The politics of male friendship in contemporary American fiction

Michael Kalisch, Sharon Monteith, Nahem Yousaf, Sharon Monteith, Nahem Yousaf

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526156358
• eBook ISBN: 9781526156341
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

1

‘The love alternative’: Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000)

‘the joining of the public and the private’

‘I knew the phone would be off the hook the day Kakutani’s review of IMAC [I Married a Communist] appeared’, Jack Miles wrote in a letter faxed to his friend Philip Roth on 6 October 1998.¹ In that morning’s New York Times, the paper’s chief book reviewer had judged Roth’s latest novel to be lacking the ‘capacious social vision’ of his previous book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997).² Michiko Kakutani wrote that I Married a Communist was a ‘smaller, less ambitious work’ that remained ‘hogtied to a narrow, personal agenda’. While it ‘purports to do for the cold war period what [American Pastoral] did for the era of Vietnam’, the novel was in fact Roth’s ‘revenge on his former wife, Claire Bloom’, for her tell-all memoir of their marriage, Leaving a Doll’s House (1996). But what Kakutani was ‘incapable of appreciating’, according to Miles, was the novel’s ‘portrayal of male friendship’. ‘Friendship between men’ is ‘a common subject, but, as I believe I have said to you once already, friendship between the older and the oldest […] is not a common subject at all in fiction’. Back in June that same year, Miles wrote to Roth to say that he thought I Married a Communist’s ‘picture of friendship between an ageing man and an old man’ one of its great strengths.³ The intimacy between the novel’s two narrators – Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s perennial ‘alter brain’, now in his early sixties, and his former high-school English teacher, ninety-year-old Murray Ringold – reminded Miles of the father–son relationship at the centre of Roth’s memoir, Patrimony (1991).⁴ ‘But there are differences, obviously’, he acknowledged. ‘The old student and the old teacher are not just looking back together. Each is looking back through the other’s eyes.’⁵

Kakutani’s negative appraisal of I Married a Communist accords with the critical consensus that has emerged around the novel, while also reflecting a curious disjuncture within the broader reception history of the American Trilogy. As Philipp Löffler observes, while the series ‘became a contemporary classic within the first years after its completion […] when critics speak about the trilogy’, they in fact ‘mostly mean American Pastoral and The Human Stain, not knowing exactly what to do with I Married a Communist’.⁶ It is by now a ‘critical commonplace’ that Roth began a ‘career resurgence’ with the trilogy’s publication.⁷ ‘Much celebrated for Roth’s turn toward social issues’, the series was praised for moving ‘beyond the narrow psychosexual concerns’ of his earlier work and instead turning ‘outward (and backward) to consider America’s transformation during the postwar era’.⁸ Although ‘Roth’s fiction has always been characterised by the tension between the individual capacity for self-determination and the deterministic forces of history’, in the trilogy he seemed for the first time to ‘write the individual into the fabric of history’.⁹ Addressing the central ‘historical moments in postwar American life’, the three novels cumulatively offer a panoramic and ‘intensely disenchanted view of the course of postwar liberalism’, marking a significant ‘historical’ and ‘national’ turn in Roth’s fiction.¹⁰ Roth himself suggested that the books reveal ‘something that had never been freed in my work before […] the joining of the public and the private’.¹¹

As Löffler intimates, however, the rapid canonisation of the American Trilogy has really rested on the reception of American Pastoral and The Human Stain; the ‘middle’ novel of the trilogy has been far from ‘central’ to most critical accounts.¹² In this chapter, I argue that this oversight is due to the fact that most discussions of the novel follow Kakutani in overlooking the male friendship that structures I Married a Communist. Miles suggests that, by missing the friendship between Nathan and Murray, Kakutani misses something important about the novel’s historical imagination, because the novel’s analysis of the political culture of the late 1940s and early 1950s is very deliberately shown to emerge from a conversation between friends, whose sense of the past and sense of themselves changes when seen ‘through the other’s eyes’. Rather than a work of straightforward historical realism, then, I Married a Communist is concerned with modes of historical sense-making – a preoccupation it shares with many historical fictions written after the so-called end of history.¹³ But its focus on friendship marks it as a novel of the 1990s in other ways, too. In what follows, I read the novel alongside some of the late twentieth-century communitarian critiques of liberal individualism discussed in my Introduction. I also connect the novel to contemporaneous revisionist histories of the Popular Front, to suggest that Roth’s depiction of male friendship is part of his broader survey of ‘the course of postwar liberalism’, and integral to his exploration of ‘the joining of the public and the private’. I argue, in other words, that Nathan and Murray’s friendship has a politics, a politics that complicates existing critical accounts of the novel’s portrayal of the sentimental civic culture of the Popular Front.¹⁴

Miles’s letter also notes that depictions of late-in-life male friendship are rare in fiction. When we think of literary portrayals of male friendship, we likely still think of Leslie Fiedler’s heroic ‘buddies’, and his analysis of classic American fiction as a literature of ‘boys’ books’.¹⁵ But in the American Trilogy – a series clearly in dialogue with nineteenth-century American literature – friendship between men belongs to the experience of old age, rather than that of youthful innocence.¹⁶ The concluding volume of the trilogy, The Human Stain, is also the story of a friendship between two men at different stages of old age. In the final part of this chapter, I will argue that its central relationship, between Nathan and Classics professor Coleman Silk, is similarly important to understanding the novel’s historical imagination. Nathan’s narrative task in that novel appears to be that of an observer, piecing together the facts of Coleman’s personal history. But it quickly becomes apparent that his role extends far beyond this; often we see Nathan imagining scenes, inventing conversations, and misconstruing events.¹⁷ His narrative position seems similar in American Pastoral, where he more readily admits that his portrayal of his old high-school football idol, Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov, is largely fictional. By ‘gazing into [the Swede’s] life’, Nathan writes near the book’s opening, ‘I dreamed a realistic chronicle’.¹⁸ Nathan’s portraits of the Swede and Coleman might seem to be further variations in his ongoing project of vicarious ‘counterliving’ – his trademark narrative art of conjuring alternative histories and fictive biographies of those around him through a high-wire combination of invention and impersonation.¹⁹ Versions of counterliving play out throughout the ‘Zuckerman Books’.²⁰ In The Ghost Writer (1979), twenty-three-year-old Nathan, staying at the home of his literary idol E. I. Lonoff, imagines that the writer’s assistant, Amy Bellette, is in fact Anne Frank (and imagines himself married to her). In The Counterlife (1986), the recursive, reiterative narratives of the lives (and apparent deaths) of Nathan and his brother Henry overlap such that their stories become ‘twinnishly’ entwined.²¹ ‘We are all the invention of each other’, Nathan suggests in that novel, ‘everybody a conjuration conjuring everyone else’.²²

While it is true that Nathan’s ‘manipulative and even mischievous side has carried over’ into the trilogy from the previous books, The Human Stain is not simply another experiment in counterliving.²³ This becomes clearer when the novel is read alongside I Married a Communist, the book that immediately precedes it in the trilogy, rather than American Pastoral, as is more often the case. I argue that it is Nathan’s friendship with Coleman that gives the novel its particular (and peculiar) form, and it is their relationship that comes to define the novel’s engagement with history. I suggest that the novel might be reread not only as a ‘national epic’ but as an elegy for, and a bearing witness to, a singular, personal friendship.²⁴ Thinking about the demands made by friendship in each of these novels – and especially by the death of the friend – reframes critical accounts of the trilogy’s exploration of American identity and history. If these novels address the nation, I argue that they do so by first addressing the friend.

Examining the role of male friendship in these novels challenges much of the existing commentary on masculinity and gender in Roth’s work. While many critics might agree with Roth’s own assessment that ‘the lives of men has been my subject’, few have judged same-sex friendship to be important to his portrayal of male identity.²⁵ Roth is often ‘caricatured as a great propagandist of patriarchy’, and most critiques of gender relations in his work have focused on his depictions of women, and the charge that his fiction is misogynistic.²⁶ Recently, however, some critics have suggested that his work ‘can appear as much a prescient critique of misogynist attitudes as a purveyor of them’, because his novels knowingly satirise ‘the acute, even hysterical, sensitivity of the masculine self to its own insecurity and vulnerability’.²⁷ Certainly, many of Roth’s male characters seem to be ensnared rather than emboldened by what Peter Tarnopol, the protagonist of My Life as a Man (1974), calls ‘the myth of male inviolability’.²⁸ ‘Under the terms of the myth’, Debra Shostak writes, ‘a man’s sense of power relative to other men is key’ to attaining a stable sense of male identity.²⁹ In this defensive conception of masculinity, ‘affection represents a threat to the male self’, leaving little room for same-sex friendship.³⁰

Often in Roth’s earlier work, encounters between men seem fraught with suspicion and not a little homosexual panic. This is revealed in Roth’s recurrent interest in doubles, or ‘secret sharers’ – the Conradian term used in Zuckerman Unbound (1981) to describe the uncanny Alvin Pepler, a motormouth ex-ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘The love alternative’: Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000)
• 2 The gift of friendship: Paul Auster’s fiction and film
• 3 Broken utopias: Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (2012) and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003)
• 4 The borders of friendship: Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2007) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011)
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index