The Humbling (review)

Author Philip Roth Studies 283 Reviews 283 Simon Axler has a problem. Call it—to understate the matter by miles— performance anxiety leading to stage fright, a deadly affliction for the sixtyfive year old icon of the American theatre, reputedly the best of classical stage actors. He is stunned to discover in disastrous dual performances as Prospero and Macbeth at the Kennedy Center that he cannot perform the roles assigned: “He had lost his magic. The impulse was spent. He’d never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful , and then the terrible thing happened: he couldn’t act” (1). With these opening words, Philip Roth sets in motion a tale more Chekhovian than Shakespearean, though allusions to the Bard are everywhere evident, to great effect. He revisits themes related to aging in later works, especially Sabbath’s Theater (1995), The Dying Animal (2001), Everyman (2006), and Exit Ghost (2007): a continuing search for sexual potency, the waning of physical and creative powers, nostalgic recollections of things past, and confrontations with the reality of death—that long day’s journey into night (foreshadowed by a literal “dying animal,” a sickly old pale possum, “nature’s little caricature” of Simon, retreating after one day into the dark hole under Simon’s barn, to a dusty death: exit possum). The Humbling, following as it does Roth’s most recent Indignation (2008), replaces youthful shock at the pleasures of sexual initiation with its mirror opposite: the re-creation of sexual pleasure in an aging actor as the antidote to depression so deep that Simon initially hid in bed for hours. Upon finally arising, “all he could think about was suicide, and not its simulation either. A man who wanted to live playing a man who wanted to die” (7). With the permanent departure of his wife (exit Victoria) and now terrified that he will kill himself with the rifle awaiting him in the attic of his country home, Simon submits himself to treatment at Hammerton, a mental hospital where he encounters in group therapy sessions other patients who have lessons to teach about the perils and possibilities of the suicidal act, the one action that, in the real world, the individual can control: “One evening Axler spoke up—to perform , he realized, before his largest audience since he’d left the stage. ‘Suicide is the role you write for yourself,’ he told them. ‘You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged—where they will find you and how they will find you.’ Then he added, ‘But one performance only’” (15). Like Indignation, Roth’s latest work is divided into three chapters, though it might be more useful to think of these as the related parts of a three-act play. The title of the first part, “Into Thin Air,” begins the narrative with the famous (though Axler-mangled) concluding words of Prospero, dismissing Philip Roth. The Humbling. Boston: Houghton, 2009. 144 pp. $22.00. 284 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2009 the actors at the end of The Tempest as insubstantial spirits, devoid of reality: Axler’s new non-reality exactly. Prospero’s words “repeated themselves so regularly in his head that they soon became a hubbub of sounds tortuously empty of meaning,” signifying nothing (7). The actor’s art, “making the imagined real,” is what he can no longer do, and thus he is incapable of accepting a role as James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night. When his agent tells him that casting directors at the Guthrie Theater have asked about his interest , Simon replies, “Why me? I can’t act onstage and I can’t find a plot for myself to live offstage” (26). Finding that offstage plot becomes, in fact (and in fiction), the quest of Chapter (or Act) II: “The Transformation.” Reconnecting with Pegeen Mike Stafford (her parents, actors and longtime friends of Simon’s, named her after the female lead in Playboy of the Western World), Axler woos and wins the forty-year-old lesbian, in the process transforming her into a “real woman.” In doing so, he not only reenacts his earlier role in Playboy as the...