Roth and the dilemma of sexuality

Press, 31 October 1981, Page 17

Roth and the dilemma of sexuality

A Philip Roth Reader. Introduced by Martin Green. Jonathan Cape, 1981. 483 pp. $27.25 (Reviewed by A. K. Grant)

Anyone who has read Philip Roth's deeply depressing, but deeply moving novel, “The Professor of Desire,” or his very funny, but deeply depressing novel, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” would agree that Roth is one of the best novelists currently writing in English. Martin Green, who has assembled this "Reader” of extracts from Roth’s novels, says that his aim in doing so is to win for Roth “the central place on. the map of our literary culture which is his due,” which sounds fair enough, but he also asserts at the beginning of his introductory essay that Roth is “the most gifted novelist now writing,” which seems to me to be pitching it a bit high. What about Anthony Powell, a writer as different from Roth as it would be possible to imagine, but no less great in his own way? To assert that one novelist is better than all others is like saying that a carrot is superior as a vegetable to lettuces, parsnips and onions. (Mind you, I agree about lettuces). But there is no doubt that Roth is indeed enormously gifted, and we can be grateful that he has

applied those gifts, has brought to bear what Martin Green calls his “broadly humourous gamut of feeling,” to the problem of human sexuality. You do not have to be as gifted as Philip Roth to have noticed that human sexual behaviour is very odd indeed, and that whether one is living in an era of sexual repression or sexual liberation, there is always a tension' between the rational, day-to-day aspects of human behaviour and the irrational, peculiar and driven behaviour which arises either through the expression or repression of the sexual impulse. Martin Green quotes from an essay by Susan Sontag which describes most effectively the problem which Roth keeps worrying away at: “There is, demonstrably, something incorrectly designed and potentially disorienting in the human sexual capacity — at least in the capacities of man-in-civilisation. Man, the sick animal, bears within him an appetite which can drive him mad . . . Human sexuality is, quite apart from Christian repressions, a highly questionable phenomenon, and belongs, at least potentially, among the extreme rather than the ordinary experiences of humanity ... it is one of the demonic forces in human consciousness . . . Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much, if not more, than it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.” I make no apology for the length of that quotation from a quotation because it seems to me to encapsulate brilliantly the dilemma which has absorbed the attention of novelists, poets, and legislators down the centuries. Philip Roth is merely the last of a long line of gifted minds to be puzzled by the discrepancy between what human beings do to each other in their societal relations, and what

they do; or would like to do, to each other with their bodies. But he writes about the dilemma brilliantly and has the advantage over many of his predecessors that within certain broad limits books are not censored nowadays, and therefore he can match the behaviour he is describing with language appropriate to its description. So much for Etoth, in terms of his undisputed stature as a writer.

Another, quite different dilemma is raised by this book. What is the point of “Readers?” I realise that they are a tribute not uncommonly awarded to writers of substantial Importance. But they seem to me to be inherently pointless, with the exception of the essay which introduces them. You cannot gauge the worth or interest of a writer by reading only what someone 'else has decided are his best bits.

Quite apart from the necessarily subjective nature of the judgment as to what are “best bits,” “best bits” only acquire that status by comparison with “norso-best-bits,” and to properly appreciate any book. by any serious writer, you have to take it as a whole. This is not to say that books are' not composed of good and bad bits; only that you cannot appreciate the first without absorbing the second. To be sure, anyone who ploughs through this book will, by the time he has finished, have a read a good deal of Philip Roth, which cannot in any circumstances be abad thing. But he would have done better to have read any two of Roth’s novels, books intended by Roth at the time he wrote them to be read as books, rather than as future ingredients of a literary minestrone. Martin Green tells us that Roth arranged and selected the extracts in this book himself, which just goes to show how important it is for writers never to take themselves seriously. There are plenty of other people paid to do that.