Source: "The Fiction of Philip Roth: An Introduction," in The Fiction of Philip Roth, Haddonfield House, 1974, pp. 1-36.

[In the following excerpt, McDaniel compares one of Roth's earlier works, "The Contest for Aaron Gold, " with a more recent piece, "I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting': Or, Looking at Kafka, " to demonstrate thematic and artistic consistencies in Roth's short fiction.]

Perhaps the best introduction into Roth's fictional world is to be found in Roth's very early "The Contest for Aaron Gold" and his very recent '"I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting'; Or, Looking at Kafka." The former was published when Roth was only twenty-one years old, and the latter appeared in the American Review of May, 1973. The two stories serve as excellent parameters of Roth's artistry, suggesting not only the continuity of Roth's essential themes and hero types but also the subtle changes in Roth's artistic techniques, particularly his movement into the fantastic, his increasing reliance on autobiographical materials for his fiction, and his growing willingness, as he says in "Reading Myself [Partisan Review, 1973], to be both subversive and perverse in his attack on traditional social values. Despite their differences, the two stories illustrate Roth's ongoing attempt to discover, in his own words, "a kind of passageway from the imaginary that seems real to the real that seems imaginary, a continuum between the credible incredible and the incredible credible." ["Reading Myself"]. And, as we shall see, the hero in each story brings with him not only the occupation but also the sensibility of the artist, one who is brought into direct confrontation with society.

"The Contest for Aaron Gold" focuses on the moral dilemma faced by Werner Samuelson, a Jewish artist driven from his studio in Austria by the Germans in 1940, who for the first time in fourteen years has left his Philadelphia ceramics shop for summer employment as a ceramics instructor at a boys' camp. The moral dilemma arises from Werner's growing interest in one of the campers, Aaron Gold, who "was about eight years old, bony, underfed, a little tired-looking." While the other boys take on handicraft projects that are less than distinguished ("snakes were the favorite, turtles a close second"), Aaron embarks on a warrior knight aiming a sword at a dragon. Difficulty arises when the aggressive, popular swimming instructor, Lefty Shulberg, lets it be known that he objects to Aaron's tardiness at swimming sessions—tardiness caused by Aaron's desire to finish his knight.

Werner's plight becomes more serious when the camp owner, Lionel Steinberg, places additional pressure on him:

Look, Werner, let's get squared around. It's good you're taking your job seriously, looking after the kids and all. But if there's one thing we don't want here it's one-sided kids. That's what I tell the parents and that's what they want, an all-round camp, you understand? But if you're going to let one kid play potsy with clay all day, Werner, what the hell are his parents going to say to me?

Lionel cannot understand why Aaron should be allowed extra time, despite the fact that Aaron's knight is much superior to the other boys' artistic efforts. In words that unconsciously parody the first of all creative acts, Lionel complains to Werner,

For christ sake, we asphalted the whole entrance road, the whole thing, and the parking lot besides in seven days. Seven days, and you stand there and ask me why a kid shouldn't take forty hours to make a pair of goddam legs. Don't kid me, Werner.

Werner's initial decision, preceded by four days of a cold, miserable rain that turns the lake into a murky brown (suggestive, perhaps, of Noah's flood), is as practical as the pragmatic Lionel could wish: He will ask the boys to speed up their work. "After all, Steinberg was his employer, paying the check, and he was the employee. This was just no summer to get fired." Aaron, however, upon hearing Werner's directive, cries that he cannot work quicker: "I can't finish by Sunday, Uncle Werner. I just can't!" Werner momentarily relents, but as the Sunday visitor's day approaches, he is faced once again with an irate Lionel. Clutching the unfinished knight in his hand, Lionel confronts Werner: "Wait'll Lefty hears about this goddam thing." Realizing that it is too close to visiting day for Steinberg to fire him, Werner turns his attention to Lefty. What would Lefty think?

What he might think was that as far as the contest for Aaron Gold was concerned—for, apparently, that was what it had become to Lefty—he had lost. Lefty probably didn't like to lose, but Werner had had his way, and if that wasn't a loss, at best it was a tie. Ties probably wouldn't do for Lefty either. Maybe he would come over and punch him in the mouth. No, Lefty wouldn't settle up that way. It was too simple. No, but he would think of something. What? That didn't take too much pondering: probably Lefty would make Aaron Gold the most miserable kid in the world. He seemed capable.

With Aaron's welfare clearly in mind, Werner takes on the task of completing Aaron's unfinished project, but when Aaron sees the result, he shouts angrily, "You ruined him, you did, you did" and runs out of the ceramics shop to the edge of the lake, "like a small wild animal who gets out of a blazing forest just as fast as he can." Werner, exhausted by the chain of events leading to the emotional confrontation with Aaron, flops into a chair to contemplate the knight.

He set it upon the table before him, contemplating it as one might contemplate a rare piece of sculpture. He stared a full minute, and then, like a mace, he pummeled his right fist down upon it. It shattered, but he pounded and pounded at it with his fist. He pounded until it was a mess, and even then he didn't stop. It was a better job than the dragon himself might have done.

With the sound of Lefty Shulberg's jovial greetings to parents and visitors dinning in his ears, Werner washes his hands, packs his bags, and walks "along the hot, squirming road and out of the camp."

Although no critic has made mention of "The Contest for Aaron Gold," the story provides a clear index of Roth's early artistic intents and techniques. Like Neil Klugman of Goodbye, Columbus, Eli Peck of "Eli, the Fanatic," Nathan Marx of "Defender of the Faith," and Gabe Wallach of Letting Go, Werner is the unwilling hero, an essentially passive man who has a difficult moral choice suddenly thrust upon him. The choice—as is the case with other of Roth's early heroes—is not a clear-cut one, and the consequences of the choice are ambiguous. Werner is not merely torn between keeping his job and remaining loyal to Aaron Gold, for his final decision to destroy the knight he has wrongfully completed for Aaron comes after he realizes that his job is secure. The choice, rather, is a partially unwitting, or at least unarticulated, response to the crass middle-class values of Camp Lakeside, values that are embodied in the words and actions of Lefty Shulberg and Lionel Steinberg. As spokesmen for social "normalcy," Werner's two antagonists are the exponents of a suffocating, soul-numbing creed of expediency, against which the hero throws his uncertain power. This contest, I believe, describes the central conflict in Roth's fiction.

Lefty Shulberg, Werner's most immediate antagonist, is, like Ron Patimkin of Goodbye, Columbus a man to be respected because of his athletic prowess. His claims to fame are two: he had been a professional basketball player and he had once, in a Tarzan movie, fought an underwater battle with Johnny Weissmuller. Lefty and the other counselors live by the proposition that, as one of the boys says, "we gotta not play alone" because "it's no good for you." Lefty thinks that Aaron is "peculiar" because he does not like to swim, and as the contest for Aaron Gold continues, Lefty grows in the conviction that the relationship between Werner and Aaron is an abnormal one. It is clear that camp owner Steinberg knows of Lefty's suspicions (Steinberg tells Werner, "I'd hate like hell to tell you what he said about you and that kid") and comes to agree with Lefty ("Werner, I'm just about fed up What kind of game are you and that little queer trying to play anyhow!").

Lionel Steinberg, like Lefty Shulberg, is a subject for Roth's satirical eye. Like Lefty, Lionel is ruled by shallow middle-class values. Lionel believes in having all-around kids in an all-around camp because that is what parents want. Lionel warns Werner early in the story, "Every kid's going to have something finished by visiting day, Werner. Parents want something for their money." Lionel's other obsession is to have all the main arteries of the camp paved by visitor's day, after which, according to the construction supervisor, "we can start paving the goddam lake." The smell of asphalt and the roar of road machines supply an appropriate background for Lionel's notion of creativity—a creativity that is sterile, commercial and ugly in conception and fulfillment.

Over and against this backdrop is the uncertain voice of Werner the craftsman, speaking for the values of the artist. To an unimpressed audience on the first day of camp, Werner gives an explanation of the vessels made in ancient times with the potter's wheel:

"The men"—whoever they were—"always tried to make these vessels more beautiful and shapely"—somebody giggled. 'They painted them red and gold, and blue and green, and they painted their sides with stories and legends. It took hundreds of years until men saw how much happier they could be if they surrounded themselves with beautiful—beautiful objects of art."

Armed with the conviction that "it takes time to learn what to do," Werner makes a reluctant crusade into the modern asphalt wasteland of Camp Lakeside. It is Werner who personifies Aaron's knight ("whose spindly legs wouldn't have done him much service against a good, fast dragon"); the dragon, on the other hand, is clearly symbolic of the Shulberg-Steinberg-Camp Lakeside values. Early in the story, Aaron pleads to be allowed to spend extra time to finish the knight's legs. Werner replies, "Of course—what do you think, I'm on the dragon's side?" Later, when Werner tries to implement Steinberg's speed-up policy, Aaron wants to know where Werner stands: "Whose side—me or the dragon?" At the end of the tale, when Werner realizes that in completing Aaron's unfinished knight he has capitulated to the Camp Lakeside values of Steinberg and Shulberg, he reverses the capitulation by becoming knight and dragon in one: "Like a mace, he pummeled his right fist down upon it," until the knight was shattered. "It was a better job than the dragon himself might have done."

The ironic twist involved in Werner's final decision to destroy the knight, the symbol of his own values, is characteristic of Roth's early fiction. In a world where normative social values hold sway, the actions of the hero sensitive to human values must often seem tinged with madness. To the public, represented by the parents who come on visitor's day, it is Lefty Shulberg, not Werner, who appears as the protective moral agent keeping watch over the children. In the last scene in the story, we see Lefty, who is about to give a special diving exhibition, welcoming visitors and campers with the aid of a megaphone:

"How you doing, Mike. Sit your parents down right there. That a boy . . . Jeff-boy, what do you say, kid." The names snapped out like sparks, and then, a moment after Werner heard them, they were muffled in a wooly heat. "Artie, that a boy . . . Hey, Joe, how's my—Hey, what do you know! Goldy! How are you doing, Goldy—buddy! That your parents? Good, sit them right down front. What do you know!" Lefty waved his megaphone at Aaron Gold's parents. Mr. Gold, in white shirt and gray Bermuda shorts, waved back; Mrs. Gold nodded. Lefty was treating their boy all right.

What do the parents know? They know that "Lefty was treating their boy all right"—a reasonable conclusion, after all, if one's vision is restricted to the smooth and artificial surface offered by Camp Lakeside.

One of Roth's most recent stories, "'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting': Or, Looking At Kafka," is, like "The Contest for Aaron Gold," a story about a Jewish artist who comes to America to confront its social forces; in this case, however, the artist is Franz Kafka and the setting is Newark, New Jersey, and the home of Philip Roth in 1942. The story is a strange blend of fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, which suggests how far Roth has come from the more traditional early techniques evidenced in "The Contest for Aaron Gold." After an introductory quotation from Kafka's "A Hunger Artist," the first part of this two-part story opens with the narrator, Roth, saying, "I am looking, as I write of Kafka, at the photograph taken of him at the age of forty (my age)—it is 1924, as sweet and hopeful a year as he may ever have known as a man, and the year of his death." The first section recounts the history of Kafka's anguished attempts, in his last years, to escape the pressures of home life, the domination of his father, and his own "habit of obedience and renunciation."

As a consequence of discovering some happiness with his mistress, Dora Dymant, Kafka, now in his fortieth year and away from Prague and his father's home, "seems at last to have been delivered from the self-loathing, the self-doubt, and those guilt-ridden impulses to dependence and self-effacement that had nearly driven him mad throughout his twenties and thirties." Roth reports, however, that it is also at this time that Kafka writes the unfinished story "The Burrow," the story of an animal "with a keen sense of peril whose life is organized around the principle of defense, and whose deepest longings are for security and serenity." But what if this Kafka who finally finds a tentative happiness in his women and his work should effect an escape of both literal and figurative death by fulfilling for himself the imagined journey of Karl Rossman, the journey, that is, to America?

It is, then, with this leap into fantasy that part two of the story begins. It is 1942, Roth is nine, and his Hebrew School teacher is Dr. Franz Kafka. Much to Roth's dismay, Dr. Kafka accepts an invitation to dine at the Roth home where Roth's father has arranged a match between Kafka and Aunt Rhoda, a spinster who works as an interior decorator at a large dry goods store ("The Big Bear") and whose aspirations are to appear on the stage. Roth's father is convinced that Kafka would "give his eye teeth to have a nice home and a wife," so he proceeds to "do a job" on Kafka ("Does he make a sales pitch for familial bliss!"). The affair between Kafka and Rhoda ends miserably, however, after Dr. Kafka apparently broaches the subject of sex. Aunt Rhoda returns to the Roth home from a weekend tryst with Kafka in Atlantic City (Kafka had wanted to see the famous boardwalk and the horse that dives from the high board), and pours out her dismay in tearful scenes: "Have you ever?" says Aunt Rhoda, weeping. "Have you ever?" Kafka sends four letters to Rhoda in three days, but Rhoda's moral outrage remains. Everyone agrees with Roth's father when he says of Kafka, "Something is wrong with him all right." Kafka dies at the end of the tale, leaving behind no Trial, no Castle, no "Diaries." All that remains are four "meshugeneh " letters "accumulated in her dresser drawers by my spinster aunt, along with a collection of Broadway 'Playbills,' sales citations from 'The Big Bear,' and transatlantic steamship stickers."

Thus all trace of Dr. Kafka disappears. Destiny being destiny, how could it be otherwise? Does the Land Surveyor reach the Castle? Does K. escape the judgment of the Court, or Georg Bendemann the judgment of his father? "'Well, clear this out now!' said the overseer, and they buried the hunger artist, straw and all." No, it simply is not in the cards for Kafka ever to become the Kafka—way, that would be stranger even than a man turning into an insect. No one would believe it, Kafka least of all.

What is the point of so bizarre a story? First of all, the story is clearly a continuation of one of the earliest thematic conflicts in Roth's fiction: the conflict between the sensitive man (quite often an artist, like Werner Samuelson, or a teacher-writer, like Kafka) and an insensitive society that constricts, stupefies, and maddens the wouldbe hero to despair. If you want to see why the artist becomes a "burrower," Roth seems to say, consider what would happen to Franz Kafka if he had to live in America, in Newark, in my home. "He's too quiet for Rhoda." Roth's mother says of Dr. Kafka, "I think maybe he's a little bit of a wallflower." "Don't worry," says Roth's father, "when the time comes I'll give him a little nudge." The banality, the tastelessness, the manipulative strategies (Aunt Rhoda had, in her younger days, put on puppet shows in which she did all the voices and "manipulated the manikins on their strings") combine to reduce Kafka to a shadow of a man, a "homeless K, but without K.'s willfulness and purpose, a homeless Karl, but without Karl's youthful spirit and resilience." Little wonder then that, after his "homey" experience in America, the homeless Kafka leaves no literary work behind—which is a way of suggesting that the artist in America experiences artistic starvation indeed.

A second point illustrated by the story (and emphasized by Roth's use of "Philip Roth" as narrator) is that Roth, like Kafka, does not hesitate to "burrow" inward and look backward, probing his own past experiences as Jew and writer for tensions that are given oblique and often ironic treatment in his fiction. Although the dangers of drawing parallels between an author's personal experience and his fiction are notorious, it is impossible to avoid observing that at times there is a proximity between Roth and his characters, between Roth's interests and those explored in his fiction (a point that is often made about Kafka's work as well). There is, of course, nothing unique about an author's utilizing his own experience in his fiction; nevertheless, Roth's candid and repeated admissions of his reliance on what is "close to home" underscores both his commitment to social realism and his willingness to explore some of his own responses to American culture through the focusing lens of fiction. . . .

Like the Roth and Kafka in "'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting': Or, Looking At Kafka," Roth's characters struggle to stay afloat in the dark, dangerous, inviting waters of the moral and psychological unknown—an area, Roth says, beyond "that barrier of personal inhibition, ethical restraint, and plain old conformism and fear." ["Reading Myself"]. And their struggle, not surprisingly, is often that of the artist, the sensitive man who is caught between seemingly inimical realms but who attempts to penetrate, to understand the mysteries surrounding his own life as well as those mysterious forces propelling him away from his own, his native land.