414
PHILIP ROTH
in the chapter in
Portnoy's Complaint
called "Whacking Off,"
in
much of
Our Gang,
in "On the Air" - but I still had not come
anywhere near being as thoroughgoingly
playful
as I now aspired to
be.
In an odd way - maybe not so odd at that - I set myself the
goal of becoming the writer some Jewish critics had been telling me
I was all along: irresponsible, conscienceless,
unserious.
Ah, if only
they knew what that entailed! And the personal triumph that such an
achievement in folly would represent! The quotation from Mel–
ville that became intriguing to me was from a letter he had sent to
Hawthorne upon completing
M oby Dick:
"I have written a wicked
book and feel spotless as the lamb." Now I knew that no matter how
hard I tried I could never really hope to be wicked; but perhaps
if
I worked long and hard and diligently, I could be frivolous. And
what could be more frivolous,
in my own estimation,
than writing a
novel about sports.
If
perversity, contrariness, my pursuit of the unserious helped to
relax my "snobbishness" about baseball as a subject for a novel, the
decade we had just been through furnished me with the handle by
which to take hold of it. Not that I knew that at the outset, or even,
in so many words, at the conclusion; but I knew it. I'll try to explain.
Earlier on I described the sixties as the demythologizing decade.
I mean by this that much that haa previously been considered in my
own brief lifetime to be disgraceful and disgusting forced itself upon
the national consciousness, loathsome or not; what was assumed to
be beyond reproach became the target for blasphemous assault; what
was imagined to be indestructible, impermeable, in the very nature of
American things, yielded and collapsed overnight. The shock to the
system was enormous - not least for those like myself who belong
to what may have been the most propagandized generation of young
people in American history, those whose childhoods were dominated
by World War II, and whose high school and college years were col–
ored by the worst of the Cold War years -Berlin, Korea, Joe Mc–
Carthy;
also
the first American generation to bear the full brunt of
the mass media and advertising. Mine was of course no
more
gullible
than any other generation of youngsters - it's only that we had
so
much to swallow, and that it was stuffed into us by the most ingenious
methods of force-feeding yet devised to replace outright physical tor–
ture. The generation known in its college years as "silent" was ac-
