PARTISAN REVIEW
411
" Civiliza tion and its Discontents" (in
N ew American Rev iew),
assured
us tha t Roth had secrets enough for all of us.
Since then, however, two things have complicated, without neces–
sarily diminishing, my enthusiasm for Roth 's writing. The first has
been the discovery that my loyalty to
Portnoy
as a version of truth and
my convicti on that Ro th has talent have no t been widely shared, cer–
tainl y no t among J ews. T he second sou rce of complica tion is Roth 's
own work su bsequent to
Portnoy.
While his voluminous writing of
la te h as kept hi s talent on full , hil arious display, it has fa iled somehow
to sa tisfy my own , somewha t unformed, expecta tions. The first matter,
the opposition o f
the
J ews, is of course no barrier to admiration .
In
the
conflict between Ro th and the numerous voices of J ewish disapprov–
al, a conflict which goes back to 1959 and the publica tion of
Goodbye
Columbus,
Roth is right and hi s critics wrong. For their quarrel with
him is no t p roperl y over litera ture or any aspects thereof but over cul–
ture, and instituti onal J ew ry in America these days has a decidedly
rig id, defensive no tion of cultu re. T ha t no tion , I might add, may be a
historica l necessity and a cond ition of surviva l, but the Bar Lev lines of
the hea rt do interfere with the reading of fic tion. T he second ma tter is
tha t of Ro th 's ta lent and the uses to which he has put it which for me is
a more serious matter.
It
too, though, po ints us away from litera ture
and toward, in thi s instance, psycho logy. Everything about Roth 's re–
cent writing suggests the need fo r a psycho logica l inquiry.
Portnoy's
Comp laint
itse lf ca lls to mind tha t little- known first book by Sigmund
Freud:
S tudies in H ysteria .
But these two faces of Ro th-in-the-world,
the J ew and the writer
cum
psychologica l man, are the two sides of his
writer's identity. Roth the novelist and culture critic is also Roth the
son. Observe the abundant filia l torments o f Alex Portnoy. Observe too
Bruno Be ttelheim 's psychoanalysis of him in
M idstream,
with its pee–
vish diagnosis o f Alex's neu ro tic conflicts. Al ex, after a mere six hours
on the couch, is dismissed by h is a nalys t, Spielvogel, aka Bettelheim,
as a three-way loser. He is a bad pa tient, a bad J ew, and a bad boy. As
therapy, Bettelheim 's diagnos tic putdown o f Alex may look like a nov–
elty but as criticism it is a cliche, just another sad complaint about
wha t the critics mi stakenl y ca ll Ro th 's "self-ha tred."
T he same line o f argument has been ta ken up by Irving Howe in
his " Philip Ro th Reconsidered" in the December 1972
Comm entary.
H owe compla ins there of Ro th 's persona l and ideolog ica l assertive–
ness, of his sta nce of adolescent sUPeriorit) to suburban Jewish life, of
