By Ratan Bhattacharjee
Only last month I was in Princeton University as International Visiting Professor and I was amazed by Philip Martin Roth’s contribution as a teacher in the Creative Writing Department in the 1960s. Only in the other campus, Toni Morrison used to teach in the Afro-American Studies Department.
Morrison got her Nobel Prize, which eluded Roth, the Proteus of Fiction. His books meant so much for me and in fact as I was going to Newark airport from Mumbai, I was coincidentally reading his third novel and fourth book, Portnoy’s Complaint.
In the Newark Airport I decided to see his birthplace in New Jersey where I was going to stay during my US trip near Teaneck where he was born. Portnoy’s problem was that he was victimised for being a Jew. But the tragic story was told in the narrative that was a dictionary of Jewish jokes and which are so enjoyable in the novel simply because Roth had a prodigious master of a literary Jewish idiom, which Christopher Lehmann described as “bizarre, exaggerated, visceral profane and wildly funny”.
I find some similarity with George Eliot’s Romola and this also reminds me of his American Pastoral in which Roth tackles the very subjects he once spurned as unmanageable, namely what happened to America in the decades between World War II and Vietnam, between complacencies of the 50s and the confusions of the 70s and 80s. I fell in love with Neil Klugman, forerunner to Portnoy and hero of Goodbye, Columbus, Roth’s first novel that I read during the snowfall in New Jersey.
Roth got the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award twice and the PEN Faulkner Award thrice. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral.
Roth’s fiction is chiefly significant for its provocative explorations of American identity. Awards came his way although he did not get the Nobel Prize which he deserved more than many who got it. He received US National Book Award for Fiction for his literary debut Goodbye, Columbus which was exceptionally short, a novella rather than a novel.
In his novels, the picture of his Weequahic neighbourhood where he was born is so faithfully depicted with his zest for life and his sardonic humour. In Portnoy’s Complaint, his nice depiction of Weequahic High School makes Newark life vivid by referring to Empire Burlesque, the Weequahic Diner, the Newark Museum and Irvington Park.
During my stay in New Jersey I saw all these places and found wonderful resemblances. These places shaped his artistic sensibility. He graduated from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. He pursued graduate studies in the University of Chicago and got his Masters degree in English literature. He taught creative writing in University of Iowa and Princeton University. Later, he continued his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught Comparative literature.
His fictional voice is his own voice sometimes as in I Married a Communist he was giving reply to his divorced wife Claire Bloom whom he married as his second wife and who after divorce wrote a Memoir to which he responded by this novel. Still he maintained the artistic distance and the author’s persona never lost the aesthetic beauty as it incorporates social commentary, political satire as in Our Gang or Operation Shylock.
In an interview to The Guardian he bluntly confessed, “I’m exactly the opposite of religious.” Maybe like Thomas Hardy of British literature, this great American Jewish novelist was not considered for Nobel Prize for this atheist attitude. His death in a Manhattan hospital of congestive heart failure on May 22 at the age of 85 stunned and saddened many of his admirers and readers like me.
(The author is International Visiting Professor of
Fairleigh Dickinson University New Jersey
