Once More, The Literary World Lamp Goes Dim Again-“Portnoy’s
Complaint” Author Philip Roth Has Cashed His Check At 85
A link to an NPR Open
Source program hosted by Christopher Lydon who interviewed Philip Roth at
his Connecticut home in 2006
http://radioopensource.org/philip-roth/
By Bart Webber
As usual Scribe, the late Peter Paul Markin, who was what
amounted to our intellectual-in- residence that residence being our 1960s
corner boy haven in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in the Acre neighborhood of
North Adamsville, was the first to hip us to the recently deceased American
author Philip Roth. The book he had hipped us to was the first big Roth novel Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 while Scribe
was doing his psychologically fatal tour of duty in Vietnam. (While I had
already done my time in hell by then having gone in right after high school
under the flag of patriotism, family tradition of military service, nothing
better to do or you name it for why I went to that hellhole and kept quiet
about it not warning Scribe of the horrors that would affect him much more dramatically
than it did me-then). He kept raving about it being the first truly honest, if
over the top, depiction of sexual acts including the no-no talk masturbation
along with serious dirty language not known in earlier books, at least books we
knew about. Of course when we were hanging out earlier in the decade in high
school we would have never talked about such subjects and about strange sexual
practices either because of our Catholic no talk heritage or lack of awareness
that there are many, many ways to express oneself sexually or not.
Previously Scribe had like half the literary world touted
guys like his heroes Hemingway and Fitzgerald, especially the latter’s The Great Gatsby who he claimed was one
of our con artist forbears although as usual with Scribe when he got on his
high horse about books we could have given a fuck if wasn’t about screwing
girls, with a little John Dos Passos thrown in. (It was mostly guys in his literary pantheon
although Dorothy Parker because she wrote so strongly, I think he might have said
like a man, and strangely high society novelist Edith Wharton which tells you
more about Scribe than Wharton were on his top writers list). Beyond that he
dared not go in our crowd, our crowd of Irish Catholic corner boys who while
pissing against the wall about the ill effects of that doctrine, that see,
hear, do nothing about those raging sex hormones on our love lives and our
guilt trips still maintained some semblance of adherence if only as background
noise in our brains.
That Irish Catholic stranglehold was no small matter when
it came to anything involving Jews back in high school although we got better
later through breaking out of the Irish Catholic ghetto of our youth. That
despite Vatican II of our later youth eliminating the idea of Jews as
Christ-killers (my sainted pure Irish grandmother who had many good qualities
never reconciled herself to that elimination of the bad guys and to her dying
day cursed John XXIII for his infamy. She also hated the idea of the Mass in
the vernacular thinking the rite had lost its mystery although she could speak
no Latin phrases or jumbled them all up when in church). Mostly this was a
“street” gentile anti-Semitism, a little Jew-baiting of Jewish kids in our high
school who were all the smart ones in the academic sense and we, even Scribe
for a time, hated that book smart idea. It was fine to be street smart like our
leader Frankie Riley but book smart was off the charts. Except when Scribe went
into one of his raves. He went to his grave from what Josh Breslin the last guy
of our crowd to see him before he left for that fatal Mexico trip cursing
himself for in high school not hanging out with the Jewish kids who filled up
the Great Book Club. He had refused to join because of the ban on touting book
smarts which even he tended to adhere to inside our corner boy circle. So this
was not some neo-Nazi thing but a common, too common, gentile distaste and
disparagement of the “other” (nice term, right). The one Jewish kid, a good kid
and an athlete which held some cache with us, who tried to hang with us on the
Tonio Pizza Parlor corner got the cold shoulder and after a while stopped
trying to bust into our ignorant little crowd.
The fact is part of the reason we didn’t go for book
smarts, except as always when Scribe got on his high horse, was we, and I in
particular then did not give a fuck about books, high-brow or low. Never read
much except a few times to get next to some girl who would mention some book
and asked me had I read it and off I would go to the Thomas Knowles Public
Library and grab a copy. Most of the stuff was too gushy romance which I held
my nose as I read. But such are the love battles. As for Jewish writers I would
say I don’t remember reading any then, then in high school. Especially after
Scribe would fill, try to fill, our lonely Friday nights reading some fag homo (our
names for guy homosexually then which we are old as we are much better about
now including if you can believe this marching in the streets in defense of gay
marriage) named Allen Ginsberg, a friend of Jack Kerouac, who had written a
poem Howl which he insisted that we
let him read once he “discovered” the Beats. Jesus, a couple of guys, Timmy
Riley for one who later on became one of the great drag queens in San Francisco
after he came out of the closet and maybe Jack Callahan who holds the
distinction of being the sole corner boy who stayed married to one woman for
life almost tore Scribe apart one night to stop his madness. Later in the
Summer of Love in 1967 we would be so stoned on drugs that when Scribe started
to recite Howl we were all ears.
To cut to the chase about
Philip Roth once Scribe gave the word that this guy had something to say even
to us gentile anti-Semites about the new mores in book world where unlike in
Hemingway and Fitzgerald say they merely alluded to various sexual practices
and had their swears sanitized he let it all hang out we were all ears. Except
here is the funny part we were talking that talk, except maybe the going on and
on about masturbation and satisfaction that way in some strange ways much, out
in the streets so I remember Frankie Riley who respected Scribe more than the
rest of us wondering what the big deal was. So, yeah, Philip Roth wrote some
good stuff, told a tale well, expanded the literary universe, or what was left
of it back then and got a bunch of guys who probably would have not given a
damn reason to read him. RIP, Philip Roth, RIP
