Source: "The Sadness of Philip Roth: An Interim Report," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. III, No. 2, Winter, 1962, pp. 259-68.

[In the excerpt below, Landis claims that sadness and a yearning for a more meaningful way of life motivate Roth's acerbic portrait of upper-middle class Jewry in his short fiction.]

The publication of [Goodbye, Columbus] in 1959 confirmed the already widespread impression left earlier by his stories in the New Yorker and Commentary that a young writer of great vigor and promise had appeared on the scene. Among his reviewers were Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin. His honors included a National Book Award in 1960 as well as the Daroff Memorial Award of the Jewish Book Council of America, also in 1960, for the best "work of Jewish interest" in fiction. And he and Bernard Malamud have since been frequently coupled as artists of large talents who write about Jews.

For this very subject matter Roth became the center of a controversy that has only recently subsided. In Yiddish as well as in English he has been severely attacked for distortion in his portraits of Jews. With equal warmth he has been defended for his honesty. Leslie Fiedler congratulated him on having "already received the young Jewish writer's initial accolade: the accusation of anti-Semitism. . . . " And Saul Bellow encouraged him: "My advice to Mr. Roth is to ignore all objections and to continue on his present course."

Now that the dust of controversy has settled, it is possible to see Philip Roth in a clearer perspective. . . . His talents are large enough to warrant an interim report.

Despite their sharp dispute, Roth's friends and foes found themselves in curious consort: they agreed on the acerbity of his portraits and they saw in that acerbity Roth's essential quality. Like Neil Klugman in the story Goodbye, Columbus, Roth is indeed fiercely satirical, at times even cruel. Klugman, as Irving Howe emphasizes, means "cleverfellow" in Yiddish, and Roth's tone and style are those of a clever fellow, sometimes even of a wise-guy. But if the u in Neil's name is pronounced short instead of long, Klugman in Yiddish comes to "sadfellow," "mourner." If Roth is a clever fellow in his portraits, he is perhaps even more a mourner, a man made deeply sad by the spectacle of what he sees. In the controversy, this sad undertone seems to have escaped the notice it deserves. If Roth is indignant at the values of a prosperous world, he is also saddened by the sheer pathetic emptiness, the comfortable meaninglessness, the petty superficiality of the lives he sees. Under the ferocity of his satire is a terrible sadness that is ultimately the more important quality of his vision, a sadness that life has become merely a comfort station for easing tensions. The world of Roth's fiction is not one damnably dedicated to making money; it is a world dedicated to nothing, desiring nothing except "normalcy." What oppresses Roth above everything is the insignificance of those normal, humdrum, comfort-seeking lives, the pathetic waste of time.

The lives he pictures are wholly unrelated lives—unrelated to any real group or community or indeed to any other human being. Utterly lonely lives, they have not even Carlyle's "cash nexus" as a bond between man and man. They make no real contact with one another. In pursuit of their own ends, they merely brush against one another. Despite all the zipping and unzipping, they are really loveless lives. Those of his characters, like Epstein, that yearn for love, do not find it. Lives are empty and cold, full of food only, like the Patimkin refrigerators. When lives are ruffled, Freud becomes a tranquilizer to soothe them back to insignificance. Even those that dream and hope, like Neil Klugman and the little Negro boy, find that someone else has taken their books out of the library.

What grieves Roth most is the awareness that normalcy has, like a Procrustes' bed, truncated the range of life, excluding on the one hand the embrace of aspiration, the exhilaration of wonder, and on the other the acceptance of suffering. From this sadness grows Roth's ferocity, directed mainly against those who deny life, against the cowards who fear it, against all who would reduce it to safe insignificance, against all who flee from self and suffering. It is beneath the dignity of man not to sacrifice and suffer—to seek repose is a travesty of the realities of life and the potential of man. Roth is committed to his unheroic heroes who yearn and aspire, who want to climb out of the morass "up the long marble stairs that led to Tahiti." Such a hero is "the little colored kid who liked Gauguin" (in Goodbye, Columbus), who dreams of island paradises, and who taunts the library lions and growls at them though they are but stone: "Then he would straighten up, and, shaking his head, he would say to the lion, 'Man, you's a coward. . . . ' Then, once again, he'd growl." Here we perceive the essence of Roth, the source of his sadness and his ferocity: "Man, you's a coward." And he shakes his head sadly. Then, once again, he growls.

In Goodbye, Columbus, Brenda Patimkin's sin is not so much that she has affronted Neil and his dignity as a human being. Her greater sin is her cowardice, her dreamdestroying fear. Hers is not merely a betrayal of Neil or a betrayal of love; it is a betrayal of herself, and of life. Neil's return to his work in the library on the day of the Jewish New Year is not the act of desecration that it seems. It is meant to be an act of dedication to dreams and meanings and values symbolized by the library. The return to work is Neil's own goodbye, Columbus, a goodbye to the sad values and empty lives that are normal in America—a land sometimes referred to in the Yiddish as "Columbus's medineh [country]." That his renewal of himself should take place on the New Year is symbolically appropriate.

Neil is relatively fortunate. He is free to hope again. But not Epstein. It is given to Goldie Epstein, his wife, to pronounce the most terrible sentence in Roth's book: "You hear the doctor, Lou. All you got to do is live a normal life." Underlying the farce and the ferocity of "Epstein" is the grief of Epstein's outcry to his nephew: "You're a boy, you don't understand. When they start taking things away from you, you reach out, you grab—maybe like a pig even, but you grab." And after the outcry there is the sad defeat that seals Epstein's fate. His rash and his yearning are merely an "irritation," which the doctor promises to clear up "So it'll never come back." And underneath the sadness of Epstein's defeat is the sadness of Roth's own sense of man's defeat. The rash in man is only an irritation which the world will all too soon and irrevocably clear up so it'll never come back.

This same awareness is what gives other stories of rash men, like "The Conversion of the Jews" and "Eli the Fanatic," a dimension that some of Roth's critics have missed. One of our most perceptive critics thought "Conversion" little more than a lesson in tolerance: "The point—'You shouldn't hit me about God, Mamma. You should never hit anybody about God'—is altogether too clear; there really isn't a story apart from it." But "Conversion" is far more than (perhaps even far from) a plea for tolerance or "a beautiful treatment of a young boy coping with comparative religion," as another reviewer put it. In "Conversion," as in all Roth's stories, is implicit a plea for dreams, for life's wonders, for aspiration to the meaningful and the miraculous and the bold. It is a plea for the conversion of the Jews—but to Judaism. And now. For like the lover in Andrew Marvell's "Coy Mistress," from which the story's title seems to be taken, we have not "world enough and time," and any coyness is a crime.

In "Conversion," Ozzie Freedman is approaching thirteen, the symbolic age of adulthood in Judaism, the age at which full moral responsibility is assumed. And Ozzie Freedman discovers God.

His mother was a round, tired, gray-haired penguin of a woman whose gray skin had begun to feel the tug of gravity and the weight of her own history. Even when she dressed up she didn't look like a chosen person. But when she lit candles she looked like something better; like a woman who knew momentarily that God could do anything.

Ozzie tries unsuccessfully to reconcile his sense of miraculous Divinity and miraculous life with the domesticated, naturalized, and reasonable local Deity of Rabbi Binder. The contest is reflected in the names. The efforts of the youth aspiring to freedom outrage the Rabbi who binds and is earthbound. Ozzie is unable to understand why a God who could "make all that in six days . . . why couldn't he let a woman have a baby without intercourse." When Ozzie finally blurts out his pent-up protest, "You don't know anything about God!" and Rabbi Binder unintentionally bloodies his nose, Ozzie seeks refuge on the roof of the synagogue. As he looks down at the crowd in the street below, at the Rabbi, "normal" in his faithless faith, at Blotnik the Caretaker, who had "memorized the prayers and forgotten all about God," Ozzie's mother cries up to him with splendidly unconscious irony, "Don't be a martyr, my baby." But to Roth the history of Judaism is the history of a faith so deeply held that it embraced martyrdom and gloried in the miraculous potential of life. Jews have always been martyrs, and it is, ironically, their martyrdom that has kept them alive, that has made their history significant and transformed them as Ozzie's mother was transformed in the glow of the Sabbath candles. To be a Jew is to be a martyr. And Ozzie, not "my baby," but preparing to be a man, is the only one who senses that meaning—Ozzie and to a lesser degree his friends who urge him to "be a Martin" in counterpoint to his mother's pleas for his safety. "He's doing it for them," Rabbi Binder explains, not really aware of the truth that Ozzie's dilemma involves all the young, all who aspire to be men. Neither side quite aware of the implications of their words, they stage a debate whose real meaning concerns the nature of life. In the background of the debate is the bored appeal of the firemen, who were called to catch Ozzie in their net: "Look, Oscar, if you're gonna jump, jump—and if you're not gonna jump, don't jump. But don't waste our time, willya?" Oblivious to meaning, they are eager to return to normalcy.

The debate is resolved by a leap that provides a subtle and complex affirmation of the theme of conversion. As a sexual symbol, Ozzie's ejaculation of himself from on high into the firemen's net below affirms the creative wonders of life. And as an act of martyrdom his leap into the "net that glowed . . . like an overgrown halo" becomes paradoxically a moral symbol of his conversion to Judaism and to life. As a moral symbol this act of "madness" is a jolting reminder that to assert one's faith in a world overwhelmed by everyday, petty reasonableness requires an act of martyrdom and fanaticism.

To think of Roth as a social realist (as some of his critics seem to do) is to miss the outcry of such a story and to find in the mad act of its ending a dissipation of its vision. But Roth is more than a realist. His heroes are, in varying degrees, mad—or seem so to a normal world. It takes an act of "madness" to crack the smooth glaze of its tiled life, an act of "fanaticism" like Eli's in "Eli the Fanatic." Eli asserts his identity and like Ozzie assumes the responsibility of martyrdom. His education begins when, as attorney for the Jews of suburban Woodenton, who wish only to "protect what they value, their property, their wellbeing, their happiness," he tries to reach an accommodation with a newly-established yeshiva of refugees: let the activities of the yeshiva be restricted to its own grounds, and above all let its strangely clad teacher give up his caftan and wide-brimmed hat and adopt American dress in town. The request is reasonable enough in a world striving for normalcy. But the headmaster informs Eli that "The suit the gentleman wears is all he's got," a remark whose meaning Eli slowly comes to realize: the Nazis have taken everything from him except his identity in a tradition of martyrdom for faith. When he is finally forced to wear the tweeds that Eli provides for him, he leaves his own clothes at Eli's door. The "greenie's" unspoken message becomes clear. Eli must himself take up the identity which the normality-seeking Jews of Woodenton have forced the greenie to shed; Eli and the Jews of Woodenton must accept the heritage of faith and martyrdom that is symbolized by the suit. Eli's earlier words acquire an added dimension: "In a life of sacrifice what is one more? But in a life of no sacrifices even one is impossible." There is no doubt as to which of these is life and which is death.

Having donned the greenie's clothes, including the ritual undergarment worn by every orthodox Jew, Eli goes to the greenie as though to seek forgiveness and direction. The greenie points his finger skyward, and Eli has a "revelation." Like Ozzie he is converted. Wearing the strange attire he shows himself in all the streets of Woodenton as the greenie had done wearing Eli's tweeds. And now Eli is ready to show himself to his new-born son in the maternity ward, to pass on to his child the ancient heritage. When his wife begs him, "Please, can't you leave well enough alone? Can't we just have a family?" the answer is obvious. "No." But the penalty for "No" is martyrdom. He is seized on either side by solicitous interns. "But he rose suddenly . . . and flailing his arms, screamed: 'I'm the father!"' before undergoing the martyrdom of modern man—sedation. Not the son this time. The Father himself. El li. My God.

In contrast to the wooden life of Woodenton is the life of the yeshiva with its eighteen students, a number symbolic of life in Jewish tradition. It is perhaps pressing a point to see in the headmaster's name, Tzuref (not a common name, if, indeed, a name at all), an amalgam of the Yiddish and Hebrew words tzureh (trouble) and refueh (remedy). It is perhaps also pushing too far to read in the name of Eckman, the tranquilizing, normalizing analyst of the story, the pun in Yiddish signifying both man's tail and man's end. But whether or not the names were thus chosen, the men themselves represent these conflicting forces in Roth's world. Eckman wins. Normalcy is the opiate of the people.

Even a story like "Defender of the Faith" grows out of the same vision as "Eli" and the others, the same hatred of normalcy and cowardice, the same insistence on the acceptance of suffering which life requires of man. Grossbart, the Jewish rookie who uses his Jewishness in every weasel way to avoid the unpleasantness of army life and, finally, to get himself removed from a shipment to Pacific combat, Grossbart, like Henry VIII, first bearer of the title, is a betrayer, not a defender of the faith. But in the complex ironies that are typical of a Roth ending, he begins the process of conversion, of becoming a defender, by accepting man's fate of suffering. And Sergeant Marx, the Jewish combat veteran who has Grossbart put back on the Pacific shipment, accepts the knowledge and the guilt of his own vindictiveness and the suffering that is the penalty of that knowledge. He discovers another dimension of martyrdom. In fact, from the final paragraphs of the story there begins to emerge a complex sense of crime and punishment, guilt and innocence, a sense of man's moral capacities. But from the final paragraphs only. The story, which has been praised for its construction, is, apart from these paragraphs, nothing but construction. The complex humanity implicit in the final vision, the compassionate sadness that is as characteristic of Roth as his satiric ferocity, is apparent nowhere else in the story. Only a venomous portrait emerges. Of all Roth's stories that require serious consideration, "Defender" is the least successful because less than any other it translates its meanings into human terms; because more than any other it is untrue to the intention and the vision enunciated in its closing lines and characteristic of its author. And also, perhaps more than any other, it reveals the limitations of that vision.

The debate around Roth has unfailingly pointed out that he is a Jewish writer. The designation needs some explanation. Mark Harris implies that Roth is too narrowly Jewish when he charges Roth with writing about "the small memory," not "the national adventure." It is true that danger lurks for the regional writer, whether his regionalism is geographic or ethnic—the danger of provincialism or parochialism. Yet Roth is not guilty of such weakness. The middle class Jews he writes about are distinguished by their Americanism rather than their Jewishness; the problems he discerns, the voids and the failures, are not distinctively Jewish at all. Roth's concern is with the large national misadventure in normalcy. Irving Howe, on the other hand, observes that Roth does not draw upon Jewish tradition at all, that he fails to use the positive values in Jewish life. The remark is especially interesting in the light of Roth's own charge against Bernard Malamud that as a writer he "has not shown specific interest in the anxieties and dilemmas and corruptions of the modern American Jew. . . . " Change "specific interest in" to "much knowledge of and one gets the charge of the Yiddish critics against Roth. And there is much justice to this accusation. He does not write about the problems that American Jewish life is deeply concerned with: its struggles to maintain or transmit or define its moral values, its cultural creativeness, its scholarship, its relation to Jewish life in other lands. Nor does he write about the problems of self-definition that face multitudes of Jews or the dilemmas that arise from the impact of two moral heritages. Roth does not really deal with the complexities of the Jewish experience in America.

And yet it is overstating a point to deny his relation to Jewish tradition. Not only does he make skillful symbolic use of tradition, custom, and language; ultimately, all of Roth's stories are about the conversion of the Jews. But to what? Roth's weakness lies in the vagueness with which he formulates that tradition and in the resulting softness of his outlook. Although faith and martyrdom, affirmation of life and acceptance of suffering are in the Jewish tradition, that tradition embraces far more than these concepts and defines them within a specific moral context. Since Roth uses these concepts symbolically, since his stories convey no real sense that he takes them literally, definition becomes doubly imperative for him. Faith in what? Martyrdom for what? In his assertion of these values he is strangely reminiscent of Sholem Asch, who was also intrigued by faith and martyrdom. But Asch thought he was talking literally about Judaism when he romanticized these aspects of the Jewish past. Roth's stories give every indication that he does not wish to be taken literally. His recent explicit statement confirms these impressions: "For myself, I cannot find a true and honest place in the history of believers that begins with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. . . . " [Roth's untitled contribution to "Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals—A Symposium," Commentary, April 1961] The result is an element of vagueness and generality in his fiction where there should be hard clarity. What kind of island paradises to dream about? What kind of life to live now, shaped by the dream? The "madness" and martyrdom of an Ozzie Freedman or an Eli Peck are not in themselves values. And "since madness is undesirable and sainthood, for most of us, out of the question, the problem of how to live in this world is by no means answered; unless the answer is that one cannot." These words are Roth's criticism of Salinger. They are equally applicable to Roth. "The only advice we seem to get from Salinger is to be charming on the way to the loony bin." ["Writing American Fiction," Commentary, March 1961] What advice do we get from Roth? We need to know his values, to see his vision of how to live in the world and how to die in it. It is this soft center in Roth, this lack of a hard moral position that, throwing the emphasis of his stories onto the satire, leaves an aftertaste of pessimism and prevents the compassion from fulfilling itself. Neil Sadfellow's longings are never clearly articulated, so that Neil Cleverfellow's satiric tone remains uppermost in our recollections. Roth's weakness is not, as several of his critics have charged, that his stories are too thematic. His real weakness is that ultimately they lack a theme, a vision and a visionary sense of life, a hard center. Steps—even marble ones—must lead somewhere.