involves no betrayal of trust or confidentiality. A couple of pages later, Roth reflects on the meaning of his father’s humiliating experience. “You clean up your father’s shit because it has to be cleaned up, but in the aftermath of cleaning it up, everything that’s there to feel is felt as it never was before” (175). This leads to the central epiphany of the memoir: cleaning up his father’s shit turns out to be the son’s patrimony. “And not because cleaning it up was symbolic of something else but because it wasn’t, because it was nothing less or more than the lived reality that it was.” The son’s patrimony, in other words, is not the father’s money or material possessions but “the shit” (176). Only by breaking his father’s promise, then, can Roth obey what he believes is a higher ethical imperative, verbally bringing back to life the man who has bequeathed him this legacy. Roth’s devotion to art trumps his allegiance to life—or, perhaps we should say, as he might, that only = Roth and Patrimony < 97 a total commitment to art can do justice to capturing the complexity of life. Central to the novelist and memoirist is the injunction to remember everything, good and bad. It is the vow on which he ends Patrimony: “You must not forget anything” (238). Roth’s belief that art depends upon betrayal may also be seen in Art Spiegelman’s two stories about his parents’ experiences during the Holocaust , Maus and Maus II. “Artie,” the narrator who is a writer/cartoonist, promises his father, Vladek, not to write about his affair with a woman whom he later casts off to marry another person. “I don’t want you should write this story in your book,” Vladek tells his son, because “it has nothing to do with Hitler, with the Holocaust.” Artie protests, declaring that “it’s great material, it makes everything seem more real, more human,” adding, “I want to tell your story the way it really happened” (Maus 23). The father responds, “But this isn’t so proper, so respectful. I can tell you other stories, but such private things, I don’t want you should mention.” Artie reluctantly agrees to the promise—and then breaks it. In Maus II, Artie has become an unlikely celebrity over the spectacular success of the first Maus volume and confesses his guilt to a therapist, Pavel, who, playing devil’s advocate, wonders whether it’s better not to write any more stories about the Holocaust. Artie appears to agree, citing Samuel Beckett’s observation that “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” But then Artie immediately qualifies himself: “On the other hand, he said it.” Pavel agrees: “He was right. Maybe you can include it in your book” (Maus II 45). Patrimony and the two Maus stories both suggest that writers must sometimes disclose dark secrets that they have sworn not to reveal because they are essential to understanding shameful experiences. Only by casting light on shame, Roth and Spiegelman imply, can it be detoxified. These shameful events are a central part of the fathers’ burdensome legacies to their sons. Writing becomes a countershame technique—for the writers, not for their fathers. Significantly, the sons’ betrayals occur only after their fathers have died. Both fathers are tough, blunt, and obdurate , formidable figures whose gifts for survival are bequeathed to their sons. Both Roth and Spiegelman reveal “mixed motives” in writing about their fathers, as Andrew Gordon has pointed out: “On the one hand, to memorialize the father and to record family history; on the other hand, to expose the father and to triumph over him through art.” Several literary critics have commented on the problematic nature of the 98 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < bathroom scene in Patrimony. “Although in many ways Patrimony is the attempt to rewrite the father in a more powerful light,” Hana Wirth-Nesher suggests, Roth’s inclusion of the bathroom scene is also an “exercise of power over the father who had always wielded authority over him” (166). Nancy K. Miller argues that the bathroom scene is central to the memoir. “To shut the door on the bathroom would mean not only not writing the book but forgetting that writing in some way always begins just there, in the spectacular but nonetheless ordinary mess of human life. So a writer has to remember the bathroom and return there in memory because that is where the material is” (25). Patrimony “gets written in the space between two contradictory injunctions,” Miller contends: “not to forget and not to tell” (28). One does not need to conclude, as Miller does, that the “betrayal of secrets is a requirement of the autobiographical act” (124) to agree with her that this betrayal is strikingly evident in Patrimony. Similar betrayals may be seen in many of Roth’s novels, where he writes about his family, friends, and acquaintances, often without changing their names. Claire Bloom, who was married to Roth, reports in her memoir Leaving a Doll’s House her anger and dismay when she read the manuscript of Deception, in which Roth writes openly about being married to a woman named “Claire” while having an affair with another woman. “What left me speechless—though not for long,” writes Bloom, “was that he would paint a picture of me as a jealous wife who is betrayed over and over again. I found the portrait nasty and insulting, and his use of my name completely unacceptable” (183). While writing Leaving a Doll’s House, Bloom struggled with the question of how much about her relationship with Roth she was willing to disclose. A passage from her memoir captures the ethical dilemma of transmuting a real person into art: “It is both shameful and courageous to take a record from life and use it as a means to an end. The painter Claude Monet, to his own shame, looking at his adored young wife on her deathbed, could not help recording the changing color of her skin and the dissolution of her once-beautiful face. But he went on to use this image in his work” (131–32). Roth surely struggled with this dilemma in Patrimony, and he had no trouble remembering—and recording—the many adversities his father encountered in his work. The need to remember compelled Roth to write a letter to the NewYorkTimes Book Review in which he expressed indignation = Roth and Patrimony < 99 over the widespread anti-Semitism in the insurance industry. The letter, which appears in the opening chapter of The Facts, provoked a response from John Creedon, the president and CEO of Metropolitan Life, who pointed out that Herman Roth had never complained about anti-Semitism while working for the company. Roth recounts how he then spent several afternoons working in the archives of the American Jewish Committee to document this history of discrimination, and he quotes part of the letter he subsequently wrote to Creedon. Herman Roth agrees with his son’s conclusions but nevertheless asks him not to write any more letters. “‘Do me a favor, will you? After this,’ he said, holding up my letter, ‘that’s enough.’” The response surprises his son, who adds, “Well, this was new—my father expressing chagrin over something I had written. In my Zuckerman novels, I had given Nathan Zuckerman a father who could not stand his writer son’s depiction of Jewish characters, whereas fate had given me a fiercely loyal and devoted father who had never found a thing in my books to criticize ” (Patrimony 187–88). This claim is repeated in an early interview published in Conversations with Philip Roth, in which Roth states that when some of the sections of Portnoy’s Complaint appeared in a literary magazine , Herman Roth “gave out copies to friends, while Mrs. Roth, jokingly, declared that when the book appears, she will leave the country” (19–20). Roth has long insisted that his parents were never critical of his novels, and that they loyally defended him against the charge of Jewish antiSemitism that surrounded the furor over the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint. Nevertheless, Roth has forgotten something important that he wrote about his parents decades earlier. Recall Zuckerman’s criticisms of “Roth’s” selective memory of his parents in The Facts, the omission of painful and shameful feelings, the tone of reconciliation and “loving kindness” that is even more pronounced in Patrimony. There is indeed a countertext that changes our understanding of both The Facts and Patrimony , a countertext that reveals the ways in which Roth’s presentation of his father is out of character. “The Angry Act” Zuckerman’s question, “Where’s the anger?” leads us, ironically, to Hans J. Kleinschmidt’s psychiatric case study “The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity.” In Roth’s world, “nothing is never ironic,” as Alex 100 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < Portnoy observes. As it turns out, “The Angry Act” is the major countertext for both The Facts and Patrimony. As I discuss in The Talking Cure, Roth was writing Portnoy’s Complaint when he was in analysis with Dr. Kleinschmidt in the mid-1960s. Roth revealed to him an embarrassing experience involving his parents when he was eleven years old. His mother and father take him to his uncle’s clothing store to buy a bathing suit, and he feels intense shame when they fail to realize the kind of suit he wants. The following passage is from Portnoy’s Complaint. “‘I don’t want that kind of suit any more,’ and oh, I can smell humiliation in the wind, hear it rumbling in the distance—any minute now it is going to crash upon my prepubescent head. ‘Why not?’ my father asks. ‘Didn’t you hear your uncle, this is the best—’ ‘I want one with a jockstrap in it!’ Yes, sir, this just breaks my mother up. ‘For your little thing?’ she asks, with an amused smile. Yes mother, imagine: for my little thing” (51). Kleinschmidt relates the same incident in his psychiatric case study. “He was eleven years old when he went with his mother to a store to buy a bathing suit. While trying on several of them, he voiced his desire for bathing trunks with a jock strap. To his great embarrassment his mother said in the presence of the saleslady: ‘You don’t need one. You have such a little one that it makes no difference.’ He felt ashamed, angry, betrayed and utterly helpless” (124). Roth and Kleinschmidt did not realize that the other was writing about the same incident, the former in a novel, the latter in a journal devoted to the relationship between psychoanalysis and art. Roth was furious when he discovered that his analyst had written about him without permission, rightly fearing that anyone who read his novel and Kleinschmidt’s article would realize that he was the analyst’s patient. Roth writes about this experience in My Life as a Man, where his autobiographical projection, the novelist Peter Tarnopol, recounts the bitter argument with his analyst, Otto Spielvogel, whose breach of confidentiality and reductive psychoanalytic interpretation infuriate Tarnopol—and Roth. Tarnopol is particularly incensed by Spielvogel’s refusal to accept responsibility for the violation of confidentiality. Spielvogel tries to defend himself by dismissing Tarnopol’s reaction as a result of “narcissistic” defenses, further enraging his analysand. It’s possible though unlikely that one could discover the link between Portnoy’s Complaint and “The Angry Act” simply by accident. I made the connection only after reading My Life as a Man, where Roth leaves all the clues necessary to find the psychoanalytic article. I debated with myself = Roth and Patrimony < 101 whether to publish my discovery—I did not want to participate in another violation of the novelist’s privacy, as the psychoanalyst had done. I finally justified the decision to include the chapter on Roth in The Talking Cure because it was Roth’s words in My Life as a Man, not Kleinschmidt’s words in “The Angry Act,” that led to my discovery. If Roth did not want anyone to invade his privacy again, he would not have revealed to us that Tarnopol ’s analyst published his case study in a special issue of a psychoanalytic journal in the mid-1960s exploring “the riddle of creativity.” Forty years ago there were fewer psychoanalytic journals than there are today, and when I began to search for the existence of the real article, I found it. Before submitting The Talking Cure for publication, I sent my chapter on Roth to Kleinschmidt, to see if he wanted to comment on the chapter. The analyst at first angrily denied I had proven anything and insisted that he would file a law suit against me if I attempted to publish the Roth chapter. He backed off his threats when I pointed out that I was dealing not with confidential material or with hearsay but with a published novel and a published psychiatric case study. Kleinschmidt authenticated my discovery and spoke about Roth’s anger toward him over the publication of “The Angry Act”—a title that could not be more prophetically selfful filling. In “Revisiting Philip Roth’s Psychoanalysts,” published in The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, I discuss my 1980 interview with Dr. Kleinschmidt, when I understood for the first time how Peter Tarnopol felt in My Life as a Man when he reveals, with begrudging admiration , his psychoanalyst’s “immunity to criticism” (259). Several of Kleinschmidt’s observations about his patient in “The Angry Act” are almost identical to Roth’s observations in Portnoy’s Complaint and My Life as a Man. Kleinschmidt’s discussion of his patient’s symptomatology—“practices of voyeurism, exhibitionism and fetishism abound” (125)—becomes the clinical definition of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” which Roth uses as the frontispiece of the novel: “Acts of exhibitionism , voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism, and oral coitus are plentiful.” Kleinschmidt’s characterization of his patient resembles Spielvogel’s characterization of Peter Tarnopol. “A successful Southern playwright in his early forties illustrates the interplay of narcissism and aggression while his points of fixation are later [than those of another patient] and his conflicts oedipal rather than pre-oedipal. He came into therapy because of anxiety states experienced as a result of his tremendous ambivalence about 102 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < leaving his wife, three years his senior,” observes Kleinschmidt in “The Angry Act” (123). “A successful Italian-American poet in his early forties entered into therapy because of anxiety states experienced as a result of his enormous ambivalence about leaving his wife,” observes Spielvogel in My Life as a Man (239). Castration anxiety appears in both “The Angry Act” and My Life as a Man. “It soon became apparent that his main problem was his castration anxiety vis-à-vis a phallic mother figure,” declares Kleinschmidt (124); “It soon became clear that the poet’s central problem here as elsewhere was his castration anxiety vis-à-vis a phallic mother figure,” declares Spielvogel (240–41). So, too, is the characterization of the father identical. “His father was ineffectual and submissive to the mother,” Kleinschmidt notes (124). “His father was a harassed man, ineffectual and submissive to his mother,” observes Spielvogel (241). Roth’s decision to base Alex Portnoy’s parents closely on his own parents calls into question his idealization of his mother and father in The Facts and Patrimony. Roth imagines himself as the “bad son” in Portnoy’s Complaint, the transgressive son who rails against his castrating mother and ineffectual and submissive father; he imagines himself as the “good son” in The Facts and Patrimony, the devoted son who honors his parents and defends them from attack by others. Roth’s parents do not change dramatically over the years, but his attitude toward them does. Roth’s Fictional and Real Parents Sophie and Jack Portnoy are satirical portraits of Bess and Herman Roth, and despite the novelist’s deliberate exaggeration and distortion of them for comic effect, Alex’s parents are recognizably Roth’s parents. Sophie Portnoy’s positive qualities appear in The Facts and Patrimony but not her negative qualities. In Portnoy’s Complaint she is a smother-mother, identi- fied with a “castrating” bread knife that evokes anger and dread in Alex. She points this knife at her young son when he refuses to eat, a scene that he later discloses bitterly to his analyst: “Doctor, why, why oh why oh why oh why does a mother pull a knife on her own son? I am six, seven years old, how do I know she really wouldn’t use it? What am I supposed to do, try bluffing her out, at seven?” (16). Alex cannot exorcise the image of the maternal knife from his imagination, and he is enraged that none of her friends who hear the complaints about her disobedient son find = Roth and Patrimony < 103 the threat excessive: “Alex is suddenly such a bad eater I have to stand over him with a knife (43). Alex’s anger is also directed at his passive father for failing to defend him. “And why doesn’t my father stop her?” (17). Ironically, the castrating knife in Alex’s family is wielded not by his father but by his mother, something he has difficulty understanding and accepting. It’s not that Jack Portnoy lacks sexual organs; in a scene that anticipates Roth’s description in Patrimony of his father’s penis, Alex remarks approvingly of his father’s sexual equipment. “Oh, thank God! Thank God! At least he had the cock and the balls!” (42). To Alex, the father’s wounded masculinity arises not from a physical but a psychological problem, namely, a wife whose authority and discipline remain unchallenged. If Roth associates Sophie Portnoy with a castrating knife, he associates Jack Portnoy with blocked bowels—another quality that eerily foreshadows the portrait of Herman Roth in Patrimony. There are more than half a dozen references in Portnoy’s Complaint to the father’s “blockaded body” (5). Most of these references are comic, but others are disturbing. The most poignant reference occurs when Alex observes that he used to find his father “in the morning fast asleep on the toilet bowl, his pajamas around his knees and his chin hanging onto his chest. Up at quarter to six in the morning, so as to give himself a full uninterrupted hour on the can, in the fervent hope that if he is so kind and thoughtful as this to his bowels, they will relent and give in” (114). Sometimes Jack Portnoy finds mordant humor in the situation , as when he whispers to Alex, “I ought to stick a hand grenade up my ass” (115), but mostly he is tormented by his blocked bowels. Like Herman Roth, Jack Portnoy works a brutally long day for a giant insurance company that never appreciates his commitment and years of service to them. Also like Herman Roth, Jack Portnoy has an eighth grade education. But whereas Roth honors in Patrimony his father’s heroic work ethic and indomitable energy, Alex mocks his father’s ignorance and lack of success. “Don’t be dumb like your father,” Jack tells his son, and though he says this “lovingly” (5), Alex grows up feeling ashamed of his father’s lack of formal education. Alex recalls an incident when he was a freshman in college and tried to educate his father by ordering a subscription for him of the Partisan Review. As the thirty-three-year-old Alex discloses to his analyst, when he arrived home from college the magazine was nowhere to be found. “Thrown out unopened—I thought in my arrogance and 104 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < heartbreak—discarded unread, considered junk-mail by this schmuck, this moron, this Philistine father of mine!” (9). Alex knows he is being judgmental here, but he can’t forgive his father for his lack of culture and education. “No money, no schooling, no language, no learning, curiosity without culture, drive without opportunity, experience without wisdom. . . . How easily his inadequacies can move me to tears. As easily as they move me to anger!” (26). Alex’s attitude toward his father is more complicated than Kleinschmidt implies in “The Angry Act,” but there is little doubt that Alex regards his father as ineffectual and submissive. Truth—or Kvetching? Alex admires his mother more than his father, partly because she is more powerful and successful. She is, for Alex, a force of nature, and she achieves perfection in whatever she does. Alex is his mother’s child in many ways: he is smart, energetic, and successful. His father is also a hard worker, but he is not successful. And yet for all of Alex’s criticisms of his father, he resembles him in one crucial way: they are both hockers . “I hear myself indulging in the kind of ritualized bellyaching that is just what gives psychoanalytic patients such a bad name with the general public. Could I really have detested this childhood and resented these poor parents of mine to the same degree then as I seem to now, looking backward upon what I was from the vantage point of what I am—and am not? Is this truth I’m delivering up, or is it just plain kvetching?” (94). The answer, no doubt, to this last question is both: Alex delivers up the truth through his complaints, which are simultaneously funny, sad, and serious. Portnoy’s Complaint is both an astonishingly original novel and a fascinating psychiatric case study, one that has been analyzed (and overanalyzed) by countless literary and psychological critics. Published when Roth was in his midthirties, Portnoy’s Complaint confirms many of Kleinschmidt’s observations in “The Angry Act,” including the ways in which aggression can be the driving force behind artistic creativity. “It may be the prime mover or the unconscious motivating force for a creative push; it can find poetic, literary, graphic or musical expression and thus channel and dissipate that which otherwise might be intolerable to the ego” (125). But aggression is only one of the motivations behind creativity; the need for reparation is no less important. Roth’s parents = Roth and Patrimony < 105 were in their sixties when he published Portnoy’s Complaint. There are moments when Alex fears his father’s death (significantly, he doesn’t fear his mother’s death), but Sophie and Jack Portnoy are still alive and in good health. Alex never worries about becoming a caretaker. This is not the case in Patrimony, in which the prevailing tone is elegiac. Having devalued his father throughout the 1960s, when he was in psychoanalysis and writing Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth sought to repair the broken father-son relationship in the 1980s before it was too late. He did not want to become another Nathan Zuckerman, who remained estranged from a father who died cursing him. Writing Patrimony allowed Roth to repudiate “The Angry Act” and honor the father who, for all of his imperfections, remained proud of his son’s vast achievements. Roth’s need to heal the relationship with both parents may be seen in his novel The Plot against America, where he lovingly brings Herman and Bess Roth back to life and portrays them as thoughtful and articulate, able to foresee the rising menace of fascism long before other, better educated, people. Despite the limitations of Kleinschmidt’s theory of artistic creativity, which emphasizes aggression but ignores reparation, he is right when he concludes that art “signifies the triumph of Eros over Thanatos; it is the triumph of libido over aggression” (127). “I read Patrimony,” Roth’s impersonator proclaims in Operation Shylock . “Warmhearted but tough. You’ve been through the wringer” (380). Patrimony is certainly warmhearted, and no one can deny that Roth has been through the wringer, but the memoir suffers from the omission of dark countertexts and countervoices. We can now begin to understand the meaning of Zuckerman’s assertion in The Facts that there is “something in the romance of your childhood that you’re not permitting yourself to talk about, though without it the rest of the book makes no sense” (168–69). The gaps and silences in The Facts and Patrimony point in the direction of “The Angry Act.” One of the curious coincidences in Patrimony is that around the time Herman Roth was dying of a brain tumor, his son almost died of a heart attack. Roth needed emergency quintuple bypass surgery when he was fifty-six years old. After the surgery, he felt “reborn—at once reborn and as though I had given birth” (225). Roth’s close encounter with death heightened his identification with both of his parents to such a degree that he imagined merging with them. These paternal and maternal 106 = “With Autobiography There’s Always Another Text, a Countertext” < identifications during his brush with death, which occur only a dozen pages before the end of Patrimony, testify to Roth’s internalization of his parents. He is intrigued by the startling coincidence of his need for emergency bypass surgery during the time his father was dying. Nadeau coins the term “coincidancing” to “capture the action of grieving people as they used coincidences to construct meanings. The dancing part of the term is intended as a play on the active and interactive nature of using coincidences to make sense of a death” (126). We learn in the remaining pages of Patrimony about Herman Roth’s deteriorating health and the agonized decision not to use “extraordinary measures” to prolong his life. “Dad, I’m going to have to let you go.” The final revelation in Patrimony occurs when Roth tells us in the last paragraph that, “in keeping with the unseemliness of my profession” (237), he has been writing a book about his father’s dying and death, a book that he has concealed from his father. Roth implies that his father died in character during a “twelve-hour ordeal” in which he “fought for every breath with an awesome eruption, a final display of his lifelong tenacity. It was something to see” (231–32). Roth adds that dying is “work” and that his father was a “worker.” Afterward, Roth dreams that he has dressed his father in the wrong burial clothes. As Patrimony closes, Roth confesses his fear that he will live perennially as his father’s “little son, with the conscience of a little son, just as he would remain alive there not only as my father but as the father, sitting in judgment on whatever I do” (237–38)—a fear that may indicate guilt over the broken promise to remain silent about his father’s patrimony. Rehearsing Death After writing good-bye to his father in Patrimony, Roth continued his prodigious literary productivity, and many of his more recent novels seem to be rehearsals for his own farewell. Death appears to be his constant companion in these stories, the muse behind his imagination. “Whatever catastrophe turns up,” he states in The Human Stain, “he transforms into writing . Catastrophe is cannon fodder for him” (170). The eponymous hero in Sabbath’s Theater reads “book after book about death, graves, burial, cremation , funerals, funerary architecture, funeral inscriptions, about attitudes toward death over the centuries, and how-to books dating back to Marcus Aurelius about the art of dying. That very evening he read about la mort de = Roth and Patrimony < 107 toi, something with which he had already a share of familiarity and with which he was destined to have more” (88). Sabbath discovers what Roth has known for a long time: “everyone learns sooner or later about loss: the absence of a presence can crush the strongest people” (138). “Can you imagine old age?” Roth asks in his aptly named novel The Dying Animal. “Of course you can’t. I didn’t. I had no idea what it was like. Not even a false image—no image. And nobody wants anything else. Nobody wants to face any of this before he has to. How is it all going to turn out? Obtuseness is de rigueur” (35). Roth’s dark vision grows darker with each novel; “old age isn’t a battle,” he opines in Everyman, “old age is a massacre” (156). Roth’s fear of the loss of his artistic creativity shows up in a variety of his characters, including the aging actor in The Humbling, who suddenly finds that he is no longer able to act. Devastated by the loss of his magical power and spurned by the woman with whom he has been having an affair, he takes his own life, no longer able to work or love. And in Exit Ghost Roth kills off a cynical and embittered Nathan Zuckerman, who rails at literary critics, journalists, and scandal mongers whom he views as responsible for the poisoning of literature and the destruction of the country’s greatest writers. Nor does Zuckerman derive comfort from the possibility of a posterity self, literary immortality. The “retribution of biographical inquisition” (275), he predicts, will deflect attention away from the stories themselves, wrought in the writer’s imagination, to the writer’s life, which, Zuckerman implies, with Roth’s approval, can never explain the mystery of creativity. Roth need not fear that the creative process will one day be explained, either his own creativity or anyone else’s. “Before the problem of the creative artist,” Freud admits at the beginning of his essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” “analysis must, alas, lay down its arms” (177). No Freudian, Roth would nevertheless surely agree with that statement, just as he would agree with Freud’s observation that a father’s death is the most poignant loss in a man’s life. It is hard to imagine a more moving portrait of the father-son relationship than Patrimony, and whatever biographical secrets about Roth may come to light in the future, whatever countertexts and countervoices may appear, the memoir will surely remain an eloquent statement about the power of writing to honor both the living and the dead. ...