406
PHILIP ROTH
No, it expressed concerns central to the stories under attack; and
my rhetoric then, far from being borrowed to obfuscate the issue, was
all too close at hand, the language of a preoccupation with conscience,
responsibility, and rectitude, rather grindingly at the center of
Letting
Go,
the novel I was writing in those years.
At that time, still in my twenties, I imagined fiction writing to
be
something like a religious calling, and literature a kind of sacrament -
a sense of things I have had reason to modify since. Such elevated
notions aren't uncommon in vain young writers; in my case they
dovetailed nicely with ideas of ethical striving that I had absorbed as
a Jewish child, and with the salvationist literary ethos in which I had
been introduced to high
art
in the fifties, a decade when cultural,
rather than political loyalties, divided the young into the armies of
the damned and the cadre of the blessed. I might turn out to be a
bad artist, or no artist at all, but having declared myself
for
art - the
art of Tolstoy, James, Flaubert, and Mann, whose appeal was as much
in their heroic literary integrity as in their works - I imagined I had
sealed myself off from being a morally unacceptable person, in others'
eyes as well as my own. The last thing I expected, having chosen this
vocation -
the
vocation - was to be charged with heartlessness, ven–
geance, malice, and treachery. Yet that was to be one of the first
experiences of importance to befall me out
in
the world. Ambitious
and meticulous (if not wholly enlightened) in conscience, I had gravi–
tated to the genre that constituted the most thoroughgoing investiga–
tion of conscience that I knew of - only to be told by more than
a few Jews that I was a conscienceless young man holding attitudes
uncomfortably close to those of the Nazis.
As
I saw it then, at twenty–
seven, I had to argue in public and in print that I was not at all
what they said I was; the characterization was ill-founded, I ex–
plained, and untrue, and yes, I maintained that Conscience and
Righteousness were the very words emblazoned upon the banner I
believed myself to be marching under, as a writer
and
as a Jew.
I think now - I didn't then - that this conflict with my Jew–
ish critics was as valuable a struggle as I could have had at the out–
set of my career. For one thing it yanked me, screaming, out of the
classroom; all one's readers, it turned out, weren't New Critics, sitting
on their cans at Kenyon. Some people out there took what one wrote
to
heart
-
and wasn't that as it should be? I resented
how
they read
