Amitava Kumar: Philip Roth teaches me to be a bit more honest

Lunch with a Bigot by
Amitava Kumar
(Duke University Press, 2015)

Our series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, poetry, essays, and history continues today with a contribution by Amitava Kumar, whose new collection Lunch with a Bigot: The Writer in the World (Duke University Press, 2015) encompasses memoir, reportage, and criticism. Below, Kumar expresses his admiration for Philip Roth's ability to combine detailed observation with “the voluble, expressive sharing of rage, and sorrow, and befuddled despair.”

On the right side of my writing desk in my study is a black wooden bookshelf with thick, box-like sections where I keep books I need for my current projects. But on the wall in front, the wall that I face while I write, is a bookshelf on which are kept the books I know I will return to regularly. Those are the books that have made me who I am: they hold the key to the kind of writer I want to become. These titles are my personal classics. On the top of the shelf there is a boxed set of Paris Review interviews and the framed photographs of my two children, and below them, in the first row, a line of hardbound books in their white cardboard cases. These are the Library of America editions of Philip Roth’s writings.

I must have already read three or four novels of Roth’s before he became central to my thinking. Why did this happen? Perhaps the change occurred one night in Delhi. I was in my late thirties. By then I had published books of criticism, reportage, and a literary memoir. During a visit to India, the country of my birth, a young writer I admired took down Roth’s American Pastoral from his crowded bookshelf. We were sitting on the floor in his living room, drinking rum and coke. This writer is a man of unusual sensitivity and, although he downplays this part in conversation, he is a powerful editor of a national newspaper. He also stammers. From the page he had opened in American Pastoral, my friend began to read a passage which ended with the following words: “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.”

American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
(Houghton Mifflin, 1997)

I remember asking my friend to read the entire page again and, for my sake, he did so with many pauses. When I came back to the U.S., I bought a paperback copy of the novel. The lines that had been read to me in Delhi appear early in American Pastoral and what they catch quite effectively is a kind of shocked bewilderment in the face of angry social change. I’m talking now of the late 1960s in America. Roth’s novel is about the unsettling of middle-class notions of success and stability. But the above passage also presents a literary credo. Its essence was captured by Grace Paley when she argued that the writer, in contrast to the critic, writes not out of expertise but out of bafflement and urgent, unfailing interest. In an essay called “The Value of Not Understanding Everything,” Paley distinguished criticism from literature with disarming lucidity: “What I’m saying is that in areas in which you are very smart you might try writing history or criticism, and then you can know and tell how all the mystery of America flows out from under Huck Finn’s raft; where you are kind of dumb, write a story or novel, depending on the depth and breath of your dumbness.”

I like Roth for his monumental dumbness. His lack of understanding of the mystery that is his life—this also explains why he sometimes seems to be writing the same book again and again—is interesting because it is paired with a particularly male, even arrogant, set of certainties. The struggle for understanding is examined with great frankness. Roth generates enormous energy in American Pastoral by putting beside the voluble, expressive sharing of rage, and sorrow, and befuddled despair, an impressive array of precise observations. Think, for instance, of the detailed description of glove-making in Newark.

It’s not just that Roth’s characters can be so completely sure, and then so incredibly filled with doubt. Very few writers are capable of showing how they get things wrong, how they get themselves wrong. But let me make this argument by using Roth’s own words. Here is an anarchic poet named Ralph Baumgarten talking to Roth’s narrator, David Kepesh, in the novel The Professor of Desire: “For me the books count—my own included—where the writer incriminates himself. Otherwise, why bother? To incriminate the other guy? Best leave that to our betters, don’t you think. . . .”

English departments in this country are full of our betters. Roth teaches me to be a bit more honest.

Writer and journalist Amitava Kumar is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College and a contributing editor at Guernica and Caravan. The author of several books of nonfiction and one novel, he sits on the board of the Asian American Writers Workshop and was recently awarded a residency at Yaddo. Geoff Dyer praised Lunch with a Bigot as “stimulating, wide-ranging, learned, and funny—exactly what one wants from a book of essays,” and Edmund White has called Kumar “a sensitive, probing, erudite writer, always ready to question others and himself.”

Previously in this series:
“Influences” posts by Jabari Asim, Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Jennifer Gilmore, Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, Jane Hirschfield, Alan Heathcock, Adam Levin, Annie Liontas, Dawn McGuire, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Maggie Nelson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, Mark Statman, Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Ellen Ullman, and Adam Wilson

Jennifer Gilmore on Grace Paley and her radical “power of reduction”

Something Red by
Jennifer Gilmore
(Scribner, 2010)

Jennifer Gilmore opens her most recent novel Something Red (2010) by quoting the Grace Paley short story “Faith in the Afternoon.” Today she joins our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, poetry, essays, and history with an appreciation of how reading Paley changed her writing.

I met Grace Paley only once, when, like a crazy person, I ran up to her at a rather large and very literary function. I wanted to touch her hem, only touch it. And tell her, as I have wanted to tell few others, that her writing had meant a great deal to me. 

I wish I could say she looked at me kindly, but, what with me trying to grab at her clothing, and the surely wild look in my eyes, I do think she backed away. “It’s okay!” I said. “I know your neighbor!” 

What? I have no idea why I approached her with such animal ferocity, or why I believed in that moment that my knowing her neighbor would assuage her fears, but I do know there was something physical I wished to take away from her. Subsequently, as I toured for my novel that employs a Paley quotation as an epigraph, writers often approached me on the subject of Grace. More than four—four!—women writers told me on separate occasions that they have the distinct honor of having been bestowed her glasses. 

There is much metaphor to be made in the coveting of a great writer’s spectacles, in relics of any kind, and if these stories are true and not part of the mythmaking writers so often subscribe to, what I find most interesting is that we all want in some way to feel touched by grace.

I came to Grace Paley’s work rather late, in graduate school when a fellow student, frustrated with re-reading a scene I’d revised several times to ill effect, handed me Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974). “She’s really good with dialogue,” he’d said. The subject matter of the stories certainly spoke to me—I was at work at that time on a book about Jewish immigrants on the East Coast. I ate that story collection in a single day, and then devoured her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), and then the last, Later the Same Day (1985). I stuck on certain lines:

Just when I needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park, surrounded by children.

So begins the story, “Faith in a Tree,” and I often thought about this sentence and others as I walked the snowy streets to class. 

Though it was the late nineties then, and here we are already into the early part of the twenty-first century, still nobody writes dialogue like Paley. The stories took root. I say this as a proud novelist, mind you, but the most excellent stories have a power of reduction, as in a French sauce, all the richer to taste. But there were only those three collections to swallow. 

While Paley’s life outside of her work—her protest against American militarism, her support of nuclear disarmament—are much documented, most recently in the documentary, Grace (2010), the work on the page is also political in its attention to race and class, always filtered through the lens of women’s lives. These stories, comprised of voices I recognized, are the same ones we overhear on our streets and in our kitchens. When Paley published her first collection in 1959, writing about women’s domestic concerns was a radical act. 

And is it not now? The concerns remain immediate, as do her formal considerations. In an interview in The Paris Review—a piece I assign to my students each semester—Paley responds to how she begins her stories. “A lot of them begin with a sentence—they all begin with language,” she says. “It sounds dopey to say that, but it’s true. Very often one sentence is absolutely resonant. A story can begin with someone speaking.” Later she states, “… everybody says I have no plot, which gets me really mad. Plot is nothing; plot is simply time, a timeline. All our stories have timelines.”

While I wouldn’t call Paley hugely experimental in form, her attention to language, the way her prose acknowledges that a sound can begin a story, and likely end it, and that this sound can be the often-silenced sound of women talking to each other, seemed revolutionary and it was a relief to me as a writer to discover. 

Politics is in everything we do, and yet fiction that is overtly agenda driven does not interest me. Even if its “cause” is one I believe in wholeheartedly, if I can see the gears turning, a discernible agenda revealed behind parted curtains, I would rather read the paper. Politics in art is a subtle and nuanced affair. In her stories, Paley documents lives overlooked—women, immigrants—placing them smack in the center of her stories. That chorus of voices sounds like her, captured, and all these years later, still, it sounds like us.

Writing about her first novel, Golden Country (2006), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Adam Langer wrote “Sharp and funny, Jennifer Gilmore’s debut novel roller-coasters through the first half of the twentieth century, showcasing not only her intelligence, her wit, and her intimate knowledge of Jewish culture but also an uncommon depth and humanity.” Gilmore’s second novel, Something Red (2010), was not only a New York Times Notable Book of the Year but a finalist for Salon’s Good Sex Award. “Sharp and contemplative,” were Susann Kokal’s words for it in The New York Times Book Review. “Gilmore has pulled off a remarkable feat: not of fusing the personal and the political but of showing why they’re so difficult to reconcile.” Gilmore currently teaches at Eugene Lang College at the New School for Liberal Arts and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her third novel, The Mothers, will be published by Scribner in 2013.

Also of interest:

• Other “Influences” posts by Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Lev Grossman, Alan Heathcock, Adam Levin, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, J. Courtney Sullivan, and Emma Straub 
• Grace Paley reads several poems and stories at Boston University, 2007: