Philip Roth’s The Humbling: Loneliness and Mortality in the Later Work

Ever since Portnoy, most of the protagonists in the many novels of Philip Roth have been outsiders, that is, persons estranged in some way from their environment. This basically serious theme is illuminated by the ever-present—and sometimes macabre—black humor in which it is cast. Indeed, one way to read Roth’s oeuvre as a whole is to trace the many variations—and the growing depth—in which he treats personalities distanced or even divorced from their settings.

Simon Axler, “the last of the best of the classical American stage actors”—protagonist of Roth’s thirtieth novel—at the age of 65, feels that he has lost his imagination, his ability to make “the imagined real.” “He’d lost his magic” (2, 139, 1). He recalls how in acting class, students would mime drinking from a teacup: “I would look ridiculous as I held my pretend teacup and pretended to drink from it.” He tells his agent Jerry Oppenheim, “There was always a sly voice inside me saying, ‘There is no teacup.’ Well, that sly voice has now taken over” (37–38). Somehow, robbed of his imagination to willingly suspend disbelief, he tells his agent: “Jerry, it’s over: I can no longer make a play real for people. I can no longer make a role real for myself.” He laments, “I am a liar. And I can’t even lie well. I am a fraud.” For Axler, “something fundamental has vanished” (33, 37).

Axler is out of a job, a job from which he gained his identity. Unable to act on stage, he feels that his life is bereft of a plot. For Axler, life becomes meaningless; he becomes so depressed that even his caring wife cannot bear to live with him. For this renowned actor, the only act left is suicide. And, frightened by this possibility, Axler calls a psychiatrist and has himself admitted to a mental hospital.

The pain of losing one’s prowess is voiced most poignantly in the novel—not by Axler, but by Carol Stapleford, mother of Pegeen, the forty-year-old woman to whom Axler turns like a drowning man for a lifeline. Carol and Asa Stapleford (old friends of Axler) are more chagrined over their daughter’s having an affair with a man twenty-five years her senior than they had been twenty-three years earlier when she announced that she was a lesbian. Carol tells Pegeen:

What am I afraid of? I am afraid of the fact that he is growing older by the day. That’s the way it works. You’re sixty-five and then you’re sixty-six and then you’re sixty-seven, and so on. In a few years he’ll be seventy. You’ll be with a seventy-year-old man. And it won’t stop there . . . After that he’ll become a seventy-five year old man. It never stops. It goes on. He’ll begin to have health problems such as the elderly have, and maybe things even worse, and you’re going to be the person responsible for him.

(75–76)

For Axler, Pegeen is a lifeline. Having sex with her invigorates him and causes him to regain a plot in his life. Axler believes that their affair has awakened heterosexual urges in Pegeen, that Galatealike, she has changed into the woman who can love a man instead of another woman. He outfits her in expensive, glamorous clothes, directs her to a beautician who gives her a seductive hairdo, and Axler is overjoyed to see her appreciate herself as the woman he wants her to be. He believes that, like Pygmalion, he has shaped her. He feels revitalized by her, and he believes she has been revitalized by him.

Eager to please and to keep her in their relationship, Axler later exclaims: “I gave Pegeen everything I possibly could! I tried to satisfy her in every conceivable way” (135). Fearing that she may be desiring some of the excitement she formerly had with women, he encourages a ménage à trois with...