In History's Grip

Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy

Michael Kimmage

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804783675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In History's Grip concentrates on the literature of Philip Roth, one of America's greatest writers, and in particular on American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Each of these novels from the 1990s uses Newark, New Jersey, to explore American history and character. Each features a protagonist who grows up in and then leaves Newark, after which he is undone by a historically generated crisis. The city's twentieth-century decline from immigrant metropolis to postindustrial disaster completes the motif of history and its terrifying power over individual destiny.

In History's Grip is the first critical study to foreground the city of Newark as the source of Roth's inspiration, and to scrutinize a subject Roth was accused of avoiding as a younger writer—history. In so doing, the book brings together the two halves of Roth's decades-long career: the first featuring characters who live outside of history's grip; the second, characters entrapped in historical patterns beyond their ken and control.

One

Newark

And so to the king himself all Ithaca looked strange . . .

the winding beaten paths, the coves where ships can ride,

the steep rock face of the cliffs and the tall leafy trees.

He sprang to his feet and, scanning his own native country,

groaned, slapped his thighs with his flat palms

and Odysseus cried in anguish:

“Man of misery, whose land have I lit on now?

What are they here—violent, savage, lawless?

or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?

Where can I take this heap of treasure now?

and where in the world do I wander off myself?”

The Odyssey, Book 13

The riddle of Newark, in the Newark trilogy, is that it defines everything, fixing the pattern, furnishing the real names, and shedding light on the darkness of mutable selves, while being itself a place of metamorphosis. In the trilogy’s grammar, Newark is the subject of the sentence, and the trilogy’s protagonists—the Swede, Ira, and Coleman—are its direct objects, set in motion by a moving city. For those intent on leaving Newark, as these three heroes are, it is an easy enough place to leave, more Sherwood Anderson’s or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Midwest, which can be left, than Faulkner’s Mississippi or Hawthorne’s New England, which cannot. Those who stay in Newark must contend with the demise of their city and live in an Atlantis not fully sunk beneath the water. Newark disappears and its presence is ubiquitous. In keeping with its riddle, the city reappears (often uninvited) in the psychic landscape of its many children, far away from New Jersey as they may be. Newark is the unchanging terrain of childhood, and it resembles the Old World topography that marked immigrants as immigrants, telling them and others who they were, leaving imprinted upon them the quirks of speech and manner, the communal memory, the moral and religious passions that made them Irish American or Jewish American or Italian American. Newark’s power is strongest in those areas of life where memory matters most, but the remembered city is at odds with the city one can visit, youth and adulthood separated by an abyss of urban change. The remembered city is the lost city, and the lost city is the spur to memory in the novels, if not for all the characters in them. By virtue of its impermanence, Newark is an elusive hometown and all the more unforgettable for being so elusive.

Founded in 1666, Newark is among America’s oldest cities. Its original name entails the usual obscurity: it may refer to Newark-on-Trent, a small English town, or it may signify “New Ark” or “New Work,” since the city was founded by Puritans from Connecticut who were seeking a new beginning on new soil.¹ It is a city bound up with newness of some kind. If little of great note happened in Newark, it was never isolated from colonial or from national history.² In the seventeenth century, the city was a site of conflict when the Puritan founders were unable to guarantee religious homogeneity and rival factions fought with one another. During the Revolutionary War, Newark was home to Loyalists and Revolutionaries and to the tensions among them. In the War of 1812, residents of Newark feared British conquest, which came to New York in the North and to Washington, DC, in the South. In 1815, Seth Boyden arrived in Newark, an entrepreneur who began the city’s leap into the twentieth century. His leather-making business, a business associated with the city of Newark and central to American Pastoral, foreshadowed later industrial developments. An overall expansion of commerce transformed Newark from a provincial town, between Philadelphia and New York, into a modern metropolis. An anonymous early nineteenth-century letter to a Newark newspaper described the changing city; the letter writer had left Newark in 1819 and returned in 1834. “The numerous streets, spires and wharves, proclaim that the population and commerce have spread further and wider, and the hum of business declares that the march of improvements has not yet ceased,” observed the letter’s author. This is nineteenth-century boilerplate interrupted by a sudden note of sadness: “With all these [changes] I do not feel so much gratified as if I had found it in the same condition as I left. . . . I cannot realize it as my home . . . every face I meet is a stranger.”³

Participation characterizes Newark’s nineteenth-century history. Newarkers “were heavily represented” in the settlement of the West; some two hundred Newarkers joined in the gold rush of 1848–1849; Newark did its bit in the Civil War; the financial panics of 1857 and 1873 wreaked havoc in Newark. Most of all, Newark participated in the industrial age, connected to points west by the Morris Canal, to the larger world by central railroad lines and by direct access to the Atlantic Ocean, not to mention its proximity to New York City. “Arguably no other U.S. city was so closely associated with industry and manufacturing,” Brad Tuttle writes.⁴ The growth of industry invited immigrants, Germans and Irish first, followed by Italians, Jews, and blacks, who migrated to Newark from the South. By 1917, approximately thirty thousand blacks were living in Newark, mostly from Georgia and Alabama. “It seems impossible that a Negro is left in Dothan, Alabama,” a Newark social worker observed in the 1960s. Between 1880 and 1910, roughly two hundred thousand immigrants arrived in Newark from Europe.⁵ In the words of Philip Roth:

As soon as they [recently arrived immigrants in Newark and in other industrial American cities] could climb out of the slums where most of them began in America, more or less penniless, the immigrants formed neighborhoods within the cities where they could have the comfort and security of the familiar while undergoing the arduous transformations of a new way of life. These neighborhoods became rivalrous, competing, somewhat xenophobic subcultures within the city.⁶

For European immigrants the general trajectory was toward assimilation, “the arduous transformations of a new way of life.” For Newark’s black residents, the barriers of exclusion were radically higher; transformation was more impossible than arduous. If anything, multicultural Newark—in one of the few Northern states that voted against Abraham Lincoln in 1860—harbored a virulent brand of racism. Newark was no ethereal Concord, Massachusetts. “Hard-working, coarse-grained, bribe-ridden, semi-xenophobic Irish-Italian-German-Slavic-Jewish-Negro Newark”—a phrase from Roth’s novel Indignation—participated in a fuller and less beautiful image of American nationhood.⁷

Newark’s twentieth-century rise and fall were vertiginous. The first four decades were scarred by the Great Depression and the Second World War, but they also witnessed monumental industrial and economic efforts, the construction of an Irish-Italian-German-Slavic-Jewish-Negro metropolis. If “Newark was the great American enthusiast of the Industrial Revolution,” in Brad Tuttle’s words, the fruits of this revolution were there to be enjoyed in the 1910s and 1920s, even in the 1930s, which was not Newark’s worst decade. The origins of Newark’s decline are not transparent. In the 1920s, “rich Newark families had begun fleeing the city in droves,” Tuttle writes. Civic corruption jeopardized the city’s manufacturing base before World War II, and “about a hundred thousand Newarkers—more than one quarter of the population—left the city in the 1950s,” Tuttle continues. Suburbanization, sped up by racial tension and by racism, drained the city center of its tax base, leaving downtown Newark poor, black, and dramatically untended by government services. On July 12, 1967, terrible riots erupted in Newark, and every negative trend that had caused the riots intensified in their wake, as the city became nationally synonymous with white flight and black poverty. In the 1970s and 1980s, Newark was “the epitome of a ghetto,” Tuttle concludes.⁸ The city’s heritage of corruption had not diminished, nor would it until the election of Corey Booker in 2006, after which a new chapter in Newark history began. Yet the horrific images were the indelible ones. A 1975 Harper’s article about Newark was titled “The Worst American City,” a lasting honorific.

Kaleidoscopically presented in the Newark trilogy, Newark’s twentieth-century history divides into four eras: the 1920s and 1930s; the 1940s and 1950s; the 1960s; and the late twentieth century. The first is hazy prehistory, Newark’s Paleolithic era. The odd detail from this time surfaces now and then in the Newark trilogy but without much context or coherence. In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman describes “our own largely Americanized clan, moneyless immigrant shopkeepers to begin with, who’d carried on a shtetl life ten minutes’ walk from the pillared banks and gargoyled insurance cathedrals of downtown Newark . . . our pious, unknown ancestors, whose Galician tribulations had been only a little less foreign to me, while growing up securely in New Jersey, than Abraham’s in the land of Canaan.”⁹ If these ancestors populate a Newark Book of Genesis, Europe is unknown and the adjective “Americanized” is merely a prelude to what Newark, with its neoclassical pillars and pseudogothic towers, will do to the Zuckerman family, obliterating the shtetl and putting America firmly in its place. This early era is a time when the various families—Levov, Ringold, and Silk—are still arriving in the city. It is the time, dominated by the Great Depression, when the fathers were becoming fathers, leaving their parents to found families of their own, and for the sons born in the 1930s it is inevitably a mythic period. It is comparable to history without a documentary record.

The second era is awash in detail, in meaning, in the intensity of sensual cognition that only children possess. Here Roth draws upon his own Newark childhood and turns it into the stuff of literature. Newark of the 1930s and 1940s, buzzing with a child’s vitality of perception, is a city dominated by family and then by neighborhood, a mosaic of American variety. The mosaic dictates that black and Jewish narratives have little in common with each other. The black narrative, the Silk narrative in The Human Stain, shows the extent of American racism in these years, pushed against by a talented, enterprising black family. The Jewish narrative has the aura of a Golden Age, anti-Semitism falling away, opportunity knocking amid the national trial of World War II. When Zuckerman describes World War II–era Newark in an undelivered high school reunion speech, in American Pastoral, he recalls that “our class started high school six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge of energy was contagious . . . the clock of history reset and a whole people’s aims limited no longer by the past.” The clock of history is reset in the minds of jubilant Americans, an imagined circumstance and no statement of generic twentieth-century fact. As Nathan continues, “There was the neighborhood, the communal determination that we, the children, should escape poverty, ignorance, disease, social injury and intimidation—escape, above all, insignificance.” Appropriate to a Golden Age, Newark’s midcentury is imbued with a certain conservatism, “the pervasive rectitude of the era, whose taboos we’d taken between our teeth at birth.”¹⁰

Golden Age Newark materializes at the end of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s putative satire of the Jewish American family. This complicated novel is no heartrending tribute to Newark. As far as the manic voice of Alexander Portnoy is concerned, Newark is the hated locus of family, neurosis, and repression. The New Jersey inferno must be left for New York City, where Newark remains perilously near at hand, giving the parents easy access to their son, the Manhattanite, and to his tortured psyche. Portnoy lives in a metaphysical Newark, the city a metaphor for the inhibitions drummed into him by his Jewish American family. These inhibitions unman him. “Doctor,” he says to his psychotherapist, “I can’t stand any more being frightened over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole!” Portnoy’s rebellion, the lurid behavior that would give Portnoy’s Complaint its genuinely scandalous effect, only leads him further and further back to Newark, scene of all the Freudian crimes. The Manhattan libertine victimizes himself with a self-control that he cannot escape: “To be bad, mother, that is the real struggle: to be bad—and to enjoy it.” Portnoy can be bad, but because he is from Newark and his parents’ son, he cannot enjoy being bad. Newark history is tantamount to his hectoring superego: “My right mind is simply that inheritance of terror that I bring with me out of my ridiculous past!”¹¹ Alexander Portnoy was often regarded as a sign of the times in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a Trotsky of the sexual revolution, but Portnoy, unlike Trotsky, betrays his own revolution. Manhattan hedonism—a bungled, inept hedonism—is more the surface than the heart of Portnoy’s Complaint. At the heart of this novel is a lyrical picture of Golden Age Newark.

The picture comes to Portnoy en route to Israel, as he begins to weep for the Diaspora. He weeps for the Newark manhood that he could never claim, much as he lived in its ambience as a child: “I look down from two thousand feet in the air upon the land of Israel, where the Jewish people first came into being, and am impaled upon a memory of Sunday morning softball games in Newark.” In a novel that goes from burlesque to burlesque, Alexander Portnoy raging against the petit-bourgeois chains into which he has been born, the burlesque abruptly disappears, in this passage, and in its place comes an image of joy. The image is of Jewish men at ease with themselves and with their bodies, giving themselves over to sport and laughter. They are playing softball, comfortably insulated from the Gentile world by Sunday morning—not Zionist soldiers but American citizen-athletes. Young Alexander is struck as much by their voices as by their effortless physical strength: “Nobody has to tell them to stop mumbling and to speak up, never! And the outrageous things they say! The chatter in the infield isn’t chatter, it’s kibbitzing and (to this small boy, just beginning to learn the art of ridicule) hilarious!”¹² The image is a wondrous composite: health, strength, joy, and humor. This scene, placed where it is in Portnoy’s Complaint, becomes an essay on the road not taken, the home base at which Jewishness and America converge, indicating a fulfillment possible only in Newark. This is the Newark, wholly emptied of Jewish alienation, that must never be left:

I sit in the wooden stands alongside first base, inhaling the sour springtime bouquet in the pocket of my fielder’s mitt—sweat, leather, vaseline—and laughing my head off. I cannot imagine living out my life any other place but here. Why leave, why go, when there is everything here I will ever want? The ridiculing, the joking, the acting-up, the pretending—everything for a laugh! I love it!¹³

America is the new Zion or, rather, Newark is: “How I am going to love growing up to be a Jewish man!” Portnoy thinks. “Living forever in the Weequahic section, and playing softball on Chancellor Avenue from nine to one on Sundays, a perfect joining of clown and competitor, kibbitzing wise guy and dangerous long-ball hitter.”¹⁴ Yet this is Zion discovered in a dystopian novel, one that marks the harrowing distance traveled from the Chancellor Avenue playground. Alexander Portnoy’s eventual self-hatred as a Jewish man, his failure to become one of these exuberant long-ball hitters and kibbitzers, approaches tragedy, since behind it lies the prosaic, approachable chance for another adulthood and for another Jewish American life.

Newark in the Golden Age is Newark lost. Even in Roth’s novella, Goodbye, Columbus, written before the Golden Age had been officially terminated, Newark is a gateway out from itself:

The neighborhood had changed: the old Jews like my grandparents had struggled and died, and their offspring had struggled and prospered, and moved further and further west, towards the edge of Newark, then out of it, and up the slope of the Orange Mountains, until they had reached the crest and started down the other side, pouring into Gentile territory as the Scotch-Irish had poured through the Cumberland Gap. Now, in fact, the Negroes were making the same migration, following the steps of the Jews, and those who remained in the Third Ward lived the most squalid of lives and dreamed in their fetid mattresses of the piney smell of Georgia nights.¹⁵

Whether in squalid tenements or prosperous suburbs, the Newark constant is migration, the migration to and from the city. The Golden Age, to which Goodbye, Columbus is satirically consecrated, could also be strangely morbid (as Leslie Fiedler had pointed out in his contemporary review of Goodbye, Columbus). Perhaps migration would leave Newark bereft and empty, a feat of the imagination in 1959, yet still a foreseeable future in Goodbye, Columbus: “Who would come after the Negroes? Who was left? No one, I [Neil Klugman] thought, and someday these streets, where my grandmother drank hot tea from an old jahrzeit glass, would be empty and we would all of us have moved to the crest of the Orange Mountains, and wouldn’t the dead stop kicking the slats of their coffins then?”¹⁶ That departure is an American activity—and not some quirk of ethnic Newark—is made clear by the reference to the “Scotch-Irish,” to the pioneer motion away from the immigrant East Coast and through the Cumberland Gap to a self-made, ancestor-free future. The goal, there from the beginning, was to leave the ancestors and the dead behind.

In Operation Shylock, the Palestinian intellectual George Ziad delivers a brilliant, hilarious analysis of Goodbye, Columbus, paraphrasing the Golden Age of Jewish achievement in America. This is a tirade about Brenda Patimkin’s Newark:

The age of the nose job, the name change, the ebbing of the quota system, and the exaltations of suburban life, the dawn of the era of big corporate promotions, whopping Ivy League admissions, hedonistic holidays, and all manner of dwindling prohibitions—and of the emergence of a corps of...