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People Will Talk
David B. Green
 (Nancy Crampton) |
(July 3, 2000)In Coleman Silk, Philip Roth has created a tragic hero who is brought down by both his own hubris and society�s hunger for scandal
Philip Roth expects us to swallow some pretty improbable stuff in "The Human Stain." But then one of the points Roth has been making with increasing frequency in his recent books is that nothing is improbable anymore when it comes to human behavior. Cultural and moral norms have long since been thrown out the window, or, as one character observes, toward the end of this wonderful new work, "There are no criteria any more ... only opinions."
For example, early on in "The Human Stain," we learn that Coleman Silk, a prominent and now retired professor of classics at Athena College, decided to quit after being subjected to a grueling investigation of alleged racism instigated by his having wondered aloud whether two students who were registered but failed to show up in class during the term�s first four weeks might not be "spooks." The truant students, it turned out, were both black and when word got back to them of Coleman�s comment they apparently felt racially attacked, turning for help to a misguided faculty adviser. She, in turn, passed the matter on to a dean, getting the whole trial by fire underway, with devastating results. When we read this, we may say: That�s absurd, but we don�t say, such a thing could never happen. That�s in part a tribute to Roth�s writing, which so rarely hits a false note, but it�s also because more absurd things have happened, such as the time a few years ago when a Jewish student at the University of Pennsylvania was hauled before a disciplinary committee after calling several late-night partying students who were keeping him from studying "behemot" (beasts), a Hebrew word his teachers had used back in yeshivah to characterize unruly pupils. The revelers were black, and suddenly, the word was understood as a racist insult, and the student nearly got himself thrown out of an ultra-PC Penn.
What makes Coleman�s situation all the more ironic, we learn later on, is that far from being white and Jewish, as the college community knows him - as his wife and children know him! - he�s actually black himself, and has for more than half a century kept that identity a secret. Again, a preposterous premise, but not unheard of: Remember the story of Anatole Broyard, longtime book reviewer for The New York Times, a fair-skinned black man who early in his professional life learned he could pass for white, and did so, til the end? Not even Broyard�s wife and children knew of his origins until he told them on his deathbed, an opportunity not afforded to Roth�s hero.
Coleman Silk is a professor of classics, and so it�s appropriate (and credible) that his life reads like a Greek tragedy, or at least is framed in such terms by his chronicler. He is a larger-than-life figure, a handsome, talented, arrogant man, about whom the saying, "the bigger they come, the harder they fall," could have been coined. Early in his life, he takes a fateful step - hiding his race, something his pigmentation and features make possible - almost without thinking about it, setting into play the events that will lead to his inevitable downfall many years hence.
"THE HUMAN STAIN" IS THE third book in a trilogy, following rapidly on the heels of 1997�s "American Pastoral" and the following year�s "I Married a Communist." In all three, Nathan Zuckerman is our more-or-less passive narrator, who has taken on the task of putting to paper the life story of, respectively, Silk, Swede Levov and Ira Ringold. Each of these tragic heroes is felled by a combination of his own missteps - trying to fit in where he doesn�t belong, it could be argued - and a confrontation with evil, evil that is in each case very specific to the era in American history through which he is living. The trilogy, then, is Roth�s personal critique of the destructive forces that he saw dominating his society during the second half of the 20th century.
Ira (Iron Rinn) Ringold, in the trilogy�s second installment, is the charismatic victim of the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. Not that Ira, the star of a popular radio drama series, is not a Communist, or that Roth�s book is an apologia for Stalinist Russia. But Ira�s politics is based in large part on na�ve idealism; he is hardly a threat to the great American republic. But taking advantage of the instability and extreme vulnerability of Ira�s self-denying, social-climbing estranged Jewish wife, an opportunistic politician (highly reminiscent of Roth�s longtime b�te noire Richard Nixon) writes an expos� in her name ("I Married a Communist") and uses it to kick-start his own political career, destroying Ira�s at the same time. The United States is in a frenzy over the Communist threat and ready to discard its own constitutional guarantees of free speech and ruin lives if it suspects someone of being tainted by the contagion.
Ira, though, would likely never have got into the mess he does if he hadn�t married out of his class. Eve Frame, n�e Chava Fromkin, has done everything possible to erase and deny her Jewish origins, and feels physical revulsion when she encounters characters that remind her of her past. (She too will come to ruin for her social presumption.)
In "American Pastoral," Seymour (Swede) Levov, high school athletic legend and all-around good guy, realizes the American dream when he marries out, to Miss New Jersey, no less, a Catholic who will have their children baptized. Together they create the American nightmare, a daughter, Merry, who, during the Vietnam War, sets a bomb in their local post office that kills a man. Merry then goes on the lam, living and acting little better than an animal, and it is the Swede�s curse that he is unable to stop loving her. Merry, a Jainist by the time he finds her - she won�t hurt even the smallest insect, but is unapologetic about a series of political murders she has committed - is a rawly unsympathetic realization of a self-indulgent, inchoate political discontent gone completely haywire, not at all unusual, Roth tells us, for the period in question.
Roth's narrative skills, and his vision - and, it must be said, his humanity - only grow as he ages. Born 67 years ago, he has now published 23 books. If they just keep getting better, it may be because his own personal life is said to closely resemble that of the fictional Zuckerman, who some years ago moved to Massachusetts (Roth is in rural Connecticut), where he lives modestly, socializes little and devotes nearly all his time to his work. An operation for prostate cancer several books ago left Nathan healthy but impotent, but as he writes here, "all the surgery had done was to make me hold to a renunciation to which I had already voluntarily submitted."
Sometimes, though, Nathan�s solitude fills him with sadness, and he finds himself craving companionship. This, roughly, is how he happens to find himself one Saturday night in the living room of Coleman Silk�s home, dancing together with his host to the sounds of a weekly big-band show that is blasting forth from every radio in the house. Coleman is 71 and shirtless, and Nathan is remembering the way he burst into his house two years earlier to tell him his wife was dead and that it was the Athena College community that killed her with its inquiry into his "racist" remark. She had taken the charges even harder than her husband, and several months after the affair began she suffered a stroke and died.
Iris�s death left Coleman stricken with grief and rage, and a need for revenge, which he had planned to take by way of a book about the affair that he decided Nathan, the published author, would write for him. When Nathan turned him down, Coleman began the project himself, producing a manuscript he calls "Spooks." It is unpublishable, he quickly realizes, but preparing it has been cathartic for him, as Nathan says Coleman explained to him just before inviting him to fox trot. "Coleman, by abandoning a draft of a book as bad as the draft he�d finished, had somehow managed to swim free not only from the wreck of the book but from the wreck of his life." (Much later, when Nathan discovers Coleman�s secret, he believes he understands why he was unable to write his book: "Writing personally is exposing and concealing at the same time, but with [Coleman] it could only be concealment and so it would never work.")
That same night, Coleman reveals to Nathan that he is having a relationship with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old cleaning woman. Though she comes from a patrician Massachusetts family, Faunia�s life has not been privileged: As a teenager, when she told her mother that her stepfather was sexually molesting her, her mother chose not to believe her; her marriage to a seriously shell-shocked Vietnam vet ended with their dairy farm going belly up and her body bruised from the beatings he dished out to her; both her young children died in a fire caused by a space heater she left on. The only thing Faunia has left to lose is her life, a prospect that doesn�t especially frighten her, and Coleman, who resigned his college teaching position shortly after his wife�s death, has a similar attitude of resignation. But, as Kris ("Freedom�s just another word for �nothing left to lose�") Kristofferson understood, that feeling of having scraped bottom can be liberating. And so the apparently illiterate Faunia and the ex-classics professor get together, and their unlikely union provides them both with satisfaction and comfort.
But it is the summer of 1998, "the summer of an enormous piety binge [when] a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America�s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony." And if powerful forces in the U.S. Congress took advantage of America�s lurid puritanism to nearly bring down a president for having sex with "that woman" (much as a fictional congressman in "I Married a Communist" exploited the Red Scare to hurt Ira Ringold), then it is to be expected that the small college community where Coleman and Faunia live, and she still works, will render a negative judgment of their unconventional liaison. For Faunia�s psychotic and obsessive ex-husband, it�s further proof that she�s a slut who hasn�t suffered enough; for a deluded young French professor (the same one who instigated the racism investigation) who�s so lacking in self-awareness that she doesn�t realize she�s in love with the older scholar who hired her, it�s justification for sending Coleman a barely anonymous note that says "Everyone knows you�re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age." Word about the affair even makes its way to Coleman�s children spread in various points around the country. They too disapprove.
Since Faunia and Coleman do all they can to keep their relationship secret, it�s perhaps natural that the rumors that inevitably emerge reflect little understanding or sympathy for the couple. But then again, it�s not really anyone else�s business. Coleman is no more "sexually exploiting" Faunia than he was being racist when he uttered the line about "spooks." But larger forces are at work here, and the couple are doomed from the beginning, as they somehow intuit.
Oddly, when it�s all over, Coleman�s real secret - about his race - is intact. Nathan learns about it in the book�s denouement, when he meets Coleman�s sister, Ernestine, who tells him something about his friend that he never could have suspected. This could be the central drama of the book, but Roth underplays it. Coleman�s decision to "become" white was almost improvised, and made sense for a talented, hungry young man in the 1940s who didn�t want anything to hold him back, who, living in Greenwich Village after the war, found picking up white girls in the subway was as easy as fishing, at least when the fisherman was white. As Ernestine explains to Zuckerman, "Coleman couldn�t wait to go through civil rights to get to his human rights." Similarly, there�s no great significance, at least to Coleman, that he cloaks himself in the identity of a Jew, an only slightly less hated group at the time he made the switch. The woman he married, Iris Gittelman, was not much more interested in her heritage than he was. He made himself Jewish because his high school boxing coach was; at times the impulsive Coleman even suspected of himself that he married Iris only because of her frizzy hair, anticipating having to explain the appearance of their children if they were born with kinky hair. (All four of their children have white features, and only one, the troubled, angry one, chooses to become an observant Jew, the implication being that this is one of his ways of rebelling.)
When Coleman begins to tell Nathan about himself and Faunia, Nathan observes: "The moment a man starts to tell you about sex, he�s telling you something about the two of you .... Most men never find such a friend." It�s not only a profound and genuine observation, it also contributes to the humanity of this sad but gratifying book. Gratifying not only for all the obvious reasons that make a Philip Roth book a treasure, but also because we can see Nathan Zuckerman, who first appeared in "The Ghost Writer" two decades ago, gradually rejoining the human race as his connection to Coleman develops, reacting and acting, and no longer just recording the folly of his fellow humans.
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