American Fictions: Goodbye, Columbus

“Roth’s literary career began in fine style. No apprentice’s clumsiness in Goodbye, Columbus, his first book, published in 1959, nothing that suggests a beginner’s work, so accomplished is the writing already. A lively tone, already a touch sharp, a cadence already sure of itself, a supple talent for storytelling, a keen sense of detail: a writer was born, and one who had the good fortune to be recognized and hailed as such from the outset.”¹

This is how André Bleikasten begins his essay Philip Roth. Les ruses de la fiction (Philip Roth: The Ruses of Fiction), which aims to be as much a tribute as an exhaustive monograph on the life and work of the American novelist. Indeed, Goodbye, Columbus drew the praise of recognized critics, such as Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin; both were not mistaken, discerning the accomplished, though fragmentary, character of the work as a whole. Saul Bellow, for his part, applauded the author’s capacity to reconcile a plurality of voices in a work that, from its very appearance, possessed an undeniably testimonial value.

A succession of stories relating the life of the Jews in the America of the 1950s, Goodbye, Columbus is built around the short eponymous tale that opens the collection. It might almost begin like a Fitzgerald novel: a young Jew of modest background, living in Newark with his uncle and aunt, Neil Klugman one day makes the acquaintance of the pretty Brenda Patimkin. Summoning his courage, he resolves to set up a date with her that very evening:

“as she spoke, Brenda kept closing and opening the cover of her racket; for the first time, she seemed nervous. Her nervousness called up mine, so that we found ourselves ripe for the very thing that, magically, it seemed we might have done without: a meeting.²”

From then on, the two young people strike up an idyll in the gaudy and artificial setting of the Green Lane Country Club — and never mind if the love can seem overplayed:

“In fact, we did not feel the sentiments we spoke of before we had voiced them […] [T]o say them was to invent them, to take possession of them. Out of strangeness and novelty we made a foam that resembled love, but we did not dare play with it too long, talk about it too lengthily, for fear it might collapse and disintegrate.³”

Everything sets Neil and Brenda apart: he, from the middle class, a philosophy graduate with indecisive plans and an uncertain future, earns a meager living as an employee at the municipal library — a thankless and monotonous job, sometimes brightened by the visits of a little Black boy fascinated by Gauguin’s paintings; she, the youngest of a family of nouveaux riches, a spoiled child without great ambitions, awaits only enrollment at university to get away from a too-present mother and a falsely indulgent father. However, despite the differences, their affair quickly takes a more serious turn; soon, Neil is invited to spend a few days with the Patimkins. The stay is for him the occasion to discover his sweetheart’s world. Archetypes of the newly arrived industrialists, Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin have made their fortune in the manufacture of sinks and washbasins; gravitating also around Brenda are a brother, Ron, athletic as much as superficial, and Julie, a coddled and capricious little sister. To this circle is added Harriet, Ron’s fiancée, who likewise finds little favor in Neil’s eyes:

“Harriet Ehrlich gave me the impression of a girl singularly unaware that there could exist motivations in others and in herself. She was all surface, and seemed a perfect partner for Ron, and also for the Patimkins.⁴”

Harriet and Ron’s wedding — a pretext for a series of “secondary” narratives that come to enrich the principal narrative fabric, dwelling for a few moments on the destinies of other characters such as the picturesque Leo, a small tradesman beset by financial difficulties — pushes Neil to question his own story with Brenda: what future for two lovers barely of age, especially when the young woman is about to leave to study in Boston? Despite the promise of swift reunions, distance digs in the couple a gulf each day a little harder to bridge. The rupture, put off many times, is consummated when Brenda receives an incendiary letter from her parents: the moments spent in Neil’s company have dishonored the Patimkin name; she then has no choice but to put an end to this relationship, already too weakened by remorse and absences.

A paving stone thrown into the calm waters of the well-meaning American bourgeoisie, Goodbye, Columbus attests to a remarkable critical spirit on Philip Roth’s part. Indeed, from its first publication, he sets not the whole of the Jewish community against the goyim, but Jews against Jews, without fearing the consequences such an approach might have entailed shortly after the end of the Second World War and within an intellectual milieu still shaken by all sorts of identity discourses. Thus, more than class struggle, it is the struggle between the classes that occupies the author, ever quick to draw — in a manner as merciless as it is delicious — the portrait of men and women often incapable of stating their existence other than by existing. Like the actors of a “human comedy,” these people remain alone and helpless, despite the material comfort the majority of them have inherited; they are not able to communicate with their loved ones, except for the purpose — sometimes unavowable — of carrying through a negotiation, of whatever nature.

It is in this perspective that one must consider the interactions between the various characters. Nothing is gratuitous, and behind Philip Roth’s acerbic humor a bitterness shows through: whether it be a matter of romantic or friendly relations, the exchanges are always interested. On closer inspection, the cement of the Brenda-Neil couple is not passion, but selfishness: each needs the other to satisfy his or her own desire. The same goes for the other pairings, which are only a variation on this motif. In friendship too, the deal is rigged. Thus, the evening during which Ron has Neil listen to the farewell record from Ohio State University⁵ does not mark the beginning of any kind of camaraderie. If Ron sees in Neil only a privileged listener to his athletic exploits — and no doubt the only man in his circle with whom to share his last night as a bachelor — Neil is no less ambiguous since, for his part, he seeks Ron’s support the better to find his place among the members of the Patimkin family.

In the end, only the exchanges with the little Black boy who comes to consult the art books at the library are devoid of all ulterior motive. Nothing surprising, then, that Neil’s unconscious accepts only him in a dream he relates:

“I was on a boat, an old sailing ship like those one sees in pirate films. With me on the boat there was the little Black boy from the library — I was the captain and he my sailor, and we were the only members of the crew.⁶”

Far from being trivial, the figure of this child — and, to a lesser degree, that of Carlota, the Patimkins’ maid with her Faulknerian air — recalls, on several occasions and by contrast, Neil’s difficulty in mixing with the other Jews, the assimilated Jews of the large residential suburbs.

This failure, on the part of the various protagonists, to understand one another, is underscored on the linguistic plane by a quite particular attention paid to orality. In mimetic fashion, each character expresses himself in a language proper to his condition: thus, at her very first meeting with Neil, Brenda seems to take for granted that the mere term “Boston” will constitute a sufficient answer to the young man’s question about which university she attends. But complicity is not easy:

“I hated the answer. Each time I am asked where I went to school, I answer immediately: at the Newark College of Rutgers University. I say it perhaps with a little too much emphasis, too much pride, too quickly, but I say it. For a minute, Brenda made me think of the snub-nosed little fools from Montclair who come to the library during their vacations and who, while I stamp their books, stand there tugging at their gigantic scarves until they hang down to their ankles, ceaselessly alluding to ‘Boston’ and ‘New Haven.’⁷”

Likewise, the words of Mrs. Patimkin, who does not hesitate to use the latest fashionable French expressions, are not the words of the boy from the library who, for his part, multiplies syntax errors without even realizing it. One will then hardly be surprised not to hear the voice of Carlota, the maid, the language most appropriate to her social rank remaining that of the body:

“Watching her at work, one had the impression that household chores were merely gestures illustrating what she was singing […]. She went from the stove to the dishwasher — she pushed dials, glanced at the glass door of the oven, and from time to time picked a big black grape from a bunch in the sink.⁸”

These linguistic calques bring to the story a touch of verisimilitude that is not without recalling the principles of storytelling, set out by Mark Twain half a century before the appearance of Goodbye, Columbus: when the characters of a narrative are plunged into a discussion, their conversation must resemble a human conversation, and their words must be those that human beings would utter in similar circumstances.⁹ The abundance of detail in the descriptions — whether of the clothes worn by Brenda or of the menu of Neil’s meals — further reinforces this “reality effect”: without claiming kinship with it, Philip Roth assuredly perpetuates the heritage of the nineteenth-century Anglo-American novel. But any categorization would necessarily be reductive: if Goodbye, Columbus inscribes itself in a realist vein, it is the better to set itself apart from it, and one could not limit it to a mere depiction of daily life. The narrative form is here a pretext for clothing, if not a thesis, at least a program: to sketch the portrait of American Jewish society in the delicate context of the postwar period, and to bring to the surface the divergences that can exist within that very society. Does that mean, for all that, that it is a roman à thèse [thesis novel]? Here again, let us beware of falling into this pitfall. Yet it seems clear that, by its very form, the work bears within it a contradiction, aptly summed up by Susan Rubin Suleiman in an essay that is a reference:

“The realist novel proclaims above all the vocation of rendering the complexity and density of daily life; the thesis novel, by contrast, finds itself faced with the necessity of simplifying and schematizing its representations for its demonstrative needs.¹⁰”

Closer by its length to the novella than to the novel, Goodbye, Columbus relates a story in condensed fashion, too much so no doubt to make it a pertinent support for the development of a genuine thesis. However, and paradoxically, the permanent concern to stick as close as possible to reality ends up conferring on the narrative an artificial dimension. Who, in real life, would possess a memory as sharpened as Neil’s, whose too-keen eye would almost incite us to call into question his status as “intradiegetic narrator”¹¹? In wanting to be natural, the speech of the characters too ends up becoming predictable. By pushing the programmatic aspect of the narration to the extreme, Philip Roth makes of his first work a labor halfway between the predictable and the unexpected. On several occasions, Neil catches the maid Carlota whistling blues standards. The detail has its importance: the narration in its entirety can be read in the manner of a jazz score, where grids with imposed chords decline themselves to infinity, leading to totally free improvisations. It is in the light of these variations on a single theme that one must apprehend the short novel Goodbye, Columbus, but also, in a broader perspective, the entire collection. The five other stories that constitute it find their meaning, indeed, only in the relation they maintain with one another. A true filmmaker-writer, Philip Roth does not content himself with unrolling the reel of a story in mechanical fashion. He cuts, juxtaposes, splices, brings together: it is in the montage of scenes within the narratives and, by an inverted mise en abyme, in the montage of the narratives themselves, that all the interest and all the unity of Goodbye, Columbus reside.

Indeed, characterized by a lively style devoid of all rhetoric of circumstance, these stories echo one another in many respects: in The Conversion of the Jews, Ozzie Freedman — whose name, seeming to count one consonant too many, already evokes a desire for freedom vis-à-vis adults and religious authorities — embarrasses and exasperates his rabbi with irreverent questions about God, Jesus Christ, the Immaculate Conception and the election of the Jewish people. Having taken refuge on a roof, he threatens to jump if the crowd gathered below does not promise, heads bowed and bodies bent, never again to impose its “truth” on others; Defender of the Faith stages a second confrontation, this time opposing Sergeant Nathan Marx, a veteran of the Second World War, to Sheldon Grossbart, a young recruit in a training camp in Missouri. While the latter thinks he can use his Jewishness to obtain privileged treatment, Nathan for his part ends up unmasking his maneuvers and obliges him to stop exploiting religion for personal ends; a third face-to-face occurs in Eli, the Fanatic. In a tragicomic tone, the story plays out entirely around the intrusion of a few Hasidic Jews from Eastern Europe, survivors of the camps, into the conservative outskirts of Woodenton. A place apart is assigned to the two remaining texts, whose symbolic import surfaces, as if by interference, by way of a barely sketched dialogue between the fifty-something adulterer of Epstein, who breaks definitively with the myth of the fidelity of good Jewish husbands, and the young adolescent of You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings, who strikes up a friendship with the sons of two Italian immigrants, destined, to be sure, for a brilliant future as gangsters, but not devoid of moral values.

If the link between these last two stories is established notably at the level of content,¹² it is also true that they refer to one another by way of their titles: on the one hand, “you can’t tell a man by the song he sings” sums up the lesson of a story whose presuppositions exist in Epstein; on the other hand, the character of Epstein, as ordinary as the name he bears, recalls once more that anonymity is proper to every man, whether or not he belongs to a community recognized as such, as the young men of You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings suggest — marginal, of course, and yet so similar to their “native” neighbors, representatives of a certain number of behavioral models that in no way pertain to an exemplary code of ethics. On the plane of microstructure, such a semiological correspondence applies also to the words spoken by the various protagonists who people Roth’s literary production of this period. Thus, in scraps, we have as it were the impression that certain lines come to clarify others, no matter whether they are spoken by the same character, present within the same dialogue, or integrated into the same narrative. Only the play of ricochets that this procedure sets up matters; this impression of eternal return, which makes of each the dreamed portrait of someone else.

From one story to the next, a path thus takes shape in the labyrinth of the stories of Goodbye, Columbus and already announces the approach Philip Roth will adopt in his entire body of work. Indeed, the writer’s later novels possess, too, resonances among themselves. Thus, certain silhouettes cross different fictions — no need any longer to introduce the now-familiar figures of Nathan Zuckerman or David Kepesh. But, above all, the circumstances themselves can be envisaged in a cyclical form. Whatever their name or their face, the beings staged are confronted with similar obstacles and adopt, powerless, the same attitudes to free themselves of them. Their freedom is only illusory — the puppets never escape very far. One sees taking shape there a figural conception of History: to each fact correspond a prefiguration and a fulfillment; each situation calls for only a limited number of possible reactions. No religion, however, in what one might, for lack of a better term, qualify as a “negative teleology”¹³: if there is a demiurge, it is only the author who, having remained in the wings, pulls the strings of his characters in order to make them move about in a paper theater.¹⁴

Does this mean that the reader would have no role left to play and that, a passive spectator, he should content himself with witnessing the unfolding of the plot? The form adopted by Goodbye, Columbus — and, to a larger extent, by the whole of Roth’s dramatic production — seems, however, to indicate the contrary. The fragmentary structure of the book allows here a greater freedom than the traditional, constraining novelistic genre; where the novel requires that one begin with the incipit and follow a predefined sequence of chapters to arrive at the last pages, the collection of stories possesses several entrances. Free to read the last tale before the first, the reader has every latitude to create and recreate to infinity a work in which he takes an active part. Which amounts to saying, with Todorov, that:

“[t]he inaugural gesture of all reading is a certain upheaval of the apparent order of the text. In its surface linearity, the work presents itself as a pure difference: from this work to others, from one part of the work compared to the rest; the work of reading begins with the drawing-together, with the discovery of resemblance. […] A certain upheaval, we said: for to upset does not mean to ignore. The apparent order is not the only one […].¹⁵”

More than a linear succession of stories, Goodbye, Columbus can therefore be conceived in the manner of a mosaic; the approach is transposable to most of Philip Roth’s other novels, which it would be reductive to include in a vast chronological saga, but which it is, here again, preferable to take in their individuality, in random, kaleidoscopic fashion. This apparent anarchy, this “lack of a straight line”¹⁶ in Roth’s work has no doubt been the source of a misunderstanding between the critics and the writer. Some reproached him for a language too mastered, situations too predictable, an abundance of naturalness that ended up sounding false. One could answer these attacks in the voice of Flaubert, who tried, in a letter to Roger des Genettes, to analyze the failure of L’Education Sentimentale (Sentimental Education):

“Aesthetically speaking, there is one thing missing: the falseness of perspective. By dint of having combined the plan well, the plan disappears.¹⁷”

Paradoxically, then, it is the absence of flaws that would be prejudicial to the work; but, precisely, the fault arises from the quest for this perfection — by essence, inaccessible. The excess of order in Philip Roth’s work brings about disorder, an infinitesimal and happily human weakness that blurs the divides between words and things, between literature and life.

Notes