[In the following essay, Shechner assesses Roth's influence on his own literary outlook.]

For all I know, I was the only person in America who was taken by surprise by the double-barreled attack on Philip Roth in the December 1972 issue of Commentary, which featured Norman Podhoretz's essay “Laureate of the New Class” and Irving Howe's surly and agitated “Philip Roth Reconsidered.” Even Roth, who had been taking blows for more than ten years, must have been on red alert for this. It certainly took me by surprise; the revelation that literary culture was a war zone was a wake-up call. I probably should not have been so surprised. I had spent the years from 1964 though 1970 in Berkeley and San Francisco and knew about cultural combat as a daily experience, one that exuded the pungent aroma of tear gas. But it was not easy in that time and that place to separate the spell of cultural revolution from the politics of anti-war and anti-what-have-you-got protest. It was something that took place in the streets, and it was not for many years that I learned that Lionel Trilling had called the cultural revolution “modernism in the streets” and looked upon it as a bad omen for Western civilization. When it came to the academic side of life, the view from Berkeley was distinctly different from the view from Columbia: cultural warfare had not found a home in the West Coast literary curriculum, not at least in any class that I ever attended. Things changed shortly afterwards. Someone said to me as I was leaving Berkeley for the East, “You're trading in Dickens for Dostoevsky.” That sounded inviting. I couldn't wait. I was fast outgrowing California youth culture and was ready for some Russian soul and Dostoevskian strangeness, until I learned what it meant, the Kulturkampf around Roth being the Freshman Comp class of my unsentimental education. How could I know that the lower depths I cherished would take the form of a live and desperate Nikolai Raskolnikov on my bookshelf and a live Porfiry Petrovich hot on his tail?

There was another piece of this adventure for me in 1972 that went beyond the thrill of having a Newark landsman out there who could portray an overbearing Jewish mother and a peevish son so accurately that he seemed a one-man survey research team with so many interviews under his belt that he knew, down to the least standard deviation, what such people were like. I had left California with a sense of inexorable and durable method under my belt and was itching to test it out in a live literary arena. It is a little embarrassing to talk about it now, but since intellectual Marxists are out there, even to this day, writing books about when and how the scales fell from their eyes—when they had their personal Kronstadt¹—why not at least a few pages about my own version of that adventure?

I was a Freudian. Back then at Berkeley, a bright young assistant professor of English, Frederick Crews, was teaching graduate seminars in applied psychoanalysis and attracting disciples the way a magnet attracts iron filings. It wasn't hard to understand why. Those were heady days of radical thought at Berkeley, and in English, at least, psychoanalysis was the available radicalism. At that time there was no resident Marxist, save maybe a disciple of critic Leo Marx, and Marxism, in those days of home-brew revolutionism, when Friedrich Engels seemed as stolid as a plow horse beside thoroughbreds like Che Guevara, struck most of us as at least musty if not discredited. Whatever else was true, Crews had an odd and offbeat charisma for a radical. He was about the funniest guy going, and classes with him were a treat, no matter what we were talking about. The person we encountered in the classroom might talk about guilt like the Crews of The Sins of the Fathers, his book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, but the offhand manner was pure Pooh Perplex. For me, at least, if someone that consistently witty and ironic believed so strongly in Freudian theory, then it had a fighting chance of being true. (But let it be said that not even Lenny Bruce could have gotten me to read Capital.) We now know that Crews's doubts were festering even as he marched us through our classroom exercises of finding the primal scene in every human struggle and every rustle of garden foliage—and boy, did we ever find them. Mom and Dad were never so exposed for the mad fornicators they were as in that seminar. But in those classes, in 1967 and 1968, Crews never let on that we might just be finding what we had set out to look for, and we, in need of some classroom experience that could rival the drama and spectacle of the daily rallies at Sproul Plaza and weekly rumblings out on the streets, clung desperately to the dubious wisdom to be found in Freud's Standard Edition, as though it were nothing less than a voice out of the burning bush itself.

I have little recollection of the classes as such: maybe because finally they were more ordinary than I cared then to acknowledge. No, let's be honest. I was bored most of the time. But I have vivid recollections of evenings spent with Crews and members of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute in one psychoanalyst's apartment on San Francisco's Nob Hill, where after drinks and hors d'oeuvres, analysts and lit critters alike sat in a circle and talked theory and literature for about two hours, until dessert came out and we got to freeload amply on Napoleons and Courvoisier, afforded to us by the happy fact that psychoanalysis had emerged in Europe as the treatment of choice for a sexually-obsessed middle class and had retained its association with affluence and high culture in the United States. It was certainly a break from the jug wines of student life, and if truth be told, it did not incline one to bouts of skepticism. It was a reassuring way to be young and intellectual in the vortex of a revolution, and as we drove home across the Bay Bridge in my friend Al's MGB, myself stuffed behind the bucket seats like a piece of collapsible luggage, I could only congratulate myself on my luck. Slogging through Hamlet week after week with the soigné heirs of the Freudian revolution was a small price to pay for being a privileged student in the back of a sports car roaring its way through the California night with my stomach full of cheesecake and brandy and my head full of the best that had been thought and said—sixty years earlier. Yes, it is true that during one of those soirées a senior analyst had taken me aside to confess that the contents of the Freudian unconscious were, in his words, “few, simple, and boring,” but I didn't take it then for a warning, just a bit of late-night personal grousing about the dreariness of having to put up all day with so much kvetching. (A friend reported not long ago of having been fired by her analyst. “I don't want to hear any more about your father,” he had said. My sympathies were with the analyst.) It would be a few years yet until I would discover that he was absolutely right: few, simple, and boring, and one thing more: fictitious. That would come later, and Crews himself, having become the Sidney Hook of psychoanalysis, would happily help that reassessment along.

At the time this second storm broke over Roth and Portnoy [Portnoy's Complaint] in December 1972—there was an earlier one in 1969 that had driven Roth out of the country—I was casting about for something compelling to do. I had completed my graduate school project and was at loose ends. I didn't want to go any farther with the grad school work: it wasn't gripping enough, and I wanted to be gripped. Out of the blue, I had a subject that didn't have to be chosen by lot from a shopping list of options. To take a phrase from WWF wrestling, Podhoretz and Howe had opened a serious can of whoop-ass on Roth, and like the tag-team buddy I fancied myself to be, I sat down and pounded out a riposte that surely didn't take me more than two weeks to write. It was an agitated defense of Roth against charges of being a willful writer “who imposes himself on his characters and denies them any fullness, contour, or surprise”; of lacking all patience for uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, for “negative capability”; of being vulgar and reductive in his thought; of being a literary “swinger” and a slave to cultural fashion; and of being hampered by a “thin personal culture.” These from Howe. After such shredding, what forgiveness? Was any hope of dignity left? It was a mugging, pure and simple, and I pegged Howe and Podhoretz for a couple of mugs. It sent me flying wildly out of my corner, swinging from the heels. There was a second part to the exercise, much of which is now lost: an attempt to use my newfound tools, my keys to the treasure house of the unconscious, to get down to the bedrock of Alex Portnoy, as though he were my patient and that, in effect, while defending Roth against detractors, I could also bring Portnoy's strange “case” to light. That those two purposes might in fact conflict with each other did not occur to me at the time.

The entire exercise was exceedingly weird, but at least I had what I wanted: I had been moved at last, first by a book and second by someone else's insistence that my own literary passion—my first since falling hard for James Joyce—was utter trash. If Roth was “Laureate of the New Class”—Podhoretz's phrase—what was I, then? A face in that depthless crowd? So I rose up, with indignation as my sword and Otto Fenichel's The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis as my shield, and wrote about it. And, when I was done, I mailed it off to Roth.

Part of the strategy of that essay was to find a voice, something that was as far as I could get from the prefabricated jargons that were rampant in the profession I had chosen—and that have, if anything, grown worse—and from the off-the-shelf middle style of compositional prose that was its immediate alternative. I had written nothing at all since finishing the book on James Joyce two years earlier and felt stymied by both the lack of a compelling subject and a way of writing that could bring ideas to life. By adopting for this diatribe-cum-routine a brash and unbuttoned style, the bratty style of the schoolyard, as it turned out to be, I was able to solve a problem of how to write about Roth without sounding like just another pundit, another sober and wearisome talking head. There would turn out to be problems with this style, including its inappropriateness to other subjects, but for a short while I was able to revel in the freedom that it afforded me; I was able to say things through it that the middle style of expository prose simply ruled out.

About all I remember now is that Roth did not altogether despise it. More than that I can't claim. But the absence of complete contempt was all I really needed to summon up the courage to revise the screed and send it off to Partisan Review, where it was accepted immediately. Had Roth called ahead? Now, what I had sent to Roth and what was finally published in Partisan Review were substantially different pieces of writing. The first was a screed, a cri de coeur, that lit out after Howe on grounds that the character he discovered and scourged in Portnoy's Complaint bore distinct resemblances to the person he had anatomized in a self-revealing essay about his own youth, “The Lost Young Intellectual.” Howe, I had argued, was in effect tilting at mirrors. Uncertain of how that would fly at Partisan Review, I excised that part of the essay. Without this section, much of the essay's original polemical heat was damped and its velocity was throttled back to the ambling speed of a study, an exegesis. The middle style was creeping back.

There was another section, a piece of reckless analysis in which I tried my own interpretive hand at Alex Portnoy's complaint, his struggle—and maybe Roth's as well—between raffish appetites and ethical impulses. Recall that Portnoy's Complaint is a long analytic confession to one Doctor Spielvogel, who is silent until the end, when he announces his presence with the punch line, “So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” My own Spielvogel imitation had to be scaled back: it was fine as a jeu d'esprit, but for publication? For the world to see? For literary history? For Partisan Review, that Parnassus of my own household gods: Dwight Macdonald, Harold Rosenberg, Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, Isaac Rosenfeld, Meyer Schapiro? I chickened out and dropped those pages in the wastebasket. In tone it was brash and insouciant, somewhere between diagnosis and shtick, between putting Alexander Portnoy on the couch and putting him on stage, though of course Roth had already beaten me to the punch with both. So, for that matter, had Partisan Review, which had published one of the brashest sections of Portnoy in 1967: “Whacking Off.” But I wasn't Roth and knew that I hadn't the verbal chops or the case-hardened nerves to pull it off, and so I put that routine on a short leash, discarding some of the more reckless and jocular speculations.

Here is one I remember. I was running the Freudian chord progression, from oral to anal to phallic, and had this brilliant—to me—anal epiphany. Recall that Mr. Portnoy suffers from a nervous bowel and spends countless hours on the toilet trying to expel as feces some fraction of what he imbibed as food. His bowels, he jokes, are turning into concrete. But Sophie Portnoy, that humming assembly line of symptoms herself, while reminiscing about a man who once paid her court, a businessman in the condiment line, recalls him as “the biggest manufacturer of mustard in New York.” “And I could have married him instead of your father.” Hello! Now it may be precisely because the contents of the Freudian unconscious are few, simple, and boring that it took me about a nanosecond to see that someone's unconscious—Sophie Portnoy's, Alex's, Roth's?—had dreamed up a rival for the mother's affections whose bowels not only functioned 24/7 but had brought him riches as well. But if it had been too good to pass up the first time around, it was too wild to pass around the second, and out it came. There are those who spend their later years regretting their youthful indiscretions—repentant Marxists in particular are ever beating their breasts about the credulities of their youths. There is a silent majority, however, who regret their youthful discretions, and I am one of them. Forget the Oedipus Complex. Had Freud given us the Prufrock Complex instead, I'm sure I'd still be quoting him today.

Then again: without regret, would we have any literature? Would there be anything to write about? By the time my denatured essay on Roth appeared in Partisan Review in 1974, there were intellectual dramas about psychoanalysis being played out all around. Crews had done an about-face on the subject, now proclaiming it to be a pseudo-science whose authority was rooted in Sigmund Freud's flawed character—the character of an intellectual conquistador—rather than in anything empirically derived and testable. That caused no little bit of consternation among his students, many of whom had founded careers on psychoanalysis—either as academics or, in some cases, as psychotherapists—and felt betrayed. I don't count myself as one of them, and while I maintain to this day a handful of Freudian props in my closet, I don't feel any abiding nostalgia for a system of thought that is so clearly a patchwork of cultural prejudice, guesswork, daring, and blunder, and has so little to do with science. It was on Nob Hill, after all, over drinks, that I was given my mantra of few, simple, and boring, and how hard was it really to go the final yard and detach from a fiction that, like Marxism, makes the world seem so much simpler, meaner, and less fascinating than daily experience tells us it is?

We know, too, because Roth wrote about it in My Life as a Man in 1974, that he also was having a crisis of faith over his own analysis and analyst—the actual Spielvogel in Roth's life who had in fact published an essay in which “a successful Southern playwright in his early forties” exhibited symptoms that were remarkably similar to those presented by Alex Portnoy. It comes out in that novel, whose “My True Story” section is close enough to Roth's life to be read as a memoir, that “Spielvogel” had published a case history in a professional journal of his famous patient, the very fact of which struck Roth as a violation of trust and a potential exposure of himself as a patient. In the novel, the Roth stand-in, Peter Tarnopol, is driven to break relations with his analyst, who is accused not only of the betrayal of his patient, but with filling his head with ready-to-wear visions of his own life: with, as he puts it, substituting for the character's actual, blessed childhood, “rather Dickensian recollections of my mother as an overwhelming and frightening person.” We are expected to read in Tarnopol's break with his therapist Roth's own disaffection from the Freudian world view itself. Certainly after the minor debacle of The Breast in 1972, in which Freud-in-Spielvogel presides over a Kafkaesque farce about a man turned into a giant female breast, Roth clearly was going to have less to say about “the mother.”

These simultaneous disaffections, by Crews and by Roth, were both very intense for me at the time, in part because I had gotten involved in a situation at my home university that had its own momentum of decay, and in part also because Crews took the opportunity in 1972 to dramatize his disgruntlement in a review of Roth's The Breast in The New York Review of Books that was so damning, that, when added to screeds by Podhoretz and Howe (and Marie Syrkin and Bruno Bettelheim) only confirmed Roth's special preeminence in the rogue's gallery of literature. Sure Roth had his defenders: so had Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but that handful of us out on the picket lines with our “Free Philip” buttons and our “Unfair” placards on high might just as well have put them down and gone home for dinner. The verdict was in.

In a few brisk and slashing phrases, Crews roughed up Roth as surely as the others had, not by professing revulsion at his sexual hedonism or at crimes against the Jews but by finding in The Breast a failure of literary nerve: a backsliding into sobriety at just that moment in his career when he should have been pushing the envelope of his forte, “the portrayal of compulsives whose humane intelligence cannot save them from their irrationality. The sharpness and energy of his work have to do with a fidelity to petty idiocies of self-betrayal.” Roth instead had swallowed the sour bait of orthodox therapeutic wisdom and made his suffering mastomorphic hero into a “noble survivor.” “Roth loses control over the half-developed themes that would have saved his story from banality. It is as if Kafka were to bludgeon us into admitting that Gregor Samsa is the most stoical beetle we have met, and a wonderful sport about the whole thing.” And what, asks Crews, “would Alex Portnoy have to say about that?”

Why had I neglected Crew's review of The Breast while working up a brief on Roth's behalf? Because, painful as it would have been for me to say then, I shared Crews's disappointment, though not for his reasons: the hero's, and presumably Roth's, stoical recipe for enduring catastrophe—Freud's own “put up with it.” (British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips refers to classical psychoanalysis as the “noble killjoy” and there it was.) The book struck me as flat in ways that were not so easy to pin down: the elan, the propulsion, the sheer performative excess of Roth at the top of his game, were missing. The problem for me was not where Crews had found it, in the hero's, David Alan Kepesh's, sententiousness, his mammary rendition of Polonius, but in the book's dark, wordless core. The book was depressive, as if produced by a collapse of spirits, for which Kepesh's grotesque transformation was only a metaphor and learning to put up was the only available choice. Roth's next book, My Life as a Man, would tell us what that was.

My own connection to the Freudian enterprise was also under strain. I had taken a teaching job at SUNY Buffalo, which at the time was a watering hole for psychoanalytic theorists through its Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts, presided over by Norman Holland. When I arrived, the Center was a raucous ongoing symposium: a place where the Sturm und Drang of the psychoanalytic movement at the end of the last century was particularly sturmy. Its monthly dinner meetings were occasions for airing the crises of faith that psychoanalysis was experiencing and for staging previews of the Next Big Thing, whatever it might be. Everybody conceded that the future of psychoanalysis was up for grabs, and like bookies in some Caesar's Palace of ideas, my colleagues were out there handicapping the contenders. In that hothouse atmosphere I was brought nose-to-nose with bold and free-wheeling speculation from all over the map: from the French Freudians, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, to the British Kleinians and Object Theorists (Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, R. D. Laing), to American therapeutic radicals from Wilhelm Reich to Norman O. Brown. At the meetings there were feminists brandishing their copies of Juliet Mitchell; a cigar-smoking composition theorist who fulminated about “reader response” and “discourse communities”; an acolyte of Jacques Lacan who giddily regaled us with stories of how the master stiffed him on his training analysis; a neo-Jungian disciple of James Hillman who touted a polytheistic psychology that hearkened back to Greek theology; a law professor and pornography buff who usually showed up stoned and sprinkled his tedious filibusters with quotes from the Beatles; a local psychoanalyst who had cooked up his own post-Freudian system called “identity theory,” whereby personality could be boiled down to its dominant and repetitive themes. I had fallen into an academic Walpurgisnacht, in which I felt like Leopold Bloom wandering through a hallucinatory nighttown of theories. Though it left me bedazzled, I did value the free-wheeling spirit of a forum in which all the debates were so heated and most questions were open for discussion, except the crucial one: how can we know if any of this is true?

Then, one day, by some hand signal that I happened not to see—like a batter who has missed the bunt sign—it was over, and the winner was declared: identity theory. As if nothing momentous had taken place, suddenly my colleagues were busily coining these one-liners, summing up human essences in aphorisms so compact that you could stick them into fortune cookies and still have space left over for lucky numbers. From the delirious multiplicity of jostling isms, few, simple, and boring were back in the driver's seat. This collapse of the marketplace of ideas into a sectarian sweatshop was my cue to slip quietly out the door and turn my attention to a body of writing that I had been working up since Portnoy's Complaint and which extended outward into unknown and fascinating territory: Jewish writers and New York intellectual life. There was my cornucopia of ideas: Russia, Stalin, Trotsky, homeless intellectuals, homages to Catalonia, modernism, the fall of Paris and the rise of abstract expressionism, Partisan Review, the death rattle (it then seemed) of Marxism, the Chicago Dostoevskians, the tragic sense of life, the fiction produced by the decay of a radical movement: the literature of the fortunate fall.

It is a truism that changes in basic orientation, in paradigm, as they say, are always experienced as liberations, and it was true that the encounter with psychoanalysis felt to many of us at first like a breakthrough into new and exciting vistas and a permission to speak candidly of intimate matters that had formerly been taboo. To have the unconscious life at one's beck and call made life seem more intricate, more mysterious, more unstable and explosive. It lent depth to ordinary life, drama to any human activity more complicated than a yawn, and rational purpose to eccentric behavior. For the literary critic, moreover, it provided a backstage pass to the artist's unconscious, allowing the critic to trump the writer at his/her own game: an understanding of the heart's true desires. “You call that passion? Why, that's textbook regression.” Ten years later, after those mysteries had been packaged as doctrines and the taboos had become brand names—when, for example, the male sexual organ got shipped over from France and marketed as a philosophical nullity called The Phallus—I needed liberation from the liberation. For the next leg of the journey, Philip Roth turned out to be a point of departure: his writing, the energies it engaged in me and others, blustery and provocative though they sometimes were, were embarkation points into the turbulent and unpredictable world I was looking for. Did I want strangeness? Well, there it was. The treacherous? Stick around. Sex? Well, Newark had it too, and as for comedy, it had Vienna beat hands down. The tragic sense of life? Prague. So much of what I've read, thought, and explored for the past thirty years started out with Roth. His books have served me as windows on the one hand and a home base on the other: a certain renegade sensibility that answers to my own need for a familiar, reliable, and above all intelligent rebelliousness. Maybe it is the Newark thing, calling me home like a salmon that lasers in on its own tiny stream a thousand miles out at sea. I'd be the last one to deny that there might be something irreducibly parochial in my interests. Maybe too it is the engaged intelligence in everything Roth puts his hand to, or the grievance and restlessness that keeps his writing fresh, even when, as some of his critics continue to complain, it is a theater of personality or of libido. They are hard to distinguish at times. If a man wants to shill for his own cock, why get in his way? Let's leave it this way: I found in Roth something I needed to stay interested for these thirty years: the opposite of few, simple, and boring and the antidote to the terror of growing stale, routine, and predictable with age. Roth hasn't: an example I would hope to follow.

Note

1. As the mystique of Soviet Communism began to unravel for American intellectuals, the phrase “I had my Kronstadt when …” took on a certain currency. It signaled the moment when a member of the Communist Party or a fellow traveler woke up to the reality of Soviet Communism. The first awakenings hit as early as 1921, when a revolt by Russian sailors at the port of Kronstadt was brutally put down by the Bolsheviks under the generalship of Leon Trotsky. Kronstadt was a Kronstadt for some, the famine in the Ukraine was another, the Moscow Trials still another, and for laggards there was the 1956 invasion of Hungary and Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech that same year. Maybe the most famous Kronstadt of all was Mikhail Gorbachev's in the 1980s, which brought down the entire Soviet empire.