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Authors: Philip Roth
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covertly malicious, who behind the mask of fiction had punished his adoring mother for no reason. True or false? In a school debate, he could have argued persuasively for either proposition.
* * *
Gone. Mother, father, brother, birthplace, subject, health, hair — according to the critic Milton Appel, his talent too. According to Appel, there hadn ’ t been much talent to lose. In Inquiry, the Jewish cultural monthly that fifteen years earlier had published Zuckerman ’ s first stories, Milton Appel had unleashed an attack upon Zuckerman ’ s career that made Macduff ’ s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical. Zuckerman should have been so lucky as to come away with decapitation. A head wasn ’ t enough for Appel; he tore you limb from limb.
Zuckerman didn ’ t know Appel. They ’ d met only twice—one August out in the Springs on Long Island, strolling by each other at the Barnes Hole beach, then briefly at a big college arts festival where each was sitting on a different panel. These meetings came some years after Appel ’ s review of Zuckerman ’ s first book had appeared in the Sunday Times. That review had thrilled him. In the Times in 1959. the twenty-six-year-old author had looked to Appel like a wunderkind, the stories in Higher Education “ fresh, authoritative, exact ” —for Appel, almost too pointed in their portraiture of American Jews clamoring to enter Pig Heaven: because the world Zuckerman knew still remained insufficiently transformed by the young writer ’ s imagination, the book, for all its freshness, seemed to Appel more like social documentation, finally, than a work of art.
Fourteen years on, following the success of Carnovsky, Appel reconsidered what he called Zuckerman ’ s “ case ” : now the Jews represented in Higher Education had been twisted out of human recognition by a willful vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy and the tenets of realistic fiction. Except for a single readable story, that First collection was tendentious junk, the by-product of a pervasive and unfocused hostility. The three books that followed had nothing to redeem them at all—mean, joyless, patronizing little novels, contemptuously dismissive of the complex depths. No Jews like Zuckerman ’ s had ever existed other than as caricature; as literature that could interest grown people, none of the books could be said to exist at all, but were contrived as a species of sub-literature for the newly “ liberated ” middle class, for an “ audience, ” as distinguished from serious readers. Though probably himself not an outright anti-Semite, Zuckerman was certainly no friend of the Jews: Carnovsky ’ s ugly animus proved that.
Since Zuckerman had heard most of this before—and usually in Inquiry, whose editorial admiration he ’ d lost long ago—he tried being reasonable for fifteen minutes. He doesn ’ t find me funny. Well, no sense writing to tell him to laugh. He thinks I depict Jewish lives for the sake of belittling them. He thinks I lower the tone to please the crowd. To him it ’ s vulgar desecration. Horseplay as heresy. He thinks i m “ superior ” and “ nasty ” and no more. Weil, he ’ s under no obligation to think otherwise. I never set myself up as Elie Wiesel.
But long after the reasonable quarter hour had passed, he remained shocked and outraged and hurt, not so much by Appel ’ s reconsidered judgment as by the polemical overkill, the exhaustive reprimand that just asked for a fight. This set Zuckerman ’ s teeth on edge. It couldn ’ t miss. What hurt most was that Milton Appel had been a leading wunderkind of the Jewish generation preceding his own, a contributing editor to Rahv ’ s Partisan Review, a fellow at Ransom ’ s Indiana School of Letters, already publishing essays on European modernism and analyses of the exploding American mass culture while Zuckerman was still in high school taking insurgency training from Philip Wylie
* * *
Gone. Mother, father, brother, birthplace, subject, health, hair — according to the critic Milton Appel, his talent too. According to Appel, there hadn ’ t been much talent to lose. In Inquiry, the Jewish cultural monthly that fifteen years earlier had published Zuckerman ’ s first stories, Milton Appel had unleashed an attack upon Zuckerman ’ s career that made Macduff ’ s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical. Zuckerman should have been so lucky as to come away with decapitation. A head wasn ’ t enough for Appel; he tore you limb from limb.
Zuckerman didn ’ t know Appel. They ’ d met only twice—one August out in the Springs on Long Island, strolling by each other at the Barnes Hole beach, then briefly at a big college arts festival where each was sitting on a different panel. These meetings came some years after Appel ’ s review of Zuckerman ’ s first book had appeared in the Sunday Times. That review had thrilled him. In the Times in 1959. the twenty-six-year-old author had looked to Appel like a wunderkind, the stories in Higher Education “ fresh, authoritative, exact ” —for Appel, almost too pointed in their portraiture of American Jews clamoring to enter Pig Heaven: because the world Zuckerman knew still remained insufficiently transformed by the young writer ’ s imagination, the book, for all its freshness, seemed to Appel more like social documentation, finally, than a work of art.
Fourteen years on, following the success of Carnovsky, Appel reconsidered what he called Zuckerman ’ s “ case ” : now the Jews represented in Higher Education had been twisted out of human recognition by a willful vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy and the tenets of realistic fiction. Except for a single readable story, that First collection was tendentious junk, the by-product of a pervasive and unfocused hostility. The three books that followed had nothing to redeem them at all—mean, joyless, patronizing little novels, contemptuously dismissive of the complex depths. No Jews like Zuckerman ’ s had ever existed other than as caricature; as literature that could interest grown people, none of the books could be said to exist at all, but were contrived as a species of sub-literature for the newly “ liberated ” middle class, for an “ audience, ” as distinguished from serious readers. Though probably himself not an outright anti-Semite, Zuckerman was certainly no friend of the Jews: Carnovsky ’ s ugly animus proved that.
Since Zuckerman had heard most of this before—and usually in Inquiry, whose editorial admiration he ’ d lost long ago—he tried being reasonable for fifteen minutes. He doesn ’ t find me funny. Well, no sense writing to tell him to laugh. He thinks I depict Jewish lives for the sake of belittling them. He thinks I lower the tone to please the crowd. To him it ’ s vulgar desecration. Horseplay as heresy. He thinks i m “ superior ” and “ nasty ” and no more. Weil, he ’ s under no obligation to think otherwise. I never set myself up as Elie Wiesel.
But long after the reasonable quarter hour had passed, he remained shocked and outraged and hurt, not so much by Appel ’ s reconsidered judgment as by the polemical overkill, the exhaustive reprimand that just asked for a fight. This set Zuckerman ’ s teeth on edge. It couldn ’ t miss. What hurt most was that Milton Appel had been a leading wunderkind of the Jewish generation preceding his own, a contributing editor to Rahv ’ s Partisan Review, a fellow at Ransom ’ s Indiana School of Letters, already publishing essays on European modernism and analyses of the exploding American mass culture while Zuckerman was still in high school taking insurgency training from Philip Wylie
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