This blog has seen several essays that mention — or, are about — Philip Roth, but none by the "Great American Novelist" (a description from one of the aforementioned essays) have found their way into this blog. Today, that omission is righted. Philip Roth's apologia is a (fair & balanced) antidote for the poisonous rhetoric of these dismal days. This blogger says: So Be It!
[x New Yorker]
I Have Fallen In Love With American Names
By Philip Roth
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
The writers who shaped my sense of my country were mostly born in America some thirty to sixty years before me, around the time that millions of the impoverished were leaving the Old World for the New and the tenement slums of our cities were filling up with, among others, Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. These writers knew little about the families of youngsters like myself, a rather typical American grandchild of four of those poor nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants, whose children, my parents, grew up in a country that they felt entirely a part of and toward which they harbored a deep devotion—a replica of the Declaration of Independence hung framed in our hallway. Born in New Jersey at the start of the twentieth century, my mother and father were happily at home in America, even though they had no delusions and knew themselves to be socially stigmatized and regarded as repellent alien outsiders by any number of their anointed betters, and even though they came to maturity in an America that, until the decades following the Second World War, systematically excluded Jews from much of its institutional and corporate life.
The writers who shaped and expanded my sense of America were mainly small-town Midwesterners and Southerners. None were Jews. What had shaped them was not the mass immigration of 1880-1910, which had severed my family from the Old Country constraints of a ghetto existence and the surveillance of religious orthodoxy and the threat of anti-Semitic violence, but the overtaking of the farm and the farmer’s indigenous village values by the pervasive business culture and its profit-oriented pursuits. These were writers shaped by the industrialization of agrarian America, which caught fire in the eighteen-seventies and which, by providing jobs for that horde of cheap unskilled immigrants, expedited the immigrant absorption into society and the Americanization, largely by way of the public-school system, of the immigrant offspring. They were shaped by the transforming power of the industrialized cities—by the hardships of the urban working poor that were inspiring the union movement—as much as by the acquisitive energy of the omnivorous capitalists and their trusts and monopolies and their union busting. They were made, in short, by the force that has been at the heart of the national experience since the country’s inception, and that drives the national legend still: relentless, destabilizing change and the bewildering conditions that come in its wake—change on the American scale and at the American speed. Radical impermanence as an enduring tradition.
What attracted me to these writers when I was a raw reader of sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen—I am thinking of, among others, Theodore Dreiser, born in Indiana in 1871, Sherwood Anderson, born in Ohio in 1876, Ring Lardner, born in Michigan in 1885, Sinclair Lewis, born in Minnesota in 1885, Thomas Wolfe, born in North Carolina in 1900, Erskine Caldwell, born in Georgia in 1903—what drew me to them was my great ignorance of the thousands of miles of America that extended north, south, and west of Newark, New Jersey, where I was raised. Yes, I had been born to these parents, in this time, with their struggles, but I would volunteer to become the child of those writers as well, and through my immersion in their fiction try to apprehend their American places as a second reality that was, to an American kid in a Jewish neighborhood in industrial Newark, a vivifying expansion of his own. Through my reading, the mytho-historical conception of my country that I had developed in grade school, from 1938 to 1946, began to be divested of its grandiosity and to unravel into the individual threads of American reality the wartime tapestry that paid moving homage to the country’s idealized self-image.
Fascination with the country’s uniqueness was especially strong in the years after the Second World War, when, as a high-school student, I began to turn to the open stacks of the Newark Public Library to enlarge my sense of where I lived. Despite the tension, even the ferocity, of antagonisms of class, race, region, and religion that underlay the national life, despite the conflict between labor and capital that accompanied industrial development—the battle over wages and hours that was ongoing and at times violent, even during the war—America from 1941 to 1945 had been unified in purpose as never before. Later, a collective sense of America as the center of the most spectacular of the postwar world’s unfolding dramas was born not just out of chauvinistic triumphalism but out of a realistic appraisal of the undertaking behind the victory of 1945, a feat of human sacrifice, physical effort, industrial planning, managerial genius, and labor and military mobilization—a marshalling of communal morale that would have seemed unattainable during the Great Depression of the previous decade.
That this was so highly charged a historical moment in America was not without its impact on what I was reading and why, and it accounted for a good deal of the authority those formative writers had over me. Reading them served to confirm what the gigantic enterprise of a brutal war against two formidable enemies had dramatized daily for almost four years to virtually every Jewish family mine knew and every Jewish friend I had: one’s American connection overrode everything, one’s American claim was beyond question. Everything had repositioned itself. There had been a great disturbance to the old rules. One was ready now as never before to stand up to intimidation and intolerance, and, instead of just bearing what one formerly put up with, one was equipped to set foot wherever one chose. The American adventure was one’s engulfing fate.
The country’s biggest, best-known city lay twelve miles east of my street in Newark. You had only to cross two rivers and an expansive salt marsh by bridge, then a third broad river, the Hudson, via a tunnel, to leave New Jersey and reach what was then the most populous city on Earth. But because of its magnitude—and perhaps because of its proximity—New York City was not the focus of my youthful brand of postwar nativist romanticism.
In the 1927 poem whose famous final six words are “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee,” Stephen Vincent Benét had spoken as much for a Roosevelt-reared Jewish boy like me as for a wellborn Yale graduate like himself with the poem’s guilelessly Whitmanesque opening line: “I have fallen in love with American names.” It was precisely in the sounding of the names of the country’s distant places, in its spaciousness, in the dialects and the landscapes that were at once so American yet so unlike my own that a youngster with my susceptibilities found the most potent lyrical appeal. That was the heart of the fascination: as an American, one was a wisecracking, slang-speaking, in-the-know street kid of an unknowable colossus. Only locally could I be a savvy cosmopolite; out in the vastness of the country, adrift and at large, every American was a hick, with the undisguisable emotions of a hick, as defenseless as even a sophisticated littérateur like Benét was against the pleasurable sort of sentiment aroused by the mere mention of Spartanburg, Santa Cruz, or the Nantucket Light, as well as unassuming Skunktown Plain, or Lost Mule Flat, or the titillatingly named Little French Lick. There was the shaping paradox: our innate provincialism made us Americans, unhyphenated at that, in no need of an adjective, suspicious of any adjective that would narrow the implications of the imposingly all-inclusive noun that was—if only because of the galvanizing magnum opus called the Second World War—our birthright.
A Newark Jew? Call me that and I wouldn’t object. A product of the lower-middle-class Jewish section of industrial Newark, with its mixture of self-characterizing energies and social uncertainties, with its determined, optimistic assessment of its children’s chances, with its wary take on its non-Jewish neighbors, the progeny of this contiguous prewar Jewish community rather than of Newark’s prewar Irish, Slavic, Italian, or black sections . . . sure, “Newark Jew” describes well enough someone who grew up, as I did, in the city’s southwest corner, the Weequahic neighborhood, in the nineteen-thirties and forties. Being a Newark Jew in a largely working-class city where political leverage accrued through ethnic pressure, where both historical fact and folkloric superstition sustained a steady undercurrent of xenophobic antipathy in each ethnic precinct, where the apportionment of jobs and vocations often divided along religious and racial lines—all this contributed enormously to a child’s self-definition, his sense of specialness, and his way of thinking about his discrete community in the local scheme of things. What’s more, attuning my senses to the customs peculiar to each city neighborhood had to have alerted me early on to the perpetual clash of interests that propels a society and that sooner or later would provoke in the incipient novelist the mimetic urge. Newark was my sensory key to all the rest.
A Newark Jew—why not? But an American Jew? A Jewish American? For my generation of native-born—whose omnipresent childhood spectacle was the USA’s shifting fortunes in a prolonged global war against totalitarian evil and who came of age and matured, as high-school and college students, during the remarkable makeover of the postwar decade and the alarming onset of the Cold War—for us no such self-limiting label could ever seem commensurate with our experience of growing up altogether consciously as Americans, with all that that means, for good and for ill. After all, one is not always in raptures over this country and its prowess at nurturing, in its own distinctive manner, unsurpassable callousness, matchless greed, small-minded sectarianism, and a gruesome infatuation with firearms. The list of the country at its most malign could go on, but my point is this: I have never conceived of myself for the length of a single sentence as an American Jewish or Jewish American writer, any more than I imagine Dreiser and Hemingway and Cheever thought of themselves while at work as American Christian or Christian American or just plain Christian writers. As a novelist, I think of myself, and have from the beginning, as a free American and—though I am hardly unaware of the general prejudice that persisted here against my kind till not that long ago—as irrefutably American, fastened throughout my life to the American moment, under the spell of the country’s past, partaking of its drama and destiny, and writing in the rich native tongue by which I am possessed. # # #
[Philip Roth's essay was adapted from his acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, delivered on November 20, 2002. Roth has published twenty-nine novels. This fall, the Library of America will put out Why Write?, his collected nonfiction from 1960-2013 (forthcoming July 2017). He received a BA, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa (English) from Bucknell University (PA) and also received an MA (English literature) from the University of Chicago. Roth taught writing, over the years, at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania until he retired from teaching.]
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